You're listening to Topcast, this old pinballs online radio. For more information visit them anytime, www.marvin3m.com Flash Topcast. Welcome to another edition of Topcast. Tonight we're going to be speaking with a very special pinball designer and software writer for Williams Valley. We're going to give him a call right now. He's done several very high profile games for Williams, including Scared Stiff and Circus Voltaire, along with Star Wars Episode 1 and Ticket Tacto. And I should be an interesting talk to hear software perspective at Williams Valley. We're going to give him a call right now. Special guest. Special guest. Special guest. Okay, we're going to give a call right now to Cameron Silver, the software engineer at Williams Valley that was responsible for some very high profile games. And let's give him a ring up right now on the phone. Cameron. Hey, how are you? Okay, so we're talking with Cameron Silver. He worked on Circus Voltaire. He's well known for Circus Voltaire because he did the infamous home-rom, which just turned that game into something that every pinball collector in the world wants now. Star Wars Episode 1, Scared Stiff and Ticket Tacto and Cameron. You're originally from Australia, right? Correct, I grew up in Melbourne. Okay, tell me about that. How was the pinball seen in Australia when you were growing up? Well, you know, I didn't play a whole lot of pinball. I didn't really get into it until I was at college. Maybe you're going to senior in high school and first year college. I used to go with my brother who was a couple years older than me. Well, of course he still is. So I used to go with him and a bunch of his friends. They would go, you know, maybe once or twice a week to this little arcade in Melbourne and get together and play pinball. And that was around the time of, you know, a fun house and bride of pinball. Okay, so how old were you at this time? Like probably around 18, 19 years old. Okay. And that's where I really started learning, you know, the rules and, you know, not to flip both footers at the same time and stuff like that. And, you know, that's how I got into pinball. Are you a pretty good player? I'm not saying I'm an above average player, but probably only marginally, marginally above average. Okay. So like I'm in a league here in Chicago and I pretty much always end up in sea division. But, you know, that's all right. Right, right. I'm believing you're, I'm sure you can kick my butt. Well, I'm very inconsistent. I mean, I can play three games of circus in, you know, like 40 seconds total. And then, you know, I'll have one game in the last 45 minutes. Now, how did you get in this? I mean, you don't just walk into Valley Williams as a software engineer. Obviously, you've got some history. Because I like pinball so much after playing with my brother and then, you know, getting my own friends involved in it, I started to, actually while I was in college, I had a part-time job there in Melbourne at an arcade. It was actually a fairly large chain of arcades throughout the whole country. But there were three stores within walking distance in downtown Melbourne and that's where I was based. And I was just, you know, maintaining the pinball machines down there. So you just work in on them. You're just fixing them at this point. Pretty much. Yeah. Just fixing them. And I love to play them too. And I was, you know, I used to print out the rule sheets from RGP. And, you know, I printed them out and I had them all in a little plastic pocket behind the counter. And, you know, we signed on all the game saying, you know, if you want to read the rule sheets, go on after them and blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, there was this, you know, a growing collection of regular players would come and play the machines. Because, well, first of all, the big story in downtown Melbourne used to get sample games off of it, you know, really early. Like, we had the first Adams family in Australia and we had, you know, we used to get the new Balli Williams games often before many places in the US. So, there were times where even I could write rule sheets for new games because I would see them often before, you know, lots of other people. So, that was kind of cool. And so, I was right there in the, in the, in the pinball scene, I guess, in Melbourne, which was a lot of fun. And at the same time, I was also fairly vocal on REC Games Pinball. And I remember there was one day in 94, probably early to mid 94, where there was, you know, one of several discussions going on about Star Trek next generation that Dwight actually responded to personally. And of course, you know, I was a geek. So, I emailed Dwight and I'm like, hey, you probably have no idea who I am, blah, blah, blah. But I think you did a great job on, you know, Star Trek, get away, and terminate it too, which were all, you know, three of my favorite games at the time. Yeah, they still are. And so, Dwight replied, which surprised me. Of course, now that I know him, it doesn't surprise me at all, because he's a terrific, terrific guy. But, you know, we entered into, you know, fairly, you know, lengthy email discussion, just about pinball on the design industry and stuff like that. And there was one message that I sent him that I was talking about how I was planning at the end of that year, that was not in 94. I was planning on coming to the US. And he said, oh, you know, it would be cool if you were coming to Chicago, you know, you could get a tour of the factory. And I replied something like, oh, yeah, you know, maybe I could even work with you guys if there's a guard. And he thought I was being serious. So, in his response to me, he said, you know, while I was talking to Ted FD, he's the head of our software department, and he said, if you're interested in working, he sent us to your resume. And I thought, oh, okay, you know, I didn't think it would go anywhere, but I sent the resume, and I started talking to Ted and Ted said, if you're in Chicago, come around for an interview. So, of course, I changed my plan, you know, to come for Chicago. Now, you were working, did you work for a radio station or something, Australia, too? It's just a college radio station. Okay. And I did a tiny little bit of volunteer work for community radio, but I didn't really do much on hand stuff for them. But that's all going to be on hand stuff I did with the college station. But that's all going to tie in later to something that you did, and we'll talk about that in a bit. So, you come to the US, you go and you talk to Ted, and you talk to Keith. And of course, Keith was the software designer for the games you mentioned. And Ted was the head of the department, and how did that go? Well, it was weird, because, you know, leading up to the interview, I thought it was more of a tour, but as it got closer and closer, I realized, you know, this is a real interview. So, I did the whole thing with the suit and the tie, and getting your hair cut, and all that stuff that you do before in interview. And I went into that day, and it was grueling. It was absolutely grueling. I mean, I was shuffled from office to office. I went, you know, from Ted and Dwight and Tom Uban and Bill Grapp. And I spoke mainly to the program. It's not any of the designers, but still, I mean, some of these people like Lewis. You know, Lewis and I had been talking on RGP and through email. You know, for years. And so, you know, it was great to catch up with them, and I went out for lunch with them all. And then, you know, I went back to my friend's place where I was staying, and just, you know, sort of had a heart attack. But it was amazing. I mean, just to see it, oh, I didn't think I'd get the, you know, particularly before the interview, I didn't think I'd get the job, and I didn't think I'd leave Australia and come to Chicago and start working on Timber. I mean, that's like, you know, that was like my dream job, and no one ever actually expects their dream job to come to fruition. So, how good of a software program or were you at this time before you started working? I hadn't even graduated from college yet. I was, you know, my last semester of college was, you know, the early 95. I finished in, you know, my, sorry, I finished college in, like, June of 95, and I was at Williams in January of 95. And were you, at college, were you, you know, majoring in software? Yeah, I was, I was getting a computer science degree, and primarily I was taking computer programming classes. And what was the name of the school? The school is the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, abbreviated to RMIT. Huh. So you come over, and I mean, have you done any assembly language programming prior to this? We had done one semester of assembly language programming in first year. That I loved, I absolutely loved it, and that was part of the appeal of Williams, was that it was all in assembly. Cameron, you absolutely suck. I can't believe you walked into this. You know what's the next thing? They initially turned me down. Oh, they did. They turned me down because, you know, I had no work experience. I hadn't even finished college yet, and they, you know, there's no way they're going to pay for some kid to, you know, to move from Australia to the US, has had no work experience and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, they got a sponsor for Green Card, too, right? Right. So I, you know, I called their boss. I said to Ted and Larry, you know, if I get myself to Chicago, you give me a job, and they said, yes. Probably thinking, up, there's no way he's going to do that, but at least we'll look good. So I did, and, you know, I paid, well, with my parents' help, we paid, you know, for the moving expenses, we paid for the, I didn't start out with a green card. I started out with what's known as an H1B visa. Right. I don't know if it's the same now, but back then, that's basically a visitor's visa that permits you to work. Right. Right. But it only permits you to work at one place. So I was fine with it. One place for a set period of time, right? Thank you, Paddham. Set one place for a set period of time. Yes. The visa expires after, I think, three years, but then you can extend it for another three years. Man, because, you know, I was, I was a 6502 assembly language programmer for years, and I put out a bunch commercial products and stuff, and I would have never thought to do what you were doing. I mean, it would have never even crossed my mind. Right. I think part of it was that I was, you know, 21 years old, and you know, what you like when you're 21 years old. I can do anything, you know. I can, you know, sure, I'll move across the world by myself. I don't care. This is a once in a, you know, I'm sure that happened now. Like if someone in, you know, like Greenland offered me an amazing job. I was like, well, you know, I've got the mortgage and I've got the car and I've got all my stuff. You know, oh, no, don't worry about it. Right. It's back then. I mean, I'll still live with my parents. I had nothing to lose by coming over here and trying it out. So when you came over here, where did you first live? I lived with, for like a week and a half with one of the other programmers at Williams. Was that Duncan? No, that was Craig Sylla. Okay. And he had a townhouse up in Halitine. And so I just, you know, during the day, who'd go to work and drop me at the metro stop? And I just took the train down, you know, from Halitine down to like Ellington Heights and now prospect and displace. And I just looked for apartments in all those little towns and ended up finding one in nonprofits. Wow. And so, you know, two weeks later, I moved into, you know, I was renting this apartment and I moved in and then I started, you know, then I started work. I really wanted to find my own place first because, you know, I felt like I was, you know, I didn't know Craig at all. It was, you know, it was really, really nice for him to offer to put me up. I didn't, you know, I had never really spoke to him on line or anything. I didn't know him at all. Yeah, you sleep in on his couch, right? You're sleeping on his couch. Pretty much. I was, you know, he was just in this one bedroom townhouse and he had to fold out couch and that's where I was sleeping. So when you get to Williams, what was the first day like? I remember the first, I didn't have a desk. Actually, I might have had a desk or at least a table. I didn't have a computer. I didn't have a game or anything. But the Pimble system there, the software, was really well documented and printed out in this nicely bound book. So I just remember sitting in the office just looking through this thing, you know, all day just, you know, well, I wonder how they did this. And, you know, looking up, you know, system calls and stuff like that, how to do lamp effects, how to do display effects and so on. And it was amazing. And just, you know, getting to know my colleagues and stuff like that. So you're like pinching myself every 30 seconds to make sure that, you know, I haven't, you know, fallen asleep somewhere. So you're talking about Apple, the, what is it? Advanced pinball programming language environment? Yeah, something like that. I don't exactly recall what it's dance for, but yeah, something like that. And that OS was called Apple, yeah. Yeah, and that's Larry DeMarz, baby, right? Exactly. And did he have, he had everything all well documented, huh? Yep. And Ted took over from that. Ted and Larry are very similar programmers. They're terrific programmers, borderline geniuses. And, you know, they're very, very disciplined in, you know, how they write their code, how they structure everything, and very much so the documentation too. So everything was really well documented. I've not worked anywhere since that has, that has their code as well documented and as well weighed out. So it's a fairly small system compared to the stuff I've used since. But still, I mean, it says a lot on their part. Right, right. So you walk in there, you got, you know, you got a desk, no computer. How long was it before, you know, you actually felt like they actually, you know, assimilated you into a design team and, and giving you, you know, work to actually get done? Yeah, I don't remember the exact, exact timeframe. I mean, I'm sure I got set up within the first week with a computer and everything. I think I had Larry's old computer. The computer he used to actually write, you know, fun house and the operating system and stuff like that, whichever one was like, oh, you're using Larry's conducive, this was a very special computer, I'm like, yeah, whatever. It's just a computer, it's been reformatted like 17 times anyway. So the very first thing they did was they, they willed in a demolition man and, you know, showed me how to set it all up and compile the code and stuff like that and just said, you know, just don't know, you know, do whatever you want to do, you know, get used to it, you know, write a couple of land effects, write a couple of display effects, change, you know, add some rules, take out some rules, write some new rules, you know, whatever you want to do, just to get your feet wet. Did you do all that? Sorry, did you do all that? So yeah, yeah, I think the biggest thing I did on the demo man was add something akin to the white water vacation jackpot. And I forget, I think you had to have played all the multiball, get demolition time, a few other things, you know, maybe complete act mag. I mean, I don't remember the rules for the demo man too well. But there were like four or five things you had to have done and then I put in this big effect and this big jackpot and stuff like that. Did that end up in any version of code that was seen today? No, that was all just, no, we never burnt any ROMs or anything like that. This was long really before home ROMs or anything. So was demo man, demo man was of course Ted's one of Ted's projects. Exactly, and I think that's why I ended up with a demo man in my office because Ted had put me in an office across the hall from him and he was right there if I needed any questions and so on. And was that, I mean, how exactly does that work? I understand that there was like, you got a computer and then you got some interface to a module that plugs into the ROM space on the CPU board? Yeah, well, we used to plug just some RAM into the ROM socket and there's a right pin on the ROM socket as well, which we used to write the data into the RAM. And then there was a hardware device that actually plugged into the CPU socket on the CPU board. And then into that we plugged into the computer through parallel port for sending data and through a serial port for sending commands. So instead of actually burning e-proms and plugging them in, you basically just do some sort of a, you know, a DOS send command or something. Yeah, we had a bunch of DOS tools and one of them just, you know, you compile the code, it creates the image and then this other tool basically just, you know, send it all down the parallel port into the RAM on the CPU board. Now what were we using for a compiler? Oh, I was a 6809 compiler. You know, I don't remember... Was it a commercial product? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so was it something that Larry wrote? No, no, we used, we used brief to edit the source code and we used this assembler. I mean, I can find out and I can email it to you. No, it's just, I'm just kind of curious about this, the, you know, about the whole procedure from a software point of view, you know, how this, you know, somebody once told me that you guys had like a base empty game. You know, like a software that had two flippers, two sling joints and three pop bumpers and that's what you started like basically every game. You were one of these in that, with software that you, that, I mean, the empty game, you had to set up a little bit before it would function. And the setup included, you know, how many, you know, tying, you know, footers to footer buttons so you could, you know, it was all, you know, the setting stuff up like this was, you know, there were, it was basically like a blank form that you filled in. You know, how many footers do you have, which footer buttons are they tied to, you know, how, you know, for every jet you specified, you know, a switch and a coil and then, you know, the OS takes care of firing the jets for you and the same with the fling shot. And we even had, we even had a fairly substantial, the borderline on object oriented, you know, or written in assembly, of course. What we call the multiball system that handled all the locks and the kickouts and the saucer and the troughs and the auto plunder and stuff like that. So the same thing, I mean, you could just, you know, for every kickout, you just specified, you know, the switch and the coil and what type of a device it was. And, and then you were good to go. I mean, in an afternoon, you could have a brand new whitewood flippin. You know, there were no rules, obviously, but I mean, you pressed start, it would punch, stover ball, you punch the ball, you know, three balls per game and whatever. And it would keep score and stuff too? Well, but you'd have to, you'd have to, you know, put scores on switches, you know, there were, there were no default switches. So you assign a switch to be a particular score value or what have you? Well, it wasn't so much like that. I mean, but you assign a function to get called every switch here and within that function, you can apply a score value. And which is basically the beginning of your rules? Exactly, exactly. Okay, now, what about the dot-mature animations? How did that work? I mean, obviously, when you started out with this, you know, empty game, you probably had very minimal animations. Right. All we had was the, the, the, the, the score flash, you know, when you, you know, before you've scored anything and it just blinks your score on the screen, the, the score sweep, you know, when you're actually playing in the, the score sweep's on and off, you know, so the current player off. Right. We had things like, you know, replay at, we had a very basic attract mode that just said, you know, the text title of the game, you know, replay at and, and the number of credits. And I think that's it. You know, I didn't like the say no to drugs screen and stuff like that was all built in. Right. There was a default bonus count that just put up a score value and, you know, you know, you know, count it down real quick and apply that to your score. And that was it. Huh. That's pretty cool. So then after you got acclimated with the demo man thing, then you, your first assignment was scared stiff, right? My first assignment was to detect. Oh, it was. Okay. And that was, that was sort of an accident because, you know, Ted was slated to work on that with Steve. And so I think that work. I think Ted was, was on vacation for a couple of days when they got the whitewood done. And so they ended up bringing it up into my office. And I got it flipping and I'd actually started implementing the rules when Ted got back. And so Ted said, well, do you just want to work on this project? And I, you know, obviously could not say yes quickly enough. And how long this was kind of a long project, right? Actually, no, it was, it was pretty, you know, compared to a full on pinball. It was, it was pretty short. Like I started probably just before Christmas in 95. So it would have been, you know, like sometime in December. And we were at the show at the trade show in, what was that? The trade show in Orlando in March, you know, with the finished game, you know, for sale. So that was literally a, you know, three, four month project. And did you, I mean, how, how are rules where they've done by committee, where they just something you made up or how did this work? It all depended upon the design team. I mean, Ticketecto, the rules were pretty much already designed, you know, by Steve. You know, he's like, and I think Larry probably had a hand in it too. And, you know, we tweaked it. Once we had the game set up, we tweaked it. Not so much the rules, but the presentation, you know, how the whole, you know, the holes on the play field match to the holes up the top. And how it's presented on screen and stuff like that. And, and, you know, so on. Maybe we should back up a step and talk about what Ticketecto is because I'm sure there's some people who have never even seen the game and are not familiar with it at all. So Ticketecto was a redemption game that Steve Codak and a few other people wanted to try. And the basic goal was to get kids, you know, little kids, you know, playing a pinball-like machine to try and get them used to using flippers and balls and, you know, just a mechanical machine. So that hopefully when they get a little bit older, they'll sort of graduate into real pinball. You know, because, you know, the market had already definitely, you know, started its downturn at that point. And we would, you know, we wanted to try and get new players interested. And so Ticketecto was, I mean, it was very simple. It was, it was a, it was the size of, of safe cracker. It was in a safe cracker cabinet, you know, the same safe cracker size play field. But with regular pinball-sized flippers, it had inlanes, but no outlanes. It had passive slingshots. So there were no kickers, but there were switches. So, you know, when the balls hit the slingshots, it would make sound. And then in the center of the play field, like where the mansion is on Adams family, there was a Ticketecto grid with, you know, the nine lights, numbered, you know, from one to nine. And then halfway up the play field was a very steep ramp that was the entire width of the play field with nine holes at the top of the ramp. And basically, each hole at the top of the ramp corresponded to one light in the Ticketecto grid. And for one coin, you had three shots at the hole. And so you put your coin in, the ball kicks out. There was no drain. So, you know, between the flippers was just a little kicker. So the ball landed, you know, the ball would go between the kickers and then just kick right back out of you. So you won't penalize for that. You know, you take a shot, the ball drops into a hole, the light comes on on the Ticketecto grid. You do that three times and then you put in more money and you continue. You had like 30 seconds, I think, to continue. Oh, so you could, it didn't end the game necessarily. You could, it was like a buy-in. Exactly, exactly. Right. Okay. And how successful was this game? The game was successful. I mean, it makes a lot of money on location. As far as redemption go, it's probably only above average in the redemption world. But I mean, it outerned Pimball, like maybe three or four times over. But the problem is the redemption world, especially back then, was very, very different from Pimball. You know, like Williams, the factory, everything was set up to make games as quickly as possible and sell them as fast as possible and be done and move on to the next product. And that just doesn't work in the redemption world where, you know, you really want to just trickle games out, like, you know, maybe two or three a day, which Williams just could not do. And so we ended up not producing the game. I think there were maybe only about 100 out there. Really? And you have a lot of people who would have been successful. But, you know, some friends of mine in Melbourne who I used to work with at the arcade there, I mean, they still got some on location that make, you know, $7,800 a week. Really? And they decided not to make this game. Exactly. Well, they couldn't do it profitably. I work on a make, you know, 2,000 machines and just sit them in a corner for a year and a half while it took to sell them. Right. Right. Right. So there's only about a hundred of them out there. And you have one. I have one. Now, okay. So when you finished up the TTT, you went next. That was scared stiff next, right? Exactly. Exactly. And scared stiff was, was, you know, I jumped on scared stiff, you know, probably well after the halfway point in their development cycle. I think they had just settled on the name. They had trouble finding a name. And I think it was a great ferris who came up with the name. And I mean, because most of the time it was just called El Vierer 2, which, you know, is pretty dull. Right. And I think we were just starting to get some real prototype parts in and maybe even a screen play field, something like that. When I started and on scared stiff, you know, my role mainly was to do effects. You know, lamp effects, the fly effects. You know, I was sort of a second programmer. I did a few rule that, but mostly, mostly I was doing all the effects. Who was the key programmer? That was Mike Boon. Okay. And scared stiff was actually interesting because, you know, here I am, I get to Williams. And, you know, with, you know, months later, I'm working with Steve Coddek, which sort of blew my mind. And then, you know, six months later, I'm working with Dennis Nordman and Mike Boon, who were responsible for white water, which was one of my all-time absolute favorite games ever. And I was just like, I'm like the only one, you know, and, and, you know, it was just crazy. It was so crazy. I could not believe it. Now halfway through scared stiff, there wasn't there some design team issues or something. Something happened, right? There were layoffs that Williams. Pardon me? There were layoffs. Right. Yeah, that wasn't a fun day at all. It was a Thursday. It was supposed to be a Friday, but Williams, you know, in their infinite, you know, incompetence leaked the press release a day early. And so I get to work that morning. And there have been rumors brewing for weeks and weeks leading up to it, you know, which was terrifying to me because I just got there and I just want to lose my job and have to go back to Melbourne. You know, and so I get to work that morning and every, you know, Mike was what we called the early shift. He would, he would get to work around seven and stay probably until like, you know, six or seven at night. And I would usually get to work at around nine or ten and again, stay until nine or ten at night. So he was always there when I would, when I would arrive in the morning. So I come in and I walk into his office just to catch up and, you know, tell him about stuff I'd worked on the night before and find out what he was working on, you know, that morning and what we're going to do that day and blah, blah, blah. I walk in and he looks at me and he leans back in his chair and I'm like, what? He goes, guess what I heard on the radio this morning. I said, what? He said, I heard that Williams is going to be laying off 50% of their people department. And like my heart just sank and it was right about then. Yeah, I mean, it was, it was on cue. It was, it was on cue like we're in a sitcom, you know, right then his computer stops working his phone goes dead and like all hell breaks with He was running around the hall. Someone had found a, actually printed off the press release from the net, you know, and that was being passed around. I don't know what was happening, no one knew what was going on, you know, Ted and Larry were behind closed doors all morning. You know, and finally we were in Brian Eddy's office, which was next door to my office, which was right in the Ted's office. And we're all just sort of chatting and Mike just confronts Ted and like, you know, do you know anything about this and Ted's like, yeah, yeah, I'm going to have to talk to everyone about it, starting with you and he points directly up Mike, who sort of like took a step back and they disappeared into Ted's office for a couple of minutes and whatever. Now that day the, the scared stiff team had planned to go downtown to do a recording session with Elvira and we couldn't, we couldn't cancel that, you know, the show must go on type of thing. So Mike comes out of Ted's office. He knows he's going across the street to midway to work on his work, on Mortal Kombat with his brother and become immensely rich. So he's happy. And, you know, none of us, you know, me, Dennis, Mark Weyna, Greg Freres, none of us know our futures at all. Well, we get in this car, well, we get in the car and head down to Navy Peer to the recording studio to do this thing with Elvira. Well, so we're sitting in this recording studio, pacing up and down, you know, talking to the engineers about what was happening and everything. And, and, and then, you know, something had happened on Elvira's end and she couldn't show up. So we basically wasted like an hour and a half down there. So we get back to work and as we're walking in, we see people who used to be our colleagues walking the other way with boxes of all their stuff, you know, which was, which was just sort of, you know, really depressing. And we come back up into engineering and it's sort of very quiet and subdued and people thought, you know, some people have already gone home and stuff like that. And, and so nervously, I make my way into Ted's office and that's where he tells me that, you know, I'm going to be working with John Papadouk on his next game of blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah. Louis will be working with Pat and so on and so on. So, huh. So, I mean, you kept your job through this. Yeah. Yeah. And I think probably me keeping my job had more to do with the fact that I was extremely cheap rather than my talent. I mean, I was talented. I'm not going to deny that. But I think at that point, they were looking more at money than they were talent. So did Mike, the guy that was working on Scared Stiff, he was gone. He was off the project. Well, no, they didn't kick him off the project. He wanted to stay and finish stiff and they let him, you know, so that, you know, so he stayed and finished stiff and once stiff was in production, he moved across the street. Okay. Did you say something about his brother? Yeah. Mike Boon's brother is Ed Boone, the creator of Mortal Kombat. Oh, and those guys worked together on that project? Well, they didn't work together on the original Mortal Kombat. But once Mike moved across the street, then they've been working on Mortal Kombat ever since. And interesting, Ed Boone, the creator of Mortal Kombat, is the voice of Rudy on Fun House. Really? Yeah. Now, did he become very wealthy from working on Mortal Kombat? No, I don't know. It's just the running joke. It's just the running joke. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So now, you come in, things are a little depressed. Was the Williams pinwall division really slash 50 percent? I don't think it was as much as 50 percent, but it was pretty significant. And was it mostly designers or mostly software guys or a little of each? Actually, the software guys fed pretty well. It seemed to be more of the designers. Again, I think that goes back to the money thing, because I think the designers will pay a fair amount more than the programmers. Gotcha. Okay. So now, you're over on Papadouk's team, wait from the dead start with Circus Voltaire, right? Oh, yeah. And this was, you know, if I was amazed earlier to be working with Steve Kaurak and then with Dennis Nordman, you know, I was reached a whole new level of astonishment to sit down with John Papadouk and a pinball design team and have him, like, unroll a blank sheet of paper on the table and look at everyone and go, so what game do you want to make? That's really how it started. Yeah, that's really how it started. I mean, he didn't even have a name or a concept or anything? Oh, he had so much to do, but he was very much, you know, listen to everyone on the team and then make his decision based on all the information you can get. You know, he was the complete total opposite of a dictator. Huh. Okay. So when he laid this sheet of paper, how did you guys all take out your sharpies and start writing on it? Pretty much. It was like, you know, a whiteboard on the table. We all made notes. We all wrote. I don't remember where the Circus team came from. I think it was probably his suggestion. Oh, I can't imagine it would be anybody else's. Who would write? Who would design some of the other suggestions I think we were talking about maybe doing like a space pirate game, but the space pirates were all these hot like voluptuous, vixen, women, you know, and all sort of, you know, very tongue in cheek, you know, stuff like that. And that actually came up again when we were thinking about doing Star Wars, too. Did that have any influence from Big Bang Bar at the time? No. Because that Big Bang Bar. I'm trying to think if Big Bang Bar was out of the time, but yes it was because I remember Big Bang Bar was on test with scared stiff. So I don't, you know, I didn't have anything to do with Big Bang Bar. Okay. I mean, to design a pinball game with the theme of a 17th century French philosopher. Only John could do that. Yeah, I mean, just when he presented that to you guys, did you all kind of look at each other and go, wow, what? You know, was it like one of those? A little bit, but what won me over was when he turned to me and he said, you know, what do you think about putting, you know, a neon tube in the game? And, you know, this goes back to when I was a kid. I used to love neon and like illuminate up finds. And I used to pretend I had my own company called like Cameron Neon. You know, when I grew up, I was going to make neon finds for people. And so the chance to work with neon now was incredible. So that won me over. And, you know, to be honest, I didn't think it would be a bad theme. I thought we could have had a lot of fun with it, you know. So I certainly wasn't opposed to it. I didn't think anyone else was. Well, what was... When we started talking about, you know, artistic concepts, you know, we'd love to sort of swells and curves and stuff like that. I was pretty excited. Was everybody else's reaction? I mean, did nobody else just kind of say, you know, maybe John, you know, maybe the idea with the half-naked girls is really a better one. No, I think we were all pretty fond to do the circus thing. And how was the reaction to everybody else at WMS at the time? As far as, you know, I wasn't aware of any negative reaction. I mean, I'm sure I think there were some people a little bit nervous, you know, more so in the direction of the art, rather than the theme itself. Now, why would you mean in the direction of the art? Just the color scheme, you know, green and purple and stuff like that. Yeah, because green has had a tradition in the pinball industry as being equated to a commercial failure. For some reason, green has never done well on a pinball machine in a commercial perspective. I don't know why that is, or maybe it's just bad luck. The only game I know that's green is Fischtael. Oh, World Cup fuck of green, too. Well, I wouldn't call either of those games really green. The only game that I can think of that's green green is like 4 million BC from Bali in the 70s. Everything else is like, I mean, World Cup had some green on it, but not a lot. Certainly, didn't have a green knee on two minutes. We'll be right back with Cameron Silver of Williams-Balley Software Engineering. This portion of Topcast is brought to you by Pin Game Journal. Covering the World of Pinball is them online at www.pingamejournal.com. Okay, we're back with Cameron Silver from Williams-Balley Software. How much of the rules did you have control over in CP? I had control of most of the rules, and in fact, Jonathan and I, you know, did most of the play field layout together as well. Now, he did all of the technical drawings and the CAD stuff. So we would sit down together and talk about, you know, what we wanted to do on the play field. Like I remember suggesting that I wanted, you know, locked balls to stay above the play field so you could see them. And I really wanted to do the, especially once we had the circus theme. I wanted to do the jugglers with the initially we had four sources for the jugglers. And then that went down to three, and now, you know, then finally we had to ask the third one for production. Wow. And stuff like that. You know, a lot of the play field layout, you know, we did hand in hand. Now, who was the lady's voice in Circus Voltaire? Who is that? She was some talent that we hired. She may have been the same voice in theatre magic. I think so, yeah. Again, I can double check with John and shoot you an email. I mean, was she, it seemed odd to me like I'll play theatre magic and I'll play Circus Voltaire. And it's the same female voice. And I've never heard that before in a pinball machine. So, you know, we often use the same male talent in several games too. Really? You know, the male voice in Scared Stiff is the same as the announcer in Attack from Mars, I think. And several other games. I think MBX Fast Break and World Cup, I think it's all the same guy. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. So, now, you're, you get to the point where the play field is screened in the design process. And the cabinet is screened. Oh, you know, I forgot to ask you. This backs up a little bit. Sorry to break the train of thought. The R-R-R on the side of the Scared Stiff cabinet. Tell us about that. Sorry to change gears. Yeah, that's all right. Well, you know, I have to check my own game because I don't remember the actual wording here. It stands for real, wonky and ribbed for your pleasure. Right. Rated R-R-R. Now, I mentioned the community radio stations in Melbourne. One of them that I still listen to, they stream online now, is called Triple R. And their call fund is R-R-R and it's 102.7. And so, I had a Triple R sticker up on my desk at work. And there was one day that, you know, I was still working on Stiff, obviously. And Greg comes into my office and we're just chatting and suddenly he stops. And he's looking at the sticker. And I look at him and I look at the sticker and I think, you know, Greg, what's going on? And he's like, where did you get that? And I explain it in the radio station blah, blah, blah, blah. He goes, you know, has that been up all along? I said, yeah, he goes, all right, come with me. And so I get up and I follow him down to his desk in the art department. And he points to his, you know, pencil sketch of the cabinet, the Scared Stiff. And there's the Triple R logo on it. He goes, I just drew that. And I said, that's the same as the logo. He goes, I hadn't seen the logo. There was just a complete coincidence that they look so similar. Huh. But eventually you ended up putting the scratch mark through it, you know, the claw mark through the RRY. I think the thought was that it was a little bit too unfamely friendly. Oh, really? That was the only reason? Yeah. Okay. And so it was easy to cover it with the claw mark then to release it from the artwork. We wanted to keep a little reference to it because I think it's kind of cool. Right. I thought it was cool too. Well, sorry, that was a gear changer. Sorry about that. Back to the Circus Waltair thing. So you've got a screen play field. And when people saw this, were they still rural enthusiastic about the game? Everybody stole, okay? Yes. And in fact, people were when we put the game at the bottom of the stairs, we had engineering at Williams with upstairs. And so we had some space at the bottom of the stairs that we put all new games, you know, for a couple of weeks before we go out on tests. It's sort of like an internal test. You find a whole, you know, a bog load of bugs, you know, because people play the game very differently than you do when you're just testing stuff. You know, tweaking rules and getting feedback and stuff like that. So when we went to the bottom of the stairs, people really, really liked the game. I mean, you know, there are obviously things that they wanted to change and blah, blah, blah. But marketing was so worried that Circus Waltair was going to take sales away from Evolving's medieval madness that they didn't want to put the game on test in Chicago. Because they didn't want operators to see it. They didn't want the neck communities to see it or anything like that. So they put the game on test in Evol places and walk a shower with Gunsons. And this was, you know, this was in, it was probably like June, like right at the start of summer, which is a terrible time to go on test, especially at a bar in a small town in bloody Wisconsin, right? So we go on testing Wisconsin and then in the first two weeks, the game just does nothing, absolutely nothing. Because you know, the bar's dead, everyone's on vacation. And I think the die was cast at that point. Marketing did a complete 180 and they decided the game wasn't good at that point. And then, you know, that was sort of the end of it. I mean, you know, I didn't learn very well on location anyway. But just, you know, the fact that Dave will worry that it was going to take sales away from medieval madness makes me laugh. And it shows what sort of marketing department we had to deal with over there. But I mean, you did, they made the game. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, the game didn't get made. It got made. Right. But, you know, pop I got made. So Dave never can for projects. Oh, they never cast one. I mean, once you've built prototypes and you're on test, I mean, you've spent 99% of your development budget anyway. Your might as well make the game. And was John Papadiuk pretty disappointed? We were all disappointed. You know, we were all disappointed. And, you know, I'm sure you've heard of the ball hangout kit for circus. Right. When we, the Pimbo Expo, which was right at the start of production, we already had these kits in hand and we installed them on all the machines there at Pimbo Expo. And what he, part sales didn't start sending them out until almost the end of the year for people. So, at least poor customers had these games on location that balls were getting stuck. And, granted, we probably should have found them and fixed them earlier. Still, you know, we had a fix for it and the stupid company sell on them rather than sending it out. Or, you know, and that all goes back to the bad earnings the first week or two on test. You mean that it just like gave people the wrong attitude about the game? Yeah. Yeah. Now, if it was on test in Chicago, do you think things would have been different? You know, I still don't think the game would have, you know, been a star, but I think it would have earned better than it did. Well, is there anything that you guys could have done to change, you know, the artwork or something to make it more appealing? Or do you think that was the issue? I don't know exactly what the issue is. I think, you know, part of the issue certainly is the rules. I mean, I think the rules are really good if you're a total bonehead and can't play Pimbo at all. You know, you hit the ring master, he comes up, he, you know, talks you a little bit and then your game's done. The rules are really good if you're a good player. You know, you can stack the multiples and you can set things up and the machine has orgasms all over the place. You know, but if you're a normal person like an average player, I think the game is kind of dull. And I think that hurts us. I think the bright colors and the outrageous artwork hurts us a little bit too. So, I mean, there are a few things. Now, the game came out in 97, like you said, right? In the fall in 97. Yes. You wrote the home version of the software years later, right? I actually was working, all right, after Pimbo shut down in 99, I studented and had my green card. I just had, I was still on my H1B visa, but Williams was working on getting a green card for me. So, I was stuck. I had to stay at Williams, which was close then with W and F, you know, the slot machine. Right. So, to stop from going mad working on slot machine software for a year and a half, I tinkered with circuit. And it's funny because in your email, you said that I was a cult hero for the circuit's home ROM. Absolutely. And it's funny because I really did the ROM for myself. I did the changes I wanted to make for me and stuff like that. And at the time, I had no real intention of releasing it. But I remember I'd sent a copy to a few close friends of mine who had circuit. And they all loved it. And I said, you know, you should release it. But the people who owned circuit, who loved it. And I was nervous about it because, you know, I didn't know how stable it was. I mean, I don't, you know, three people had only been playing it and stuff like that. So, I was nervous about releasing it. But then, a friend of mine, I think, was Cory finally talked me into it. And so, I contacted Craig Cattle. He's got the circuit's web page with the owners list and stuff like that. And I started talking to him about it. And through him, I got the names and the addresses of a few other people with circuit says, and I sent them all copies. And the guy in seemed to behave fairly well. I mean, the most obvious bug is that it doesn't know the day of the week correctly. And I thought, you go, well, we can live with that. Yeah, that's pretty minor. No one's taking hard orders. I don't think anyone's going to look at timestamps or anything like that. It's a bit of a bummer for the circuit member high score table, but it doesn't show the correct day of the week. But, you know, we can probably live with that. So, then Craig again, you know, sort of pushed me just a little bit harder to release it. Did you have to get approval from Papaduke to do this? No, not officially, no. But I remember talking to him about it. He's one of the few who had a copy of it early on. And he had no issues with you doing this. No, not at all. I mean, he loves the game just as much as I do. And I mean, when you, yeah, when you, I can't just remember when that post came out that it was available. And then everybody kind of getting it and burning it and just like the comments were like, wow, this is like a totally different game now. Yeah. Well, it's funny because, you know, all those people went, you know, in one instance, from old software to new software. And I never experienced that because when I was working on it, I mean, I'm working on it for maybe an hour or two every couple of weeks. And just do a little feature here and there. And most of the stuff I was doing sort of on the side at work. So, I didn't even have a game there to test stuff. So, I would make some changes and I would burn it around and come home and try it out. So, for me, the progression from old version to new version was really slow. So, I never got to see this transition. So, I was surprised at how people were reacting. Yeah, the reaction was unbelievable. People loved it. You know, and now if you had your choice, I mean, what if you implemented all these things in the code when the game was, you know, prior to test or whatever? Well, several of the things were originally in the code. Like the Copycat video mode was in there. The Skillshare with Pick Your Award was in there. What else? So, those were already in there. I just went back and turned them on and added some sounds and a little bit of polish and stuff like that. You know, the reason we took Simon to Simon's house was because we were worried about potential problems. I think it has, Bro, who has the actual Simon game, right? Right. We didn't want problems for them, and since it's not circums themed at all, we're sort of figured out it's probably just easy to take it out. This kill shot was an attempt to make the game a little bit less confusing for people. Because we found most people were just punched the ball when they were at the start of the game. And they were just getting random stuff, and it's just, you know, when random stuff starts happening, it makes the game hard, more difficult to learn when you're just a novel player. Right. Right. Now, what about the animations? Did you have to add any animations? I don't think I did. I think animations and sounds, everything was already in there. You know, I remember when in development, when we were pruning the sounds, because we always have a struggle because the 8-meg romchips on the soundboard are pretty expensive. So you always want to try and get down to as few as possible. And so we had to, I think we, most of development were in 4 8-meg romchips, and we wanted to get down to 3. So we're going for and we're cutting out sound. But I made sure to leave a few speech calls and a few sound effects in there, you know, because I wasn't sure if all it was going to need them, you know, before the end of development. You know, the sound romchips are actually masked, which means you have to lock them down a month or two before production starts. Right, and then have them sent out because a masked rom is cheaper than an e-prong. Exactly. Exactly. Right. And so, you know, when I got down to doing the home rom, I found a few extra speech calls and stuff like that. So I used them, but they're already in the rom. And I don't recall any additional animation. I think really the only artwork that changed on the screen was sometimes during the match instead of the pie hitting the little clowns, but I will see a cow. But it's the same cow that I used in the video mode anyway, so that was already in there. As far as animations go, did you do your own animations or was there an animation artist? No, no, I can't even draw stick figures. The dot matrix animations were done, at least while I was there, by two guys, Brian and Adam, both extremely, extremely talented. And actually it's funny, because there was flanks on circus where I think it was for the Ringmaster multiball. I wanted like a, just a subtle animating border around the display. So I quickly drew on and put it in the game. And then Adam was playing the machine and he just stops and steps back and he looks at the screen and goes, who the hell did that? I'm like, that was me. He goes, that's terrible. He walks out of my office and he comes back to five minutes later and hands me a sheet of paper. Use this one instead. That's great. So the, the guy, so the, were the animations? I mean, was it difficult to draw animations and I know on that kind of a display? Yes. It was. At least to me, it looked very difficult. That's probably more a question for the animators, for like Adam, or Brian, Brian doesn't live in the US anymore. But you know, it was, it was difficult and paint and you know, paint's taking to draw on because like, you know, if you wanted to use a clip from a mute movie or something like that, you couldn't just digitize it and stick it on the screen because it just looked like crap. So everything had to be retouched and often just drawn from scratch, you know, you know, down to the pixel level. I mean, you know, these guys literally were pixel by pixel drawing things. So and then, you know, we have space issues in the, in the game room too. So they're constantly, you know, so the programmers and the artists are constantly, you know, add odds about, you know, it's got to be smaller but it's got to look amazing, you know, which is obviously an impossible task. So there were, there were often, you know, too much dizzling on this, dizzling doesn't contrast well. You know, this thing is, you know, this animation is too big. We've got to cut out some frames here. And then in some cases, you know, big full screen animations are actually made up by, from lots of little parts. Like I remember, like the multiple start on circus. If anyone remembers the animation, it starts off, you know, the cat will flip the switch and then you'll see the spark, you know, going up the pole of the high wire. And as the spark goes up the pole, the background is sort of scrolling down on the screen. Now originally, that was just a basic animation, you know, one full screen frame after another. But it was huge. It took up so much space. So we ended up cutting it up into, I think the cat throwing the switches is a regular animation. And then there are just three frames of the background that I just scroll, you know, one frame onto another. And then the spark is just a little sprite that I just plot in the right spot as it goes. So we cut down this animation from like 100 frames to four. You know, and so there's a lot of stuff like that. How hard was it for you to learn the 6809 stuff? Well, the assembly I did in college was 68000. So 6809 was, was, was an extension. Yeah. Yeah. And it is a great chip to program. I mean, it is so friendly to let you do whatever you want. There are, you know, the registers are laid out. Well, you know, the assembly language is great. I mean, if anyone, you know, anyone who's done assembly and heights it because they've only ever done Intel assembly, you know, doesn't know what they're missing. You know, the motorola chips. I mean, it was just wonderful to work on. And I miss it. I still miss it. Now, did you ever have issues? I mean, because you have unlike say like, data east where they have a separate processor that you make calls to to actually draw the animations. You guys use one 6809 to do everything except for the south and tax 6809 to do everything. Yeah. Pardon me? It was a very sort of tired and taxed 6809 and had trouble a lot of time keeping up with everything we were throwing at it. It did. So you did have to put where for speed. Oh, definitely, definitely. And you can see it. I mean, you can see it when you play the games. I mean, just look at, look at, you know, regular blinking lights. I mean, they'll slow down sometimes when, you know, there's a big display effect happening or, you know, they're in the background. I mean, you'll see the lamp flow down all the time. We call that bog. You know, and it's funny. I'm in Hades, he would spend days and days and days just trying. You know, fix one little little instance of bog, which of course we all should have been that diligent, but, you know, this is kind of all be Lyman, unfortunately. Yeah, Lyman's kind of he's a real good programmer, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of figured. Yeah. And so there was definitely speed. I mean, was there ever, it never got as bad as when I saw like Johnny Nemanik. The lane change in that game was really slow. Was that because of a speed issue? You know, I sort of missed Johnny Nemanik because it had just come out in Melbourne when I left. And by the time I got here and I got settled and I got settled at work, it was already old news. So I've never really played Johnny, but I've heard a lot about it. So I would say that's possibly caused by bog, but I don't know for sure. So, you know, don't plug me on that. Okay. So then after Circus Voltaire, your next project was the course to Star Wars Episode One. Yeah. But there was a fair amount of time between Circus Voltaire and Star Wars Episode One, right? Right. We, you know, John and I were the whole team really. We, you know, after after circus. Cause, you know, like circus, we played with the display above the play field rather than in the backbox. And so, you know, after circus, John, John wanted to try and experiment with, you know, different cabinet designs, you know, try and use a monitor, you know, like maybe in the backbox and stuff like that. And so we, we were doing experimenting, you know, with, with stuff like that. And now let me see. So the circus finished. It was late 97. And I think we, we tried our own stuff until I'm trying to remember when Pat and George unveiled this. So you mean you were basically working on the replacement for WPC, our, John. Right. It's while Pat and Gomez were working on their version of pinball 2000. Right. Exactly. And I think, I think it was, it was, they came out with their version. It was probably early 98. I want to say. And so we had been working on ours for probably three or four months. And I think it was interesting that you guys did compare, you know, I mean, obviously, you know, the law or Gomez version one out. But I mean, was there anything that you guys did that was not worthy that did, you know, that you felt should have been implemented or whatever. I think that the law or Gomez concept is way greater than anything we were thinking of. But I, I, I loved John's cabinet designs. I mean, he, you know, he's just industrial designs for the actual box to put all the stuff in. And when I look at what pin 2000 turned out to be just from a, you know, when you stand back and you look at the actual cabinet, I mean, it looks like an old man who's had a heart attack and slumped over his chest board in the park. I mean, it's just this little hunched over dark thing in the corner. And when I compare it to these big bright things that John had been working on, it just seems a shame that, that, you know, pin 2000 is amazing technology. And this amazing concept, you know, stuffed into a cabinet that looked worse than something that was designed in the 1920s, you know. Right. Right. So there was no way to get these guys together and get John to design the cabinet for pin 2000. And, you know, you know, the problem is that the pin 2000 was expensive.