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Episode 114 – A Banner Day

Slam Tilt Podcast·podcast_episode·analyzed·Oct 30, 2018
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

Orin Day deep-dive: career trajectory, classic game design stories, massive collection.

Summary

Slam Tilt Podcast Episode 114 features an extensive interview with Orin Day, a legendary pinball programmer who worked at Data East, Sega, and Stern on classic titles including Guns N' Roses, Tommy, Baywatch, Apollo 13, and others. Day discusses his entry into pinball, his early career at Data East starting in December 1993, collaboration with famous designers like Joe Kaminkow and Slash, and his personal collection of over 40 pinball machines spanning from early EM games to modern DMD titles. The episode covers game design philosophy, behind-the-scenes anecdotes from iconic games, and Day's approach to rules programming and display code.

Key Claims

  • Orin Day started at Data East on December 8 or 9, 1993, and changed translation code in Tommy the first day

    high confidence · Orin Day, recounting his first day at Data East during the interview

  • Kevin Martin and Orin Day both started at Data East the same week in December 1993 after Christina Donofrio left the company

    high confidence · Orin Day explaining how two programmer positions opened up simultaneously

  • Guns N' Roses originally had a 'stage' mechanism in the back box for locking balls, but it was removed due to cost

    high confidence · Orin Day discussing the evolution of Guns N' Roses design and how it influenced Apollo 13's 13-ball multiball concept

  • The idea for Apollo 13's 13-ball multiball came to Orin Day at a trade show in Reno, with input from John Borg and Joe Kaminkow

    high confidence · Orin Day recounting the dinner conversation where the 13-ball concept was decided

  • Orin Day owns approximately 40+ pinball machines across three basement rooms, including rare machines like Frankenstein (first surviving unit off the line with Data East backglass)

    high confidence · Orin Day detailing his collection throughout the latter half of the interview

  • Slash was easy to work with on Guns N' Roses, but Axl Rose was not

    high confidence · Orin Day's direct statement about working with Guns N' Roses band members

  • Tattoo Assassins was only made in about 100 units and is now available on MAME

    high confidence · Orin Day discussing the limited production run of Tattoo Assassins

  • Lyman Sheets moved from Data East to Williams, where he worked on Demolition Man and Attack from Mars

    high confidence · Orin Day tracing Lyman Sheets' career path from Data East to Williams

Notable Quotes

  • “I think I changed translation code in Tommy the first day that I was there.”

    Orin Day @ ~early in interview — Illustrates the fast-paced, demanding environment at Data East and Day's immediate immersion into major project work

  • “Joe left the room and he came back in a World War II gas mask that he had stashed away in his office, and then the smoking got cut down a little bit.”

    Orin Day @ ~mid-interview — Anecdote revealing Joe Kaminkow's personality and the casual work culture at Data East during game design sessions

  • “I said, you know, Apollo 13, you know, you had talked about having 12 balls. And he turns around and he says something to Joe. He's like, Joe, guess what? We're going to have 13 balls on Apollo 13. Joe's like, go for it, man.”

    Orin Day (quoting John Borg's exchange with Joe Kaminkow) @ ~late-interview — Captures how creative decisions were made at Data East with flexibility and collaborative spirit, resulting in iconic design choices

  • “Frankenstein is a game, and Maverick is too, that I really liked because it made you shoot targets.”

    Orin Day @ ~mid-interview — Reveals Day's design philosophy valuing strategic target shooting over flow-based gameplay

  • “So I got in my parents' old Oldsmobile or whatever they were driving at the time, and went over there, and the first job that I got was to go pick up pizza and a bottle of Jack Daniels for Slash.”

    Orin Day @ ~early-mid interview — Humorous anecdote about starting at the bottom on a high-profile project with a famous rock musician

Entities

Orin DaypersonJoe KaminkowpersonKevin MartinpersonLyman SheetspersonJohn CarpenterpersonJohn BorgpersonNeil Falconerperson

Signals

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Orin Day hired at Data East in December 1993 directly from NASA position in Washington D.C., immediately assigned to Tommy translation code; Kevin Martin hired same week

    high · Orin Day's detailed account of his hiring process, interview, and first day at Data East

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Data East design culture emphasized flexible collaboration over ego; designers, programmers, and mechanical engineers could freely propose ideas without being shot down

    high · Orin Day's commentary on working environment and specific examples like the 13-ball multiball decision at dinner

  • ?

    design_innovation: Apollo 13's 13-ball multiball was an evolution of earlier concept from Guns N' Roses (stage mechanism), ultimately rejected for cost but reimagined with higher impact

    high · Orin Day's explanation of how the stage mechanism was removed from Guns N' Roses but inspired Apollo 13's 13-ball concept

  • ?

    historical_signal: 1993-1995 Data East had only 5-7 core programmers: Neil Falconer, Lonnie Ropp, Christina Donofrio, John Carpenter, Lyman Sheets, Kevin Martin, Orin Day; industry-wide ~12-15 programming jobs across all manufacturers

    high · Orin Day's detailed account of programmer roster and Joe Kaminkow discussing budget constraints

  • ?

    product_concern: Guns N' Roses stage mechanism removed due to cost; design choices at Data East frequently required trading off mechanical complexity for manufacturing feasibility

    high · Orin Day explicitly stating the stage mechanism 'got too expensive, so it got taken out'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.463

0:00
Now comes the fun part. You get to make a video. Cool. Are we gonna like be naked? Yeah. Oh you. My name's Butthead and I'm like a pleasure machine. Your mission is to turn me on. Uh. So like, uh, my interests are like doing it. Uh. And uh, that's about it. Coming to you from beautiful upstate New York, this is the Slam Tilt Podcast, the show about all things pinball. I'm your host Ron Hallett, here with my co-host Bruce Nightingale. Howdy ho from the Silver Ball Saloon. Yes, we're recording on Sunday today, Bruce. Yes, so screwed up it's not even funny. We are not alone this week, Bruce. We have a guest. A guest that we've been trying to get on for how long? Oh my God, I think longer than the one. I mean, you said this when we started the podcast. I know. It's taken a while, but we did get... He is a world famous, world famous, he has been on many pinball machines. You might see his name actually on Starship Troopers and Apollo 13, But he's done pinball machines for Sega and he's done pinball machines for Stern and Data East.
2:03
This is Mr. Oren Day. How you doing, Oren? Good. How are you guys? All right. I met Oren actually before. I didn't even know Oren was who he is when I first met him because I actually bought a arcade game off Oren.
2:22
Do you remember that, Mr. Oren? That's right, I remember it was a football game. Yep, Gridiron Fight. The color version of Atari football. Yes. With light up color track balls. Yes, great game. I had it for about a year, two years afterwards, then I just ran out of room. Those stand-ups are a little hard to have into a tight game room, but I love that game. Now I'm looking for one for the bar. What does that tell you? It all comes around in a big, huge circle. I didn't know Oren DeTime was a designer and a pinball major guy like he is, but he has actually worked on great games like Guns N' Roses and WWF Royal Rumble for Ron's favorite, Maverick, Apollo 13, Godzilla, and many more. So, Oren, what got you into pinball? That's the world famous question we always like to say. Well, there were a couple things that when I was growing up, we used to go to a beach resort in Sarasota, Florida on Siesta Key. And this resort added a game room on their top floor, and it had a volley and a super soccer. They were new. I was about six or seven years old, and there was nothing better than playing volley and I was in super soccer on vacation for, you know, two plays for a quarter, whatever it was. And I think my best memory of that was that super soccer, as you might recall, has the countdown mechanism with the little balls in the back box where it counts down bonus. And one year when I went down there, there was a kid that had a magnet. And he took this big magnet and he used it to hold the scoring switch in place so it It would continue to score during your ball and knock off as many free games as you needed. So there was a lot of free play pinball going on with that naughty young man. But it got me interested in how pinballs worked. And later on, when I was in college, I sort of got back into pinball, played a lot of I've played a lot of games like Space Shuttle and Cyclone and Data East Batman and Addams Family once it came out and was really fascinated with it and by then I learned how to program. So when I got to know Joe Kaminkow and Lonnie Ropp and some of the other people at Data East through the old Rec Games Pinball News Group, when they had a job opening, I was able to apply for it. Kevin Martin and I started at Data East in the same week of December 1993. Wow, pretty cool. Kevin Martin of Papa Pinball fame, or the Papa Facility fame, I guess you could say. Yep, exactly. The replay foundation guru. Yes. And so, when you started there, how long did it take before you actually jumped into a game? Game. I think I changed translation code in Tommy the first day that I was there. Wow. Hello. So it was pretty much a fast and furious introduction that around that time, Tales from the Crypt was just finishing up its production run. I think I started on December 8th or 9th of 93 and Tommy was about three or four weeks away having moved from the six bumper prototype to something more like the production model. Guns N' Roses was very firmly on the drawing board and WWF was already being programmed. It was sort of serendipitous that I got to start there because there were really only a few programmers there. And, you know, it's an industry where at that time there were probably 12 to 15 programming jobs. You know, definitely more people at Williams, but a few people at Dotly than a few people at Data East.
Lonnie Ropp
person
Slashperson
Brian Rudolphperson
Christina Donofrioperson
Ron Hallettperson
Bruce Nightingaleperson
Data Eastcompany
Williamscompany
Segacompany
Stern Pinballcompany
Guns N' Rosesgame
Tommygame
Baywatchgame
Apollo 13game
Frankensteingame
Tattoo Assassinsgame
Slam Tilt Podcastorganization
  • ?

    collector_signal: Orin Day owns 40+ machines across three basement rooms including rare EM, wedgehead, and DMD games; Frankenstein is first surviving unit with Data East backglass

    high · Detailed enumeration of collection throughout latter half of interview

  • $

    market_signal: Early 2000s saw robust secondary market for European-imported Sega games ($700-800 each); Coinop Warehouse was major supplier; collectors used arbitrage strategy (fix 3, sell retail, keep 5) to grow collections

    high · Orin Day's description of trading with Lloyd at Coinop Warehouse and business model of refurbishing games

  • ?

    event_signal: 1994-1995 trade shows in Reno and Dallas featured major manufacturer presentations; Baywatch show featured celebrity appearance (Pamela Anderson); Japan JAMA show included international representation from Data East

    high · Orin Day's accounts of Reno trade show, Dallas Hard Rock Cafe Tommy opening, and JAMA show in Japan

  • ?

    content_signal: Slam Tilt Podcast Episode 114 represents first-hand account from legendary pinball programmer on industry history, game design philosophy, and behind-the-scenes development of iconic Data East titles

    high · Ron Hallett's introduction noting difficulty getting Orin Day on podcast; comprehensive interview spanning career, games, and collection

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Orin Day favors games with target-shooting mechanics (Frankenstein, Maverick) over flow-based games (Demolition Man), valuing strategic accuracy and jeopardy over automatic progression

    high · Orin Day's explicit comparison of his design preferences and discussion of Maverick's discard penalty mechanism

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Slash was collaborative and accessible during Guns N' Roses development; Axl Rose was difficult to work with; licensing challenges with celebrity involvement affected game design decisions

    high · Orin Day's direct statements comparing Slash and Axl Rose's involvement and willingness to contribute to game design

  • ?

    product_launch: Tattoo Assassins produced in extremely limited quantities (~100 units); Data East Frankenstein had six units built for movie premiere with different playfield design before production version

    high · Orin Day's statement about Tattoo Assassins production run; detailed account of Frankenstein premiere versions vs. production model

    • 6:47
    And at that time, Neil Falconer was doing game code. Lonnie Ropp was doing game code. And Christina Donofrio was doing game code on Crypt. John Carpenter and Lyman Sheets were there doing display code with Lyman having been recently added so that Neil and Lonnie could all do game code. But Joe and Lonnie, Joe Kaminkow and Lonnie Ropp, were in his office talking about if they had the budget to add another programmer they felt like they did. They did when Christina came to their office and said, I don't know that this is a great job, but I don't have enough time with my family. I think I really want to go back to my old job at Zenith. So just as they were talking about having an opening, another one was created. So that's how Kevin and I were both able to come on board at the same time. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I'm going to hire some of these nerds off the internet and they'll do good work. So we both landed there and Lyman had done the majority of the dot code on Tommy and was getting ready to move on to work on WWF and or maybe Guns N' Roses. John Carpenter was going to work on WWF. I don't remember exactly what the dynamic was there, but I got handed a sheet of French and Spanish and Italian translations and was told, put these strings into the code, compile it for that language, and then test it on the test display to make sure that all of them fit. So, I think probably the first one was stuff like audits and adjustments where we had, you know, some things that need to be translated like left ramp and stuff like that. And all those translations got sent out to our distributors who would translate them and send them back. So, we were very efficient in reusing stuff, but of course there was always game specific stuff. The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.
    9:56
    I had been there twice. I got involved with those guys really when Tommy came out as a prototype game. Data East did sort of a road show, I guess you could say, for Tommy opening off Broadway in Dallas. And they brought all the Tommy prototype games at that point. I think they had, I think they maybe had, had, had 12 built and they maybe brought 10 to Dallas. And they did a big opening at the Hard Rock Cafe. And they posted on Rec Games Pinball that they wanted a pinball player to be there because Lyman was working a trade show in Spain. So I said, well, I'm not the greatest pinball player, but I think I'm pretty good. And I was working at NASA in Washington, D.C. at the time, and I had a business trip already planned to Birmingham, Alabama, which I thought was a relatively short drive to Dallas. It was shorter than driving from D.C. to Dallas, but it wasn't exactly short. But I drove down there and I stayed the night with a friend who lived near the city and showed up and played pinball for a while and went out with those guys after and got to know them and it was a blast. I was just, then when I was back in Chicago for Expo, I got to stop by their office and, you know, got to play the six-bumper Tommy and sort of did like an informal interview with Lonnie where he was, you know, asking, you know, well, what do you think you would change about this game? You know, we're thinking of getting rid of these three pop bumpers because of cost, you know, and I sort of, you know, gave my input and opinion, you know, that that playfield was maybe a little bit more like Whirlwind at the time that had the upper and lower pops. But they called me up in November and said, hey, come interview. And I said, well, I don't know if I have all the technical characteristics. And they said, oh, well, we think you can figure it out. And pretty much I did. Very cool. So you went on to Guns N' Roses, which is, of course, probably one of the best games ever done by Data East. And we're going to ask you the same questions we asked Lyman. Did you get the meat slash? Oh yeah, so that's an interesting story in and of itself that I came back and when I interviewed, so my parents were living in Chicago at that time, they were still in the house where I grew up, which was about 20 miles outside the city and about 10 miles from the old Data East factory. So they brought me back and I interviewed, but then I was actually back the next weekend Because it was Thanksgiving. And the Friday after Thanksgiving, they called me up, and after they'd already offered me the job and I accepted, but I wasn't gonna start for a couple more weeks, they said, hey, do you wanna come on down to the factory? We're working on the Guns N' Roses game design with Slash. And I'm like, well, yeah. So, you know, so I got in my parents' old Oldsmobile or whatever they were driving at the time, and went over there, and the first job that I got was to go pick up pizza and a bottle of Jack Daniels for Slash. So starting at the bottom of the totem pole.
    13:34
    And so we had a room, we had a room that had Joe, Joe Kaminkow and Neil Falconer and Lyman and Slash and John Borg and me. And at the time, I think Neil and Slash and John were smoking like fiends.
    13:55
    I don't remember if Lyman smoked then or not, but Joe left the room and he came back in a World War II gas mask that he had stashed away in his office, and then the smoking got cut down a little bit. But that was the meeting where most of the playfield modes got decided that, you know, Slash told us about the concert where there was a riot and that was where the riot ball John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I promise you I'm kind of That sort of got replaced. I know that... have you guys seen that backglass? Yes. Okay. Yeah. So I think there's six of them around. I don't have one. But yeah, we did... and Slash came back frequently, you know, a few times during the production of the... during the lead up to production and the production of the game. It was very easy to work with. Axl was not so easy to work with. The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I'm going to get in this with celebrities if they're going to agree to do it and then exactly how well they do do it. But Lyman was all, it was funny, Lyman was all lined up to do display on Guns N' Roses as I was sort of getting the hang of things. And then I was going to work on something that was next down the line. But a couple things happened. The first thing that happened was that Tattoo Assassins came along, which took Kevin Martin and John Carpenter's time 100% and then some. And then with the 192 by 64 large format dot matrix display coming along, that Lyman was the person who was tapped to do the system programming on that. So it ended up that I got put into the display slot on Guns N' Roses, though Lyman did actually program the excellent video mode that was there. And so he moved into the Maverick slot and that slotted me for Frankenstein since I was the only display programmer that was left. Lonnie Ropp and Neil Falconer were doing game and at that point me and Lyman were switching There's no water overlap on my trial I will use the escapeRE introsまた Tealay so z there liner carga tractors При Megane a or class A Mmm done Mer 肉 ok The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Scott Danesi. Mark Morris, We brought in a show called The Mask that was done on a Data East USA platform. And we actually ended up showing that game at our booth at the same show as Baywatch out in Reno. Nice. So yeah. So that was probably what that was from that was left over. There were a lot of leftovers around and in fact I'm sitting here in a chair right next to my Frankenstein, Which is the first, I'm not going to say it's game number one, but it's the first surviving one off the line that actually has a back box that says Data East. Nice. Because after that Whitewood, we made six Frankenstein games that went to the premiere of the movie in LA. Um, and the playfield was a little bit different then because, uh, the ramp, uh, instead of, uh, being a looping ramp was actually, uh, at the same height as the hands that dropped the ball into the creature. So it was a very steep ramp like Baywatch.
    19:49
    Um, and then the, uh, and I believe it had a diverter so it could send it either way. So the way that we changed it was we dropped down the ramp to light the locks at the kicker, redid the wire forms so the kicker went up into that plastic trough there that would either take it to the left hand or the right hand or just all the way around and back to the right flipper. Uh, but that piece that's up top is actually from the mold from the original ramp. It was cut off. Hmm. So they used just that form to make that part. So it used to be that you were hitting it from the ramp right into the hands, uh, which is, you know, which would have sort of less virtual ball locks. Because if you, you know, if you recall the way the multiball works, the way it works now is you shoot the ramp a bunch of times to light the buck, then you hit it into the buck, it gives you a two ball, throws the one ball, and then you have to relock both balls so that he throws both balls at you, or I guess I should say, surely throws both balls at the glass. And, you know, we, we, there was probably a lot of play testing of that game with the Whitewood and a lot of having fun before we actually put the glass on and saw what happened. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very near thing with his head. You know, as I sit and look at it, but there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of clearance there. But Frankenstein is a game, and Maverick is too, that I really liked because it made you shoot targets. That, you know, it's sort of the opposite of Demolition Man, which I'm also sitting right here next to. But, you know, that's a game that's all about flows and combos, and if you hit the targets in there, it's kind of by accident. But here, if you want to actually get the modes, then you have to shoot the targets and you're not going to get the six ball multiball unless you're really adept at catching the ball. I actually got it the other night and it was really satisfying. And Maverick has that discard penalty where not only do you need to shoot the targets, you need to shoot the right targets and don't shoot too many of the wrong targets because if you do, then you're going to lose. You know, there's not a, there's maybe, there's maybe not a lot of losing in pinball other than when, you know, something times out or something like that. So, you know, they had a degree of jeopardy and accuracy and, you know, that probably really goes back to coming up, helping come up with the rules for Maverick. I didn't, I didn't write a line of code on it, but contributed the rules. Goes back to my love of some of the EM games. That's cool. A game with lots of drop targets. So... Like Volley. Definitely. Volley rocks. Well, so you're talking about the games you're sitting next to. So what games do you own currently? Oh gosh. Here we go. A lot. So I'm sitting in a room that has mostly DMD games right now. So I have a road on my left that's against a wall that has Circus Voltaire, Demolition The Twilight Zone, The Demolition Man, Twilight Zone, and Jack Bot. That's sort of a Williams row. The Circus Voltaire came from the arcade, the Tiltier and Carey, North Carolina, at that mall. The Demolition Man was bought new from a very convention in Chicago. The Twilight Zone was a very early Chris Hutchins high-end pinball job. The jackpot actually came from somebody in Omaha, but it was really nice. Frankenstein that's here, it was a game that was on test for four weeks and came back, so pretty good shape. A Monopoly, which is the second home use only Monopoly I owned. I bought one from the factory back in 2001 and it turned out, and sold it, and then it It turned out that a friend of mine that I knew through photography down here in Durham had also bought a Monopoly that same week and was ready to replace it with Lord of the Rings. So I scooped in and grabbed that. I've got a 24, which is also a home use only machine. So that's opposite that row. Then against the opposite, against a wall and running in the other direction, I've got some of the games that I worked on, Maverick, Twister, Tommy, Starship Troopers, and X-Files. I haven't quite gotten all the Sega Showcase games together and lined up because back to back with Frankenstein, there's Jurassic Park Lost World. And on that side there is also a World Cup Soccer and Super Soccer, one of the first games that I played, first titles. And capping off the end of that row is actually a Gottlieb Challenger that is not long for this room that Jeff Danek, who runs Holy Free Holies up in Baltimore, has agreed to buy it. So that will be traveling north on Saturday. So that's one room. It's just one room. I'm lucky in this current house to have a finished basement that actually has three pinball rooms. So I have next to it an EM room, which is all EM games. Have a Bally Big Day, which is a great Ted Zale non-symmetrical playfield, a four-player game with those three yellow reels plus the one that lights up so it rolls over at 2,000 points. A bally wiggler, a Gottlieb gridiron, a volley, and then next to it it's wedgehead friend, a Gottlieb Sweethearts, which is kind of a nice combination that I like because it's a very early wedgehead and then a very late wedgehead. Of course, gridiron is the two-player version of pro football, which was another wedgehead, one-player wedgehead game, but it's nice to have a two-player version. To the right of that is a high diver wood rail and then two other wood rails that aren't set up, a Coronation and a Chinatown. Then sitting on the floor that I actually haven't had time to set up is a Williams official baseball pitch and bat. So I'm looking forward to getting that up and running. And then in my other room, where it's a little noisy because a parrot and a cockatiel live, but is sort of my solid state room, I have a Bally Electra, Swords of Fury, Black Knight 2000, Gottlieb Buck Rogers, Paragon, Future Spa, which are two great Paul Ferris titles. Of course, I worked with Paul on WWF and Twister. And then a few EM games too. A Love Bug, which is the add a ball of Doodle Bug, Bally Little Joe, which is sort of a crap-screen game. And then a Genco Shuffle Pool, which is a game from the 1950s that was designed by Steve Kordak that has a half-silver glass, very much like Pinball 2000, where you shoot the puck through images of pool balls, which are pool ball shaped lamps that face downwards underneath the hood that's above the half-silver glass. And again, thequiéré des maximes de la classe avec la nelleoryale visée d'ouverture dans l' possibilities, Jean Mignろ, Frank Trithemun, Robert Goleta, Rothschild & Schade registered,
    28:06
    Michael bertstein,мотрateur du L'inferno, President Jacob and Richard P. 밥نِّ ע لو幫, human that wants to make go with this desire to make it happen without very much buying. So, the first collection, I did move a 24-foot truck from Chicago when I moved down here from North Carolina, but the collection doesn't have a lot of survivors of what I moved down. The three wood rail games came down. The volley and the super soccer came down. I had Demolition Man at that time and Twister. But other than that, I believe everything since then is a new ad. When I moved down, I had, of course, the football game that I sold you, Bruce, but also had a lot of other classic video games that sort of went by the wayside. I had a dedicated food fight, a major havoc, a previous Marvel madness that actually came from Brian Rudolph, who was the programmer of Batman Forever for Sega and also some other wonderful titles such as Cut the Cheese and Sega Sports, 30 Days and Road Racers. But, you know, I did a lot of horse trading for a while, buying a lot of games from Lloyd up at Coinop Warehouse when you could buy a Sega game for $700 or $800. That was back when Lloyd's son Ben was actually going to college down here in North Carolina. So they like nothing better when he would come back from Thanksgiving break or spring break to stop by Mr. Day's house and drop off a pickup truck full of six or seven or eight pinball machines. And typically what I would do is fix up three of them and sell them at retail to pay for the other five. So that's how the collection grew in the good old days of Europe to US re-importation. Oh yes. So did a lot of trading that way. I think the Jersey Jack actually sold me an Indy 500 that I ended up basically trading for this Twilight Zone. I'm a fan of the Pinball Game. It was nice. I think I had a new wired prototype playthrough that I've gotten from Mark Wehne
    30:53
    that actually was a throw-in in that deal to make things work. And the Frankenstein, interestingly enough, I had actually sold to a pinball friend who lived here in North Carolina when I was still in Chicago and And they needed to make a little bit more space, so a couple years ago he sold it back to me. So Frankenstein number one came back. So the Challenger came from Herb Silver, you know, and a variety of other parts. The Shuffle Pool actually came from Sega. That was a fine Mike Wiley restoration. Mike and John Wiley restored that game, found it in a barn, you know, or somewhere around Detroit, cleaned it up, brought it to Expo, Sega bought it. We did two digital versions of the game that I programmed, brought them to a trade show, game didn't sell, and I was able to get Gary to sell me the original. There you go. So, you know, it's a gem. I really like it. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, We had to learn about pinball schematics and how they did pseudo-random mixing so that, you know, sometimes you would have a perfect shot and it would give you all the pool balls like a strike and sometimes you made the perfect shot and oops, the two and the ten are still lit. Too bad. So we reverse engineered that exact Steve Kordak logic into the digital versions that we did, which were Shufflepool, and we also did a Goosebumps game, which had Greystones and Ghosties with little glowing LED eyes back before LEDs were popular in place of the pool balls. Pretty cool. So after Frankenstein, what was your next game you worked on? So I moved on from Frankenstein directly to ending up taking over Baywatch because that was the time when Lyman departed from Data East Sega and went to work at Williams. Of course, he went there, did the Demolition Man home runs, and then it was right on to Attack from Mars. So, he did some great games, but he had contributed a lot of the very solid rules from Baywatch that we went on and continued. So, it seemed like I did a good deal of Baywatch, but John Carpenter also did quite a bit of the dots. We sort of tag-teamed on it to get that picked up.
    33:53
    And, you know, I think it was, I think Baywatch was also a tag-team game programming thing too, because I know that Neil Falconer and Lonnie Ropp both did some game code on there.
    34:09
    And then it was on to Batman Forever, which Brian Rudolph programmed, And John Carpenter did the dots on that one. I did not write any code on Batman Forever.
    34:22
    And on Baywatch, I believe Kevin Martin's in that. He's like the center guy you're trying to save. Kevin is the... the drowned Kevin. Yeah, Kevin was, of course, we hired more dot artists and
    34:39
    programmers at that point, or dot artists to work with the two programmers on Tattoo. And I think they might have actually taken some art that they had of Kevin from Tattoo, I'm not sure. You know, or maybe they just recorded him, but he was right there. So it's like, well, hey, we need a drowning guy. Let's use him. So, you know, so they, they, they, they, they put him in there. And I think I was the one who actually, who actually put the, put the little, put the little line in that when you, when you, you know, when you, I guess you press the extra ball button, whatever you do during the multiball restart to actually drown Kevin. And I was the one who put the text up there that said, you drowned Kevin. Poor Kevin. So it was kind of funny to tease him. And of course, you know, now he's immortalized in that game. He is. But Baywatch was fun. We had a really fun trade show. That was out in Reno. The Aspen Bleef from the show actually appeared and signed autographs at the show. So that was cool. That was the first really big trade show that I went to in America. And I say in America because I actually accompanied Guns N' Roses and Tattoo Assassins to the JAMA show in Japan when Guns was still pretty new and Tattoo had just come out. And we were basically the American representation of Data East while everybody else went with Tattoo Assassins and Maverick to whatever show it was then. I don't know if it was... I don't think it was AMOA. I think AMOA was a spring show and there was some other fall show that I think has been replaced with IAPA or something like that. Whatever the old name show was, that was where they had all the tattoo assassins programmers and some of the actors and actresses that played the characters in the tattoo assassins game. Including, I think it was the spider lady from Tattoo Assassins who was actually O.J. Simpson's girlfriend at the time that he was arrested for those murders. So the National Enquirer was actually sending inquiries to us if they could get any pictures of her as the tattoo assassins character. But they didn't offer enough money so we didn't do it. Zoinks. Toys. Is Tattoo Assassins the one they didn't make many of, if I recall? Yeah, I think they only made like a hundred. You know, they always turn up in the weird places. Somebody had one on a cruise ship and I know that there was one at Pinball Expo. Kevin has two of them, but it's also available on MAME, so pretty much anybody can play it. The big question is, did you get to meet Hasselhoff? No, nobody got to meet the Hoff, except for maybe Brian Schmidt, who probably went out to do the infamous... Multiball, check it out! Recording session. That's funny. I don't actually still have my Baywatch. I gave it to my sister as a graduation present for her college so that she could have a pinball machine. And she actually kept it She went to Atlanta and then to DC with a couple corporate jobs I actually ended up selling it to one of the guys who was in the Free State Pinball Association in Maryland And that Baywatch is actually still being operated at a location called Volleyball House where they have league So my old Baywatch is still taking money. Hanging around. Yeah, never really thought that, you know, 20, 25 years later almost that that thing would still be taking coins, but still is. So after Batman Forever, we move on to?
    39:09
    Apollo 13. Ah. And Apollo 13, interestingly enough, the idea came to me for the 13 ball multiball when we were actually at that trade show in Reno. And there was probably a lot of wine involved. And if you, if we throw back to Guns N' Roses, originally, Guns N' Roses had a mechanism in the back, in the back box, right towards the back box that was called the stage. And it was basically a locking mechanism that was at the back center of the game up above the top lanes. And the idea was to lock balls to get all the band members on stage. And then it would dump out when you got multiball all into the top lanes so you would get like, you know, as many as six balls at once. I guess there was like a plastic up there that had lamps that had a picture of each person in the band. I think they were lamps that were crossed, that were tied to the cross in the middle of the playfield that showed all the band members. But it got too expensive, so it got taken out. But there was still that idea in the back of my head of, you know, gosh, wouldn't it be fun to just dump a bunch of balls onto the playfield all at once if you locked them? And of course, we, you know, sort of see something like that in Twister where all the balls kick out and get stuck to the magnet. But, you know, Borg and Joe and I were out there and we were at dinner with some folks and I said, you know, you know, Apollo 13, you know, you had talked about having 12 balls. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, Bally Williams, Straight Down the Middle, And so he turns around and he says something to Joe. He's like, Joe, guess what? We're going to have 13 balls on Apollo 13. Joe's like, go for it, man. So, you know, there was good creativity. You know, we had some really good teams and it was sort of a flexible thing. It wasn't, you know, like, you know, this programmer will work with this designer, you know, this mechanical engineer. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.
    42:17
    I think there's a lot of egos involved. You could really sort of step up and share an idea and you wouldn't just get shot down. It was good. Then there was basically, as far as getting Playfield played out and whatever, as long as stuff wasn't too crazy, there wasn't too much interference from the top. You know, folks who want to get their ideas in, Gary, you want to have the ball go to the pop pumpers a lot, but, which is why Guns N' Roses didn't have an orbit shot.
    42:57
    Fail. Yeah, it went to the pops, so. Yeah. There used to be a gate that would open and Gary's like, oh no, you're not going to spend $3 so the ball won't go to the pops. Oh. Put it in there. So blame Gary for super pops. That was the game where we needed to have more than 9.9 billion scoring, I guess, because of that, right? Or was that, I guess, Twister was that way, too. Yes. So after Apollo 13... Goldeneye. Great game. And Goldeneye was kind of funny in that that was one that John Carpenter was working on. We were both working on that. And at some point during that game or close to the end of that game, John and his wife decided to move to Florida. Because they were sick of the winter in Chicago. Don't blame them. She didn't want to have another one. So I was doing dots and did some of the rules, did some of the movie integration. And the cool thing was that at the time of another trade show, they needed somebody to go to London and meet with the Bond people. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. There was no music and whatever, but there were there were three people at the screening
    45:10
    The guy from BMW the guy from Rolex and me So I was there to find out about the movie for the pinball machine and they were there to make sure that product placement was being done correctly according to the contract
    45:26
    Wow, so it was you know, of course when I was the I was sort of a little guy in the room John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I think that's what you do for the wiring and for the connector, the bigger fuse afterwards. There was a technical bulletin on that. It wasn't one of those fuses but it plays great. Bigger fuse for what? The magnet? Yes. The cool out-of-hole magnet. Yes. And you don't have trouble with magnetic balls? Not yet. I really haven't. So with the Golden Eye and Twister because those magnets were so powerful, it just turned It turned out that some of the pinballs had a certain property where they would become permanently magnetized and stuck together. So Mike Toller, who was our electronics wizard, actually developed a magnetic ball sorter to where all the pinballs that came to the factory got put into this big hopper. And it would roll the, one at a time, it would roll the ball down a ramp and get grabbed by a magnetic core. And then the core would shut off. And if the ball stuck to the core, if the ball didn't stuck to the core, it would stick to the core. It would drop down into a bucket where the ball would be put into a game. The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. The GoldenEye was a lot of fun. That was probably the first game that the display guys got silly enough that there were outtakes of things that actually did not get put into the game that they sent to me as animations that made me laugh so hard that I almost wet my pants of things that would We'll be heading to James Bond when he was shot through the barrel, that scene with the barrel and the gun. Yup. But, y'know, those didn't… those didn't go into the game, I didn't even know if I had copies of them anymore, but it was just, uh, y'know…
    48:29
    We had a lot of… we had a lot of really, really talented art guys, you know, Jack Lidden And Curt Anderson being pretty much the first two that Jack's mother Phyllis was actually, I think she was on the line at Bally and she ended up at Data East and Sega doing our cables and also helping out with Bill and Material. She's fantastic. And then Mark Reneeses and Ish Reneeses got hired during Tattoo. They did dots. Ish is working at American Pinball now. And then also Sally Davis, who's not in pinball anymore, but Scott Melchionda, who did dots for us at Data East and Sega. And then he went and did some dots at Premier Gottlieb. And then he actually came back and did some more dots for Stern. So Jack and Kurt, I think, did some dots too, you know, in the last 10 years in the Sega, in the Stern era, even though they've been out in Reno doing great animations for slots And that's another gambling influence. At IGT. Yep. Been there many times. Unfortunately, many, many times. No, we had two machines out there. And I used to work for one company and they did all the trans lights for the slot machines. So it was always a busy... and also the reels. Printing the reels. Oh, God. Yeah, I interviewed out at IGT twice. And just decided that moving to Reno wasn't in the cards, that I was happy down here in North Carolina. Yeah, I know I wouldn't blame you. It's nice out there, just not like North Carolina, I would agree. Yep. Totally agree with that. So after Goldeneye, we have Independence Day? Twister. Twister, sorry. Yep. So I've got one of the early twisters here as well. And one interesting feature of my game that you won't see anywhere else is that it has a red wire form ramp. Hmm. Like a dark cherry metallic wire ramp that was something we experimented with that we hadn't done those colored powder coated ramps since the good old Data East days. and you know decided to see how it would look and uh you know the cherry ramp was okay and there was also this sort of electric uh greenish yellow neon uh ramp uh wire ramp that came out of the uh that came out of the ball lock and dropped onto the magnet and uh boy it's horrible uh john john boer gave them to me but i put the red one on the i put the red one on my game but the uh the yellow one is uh the yellow one is still in the cabinet But it was interesting. My game has one of the unique prototype things that the speakers say, severe weather research, Okla Tech. And that was what we did. I think this was one of the last games. Twister was one of the last games where we actually had the Data East style screened, silk screened speaker covers. Ummm. Like Frankenstein has sort of the Frankenstein logo, the guy getting shot... Maverick has the U.S. Marshal on one side and the Ace of Spades on the other. It sort of continues the art work of the plastic piece that was there in the front. Apollo 13 and GoldenEye each had the lamps in the back panel there. The Blast Off Letters and the GoldenEye Letters. But Twister was the first game in a long time where we actually went back to the same speaker and display holder that we had used in games like Tommy and WWF, the old style, Data East one, for a little bit of cost cutting. Though it didn't have the... Well, I guess Tommy doesn't have it either. There used to be the Data East was stamped, silver stamped on there. But Twister did have the screen speaker panels which said, and I was looking at it and I said, you know, that's the school logo of the bad guys, of like Cary Elwes and the other school that the ones that Bill Paxson was with was Muskogee State College. So they realized the mistake and the production games actually have the correct college logo on the speaker panels, but I was able to save those guys. So mine is actually wrong. The other unique thing about my game is that the canister in the movie was called Dorothy 2. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Rohit Indianac, Donald Nelson, Karneta Smit orbital golfers, Chris Butler, Kim Smireski, Ray restaurant, Dan mattress, Mark Medley, Paul wied cigarettes We had to change the decal, so it said lock the balls in the hole rather than Dorothy 2 to start multiball. That's a little sign that's up at the back left corner of the game. And instead of Dorothy 2 multiball on the instruction card, we called it something else, but I still have the Dorothy 2 instruction card. The other thing that's interesting about this game is that on the far left side of the back glass, Philip Seymour Hoffman is present. Hmm. Because he was in the movie. Yep. It was one of his early movies. And we didn't have a contract to use his likeness. Oh. And he came up to Joe and John Borg at the premiere and he was so overjoyed to be in a pinball game and where could he buy one? Nice. So, not everybody in Hollywood is out to make a buck, you heard it here. We worked with some, even though there were some people that didn't want to be part of it and had to be prodded, or some people like Tom Hanks that wouldn't be part of it at all, there were other people that, you know, recognized, oh my gosh, you know, lots of people are in movies, but how many people get to be on a pinball machine? This is true.
    55:56
    So, after Twister, what's next on the repertoire? That should be Independence Day. Yes. Yes, and you know it was really interesting that we had a bunch of scripts. We did an off-site meeting, I think, at one of the hotels near O'Hare Airport to brainstorm We had to go to the storm and try and figure out what licenses we were going to do next. And we read a bunch of scripts. One of the scripts we had was Twister. One of the scripts we had was Independence Day. One of the scripts we had was Men in Black. Oh, that makes sense. We did not know how Men in Black was going to be cast. What was the most surprising thing you ever saw in the movie? I think it was the whole cast. At some point they were talking about the Tommy Lee Jones role being played by Bill Murray. Wow. Which would have been an entirely different movie. We were trying to skew away from comedies because pretty much with those comedy-style After playing the pinball enough times, the joke gets old.
    57:20
    So, unless it's a cult classic, we're not gonna do it. And you know, nobody did Three Stooges, right? Yep. So, um...
    57:32
    You know, so, uh, I thought Independence Day turned out really well. It was the first game from Robert Toto, who had worked at Williams with Steve Ritchie. I'm a Python and I think the ramps on his games had a wonderful feel to them. His games had really great flow and I felt like Independence Day was a really great theme. We had one of the things that we had to deal with was that starting with Goldeneye in part And then moving on in the twister, the people at SEGA really realized how much money we were losing as a pinball company.
    58:20
    And they said, guys, we need to make these for about $300 less a game or else. And they sent a guy to watch us. So, yeah, so he was there keeping an eye on their investment. So Twister was really the first game that got cut down. Really not a lot of toys. You know, it has a little ball that's on the ramp that's just a little circuit board that's exposed. We have a truck which was, you know, sets of trucks that we bought in a box of five and put on decals. So some of them have the semi-truck that says, Good Golly Transport. Some of them have the re-themed shell tanker truck, whatever. There are a bunch of trucks in the movie, so it's like, okay, well, it doesn't matter what we use. You know, you'll get one of five. And, you know, we had the wonderful ball-sensing magnet there and another magnet up top. Other than that, it was pretty basic, but it shot well. And the same was definitely true with Independence Day. It had nice back and forth ramps, the change of pace ramp in the middle, third flipper, you know, those cool light-up inserts underneath the flippers that were the alien's eyes that turned on when you flipped. It was just a good, a solid, good shooting game. We went through, I don't know, five or six different materials for the head before we found one that wouldn't break too quickly.
    59:57
    And, you know, we're happy with it. The movie was a hit. And the sort of little trivia is that the name ID4 and that abbreviation came out of our shop. Oh, wow. And they saw it on the drawings and they're like, oh, what's that? John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.
    60:45
    I'm like, okay, why don't we have play the Sega pinball there? And they did it. Nice. Which was amazing that Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich on Independence Day were as delightful as they were hard to work with on Godzilla. Wow. So, now you've talked about Sega starting to cut back at this time. Is that nerve-wracking to all the employees or were you like, well, they're just cutting costs and that's just a sign of times? Well, you know, we saw that there was a downturn. We had a series of licenses that did not do as well as we thought. Tommy, there was maybe some backlash from that game because it was the Who's Tommy but it was not the Who's Music. And, you know, Pete Townsend was, you know, very strong behind it, and maybe some other people in the band weren't as strong behind it. That, you know, on one hand, when we saw the off-Broadway show, the premiere in Chicago, my parents and I were sitting right next to the soundboard, and who was running the soundboard but Pete Townsend. Wow. Of course, he's also deaf, so it was maybe a little loud in spots for my parents. But, you know, so Tommy seemed like it was the perfect pinball license, but, you know, maybe some people didn't like it. Maybe it was too yellow, who knows. But then wrestling had back and forth with steroid scandals of, you know, first there was this big Paul Ferris, you know, back glass with all these guys with the muscles on top of their veins on top of their muscles on top of veins and, you know, chest pushed out or whatever. Done With The We had Frankenstein, which was also critically acclaimed. We had Baywatch, which our German customer did not want to buy because there was too much TNA. This is a family show. Glad you make the cabinet like this. Okay. Batman Forever, could have done better. Yeah. Pile 13, critically acclaimed, Twister, cult classic. Yeah. And then, you know, and then ID4 was the real first, I think, kind of hit license that we'd had in a long time. It sold okay, but the numbers were still down. The numbers were still down. It was kind of rough. I think at the time we did ID4, we already had X-Files in our pocket. We had South Park in our pocket. And we're letting that show get bigger and bigger before we did it. Which was a mistake. Slightly. But we'll get to that. I think there's more games in between here and there. Oh yes, there is. So, after ID4, is it X-Files for you? I think after ID4 was Space Jam. Oh, yes it is. So finally... Bruce doesn't have his IPDB up. I have it up, but it's a big list. Yeah, but you sort it by date. You see, click where it says date, and then you sort it. Oh, there you go. There you go. Never did that before. Go ahead. So is it Space Jam? It's Space Jam, yes it is. Okay. Yeah, I kind of remember that because we worked on it in the fall. I think Space Jam was the first game where we put in the trivia mode and I had lots of fun writing those questions about Michael Jordan. I think it's important to note that the abject failure of Bugs Bunny, Birthday Bash, was the reason why there were no cartoon games. And Warner Brothers was notoriously hard to work with on other projects. So if they're, you know, difficult to work with on, you know, for making sure that they have everything exactly, exactly, exactly the way they want it on something like Maverick, then oh my gosh, what's it going to be like with their animated characters that, you know, is their treasure? But, you know, we felt like we had to do that. We already had a relationship with Michael Jordan from having done the charity game that was the conversion of Lethal Weapon. And I worked with that on Lonnie Ropp. Lonnie was a big basketball fan too. Um, and uh, um, the game, the game I think turned out pretty well. Uh, thousands of magnet cores later. It's in the jump ball. People are still operating it. I know that somebody down here actually reproduced 10 of them to try and keep his game running. Yikes. Um, but uh, you know, so that, that, uh, that jump ball was a little bit hard on stuff, but uh, it's uh, the way that it kicks it is not unlike the famous magnetic ball sorter. I mean, but, and Fred Young did a fantastic job doing those, doing those voices. I know that a lot of people have met Fred Young, who is in Chicago, comes to Pinball Expo. Of course, he was the, he was the voice of the announcer in 24 with, after doing so So many, so many impressions from Geneva onward that he finally got to do a game where he used his own voice, which is great. One of the things that I was really surprised about 24 because I'd only played it in noisy places before I got it. I didn't realize, oh my gosh, that's Fred and he's doing Fred, someone else. But yeah, Space Jam was fun. It's definitely a game that someday I want to add into my collection and maybe I'll be able to complete my run of Sega showcase games. Showcase. Put them all on the line. Why was showcase done? To be marketing? Yeah, to, you know... Well, Bruce, what is showcase? Why don't we explain? Well, let's think about this, though. You're talking about a company that was trying to cut costs, and now you changed the whole back box to something totally different, totally, you know... So what did Showcase look like? What was the difference? Showcase has a curved front. Okay. And there were, and then a generic metal back box, a metal box in the back. So we did two versions. We did versions that had wood fronts and metal fronts. And the idea was to look different. That, you know, what, and you know, you mentioned IGT, and we certainly watched that company for a long time. How did slot machines start to look different? Well, they went from a, they went from a flat top to a curved top to draw attention. So we said, what can we do that might be cost neutral to make our new games look different? Because the fact was that if you put a Gilligan's Island and an Addams Family next to Space Jam and Independence Day, The only difference that you would see is this has something that, you know, this is Space Jam just came out this year. It came out last year. Okay, so this game must be newer than Gilligan's Island. But otherwise, how would you tell? There was no change. That if somebody was to walk through my room of 15 DMD games, other than some games having a big display, and of course a few games having a color DMD, you know, what's the difference? And the answer was there is none. So let's try and make a game that looks, let's try and make, let's try and make something that looks different so it'll stand out and maybe people will see that and put some more money into it. And let's, we're doing these big movie titles and these big TV titles. Let's go ahead and, let's go ahead and get this, get this billboard. You know, Morgan Weisling, who was a wonderful artist out in Hollywood who was painting movie posters. You know, the Starship Troopers people wanted his back glass to put on a t-shirt to market the movie. You know, so we were, you know, so we had people that were doing work that was just as good, every bit as good as, you know, as the Hollywood folks. So let's, you know, let's make this, let's make this a showcase for our, let's make this a showcase for, you know, for these wonderful backglasses that are being done and, you know, oops, well, maybe it does reflect a little more under the playfield. That's not so great, which is, which is why I think at least the bulb on my X-Files is taken out because my wife complains she can't see the top lanes. Yep. That in the brackets for holding the head up. Yep. Yeah, I've got bent ones there. But, you know, it was a decent piece of engineering, I think, and, you know, it was an attempt to look different. And then after that, boy, did we really go cheap with the Sega Showcase 2, which was the sort of notched back glass that had no side art. So, you know, the savings there is that some of the savings there is that there's no side art. And eventually some more of the savings was that there was only one speaker. And only one set of amplifiers on the soundboard. I mean, that's how bad things have gotten money wise to that point of let's say, let's see if we can save, let's see if we can save $6 by not putting in all the components on our board. The This is a production of Willy Wonka. Yep. Well, I mean, Williams was Williams was mono, too, but of course, but of course, it was a tweeter and a mid range. Yeah, you guys. But as you know, think about it. When you looked at a Sega game, they actually put it on the DMD stereo sound, you know, and The BSMT and showing a CD going into a plot. Boy, that's
    73:33
    That's modern now, isn't it? No, I know but it was it was innovative back then. It was great like oh wow And you did hear the difference You knew you had a better sounding game Yeah, and and a funny thing too is that I didn't keep the Guns N' Roses that I got that The way our contracts work back in those days. It's like if you programmed a game Your contract would specify that you would get one. Hmm. So So, but it didn't specify what, how good of a game you would get. Oh. So, so we had a prototype actually of Guns N' Roses that had a headphone jack on the front. It had a headphone jack and it had two flipper buttons for volume up and volume down. And I was really excited because the game I was going to get had a headphone jack, except Apparently they needed the prototype stuff, the electronics and the guts of it or whatever, to send to somebody in Europe to test out. So they just left the hole in the front of my game and they covered it with Bondo and painted it black. It's like, oh my gosh, really? Thanks, guys. I would have really liked to have that headphone jack. Or you could have just left the hole. I would have put a steel plate over it. Exactly. So, but, you know, so, you know, so a number of my games, you know, got, got traded or, you know, didn't get kept, maybe because they were just a little bit too prototype-y. Yeah. But certainly, you know, Frankenstein and Twister, you know, played great. So I held on to those. But, you know, there was, there was sort of the, you know, the call when you could trade I made one of those games to somebody for maybe two old Williams games plus a couple dedicated video games or whatever. That was the way that my collection maybe grew a little and I figured, oh well I can recollect some of these titles and of course with some of these reimport games that... My ex-files actually came from Pennsylvania, but Starship Troopers was in Austria, and Tommy was actually in Greece. And I believe my Maverick was in France. So, you know, they got around. It's kind of neat stories. In fact, I actually have left the German display code in my Starship Troopers. So that people can actually appreciate, yeah, you know, we made these for all over, they went all over, and guess what, this one came back. So it'll probably get U.S. code sometime, but, you know, it's not, for pinball players it's not too hard to figure out what to shoot, and for people who don't play pinball they're not going to look at the thing anyway. Gotcha. So next is Star Wars Trilogy? Star Wars Trilogy, the game that I traded for part of a 1976 Corvette. Wow. Okay. It was a nice Corvette. It had 19,000 original miles on it, and it had not been rained on for 14 years. Oh, wow. So I had that vet brought it down here and eventually sold it But that was nice I hadn known how to drive stick until Neil Falconer who was programmer of Jurassic Park and a bunch of games with me Neil taught me how to drive stick on his Mustang Cobra, which was very nice of him since I didn't know how to drive stick. He had this very nice Mustang Cobra that he bought with his royalty money from Jurassic. And anyway, I didn't know how to drive stick. I had to learn how to drive stick to sell a car of my sister's that she left when she went off to her first job and took the Baywatch and left me with a crappy Saab that actually somebody at Stig ended up buying. So I didn't know how to drive stick at that point, so it was really cool to hop into that Corvette on a nice day and drive it down to Sega. But yeah, Trilogy was fun. We had great disappointment later in that we didn't get episode one on the heels of doing Trilogy, but we had a lot of fun with that game. I think it was relatively solid. It was kind of neat to have another drop target game. That there was really a long stretch of games where we didn't have hardly any drop targets at all. That it was pretty much all of those funky hat mechanical targets.
    78:41
    You know, so it was neat to sort of have that, you know, sort of that sort of matrix of tie fighters and, you know, and bust through and it was an easy shot that people could hit. But, you know, again, it was a game that if we'd had a little bit of money, we could have done more.
    79:00
    Would have been, would have been cool to have a little bit more magnets or, you know, maybe a Death Star that did something.
    79:07
    Were they as hard to work with as you hear now with everyone complaining how Lucas was or is? Was it back then?
    79:17
    I think they were actually pretty cool then because they knew us from doing the first Star Wars game. The People hadn't completely turned over then
    79:27
    You know Disney hadn't taken over and they were sort of in that they were sort of in that in-between period when
    79:36
    They hadn't made they hadn't made the fourth Star Wars movie the episode one. Yep. They were You know all they all they had at that point was licensing And you know still probably still trying to pay for Howard the Duck. I don't know But they were cool. They liked the idea of the 3D backglass. That was another showcase game. And the showcase was really sort of intended for that 3D backglass, which I think we did a few of them on Space Jam, and we did it on Lost World and on Trilogy. And I think those were the only three. Yeah, I think those were the only three lenticulars. So that's the, and that's the, you know, is that sort of the prequel to the, you know, to the premium and LE? Well, maybe. You know, the first optional pinball mod. Yeah, that is true. Other than the X-Files and the Neiman Marcus catalog, or the Special Property Monopolies, really. That was probably the first one. Let's make a regular production game and let's jazz it up and make it be something special. Not like a rerun of Addams Family Gold or something like that. So after Jurassic Park, after Trilogy, you have Jurassic Park. Yep, so we got Lost World, so that was the revisit and, you know, I had a lot of fun going back into some of those old display effects and using them again because really when I was just this guy who had a job writing astrophysics software for NASA and DC and was going and playing pinball, That probably the games that we played the most that summer there before I got hired at Data East were Jurassic Park and Twilight Zone. And it was back and forth, back and forth between those games, you know, try and get lost in the zone, try and get system failure, you know, pound the modes, you know, maybe think about getting a multiball every once in a while. You know, from somebody who was in the era of video games, a hardcore video game player that really sort of shunned the ballet pinball games, like having played EMs and then not playing pinball for a while because the resort we went to that had volley and super soccer turned into a timeshare, got rid of their pinball machines, we couldn't go back there anymore. So I didn't play pinball for a while. And of course, that was the end of the EM era. Then, when I got to be old enough to go to arcades around Chicago for birthday parties and stuff like that, it was games like Fathom, and Centaur that were really classics. But after playing the EM games as a kid, and I played those, man, I got killed just like we do with Papa playing those games. I was, you know, compare the art for volley or super soccer to centaur and, you know, as like an 11 or 12 year old, it was like, you know, to me that wasn't quite pinball yet. And, you know, I didn't have, you know, wasn't wearing the heavy metal t-shirts or the, you know, the biker jackets or whatever. So, you know, that wasn't a hit for me. So I was gravitating to, you know, games like Super Sprint and Marvel Madness and some of the lighter Atari stuff. And you know, really didn't get back into pinball until college. But then, you know, after college, you know, hanging out with hanging out with guys like Steve Yonke up in up in Baltimore, up in Baltimore and DC. They worked with me at NASA. You know, we would go and drive 40 miles to the arcade that had the Twilight Zone and Jurassic and the Doctor Dude or whatever and just, you know, spend all Friday night playing those games. So when it came to do another Jurassic, I'm like, you know, oh my gosh, what can we do? What can we do to take advantage of these really good Data East display effects that I got done and, you know, maybe try and pull in some of those good multiball rules because the Data East games had really, really good and really deep multiball rules. And maybe some of our multiballs got a little bit simpler and a little less deep as we went on. So it was like, you know, maybe we can bring in something that's more, you know, multistage. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. This was the, I believe it was the Site B mode where you had to shoot the lit target, but the flippers moved the lit target. So if you're going to shoot at the target, if you're going to say backhand the rightmost target from the right flipper, Then you better use the left flipper to position it to the fourth one out of five, because as soon as you flip that right flipper, it's going to move. Yep. So, you know, that was kind of fun and, you know, something for the real good player to do. And, you know, we like the snagger and we all got a really good laugh when Jeff Goldblum misread the script and said, Oh, the snagger's got my balls. Bad snagger. Let go of my balls. That's one of the recordings that needs to be in a home ROM someday. That'd be cool. So, the dad is out in Seattle with Brian Schmidt, so. Been trying for years to get it, so. Maybe someday we will. But, you know, again, that's, you know, a pinball machine that, you know, has one ball interactive toy. The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I'm a little bit out of control. You know, players would say, oh my gosh, I got a billion points. I didn't get a replay. This game cheated me. Yeah. So. Then after that, we're at X-Files. After that at X-Files. Yeah, I've got one of those too. So yeah, so X-Files was one where, was one of, was a game where we, we maybe waited a little bit too long to do it. I think we've all been sort of lost Chris Carter's attention because there was, by the time we did it, there were so many, so many layers of, um, so many layers of licensing and management between us and him that we couldn't get permission to put the stuff in the game that we wanted to put in. And we couldn't get any speech script at all. Because it was like, well, Scully and Mulder would never say extra ball. It's like, geez, they would say it all the time if they were in a pinball machine. That's what we're making.
    88:05
    You know, we're not making another episode. Yeah. But, you know, so it basically went from Chris is going to write an original story to go with this pinball machine that's a side story to you can't use anything at all unless it's in context. So that's why that's why our jackpot and extra ball effects sound effects are woo woo woo woo woo woo that's all there is to it so yeah it was uh it was it was very it was very disappointing um um but we did at least get good artwork good likenesses we didn't have trouble Tim Kitzrow was one of the first people with that part. And the sculpting that Dave Link did for the game with the Fluke Man and Alien Baby was terrific. We had people on the production line who were taking those FBI badges and wearing them around the factory pinned to their shirt, which was great. And it was another Hurtado playfield that the ramps and the loop shots were just exquisite. So, uh, and hopefully if anybody's out there, they remember to leave that rubber on that center post, because without it the game's unplayable. Yes. Totally agree with you on that one. Tournament directors take note. Yes. And then we go to one of my favorites, Degas, Starship Troopers. Wow, that was a fantastic game to work on. So, we, that was another license we got in on way early. We knew that we wanted to do this, that this was going to be the Hollywood Brat Pack and, you know, have the right stars, that we had a relationship with Tiger Toys so that we could buy all of the bugs and guns and ships and creatures to put on the playfield. Dave Link did the sculpting for the brain bug. And we felt like it was kind of a unique rule set because we're once again back to what I like, which was target shooting. That, you know, we had this neat stuff that the guys did good speech for where you had to shoot a certain number of bugs, then there was sort of a jeopardy of do I want to nuke this planet or do I want to go on to the next one? John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.
    91:02
    John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. The third flipper is really cool too. Yeah, you know, that was, you know, it's funny, you know, I mentioned I have a Paragon and I didn't have it then but I always wanted it and I was constantly bugging Joe Balcer like, guys, we gotta do a different flipper arrangement, let's do something at the bottom. He's like, no man, no, we can't do it unless there's a wide body. I'm like, gosh, there has to be a way. So, you know, we ended up with that, we ended up with that launch the ball through the shooter lane with the one-way gate. And, you know, it's sort of the, when I think back to pro football or gridiron, which is in the other room, or challenger, where there's a ball launcher that shoots out through the center up between the flippers. It's like, you know, how are you gonna, how are you gonna make, how are you gonna make, how are you gonna get the, you know, get something that's not a wide body to have a different bottom? And that was sort of the answer and, you know, it was interesting how we did it with that second button because we didn't want to confuse, we didn't want to confuse a player that wasn't used to those weird flip arrangements and gets scissored all the time. Yeah. So if you don't want to use it, you don't have to. But if you do use it, then you get the double bug credit. And I'm looking at the instruction card and trying to figure out if it actually says it on there, but unfortunately my instruction card is in German. Oh yeah! So, I see something about the, uh, the punky blinkin' zeal treffin' per speesewangen der das display. So obviously I don't speak German. No. I don't think so. But, uh, but yeah, it's, that, that's, it's always gonna be one of my all-time favorites. And, you know, the brain bug is just so funky looking. And that was actually the first game where I got hidden in the display in a couple of places. So I'm actually in the match sequence of what the brain bug is thinking about. And then I'm also, if you flip all the way through the cards in the psychic test, through all 52 cards, if you get to the Joker, I am the Joker on a bug. So next time you get psychic test, if you've got time to flip all the way through the cards before you time out, then you can guess the joker and you can have a fair chance to win a special. So that was what the psychic test gave out, which was a special. Nice. So, and I believe it was, I believe it was totally random and it could be because it was, you know, less than, less than, less than a 3% chance so it wasn't going to mess up our percentage too much. Gotcha. It'd be, it'd be fun to have that mystery ward come up a little bit but I think it confused people too, so. One of the bad things about this game is it does use those half targets, so. Yeah, that's the one thing I don't like about it. But, uh. They're getting hard to find too, unfortunately. Yep, well, hopefully, I think with any luck, Stern is sensitive to the fact that they're hard to find and maybe eventually someday there'll be a solution. So, I know I have a set of William Targets in the correct color sitting in the cash box of my game. There you go. So, it would be neat to do it that way. It'd be neat to do a little bit of tweaking on there. The other thing that was cool about Starship Troopers is we actually, for some of these planet names that weren't mentioned in the movie, we actually went back to the book. Oh, there you go. So, we did that. Of course, the book was a little bit different from the movie, that of course in the book there were no women allowed in the mobile infantry, which was a big part of the movie, and, you know, it was done after he died. I'm a fan of the movie, but I don't know if I would have been pleased with the end result or not. But, you know, I think it was pretty well done and certainly became a cult classic. Again, maybe it wasn't so great at the box office, but people like it now. You know, I was able to, at some point, watch all of those Roughnecks animated stuff with my son when he was 10 or 12 years old, so a little bit better than the R-rated movie. Yeah. So that was how he was able to get hooked up with the game a little bit, so it was good. We did miss one showcase. It's your next game. Night Driving. Night Driving, oh yes. Now there's two versions of that. Don't forget the Mini Viper. Yep, the Mini Viper was a game that I programmed in my office in my so-called spare time that we took to a trade show along with when I was actually at the same time programming the shuffle pool and goose bumps to take to that same trade show. I think we took five or six novelty games to that show that we had of course done. We'd done Sega John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.
    97:39
    Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi, The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. We made the show with White Star instead of the old Data East boards. So we reprogrammed Cut the Cheese with a small display and called it Cut the Cheese Deluxe. So we did that, but we brought a bunch of novelty games to that show, including Derby Days and Road Tracers, which were also kind of, sort of pinballs. I don't know if you guys have seen that Playfield. I think it's on IPDB. It is. I know I've sent those guys some photos since I have a Derby Days playfield sitting here in my stack of playfields at the end of the room. A twister playfield that we used as a test for Mini Viper actually where we just airbrushed a bunch of stuff onto a playfield then screened a black screen and a clear coat over it to see if it would be smooth enough to play. And actually it was. So that was how we did Mini Viper. Um, that uh, Mini Viper was a game that was conceived of as being the size of a wood rail. So that uh, operators could easily place it in a smaller space. But it still played like a regular pinball. Of course a little bit after that came along Safecracker. So everybody was sort of doing the same idea, but Safecracker was a lot smaller. But, yeah, so I programmed Mini Viper and I programmed it right off of the Twister code, which was a really easy fix that there was a shifter in the middle of the playfield that you would hit the, a shifter target that had a weight on the bottom or whatever, you would hit it and it would go back a little bit John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.
    100:26
    It's sort of like a high speed rule on targets that was green light, yellow light, red light for a different multiball. It was real simple. It was real basic. We painted a playfield. We shot the playfield art. Then we screened the black line onto that playfield and cleared it. And that's the one that I programmed. That was the one that Mark Bakula bought and I guess he sold it to somebody in the Netherlands who has it now. But I think I programmed it in about three or four weeks. Did all the display stuff, all the game stuff. Brian Schmidt sent sounds. The way we did sounds was kind of interesting. To sync up sounds with display effects. I would make a VHS tape of the display effects and send it to Brian at his house in Evanston via 303 cab messenger.
    101:34
    So, you know, that's a little bit more analog than what we have now. Yeah. The VHS tape being delivered by cab. I don't have any of those VHS tapes anymore either, which is funny, but he would eventually send them back to us or bring them back to us at the office. Then I think he had some sort of a BBS that we would dial into and download the chip over a modem. Oh my God. Eventually it got to be emailed, but back then you couldn't send an email that was much more than, hi, how are you? You know, you could send a couple of paragraphs, but, you know, attachments were like still, you know, way down the road. Yeah, exactly. So it was like, you know, Munich's email and stuff like that.
    102:31
    So, but yeah, so Viper Night Driving. So, you know, so we did that small game, but Joe Kaminkow had multiple Vipers. So he wanted to do a game where all his Vipers were in the game and
    102:45
    Chicago DJ got involved with the project, Man Cow, so he did, he ended up doing some of the speech for it, which was kind of fun, and, you know, it sort of devolved into the Rabid Raccoons and all this other stuff. I don't remember exactly where those rules came from. It was probably, it might have been from John Borg, I'm not sure, but, you know. Didn't it have like, glow balls or something like that? Or am I thinking about another game? We wanted, yeah, we had that, we had that black light gag in there where we had the plastic coated balls that would glow in the dark. And it would only do it if you got to multiball. So it's like the black light wasn't on the whole time. But yeah, it was kind of cool. It sort of changed the physics a little. It was a little bit like playing with five power balls. But once they got dirty, they were slow power balls. So. So then the next game we have, at least according to IPDB, is Lost in Space. So Lost in Space was the first game I started programming when, I'm not going to say I had one foot out the door, but I was sort of toe dipping into living in North Carolina. I did some of the programming from down here. Met my now wife and was really thinking about moving to North Carolina. So we did sort of a test where I drove down here and I took a PC and a monitor, a CRT monitor, and set it up at her kitchen table and did a bunch of programming. I mean, you wouldn't even think about, back in the 90s then, you wouldn't even think about having a laptop to do any sort of like serious programming. But, you know, did some code down here, sent it back, it worked out okay. And they're like, yeah, you know, if you want to move to North Carolina, you can.
    104:48
    So, you know, so I sort of had that in my back pocket during that game. We all went to the movie together and I walked out and we said, oh, my God, how do we license that? It was awful. And, you know, it's like if we had done the TV show a year before, it would have been a fine license. So, but, you know, the robot probably saved it. I'm sorry, I didn't get it. But, you know, at that point, all we needed was a bad license along with the pinball market that was really sort of, really sort of, I don't know how I can say this nicely, circling the bowl. Yeah, you could say it. It's okay. Yeah, it was circling the bowl. Yeah, we were really in trouble then. I'm looking at IPDB, this is a fun fact, like most of the games you worked on were six player games. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. We added that in just because we could with the big display. And then when we went back to the small display, which was during Apollo 13, in fact I programmed five or six display effects for Apollo 13 with a large display. And those all got scrapped. We said, yeah, we can fit six players in, why not? The other guys don't do it. Maybe somebody will have a six player game, there'll be some reason to do it, they'll do it in a tournament, people will put in more money. Maybe somebody will press the start button six times after some good player wins a lot of credits. Who knows? But yeah, we were able to figure out with some smaller scores and some coloring how to do it. And we also had the very unfortunate and confusing team play, which looked like it was six players when it wasn't. Where players one and three scores are totaled and players two and four scores are totaled, so that you could easily have a two-on-two match. And, uh, it doesn't look like a lot of people did that. That was in our code there for a long time. Yeah, I know, because I just, just recently played Baywatch where we had more than four people. It's like, oh, we can do that! This has like six players. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I think, uh, I don't, I don't think we did it on Frankenstein. No, it's only four. I think Frankenstein was still a four, a four player game with six balls. Um, and, um, and in fact I did steal the, uh, the graphic with all, from the six ball multiball in Frankenstein where it said six, six, six, six, six, you know, with all the, all the different balls and, you know, that in turn is sort of a throwback to, uh, uh, a throwback to the old Williams games where when you got three balls the displays would light up with, with threes that were strobing across like Black Knight. Yep. Oh yeah. And it would ring the bell or whatever so. Firepower, dancing digits also. Yeah, so that was why I threw that into Frankenstein in the first place. That was never really a display effect. It was just taking all of these different fonts and just sliding stuff around because, gosh, I figured out how to program the big display so I could. But then, then we, you know, when we did Baywatch Six Player, you know, to sort of try and get some value added to the big display, you know, use that sort of same, that sort of same, you know, six can play thing. And, you know, Chris was funny to put up 666, but...
    108:42
    So after Lost in Space, we have, I don't know if these are in the right order or not, we have, it's saying Golden Q.
    108:53
    Golden Cue, the John Norris Project. The ten prototypes. Yep, yeah, so that was, uh, so, so Gary Stern, Gary Stern was, um, you know, always felt like bowling is a great game.
    109:11
    Because you can bowl, and if you're a good bowler, your game will be shorter than a bad bowler. So the bowling alley would make more money off of a good bowler. But pinball is the opposite way because, you know, guys like us and gals who are, you know, probably listening, you know, you're a good pinball player so you're not only going to have a super long game with lots of extra balls but you're also going to get a replay and then do it again. So the idea behind Golden Q was to have a time game with objectives where your score would be based on how quickly you finished. And, you know, I think John Norris is probably one of the least credited visionaries in pinball. He basically invented modes. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.
    110:33
    Unless you're Capcom or now today Spooky, you couldn't have a single level game. But, you know, so we added that in. The other reason we couldn't do Eight Ball Deluxe just the way it is because William still had the single reset inline drop target patent, Which is probably one of the biggest regrets I have in pinball is that I never got to do a game with inline drop targets Because we would have had to have them be individual resetting and it would have been expensive and we couldn't have had them close together
    111:13
    Yeah, yeah, so, you know, so so I worked on that with John You know, I think I did some of the display I did some of the display stuff John was learning to do some programming too, but he was really more of a rules and layout guy. I think probably if you're looking at IPDV that probably Irons and Woods is in there too at that time. Yes. Is that on the list? There's actually no date on it, but it does say Irons and Woods. Yes, that was in there, and it was sort of a pun on maybe a little bit of a pun on Tiger Woods. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. The Winning Pinball Show, Knapp Arcade, Bally Williams, Straight Down the Middle, Bally Williams, The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. The Winning Pinball Show, Knapp Arcade, Bally Williams, The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. It happened probably three months or four months before Joe Kaminkow left Sega and went to work at IGT.
    113:29
    Alright, the next game we have here is one we mentioned earlier, Godzilla. Yep, so yeah, Godzilla was an interesting project and that was the first project where I was really working from North Carolina full time. So, moved down here around July 4th weekend of 1998. So, we're looking at about 20 years ago plus a few months. And worked on that game from home. Would email up code that I'd programmed in the display so that the guys could put it in the game. And we sort of got into a rhythm where I'd fly up to Chicago about twice a month for sort of these two-day trips. And it was really cheap for Gary because I could do back-to-back plane tickets. So it was like $200 for a round trip. I'd get a rental car for 20 bucks a day and I would stay with my parents. So it was a win-win. My parents got to see me. I got to go into the office for a couple of days. And we worked pretty effectively that way. Godzilla turned out okay. Again, it was... This time it was a movie that didn't do so well and was not critically acclaimed. So I don't... luckily we didn't have Rotten Tomatoes back then, but Godzilla was really tricky because we didn't have a lot of support from our licensors. And there was a thing where they didn't want any... they didn't want what Godzilla looked like to leak, so they gave some very different... John Popadiuk Bob Betor Keith Elwin Laser Los Bowen Kerins Lyman F Sheats Jr orbit ramps Automated Amusements Python Anghelo Joe Kaminkow Tim Kitzrow Scott Danesi Um but uh you know I think uh I was we were I think we were really still getting some very solid dot art on that game that you know I played that game at uh at Replay FX and you know just noticed uh you know for the you know different shots and the bonus you know just how we had those borders and different fonts for you know the taxi and the other stuff that was just very distinctive and nice and not at all We're going to have to go through the whole thing. But, you know, it's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be a lot of fun. And, you know, I think it will look really good. But we didn't make very many, like Lost in Space. Now, going by, this is towards the end of Sega, were you guys really starting to see the pinch or... Yeah, I mean, by that point I was no longer full time. Joe was gone and I was working from North Carolina on a contract and Lonnie and Neil were doing game code but there was no display programmer in house but after John Carpenter left it was basically me doing four games a year on display where usually it was somebody having as much money as they could.
    117:03
    I don't have as much time as the game programmer if they do display, but I did it so much that I got really good at it, and I had really good artists who knew exactly what to do. And, you know, it just became a really smooth process, but, you know, I'd probably be lying if I said by the end of it I wasn't kind of burned out. I can imagine. Yeah, but yeah, so then it was on to South Park. And as I've probably said in other forums, that's kind of the game that turned things around. Yeah, it did sell a lot for Sega. And it really changed the industry because that was the game that the company figured out that, John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.
    118:24
    John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.
    118:54
    Mark Obama, student financial advisor, John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.
    119:43
    I said, hey Oren, we hired these guys from Williams since they shut their pinball division, but they're not going to be ready to do display. Can you do striker on the side? And I thought about it for about one microsecond and said, sure, I'd be glad to. So I was working a regular job and then coming home and doing that. I think, you know, maybe Lonnie did some of it, but, you know, it was a pretty easy game to do. And I think a story that a lot of people don't know is that the original layout for Striker Extreme by Joe Balser was really Oktoberfest.
    120:26
    He wanted to do an Oktoberfest game. And now he has. Yes, he has. Wow. I did not know that. The Only, only night only 19 years later. Yeah Wow so You know that that was You know and and I think you can maybe see if you if you if you were to look at the two side-by-side You might see that there's maybe a little bit of similarity and where targets are and stuff like that But you know Gary wanted soccer and eventually he wanted football and NFL So of course since I had since I had done the striker stuff. I came back and did that too John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, INDISC, Data East, The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I was very stunned because they reached out to me and asked if I could maybe work on Monopoly with Pat Lawler. And that was really on the table for me for quite a while until Greg Dunlap decided that he wanted to get back into pinball. And of course, he was in Chicago. So everybody, including me, agreed that that made way more sense. So Greg went up there and worked with Pat on Monopoly and Rollercoaster and I think a little bit of Ripley's before he moved to Seattle and went on to Life Beyond Pinball. But that didn't stop them from giving me a call when they needed some help with Playboy, Which was the last game that I worked on. And that was a fascinating game because it was a two-shift effort that Lonnie Ropp worked on display during the day. And then he would... We're moving into the 21st century here. He would email me a zip file of the code each night and I would get home from my regular I was a computer programmer. I had a job, had dinner, spent an hour with my wife, and then come downstairs to my basement here to the computer and do five or six hours of coding. And when I was done at the end, I would zip it up and send it back to him, and he would work on it the next day. So I was basically the second shift Playboy dot programmer. Wow. And I thought that was... after that, you know, eventually White Star came to an end. You know, every once in a while Keith Johnson would give me a call and say, hey, what's up with this display thing? And he actually fixed a bug that was 15 years old that we still laugh about, about where you could store text strings in the ROM. But because, of course, for Lord of the Rings everything got too big because there were I think there were just way too many rules for that system. I don't know how I did it. But I thought I was pretty much done. But I thought I was going to have the opportunity to work a little bit on Batman, but that project took a little bit of a left turn from what it was going to be into Batman. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. Matterhouse
    125:13
    I've been collecting and fixing up games and playing Coraline tournaments on pretty much everything. So what is one of your favorite games? If you said I needed a desert island pinball, one pin only, what is it? Well, if it was one of mine, I would probably take Twister. Okay. Just because I like playing that so much. I think there's some good humor in it. There's some things on the display that I see that I've hidden in there that make me laugh. Okay. And, you know, in terms of a game that isn't mine, you know, it would probably be a real close crapshoot between taking Voltaire or Demoman or Twilight Zone because I like all three of them. There's sort of a love, there's sort of a love hate there.
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    You know, and, you know, I would count, I would count all of the, all the people who program those games as friends. So, you know, there's sort of that, there's sort of that relationship there too, is that, you know, I'm not, I'm just not playing my game, but I'm playing Lewis's game or Ted's game or Larry's game. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.
    127:01
    John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, Raydaypinball, Bally Williams, Straight Down the Middle, Bally Williams, Straight Out the Middle, Knapp Arcade, Raydaypinball, Pinball, Golf League, and then it expanded a little bit. But, you know, that's another thing that John Norris invented that he might not get credit for is pin golf. But, you know, it's great to see those folks. And, you know, I've got, you know, a Paragon and a Future Spa that Paul Ferris did. Did the art on both of those. And, well, at least the art on all of Paragon and half of Future Spa since Christensen did the Playfield, which is an interesting combination. And you know, of course, Steve Kordak did Shufflepool. You know, so it's, you know, so playing these games is sort of a trip down memory lane in a couple different ways. Oh yeah, of course. So, and then, you know, then I've got a game like 24 that's a show that we didn't watch when it came out, but my wife and I watched it on DVDs and then we watched it with my son on streaming, so it's kind of fun to have a, you know, it's kind of fun to have a title that we're kind of hooked into. I'm a fan of the game. I've played it a lot. My wife really likes X-Files, so that was one of the reasons that I tracked down that game eventually, even though it may not have had the greatest memories from its creation. But, you know, as Joe always said, it is what it is, Oren. Yep. I agree. Sometimes that's all you can say, and, you know, that was one of the great things about I'm making four games a year. Oh, God. There was always going to be a next one. And of course, that was the bad thing about making four games a year. Oh, my gosh, now I've got to work on the next one. In a limited amount of time and kill yourself almost. Yeah, and it was, you know, it was interesting that, you know, some of the games that, you know, there were some games that we had to rush out the door, and there were some games that we worked really hard on, John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. You wish they kept in any of your games that you've done? Well, you know, by the end of things, we weren't really able to even put a lot of stuff in to start with. And, you know, there were some fun things. There was, you know, there was the wide body Maverick, which the, I had that one playfield and actually conveyed that to Cary Stare. I don't know if he was ever able to build up a game or not, but it had a paddle wheel That was much wider and the angle of the boat was, I'm looking at my Maverick now and the boat target, the targets under the boat, the cards are almost straight up and down.
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    Whereas the, on the prototype game, it was angled about 30 degrees so you could shoot it from behind the flipper. Oh, nice. And there was actually rollover and there was a hole back there that you could shoot the ball into. Nice. So, you know, a little bit more space, but, you know, it cost a lot of money to do a wide body and, you know, we did it, Williams did it, they moved away from it, it was time for us to move away from it. Yep, I agree. But, you know, I really, thinking about stuff, you know, I like those prototype Tommies. You know, I think that replacing those other pops with that captive ball was sort of a weak trade. Yeah. That if I had my choice and, you know, maybe, you know, there's probably not room there for it. But, wow, it would have been great to have that captive ball be a very target. Yeah, that would be kind of cool. Tommy so that it wasn't so that it wasn't such a drain shot but but now there I don't think there's I don't think there's anything that there's anything that we got rid of that was that was really that would have been that would have been really great or where if there was maybe I'm blocking it out maybe it's just maybe it's just a defense mechanism gotcha well don't forget if you We do go to Expo, which I know you did. Did you just go a couple weeks ago, Orin? I did. Okay. If you ever see or go to Expo, Orin is very easy to talk to. If you see his name on the badges there, please go up to him, say hi, introduce yourself because Orin will talk to anyone. He is a great person. And he can talk to me, hell, he can deal with anybody. That's true. And, you know, I'll certainly be at Pinburgh next year. That's one of the highlights of my year. You know, we'll probably try and go to Expo. I was going to go out to, I'll put in a plug for the Stern Circuit event down here in North Carolina out at Flippers in Grandy, North Carolina, out in the Outer Banks. I had been planning to go to that, but had something come up that's going to keep me here for the rest of November.
    133:25
    So I'm not going to make it out there this year, but certainly I'd encourage everybody to go to that, and I'll probably pencil it in for next year. Yes. Because they have that wonderful set of games. They do. They have a great selection there. It's a nice location. It is a very nice place. People from the Northeast brag about it all the time, including Levy. Levy Naiman, he's been there many times and they love it. Yeah, and you know, it's one where, you know, of course, Fred Richardson is now semi-local, with him being down in Columbia, South Carolina, so he'll be up there, but I know that he was coming down from Minnesota to do it, and I think probably Jason Werdrick will be there. A lot of top-notch players will be there. Yeah, and it's really a time for folks around here to, you know, and from, you know, Virginia and Maryland to get to see those guys up close and compete against them because it's really something wonderful. I mean, you know, I love watching those guys that, you know, even after I had an early flight home from Expo this year, I was home by, you know, five or six o'clock in the evening. But, you know, looking at Steve Bowden holding up his iPhone and streaming the finals and, you know, watching those guys play and, you know, some of the young guns like Zach Barks, you know, lots of fun to, John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi.
    135:27
    I'm sorry, it was Lethal Weapon 1, I think you're on to Lethal Weapon 2. Yes, we are. We are on Lethal Weapon 2. Can you offer me the left arm, Joshua? Your left hand, please, Mr. Joshua. Oh, when he burns it. Yes. Yes. Yes. Wow, okay. That was a deep one. That wasn't in the game. No, no, no, it was not in the game. That Gary Busey scene was just... Yeah, he's a little crazy. He was a great villain. Yes, he was. For the first item, unfortunately, we had a loss in the pinball community. Actually, I think it was yesterday, yesterday morning, Dahlia Rowan, who we've mentioned before, passed away from cervical cancer. Yeah. A long, long hard fight where she basically, she got diagnosed with a very rare form and actually went into remission and then she was back and she was part of the Orange County Pinball Club. She went to a lot of their events, like at Rock Fantasy, so I played with her a lot. And, but then it came back, she's actually been in the hospice for like the last month. So unfortunately she passed away. We'll all remember her. I will miss, she was very feisty. Very vocal. Very vocal. So just from all of us at the Slamtail Podcast, rest in peace Dahlia. Yes, Eddie, so sorry. So sorry.
    136:52
    Then we have, I also wanted to mention this, although it's really not going to be as big a news item anymore, I don't think. You were the American Pinball Backglass Incident. I am. Yeah, I am. It's pretty bad. For those who are not aware, and to give a little background, on Houdini, they had a monkey on the artwork. and I guess the deal was, there was story Houdini thought he could live longer if he had like monkeys testicles like something it was something like that so they had a picture of a monkey on the playfield like a casterated monkey so they decided that they're gonna going forward the monkey is gonna be kind of like their mascot
    137:37
    kinda like to have like cows in all the other Williams games so they're gonna have like every game's gonna have this monkey in it it's like it's gonna be there whatever The Willy Wonka Show, Knapp Arcade, Bally Williams, Straight Down the Middle, Bally Williams,
    138:16
    The Wally Winka Show, Knapp Arcade, Bally Williams, Straight Down the Middle, Bally Williams, Alright, I thought I was on mute. Sorry. Nope. Go ahead. I won't edit that one. That was funny. No, that's good. That's classic. Yeah, but, but, there was, this got out on Facebook. It got out there and it's just very poor taste. I don't know what the, you know, some people are like, it's campy. You know, my thing is, if it's campy, okay, have the monkey like holding some guy's dick. Yeah, that'd be fun. Yeah, ha ha, no, that won't happen. It was rightfully, they got complaints from Facebook, they got complaints from their Twitter and American Pinball has released a statement that that will be removed. Yes, and they're sorry about the issue and... So you guys done fucked up, but at least you have tried... Are going to correct it. Going to correct it. We'll give you kudos for that, but I... Whoever approved that, whatever meeting that was in, was like, come on, that's just, that's This is ridiculous. It will be funny! Yeah, it was really funny. It was so funny, nobody noticed it until days after Expo now. And then a shitstorm started. Yeah. And of course, in our awesome timing department as usual, I think the day after we recorded, guess what leaked? Yes. Some new pinball machine. It's called Sea Witch 2. Electric Beetle. The Beatles. Or Beetle Witch, as my father called it. Yeah, Beetle Witch. And as rumored, it is a rethemed Sea Witch. Yes it is. With some additions. Now this got leaked. This is actually, I don't know if it was considered leaked. It was from the Beetle store and they linked to an unlisted Stern YouTube video. And basically it's Sea Witch with... Two magnets. Yeah, it's got a magnet up on top where the rollover used to be. The star rollover. It's got a magnet there. It's got an extra spinner on the left side, inside like the circle. Yep. It has a target that's actually behind the drop target bank on the left. Yep. So it's behind the flipper, which looks pretty cool. I mean, it's got the art, it's a Beatles artwork. It looks like it's based on, it's early Beatles. Yep. So it doesn't look like it's... 64, 63, 64. Yeah, it's like not different eras. They're going to make 1,964 of them. Yep. Get it? The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. The Diamond Version, there's going to be like the Gold Version, the Platinum Version, and the Diamond Version. And if they're all going to be five figures, you know, the thing to remember, we are not the intended audience. 60-year-old Beatles fans with money are the intended audience here. Yep. We'll see how that goes. They'll probably still sell out, I bet. Yeah, well, I'll guarantee that. And, you know, everyone will be, uh, you know, what a horrible thing. Meanwhile, the Kapow and Stern are counting their money, saying, yep, yep, bad idea, yep, yep, here's more money we need. Winner! Yeah, winner. With this money, we can hire more programmers and make even better games. Does anyone notice that they're almost at 1.0 code on almost everything now? I know. Yeah. How dare they? How dare they catch up? How dare they catch up and do all that stuff with the code that everyone was complaining about? Yeah. In pinball news, there actually was like an early pinball news that came out. Scooby Doo license has been acquired by the same people who did the Jetsons license. I heard orange not just my hat. Scooby Dooby Doo. But it's not the same people that did Thunderbirds, is it? No, it's not. Thank God. Okay, then we can at least jump for two. There's hope. There's hope. Yeah, it better have a mystery machine on it. Yeah, if it doesn't, it's a fail. Yep. Then we have Great Lakes Pinball first title announced. I have no idea who they are. You ever hear of them? Nope. They're gonna make their first pinball creation expose. Oh boy. Alright. Okay. Is it about Pinball Expo? Is it Mike Pacek? Oh man. It's like yeah, there's different modes where you battle to get control of Expo. It's like Autobots and Decepticons. You either pick Rob Burke or you pick my PASAC. There you go. You pick one or the other. Oh, that's so bad. Oh, that's, that was, yeah, that's all I have for the news. That was pretty funny. Pick the re-themed challenger. There you go. You can battle against each other. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Burke goal, PASAC goal. So that was Sea Witch. Okay. Um, oh, and the other thing, going back to the Oktoberfest backglass, another thing I noticed along those same lines, which I only saw mentioned once, is Pinball Expo did a promotional video, I don't know if you saw it, like before Expo, hosted by Rob Burke, you know, where he was like showing some of his games and he was like, you know, this game's gonna be at Expo, this game's gonna be at Expo, you know, plug in the Expo, basically. Did anyone see this video at all? Nope. I didn't see it, but it's pretty likely that Roger helped produce it because he was involved with a lot of PR. In the video, one of the first games he shows is his Flintstones. And his Flintstones, the playfield art, has been changed to the cartoon Flintstones. Which is cool. Then he shows the backglass. Guess what backglass is in this game? He has the raunchy one, doesn't he? The porno backglass in the game, for those who haven't seen it, it's the one where Wilma and Betty are giving Barney and Fred blowjobs. And they swapped. Oh yes, they're swapped, like that matters. Jesus Christ. And I'm like, is that the backglass I think it was? And he's there like, and this game will be at Expo. Now I don't remember seeing it at Expo. And if it was, man, I hope they swapped out the backglass. Yeah, I hope so too. It's like, are you kidding? Wow. It's just... Someone needs to think, folks. You really need to think. The Pittsburgh Pinball Open was this weekend. Yes. And it was televised. It was streamed on YouTube and Twitch. Yes, yes, yes. Which had to be a pain because that's two different chats they had to look at. Yeah. And the winner? Eric Stone. Yay! Robert Plogo in second, Alberto Santana, my nemesis, in third, and Greg DeFeo in fourth. There you go. Congratulations guys. Congratulations to everyone. And Bowen One Classics. And supposedly it's going to be the last tournament... Eric's going to be in for a long time. For, well, yeah, for Eric, but also for the Papa location, supposedly. Yeah. But, I mean, the Papa that was there was supposed to be the last event, so we'll see. I'll believe it when they actually move out. Yep. And I just have a little note. I went to get pizza today in a pizza place I go to, Bruce. And they had a pinball machine this time. What would they have? Monopoly! Excellent. And it worked! Excellent, excellent. It actually worked. And I got 70 something million on it. 70 million? Mm-hmm. You beat my 62 then. Does yours have extra balls? One. This one I had three extra balls. The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. Why? Because I like to play against you. Ah, well you're not going to get to play against me, Bruce. But you can make your goal to finish better than I did. Yeah, which is fourth. No, I was seventh. Oh, seventh. Okay, so I got a little more wiggle room. Yeah, Jesus, fourth? That would have been really cool. But yeah, seventh. You need to finish better than seventh or you fail. Okay. And remember, Zach Sharp's not playing in it this year, so technically I had a harder field. Just saying. I'm just saying. How big is that field, guys? 100 people. Sold out faster than Pinburgh. Sold out in like, what, 10 seconds? 5 seconds? 13 seconds. 13 seconds, as they said. And there's another one in Colorado, too, right? I think so. I think it's the one at, I forget the name of the place, but yes, there is one in Colorado this weekend. And it's neat because it's when the clocks go back, so you're going to be starting at 9 a.m., but you're going to be finishing at 10 a.m. the next day. No, it's the other way around. We start at 10 and we finish at 9. Oh, yeah. We fall back. Yeah, you fall back. You start at 10 and then it's 9 the next day. The next day. Because you get the extra hour overnight. Yes. Okay, so I screwed up again. See? That's why everyone loves fall back for drinking because when the clock's chained at 2, it goes back to 1 and then we're stuck opening another hour here at the bar. Mm-hmm. Yeah, my wife's going to kill me. I'm not going to be there. So that's the 24 hour. Yes. You going to make it? You going to be able to survive? Oh, easy. I'm already up 18 hours a day normally, so what the hell's your difference? Five or six. Yeah. So what I'm going to do, since I'm not going to make it, I am going to bring my camera. Ooh, and you're going to record? I'm going to do a little documentary. I'm going to get them like, this is how everyone is when we're starting. This is how everyone is at like, say, midnight when I'm going to leave. And this is how everyone is when it's over. Is that going to be great? Oh, great. I'm looking forward to it, I guess. I'm trying to make the most of it, seeing that I didn't make it in and I'm still pissed. Yeah, fail. Yeah, thanks Bruce. Thank you for making me feel great. Excellent. That's my goal. And we've had a request. We need to get Jim from the Sanctum on. Okay, we can do that. Because I've actually asked him a couple months ago and he said no problem. I knew he didn't want to do it these next couple weeks beforehand, but I think we can get him afterwards and we can talk about it. The post-Sanctum pain. Yeah, and how, what goes into it. Now is it like me who said no problem and you're going to have to wait two years to get him on? No, no. I actually have a banner up at the Sanctum, so that's kind of cool for the company. Yes, you do. It's still there. So that's all I got. That's all I got. So do your final spiel. Well, Noorain doesn't have anything he wants to plug? Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and put in a plug for Tim Arnold in Pinball Hall of Fame raising money for his new location. He gave a fantastic presentation at Pinball Expo with some really good news about where he is with a buyer coming in Andrew Sle occurrent from Milwaukee TV zachmenkoère . The
    151:05
    There'll be, you know, special access and grand opening and lounge and access to some of the games that Tim has that are so rare and so fragile and so old that he can't expose them to the general public. But our community would be trusted with those. So get online to Pinball Hall of Fame and take a look and consider showing out some money for Pinball Hall of Fame because it's a great project. I think they're going to be able to go up to as many as 600 or maybe even 720 games with their stretch goal. They're going to be right there on the strip, right next to the Harley-Davidson store by the Las Vegas sign. Yep. So that's gonna, that could expose a whole new generation to pinball. So it's more than, it's more than just us going out there to have fun, which of course we will, but it's turning pinball into a tourist attraction that maybe people going home and saying, you know, gee, maybe I can find that bar or find that other location where, where I can do this. All right. Thanks to Oren Day for joining us again. Thank you. Thank you again, Oren. Thanks guys, it was great fun, thank you. Thank you. This has been episode 114, Lethal Weapon 2, We Are The Slamtail Podcast. You can find us at www.slamtailpodcast.com. Look for us on Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram. I really haven't been putting anything on there, so sorry about that. Fail. Fail. You can send us a hate mail, I mean praise and hate mail to Bruce at slamtailpodcast at gmail.com. www.slamtiltpodcast.com
    153:16
    He is also a Stern distributor. Thanks everybody. Thanks Oren. Say goodbye Bruce. Goodbye Dahlia. Lbs7 Live roam to the % banker my Technorian
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