this is the blockade podcast with your hosts chris and jared you are listening to the BlahCade Pinball Podcast i'm your host chris freebus aka shut your trap uh seeing as how it is a thursday morning and would be 2 a.m in australia jared is not with right now. But instead, who we've got is our good friend over at Zen, Mel Kirk, Vice President of Publishing. Hey, Chris. Good to be back with you. Absolutely. And of course, why would we possibly have Mel here? Nothing better than because of the Volume 4 announcement that just came out the other day. So that's kind of the impetus for all this, but we've got a whole bunch of other things that we're going to touch upon here. But first, we've got Whitewater, we've got Hurricane, we've got Roadshow coming in. Roadshow being the first wide body of the Williams that we've seen. Finally got one in there. Yeah. Strangely enough, it doesn't look that different from all the previous Zen tables, because didn't you say that all the previous Zen originals were all wide body in design, too? That was largely our inspiration for original Zen designs. And so, yeah, you're right. There's some similarity there just in terms of the way it looks when you're playing. Wide bodies are tricky, too. I mean, obviously these aren't your giant belly wide bodies or the old Stern Electronics wide bodies, which are like square tables practically. But in general, wide bodies are a little bit different because it changes the speed and the flow of the ball. It absolutely does. And so, you know, in our advanced physics simulations and whatnot, we account for that. But it does play differently, you know, from the other types of cabs out there. And so I think it's reflective in this release. I think people will automatically notice that the game is playing differently. It's playing the way it should. So I've been playing the betas of all these for quite a few weeks now. And it was one of those things where I was scared at first to do the enhancement because I was like, I really like just the plastic faces of Red and Ted, and I didn't want them to be animated, and thankfully you guys didn't. But instead, they're beautifully rendered. There's a lot of just like the lighting on it and the shapes of them are fantastic. It's not flat look at all. Instead, we've got a crazy-ass bulldozer that jumps all over the place. Yeah. Comes flipping in and out of there. It was kind of a funny touch. I think we carry some of the humor and some of the mood of the table with the 3D interactions that we've created. It's also kind of odd because, I mean, unless you're looking at either the back glass or the side art, you never get a sense that these are Red and Ted or real people. And so seeing this guy driving a bulldozer, I was like, who the heck is that? And then I look closer and I'm like, oh, it's Ted. Got it. Yeah. Well, we're not adding any new characters or story or anything like that. We're keeping it in the confines of it. It's interesting the way you guys pull your source stuff from, because it's not like you're just creating a character using the head and then creating the body or whatever. You're actually pulling it from some piece of art on the table. Yeah, I think that it's still kind of our mindset that we want to stay within the nostalgia and the stuff that people love about these and not go too far into the deep end of creating brand new story or new characters or things that people don't already associate with. But I think we're sticking to our mission of being authentic still and maybe being additive or complementary to an already amazing game. That's what these are to us. They're already amazing games, and we're giving them just a new feel. And from the very beginning when we were talking with you guys about what we wanted to accomplish with these tables, I think that's where our focus is, and we're maintaining that identity. I know with Roadshow, it was one of those tables that after you drained your third ball, it would give you the option of, hey, do you want to continue for an extra credit? But Zen so far hasn't allowed that option. Is that just basically because it's free play mode? Yeah, this is what it is. I guess if you want to just continue playing like that, you might as well just go into practice mode and have at it. Yeah, for a home use console, PC, mobile, and whatever else we ship on, games will play like that in a potential commercial setting or something. It could change. Um, but yeah, for now it's just like, it's just free play. Just start the game over. Uh, then we have hurricane, which the clown disturbs me. Now that's actually been a critique of mine for all of those tables. I'm not a fan of Python Anghelo's, uh, artwork, but the clown you guys have on there, I just kind of just a suggestion come September, re-theme that thing and turn it into It and make him Pennywise holding a balloon and that game over. We're done. It's funny you mention it. I watched the trailer for Part 2. It's one of my favorite books and stories. But yeah, you're totally right. That's the easy thing to do, right? Right. He was just standing there still. For those that haven't seen the video, and you'll see it eventually, but basically they animated the clown that's right there at the bottom of the playfield art. and he's just standing there right above the dunk tank and he throws pies and pulls balls out of his butt and stuff. It's kind of reach behind him and pulls things out. But he's right there dead center of the play field. I was just like, oh man, if that was just Pennywise just standing there dead still holding a balloon and then every now and then would you like suddenly scamper at you, that'd be, yeah. It'd be awesome. Horror Table, you guys haven't done one of those yet. no i mean you know it goes back to like we always try to stay within the confines of our rating for everybody to accept the game um you know and so we've dealt with some issues on um you know mature content and whatnot as we've gone through this process but yeah i mean horror is like an untapped genre for us i think there's a lot of adult themes there's like a pinball after dart just waiting to happen you know yeah yeah yeah we've had rumors of that for years it never came about But, you know. So, and Hurricane, basically, it finishes out the Comet and Cyclone trilogy, which we don't have in this game. But it's obviously the DMV of all those. And then we have Whitewater, which is, this was the one I was really, when I first saw you guys doing plastics, the way you were doing your clear plastics, I was like, I've got to see what they do with Whitewater. And it's beautiful. Good. It looks amazing. Okay. Yeah, the plastics are beautifully done. I think that we've nailed them. This is the game to highlight our ability to do the coloring and the lighting. It turned out really well. I love what we did with Bigfoot. I think it's funny. It's a good touch. I don't know if you guys caught the video of 10 hours of whitewater. Yeah, that sent people into a dizzy. There was somebody that actually downloaded the whole thing because he's a video editor, compressed it, and checked for if there was any hidden messages within the entire thing. So that's our fan base right there. Yeah, we thought we were like, man, people would be looking for Easter eggs or something. But, yeah, I got the jingle stuck in my head. I had it on for like an hour the other day just because I started it up just to watch it, just to see before we released it. And it was funny. I got busy doing other stuff. and after an hour, I was like, what is driving me nuts? And sure enough, it was that playing in the background. I'm even impressed. So something, folks, when you're playing the game, push up on one of the joysticks. I forget which one it is. I think it's the right one. And then you can look at the back glass. And you guys fully animated the topper, which, I mean, that's a given for Whitewater. That topper is beautiful. And it's really good. I mean, it's such a throwaway animation that most people aren't even going to look at, but there it is. We're fans too. I hope the things that we do are just things that we think really dress up something that's already very special and that we think make the right touches. That's intentional. We decided whoever's the biggest Whitewater fan at the studio got to decide what we're going to do to this to make it the Zen version. Those are things that are very intentional. I do wish that you guys had done some animated water for the waterfall or for the whirlpool in Enhanced, but that's small quibble. There's always little things like that that we go, oh, but why didn't... For instance, with Champion Pub, it was like, oh, why didn't the boxer's face change for each and every boxer? It was like, oh, that would have been awesome. Well, hey, if the community wasn't so antsy to have games released literally like every month or every couple of weeks. We could take longer I guess, you know, but then the cycles would be longer and you guys would be waiting more. Wow, it's awful. Let me tell you, you know, I mean, you've spoken with Akos, our community manager. That guy does not have an easy job. I mean, to hold everybody back about how antsy they are for every single game to be here today. So, on every platform playable in every way. Yeah. The other thing that's being released with Volume 4, and it's just for the Volume 4 tables that are out right now, but you guys have new Flipper Physics. Correct. Oh, yeah, go. I was going to say, Flipper Physics are coming to all the Williams tables. So I know you've been playing them with the 3 in beta. It will be deployed to all the tables. Upon release, or is it delayed until a little bit later? Upon release. I'm pretty certain that we are able to release it through all tables. Oh, that's fantastic. On May 28th. Yep. Great. And I can say, folks, they're pretty awesome. I mean, just like, again, people pointed out in the video, they noticed the slight little when the ball hits the flipper, it kind of does that little tap down. Obviously, it's being affected by that. But it's not just a visual thing. It actually affects what you're able to do with the ball. And even better, and this is my favorite part, is you get some of the little wonky ball spin action that happens when it hits on the flipper. So I would like that. Just a little bit of randomness. Yeah, it is very true to form. You know, of course, we're biased over here. We think this is the best it's ever been, right? In deep, who's responsible for this physics simulation has put a lot of time and a lot of effort. and this is the flipper physics that are being released here in the late May have been in the works a long time. This is not something he just cooked up in a couple weeks. I mean really since we began on this project this is something he's been working on. Now it's ready to go. So it's a lot of time, a lot of effort. We hope the Die Hard you represent a section of this Die Hard community and you guys have been playing it so pretty sure we're in a good spot. Yeah, I think most of our listeners pretty much play only in arcade classic single-player arcade mode rather than playing the standard, what we call Zen mode. It's kind of funny. We have our own way of labeling what everything is versus what it says in the game. It kind of keeps ours... It makes it difficult when talking to people going, well, what's this mode? And they're like, but there's nothing in the menu that says that's not what we mean. Come up with your own lingo and terminology for our modes. That's cool. Yeah. Is there any potential? I mean, we always ask this, and it relates to all of this. So previously we were saying, oh, it would be great if we had the Williams physics in the regular Zen original tables. What about, I mean, would the flipper physics be even something? Or is it, again, it becomes all about that you have to retune the entire table to match what that physics is? Yeah, it's a huge undertaking. We would have to go through game by game. with physics. It's something from the very beginning when we launched Williams, we started to hear, we heard the feedback from you guys first. We hear it from other places as well and other sources. So we know that there's a demand for it. There's always this, when you look at the history of Zen, the way that we've treated our pinball platforms, there's always been like, there's platform, which we've given away for free. There's content which we sell. And then when we do a major upgrade to platform, we let you take the tables with you. So that's a major investment on Zen's part to do that. And we have to really be clear on which features we want to focus on and make the most people happy with because of the way we've committed to our community. Because of the way we sell content. We don't sell it to you over and over again. Once you get it, you get it, and then we just update the features. So is that the feature that is most, that would make the most people happy and keep them coming over with us as we create new content? these are things that we're constantly asking ourselves. This is just a, this is a look into our process in the way that we think about it. It's an overall relationship with the player over the course of like a decade. And so these features you know we just we kind of keep a running tab of what the most important thing I do think that the physics on the new game and especially when we keep adding like the Flipper physics update it's becoming a bigger priority for us to apply to all games because the community that's come for Williams now is so large. There's a lot of people that we didn't have with us before. I do think it's a feature that would help us sell you guys our other tables because they're playing now for you. So it is very important. I think that we're focusing on this in the future. So, beyond volume four, basically, if we're sticking to DMD-only machines currently that you're doing, there's six left. So, two more volume packs of the unlicensed tables. Is it the intent that you guys will be doing alphanumeric and solid-state tables, or is Zen going to only do DMD tables? It's fine. Were you reading my email this morning? No. um yeah so uh yeah you're right we're we're almost done with the uh dmds and uh what's after that will be uh obviously there's more to do and uh there's a lot of tables out there so i would say that alphanumeric is on its way very soon fantastic the other question i don't know if i've i think i've asked you this before but i'm not quite 100 positive um is zen buying the tables or borrowing some of the tables? I mean, how does that work with what you guys do? And specifically with what we were thinking is, look, Cactus Canyon is on the way. It's not an easy table to find, and I have no clue how hard it is to find in Europe. So we were like, what if they're going to have to fly people over to the Pacific Pinball Museum? So what is Zen's... How do you guys do that? Are you borrowing tables or purchasing them outright? Nomination of things. We have a decent-sized collection in our studio. Some of those are the personal collection of Jolt, our CEO, and others are, you know, ones that the studio has bought and purchased and they're there. The Budapest Pinball Museum is massive and they've got a lot of games. We have borrowed some from them and they bring it over to our office and we do the disassemble there and we do all the all the work. And then we put it back together and put it back in the museum. So there's a good, great relationship with that museum. And then there's some very specialty things that we've had to track down. and so yeah, you're right. Cactus Canyon, very difficult to find, very expensive, but we always have our ways. When you're in the pinball community and you need something and you're somewhat well-known, now you can make it happen. Okay. Yeah. I remember when Farsight did their version of Cactus Canyon, it was one of those things where they weren't intending to do it yet and it popped up on a for sale near them. They're like, we have to buy it now. We can't delay. Go do it. And I think they wound up saying that that was the most expensive table out of all the tables that they bought. It was clearly, by and far away, the most expensive that they outlaid for. Yep. There's not many. Cactus Canyon is very rare in Europe. Yeah. That's what I figured. And I'll just say Cactus Canyon continued, but the more I've researched it, the less I think you guys will be able to do it. I think there's some licensing issues that might be in the way. Yeah, I mean, a lot of these have, even like, you know, look at, you know, Roadshow. There was some, there's licensing. A lot of these tables have like hidden gems in them where you really dig into it. And if you're going to do it right and you're going to do it, everything legal and by the book, there's a lot of things. That's the only way Zen can work because of our history now of licensing. Right. We can't be rogue. So like even Roadshow, Carleen Carter, her song and her likeness are all properly licensed. You go back to Getaway, the song that ZZ Top song and there's properly licensed. There's even some Frank Sinatra stuff in there. There's a lot of we were doing it all, you know, very officially, which also is some of the reason maybe why you guys are wondering where the third party stuff is. Well, to do it right, it takes some time. Third party stuff being the licensed DMD tables that we've all been talking about. Are we expecting to see any license tables called by December? You'll see some in 2019. Into 2019, we will see some. Okay, great. I would target maybe like Halloween for the first ones. Okay, fair enough. And those, just to be clear also, I know you said they won't be part of a volume. They'll be their own release, but they'll still be within the FX3 or the Williams Pinball mobile platform. It's not like it's going to be its own separate app. Correct. They'll be within the platform itself. This collection will always be by itself. There won't just be like some outlier, one table over here, one table over there. Right now, that is absolutely the plan. And for 2019, probably into early 2020, that is absolutely the way it'll work. Okay. Cool. Well, we have covered all the William stuff. Now let's get into the fun stuff. You went to Star Wars Celebration Chicago, which, of course, made me fiercely jealous. How is that as a show? I mean, I don't even know what it necessarily is. Is it kind of like what Comic-Con is, where there's a lot of vendor booths and then there's a hall where they do information? Or what is that? yeah uh so there's a main hall where there is uh tons of star wars you know obviously all star wars stuff yeah you can buy old classic toys that are super rare you can buy signed artwork there's um there's commissioned artists who are actually like working on pieces there and if you buy a piece of their art you just take it over to them they sign it for you so i get to meet all the cool artists um some that we might be able to collaborate with on our star wars projects in the future um there's uh there's people selling uh anything that you can imagine is branded star wars and then there's like a whole section of the show where it's just media related stuff where they're on you know the stage they bring the cast out for star wars 9 onto the stage and they do the reveal of the trailer and like that's amazing um there's just anything that related to star wars culture is there some of the most passionate hardcore star wars fans in the world and they use it to really set the stage for the year. May the 4th is shortly thereafter. Then, of course, this year is massive with Mandalorian show shipping and Star Wars 9. They revealed their new animated series. Clone Wars is coming back. It's just like if you're a Star Wars fan, you have to go at some point in your life because it's really, really special. It's funny. I spent a few days in Disneyland prior to... I went from three days in Disneyland straight to Star Wars Celebration. I was like, in Disney World for like 10 days. I was living in a fantasy land. It was hilarious. Except for when you were there, they still hadn't had the expansion, the Star Wars World opened yet. I think it opened about three weeks after you were there. It's actually opening in a couple of weeks. And so, right, correct. It was not open when I was there. Yeah. And I can't say anything more about that. But that's my deck. I literally am eight miles north as the crow flies. so I hear their fireworks every night hilarious but and I think next year actually the Star Wars celebration is going to be in Anaheim it's coming to Anaheim so if plan on going we will be there and we can all hang out and talk and we were it was kind of cool it's actually the first celebration I went to we've had other Zen people at celebrations it's a timing for me to go it didn't work but I wanted to go to this one because we announced Star Wars Pinball on Switch, which was shipping retail. So if you don't think we've been busy, I mean, we're shipping a Star Wars retail game, which is like the first time in six years that anyone's done that other than EA. So that's pretty impressive if you understand the world of games. And then we were also showing, which I know you want to talk about, a virtual pinball cabinet. So for me, it just made sense. Any time I'm going to go somewhere for like, I was there for six days in Chicago, which is insane, for me to be away out of the office, like doing one thing, focus on one product line. We did other things in Chicago too, which I think everybody saw, but it worked out for me to be there. Let's talk about it real quickly with the Switch release, because normally you guys don't make an announcement that many months in advance of it being available. But obviously you can't deny the timing of, you know, that's such a large venue to be able to make an announcement with. Obviously you get a lot of runway, but you've got the game fully running and all that. is the September release for the Switch with the Star Wars games. Is that mainly because of the retail aspect or are you just kind of, is it more like riding the crest of the wave as it builds up to the excitement for the movie being released in December? It's a combination of all those things. Because we're shipping on retail, we had to know our launch date well in advance, which has allowed us kind of the opportunity to announce it when we wanted to and then have a nice period. We're going to be at E3 next month, so we'll be showing it there. rather than probably Gamescom and PAX. So we got a much bigger marketing push behind it. Because we're going to retail, we need that. It's just a whole different process. It's a whole different type of thing that you go through. The production of cartridges takes a long time. And then, yeah, September was very intentional. There's other Star Wars games coming. I was working on that to look at Fallen Order. I believe it pulled from EA when we were in Celebration, which is, you know, that's a massive game. So there's a lot of Star Wars stuff lining up, and that was our window for us where we're not competing with a bunch of other Star Wars stuff. They've given us our own window and our own place to shine. We're the first Star Wars content on Nintendo Switch, which is very special. And we have a great history together of great games. So I think we'll be joining the ranks of good Star Wars games on Nintendo. So all of these factors, all these things put together. Yeah, we're in September. It's out there. We have a very long period in front of us in which to promote the game. That's great. One of the other things with the Switch, you guys were talking about how it's kind of got an exclusive, not content, but let's say game aspects where you're choosing light side, dark side to build up your, I don't even know what. All I can think of, though, wasn't there something similar to that on mobile with the Star Wars app where it was kind of a pick a light side, dark side? Or am I thinking it was specific, one of the specific tables had that aspect to it? No, you're correct. There was a thing that we called Balance of the Force. So we've taken the galactic struggle, and that is an iteration. The Balance of the Force or whatever it was that we had was like the very first type of this. This is taking it much further because the metagame contributes to this now in a much deeper way. And it's updated real time before it was kind of delayed. But now it's just like people log, they come into play, and they see what's happening in a dynamic way. so we kind of took some early ideas which we launched years ago and now we've really developed it based on new technology based on there's more to do in the pinball game itself so the Galactic Struggle should be a lot of fun for players my daughter is like she's all about light side she loves Luke I tend to go more towards the dark side I bought some Kylo Ren shoes at Celebration and I'm always with Darth Vader tees and stuff so we're going to be teeing off against each other it'll be pretty funny That's awesome. And Switch is, I mean, we keep on saying it, but it's such a great platform for pinball, being able to put it in a vertical screen, flop it in your flip grip. And I read something the other day that somebody was like, the Switch is what the PlayStation Vita wished it could have been. And I was like, you know what? That pretty much nails it. Console in your hand, nice big screen, very portable, and you can plug it in and play it on your TV. So it is kind of a genius platform for pinball. I think it's really, I don't know, I'm a little biased. I think it is the best platform available, and then you can dock it and it's the home system. But, like, the HD Rumble, I think we're getting it, you know, I think we're getting it right. It felt a little overbearing at first, but I just think I love the portability of the device and how easy it is to use and how good it looks, and then it's the home system. It makes so much sense. um okay so then on to the other thing that obviously that i was dying to know more about uh yeah you guys had this ginormous cabinet that had full video on the side of it displaying the star wars game and obviously all 19 star wars tables were loaded up onto this thing um i'm assuming this is what you are planning on putting out there for the commercial use because it looks It's built like a tank. It is. This is our, what you saw there was a commercial prototype. It's code named our LED commercial prototype. Okay. And it's been a long time coming. It's funny. We're probably, this is like pinball machine 4.0. If you look all the way back, you know, back in the early Steam DIY days when people asked us to just enable vertical monitor orientation, and we turned that on, suddenly you had, you know, it was cool because it was just a DIY thing. Guys in the garages building pinball machines. Yeah. Then you saw a version of it come from, like, VP Cavs, and then they got on to Shark Tank, and they got a deal with Dave and John, and they've been successfully selling to the home use market for a while. And then, you know, you get people want pinball. It's massive. Stern's really brought the game back, you know, in the barcades and whatnot. but places like Dave & Buster's or really high-end, like modern day game rooms want very flashy, glitzy video gaming type of stuff and pinball machines haven fit their model for a number of reasons And so here we are We kind of evolved over the course of like five or six years And now we've got this thing showing at Star Wars Celebration, which is completely lit up. It doesn't it looks like, you know, a spaceship instead of four legs. And there's no longer like a box coffin look. It's all rounded edges. It's all lit up the whole entire thing. It can run multiple games at once. It can be updated all the time whenever we want to do it. It can be networked with other machines around the world. You can run live events on it. It's pretty amazing. Wow. I mean, you kind of, if you're thinking about putting anything in Dave & Buster's, it has to be outlandishly eye-catching. And so I think that it seems like a natural fit there that, yeah, it's not just going to be a row of pinball machines. It's boom, here it is. There was an interview that was done with, and it escapes me, there were two gals that were doing the interview that were Star Wars fans, had seemed like never played pinball before, and they were really having a good time. It was kind of interesting, me and Jared talked about it, how not being pinball people, their approach to the tables, and they were glomming on to all the Star Wars-iness of it and just found themselves then happening to enjoy a pinball game. and you can kind of see that turn where they're like, oh, hey, this is kind of, hey, maybe I like the pinball stuff too. It was interesting. But they mentioned that you can set it up to be just Star Wars. You can set it up to be just Marvel. Is the intention to have a limited amount of your guys' tables on a particular machine, or is it going to be somebody walks up and they can pick any of the, I don't know what you guys are up to, 80 different original tables or something like that? how is that going to work? Well, in a commercial setting, there's some details that still I can't fully reveal, but I'll just tell you, we have some units already in live beta in live locations around in North America. And so because it's a device that's connected to our server, we get data off that machine. And data is much in AI and machine learning and stuff is way smarter than we are like on a daily basis. So the game can become whatever is best for that location. And it can – there's a certain number of tables, which is optimal. You want the machine turning over a certain amount of times, right? If people – you give them a tyranny of choices, we call it. You have too many options. Like if I go to buy toothpaste, that's why I don't go buy toothpaste. I sit there and look at the aisle forever. Same thing on a pinball machine. if you have too many games, it was swiping and looking at a grid or something for too long. They don't know what to play. Yeah. So you've got to help them make their choice. It is dynamic. It can, you know, because there's all that led panel on there and the video can be connected to whatever game they're playing. So yeah, sure. One minute it can be a star Wars and you know, you've got tie fighters and X-Wings fighting each other. And the next, if you want to play Jurassic Park, you've got dinosaurs walking across the thing. So from a brand standpoint, the exposure we give our IPs to the game itself, which is very attractive to people, which they can easily play, and then to the operation of it, all three of those things together are really combining for a very unique thing on a location-based game that's not really been done before. Are the Williams tables going to be able to be part of that or is that again dealing with licensing and whatever agreement you guys have with with Williams? Yeah, we'll do that with Williams. And we're actually some of the experiments that we're running right now in our beta locations. We're going to be uploading attack from Mars to the locations here probably in the next week or so. What will happen is a table that is no longer getting played because everyone at that area or that place has enjoyed it, and they want to play something else. We just remove that. It just disappears, and then they want to play. And this is going to be a card swipe kind of cabinet, right? It's not a coin drop? We have several different business models associated with it. It does work with a card swipe, like an embed or something like that. We've done all the work there for that. Jared, when he saw this, he got all excited, and I wanted to make sure that I bring this up because he was wondering, is any of your gameplay that you play on this machine going to be able to tap into then communicate with your mobile device? Almost to the extent, you know how Jersey Jack throws up the QR code for tweeting out your score, but almost like, hey, you enjoyed this, download the app kind of thing. I mean, is there going to be kind of any of that integration trying to sink you back into taking it home with you, if you will? Location based gaming is going to change quite dramatically very soon. It's connected. It will be connected to your mobile device. You can gamify even locations that just have machines like this. You can create loyalty programs. You can drive foot traffic to location. so the symbiotic communication happening between your mobile and your location based game is going to be much trying to talk around yes you get what I'm saying yeah I think that the world we live in with people wanting I think it's funny because I just think in general and sense people have suddenly become sick at least I know I have so I'm talking about myself and I've become sick of like communicating just with this and I want to have social experiences again. To me it sounds fantastic to go to a game room, play games where it feels like I'm participating in how I went on my Xbox on my phone but I'm in a social environment and having food and drinks and maybe my family's there. I do think that socially like the arcade and we all know we can all feel arcades are coming back. They're popping up again everywhere whether it's a barcade, whether it's a Dave and Buster's type of spot, whether it's a Antonio Cruz ship with game rooms, whether it's Four Seasons who are building game rooms everywhere. This social experience is coming and I think that now that we have a phone, we have high-end devices, we have the way video games are going to work now within social fabric of community, I think we're going to see the world changing with games in an offline way and now location can be online. I think that there's a lot and I think our machine is somehow at the center of this. I mean, obviously, the mere fact that you can communicate with the machine at any time and update what it's doing opens up a world of possibilities. Are the games going to be standard three ball games or are they going to be timed sessions or doing the challenges? How is that? What options are there going to be for these? Yeah, right now it's just there is a standard standard three ball game. There's a lot that we can do, especially on the service side and on event side. you know it's uh it's it's a very uh how how do i say it's an approachable e-sport or a you know the casual person can walk up and think they have a shot so if you give them an option to do a one ball high score challenge and you're going to win x amount of tickets or you're interested to win something yeah those are things i think most people just you know they want to participate in they don't even think that they're playing an e-sport they don't think that they're like competing but it's just something that's very fun and entertaining and that they get because everyone knows what a ball and flip versus like they can identify pinball. It's something they understand. So I think it's a, it's a unique position versus like a first person shooter or even a racing game or, you know, something like that. And Zen's been dancing with this e-sports idea for a little while. So it sounds like you're getting even closer and closer to becoming a, a true reality. Yeah. And I don't think that it's like an e-sport the way that we think of e-sports. I think it's just, like I said, it's very approachable. It's a, it's kind of a casual sport, you know, it's like the way that everybody plays mini golf. You're playing golf. You're not out there like swinging a huge club, but you're playing golf, you know? Um, and while there's on the, the IRPA is doing very, you know, doing well, like there's tons of players and there's guys competing for decent amounts of money and they're traveling and the circuit is being built out. Um, that, that only appeals to a very small segment of the hardcore population. Whereas this is, this is truly mass market. Um, especially when you're dealing with the type of brands type of integrations we can do time with film releases or special promotions. Right. It, it, it's just, it's just a different, this is different. It's massive. Yeah. Okay. While you were in Chicago, you sent out a tweet that sent us into a flurry and I don't know how much you can say about it, but I'm going to have you, I'd be remiss if I didn't bring it up. There is you a picture, uh, with, uh, Gary Stern and the hashtags, Stern and future. Were you just trolling us or is there something in the works or what? What is there anything that can be said about that? I also have a picture of Gary and I sharing a steak. That was pretty cool. I don't think I saw that one. And I've got a very special piece of paper with that signed by George Gomez, Brian, Eddie and Gary Stern, which was our, my, my bar, our, our, basically our, barricade pinball pub crawl that we did that night, which is really cool, which I'm going to frame and put on my wall. Gary did this whole printout for me of where we were going to go and why locations are different and what's cool about each one, and they all three signed it. There's like a drip of wine on the paper. To me, that's like treasure. It's pretty cool. You know, there's a lot of things that – there's common interests. I think if you look at the machines that they've done over the last few years and you look on the licensing and you look at stuff. I mean, there's just things that we so obviously should do together and can do, and the only way it can happen is if we do it together. So, yeah, I mean, I think that the future, you're going to see some stuff. And, yeah, well, you know, that's about as much as I can say. That's about as much I figured you'd be able to say. Yeah. I just say, though, first and foremost, I have like major fans of these guys and like just honored to be in their presence and like to talk about ideas, talk about where the game is going with the future. It's not just about Zen and Stern. It's like, what is the future of pinball look like? And, you know, what do we what do the major players and the guys who have stakes in this and the people who have invested long term now in the game of pinball? And you've got this awesome community of people who love to buy our products, play our games. they want more, how do we pioneer this so that it gets bigger and better for everybody? And companies like Zen, companies like Stern, we have a role to play in this. So just figuring those pieces out. There was some people have been asking about where we are with VR, just in terms of even more Zen original VR tables, but obviously also are we at all pushing towards having any of the Williams tables in VR? Where is Zen's stance on VR at the moment? We want to do more VR. We want to do it. Like, believe me, I, you know, I, we want to push stuff out much quicker pace. I was just, we were talking again about if we're going to do more VR tables, which ones are we doing? You know, there's, there's, there's some big things we could do. I mean, you could have, say we wanted to do Star Wars pinball in VR that would be an entire standalone game and it would take a long time and it would be huge and man we could do like the cantina and your pinball machines in the cantina but you know maybe I know that there's huge requests for Williams stuff as well people want Jurassic Park like we seem it just feels like okay everybody wants VR the market is changing pretty quickly Quest is going to I think be a game changer for VR from Oculus. We'd like to see more people just in general having VR headsets. We need a bigger market to really go next. Dropping a few tables here and there is okay, but we need to be able to move some units. And we've done fine. It's been good, but it's not as good as just selling tables the way that mobile works or the way that consoles work right now. Right. Kind of a long, long way answered all to say, like, I don't know. I don't know what next VR release is happening, what content we're doing, but we feel the request for it. The other thing that pops up a lot, and something tells me this falls into line with where you were saying, there's the laundry list of requests that get put out there, but you've got to prioritize what is going to help move the game forward the most. But one of those is with the lighting. People keep on asking about adjustable lighting for the tables. is that, again, one of those things that's just kind of down there with, like, adding Williams physics to all the Zen originals, or has there been that conversation? Chris, could you repeat that little segment for some reason? My screen froze. I don't know. Oh, sure. I missed that little section. Sure. Talking about adjustable lighting, whether or not that's something that's been in a conversation with you guys at Zen as to should it be implemented or are you just fine with how lighting is? I was just saying I know that it probably falls under that same category of adding physics to prior William or to Zen original games where it's, yes, we hear the request, but it's down there on the list. Features and content, and we try to make them both happen simultaneously as best as possible And reality is to do good work takes time I'm impressed with what the Zachariah guys are doing right now. I think they're only a couple, like two guys. Yeah, it's small. I think it's a whole team of four. But, I mean, you know, competition is good. But regardless of what some people say, that Zen doesn't, you know, we don't want to be the only pinball developer in town. It's not true. I think competition is good. What those guys are doing drives us to take a look at what we're doing and be better. But it's just when you get to certain size of things as well, it just takes – there's certain things that take longer when you're dealing with licensing. And if you start a new – so, like, say, sure, we're going to change the way that we offer lighting features or we do lighting, whatever, and we draw this line in the sand. every new table going forward is going to operate like this then all the rest of them feel neglected or old or whatever and then people are like why doesn't this apply on star wars and it's like well because we have to go all the way through an approval process and again with lucas hearts on every or lucas film on every single table and that's overhead that they incur and they might say like then we're not interested in like spending x amount of hours of our people's time for that you know we'd rather just make a new table so it's like these are all things that affect decisions and our ability to because we're talking about a huge library now of stuff. To do it all the way across the board is not I've told this to you before it's not the push of the button and I know you get it but hopefully everybody else understands we're dealing with a complex pipeline of production lots of different licenses, lots of different platforms, many different player groups, emerging technologies you know what are we doing on the next set of devices that are rumored to be coming or services that are rumored to be coming um if we don't if we don't like get there for we want our pinball there you know but what does that look like is it the entire library is it one do we focus on lighting instead of being on i don't know google stadia you know what i mean like these are just things that we have to we're constantly juggling constantly making decisions about every day there's a decision like this. It's good to hear it. See, I like having it come out of your mouth, because when it comes out of my mouth, people don't believe me. So coming out of your mouth, I think it definitely carries more weight in terms of where you guys are at with that kind of thing. It's not that you're just like, we don't want to do it, but there's many more considerations to factor in than just our desire. so the there was talk a while back that you had teased that there were still some Zen original tables coming out in 2019 and those got delayed because I think you said that you guys got excited about what was happening with two of the tables and suddenly you want to make a third table where are we at with those Zen originals yeah so surprise, surprise, game development the way it works, right? I don't think those are going to make it in 2019. We'll see, but right now it just looks like those are likely not to make it, which is a bummer. That's one of the things I know is number one request is like Zen Originals, so I don't know. Hopefully I'll have a more solid update. That's just the way game development works. indie studio doing a lot of different things. Having sampled Operencia, I couldn't help but think, well, come on, that's a natural fit to just fly itself over into a pinball original. I was like, that's the delay right there. What other Zen games are in the works at the moment? Obviously, Operencia just came out over on Epic Games. You've got the Zen Pinball Arcade. You've still got Castle Storm selling. You've still got Infinite Mini Golf and what, Disco Dodgeball, I think. Any new games? Bruin, I know you've been crazy busy, so I'm assuming plenty of stuff is happening. We will be announcing a game shortly before E3, like the day before E3 starts on the Kind of Funny Games Showcase with Greg Miller. We announced Operempia with him on their initial showcase back in December. It worked out really well for us, so look for a brand-new game announcement then. there's another non-pinball game that will launch from Zen this year so yeah that'll be three full non-pinball game releases plus all the pinball stuff plus a Star Wars retail product plus pinball machines that's a pretty exciting year so suddenly you look tired I don't know why I haven't been so available unfortunately for the last couple of years I think it might have been in Budapest actually. Yeah. How often do you find yourself in Budapest? I'm there every six weeks, maybe eight weeks on average. It changes based on what's happening. And that's what, I mean, because there's no direct flight, right? I mean... No, I usually fly to Munich, Frankfurt, or Amsterdam, and from there it's like an hour and fifteen, or hour and a half. But we're talking, what, a sixteen hour flight? Door to door. From San Francisco to Budapest is about yeah 14 15 hours oh good god i hope they're flying you at least business class i'm like i don't get jet lagged anymore it's weird i just like i'm so used to it i just show up i'm awake or asleep and and uh it really doesn't affect me anymore i don't know maybe i'm just in the zombie mode the other one is actually for me is like doing these two hour or three hour like new york central or eastern time zones because like you have a you know you get in at like 9 p.m. or whatever and you're trying to go to sleep at like midnight, it's only 9 o'clock and you have an 8 a.m. meeting which feels like 5 a.m. in the morning. I mean, that's worse. For me, that's the bad one. I keep on joking that I need to get a GoFundMe project started so that I can get flown out to Budapest and tour the studio. But then I started pricing it. I was like, ooh, that's going to be a chunk of change in order to get people to pay for that. the uh uh the williams pinball mobile app uh as everybody knows here i've been doing a whole documentation thing and i'm not gonna weigh you down with any of that i actually sent you an email and i think you were just like uh yeah let me pass that along um i kind of went nuts what can i say but one of the things that i've been hearing a lot and i thought i just would throw this out there as a suggestion to pass along. One of the things I hear a lot from people is they're not being able to play the Pro Mode and experience just how different that is. Some of these people are mobile-only players or their platform is an iPad so they're not able to experience what it was like on the FX3 platform itself. To me, I thought about well, guy, in the challenge modes, there's always a 5 star, 10 star, 15 star kind of grade and 15 star earnings is always more difficult. I was like, wouldn't that be a perfect spot to have that be in pro mode so people can at least sample it and therefore know whether or not they want to just outright purchase these things instead of grind to getting to that level. But it is one of the main things that I've heard from people where they're like, I don't even know what the new physics feel like because I'm stuck playing the grinding basic levels. So I just thought that would be an interesting way of letting people sample it without having it whole hog. Yeah, I agree with you. So I haven't been super close to Williams Mobile for the last little period here. I've been very occupied with a lot of other things. But we have a lot of updates planned for Williams Mobile itself. The game has represented new ground for us in free-to-play and mobile and pinball. And it's not perfect by any means. It's doing a lot of things better than what we did previously, but there are some issues. You know, and it makes just us talking about it right now, you know, you make a – it's a very simple thing, like people who want to play the new physics and they can't. Like, yeah, that should be fixed. I agree and you know go and we'll talk with the team and see what we can do about that but you know sometimes you're so close to something like you're so close to it you don't see the obvious things in front of you and that's sometimes in life and in business or a game that you're so close to so I appreciate you bringing that up I think we should figure that out the other good news is I checked out what your app store rating is, and it's significantly gone up from the dismal score that it had been having. So clearly people are finally playing it. They've gotten past the currency aspect of things and are actually now playing the game itself and going, hey, this is pretty dang good. I know that I spend way too much time with it when I'm sitting in the car waiting to pick up my boy. I think the approach that we've taken, there's good things about it and there's maybe not so good things. is that in mobile, it's a very challenging space. And we took the approach, let's try to be all things to all people. We knew that that would be complicated, but the majority of mobile people don't spend a dime. They'll play and they'll let an ad go by and then they'll keep playing. So sure, let's let them do that. In mobile players, what feels like a large crowd to you is actually a very small percentage of the people, but they just want to buy it and own it and they don't care about grinding. Just give it to me and tell me what it costs and we'll do it. So we try to do that as well. And then there's the virtual currency. People just want to buy some coins and they think, like, this is fun. It's like my little arcade. So that would be flexible and try to give everybody what they want with it. We fall into this space again with pinball because it's so – the game itself is so well-known. People say, oh, a pinball game, I'm going to play that. Then you don't know how they want to monetize and we need to get something for it. So we took that approach to try to be all things. And so there's some problems with that, which the one about not being able to access all features just if you come in and play it is one of those things. But I do think that the physics, they deserve to be played in the way that we built them for Williams. Well, I think one of the reasons why I mentioned that is a lot of people had already had all the tables in Farsight's version, and the Zen physics and Farsighted physics, yes, there's a difference, but it's not pronounced like it is when you play the ProPhysics, which is just like night and day. There's no comparison to anything on mobile that plays remotely like that. And so that's where it's just like, oh, it's such a shame because I think a lot of those people, if they just played that, would go like, oh, okay, now I'm, now I'll commit to this, you know. Rather than giving it five minutes and going, which i that's another problem with the mobile market in general so i mean i've done it myself i download a game i play for five minutes go and i don't need this taking up space on my phone and gone you know so it is it's it's definitely a fine line you have to uh traverse yeah and you think about changing like demographics and socioeconomics and all these different things i mean like there's a whole group of uh however we identify them call them people 20 years uh and younger, and even like 15 and younger, their primary gaming device now is a phone or an iPad. They never played a game on a console. They never played a game on a PC. They just equate their mobile device with their gaming platform. It's changing. Well, that is, Guy, we covered tons of topics. Thank you for spending the time with us to do all this. I'm very excited to hear that, yes, Alpha Numerics will be on the cards at some point, that it's not just only DMVs and nothing else. So that'll make a lot of people happy. And Volume 4 comes out, was it May 28th, I believe? Yep, 12 days from now. There you go. So get those wallets ready to purchase, folks, because here it comes. And again, thank you so much for talking with us. And next release, we'll talk again. Cool. Yep. Always happy to talk with you. Thanks. And thank you, everybody, for listening. And make sure you check out our website, block8pinball.com, slash episodes for all past episodes. And be sure to follow all of us. And I always keep on saying it, follow Zen and PinballFX3 on Twitter. So much stuff drops that you don't even know. So do that and stay ahead of the game. All right. We'll talk to you again. 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