You're listening to Topcast, this old pinballs online radio. For more information, visit them anytime, www.marvin3m.com. Flash Topcast. Welcome to Topcast, tonight we got another great show with a designer that started out as a video game designer, designing such video games as Tron and Spy Hunter. And then finally ended up at the Valley Williams Pinball Division in the 1990s designing games there. He is also the father of Pinball 2000, which is a platform that started in 1999 at Williams that combined a video monitor in a holographic fashion into a pinball machine. So I'd like to welcome George Gomez to Topcast, that George designed some incredible pinball titles at Valley Williams in the 1990s including Corvette, Monster Bash, Revenge from Mars. He's also done some designs for the current Stern pinball including Playboy, Sopranos, and of course Ward of the Rings. We're going to give George Gomez a call right now and talk to him here on Topcast. Hey, George, can you hear me okay? I can. George, let's talk about how you got into pinball and how you started out your life as a designer. I studied industrial design at the University of Illinois in Chicago and I graduated in May of 78. And my first job out of school was actually a midway game. I did video games before I did Toys or Pinball. So in the fall, I blew off the summer and in the fall I started looking for work. Had another teacher that had said, you know, you really should design something that you're passionate about because you're going to get your best work that way. You're going to love to go to work and you're going to love to do this. And at the time I was playing a lot of video games in the student center at the University. And between classes or during lunch time or whatever, they had an arcade. And I would go into the arcade and I would play the very, very crude video games. I mean, what you would find basically in 1977 and 1978, basically black and white, very, very crude. I spend a lot of quarters on the key games, tank games. I don't know if you remember that game. Top down sort of an amaze on either side and a minefield separating the two mazes. And so anyway, I was playing these games and I was way into this kind of, I had never made the connection that I could design a game. But it occurred to me one day with all the arrogance of a 22-year-old that the stuff really shocked. It was pretty bad. Hank didn't look like tanks and jets didn't look like jets. And the controls were abysmal. And here I had kind of spent all this time in school studying man-machine interface, how do you make controls that feel right and look good and all this kind of stuff. And as I thought, hey, what do I call one of these companies and try to get a job doing this since it seems like it could be a lot of fun. And I noticed that there was a company here in the outskirts of Chicago called Midway. And I noticed that because it used to say Midway Manufacturing, Franklin Park, Illinois. And I said, well, that's, I know what that is, it's up at the airport. So, you know, I called, I called over there and got some guy in HR. And I said, I'm a designer and I think you guys really need help. And I want to make tanks. And he brought me in and I think that they didn't know what to make of me. You know, they really, their company at a time had a lot of engineers. They had mechanical engineers and they had electrical engineers. Most of the software people were electrical engineers by training or mathematicians at the time. And so I came in and before I came in, I had sort of taken a bunch of, looked at a bunch of their products. And this is really not, you know, this was not innovation on my part. It was simply something that we had been taught in school was to, you know, to really kind of understand the products of the companies that you would apply to work for. And so I had taken a lot of their product and sort of redesigned it my way. Without knowing anything about anything, because you know, when you're 22 years old, what really do you know, even if somebody says you're now a degree designer. And so I went in there with a bunch of stuff that was kind of my vision of what they should be doing. And I think right away that they saw that, well, you know, here's this kid that has got into this a little bit. And so they paraded a bunch of engineering people through during my interview and looked at my stuff. And you know, at the end of the day, the guy was the Chief Engineer at the time. You know, offered me a job. And so, you know, I remember he took me out to the factory and they were running space invaders at the time. And you could, you know, that scene in Indiana Jones where they put the, you know, they put the crate with the arc. Yeah, way in the back. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's, so they, you know, you're in an office area at what, what used to be Midway Manufacturing out in Franklin Park. And in the office, you know, it's an office and engineering looks actually very primitive. The only guys with computers are the programmers. Everybody else has got drawing tables and, you know, even the electrical engineers. And so we're in this office area and he walks me through, giving me the tour and then he throws open the door and there, as far as the eye could see, running off into infinity, was, you know, the assembly area, the factory basically with an assembly line of space invaders going off as far as the eye could see. And you know, your your senses are assaulted by the sound of the air tools and the bustle and hustle of literally hundreds of people. I mean, that's a game that they produced over 70,000 copies of, which, you know, I mean, the largest run of involve machines to date with, you know, I think Pats Game, that's something like 22,000 and change. Right. I remember correctly, right? Yep. So imagine the cons, you know, imagine the notion of, and this was a factory where not only were they producing space invaders, they were producing other products. So this was a factory that was turning out 1100 coin-operated games a day. If you can, you know, it's like it's a hard number for people to, if even people in the business, right? Because the the pinball machine factory at the height of the, you know, during the 90s craze with, you know, Williams could maybe make across both lines, maybe 300 games a day. So, you know, grasp that number. 1100 games a day. There was a line of semi-trucks with raw material coming into the plant on one end and they would literally be stacked up starting at five in the morning for for many blocks, screwing up all the Franklin Park traffic and at the other end of the factory there was a line of semi-trucks leading with created games. So, I mean, you know, it was just a, you know, to kid out of school. It was an overwhelming experience. I mean, I walked out there and said, oh my god, you know, 300 bucks a week, $15,600 a year, come and design games. So, you know, when you said you bought some of their products and that you had redesigned, like, what was, give me an example. Well, I just basically took their stuff, like I went out to the ERCades and looked at stuff that they, you know, had midway labels on it and I just kind of redid it the way I envisioned it. Well, what do you mean, like control panels? No, like the whole everything, the entire package, you know, so I was, you know, I did, I even took stuff, even stuff on the screen because I didn't know where the lines were drawn. You know, I didn't know who was allowed to design what. I just looked at the whole thing. I mean, I did, I mean, I had a couple of pieces of, I can find them somewhere. I'm sure I have them somewhere that have, you know, even them, you know, even the marquee art, you know, I thought needed to tell the story. So, and so I think that, in the beginning, they wouldn't let me anywhere near the actual design of what we know as a game. I was stuck in, they threw me into the Mechanical Engineering Department and I did control systems and, you know, control panels and and and and being cabinets, you know. Here kid, we need a submarine periscope for a game. For submarine game. Here kid, we need a gun for a gun game and you know, we need some, you know, I think looks like a fighter joystick for a flying game and we need a, you know, we need a sit-down driving cabinet for a driving game. So, all that kind of stuff, but you know, that stuff got old quick and uh... Well, what titles, what titles did you work on that, you know, specifically what video titles that? Then, um, God, you know, lots of stuff that lots of obscure stuff that you've probably never heard of because Midway was basically, you know, licensing a lot of product and producing tons of stuff. The very first thing I did on my first day at work was style a thing that looked like a spear gun for a game called Blue Shark. Black and white video game where basically all these fish swam across the screen and you turned the gun and the gun had a couple of potentiometers driven by by small gears to determine the position of the fish and when you lined up and you squeeze the trigger, you basically shot the fish with a spear. So, um, that was the very very first thing that I did. So you did a control panel? I did the the thing that looked like a, it was a big gun that looked like a spear gun and it, you know, it was the thing that you actually played the game with. So you remember back in the day when gun games actually had guns on them, right? Yeah, I'm a big gun game collector, so I got the lecture mechanicals, yeah. Shark was basically, I believe it was actually designed by Tato and Midway was manufacturing it and, you know, they need Tato basically sent software over and Midway did everything else. And so that, you know, I worked on that. I worked on, I did the the famous Gwarf joystick, you know, the control stick that was years later I took it and turned it into the tron stick. Yeah, I was just going to say that, you know, it was like the same stick as tron. Exactly, I did that. There's a thing that looks like a dot matrix, a little red and black display panel on the, you know, on the top of the joystick and it's backlit. Right, exactly. Okay, if you look search, search in that area, you will find my name in there. It says Gomez and, you know, in that little in the little dot matrix. Yeah, every time you press the button, that thing lit. Right. So, you know, just, you'll see all the letters are turned sideways and separated in every which way. But yeah, poke around in there and you'll see it. Did they know that you did that? Probably not. Probably not. Midway, Midway at the time, Midway in the 80s was run by manufacturing guys. Guys that came from the factory side of the world and they were not real teen on giving designers credit. I think they were very, very, I don't know, concerned about, you know, that we would become rock stars or something. I'm not sure. But they were very touchy about credit. So, a lot of that stuff, it wasn't until years after I left there that people realized that I'd done the buy hunter while I was there. You know, buy hunter was a midway game. Nobody knew anything about me, relative to the game. Are you saying you designed the whole game or just the controls for it? No, I designed the game. I designed the game. I brought the concept in the house. You know, basically Bill Adams, guy named Bill Adams was running the software group at the time and he said, I mean, I'm kind of jumping ahead. I'll get there if you. Okay, sorry. That's okay. I did these controller things and there were a couple of other guys. There was a guy named Bill Adams who was a software engineer and it was a guy named Attiche Go. She was a hardware engineer. And the three of us, we've got the launch and pal around. And we really wanted to make games. And the company at the time, the business of Midway was licensing products such as Space Invaders in Tito and of course the most famous Midway game of all time, the license from Namco for Pac-Man. And so they had two sort of resident design shops that neither of them were in house, but they were owned by Midway. One was called Arcade Engineering in Florida and South Florida. Run by a guy named Ronnie hella Burton. And they had done their claim to fame with Omega race. And then they had Dave Nottingen associates in Arlington Heights, just maybe 20 minutes from the Midway office, the actual factory where I worked. And run by a guy named Dave Nottingen, who by the way also happens to be an industrial designer by trade. I didn't know that at the time. And so Dave Nottingen associates with Go. Org. By the way, Wizard of War, Go. A bunch of other things. They were the big Kahuna. Dave Nottingen would tool up in his Ferrari and with this, you know, really actually Dave Nottingen associates by the way as a pinball aside is where Pat Lawler got his first job in the game business. Before he designed pinball machines, Pat designed video games that Dave Nottingen associates. So you're saying that Dave Nottingen was different than the other Nottingen? They were brothers, but Dave Nottingen associates was owned by Midway. It was a captive, captively owned Midway R&D house. And so you can imagine that the powers that be at Midway paid a lot of attention to products that came from Dave Nottingen. They paid a lot of attention to products. It came from our Kate engineering. And then the what we call the in-house engineers, which I was a part of, we were really a support group. We were basically taking and filling the blanks for anything that didn't come in done from the outside. We were making sure that things were manufacturable. We were making we were cost-reducing things. We were dealing with service issues, you know, like something that was breaking in the field would get, you know, come back and have to be redesigned or whatever, whether it was the cabinet or whatever, even the electronics. So we had all of the disciplines. You know, we had software, we had art, we had mechanical and we had electronics hardware design. We had all the stuff, but it was like, we were always, you know, working, I mean, how I got to work on the Gorf joystick was Dave Nottingen brought in a game with a, I think it was a copy of an F4 phantom joystick on it. And you know, my boss said, you know, we can't really reproduce this. So, you know, why don't you see what you can do and design a joystick? What, why couldn't you reproduce that? Is it too difficult? You know, I think it, a couple of things, I think. So whatever reason thematically, it didn't, you know, it wasn't futuristic, right? It was an F4 joystick and the game was a space game and there were some aesthetic concerns and there was also, you know, the fact that we just, we had it, Dave didn't really have to worry about production. He could essentially mock something up. And so all the stuff that came in from there was not ready for production. It was a long way from ready for production. It was basically, you know, like that joystick was like, I think he got a real one and he made a casting of it and put it on the prototype and then sent it over to Midway. So it was not something that you could, you know, turn the key on and go out and get, you know, 100,000 of these things molded. So we would basically, a lot of, a lot of the designers on the outside, even the captive houses, they didn't have to worry about making the stuff reproducible. They basically just had to somehow mock up the concept and get everybody to sign off on it and of course the games would be tested. Sometimes they would be tested with prototype ports and stuff like that. And it was our job to make the stuff real, so to speak. So anyway, the three guys that I mentioned, or two guys I mentioned, the Peish Goshen and Bill Adams, you know, we kind of kept trying, you know, we kept talking about, you know, how do we do this? How do we get that, you know, how do we get one of our ideas in the pipe? And, you know, Bill was a relentless at, you know, he just kept programming and making sample mock-up things and he never got anyone to pay any attention to it. The strength of our little group and a teach with a hardware designer and he kept coming up with, you know, he would show up and say, okay, I can, you know, I can give you 496 colors, but you can only use 16. And, you know, nobody knew what to do with that. So the magic was putting it all together. Now the magic was the three of us getting together and actually doing a game. So the very first game that we actually got into production with a game called Satan's Hollow, which I don't know if you know. Oh yeah, I remember it. Okay. I mean, it wasn't a huge hit like, say, Tron, but I remember the game. No, we're near. I think we really screwed up with putting Satan in the name because if I recall, all the salesman complained that we didn't sell a single game in the Bible Bell. And, you know, different times, different moors. And, you know, so, yeah, so I did all the bird patterns. I mean, when we started making games, you know, we would, I literally would do pixel art by coloring in you know, graph paper. And then a data entry person would take and, you know, she would make, you know, all the vertical columns numbers and all the horizontal colors letters. And, you know, A1 was a blue pixel. And so it was fairly primitive. And years later, a teach guy that I would refer to who designed the hardware that we shipped Tron and eventually, it's 500. It was 500 was actually a modification of that hardware because we didn't have scrolling hardware. And I was a huge defender fan. And so I kept, you know, by then we were actually, we'd become a legitimate game team inside the company. And so when I went to the 500, I started jumping up and down for a scrolling hardware. And I got him carried medic who was at Williams all through the, through the height of pinball, et cetera, doing electronic systems. Took the, what we call the Midway Cartgrak II, the MCR II, which has been Tron and a bunch of other games, taking all of them in numerous other games. And he redesigned it for its scroll. And so, you mean by scroll? You mean, first off, a lot of people don't know what MCR. MCR was like this card rack where it had like five or six cards that plugged into this thing. Midway Cartgrak system. Yeah, I mean, Gorf used it, for example. Actually, Gorf used MCR1. Right, right. Yeah. And the Tron hardware was different. It was Tron hardware with the T-shirts, two or four, if you will. And what he did is, he had a patent, he had come up with a thing called a double line buffer, which allowed me to patent on it and allowed us to use a bazillion moving, small moving objects. We called them picture blocks. The industry calls them sprites. The Midway term at the time was picture blocks. So, you had these 32 pixels by 32 pixel sprites, if you will. And you had a lot of them on a foreground plane. And that was basically all your interactive stuff. And then you had an art page at roughly half that resolution, 16 by 16 pixel blocks, that did not lend themselves to moving. And those picture blocks were used to create static art. So, for example, in Staten Tallow, all the birds are in the front in the foreground plane. And all of the castle and the scenery and all that stuff is in the background plane. So anyway, so 500. I had gone to the company as a kind of a reward. It was a big reward at the time. They would pick five or six guys and they would send us to the jama show, which was a big video game show in Japan. And it was a big deal to go. And so, I, you know, they sent me to Japan and when I was in Japan, I bought a cassette tape. Walkman had just come out and I bought a cassette tape and a walkman of James Bond's greatest hit. I'm a big James Bond fan. So, I was listening to this on the way back and coincidentally Bill Adams was on my case about, you know, we need to come up with another game. What should it be? Should it be a driving game or what should it be? And so, I just kind of listening to this James Bond tape, I said, you know, hey, you know, it's a car with a lot of weapons. And I was kind of getting into the whole zen of driving music, if you will. And that's what generated the, when you get weapons, you have music. When you don't have weapons, you don't have music idea, which somehow has been lost to the guys that have carried on, the Spy Hunter name and all of the current iterations of the product was, by the way, I've had nothing to do with. But so, this whole notion of driving music and this car with a lot of weapons is where it all began. So, I had a roll of, you know, 18 inch roll of tracing paper, because you know, back then we did a lot of stuff with paper and pen and pencil and stuff and markers. And so, I drew this, I drew this road. I just kept on rolling the, the, the roll and drawing the road. And when I had an interesting road, I started populating the road with the enemies and the, and you know, all of the different things that could happen to the car as it, as it, as it, as you progress through the game, helicopter, you know, helicopter is going to bomb you and, you know, these big cars are going to come knock you, try to knock you off and die in a motorcycle and eventually, and, right on that time, also influenced by the trip to Japan, transformers, had just come out in Japan, but they were, they were not here yet in the stage. And everywhere I went in Japan, there was like plastic robots. I mean, it was like, I would be standing in line at a restaurant with a bowl of noodles to pay for my noodles. And there would be a stack of robots for sale at the counter of the restaurant. I mean, it was the most bizarre thing. And so, you know, we just kind of got the thinking, so it's a guy named, there was an artist on staff called a guy named Steve Olstad and Steve was a guy that, I mean, he's a guy that, you know, said, hey, you know, I had the car going into a vehicle, into a building and the car would come out of boat. And, and in his head, he said, you know, you know, transform the car. And, to me, it was like, you know, I thought, you know, we had pulled into the, pulled into the barn and left with the boat, you know, left the car to go up in the boat. Right, yeah, you didn't convert it, you'd form the car. So, so that's how the car got to transform. And so, so anyway, we, you know, we did, we started doing games before Spy Hunter, we actually had done Tron. That had really gotten us the notoriety. And Tron was an interesting project because Tron was licensed with a license that Tom Neeman, one of the very first guys that did any kind of, the problem of the first guy did any kind of licensing in the Pinball business. Tom Neeman was the, the Valley licensing guy. And, you know, he's, he's talked at numerous pinball events in the last few years and stuff. So, Tom Neeman had gone to Hollywood and brought back the Tron license. And nobody knew what it was. And he dropped off scripts. And we looked at the scripts and Bill said, this is our ticket. You know, this is what we got to do. We got to do this game. And the company had had, without even having a game, the deal that Tom had made with Disney was that when the movie launched, the game had to be on the street. And so further complicate things to company, at the time the company owned, Valley owned, Empire distributing and they owned Aladdin's Castle arcade. So the game had to be in all of the, you know, they decided they were going to have this competition at all the Aladdin's castles. And so every Aladdin's castle was going to get a Tron. And so you are on an amazing time constraint. And, um, Grand Finale was going to happen in, um, in New York, Madison Square Garden, a playoff of basically the, you know, like the top 25 kids from across the country, which we went to and it was great fun. But first we had to get the right to do Tron. I mean, we were just this, no name R&D groups that had, you know, had a minor, very, very minor success with St. Tallah. I mean, they used to laugh at us because, you know, I know what we made maybe 10,000 St. Tallah's or something. And so, you know, the company had just come off of a run of whatever, 70,000 space invaders and who knows how many, you know, Galaxians and you know, it was that the, so the in-house guys, honestly, we were just, you know, we were small time. But they had this, so they said, okay, we're going to open this competition up to the three R&D groups basically and the two big, Kahuna R&D groups were Dave Notting and Arcade Engineering and then our group. And so, my first, my first industry all nighter, if you will, was we actually made, created a presentation for to try to get the Tron, you know, project. And I made storyboards that I still have of what all the game waves should be. And we'd been working on, we'd read the scripts and worked on it for a few weeks. But the night before the presentation, I was up all night with this storyboards for all the games and all the games, you know, and by the way, this of Tron was actually the fifth wave in the original Tron. A lot of people don't know that. And we just ran out of time and couldn't do it. It became, we had very little memory at the time and so it was just a really an incredible job to just even get that, get it into the game, let alone design it in time. Environmental discs of Tron. Did you ever anything to do with that? Yeah, I did. You know, we were pretty excited about, I mean, Tron sold like, you know, a ton of games. I mean, like, you know, I don't know, 35,000 units or something. So it was a pretty big hit for us. And we were excited. This of Tron was being programmed by a guy named Bob Dinderman. And I was working with him on, you know, trying to figure out how to make the thing work. At the time, you remember, we had very little in the way of hardware to do these things. At that time, we were still thinking that it was going to be the fifth wave in Tron. And finally, one day, he just came to me and he said, you know what, we've got to make the room real because I can't fake the math. And so, so then I redrew the room and the minute that I redrew the room into a real one point perspective of the room, the, you know, the game basically just didn't fit with the rest of, you know, the rest of the wave in Tron. So it became a standalone game. And we said, okay, it'll be the sequel. And we were very excited about it. But at the time, all of the, you know, I mentioned to you that Dave Nudding was pioneering a lot of 3D stuff. And he was working on a 3D vector, you know, vector graphics-based game, flying game. And that game was really pretty much feeling all of our thunder. And we thought, you know, that's, you know, we had such great success with Tron. Let's try to blow it out and we'll do, you know, we'll do two versions. And so we basically came up with the notion of the environmental sales guys used to kid me that, you know, in Japan, they had those very small condos that, like, you know, at airports or whatever, it was basically a sleeping berth. And the sales guys used to kid me that when, you know, when they couldn't sell these things, they were going to turn them into these Japanese condos, sleeping berths. So the thing was designed to just, you know, you remember that there was like a lot of science fiction at the time was hinting at virtual reality and all of that stuff was becoming a buzzword. And so we said, you know, let's, let's, people can create a sexier effect. And we knew that it was only going to be, the thing was huge. So it was only going to end up in, like, the big, big huge family entertainment center type arcade. And so it was basically a standard. The front end was just a standard Tron or a Disertron. And then the environmental part was basically grafted onto the front of it. And it had, you know, it had all my black light tricks. And it had, I had like some fluorescent rings painted on the, or a filth screen on the bottom of the floor of the cabinet. And it had, you know, had a thumper speaker in your butt. And all these, you know, every effect we could possibly throw at it. At one time, I don't think we produced them with this. But at one time I had a prototype running that had a strobe light in it. And, yeah, you know, you take a hit from a disc and the strobe light would fire off. So yeah, I think that Disertron was, you know, we didn't make very many of them. I mean, I think they're out there somewhere. Yeah, I would have thought that designing Tron would be difficult because it was basically multiple, you know, at least four different video games. And so you had the spiders, you had the tanks. You had all, you know, you had the, the light rays. You always had the thing that we loved is when you beat the light ray thing, you could spin your arm around like Pete Townsend of the Ho. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, the, you make me laugh at that stuff. Yeah. Oh, it was a big hit. That was all the reason we wanted to complete that wave. Yeah, midway at the time, the guy who was a vice president of engineering, guy named Martin Kane, Martin Kane had a PhD in mathematics and electrical engineering and all kinds of other things. And when I made the, I proposed the control set with the, you know, the spinning disc and the joystick. And I'll never forget Marty said to me during the presentation that he says, translation and rotation are incredibly difficult to do simultaneously. Kind of like rubbing your stomach and patting your head. I said, okay, we'll see what happens. And we just kind of kept going in that direction and we managed to pull it off. Yeah, it's a great, great game. I mean, I, for the longest time I had the cocktail version of it in my, in my basement. I just recently kind of dumped all my video games though. Well, you know, the thing about that, that game too is that because we had to have it done in such a short period of time, well, actually, let me get to the part where we actually got to do it. So we were essentially in competition with Dave Nutting in arcade engineering and Bill, a teach and I really took this to heart because we thought, you know, so we did, you know, we went out of our way to spend a lot of time. A teach had the MCR2 system designed and working, but it had not really been exercised on much other than taking color. Nobody was picking it up and saying, we want to make our next game on it. So it was essentially going to be a, it was going to be a dead system if no designer wanted to design a game on it. And Dave Nutting used to, was famous for doing the absolute bleeding edge of technology when he did his games and his games were very forward looking. I mean, he was into 3D long before anyone else and he was into a lot of things, but the stuff took a long time to go from that level of refined, you know, that level, the concept level to the production level. And so there was, we used to laugh that Dave was a great showman and they would bring you into a dark room and you know, you know, Sprox, Arasustro's playing and you know, they sit you down in this, you know, in this recarrow seed out of one of Dave's sports cars and there's all these controls around you and, and you know, there's, and then behind the scenes sort of with the rod like there's five guys with cold spray, you know, spraying down chips so that the thing doesn't, you know, self-destruct during the presentation. And so we kind of knew, okay, Dave's going to promise the world. I don't think they, I don't think it's going to happen in the time that we have. And our Kate engineering, we, they were basically a vector house. You know, they were, they had, they had reverse engineered the asteroid's hardware to produce some mega-race and, and you know, they were essentially a vector house and we thought, you know what, we can do something with a hardware set that's solid, it's stable. Yeah, nobody knows it, but we know it. And, and so that's what we proposed. And I think on the, on the strengths that, that they, they looked at us and they, they saw a tremendous amount of enthusiasm when we made the presentation. Our Kate and Dave showed up and all they did was armways. There was nothing to show. And we had storyboards and, you know, cabinet designs and a hardware set that with some stuff moving on the screen and all this kind of stuff. And I think that is what got us the job. So you had prototype software. I'm sorry. You had prototype, prototype software written on the MCR too. Yes. Yes. Moving, you know, moving objects, doing stuff, etc. colliding and doing things. And I had, you know, I had a, how the joysticks came about is I had a, I had a sample of a GORF one. And we were having trouble with, we're having trouble with one of the, some of the internal mechanism inside the joystick. And I had asked the vendor to mold me a clear one. You know, mold me a clear one. I want to see what's going on inside that thing. Because we couldn't, you know, we had been struggling with, there was a field complaint from GORF about some of the switches. And we just, I'm like, you know, we couldn't figure it out. Because it was kind of pretty simple technology or leap switch and molded trigger. And we were like, you know, what the hell? So I asked this vendor, the guy who made the joystick, I said, hey, instead of running the black ABS, can you, could you possibly shoot some clear styrene in that thing and just kind of give me, you know, give me 20 pieces or whatever that I can fool around with. And he said, yeah, sure. So he shot me some clear ones and I had him sitting on my desk and I was fooling around with the black light because all the tron stuff, we had seen some, we had seen some early concept stuff from the movie guys and all the stuff was glowing. And so I was messing around with a black light and some, you know, fluorescent paints to make stuff in the game glow. And I had the joystick sitting there and I was about to turn off the lights to go home one night. And I had forgotten I had left a black light on and I flipped the light switch in my office and I was about to close the door. I looked back at my office and this joystick was glowing blue sitting on my desk. You know, one of the clear ones that I had asked for so that I could kind of reverse engineer the issue with the switch. And I turned right back around and went back in and started messing with it. And in the morning I called everybody in to a room with the thing with the black light and voila, everybody's gone, wow, it glow is just like the blue guys in the movie. So, you know, it's a happy accident. Very, very happy accident. So anyway, so we got to do the game and we hustled. It was a weird development scenario. A scenario that's actually very common today where we took every wave in the game and assigned it to a different programmer. So for example, the guy that did the tank wave, which is my favorite, it was the one that I was most in love with because I had mentioned to you that I had been obsessed in college with the top of you down tank game. And so I always wanted to make one of those. So when I did the maze, you know, and I came up with the thing where you shot, you know, you shot basically good shooter on corners and eventually expire. Okay, well, the guy who programmed that for me, guy named Tom Leone, who by the way was also Cuban and as I am. And so him and I went on to do Spy Hunter. He used the programmer as Spy Hunter, which everybody always asked me about. And so basically, but Spy Hunter, a lot of people at the end towards the very end, a lot of people in the business worked on it. A lot of people that are still in the business worked on it on the arc, especially and tuning the game, etc. But now what about the Spy Hunter pinball? You had nothing to do with that. I get bored all the time. And so I, for that reason, I think every Spy R6, you know, sometimes it's been seven years. I kind of designed something else. I go into design something else. You know, that's like a design toys for Marvin Glass and associates for about five years. And I was at Midway originally, about seven years in my first tour of duty. And the pinball thing was always interesting to me. And so I wanted to do with the success of Spy Hunter. They wanted to, Nick Company wanted to leverage the property and they said, you know, let's make a Spy Hunter pinball. But I was not, I mean, the pinball guys didn't know who I was and nor care. And pinball was a pinball designers. They were basically the first rock star designers in our business. They were the first guys that, you know, early on, they had employment contracts because they were so, they were so revered that, you know, they didn't want to, you know, stern to steal a ballie guy or ballie to steal Williams guy, etc. So those guys were, at that time, it was Jim Patla, Greg Kmiec, you know, all of those guys from that era. And Greg got the assignment to do Spy Hunter pinball. And I went to see my boss and I said, hey, you know, you think I can do something with the Spy Hunter pinball and say, sure, just go talk to the designer, okay. So I walked into Greg's office and I, man, I, I'll tell you, I said two words for the guy. I got the chilliest reception I've ever gotten. So I walked out and they're going, okay, this isn't going to happen. You know, this guy's not going to let me do anything relative to this pinball. And, and I, you know, I regret that to this day. I would love to do a Spy Hunter pinball. And, and as I think it should be done. If it makes you feel any better, the Spy Hunter pinball kind of sucks. Yeah, I, yeah. And, and I think it's, again, it goes back to, you know, it, it was, you know, there was that era where the stuff inside the box had nothing to do with the thing. And, you know, it was kind of like that thing. You could have splashed any kind of art on it and it could have been whatever. Right, right. There was no, there was no relationship between the actual pinball. Made its Spy Hunter. And, and I think that, that's significant. You know, I mean, I think that's significant relative to its failure. And I, and I, you know, I'm a big proponent in my, in my pinball games, I've always been a big proponent to, to, you know, let's, let's bring, you know, let's tie the entire thing together. You know, it all has to hang together the fiction. Everything has to be consistent. It's, it's, and when it's not, you get, you know, you get Spy Hunter pinball. Right. So, um, so yeah, so I didn't, I got a pretty chilly reception there. I didn't get to do anything with that. It was, it was about the end of my run at Midway anyway. I was, I was getting very disheartened because the business was, was just talking so badly. It was 1984 and everything was going into the toilet. Everything but Spy Hunter was going into the toilet. And, um, Spy Hunter, I mean, you know, what, we were just a bunch of guys working on Spy Hunter with no deadline, no, no, um, delivery dates, no nothing, no, no, no even recognition for management that this was at, that this game was happening. And things were sucking so bad, they were down to like a hundred games a day. That big, massive, you know, manufacturing monster that it's gone, you know, just a few years before with cranking out 1100 video games a day and, you know, making anything and everything novelties, pinball, you know, the kitchen sink had gone down to a hundred games a day and every, every week was a new layoff. And, um, and some, you know, Stanger Ockie or some, you know, the running marketing at the time, you know, 10 down into our lab and say, what, what is this thing? You know, it's Spy Hunter and, um, we originally, we actually ran the game by the way for the first six months with the James Bond music from that tape that I bought in Japan. And Tommy Neiman couldn't get the license. It was ridiculously expensive. So it was Tommy Neiman who actually suggested the Spy Hunter thing, or what we know of is the Spy Hunter thing, which is the Peter Guns thing. Peter Gun TV show. And we hated it first. And then it grew on us. And, um, and so, and my whole thing about, you know, let's, let's get, give him music when he has weapons, no music when he doesn't have weapons. Uh, to kind of reinforce the whole, you know, it's the whole, make the player feel like a million bucks when he's doing well. Um, which we try to do in every game. I mean, we try to do it today when I make video games and we try to do it in pinball machines and, and the whole thing, you know, it's all about when you're sucking, it's got to feel like it's not your fault. And you can recover. And when you're doing great, you've got to feel like you're on top of the world. And it's the game designer that pulls that off as a game designer that stands a chance to make a successful product. It's sound guys back then. We're not the sound guys that we know them today. You know, a sound guy today is a guy with a music degree or, you know, or, um, it doesn't come from the technology side. He typically comes from the, the artistic music side, you know, because they're composers, they score games just like you score a film. But back in the day, um, the guy with the power was the guy that manipulated the technology. And so a lot of our early sound guys were, uh, you know, a guy who was gigging in a band, but also was like into programming or electronics or something like that. Anyway, I don't know where I was. I was, I guess I was talking about. Well, you were talking about the Exodus from Midway too. So the business is pretty shitty. And, a couple of years before, um, company called Marvin Glass and Associates, it's the most famous, basically toy invention firm in the world, um, had come to Midway and said, you know, we want to make video games because they kind of saw the explosion of video games. And, um, and they would come in with, um, they would come in with ideas on storyboards form on paper. And the company said, you know, hey, you know, these are all really nice, but the reality is, um, you know, these are the guys that did, uh, root beer, capper and, uh, and domino man and games like that. Right. And, uh, um, what was that, uh, one where the animals switched hats, uh, wacko. So, um, uh, anyway, the, the Marvin Glass and Associates, how they got into business was, there was this invention house. They, um, they were the big cunov invention houses. They had a, they had a reputation, um, for consistently delivering successful products to the toy business. They had basically, they were the who's who of toy design. And, um, and they came, they wanted to do video games and, um, the company said, okay, that's all fine, but the only way we can really, you know, give your ideas a tumble is if you actually develop the game. You bring us games that, because, you know, the timing and the feeling and, you know, all of that stuff is just not perceptible from a drawn storyboard on a piece of paper. Right. So, um, Bill Adams by then had risen to, he was running the software group. And, um, and we had all kind of, uh, advanced it midway, you know, I had my own little development group and a teach was doing his own thing. And, and so by then we had Tron under our belts and, et cetera. And, um, and then, uh, uh, so they assigned us to help Marvin Glass come up to speed. So, you know, teach him, teach him our hardware, teach him our tools, et cetera. And, um, there was very threatened by this, you know, because it was kind of like the victory to get our own gig had been hard fought. And, um, um, you know, he considered these guys like a real threat. But, um, you know, it didn't bring out the best in him. Let's put it this way. So, so a lot of stuff would go over to, um, Marvin Glass and it wouldn't quite work. You know, and there'd be some poor guy at Marvin Glass. By the way, those poor guys at Marvin Glass, the guys that currently, uh, you know, evolved into incredible technologies. Uh, uh, uh, Lannan Richard, that were both there at the time, uh, working on game, on the very games that I'm talking about. So, um, yeah, and IT was, uh, they developed the software for the first state of East pinwalls too. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I guess it's a, it's a very small world. But, um, Scott Morrison was, uh, one of the artists is our director at IT is, uh, his father, Howard Morrison was one of the partners at Marvin Glass and Associates. And, um, it was Howard. It was my contact when I wanted to get a job at Marvin Glass after leading, um, Midway. So, what, so what happened is, uh, the business was crashing and, um, the Marvin, I called one day, I said, you know, I think I wanted to design toys. That thing that'd be cool. So, I picked up the fun at call Howard. Hey Howard, I'm, I'm still at Midway, but now things around here are really sucking every, uh, we, we were in this, um, we were in this horrible mode. We had been bought, uh, uh, uh, Valley had been, uh, senior management at Valley had changed hands and they brought in a bunch of these GE guys, GE management guys. They were all about acquisitions. It was, uh, it was the buzzword of the 80s and they, they basically took and squandered the, the video game war chest. Um, you know, in 1982 Midway, the Midway division was a $500 million company. If you just looked at the Midway division, um, without anything else, so they were bigger than the mother company. Uh, but yet the mother company was holding the purse strings and calling the shots. So, um, these GE guys wanted to buy, you know, they went out and did all kinds of silly stuff. You know, they bought Lancer yachts and because, you know, they said we were an entertainment company. Some clowns at the top had a, had a Jones for yachts and so they bought a yacht company and they bought six flags of America and they bought, uh, Chicago health clubs and they bought, uh, life fitness, uh, health equipment, you know, and so this was, uh, this was all bought with the Midway video game money from, uh, so they had squandered the war chest and, and then basically told Midway, oh yeah, you know, uh, you don't have any money in the bank, basically, you know, you guys have to send for yourselves. And so if, if you're making 100 games a day now, you're going to compress your, your staff to reflect that. Um, you are not going to, uh, pretend that, you know, you have access to some, some rainy day money here because, you know, we're doing other things. We're growing in different areas. If your business is crashing, then, you know, tough shit, your business is crashing. So, um, so at Midway, there was this, uh, you know, I called it, you know, it was like every 30 days, uh, you know, my boss had called me up to his office and say, listen, you know, you got to find X amount of dollars in your budget. X amount of dollars in my budget was basically meant to have to lay off some people. So I'd lay off some people and then the layoff would happen. And he would say, okay, let's, uh, let's have a pizza party and let's rally everybody and we're back in it. Okay. All right. Good. So we do that. After you do that three, four times, you start going, you know, so yeah, there's not enough pizza in the world to make this work. No, I mean, it's just, yeah, it gets a little old. And, and so everything was compressing around us. And I, I said, you know what? I'm, I'm, I'm just, I'm not going to beat the last, I'm just not going to be there. And I had, um, one of my early mentors in game design was Hank Ross, guy who both founded Midway and Hank was, uh, personally involved at the time. He was, some I retired, he was retired, basically, he would, but he was, uh, on, on the payroll, I think as an advisor for Dave Moross, to the president of Midway. And, uh, Hank was one of my biggest fans. And, um, I, you know, I talked to him and I said, uh, what are you saying? And he said, you know, he said as long as I'm around, you can have a job here. You don't have to worry about that. And, yeah, Hank, it's not about that. It's about, you know, and, you know, he basically said, yeah, he says, you know, I, I see your point. And he said, nobody's going to think the worst for you if you split. So, you know, do what you got to do. And, um, and so I, um, I started looking, I called Howard Morrison at the Marvin Glass and the power I wanted to design games. He's still, okay, get a portfolio together, come in for an interview, see what you can do. And luckily, I was the one guy that had not fucked with them when they were trying to do, trying to learn stuff. I had actually helped them. So, um, uh, you know, they didn't have any issues with me. And, um, and so, uh, you know, they gave me a job and I, I, I, I want to see my boss and say, you know, that money you're looking for, I got in the budget. You said, yeah, and I said, well, I got some good news and some bad news. Good news is that's how I'm going to your money. Bad news is this. I'm out of here. So I split, um, and, um, and then did Toys for five years. I loved Marvin Glass. It was a tremendous experience. It was another shark pool. It was, uh, it was really, I could have never survived the Williams shark pool had I not done time in the Marvin Glass shark pool. Um, because the, the same kind of, uh, um, just a different species of shark, but shark nonetheless. So, um, you know, the 30 designers at Marvin Glass and 30 model makers and the, the places were licensed to print money because they had done, uh, light bright operation. Uh, you know, you name it. I mean, every, you know, hands down, every, every know, every famous toy, you know, Simon, every famous toy had been done there. And, and so, um, success was basically, uh, you know, there were 29, if you were, there were 30 designers on the staff and, you know, that meant that, that, 29 guys wanted your head. So, um, after that shark pool totally prepared me for what I was going to, you know, what I was going to encounter when I landed it in the Williams Engineering Department in 1993. Well, now, how did you get to Williams? What was, uh, how did that go? Well, after, um, in, um, uh, the partners at Marvin Glass, um, they had this, they had a dispute amongst themselves and they, they could not resolve it. And, uh, basically, uh, they dissolved the company and, and they went off into what the toy industry, um, referred to afterwards as broken glass. It has resolved these little splinter design groups, um, a couple of big ones and then a bunch of little ones that, to, to this day, they are the, the, all of those little splinter groups are the face of the toy business. Um, and you know, your buddy can tell you some of that, some of the story. He'll confirm a lot of the stuff I'm saying. Yeah, he was at Myrglass, which closed the year ago. Right. So Myrglass was, Steve Meyer, who actually was one of the programmers on some of those very games that I talked about when, when Marvin Glass started making video games. And, uh, and these, uh, went, you know, Steve went on to run Myrglass and Bert Myr, his father was also a partner in Marvin Glass. So it's a, it's a, it's a very, very, uh, close knit little circle. Um, so that, yeah, um, Myrglass was a spin-off, was one of those splinter groups that happened after the breakup of Marvin Glass. So, so when Marvin Glass broke up, I had been doing, I was Vodka Married. It was, uh, um, I think it was 1984. I was Vodka Married. I just bought, um, I just bought a two flat in Evan's spin in anticipation of moving into it with my wife and, uh, my wife to be and, uh, you know, I had had a, I had a 1985 Corvette and I, you know, I had all this stuff in my life and I had, I was out of a job. So I, okay, I got to go, you know, I got to figure something out and, uh, I had been, uh, in anticipation of, uh, of my wedding, I had been getting work from Dave Morosky at Brand Product, uh, on the side. And, uh, Dave had, uh, uh, had, was the president of Midway during all those, all those years. He did the, you know, Pac-Man deal and all that stuff. And, uh, Dave, um, I called Dave one day and said, uh, hey, Dave, I'm getting married in June and, uh, you know, my wife, my wife's vision of this vision of this wedding is like Barbie's wedding and, uh, it cost me a bazillion dollars and I need some money and, and so, uh, send me any work you have. And, um, he was starting up this little, uh, manufacturing company called Grand Products. And, uh, that, uh, it's still, still alive. They're not so little anymore. They build basically all of Eugene Jarvis' product and they build, uh, IT's product and, you know, they become a big, a big crew in the business. Um, and I love those guys. It's a very successful bunch of guys, uh, currently. And, uh, so, um, I, uh, Dave started feeding me work and Dave's designer at the time was, uh, Dave was trying to do some stuff with Dave Nutting. Dave Nutting, you know, after, when, when, when, when, uh, midway went through its 1984 compression cycle, one of the things that got locked off was Dave