Riding on that lucky riverboat, take a chance, make a bet, maybe you'll get lucky yet. Riding on that lucky riverboat, I don't know who... Coming at you out of St. Charles, Illinois, the special When Lit Pinball Podcast starts now. Thanks for hitting that start button. Here are your hosts, Ken Cromwell and Bill Webb. It's another edition of the Special Windle Pinball Podcast. My name is Ken Cromwell. To my right is Bill Webb, and we've got a special treat in store for you in a bit. But first, I want to check in with Bill, buddy. How are you? We're good, we're good. We've been looking forward to doing this podcast for a little while. Very special podcast, so really looking forward to it. So I think we should probably just jump right in, Ken, if you want to take it over. Agreed, agreed. When we envisioned the podcast, and we've thankfully made it to multiple episodes at this point, I thought to myself, I would love to have this guy on the show. and we are lucky enough to have him today. He's a senior game developer at Stern Pinball, the largest manufacturer of pinball machines in the world. His name is none other than Mr. Dwight Sullivan. Dwight, welcome to the show. What's going on, buddy? Hey, how are you doing? Thank you. I'm really glad to be here. Good. Was that a satisfactory introduction for you? That was the best introduction I've had in at least a week. At least a week. Myself and Bill, we've been appreciative of all your efforts that you've done with pinball. Especially, I mean, coding is an essential part of any pinball machine. I think we can all agree. But before we go into that. Coding is the most important part. Right. Without code, the game doesn't play. It's a blinking box of lights. I actually think that the shots are the most important part. Like, when you flip a Whitewood for the first time without any rules or anything in it at all, you can tell if it's going to be fun. You can tell if it needs work. You can tell, you know, a lot about the game. A game that doesn't flip well isn't going to turn out great. True. True. What would be the official list of games that you were lead on? Yeah, I'm glad you asked it like that. So a lot of people give me credit where I believe I don't deserve. A lot of people come up and tell me that, wow, you worked on Lord of the Rings or you worked on Simpsons Pinball Party and those were my favorite games and thanks, thanks for doing such a great job. And I'm like, well, you're welcome. But those weren't my games. I had, you know, like everything you think is fun about those games was probably attributed to Keith P. Johnson, right? Keith is the one that came up with the cool things with Lord of the Rings and Simpsons Pinball Party. And there's numerous other games that I often get accredited for, and maybe I helped out on them. Maybe I helped Keith get his job done, but I don't deserve any credit for minigames. The games that I think I deserve credit for are, I started with Riverboat Gambler, And then we did T2 and Getaway, Next Generation, Roadshow, Whodunit, Junkyard, Champion Pub, Revenge from Mars. Now, Revenge from Mars was Lyman's game. Lyman is the lead of Revenge from Mars. But I did a lot of code in Revenge from Mars, and I deserve some of the credit for that. And I put in a lot of creativity into Revenge from Mars. and then Sharky Shootout, Playboy, T3, Pirates of the Caribbean, Game of Thrones, Pirates of the Good Pirates, right? The Good Pirates? Right. I'm joking. I'm completely joking. Game of Thrones, Ghostbusters, and now Star Wars. So, I mean, it's got to be difficult. Essentially, you're given a blank canvas, right, where this game's flipping, and then it's up to you to kind of incorporate the rule set, Or is it a situation where you're working hand-in-hand with the game designer and you're collaborating with him or her and you're trying to come up with a final? Yeah, there's no final right off the bat. So it's a long, iterative process. It begins with a blank canvas. It begins usually with the game designer or somebody coming up with a play field with some toys and stuff on it. And then we start talking about the theme and how it all integrates. and there's a lot of iteration long before we even start flipping the game and before we start writing software for it. We just have the drawing on the wall and we're just writing notes on a whiteboard and then we go from there. Well, let's start with this. Okay. Tell me a little bit about you. Where did you grow up? What got you really into a situation where you thought, I wanted to start programming pinball machine rule sets and codes? I mean, was that something that extended from your childhood, a passion, or is that something that developed later on in your life? That's a good question. It's both. So as a young teen, I know nothing about what jobs and careers are. I have no plan. I don't even have a plan until I'm 20-something. Where did you grow up? Do you mind me asking? No problem. Yeah, I grew up in Michigan. Okay. And I grew up in Michigan, and I used to ride my bike to the bowling alley on Sundays, and I would bowl and I would play pinball. What was your bowling average? Do you remember? Oh, it sucked. It was like less than 100. Okay, under 100. Right. I got you. But I got better. I got better at bowling. I used to bowl all the time in sports, and that's another story. Okay. I even think that I bowled a 300 once. You remembered the 300 passively, right? Well, no, no, no. It's a long story. Was that on Xbox or was that like in real life? That was in real life. So we used to bowl every single night after work. So fine, you're going to get the 300 story. So we used to bowl like I was a waiter at Denny's or something. And we would work until midnight. And then there was this bowling alley that would just let us in. And we would bowl. And we'd bowl as much as we want. We didn't even keep score. And one night, I was rolling strikes like there was no tomorrow. We didn't keep score, but my buddy was keeping count. And I rolled at least 15 strikes in a row. I mean, that's an incredible feat, I would say that. I don't – right. I don't believe it to this day, but I remember it. So don't go bowling with the white for money. No. Today I bowl about 120 average, or maybe 130. Now those foam pads that are in the gutters, those are supposed to be taken out when you're bowling a perfect game. You know that, right? I know that, right. That's impressive. I can say honestly I've never sat down and spoken with anybody that could look me in the eye and say they rolled a 300 game. So it doesn't count as a 300, right? There was no score. There was no nothing. It was just like I bowled maybe 70 frames that night or 60 or whatever, right? But 15 of them in a row were strikes. That's awesome. I'm impressed. What can you not do? I don't think I've ever told that story to anybody. How many holes in ones have you had? Zero. That was like well into my teens or maybe 19, 20 years old. way before that I'm riding my bike up to the bowling alley and bowling every Sunday and then playing pinball and I would play like a playboy because I'm 14 and it's got half naked girls on the playfield but it was still pretty cool and when I'm not doing that I would ride my bike to, and this is the late 70s mid 70s, late 70s and so you're going to correct me, someone's going to listen and go, well Gorgar playboy, ballet playboy didn't come out until and I'm going to be well, you know, I time travel right, your timeline did not line up, right, right, so but I played so then other times I would ride my bike down to the airport, which was a little bit farther and play like Gorgar or what's the game with the big lion head, you know because again, these games had like half-naked girls on them and I was, you know, I didn't really understand it at the time, but I was kind of into half-naked girls, right, well I mean you should Paragon, you're right. It was Paragon. It was Paragon? Right, it was Paragon, and Gorgar was down at the airport, and that was kind of fun. Those pins seduced you to come in and play. They did. And then a couple years later, I'm now driving, and me and my buddy, my high school buddy, we go to the arcade every day, or whenever we can. I say every day, but I probably mean twice a week, maybe. And I started playing high speed, and high speed's the game that really pulled me into pinball. High speed's the game that made me understand that there are rules, that there's objectives, that there's scoring, that there's ramps, and all those things were way better than Half-Naked Girls. And that's interesting because who would have thought down the road after playing this pin that you would be working side-by-side with the designer of that pin? Steve Ritchie. And doing the sequel to that game. Getaway. Yes. It's incredible. Yeah, it was pretty surreal. We're jumping quite a bit ahead, but yeah. Right. I mean, when you were coding Getaway, just to kind of sidetrack, I mean, did at some point, did it, it's like, man, I was playing high speed after playing some paragons. Yeah, no, I, like I, right. It was, it was all, it was, that was all pretty surreal. Right. Right. So, so, so now we're, we're many years later and Steve and I, so Steve would say this, Steve, like we're planning Getaway, right? And Getaway, and we're working on Getaway and Steve would have us over at his house to play high speed and try to do research. But research always ended up being like listening to his cool stereo system upstairs. I was going to say, what's going on in a Steve Ritchie house at that time? You're walking in. I imagine like exotic animals roaming the premise and beautiful ladies peeling grapes. So essentially it's like the opening to like Coming to America with the zoo. Right, right. Bilbo or Bobo. Bobo, right? The elephant that walks by? Bobo? Right. That's exactly what it was like. It was leopards, like live leopards walking around. Right, right. No, no. Steve is never into any of that. Steve is into bigger, faster, louder, more. Did I say bigger? Yeah. So Steve, so when we're over there doing research on his high speed, like this much high speed got played. I'm holding my two fingers close together. And like this much, I'm holding my hands apart, you know, like listening to his stereo and looking at his really cool big TV is what, you know, happened. And that was fine with me. I'm at Steve Ritchie's house, like freaking Steve Ritchie's house, you know, like watching his cool TV. That's incredible. Yeah, that was really cool. So me and my buddy would go to the arcade, and that's when I first started learning that some – I never really got an idea that there were design teams or individual people that made better games than other people. And better – not necessarily better, empirically better, but like fitting to a person's play style or what they like to play. I never really picked up on any of that but at some point I learned that Williams made great games and I was even into Grand Lizard, I know you guys are going to hate me for that, a lot of people don't like Grand Lizard but I loved Grand Lizard and Grand Lizard was sitting right next to High Speed but I always kept coming back to High Speed, High Speed's really the game that got me wanting to play pinball as much as I could somewhere mixed in with that, my friends and I, I didn't really have many friends but we would go to the roller rink, and instead of like rolling, you know, like rollerblading with girls and holding hands, I would be playing Captain Fantastic over in the corner. That was, you know, that was... Captain Fantastic. If you've ever had an opportunity to look at the back glass on that game, there's a lot going on. Yeah. There's some Easter eggs in it, too. Yeah, some Easter eggs. I don't think they're... There's some risque Easter eggs. Yeah, they're NSFW, right? Right, right. But that goes back into your kind of your game. Yeah, I said it right. What's that? NSFW. NSFW. Not safe for work. Right. So, Dwight, so when did you realize that you wanted to get involved in pinball as a profession? Great. Great question. So I go to school, and I went to school to be an electrical engineer of technology. That was some DeVry degree. It's not a real electrical engineer. It's like a hybrid between an electrician and a double E. So I come to Chicago to go to school and just to get away from home and to just make a life for myself somehow. And pinball is not on your mind as far as a profession at this point, right? Not at all. No, not at all. And I'm still very naive. I mean I'm naive today, but I'm much more so like this was decades ago. Right, okay. So just picture like – A 20-something-year-old. Like naive Dwight. Yeah. Right. Right. I can't picture it. Right. Okay. Right. Thankfully for you, that's good. Thanks. So I'm at school, and I'm starting to go to interviews and stuff. And one of my classmates, we do take some amount of programming classes, and I'd done lots of programming. So before college, I did lots of programming. I owned a Commodore 64. I made games on the Commodore 64. I used to do all kinds of programming. So you were making games at that time? I was making games. With rules. Ever since I could, yeah. Sure. Right. I've been into making rules my whole life. But I don't know that this is leading toward pinball at any point. You just did it as a hobby and you thought it was fun. Correct. Correct. Making games on the Commerce 64 was tons of fun. All right. So I'm in college and I'd done lots of programming before. So when we had classes on programming in college, they were super, super simple. They were easy. In fact, so I would do them in the first 10 minutes of class, and then the whole rest of the hour, I made this game called R Wars where – so like the assignment would be like alphabetize this list of students using Pascal or some stupid language. And so I would write that little bit of code that was needed for the assignment, and then I would – but I would always have a menu on my homework. and the menu was like one, do the homework, like see the homework results. Two, play R-Wars. And R-Wars was this game that I wrote where... It's spelled Star Wars without the ST? It's just R, just an R, space, wars, R-Wars. I was going to say more foreshadowing. You're leading up to. Right. Well, I'm a huge fan of Star Wars long before that. Right. So you were an R-wing fighter instead of an X-wing fighter that was at the top of the screen and you could move it left and right And like letters would come up the screen and you would shoot them down as they would come up the screen. That was just fun for me instead of – well, in addition to doing the homework. And I would help my friends do their homework and so forth. So software was this thing, but I still wasn't aimed at software until I got near the end of college. And a classmate of mine – we were in school and a classmate of mine said, Dwight, you should aim for some kind of software engineering degree. and then that was when naive 20 something year old Dwight goes oh yeah that does make sense that's you know yeah let's do that you keep saying naive well I think I'm fairly naive today compared to my peers but I was much more so you know as you go backwards in time so somebody gives you the suggestion hey software engineering that's where it's at you're thinking to yourself Why not? Right. Thank that man for making that suggestion. Absolutely. I love writing software. I really do. So then I'm searching for jobs, and I'm at this job fair, and it's not going well. And this girl that's interviewing me, she knows Ed Sahaki. Ed Sahaki works for Williams and is always looking for people, you know, like looking for new, you know, entry-level software engineers. Ed Sahaki called me, and I thought that was pretty awesome. And I go down for the interview. No, who's Ed Sahaki? Ed Sahaki is the, at the time, he's the boss. He turns out to be my boss after I'm hired, but he's the head of the software department at Williams. Because at the time, Williams is making both video games and pinball machines. Like they just did NARC and Whirlwind is being developed. Probably Robotron, too, was somewhere in there, too, right? Bad Cats just was on the line. So that's when this is happening, right? So, you know, and Bad Cats was at the bottom of the stairs. That's another story, but we'll come back to that in a minute. Meow, meow, meow. How did that go? Meow, meow, meow. All right. That's the best part of Bad Cats. Okay. I like it. I'll see you're doing some voiceover work now. Right. Right. Okay. So Ed calls me and I go down there and I'm nervous, you know, because I've been on lots of interviews and that was always the recommended thing by the counselors at school. The counselors say, do the interviews you don't want first so that you practice. And then – so I go down there and I just – I start – I become my animate itself. I just – I show them my portfolio and in my portfolio is artwork that I had done, like stuff that I had scanned in into my image writer on my Mac. Like Mac enthusiasts are going to know what an image writer is. Did you bust out the R Wars prototype game? No, I didn't. I had Burglar Man. So I wrote Burglar Man for the Commodore 64. It was this maze game where you ran to the center and got this gem and then got out before the cops could get you. It was this cool game. So I brought the code for that, and I was making Monopoly on my Macintosh. I was writing Monopoly, and I did all the artwork for that game. And that was, you know, so I showed them all of that, and I'm all excited, and I'm animated. How did they take that when you showed them the codes that you had already written? for... So later I learned that all that code was nothing. And it really was. Compared to what we write later or what we do professionally, it wasn't much at all. But I think that the fact that I don't give them a time I didn't give them a chance to breathe. I didn't give them a chance to say anything. I'm just spilling stuff out onto the table from my briefcase and talking about this and talking about that. And I think that impressed them. Well, your passion for the hobby. Yeah, my passion for the hobby, right. So then it's almost all over, right, and Bill Futsenruder leans over and he asks me a question. And this was a key moment in my life. He asked me, he says, would you rather work on video games or pinball machines? Because, you know. The blue pill? or the red pill? The red pill. You almost got that good. I was almost the perfect lead into that. Right, right. I stumbled. So then we just had 15 minutes of me talking and rambling and saying nonsense, and now all of a sudden there's silence, right, because I'm thinking about my answer. I'm thinking that this is a key moment. A defining moment of your life. A key moment in the interview at least, right? and everyone's looking at me and I'm thinking, well, these guys make both, right? They make both games and it would be kind of cool to make video games. But I said I'd rather, I'd like to make pinball machines. Wow. Yeah, yeah. And I, so then I apologized once again for like not having my resume and I gathered up all my stuff into my briefcase. At this point, are you thinking you nailed the interview? No, no, no. Or are you thinking that, I think that no way in hell I got this job because I didn't have a resume. And I always thought that that was key. And they think, well, if he comes unprepared for an interview, but if you're getting his resume at home, why the hell would we want to hire him? So I'm not upset. I'm not crying or anything, but I'm bummed. And I'm like, there was a chance. There was my chance. And now I'm going to go be an electrician. and so then I wait like a week because you're supposed to wait a while and I call up Edza Hockey and I say, hey, I haven't heard from you. I'm just following up. How did it go? Would you like me? When's my start date? Well, no, but is there anything else I can do to help persuade you? And he says to me, he says, oh, no, we decided to hire you that day. You impressed the hell out of those guys. I just haven't had the time to call you. Oh, wow. That's awesome. And I'm like, wow. Could have saved you some stress. Well, but I had somebody pick up the phone, I suppose. All that stress went out the window. I'm on cloud nine. I get my girlfriend. We go out to eat, and it was a good day. That's unbelievable. So then what's the time period from the time that they said, hey, you know what? You're on board to when you're finally in an office. Talk us, take us through that whole situation. It was like another month. Ed didn't have a place for me to sit. They didn't have stuff for me to work on yet. So he had to finalize some stuff. So it was like, we're going to hire you in three weeks, next month. So you walk into work. Who becomes your immediate supervisors or your bosses? And who becomes your buddies? Who becomes your colleagues? What staffing? So this is 1989, Williams. It's about to become like a golden age of pinball that I don't even realize yet. 1989, Earthshaker. Yep. Right, right. So I'm just trying to put a setting so that people understand. It's 1989. Earthshaker just came out. Bill Fritz and Ruder in his office is working on Whirlwind. Whirlwind is a great game as a Whitewood. Whirlwind, you're playing it because I didn't know this. I'm in Bill's office and I'm playing the Whitewood. I didn't even know what Whitewoods are I didn know that they existed I learning the whole process Of course Steve Ritchie office is right across the hall As soon as anybody new comes to work Steve grabs them and pulls them in his office and shows them what he working on and asks them like 75 questions about how cool his job is And then you're in his apartment or in his house listening to his audio, watching his TV. Yeah. Smooth transition. The big TV, the new TVs. The new TV, yeah. And the giant speakers. Petting the exotic animals. Right. No, like petting his motorcycle. His motorcycle. Right. Right. Right. So I'm in Bill Flitzenroeder's office, and that's reminding me that I just played Earthshaker just a couple of weeks ago or more. So you did put some plays on Earthshaker. I did. In 1989. On a whitewood. No, no. Where one was the whitewood? Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. I'm at Portillo's playing Earthshaker. Right. But this is on Finley Road, just down the street from DeVry. There's that Portillo's like at – it's a major intersection today, right? or it's near that major intersection. I forget what it's called, but it's like... But anyway, there's a Portillo's there, and they have this back room, or they did at the time, and they had like one or two pins, and one of them was Earthshaker. And then I learned later, like now that I'm working at Williams, it was a test location for Williams. Wow. Okay, so that was an Earthshaker on test. It might have even been this really cool Earthshaker sitting here in the Pale Ale Studio. The Two Brothers Pinball Pale Ale Studio. I'll let you say that. The Two Brothers Pinball Pale Ale Studio. Awesome. Right. Yeah, awesome. I'm going to add my little voiceover. The Two Brothers Pinball Pale Ale Studio. Oh, that's perfect. We might have to use that. Yeah. Use it all you want. We'll edit that up for sure. Yeah. So what game are you jumping on first? How are you getting your feet wet? What's going on with that? So my first game was Riverboat Gambler. Riverboat Gambler is Ward Pemberton. Were you lead on that game for code? Yeah, back in the day, there was lead and programmer and the guy and the coder are all the same thing, right? But it's only today where we have a team of people working on a game where you really kind of need a lead. I mean, so I was always a lead of my games. So sure, along the way, some people would help me out. Like most games, there would always be another coder that would come in and do some amount of work to get the game out the door. Okay. But most of the time, it was just me, or at least for most of it. How long was the development cycle back then? About seven months. Okay. Seven months. Seven months for your coding or from start to finish as a team? From right about just before you get your first Whitewood until they want to put it on the line and take it away. So how does that compare into lead times today? It's not apples and oranges. We make a different product today. We make three different games. We have an LCD screen. And we – so but forgetting all that, it's now about the same. So over the decades of making pinball machines, it's been all over the map, right? We've had four-month schedules, you know, and that's just nuts. And we've had, you know, 13-month schedules, and that's luxurious. And it just depends on the time, the era, and, you know, and what needs to happen. As far as the number of people that are collaborating to work on a pin, were there more or larger teams assigned to different titles back in the day? No. Or would you say that there's more now? It's much smaller. Well, when you had less code like that, you don't need as many people to code. When you're writing code in, let's say, your seven-month window, let's just use that as the average, well, now your games are, what, eight times more complex than they were from the first game you played? I don't know about eight times, but they're much more complex. And we're writing in C++ now, and we were writing in Assembler back then. It was 8-bit Assembler. It's very, very simple. But throwing all that out the window and trying to pretend that it's apples and apples, today Star Wars is 118,000 lines of code, which is a lot, and T2 was 10,000. Wow. Oh, correct. All right, so back to Riverboat. So Riverboat Gambler, Ward Pemberton and I, it has a song in it, right? Does anybody know the song? That could be a contest. I've never got to see one. I've never played a Riverboat Gambler. You haven't played it? No. So the song was sung by Mark Ritchie. Mark Ritchie is another designer. So we have a whole, like so up and down the halls of Williams, there's an amazing. So are Mark Ritchie and Steve Ritchie then working together at the same? Correct. Okay. Like down the hall from each other. Yeah, gotcha. Right, and Pat Lawler and Ward Pemberton and Dennis Nordman and Steve Kordak. So Hall of Fame all-star lineup. And more. Busting it out at Williams. Right. So before I got to Williams, I considered myself to be above average intelligence and above average creativity. And at Williams, I was just average or less. What were you learning? Even over time. Okay. Everyone there was awesome. Everyone there was just on point and doing great jobs, and it was a good time for working. How does that affect your approach? Does it motivate you to try harder? Were you discouraged at first thinking that you weren't able to? No, no discouragement. It was, holy shit, that's how you do that. That's cool. I'm going to go do that. That would work well in my game and so on. It was a lot of that. But anyway, the song by Mark Ritchie, right? I'm going to try and sing it. Is that okay? Yeah, should we give you a drum roll or anything? No, no, no. Okay, yeah, go for it. Okay. Make sure we get it into the mic, though. Riding on that lucky riverboat. Take a chance, make a bet, maybe you'll get lucky yet. Riding on that lucky riverboat. I don't know who... Mark Ritchie did a much better job. Mark Ritchie was the voice in Banzai Run. He did the vocals on that? Mark Ritchie, well, no, he sung that song. He sung the song. Okay. Not the call-outs, but yeah, he sang it. Okay. Right. Yeah. Right. Okay. So, like, he did a lot of the vocals on Banzai Run. Banzai Run was a great game about that same era or a little bit before, like, 87. Banzai Run has the play field and the back glass. Correct. Yeah. Correct. Yeah, it's on the angle. That's a crazy looking game. Yeah. They didn't make a lot of those, though. No. Okay. But that got Pat Dweller in the door. So Pat and Larry made that game out of house and then brought it to Williams and showed it to him. and they said, yeah, sure, you can become a designer. Now that's an interesting story because recently there's a lot of that going on now too with people that are jumping out of homebrew pin design. Keith Elwin, Scott Danesi. Yeah, Elwin and Denise, the latest two. Just goes to show you it all comes full circle, doesn't it? Sometimes you can learn from history. Oh, yeah. I didn't realize that that had happened prior. Well, they do it again with Pinball 2000. At Pinball 2000, George and Pat make Pinball 2000 in Pat's garage and then bring it to work. So then your career at Stern starts. Yep, with Sharky's Shootout. So I start working on Sharky's Shootout. I convince them to do a pretty much non-licensed, but they throw on that pinball. I mean, the pool champion, I think Jeanette. Jeanette Lee. Jeanette Lee. The Black Widow. Correct. Yes. They throw in her, and we pretty much make it. It's Golden T, right? It's Golden Q. It's Golden Q Pinball sort of redesigned and engineered. John Borg is the designer, and I was the designer and software engineer. Did you get a chance to meet Jeanette Lee at all during the? No. Okay. Just curious. No. But that was my first game as sort of head start. And then Gary decides he needs stronger license from then on. So were you credited as a designer or as a programmer? What are the differences? Walk us through the differences between a designer and a – Sure, sure. You got a couple of hours? We might. Right. So that's an actually interesting topic to me. I don't think it's interesting to a lot of people, so we'll see. We'll see. So I go to school and then I'm like, well, software engineer is cool. I want to be a software engineer someday, but I have no formal software engineer training. I just come and it's just seat of the pants learning at Williams how to write code for pinball machines. And I think at the time I'm a software engineer. I now know that I'm not or I wasn't. But I was working in a software engineering department writing software for a professional product. And on some levels, you could claim that I was a software engineer. So cool. That sounds cool. I like that title. software engineer and for a while i had a card that said you know that was a williams card my name on it and it said software engineer slash game designer it sounds prestigious yeah yeah and when you're 20 something you know or you know that sounds pretty cool and you know now today i don't care i had a friend that used to pump gas in florida and he would refer to himself as a petroleum fuel transfer technician whenever we went out that's awesome yeah that's cool yeah did it pick up chicks he did pick up a couple chicks right right it was good times right can you show me how you do that right yeah right sure open your ghosting yeah exactly not that there's anything wrong with pumping gas but anyways i i apologize yeah so um so starting with whodunit though so i made whodunit whodunit was my fourth or fifth game i have a list here wait no it's one two three four five six so my sixth game was whodunit whodunit was the first game where i was sort of labeled a designer like where you know i had you know where everything the buck stopped with me on everything creative. And, um, so that was cool. Like, cause before then I sort of felt like a designer and, um, and at the time, you know, only recently do I really discover what the term developer means. Like today I consider myself to be a, a, a, a game developer. Um, I take, I take a partial idea and I, and I mold it into something, you know, something interesting or fun, ideally. At least I try to. And to me, that's what a game developer does. They take a design and they shape it into something that you can produce that meets all the requirements, checks all the boxes and gets it out the door. So it's more than sitting down in front of a computer and just typing lines of code. Being chained to your desk. Correct. Well, I'm still chained to my desk. Okay. Yeah. But yes, it's more than software engineering. So after a Sharkry shootout, how many more games are under your belt before you actually end up leaving Stern? Oh, good question. So they shut down Williams, and I come to Stern, and then we make several more games, right? So I make, like, so at Stern, let's see, I have a list here. At Stern, we made. I want to see how that list compares to the list that Bill has on, that he's taken down from Pinside.com. Well, right, PennSide.com or the Internet Pinball Database usually has things wrong. They have them wrong? Well, I define things differently. So, I mean, this list I have here in front of me is like 16 games. So I've only done 16 games in my career. Okay. But those are – I've worked on many, many more than that, but it just helped. I just sort of – I did a little bit here and there on different games. So you weren't like lead per se? I wasn't the lead. I didn't participate creatively. If I didn't participate creatively, then I was just helping somebody else. I was helping the creative team. Interesting. Just get it done. And that's like over the years, lots of people have helped me get it done. So it's just the same thing. So I'm doing Sharky Shootout, and then I did Playboy and T3 and Pirates of the Caribbean, the first one, the good one. The working one. Right. No. Well, I don't know that. That's an unfair. I bet the new one is great. It's all in tongue-in-cheek. I bet the new one is a lot of fun and good, and it's pirates and it's ARG, and I bet it's a lot of fun. I haven't played it much. I don't think I've played it at all. But I'm always going to give that little jab. I made the good pirates. It's just like Star Trek, right? So now it's like Lonnie made Star Trek at Stern. I made Star Trek at Williams. So, of course, I made the good one. Absolutely. I get it. Right, right. Like you made the better high speed. No, that's not true. Wow. Getaway is a good game. I like Getaway, but high speed still has a special place in my heart. Well, yeah, and that goes back kind of to the last episode that we were talking about, Terminator 2. When I bought my first machine in 2013, that was the first one that I bought because it pulled me back into my childhood. Yeah, everybody, that's a common thing, right? Everybody has that game that pulled them in, that game that turned the corner for them and brought them into pinball. Ken, what was your game? Well, it was Earthshaker. Right. Yeah, exactly. No, you're right. You had this feeling that you get when you revisit this hobby or these games that you played in your youth or when you were younger. And a lot of people, I think, make the effort to try to buy the machine that initially pulled them in. Yeah. So, Dwight, right now you're currently with your second go-around at Stern. You left WMS. That's correct. You went to Stern originally. You ended up leaving Stern and coming back. So, I mean, how does that happen? What happened there? Yeah, that's a pretty good story. So I was at Stern, and then I left Stern when pinball died for the second time, and I went to work for WMS, which they call it WMS now instead of Williams. And then I met WMS for about six years. But one day I'm playing hooky from work, and I'm at the riverboat playing poker. Riding on that lucky riverboat. Right. And so I'm playing poker. I entered a little tournament, and I'm doing pretty good. I'm up a little bit, and I have a good chance of doing at least moneying maybe. But the tournament was taking a break, and I look over to a nearby table, and Pat Lawler was there playing poker. And I hadn't seen Pat Lawler in years at this point. And I had heard that he was getting back into pinball, that he was working on some game, and he had been working on it for a little while now. We all know now that that game turned out to be dialed in, right? Pretty good game. Great game. Yeah. Yeah, and so Pat and I catch up. We spent 20 minutes, like it was the most I've ever talked to Pat, talking about all kinds of things. And near the end of it, he told me that he was going to speak at the upcoming Pinball Expo in a couple of weeks. And I hadn't even thought much about pinball. I hadn't even realized that Pinball Expo was around the corner. and but that you know like stirred you know all kinds of pinball things going on to me and I'm like you know what I'm going to go to pinball expo I'm going to go see Pat I'm going to go see whoever else is speaking and you know it's going to be fun so I do I do that and I watch Pat and I watch Larry and I watch Steve they all talk that year this is what year is this this is 2014 I think October 2014 and so after the Steve talk or after one of the talks Steve is there And he pulls me aside, Steve Ritchie, he pulls me aside and he says, hey, we really could use you back at Stern. You know, we have lots of software needs. And everyone at this point realizes that that's very true, right? Software was something that Stern, you know, had a need for. And, you know, do you want to come back? So I say, sure, I would love to, you know, come back. So about a couple days later, George calls me up and George and I talk for a while. And before you know it, I'm back at Stern. So you had no hard feelings on the initial time that you left Stern, right? You left on good terms just because that's what had to be done. Yeah, right. Pinball died again. Gary did his best at trying to keep it alive, and it was just the times. It was just the economy. It was a lot of things. And then Gary met Dave Peterson and his friends, who know a lot about niche companies and that are now partners with Gary, and they've sort of turned the company around, and we've been growing ever since. How is it working with Gary Stern? So Gary is great to work with. Gary is passionate, on the go, always has ideas. He's still one of our top sales guys. He's, of course, the owner of the company. So Gary is a very interesting guy. So how instrumental is he in regards to – you said he's a great sales guy. So is he involved with any type of licensing or spreading the word of pinball? I know that he's made himself accessible to some media outlets, and he's had no problem talking about research into pinball and the plans for the company. Well, that's sort of his job, right? He's part of our face. He's part of the front – he's one of the front men of the company. and he's constantly dealing with lots of his customers who he's known for decades and telling them about our next great thing that's coming out. And he's the Stern Union, right? The Stern Army, right? Right, the Stern Army. Right. Did I say union maybe? Yeah, union. Stern of the Union Address, I think is what you're going to name it. That's what it is. Which is Zach Sharp's new addition to the communication with the pinball crowd, right? Zach is great. Zach is our new director. That was going to be my next question. What's up with Zach? Zach is great. He's our new director of marketing. Yeah. Correct. And so we're talking about a lot of things that are on the other side of the wall for me. So I work in product development under George, and we're like squirreled away and back on the corner and working on things that are going to happen in 2019 and 2020. And Gary and Zach Sharp, they work on the other side of the wall, and I just have to have faith that they do a good job. And so far, they're doing a great job. So now Jody Dankberg, who used to be the head of marketing, has not been replaced, but Zach's kind of stepped in to take into that. And now is Jody now more involved with licensing deals? Exactly. Okay. Jody used to have more job than he can handle because it was a big job. Sure. And they split that job into two parts, and Jody took on one half, and Zach stepped in and took on the other half. Good. Yeah. It's working out well. It's working out great. But for Gary to keep the doors open through those dark years of like 1999 into the early 2000s and then 08, 09, just to keep the company alive and still keep pinball on the map instead of just being gone in general, that's dedication and perseverance at its finest. Gary and the skeleton crew did a great job at keeping the doors open. All right, so Dwight, since your second time back at Stern, your current trek here, you've got three games under your belt, and the first one being Game of Thrones, secondly Ghostbusters, and then just so recently you've got Star Wars. Yeah, that's correct. Those are my last three games, and I'm proud of all of them. Steve and I did Game of Thrones together, and that was a lot of fun. I read all the books. I'm a huge fan of Game of Thrones. Steve is too, and he and I just did our thing and made what I think is a great game. Has everybody here seen the show Game of Thrones? I have, raising my hand. I have. Bill, have you seen it yet? I have not, but we're not big TV people in the house. Okay. Well, if you decide at some point, I think it is must-see TV if you can get through the first three or four episodes and then learn to get close to about 17 different characters. Right. But I read all the books ahead of time, so I was way into the story. So then when the TV show was clicking from one character to the next, it was easy for me to follow. A question that I had when you are, and that's what I was going to ask, something like Game of Thrones where it's a series or, for instance, The Walking Dead. As a designer and as somebody that's on code, is it a situation where you binge watch these episodes and try to take notes? Or is it just a general feeling that I'm going to code it this way regardless of what's going on in the shows? and then we'll figure it out later? I mean, what would be proper steps to code a machine? I don't think there is a rule. I think when you approach a project and you start getting ideas of how you want to represent that theme in your game, and then you just run with it and you make the most of it and you make it the best. Early on, I wanted to do seven houses. Like you picked the player got to be one of the seven houses, And as much as possible, I wanted to make that a different experience. I wanted to make that a different experience for, you know, depending on who you picked. And I wanted to try to make that balanced. Have you ever been given like an assignment or a machine that you weren't thrilled about regarding the theme? I mean, does that have a tendency to demotivate somebody that's programming a game? We always try to pair up people who want to do projects with people with the project. Okay, so there's a conscious effort to do that. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So if you hated the series Game of Thrones and you just thought it sucked, you wouldn necessarily be like well hey you know what You got to suck it up man You on Game of Thrones so have at it Right Okay Cool Now sometimes like you were saying a minute ago when the company is small we wear lots of hats and whatever comes down the pipe, you've got to work on that. Yep. But as much as possible, they try to give us what we want to work on. Do you have any feedback or input as requesting themes for licenses that you might want to work on? Sure, all the time. I'm often part of the discussions of what we're doing and when and how. Not how, but, oh, yeah, I guess how. Because I help implement rules and toy decisions. So when can I expect a Stranger Things pin? 2025. 2025? That should be wrapping up season four or five. Right, right. All right, perfect. We've read all those scripts. I'm going to pre-order. It's excellent. We can't wait. That's awesome. You don't have to binge watch either. But, you know, the nice thing about that, and you and I have talked about this, is you love Game of Thrones. Right. So it was a perfect pin for you to be on. You love the Ghostbusters theme. Absolutely. And Star Wars. Star Wars is one of my all-time favorite pins. So, I mean. Themes. You know, you seem to have hit the trifecta so far with, you know, themes that you love, which is awesome. I've been very lucky. Absolutely. Makes me wonder what's in the pipeline for Dwight Sullivan. Me too. I can't wait to find out. Are you working on something currently? I am, I am. So I just wrapped up Star Wars, but along the way for the last couple of months or more, I've been working closely with a designer on our next pin. Okay, and that's currently in the works. Right, right. Right, but for a while now. So when you were working on Game of Thrones, how excited were you to be working on that game and putting the features in that you put into it? I was very excited. It was awesome to be back in pinball. I was, you know, I had all kinds of great ideas, and I'm really proud of how the game came out. And working with Steve again wasn't too bad for a while. For once? Well, yeah, you know. Well, you got to go see Bobo and all the other exotic pets at his house again, right? Correct. Yeah, the leopard, the elephant, the giraffe. Did we talk about the giraffe? He's got to be on his third or fourth giraffe since the first time you met him by now. They only live about 12 years or so. Is that what it is? Yeah. Okay. So Game of Thrones is awesome. Game of Thrones is awesome. And then Jon and Trudeau and I started working on Ghostbusters. Yes. So to this day, I think Ghostbusters is a great game, and I think it's greatly due to Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti) and Jerry Thompson. Did I say his name right? Jerry Thompson. Correct. Yes. Well, the art on Ghostbusters is just phenomenal. Jeremy does an awesome job. Yeah. So his second game just came out. Iron Maiden just killed it. The art on Iron Maiden is off the charts. It's impressive. I love it. Yeah, we've got to see that one sometime soon in person. So with Ghostbusters, when I was younger, Ghostbusters was one of the first movies I saw at the show. And I remember it was kind of the first time I ever went to the movie theaters and I was kind of scared a little bit because I was still a younger kid. I think the movie that I'd seen before that might have been like Star Wars or something, which is more action-packed when i had thought about a dream theme for myself it was always ghostbusters and when stern released ghostbusters i couldn't have been more excited without knowing anything about the game i was already in on a pre-order and when i got the game i didn't disappoint it was a fun game and the artwork was unbelievable so i mean thank you for your contributions to that game thank you because i i literally love that game um and although it's not currently in my collection i plan to have it back in the collection again soon i just i need to come with more space. It's one of the rare games you want back. Yes, yes. There's always that game in everyone's collection where they got rid of it and then they wish they had it back. There is. Yeah. I love Ghostbusters. Yeah. I'm proud of it. I think it was pretty good. But John and I, so early on we decided to make kind of a mean game. And I think it came out a little too mean. You know, like I wanted those drop targets to be in your face. I wanted you to be a Ghostbuster who was constantly battling the game. You were catching ghosts. and we pulled that off, but I think the game came out a little mean. What would you have changed had you had creative license by yourself? I would have – I don't like the John Trudeau bottom. The flipper gap? Well, the flipper gap and the flop flippers. The droopy flipper, yeah. Okay. The flipper line is low. But then you would have to change quite a bit of the game. Can you explain what that is, though, for somebody that doesn't understand what that means? So flop flippers are flippers that hang down below. So they're not parallel to the return lane line that comes down. Right. So the return lanes bring the ball down a path, and then flop flippers don't continue that line. They flop down a little bit. And the reason John does that is smart. He does that, and other people that do flop flippers, they do it so that it's easier than to hit shots that are on the far left and the far right. and making it less easy to hit shots up the middle, but it's a compromise. It also has a tendency to throw your whole shot mechanics off when you go to a game that is online. That's my complaint because I grew up with Steve Ritchie flippers. I grew up with High Speed and then Game of Thrones and all the games in between, Getaway and T2 and whatnot. So I'm a huge fan of that. I'm a huge fan of Steve Ritchie kinetics, and John Trudeau's are completely different. And I have kind of a – I don't know about you, Bill, but like a pinball OCD almost where you like to see things make sense. You like to see congruent or parallel lines. You like to see symmetry. And when you do see something that's kind of off like that – Yeah, a line that just drops. But it's hard not to focus on it. Yeah. And I did notice that with Ghostbusters. I also noticed that, and maybe it was just because I read too much into it, but the flipper gap did seem a little bit larger on that game to where it could be brutal if you didn't have ball control. And with the droopier flippers, it's harder to cradle the ball because you don't have the extended range of motion that comes up high enough to trap it. Right, right. See, and I kind of, you know, I mean, people might complain about that, but I like it because it's a game that will teach you discipline on, you know, don't shoot stupid stuff and make stupid decisions. The risk versus reward. Yeah. For sure. Right. For sure. Well, it was easy to add kind of that aftermarket center post kit that I actually purchased at Pinball Life out in Huntley. That turned out to be a really cool kit. It was a cool kit. The thing that was nice, there was no permanent modification to your pinball play field. You weren't drilling into the play field itself. It hung the post down from the top. Yes. And it was surprisingly stable. I didn't have any issues with it. But for me, when I bring a game in the house for the family, I try to have my kids like it. And it was just pretty hard originally. It's like the blow-up things in the gutters at the bowling alley. The foam pads when you're bowling the 300 game. Right, right. Exactly. You've got to keep those in. Well, that's why I love Ken's Ghostbusters. Everyone bowls 300s. That's why I love Ken's Ghostbusters because we had the foam in the outlands. Right. So you only have to worry about the center. There's a center post. It was perfect. Right. Right. It was the only game we had to unplug to stop. Yeah. It was awesome. So that was good. So Ghostbusters, great game. Now we're into Star Wars. Yeah. Again, we'll revisit here again because I think it's important that we talk about this pin just because it was so important to you, so important to so many people. It's such an iconic theme. A dream theme for, I would say, a good percent of people that not only collect pinball but are just casual pinball players. Right. You're absolutely right. And that made it that much more difficult to design for. You had to, because no matter what you did, no matter which way you went, design with toys or shots or rules or how, you know, or if the game was like very simple or more complex, no matter which way you went with it, there was always going to be people that knew it should be something different. That in their mind, Star Wars means this. And you can't hit everybody's this. So I always have to go with my gut. I always have to say, well, what do I want out of the game? And I want it to be epic, and I tried to make it epic. You did make it epic, my friend. Awesome. I guarantee that. But with trying to make a pinball machine and make everybody happy, I mean, let's go down what people in general can agree on with pinball. You need the bats in a pinball machine. You need the pinballs. Everything else is subject to interpretation of what people like. True, true. So you're never going to make everyone happy. That's absolutely right. You're right. But with some themes that aren't as iconic as Star Wars, like AAA is as big as you can get, but Star Wars is really like quadruple A. There's going to be – everyone's going to have an opinion on what it should have and what it shouldn't have and what it should do. And I think it's even more so with licenses as big as Star Wars. True, true. But you know what? I mean, you're never going to make everyone happy. True. You cannot make all the people happy all the time. No. No. I mean, if we could make everyone happy once a week, that'd be pretty outstanding. That's what I shoot for with my wife. Once a week. I thought you were going to say with this podcast. That's what I shoot for with this podcast. People happy once a week. No expectations set with us yet. We'll see how it goes. All right. Was there anything in Star Wars that you wanted to put in that you ultimately just didn't have the room or the space or the authority to put into the game? So... So Steve and I tried magnets, right? We thought magnets made sense. We thought Steve wanted to put in magnets and – or a magnet, right? And we tested it out. We tried it out, and it didn't work, and we took it out. But that was the only thing that we really thought we should be doing that didn't work out. And then as far as code, like – Code – I mean you put everything in there, right? Which is probably what you meant. But no, code-wise, I'm very happy with it. I want it to do lots of different modes because I want to cover all three movies as thoroughly as possible. And I think I did that. When you're playing Star Wars, who is your favorite character and what's your scoring strategy? Oh, that's a good question. So I bounce around a lot. And so I think Leia is underrated. I played her the least, literally. Why? Honestly, because I couldn't figure out how to... Maximize her score. Yeah. I just felt like I started at a disadvantage. Like, if I got too good at the game, I would just ultimately think, I'll be Princess Leia and just make it harder. That's what I thought. So, right. But Leia shines in the four mini-wizard modes. So her scoring is... She adds to the scoring of all four of those modes. So you want to get to those modes and you want to maximize those to make Leia shine. So I like playing her sometimes. But to be honest, I don't play her that often. So another one of my favorite strategies is Jedi training because I take Luke and then I do Jedi training and then I try to start multiball. Because Jedi training makes all those targets worth a lot. Once you're at higher level Jedi, all of those targets become valuable. and then multiball is going to just accidentally hit all those targets and your score goes up because of that. So would you say is Luke probably, for somebody that's starting off, the easiest way to kind of get your points up? Or is it Han? So Han, see, so then the other reason I pick Luke is because every single time you do Jedi training, you complete the Force Bank and that quickly gets you to lightsaber duel. So if you play Jedi training, if you do Luke and pick Jedi training off the skill shot often or maybe two times and then on the third ball do five TIE Fighters, that's a good path because that gets you to multiball and gets you to high-level Jedi and gets you to lightsaber duel. Han gets you to escape from Boba Fett, and I think escape from Boba Fett is the best mode. That's a fun mode, escape from Boba Fett. I'm very proud of how it came out. Yeah. I like it too. Right. I always want to have some mode in the game that's like that. And like on Game of Thrones, it was the winter is coming, hurry ups. Winter is coming. Yeah, yeah. Did you have a Game of Thrones? No, I'd like to have a Game of Thrones. Okay. And I probably would not have been interested, but I've gotten so involved into the show that I just think it's a smooth transition for me to get into the pinball machine. I think the only unfortunate thing with Game of Thrones is that the series is further along now than the pin is. It'd be fun to see an update that incorporated some of the more recent episodes. I don't know how practical that is, but that'd be pretty awesome. I think we should start a crowdfunding thing. And I will quit my job at Stern. Yes. And then some private people will pay me to finish that game, to catch it up with HBO. I think we need a few million dollars crowdfunded. A few million dollars? And then you're willing to leave Stern? Well, we need to go to HBO. We have to pay for the thing again. And then you go back here a third time to Stern. We have to go to Stern. Right, right. When they call you back. Then we've got to do T2, a new code update for T2. Right. That could be next after that. Okay. Well, if you just leave Stern and we crowdfund you to recode all these older Ballywilliam machines, that would be kind of fun too. I'm in. Let's do that. The resurgence. Yep. Let me ask you this going back to Star Wars. What was the inspiration behind the TIE fighter hurry up and mashing the button in the middle of the lockdown bar? Oh, that's a great question. So, like, where did that come about? So, that came about with something that we weren't proud of on Game of Thrones. So on Game of Thrones, I had all these multipliers, and I thought the multipliers were good, and I put lots of effort into lots of different ways where you can build up your multipliers. You had shot multipliers, and you had play-through multipliers, and they multiplied against each other, and I was keeping track of it on the dot matrix. And then I wanted you... And explain the mode to people that might not have played Star Wars, if you don't mind, when it starts, what you physically have to do. I will. Okay. Game of Thrones, multipliers, right? So Iron Bank is this thing where, in my mind, on paper, it was really cool. It was great. But it turned out to just kind of be lackluster. And I think it's because the points aren't high enough. So the idea is that you build up your multipliers, and then I wanted to give you a tough choice. While your multiplier is really high, you can cash them in, return it back to 1x for some points right now, or you can let it ride and maybe use that multiplier for even bigger points on shots that you might make in the future. And I wanted you to have that decision going on in your head. And that was the idea behind the Iron Bank. But it didn't work out that way. I think the points just needed to be much higher to make you have that tough decision. And people just didn't understand it. People didn't know that 17x equaled this many points and then 20x equaled even more points and so on. I think that didn't translate. And so then Steve and I are starting Star Wars, and we have a game in my room, and we're flipping it and playing it. And Steve says something clever, right? Not for a change. He says clever things all the time. For a change. He does. He says clever things all the time. But he says, you know, like he mentioned Iron Bank and he wanted to do something more with it so that while, you know, what he wanted, and I sort of wanted it too, was more things to do with the button in Star Wars than in Game of Thrones. The button meaning the center button on the lockdown bar, not the flipper buttons. Correct. Yeah, integrate it more. Right. Well, not integrate it more, but come up with something more fun than Iron Bank. and we both had the idea and it came out of a clever thing he said which I can't quite remember he basically said he wanted to have to hit the button while the ball was in play and then that got me down the road what could we do when do we know the ball is in play we know the ball is in play when the player just made a shot and usually when one shot is important it's some kind of hurry up so I'm like well the tie fighter's there let's make it and then I took the whole idea and then ran with it and I I know the ball is in play because you just made a shot and it's coming back at you, it's not controlled and it's going to be the ultimate time where you'll have to be smashing the button for six seconds and keeping the ball alive with the flippers because that's like I'm absolutely sure that the ball is loose and not They're not controlled. And you're trying to hit that button as many times as you get to the TIE Fighter multiball. Correct. So it's like the ultimate risk-versus-work. TIE Fighter Assault is the name of this mode. TIE Fighter Assault is what you get when you complete the TIE Fighter Hurry Up. So at thresholds of TIE Fighters destroyed, you start TIE Fighter Hurry Up. And then if you complete TIE Fighter Hurry Up, you start TIE Fighter Assault. And then every other button pressed, people think it's every one, but every other button pressed destroys a TIE Fighter on the screen. Oh, I didn't know that. Right, so the TIE Fighters. I always thought I wasn't taking down as many TIE Fighters. Right, right. And it seemed like I was taking down about half of the amount that I was hitting. Right. One of my friends said that he caught on to it, and he's the one that made me want, he said you need to put in a sound for the firing and then exploding, firing and then exploding, firing and then exploding, and that's what it does now. Okay, that's awesome. Yeah, it is awesome. I didn't realize that. I love TIE Fighter Assault. I think it's one of the highlights of the game. for anybody that gets to that mode that's not used to it to be able to explain that because what I've normally done is when it's going on I just start hitting that center button on the lockdown bar to let them know what's happening and then they try to get to that again because then they want to try to do it but then there's a level of panic that goes on because you've got to take one hand off of a flipper and then you're vulnerable on one side I don't know how many times I've drained a ball because I was playing in that little six second window there's a lot of adrenaline and a lot of risk versus reward in Star Wars if you have the means I highly recommend picking one up Me too. Or two or three. Or two or three. Well, you know, you need a Pro, Premium, and LE, right? Correct. I mean, you can't play the same. Right. You can't just have one version. Yeah. I mean, it's like... You've got more than one room in the house. You know? You need one everywhere. Right. Iron Maiden is the most recent release at Stern, which is Keith Elwin's pin. Correct. And he's accredited with designer and programming a little bit, right? No programming. No programming? He designed the rules. Okay, so he has a rule set. So on the spectrum of designers that are involved with rules, Keith pegs one side of it. Okay. And other designers have almost nothing to do with the rules, and all of the designers are somewhere in the middle. So then who's on programming credit for that? Rick Nagel. So who's Rick? Rick Nagel is brand new. Okay. Keith Elwin is brand new. The mechanical engineer is brand new. and when it all first began, I went in George's office and said, like, George, should we really have all these brand new guys? And George reminded me that his first game at Williams was three brand new guys. It was Tom Euban, Tom Capera, and George Gomez. Which game was that? Corvette. Right, so they had three new guys, right? But then they had two experienced guys on the core team. They had Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti), Zombie Yeti, right? He's going to kill it with the art, and he did. and Jerry Thompson, who killed it on Ghostbusters. So those two who pulled Ghostbusters along, made a home run out of Ghostbusters, are back again with Iron Maiden. And I think the game turned out great. I think it's fun to flip. It's got fun things to do. I don't like Iron Maiden as a band, and I thought I was going to hate the game, and I like it pretty much. It does flip differently than anything I've flipped. Yeah, I haven't got a chance to play one yet, but soon enough. Terry has one in Pinball Life. All right. We'll have to make a trip up there. Get a chance. Pinball Life and Huntley, when you're picking up those pinball parts, jump in and play a couple games on Iron Maiden. Is that a plug? You know what? I guess so. Yeah. It's a personal plug. We live close enough. Terry's good people. Terry and Margaret. Terry and Margaret. Owners of Pinball Life. But I keep hearing Jerry Thompson's name coming up, and that's not a name that I'm familiar with. Yeah. Years ago, but recently at Stern. When it comes to sound, it comes to audio. It's Jerry Thompson. Because he rocks. You see what I did there? Yeah. Right. Jerry and I have become close over the last few years. Before Ghostbusters, John and I are planning Ghostbusters. We're writing design docs and throwing ideas against the wall. Jerry is in my office, and he does a small smidgen of sound for us. He's not really one of our sound guys. We have a few other sound guys at this point. and Jerry comes to me and he says, let me do the sounds for Ghostbusters. I know I can do it, and I'll do a great job. And I'm extremely skeptical. I'm like, I don't know you. I don't know your work. I don't know what you're capable of. So then we talk for a long while after that, and he convinces me to give him a shot. And I thinking in the back of my head you know I can punt at some point and switch sound guys if I really have to If like you know if if a month down the road this isn working out you know I just go sorry man this is this didn work out You know we going to go with someone else. And, um, it was far from that. If Jerry, Jerry, everything I started getting from Jerry was great. Everything, you know, was, you know, he, he had less to learn, but, um, I helped him with that and he gave me great stuff and, and it was the best decision I've ever made. So is Jerry on staff at Stern, or does he kind of freelance? Jerry lives in Seattle. Okay, so he lives in Seattle. Yeah, we have lots of people that don't live in Chicago that work for us. Jerry is one of our gems that doesn't work at Stern. He lives in Seattle. So he works remotely. I guess with sound, it's probably a little easier to do that. Yeah, yeah. I talk to him. In the middle of a project, I talk to him daily. He and I are chatting on chat like every single day whenever I need him. He's extremely fast at responding. So I can call him or text him, hey, I need this, I need that, and I have what I need before I need it. Great. Yeah. And then he's great to work with because nothing is ever perfect, right? So he'll give me – I'll need 10 sounds, right? And he'll give me five of each, right? So he gives me 50 when I need 10, which is awesome. So then I listened to all 50, and every once in a while, these 10 aren't that great. And then before I know it, I got 10 more to replace them with the notes that I gave him in the new direction. So you're making the final audio decisions on your – Yeah. Okay, that's interesting too. Yeah. The software guy makes – or at least I, I make all the decisions. Well, I'm the point man for everything that's not physical on the game. So that's sound, scoring, choreography, everything. But I don't get credit. I don't deserve credit for, like, games sounding good. That's Jerry. I get credit for their direction, for, like, hey, Jerry, I need 17 sounds that are like this or do this. And every once in a while, so there's hundreds and hundreds of sounds that go in a game and then hundreds and hundreds of speech calls. And, like, every once in a while, so, like, maybe 10 out of those hundreds, you know, I have a very specific need. like the thrum sound on Hyperspace Multiball. In Hyperspace Multiball on Star Wars, there's this thrum sound that goes thrum, thrum, thrum. And it's constant all throughout the thing. And that was something very specific in my head that I wanted. And he and I went back and forth like a day and a half. And in a day and a half for Jerry, that's like 20 things he sent my way that I'm like, no, no, no. That's not it. It's a thrum. Don't you understand? It's like do it yourself, Dwight. Do it yourself. Send me 20. I said, don't you understand? It's a thrum. That's a thunk. You know, I don't want a thunk. I want a thrum. Right. Right? It's going to be frustrating because he wants to see it through. I mean, obviously, he thinks he probably hits a nail on the head, and it's just not what you're thinking. I don't know. I don't think it's frustrating. I think it's just part of the job. We all have things we throw out, things that didn't work, things that we thought were good but other people on the team pissed on, and they're like, okay, yeah, you've got to go. Gotcha. It always is the case. That's interesting. So, Dwight, you have a team, a force behind you, so to speak. Especially on Star Wars. That doesn't just help you with Star Wars, but it's helped you with Ghostbusters, that has helped you with Game of Thrones. Yeah, that's absolutely correct. I'm the lead of the team. So way back in the day, it was mostly me, and every once in a while people would help out. But now it's much more of a team. we have artists and sound guys and other programmers and I spend a lot of my time coordinating what people are doing and how they're feeding me and feeding the game stuff that gets poured in and I'm massaging it and we're getting it done and letting people flip it to see if it's fun I really want to take a moment to shout out is that what you call it? you have a shout out the special Wendland Pinball Podcast shout out to you guys My two brothers. The Special Winlet Pinball Podcast shout-out goes to – is that what you want? Yeah, do that again, actually. The Special Winlet Pinball Podcast shout-out goes to – So I want to shout-out to Corey Stoop. Corey is – I introduce him as the man behind the curtain, right? He's the guy actually getting lots of work done, right? He's the guy that's unseen that pulling levers and making shit happen software-wise that I get all the credit for. If you don't like something about Star Wars or Game of Thrones or Ghostbusters that's rules, that was something I was – Then that's Corey's fault. No, no. That's my fault because it was – The things you liked. The buck stopped with me, and I was the guy that said, yeah, I want to do that. Corey's just the guy that made it happen or at least most of it or parts of it depending on what part. How long has Corey been on team with you then? Corey's been my wingman for, he came in at the end of Game of Thrones, and then he was my wingman for all of Ghostbusters and all of Star Wars. Anyone else you'd like to thank for your house of pinball? So there's a billion people that make pinball, that make those three games, Ghostbusters, Game of Thrones, and Star Wars, that sort of work for me or with me. Other programmers, like, you know, I'm going to forget names, right? So Corey is my wingman. Corey and I work tightly together every single day to get stuff done. But lots of others help. And like Tanya and Wason and Mike. Tanya Kleiss. Tanya Kleiss, yep. Correct. Mike Kizivets. Mm-hmm. Wason Chang. Okay. Yeah. Is that right? I don't know. I hope so. Those are other programmers that helped. We'll figure that out later. That helped on those games. There's probably more. Those are the people that helped out on those games software-wise. Then I work closely with Jerry Thompson. He's with me every single day working on sounds. And then I have several artists that I work with every day. I have this huge board of cards, and all of the rules and features are on the far left-hand side of the board. And then as the cards work their way across the board, the game gets done. Like a storyboard. No, no, no. No. No, it's an Agile board. It's a combo band board. Okay, sorry. It's a production thing. But the first column that the cards move into is like storyboarding. So every card, as it starts its journey across the board, moves into storyboarding. And in the beginning, just a simple thing is written on it, like TIE fighter assault. And we don't even know what that means yet. But so then I meet with an artist for like a day or day and a half, and we discuss what does TIE Fighter Assault look like. And then he goes off and draws it, and then I go, yeah, that's what it should look like. And then the card moves. The card moves to this card. You know, now TIE Fighter Assault needs art, and somebody starts working on the art. And then Disney says, that's not what it's supposed to look like. No, Disney was great. I'm joking. Right. and then the card moves into this card you know, TIE Fighter Assault now needs artwork and somebody starts doing all the actual art for that thing and then another card needs to move, so that original storyboarder and I spend our time so I work with artists every day on stuff like that it's a lot of fun, that's kind of where I am now with my current game is coming up with what the current game is going to look like So in this part of the process for your new game Correct Is this a tedious process? No, it's my favorite part It is tedious And it's mind bending But it's also lots of fun It's my favorite part of the whole process Where we have lots of ideas And we're trying to figure out How they mesh together How they come together Let me ask you this Who is up and coming right now? Who do we look out for? taking the ball and running with it as we move forward? Oh, that's a good question. So the rising stars right now are Tanya Kleiss, which we're going to see his game before long. Tanya Kleiss is another programmer. He was a systems guy for a while, and he was like a helper programmer for a while. He's now doing – he's killing it on the current game that he's working on, and I think everyone's going to really love what he's doing. So he's the lead programmer on his game. He's the lead programmer on his game. Awesome. Awesome. And that's a game coming out not before too long. Okay. Other rising stars, though, are Keith Elwin and Rick Nagel. Rick Nagel has a lot to learn about pinball, but with Keith, who knows everything about pinball, they make a great team because Rick is awesome at software engineering, and he's really fast at learning. He's been in the industry forever. He used to work for me at WMS, and he was always the guy that I could throw giant projects to, and I knew they would get done. and I wouldn't have to worry about them anymore. He also worked for George at Midway, and George and I had the exact same comments about him without comparing notes. We, you know, like Rick is the guy that can get it done, and he's done it again with Iron Maiden, and so he's another rising star. Anybody that you're still looking up to in pinball that's inspiring you at this point? So, well, I said this, I think, earlier. Lyman Sheets, I think, you know, is still the king of what I do, right? I think Lyman Sheets and Larry DeMar are the two of the most influential people in my world. And I think over the last couple of years, Lyman has probably surpassed Larry, you know, because Larry's kind of been out of it for a while. So I think they're still kind of heroes in my book. So you're still working with some heroes? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, awesome. And, you know, new ones on the rise. What's your favorite pinball podcast? This one. I couldn't think of the name. Whatever this one is called. Oh, Special Win Lit. God damn it. System Win Lit? Special Win Lit. Special Win Lit. Although System Win Lit is pretty cool. System Move Down is a great pinball podcast. System Move Down. Yeah. Right. There are people that are owners of Game of Thrones and Ghostbusters. I know those codes are considered complete. Do you ever find yourself maybe coming back and making additional revisions to either of those titles? I would love to do some additions to those titles. Okay. I can't promise I can do any of that. I want to, but we'll see. There's a couple of bugs in each of those games, and we will fix those. Okay. Whether or not that means more features and rules, who knows. Tell me a little bit about your feeling. Did you request Star Wars? Was that something where somebody was saying, hey, Dwight, guess what? Star Wars, it's yours. Star Wars, no, somebody said, guess what? It's yours. That's awesome. Yeah, it is. Star Wars is a dream theme for me. It's one of like three pins that I would die to do. And I tell this to everybody. I'm a founding member of the Church of Star Wars. I saw Star Wars in the theater in 1977 nine times before it went out of the theater. Now, some of those were like at the drive-in or at second-run theaters, but I count those. Those count. For sure. Yeah, for sure. Nine times. That's dedication there. Yeah, well, I was nuts. I was pretty naive, too. no way because i was 12 you're you're naive at 12 that's crazy so you're so you're pumped up you get star wars i am i am um and then you're teamed up with steve ritchie steve ritchie it's gonna be it's gonna be our sixth game i was gonna say you've done a lot of pins together so at least so at this point in time like which a couple years ago right steve and i are we're gonna do our sixth game together now several times and throughout my career i've promised myself i'm never working with Steve again. Don't get me wrong. Steve has lots of great qualities. Steve is everything that you've ever thought about him. But he and I have similar personalities. We butt heads. We're strong, passionate people and we butt heads. By the end of a long project like Star Wars, I don't want to see Steve again. Now, Now, that's all in the past. So, Ken, I knew you back when I was working on then. I was telling you all kinds of bad things about Steve, but some of them were true. Right, some of them were true. And some of them – I don't know. Maybe you were. I was naive. Some of them was just me being frustrated. Right. So what I just really want to iterate or make it clear, Steve has lots of great qualities. It was just me promising I didn't want to do that again. And it always passes. And then we do T3, and then it passes, and then we do Game of Thrones, and then it passes, and we do Star Wars. And now I could probably work with Steve again today. What would Steve say if he was sitting down and somebody had asked him a question about how was it to work with Dwight Sullivan? He would say exactly the same. Steve would say exactly the same thing. He would say, you know, working with Dwight is nuts and it's also great. No, that didn't come out right. I don't know if he would say it was great working with me, but I think we make – he would agree that we sometimes make some good games. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you guys are a good team. I don't think there's any disagreement with that. I can see where you're working with somebody for hours and weeks and months. Months, yeah. Yeah. Well, especially on something so – Passionate. Yeah, I mean, passion just fuels that. And when you're passionate about something, especially if it's your dream theme, you're not going to want to compromise on that because this is your one chance to make it you and make it the way that you want it with the code. Right. Would you say that Star Wars is your most complicated rule set or complex rule set? Yeah, and for better or for worse. Do you think it's too complex for the casual player? I do not. I'm never going to admit to that. I had to ask because I hear both sides correct and I can see so where Star Wars gets complicated is when somebody that knows the rules tries to explain it to somebody who doesn't when you're explaining Star Wars to somebody it gets complicated fast but other than a few other than a couple of things I would do differently today than if I had the chance I'm very happy with how Star Wars plays to when you just walk up and you don't know what you're doing because I think that pinball in general is complex no matter what game it is, just the silhouette of pinball is complex stepping up to any machine, there's a level of intimidation there's rules and there's shots and there's arrows and blinking lights what's flashing, where do I go what's this video mode, what am I supposed to be doing Right, but most people just walking up to a game don't get to video mode. So shoot the flashing light is like the first rule of pinball. George and I argue about this. George thinks that the first rule of pinball is keep the ball alive. And I think that's inherent in playing. That's like saying the first rule of living is breathing. Breathing, right. Right? So if the first rule of pinball or if George has his way, the second rule of pinball is shoot the flashing light, then I think a lot of people kind of latch on to that. There's a lot flashing in Star Wars. Not when you first start. What's flashing? Well, you've got your modes. But you haven't started a mode. You haven't started anything yet. I'm sorry, the multiplier insert. Usually one of the first things that flashes. I think that changes the game when you understand how the multiplier is. Right, that's someone who knows the game. It's not necessary to understand that to progress through the game. And if you just walk up to the game, you have no idea that the multipliers are even there, how they work. You don't care. You don't know. None of that should confuse novice people, novice players. So you're proud of your Star Wars code? Yeah, I'm very proud of it. So where does that lead you into your next game? Do you see that same level of complexity? Are you competing against Star Wars code? Star Wars, in my mind, Star Wars needed to be epic. Star Wars needed to have the kitchen sink. And I threw the kitchen sink into the game. It has metals, which are like artifacts of Star Trek Next Generation. It has stacking from Game of Thrones. It has all the things that I like about all the games I've ever done are in Star Wars. And it has a new rule that I'm pretty proud of. It's the whole multiplier thing. The thing that you think is complicated, and it is. At first it's complicated, but when you realize how to utilize that, it offers a whole other dynamic to the game. I think it's a lot of fun, the whole multiplayer thing. I agree, too. And it adds a layer that you, you know, another gear that you shift into when you get to that point of playing the game. Do you consider yourself an above average pinball player? I do not. So that's a funny story, right? So I sort of grew up, you know, because I think of the last few decades of my career as growing up, right? So I grew up playing pinball against some of the best pinball players in the world. But from my seat, I was playing against the guys I know, my colleagues and the guys I work with. And they weren't the best pinball players in the world. They're just colleagues, right? So and I did poor against them, like year after year after year. Then recently I met a bunch of friends, and I play pinball against those guys, and I'm above average in their league or in their group. Sounds like you won some money off of them, haven't you? I won a little money off of them. Very good, very good. Yeah, I did. Nice. And so now I know that while I was growing up, I just was playing against great pinball players. So you're a seasoned player. Roger Sharp and Larry DeMar and Steve Ritchie even is pretty good. and so on. Well, I mean, when you look at the staff at Stern now, I mean, it's stacked with highly ranked players. Yeah, it's even worse if, you know, I'm doing quotes with my fingers. It's even worse than back in the day. Back in the day in the 90s, you know, there were great players, and now there's world champions. Outstanding. Yeah. So what's next for you, Dwight? What are we looking forward to? What's next? What's next for Dwight Sullivan? I'm challenging myself not to make a game like Star Wars. I love Star Wars. So Star Wars for me, like, so over the last couple of weeks, I've been finishing Star Wars. I had some things I didn't like about it, and now they're gone. And now when I play Star Wars, I mean, you know, I really, really like it. So, like, Star Trek Next Generation, Game of Thrones, and Star Wars were my top three games. And today, Star Wars is the top game for me. But it's extremely complex. It's not approachable. It lacks in those areas. And I think T2 was much more approachable and fun. But T2 today wouldn't last because half the games go to basements, and T2 is a very simple game. So I'm going to try to make a game that's more like T2. It's a delicate balance to a routed game or on-location game. Versus a basement game. versus a home game. Yeah. Got you. But there's a good balance. You know, I mean, if you've got a couple games in your collection, you know, one's a game that's a little more simple like a T2, one that's a little bit more advanced like Star Trek Next Generation or Indiana Jones, and then if you had Ghostbusters or Star Wars that are more complex than, you know, 90s games, I mean, it's a good balance. I agree. I agree completely. Yeah. All right. So I think this one wraps it up. Dwight, it's been a pleasure. Awesome having you in. I had a blast. To the Two Brothers Pinball Pal-El Studio. Thank you very, very, very much. Oh, it was my pleasure. Yes, thank you, Dwight. I really appreciate you making it up. No problem. No problem with that. Don't be naive. We really did appreciate your efforts today. I'm not as naive as I used to be, but I'm still pretty naive. There are worse things, right? Right. All right, guys. Time to wrap this one up. We want to thank Dwight Sullivan from Stern Pinball for stopping in and being on the show. We want to thank everybody for listening. you can reach us via our Facebook page Special Wind Lit Pinball Podcast or you can reach us via email at SpecialWindLitPinballPodcast at gmail.com we want to thank everybody for listening to the show and remember the Special Wind Lit Pinball Podcast is sponsored by our friends at Two Brothers Artisan Brewing and their Pinball Pale Ale because nothing goes better together than pinball and a beer for Bill Webb, I am Ken Cromwell don't forget to take some time out of your day and play some pinball so long everybody you