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Steve Ritchie Part III: The Return… to Stern

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·3h 1m·analyzed·Sep 4, 2021
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Silver Ball Chronicles examines Steve Ritchie's Terminator 3 and return to Stern Pinball design in 2003.

Summary

Silver Ball Chronicles Part III covers Steve Ritchie's return to pinball game design after an 11-year absence, specifically focusing on his first game back at Stern Pinball: Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines (2003). The hosts discuss Ritchie's career trajectory, the technical innovations and challenges of T3, and contextualize it within the broader pinball industry landscape. The episode also briefly mentions Ritchie's recent move to Jersey Jack Pinball and touches on the Deep Root Pinball implosion affecting multiple stakeholders.

Key Claims

  • Steve Ritchie left Stern Pinball after 11 years (16 years total with the company) to join Jersey Jack Pinball

    high confidence · David Dennis and Ron Hallett discussing recent news: 'He left his home of the last 11 years, actually 16 total, I believe he said, Stern Pinball, and went to Jersey Jack Pinball.'

  • Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines was released in June 2003 and designed by Steve Ritchie

    high confidence · Hosts read the game credits: 'This is June of 2003, Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines... designed by Steve Ritchie, art by Kevin O'Connor'

  • Terminator 3 was the first game Steve Ritchie designed after returning to pinball from a period away at Atari and in redemption games

    high confidence · David Dennis narrative: 'So when you're away from something a long time, especially something like pinball, that obviously Steve Ritchie is passionate about, he had been designing games, literally from what, like 77?... And that's what Steve Ritchie does.'

  • Stern Pinball is privately owned by Gary Stern's consortium and does not divulge sales numbers, unlike Sega and Data East which were public companies

    high confidence · David Dennis explaining: 'Stern Pinball is a privately owned company, and they do not divulge the sales numbers... Now it's owned by the Gary Stern, you know, consortium or whoever that is.'

  • Terminator 2 pinball sold 15,000 units; Terminator 3 sales figures are unknown but presumed significantly lower

    medium confidence · David Dennis: 'Terminator 2 sold 15,000 units. Did T3 sell 15,000? No... Yeah, it probably sold more than that. Yeah. So there you go, right? We're not talking, you know, shooting lights out here.'

  • Terminator 3 (the movie) received a 69% on Rotten Tomatoes and made $433 million at the box office

    high confidence · David Dennis discussing the film: 'No. He gets his 69 on Rotten Tomatoes, which is still not really bad. And it did make $433 million.'

  • Deep Root Pinball owner Robert Mueller is facing jail time, and the implosion affects multiple stakeholders including John Norris and Barry Osler

Notable Quotes

  • “Steve Ritchie likes being Steve Ritchie. He likes, yes, that's the best, yeah.”

    Ron Hallett @ ~12:00 — Characterization of Ritchie's personality and recognition-seeking behavior in the pinball community

  • “I asked for T3. It was probably a mistake. I'm not going to say I hate it. I like it, actually. I really like the game in the back box. But the movie, eh.”

    Steve Ritchie (quoted by hosts) @ ~18:30 — Ritchie's candid assessment of Terminator 3 as a game versus the film; illustrates his design philosophy

  • “I don't think we have a written contract right now. He says he's going to pay me, he pays me. If I say I'm going to do a game, I do a game.”

    Steve Ritchie (quoted from TopCast) @ ~27:00 — Demonstrates informal business relationship between Ritchie and Gary Stern; hosts note this lack of contract would later become problematic

  • “There is so much going on here. It has a couple up-kickers. It actually has at least two. And then there's, like, the bad guy in the thing has a gun that shoots at you.”

    Ron Hallett @ ~50:00 — Technical praise for the mechanical complexity and innovation in Terminator 3's design

  • “Most people say that this is 100 times better than T2. Would you agree with that? I've heard both ways. A lot of people prefer T2 over this also.”

    David Dennis / Ron Hallett @ ~52:00 — Community reception is mixed; shows T3 is debated despite being mechanically deeper than T2

Entities

Steve RitchiepersonStern PinballcompanyJersey Jack PinballcompanyDeep Root PinballcompanyRobert MuellerpersonDavid DennispersonRon Hallettperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Lack of written contract between Steve Ritchie and Gary Stern in 2003 would later become problematic around 2008 financial crisis

    high · David Dennis quoting TopCast: 'I don't think we have a written contract right now... If I say I'm going to do a game, I do a game. That's an interesting quote, actually... I think the whole doesn't have a written contract would come to be an issue later on.'

  • ?

    business_signal: Deep Root Pinball collapse; owner Robert Mueller facing jail time affecting multiple stakeholders

    high · David Dennis: 'The owner, Robert Mueller, he's going to jail... I have to say that John Norris gets the shit end of the stick... And Barry Osler.'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Steve Ritchie reassembled his 'band' from Terminator 2 for T3, pulling together Chris Granner (music), Dwight Sullivan (software), and other key contributors

    high · Ron Hallett: 'I see Terminator 2. Basically, all these people are like Chris Granner, Dwight Sullivan... Steve Ritchie. He's basically pulled the band back together.'

  • $

    market_signal: Steve Ritchie's triumphant return narrative: 'He's back' marketing campaign ties Ritchie's return to pinball with Terminator's resurrection theme

    medium · David Dennis: 'One thing that I thought was particularly cool about Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines was that the marketing campaign was, he's back.'

  • $

    market_signal: Stern Pinball privately held with opaque sales numbers; cannot determine T3 commercial success objectively, but presumed significantly lower than T2's 15,000 units

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.547

0:00
From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy gold to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad-free top podcasts, included with Prime. Because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today. The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silver Ball Chronicles.
0:48
and my radio host, CBC Radio 3, listening to all the smooth classical music and the sadness that comes along with it.
1:18
Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Silver Ball Chronicles. With me this month is my co-host Ron, Mr. Whopper Hallett. Yo, what's up fella? Not much. You've been out harvesting the Whoppers, haven't you? I played in one tournament. You are out there, and a whopper, for those who may not know, is the measurement of how good you are when it comes to the IFPA. Is that right? The more whoppers you have, the better person you are? Yes, the IFPA. What's the IFPA? International Flipper Pinball Association. Sounds good enough. I believe that's what it is. Very good. That's right. I'm playing in my first tournament, or I will be playing on my first tournament here next weekend, which I'm probably not going to get this edited in time to actually be next weekend. So it's probably last weekend by the time you're listening to this because I'm a bit lazy as of recently. But I'm excited to do that now. We have the whole world ending here still, but hopefully that will keep itself running fairly smooth and we can continue to see each other because, quite frankly, this summer has been fantastic seeing people that I haven't seen in 18 months. It's interesting to see who snapped over that time period, isn't it? It's a little bit weirder, a little crazier now, isn't it? Who snapped? Yeah, they're just a little bit, they're just a little on edge, a little more crazy than they were before.
2:58

high confidence · David Dennis: 'The owner, Robert Mueller, he's going to jail... I have to say that John Norris gets the shit end of the stick... And Barry Osler. God, Barry.'

  • Terminator 3 pinball features a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launcher toy in the back box, one of the few Stern games of that era to use a launcher rather than standard shooter rod

    high confidence · Hosts discussing mechanics: 'it has a launcher, like the original T2, it has a gun launcher. Stern didn't really do that. It's one of the few...'

    • Gary Stern
    person
    Terminator 3 Rise of the Machinesgame
    Terminator 2game
    Kevin O'Connorperson
    John Norrisperson
    Barry Oslerperson
    George Gomezperson
    Ray Tanzerperson

    high · David Dennis: 'Stern Pinball is a privately owned company, and they do not divulge the sales numbers... T3 came between Simpsons Pinball Party and Lord of the Rings... not really shooting lights out here.'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Steve Ritchie, legendary Stern Pinball designer, departs after 11-16 years to join Jersey Jack Pinball

    high · David Dennis: 'He left his home of the last 11 years, actually 16 total, I believe he said, Stern Pinball, and went to Jersey Jack Pinball. Wow, that is a coup'

  • ?

    product_concern: Terminator 3 experienced multiple technical bulletins and assembly issues (launcher coil backwards, tie-wrap failure on RPG post, rubber obstruction on early models)

    high · Ron Hallett: 'Earlier T3s, they put the coil in backwards... They had issues in the back box... People just forgot to remove... it hits another post on the way up that has a rubber on it'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Terminator 3 features rare gun launcher mechanism for Stern era, harking back to Williams-era design philosophy rather than standardized shooter rod approach

    high · Ron Hallett: 'it has a launcher, like the original T2, it has a gun launcher. Stern didn't really do that. It's one of the few... back in the day they used a lot of crazy launchers, but by now with Stern Pinball it was standardized.'

    • I'm looking at your notes. It says deep root implosion. So in our show notes, just to peek behind the curtain here, folks, I write down a bunch of stuff to make sure I don't forget to talk about it because I have a very short attention span. And spell it wrong. It's been an eventful few weeks here with, honestly, a little bit of closure, let's say, around the whole Deep Root thing. I mentioned it to my wife this morning when the news broke. And she said, ooh, that's going to make a really good episode, isn't it? And I'm like, it will, it will, but I want to wait until there's some next level of closure. But boy, oh boy, Ron, you're not getting that retro atomic zombie adventure land. No, you are not. Or the food truck you ordered. No. The owner, Robert Mueller, he's going to jail. Once again, once again, I have to say that John Norris gets the shit end of the stick. The patron saint of pinball. What a bummer. And Barry Osler. God, Barry. We love you, Barry. We love everybody down there, except for one particular individual who has a difficult time with telling the truth. So, Ron, social media. You can, of course, check us out, listeners, at silverballchronicles.com. You can also check us out on facebook.com slash silverballchronicles. That's where you want to chit-chat with us. You want to make a post or talk about the latest episode. We'd love to hear from you. as well as I would like to let everybody know that we have sorted out a few issues with our RSS feed. So if you wanted to listen directly to Silver Ball Chronicles in your podcatcher, Spotify, iTunes, and the like, we've cleaned that up a little bit. It should be a lot easier to get that direct RSS, and it should be a lot easier to search for us directly in your podcatcher under Silver Ball Chronicles. You're welcome. Thank Ron Sr. Because I was setting up the direct RSS feed for Ron Sr. because even though we have many great shows on the Pinball Network, he was not interested in them other than a couple. Yeah, nobody wants to listen to any of those podcasts with Joel Engelberth on them. He is the worst. Okay.
    5:16
    So I added the RSS feed, and when I saw him like a week later, He tells me, what's up with your podcast? I'm getting old TopCast episodes. So I figured, you know, he must have did something wrong. So I did it again, and I listened to it. And, no, he was right. It was just playing old TopCast episodes. It was weird. So now, Ron, our references will be in the podcatcher, but the links directly to those references will not be there. Those will be on the original social media posts. or if you would prefer a direct link to any one of our past podcasts which we listen to for research, just shoot us an email and we will email that to you. They're mostly top cast and mostly of the new podcasts. So we'll mention it verbally, but if you would like a direct link and you can't find it on our social media post, by all means, just shoot us an email. Of course, that brings us to one of our sponsors here on Silver Ball Chronicles. that's thisweekinpinball.com where we get all of our pinball news and all of that stuff I'm sure they're going to have some interesting deep root coverage but you can also subscribe to their Patreon at patreon.com slash TWIP but please if you swing over to thisweekinpinball.com click on tools promoters DB and leave us a five star review on that promoters database so others can find us there's also a lot of really good pinball content there from pinball network and all of the other content providers, streamers, podcasters, well worth it. And if we could get you to read us some feedback, Ron, and you are probably the best at reading this feedback. Okay. We have, is this an email, the first one? This one is from the Twit Promoters Database. Oh, okay. The thing you just talked about went over my head there. I'm sorry. I need to wake up here. This is from Steve K. Which is Steve Problycordic. I don't think so. From the grave? Yes. He's a ghost at this point. The best GED historical pinball podcast around, period.
    7:27
    What does GED mean? Gosh, actually probably means something. But yes, the best gosh darn historical pinball podcast around, period. I cannot think of another podcast that I've enjoyed as much or as consistently as this one. Like many others, it's so interesting, informative, and fun that I've listened to each episode multiple times. Keep up the amazing work, you guys. Thank you very much, Steve K. And one thing that I find quite interesting is some people say that they have listened to them a couple of times, which blows my mind because the best part about doing the podcast in general is literally what we're doing now, where I'm sitting at my office in my headphones with this microphone and just chit-chatting. Honest to God, this is the most fun that I have. The editing is not so much fun as well as the research is not so much fun. Yeah, editing is not fun. But this is – I'm glad that if I'm putting in this effort and you're putting in this effort to correct all of my errors, that people are absorbing that content, which is pretty cool. Also, we are working on transcripts of episodes to be able to put them up on the website. But that is a lot of work because as much as artificial intelligence works on doing transcribing software, It's still not quite perfect. Yeah, it has troubles with Canadian accents, I hear. Yes, yeah, it doesn't know what it's talking about. Yep. So we've also got some feedback from Pinside. Yeah, Jay Stoltz on Pinside says, First time listening to a Silver Ball Chronicles and really, really enjoyed this one. Makes me want to pick up a copy of Tilt and check out those bonus features. Yeah, I love those bonus features. And George Gomez just gets more of my respect the more I learn about him. What a great dude. George Gomez has proven to be one of the largest sort of assets and contributors to pinball. Of course, Jay Stoltz is talking about our last episode, Pinball 2000, the Millennium Moment. And I had fun putting that one together because I learned a couple of stories there that I had no idea about. But if I had watched Tilt, I probably would have known. And he's been Tilt a lot. Even the extra features, there's one of the features is literally just George Gomez. So we also have a correction, not necessarily a correction maybe, but also maybe some additional information. That comes from Bman21 on Pinsight. And, of course, we were talking about projecting targets on the play field. So, you know, nowadays Stranger Things does that. We were talking about the implementation of using the Pinball 2000 computer monitor on the top reflecting on the glass. Well, he had kind of a nice thing to point out about a previous machine. He said, you mentioned projected targets. Would the precursor idea be Gottlieb's masquerade, where the values for the targets were on a wheel and were projected up onto the play field in the requisite places? Interesting. So I had no idea that that existed, but there's always somebody who comes out of the woodwork with some EM stuff. That's what I say. When every new feature you think is new comes out, I always think there's probably a wood rail somewhere that did it first. And B-Man also mentioned that he would like to see more Gottlieb content. Well, B-Man, I am working on two, count them, two hot and bothered Gottlieb topics. So those should be out relatively shortly. So that's what we're doing this episode? No, this episode, you know, we had to go with something big here because the big news happened, and we skipped over it in the news section because I wanted to bring it right into today's topic. Now, Steve Ritchie is always a great topic because he has a lot of content, interviews, documentation. He tends to sometimes maybe drive the narrative, which means a lot of the reporting that we may be doing and quotes we may be pulling are coming from Steve Ritchie. So he's kind of able to drive the narrative. He is one of the most interesting people in pinball, is he not? I would say that. He likes being known, I would say. Steve Ritchie likes being Steve Ritchie. He likes, yes, that's the best, yeah. Steve Ritchie likes being Steve Ritchie. Now, a big, big shift, not to get too deep into hyperbole here, happened this past month with Steve Ritchie, didn't it? Yes. He left his home of the last 11 years, actually 16 total, I believe he said, Stern Pinball, and went to Jersey Jack Pinball. Wow, that is a coup to dive into deeper into the hyperbole ocean here. You know, Steve Ritchie leaving Stern Pinball and moving over to Jersey Jack Pinball on face value sounds pretty amazing, which is sort of something that I think should get everybody excited about what could happen. Now, we're not talking about a Capcom Williams sort of takeover thing that happened in, you know, the 90s, which is an episode all of itself down the road. But it is a pretty significant sort of move, and it's a bit exciting. Hopefully, Steve will get a game out before 2026. That would be nice. However, we're not here to talk about that, at least not yet. Yeah, let's talk about where we left off with our last Steve Ritchie episode. So if you wanted to go back into our archives, search for Silverball Chronicles in your podcatcher, or jump onto silverballchronicles.com and scroll down, and you'll be able to see all of those past episodes. Pinball was dead when we last left Steve Ritchie. It was done. Williams was gone. Bally was gone. Gottlieb was done. Yes, Capcom and Premiere were both gone in 96. Yeah, they were well gone, but there was one manufacturer still standing at the end of the 1990s. That was Sega, who eventually ended up selling to one Gary Stern who formed Stern Pinball, Inc., which is different from Stern Electronics. Yes. And just to clarify, this is basically Data East, and then they went to Sega, and then they became Stern Pinball. But it's basically the same company, the same building, the same people, just so there's no confusion. Yeah, it's very much the same philosophy. And Gary Stern was a big part of creating Data East, a big part of continuing to run Sega when it moved over. And then he was the person who picked up Stern Pinball when Sega was on their way out of pinball. Now, that being said, we will, of course, do a Data East episode. And in fact, we have an amazing listener of the show. Aren't they all amazing? This one's totally more amazing. Ah, okay. And that, of course, is Michael W., and he pops up quite often on our social media feeds. He has been doing some research on his own on a couple of interesting designers, one of them being Ed Sebella, C-E-B-U-L-A. I'm almost positive we're saying that wrong.
    15:01
    Anyhoo, so that guy, which I'll learn how to say before we do the podcast. Also a lot of Data East information and stuff from Game Plan, and he said that he would forward over some of that research. And, of course, that was where getting into Shelley Sachs, Joe Kamenkow, John Borg, all of those individuals that, of course, were integral to the success of Data East. A big shout-out to Mike W., because he is going to send that information over. That will help us squeeze in a Data East episode down the line as well. which, of course, would dovetail very well with this episode. So once the pinball industry starts winding down, Steve had been at Atari. He was making a few games at Atari. California Speed. Yeah. Actually a really fun, cool racing game. Of course, Steve would do an awesome racing game. He formed Steve Ritchie Productions, and he did a few redemption games, because for some reason individuals in pinball, of course, have a sister product, which is kiddie gambling or redemption games. or gambling machines, which of course are actual gambling.
    16:12
    And in 2002, 2003, the whole pinball industry was more or less hanging on a thread. Stern Pinball was the only game in town, and of course they weren't doing the blockbuster numbers that even Sega was doing in the time before it. Steve Ritchie, of course, was 53 at this time, and he was a grizzled seven-finger veteran of the coin-op market. So, of course, he could add some value to somebody. What's a seven-finger veteran? Because he cut his finger off on the motorcycle. Yes, the tip of his finger. So is that a Canadian thing where the thumbs aren't fingers? Yeah, so a grizzled seven-and-a-half-finger vet in the coin-op market because he has half of the finger that he lost on the motorcycle. He was ready to make a return to pinball, so he entered in a contract relationship with Stern Pinball to distribute his games. Steve says it was a mutual idea. I call Gary one day and I go, look, I should do the Steve Ritchie voice. Absolutely. Everyone always says the Steve Ritchie voice is like this. If you've talked to Steve, he doesn't sound like that. He only does that in his games. But Steve says it was a mutual idea. I called Gary one day, and I go, look, I want to make a pinball machine. Are you interested? And he goes, I don't know, maybe. He calls me back a month or so later and says, yeah, come in and talk. So I went in and talked. Gary's great that way. I don't think we have a written contract right now. He says he's going to pay me, he pays me. If I say I'm going to do a game, I do a game. That's an interesting quote, actually, because this is from, that quote is from TopCast around the time of Spider-Man. And I think the whole doesn't have a written contract would come to be an issue later on. Yeah, that would be a problem around that time, because we're getting into sort of the 2008 type scenario, which will be a great Pinball is Dying episode in the future. So when you're away from something a long time, especially something like pinball, that obviously Steve Ritchie is passionate about, he had been designing games, literally from what, like 77? Yeah. Airborne Avengers. You know, you're going to want to play and be involved, but you're going to want to create. And that's what Steve Ritchie does. Well, Steve Ritchie knows licenses, especially since the 1990s. He has been an epic power force in licenses. He's had Star Trek. He's had Terminator. No fear of the clothing line. Star Wars, slightly bigger than No Fear. Yeah, so he's had a lot of involvement in licenses. So Steve Ritchie's first game back at Stern is Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines. Do-do-do-do-do. Jamming out. Nobody can see me, but I'm moving my shoulders. Well, let's allow Steve to set the table for us. Steve says, I asked for T3. It was probably a mistake. I'm not going to say I hate it. I like it, actually. I really like the game in the back box. But the movie, eh. When the machine comes out after that, I can picture him saying that, too. Exactly how he's – he'll say things like, you know, I hated it, but it wasn't that bad. He does that a lot. Yeah, which basically means I hate it, but it could be worse. It's, you know, it could be a lot worse. So let's start, let's do the rundown here of the sheet. This is June of 2003, Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines. This is a fictional licensed movie theme. It has a very cool mechanical back box, which we'll talk about in a minute, like a little game in there. This is designed by Steve Ritchie, art by Kevin O'Connor, the legend, dots by Kurt Anderson, Mark Galvez. We got a lot of mechanics. One of the names in here that particularly sort of sticks out is Ray Tanzer, who is a pickup from the Gottlieb premiere. He's come aboard not as a designer where he was there, but as an engineer or mech person. And he's still there? Still there. And he is a part of our future Gottlieb episodes. If you really want to be teased that much, B-Man 21 from Pinside. We've also got John Rothenell. I think you said it right, yes. Yeah, okay. And, of course, music by Chris Granner, software, Dwight Sullivan, Lonnie Robb. You know what I see here?
    20:52
    I see Terminator 2. Basically, all these people are like Chris Granner, Dwight Sullivan, not Kevin O'Connor, but Steve Ritchie. He's basically pulled the band back together. There is a good deal of Terminator 2 and Terminator 3. Well, we'll get to that in just a second. So, of course, Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines.
    21:14
    You know, Terminator 2, we talked about this in our last Steve Ritchie episode. One of the greatest action movies of all time, in my opinion. Certainly a top three action movie of all time. Of course, The Terminator was amazing. Terminator 2, just stunning. Terminator 3 has to be amazing too, right? I've never seen it. It was produced by James Cameron, wasn't it? No, he had nothing to do with it. Well, but it was directed by James Cameron, right? No. He directed the other two. No.
    21:45
    Did he? James Cameron wrote it because he thought of the Terminator during a fever dream one time. No. No, he didn't. So the Terminator movies have always been 90 plus percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
    22:01
    So this is, it's got to be, it's got to be that, right? No. No, he gets his 69 on Rotten Tomatoes, which is still not really bad. And it did make $433 million. Yeah, so, I mean, it was still a pretty big movie. Now, this is before they literally drove the Terminator franchise off of a bridge, and then while it was on fire on the bottom, just threw gas on it, and did reboot after reboot after reboot. It's worse than the Halloween series, if you ask me. But it was still kind of a fun popcorn flick. It still had, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger when he wasn't falling apart in weird shapes. Right? It was great. Well, it also had a female Terminator, which was cool. Steve says, it was hard to believe. You know, it wasn't James Cameron. It wasn't the same. It wasn't James Cameron's story. It was a mistake. Well, so they did get that band back together with the T2 groups, which is really, really cool. And another thing that I want to bring out here is there's no sales numbers.
    23:07
    So when you swing over to IPDB, which is the absolute source for all this stuff, and we pull a lot of that information, of course, for our podcast from IPDB, you can check them out at IPDB.org. We can see that there's no sales numbers, but there's sales numbers for everything until now. That's because Stern Pinball is a privately owned company, and they do not divulge the sales numbers. Ah, so Sega, of course, was a public company. Publicly traded. So was Data East. So they have to release those sales numbers and targets within their disclosure documentation that they give to the regulator, which then people will use to evaluate to value stock and things like that. Now it's owned by the Gary Stern, you know, consortium or whoever that is. I don't know who that was back in the day. But if you know, shoot us an email at silverballchronicles at gmail.com. But they don't have to display their sales numbers anymore. Now, of course, Terminator 2 sold 15,000 units. Did T3 sell 15,000? No. Did it sell like 1,500? Yeah, it probably sold more than that. Yeah. So there you go, right? We're not talking, you know, shooting lights out here. T3 came between Simpsons Pinball Party and Lord of the Rings.
    24:31
    That also didn't hurt. I think it was Simpsons Pinball Party first, then T3, then Lord of the Rings. Yeah. Yeah, that's a... But the thing is, I never owned those other two games, but I did own a T3 for like 10 years. I have played a T3. I really enjoy T3, surprisingly enough. the art is absolutely atrocious. The art is, at this point we're in the throes of bad Photoshop art, which would become kind of a staple of Stern, probably until Metallica comes out. So we talk about, quote unquote, Stern's horrible Photoshop art. But isn't it fair to say that in this era, everything was generally bad Photoshop because it was the new thing. And in this game, I think they tried to set a record for the number of times they could put Arnold Schwarzenegger in the art. Now, his face isn't huge in all of these. But if you count, and I counted once, it's like over ten times. Well, he's three times on the back glass. Three times on the back glass alone. But if you start going around the plastics, the play field, he is everywhere. It's ridiculous the amount of times There's actually a mold sculpt of his face, and then he's standing next to that on the back box, on the back panel, rather. Yep. Basically, they use steel ramps, and instead of two ramps, there's three ramps. It's insane. I'll tell you what. The first time I ever saw a T3, I went to a private collector's home in Halifax, which was, you know, four hours away. and I was going there with a buddy, and this guy has an awesome sort of collection. Now, it's that collection which is the top-tier Bally Williams and then those early sort of Sam games. You can see when he was really big in the hobby, and then there's sort of nothing after that.
    26:27
    So this was one of those games I'm like, oh, my God, I've never seen a T3 before because they didn't make a whole lot of them. And it was also an era where nobody really bought them for a bar or a pub. And I stood over this thing and I said, man, there is a lot of metal in this game. It would cost a fortune to make this game. Even at the time, they kind of, they let Steve have a little more leeway, in my opinion, on this, because fun T3 facts, it has a launcher, like the original T2, it has a gun launcher. Stern didn't really do that. It's one of the few, I mean, I'm trying to think of any other Sterns after that that use a launcher. like a gun launcher. Like it would have been in the Sega days. Well, yeah, back in the day they used a lot of crazy launchers, but by now with Stern Pinball it was standardized. They used the shooter rod. This one they did not. They actually used the launcher. It's kind of like a plastic launcher. It's definitely not like the big metal thing that was on the Williams one. This game had a lot of tech bulletins on it, a lot involving the stuff they put in. they had multiple bulletins on the launcher. Earlier T3s, they put the coil in backwards. And then they had a kit you could get for it to add, I'm trying to remember, like a resistor or something. They had issues in the back box. The back box, it opens, it's one of the only Stern games of this era to actually have just regular lights in the back glass, like bayonet-style light bulbs. By this time, most of them, they always had a fluorescent tube. in there with no insert panel. This one actually has an insert panel, which swings the opposite way as most of them, and it has a cool RPG toy. So the launcher in this one is in the head, and you launch the ball at six targets, and it's a really cool feature. It's one of my favorite features, actually, in a game when it works right. But the problem is, another issue they had is the gun, they had it wrapped. They put a post in and wrapped it to the post so it wouldn't move around in shipment. But you don't want it to jiggle. When you set the game up, in the instructions it had, like, remove the tie wrap and remove the post. People just forgot to remove. They didn't see the instructions. They didn't remove the post so the RPG would not go all the way up to the top. So you never could hit the top target. Which is already difficult, right? Yeah, well, you can kind of bounce it off the bottom. It should not be difficult if it's set up correctly. And earlier, earlier T3s like mine, even when you remove that post, it hits another post on the way up that has a rubber on it, and you've got to remove the rubber so it actually clears it correctly. Now, this sat in your collection for a long time. Yes, it did. It did. And, like, even more so than most games. And it has the silk screen cabinet when they still did those, and they almost always have major wear around the flipper buttons. But I always liked it. It's a cool game. It's deeper than T2. They added, like, there's an actual wizard mode, which is probably one of the quickest wizard modes to get to. Maybe not scared stiff quick, but pretty quick. If you're a decent player, you have to turn extra balls off on this thing, or you will get to the wizard mode every time. One thing that I thought was particularly cool about Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines was that the marketing campaign was, he's back. And, of course, that ties into both the Terminator being back and Steve Ritchie, the designer of many of the greatest pinball machines of all time, brings you a new pinball for the 21st century. featuring an interactive back box mechanism rocket-propelled grenade launcher, or RPG. Ooh, that sounds scary. Shoot the RPG.
    30:24
    And while Arnold, if you remember from our T2 discussion in the last Steve Ritchie episode, Arnold was kind of a pain in the butt to get him to do the call-outs, and they had to record it in his trailer on set. This one, he was the opposite. Like, what do you want me to do? I will say with that book. And there is a ton of Arnold speech in this one. This is the time when Arnold Schwarzenegger was not at the peak of where he was in the sort of 96 era. This is kind of where, you know, he's still picking his spots. He's still sort of, you know, he's still Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he's not what he was 10 years prior. But the cool thing is it has the shoot here and here. Which is perfect. This thing, and I mentioned this a little bit, but the metal in this thing, okay? So it has the launcher that goes up a metal ramp and around kind of in behind a molded Terminator half-man, half-robot-y face. Cyborg, I guess. Careful, don't send me hate mail. And then that'll go behind, and you can tell me what happens, I don't know. But then you can short-plunge it onto... But you don't short-plunge it. It's a launcher. You can't short-plunge it. It has a fail-safe mechanism, a gate, in case the launcher doesn't get it all the way up, it will drop back and go into a habit trail and go to your right flipper. Oh, very good. Okay. They put that in there in case the launcher had issues, because otherwise the thing would just be firing over and over and over, and that would get that. Now, the habit trail that that bailout point has on the gate there, that is the habit trail for the first ramp on the left, on the right. then there's another ramp directly across from that that does sort of like a a weird s shape then there's a captive ball then there's like a drop target with a locking mechanism behind it with some sort of vertical up kicker in there somewhere then there's another metal ramp on on the on the left side that returns to your left flipper but then there's the vertical up kicker has a metal ramp, which goes to the right ramp, or it goes to the left ramp. Like, there is so much going on here. It has a couple up-kickers. It actually has at least two. And then there's, like, the bad guy in the thing has a gun that shoots at you. That's the one up-kicker. Comes through a habit trail, comes right at you, and then the other one is the one next to Arnold's head. Yep, there's stuff everywhere. And it's a typical left-to-right Steve Ritchie fan layout. It's a classic fan layout, has an actual kickback, which they don't really use anymore. Most people say that this is 100 times better than T2. Would you agree with that? I've heard both ways. A lot of people prefer T2 over this also. This definitely has way more going on than T2. It's interesting. The ball goes in a lot of different directions. Yeah, it doesn't have the classic Williams feel, though. So the slings are the typical stern slings of that era, extremely weak. The flippers are not as snappy, but it's fun to play. I enjoyed it for the 10 years or so I owned it. I really enjoyed this game. This is well worth a flip, folks. So if you're out and about and you see a T3, you're like, T3. No, I mean jump into that, man. It's a great little game. Yeah. It's got the, oh, what's the one mode? If you get all the awards on the left, you collect them all, you get Assault, which is a super cool mode that involves the RPG and how many weapons, depends on how many weapons you collected, and you hit the lock shot that amount of times, and then you lock a ball, and then you play the RPG all while you're a multiball, and you've got to coordinate everything. That's cool. See, and that comes down to a Mr. Dwight Sullivan, who, of course, is coming into the fold here at Stern as well, after his sort of adventures trying to find something else to do when Williams folded. Now, he's, of course, now programming on the White Star system, and not that amazing WPC system. Or the Pinball 2000 system we just talked about. During a 2010 interview, Pat Lawler quoted Dwight Sullivan as saying that, we've all just come from the holodeck on the Star Trek Enterprise D, and we're now on the bridge of the original series Enterprise. So they went from having all the fancy toys and stuff to sitting in an oddly colored square chair.
    35:04
    The White Star system was limited, but it was also extremely reliable. Chris Granner would also say they went from all the fanciness of DCS to whatever the hell the White Star board is. Well, some of the earlier, like your Data East, they had Stereo, they would advertise Stereo sound But yeah, by this time it's all mono And not A lot of variety At the beginning of that White Star era It was a lot of repeatable Quotes For some reason, Keith Johnson Could squeeze more out But everybody else seemed to struggle with that Well, Lord of the Rings had a modification done to the board for a little extra horsepower there. Now the more you know. So, of course, his next Stern pinball project, you're coming out of the gate with T3, which I would say is a pretty good license.
    36:04
    You don't know the movie's going to be a bit of a turd until it happens. It's also a really great layout and a lot of fun toys. Pretty solid first outing. But how do you follow that up, Ron? I don't know. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think you follow that up with a little bit of a musician. And, of course, we're talking about Elvis Presley, if you can't tell from Ron's very good imitation. Thank you very much. Thank you. As opposed to mine, which was very bad. Of course, this is the 50th anniversary of Elvis Presley's first song recording. And the best part about being an epic artist like Elvis Presley is that you can milk Elvis' first something over and over and over again. Elvis' first romance ballad. Elvis' first album. Elvis' first movie. Elvis' first gold record. Right? You could milk the first of anything. Well, this is the 50th anniversary of his first song recording. Do you know what song that was? Blue Moon of Kentucky, according to the show notes. Oh, oh, did I know it? No, I did not know. It's August of 1954 in the famous Thumb Studio in Memphis. Blue Moon, Kentucky. Good guess, Ron.
    37:19
    So, of course, it's time to check into the Heartbreak Hotel and review some of the stats here. Elvis Presley, or Elvis, was, of course, the legend musician and band. August of 2004 is a Stern White Star Solid State Standard body. They don't do any of those wide bodies at Stern. They're all about making it good. 3,500 produced, plus, this is something interesting, 500 Elvis Gold editions. And, of course, we're a little hazy on that number. Oh, wait a minute. How did you know it was 3,500 produced? I thought we didn't have numbers. Yeah, because during this TopCast episode, Steve Ritchie says the numbers. Ah. Dun, dun, dun. Software by Keith P. Johnson, who's a new person working with Steve Ritchie. Lonnie Ropp and Dwight Sullivan. Of course, Johnson, Simpsons, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Hobbit, and Jersey Jacks, G&R. Of course, we all know Keith P. Johnson. and artwork by Jerry Wanderstelt. Or Wanderstelt, one or the other. And, of course, he did the artwork on Lord of the Rings, Harley, Wizard of Oz. Of course, he didn't do a whole lot of work, but those are the ones that he did. Sound, again, by the legend Chris Granner. The artwork is not bad in this game. It's not as photoshopped. Some of it's actually painted. Yeah, there's some Photoshop in there, but it's surrounded very well with some hand-drawny stuff, which is, you can tell that after the adventure that was specifically the play field for Terminator 3, they had a bit of a course correction, and I think they went the right way. This has an amazing soundtrack. It, of course, includes the Elvis songs CC Rider, Blue Suede Shoes, All Shook Up, Hound Dog, my personal favorite, Jailhouse Rock, Heartbreak Hotel, and Burning Love. Now, actual recordings were used from the famed 68 Comeback Television Special, as well as the Aloha from Hawaii Television Special. Except for Burn in Love is the actual studio cut. The interesting thing, when you play the game, the music is not from these specials. His voice is. The vocals are. But then the actual music is like MIDI or something. It's something they made. It's like Chris Granner's version of those games to be able to fit into that White Star. Yeah, I'm guessing they were limited in what they could do with that. Yeah, so, I mean, if you're talking about Elvis Presley songs in a game, that has to be expensive. Obviously not. They got a good number. And I don't think they had any limits to the amount of time. It's like Beatles. Yeah, well, that's a whole other thing.
    40:27
    Can we talk about just the worst? The dancing Elvis is awesome. I love the Dancing Elvis. So can you describe this Dancing Elvis? Paint us a word picture here, Ron. Well, let's see. He's dressed in the classic black leather from the 68 Comeback Special.
    40:51
    You're winning it right there. He's got, at his waist, it's like a separate piece for his legs, and they sway back and forth like he's moving his hips. And his arm moves, so he puts the mic up to his mouth whenever he sings, and that's all coordinated. and he slides up and down the playfield on a track above the playfield. He looks like he's having a seizure, Ron. I always liked the Dancing Elvis. And the thing is, if the music is not up loud enough, you can hear the plastic, like, clink, clink, clink, clink, clink, clink. All right. It's very, very weird. It's cool. I'm not going to lie. It is a cool mech. It is interesting. It certainly beats the old mech on a stick that everybody jokes about from Rolling Stones at Stern, where it was literally a picture of Mick Jagger on a stick that went across the play field. So I'm going to give him that. It's pretty cool. Elvis is packed. If this game was made today, it would be a $10,000 LE model. Yeah. We're talking to the gills packed. The five bank, drop target bank, upper play field with a Heartbreak Hotel molded piece up there. Huge. And it has a pop-out part on that heartbreak hotel, right? Magnet. It's got a magnet that stops the ball before the flipper. And he says, hit that interloop. You ought to hit that interloop, baby.
    42:14
    And, yeah, it is a packed, packed game. Hey, if anybody needs somebody to do call-outs for a game here, give Ron a call. He's your man. Actually, the Elvis impersonator they got for this was excellent. That's another thing they did right. They got a very good Elvis impersonator. It has some awesome animations. The extra ball animation. There's a pinball with the sideburns on it with the pompadour, like the Elvis air. An extra ball, baby. You know, it's great. This is pretty cool. I have played an Elvis, played it quite a few times. I didn't play it enough to get into the rules and what to do and how to actually do it. But I'll tell you, there are a few things in here where we're – I don't want to use the term, but I'm going to say it anyway, and please don't be offended by this, but there's a little rinse and repeat in here. Okay, I thought you were going to say something offensive there. So there's a magnet that stops the ball for the third flipper. There's the third flipper into the Steve Ritchie left ramp shot. That's a loop. We're looking at, yeah, it's a loop. It comes around. Hit that inner loop. Hit that inner loop, baby. It's got a thick spinner on the left. The correct spinner, yes, unlike the skinny ones they use now. It's not a fan layout because there are targets in the center, which are... Where's the upper flipper so it can't be a fan layout? Right. And there's also a... But it is fan-ish. The shots on the main play field are all left to right. There's nothing really far ahead. It's really far in the back.
    43:46
    All metal ramps. All metal habit trails. And not only metal, they're etched. They've got designs in them, like musical notes. This is a cool game. Raymond Davidson, the number one player in the world, has this game. So there must be something about this game. And he can't finish Graceland either, which means that might be a little too hard. Yeah. We need to get Joe Katz on the code here. Make that a little easier. He's got a hound dog. He's got a little, it's like a pressure switch thing in front of him. So he hit, it's like a piece of rubber. He hit it. And the hound dog goes, oh! You know, it's got Jailhouse Rock. It's got Jailhouse Rock Scoop.
    44:26
    Heartbreak Hotel. on the upper play field. This is Elvis. Like, it really is. You couldn't just slap something else on here and be like, it's Elvis. I will always remember this game because the first pinball expo I ever went to, this was the new game that was out. So there was like a whole row of Elvises. The single greatest thing on this game, Ron, is that there is a Photoshopped picture of Elvis on the bottom right in his white leisure suit thing, and he's going, And, hooyah! He's doing the karate thing. Yeah, love it. And you've got the 50s Elvis on the left side. This is a great game. It's not the greatest, but it is a great game. You jump onto IPDB. They've got a lot of really cool original cabinet artwork on here, pictures of the prototype for Elvis, the original Translight artwork. All of that stuff is on there. It's super cool. Yeah, this was still the era where Stern, there was no big official launch. The game would just show up at a certain secret test location that certain people knew where it was. If you look at IPDB a lot of the pictures are from that test location So this was probably one of the first Elvis And I think this is probably one of the biggest licenses that you could get at the time considering that pinball is more or less dead in this era What did Steve Ritchie think of this? Well, before we talk about that, he asked me about the dancing Elvis. In the promotional materials, it says, a mechanical Elvis with shaking hips and gesturing hands moves forward and back in perfect sync with real Elvis tunes, bringing the microphone to the king of rock and roll's lips. Every time he sings the phrase, yeah, register a trademark.
    46:03
    So what did Steve think of this game? As usual, he says, I hated it. I hated it at first. I didn't want to do Elvis. It's not Steve Ritchie. In the end, I did see Elvis had marketing power, and I decided to do it. The alternative games did not have the marketing power of Elvis. As it turns out, it was a very good decision. We sold a lot of them. This is a great quote for a couple of things. One, Steve Ritchie hated it. He hates Elvis, which is funny. Will he make a game he likes? T3 said that was a mistake. Elvis, I hated it. Wait till we get to the next game. So then he also goes, but Elvis had marketing power, and I decided to do it. So he's like, I hated it. I hate the theme. Although it could probably sell, which is what he's saying. And the alternative games didn't have the marketing power. What were the alternative games at the time? I don't know. And honestly, at this point, it's more like, Steve, you're making this or you're not making a game. In this market, yeah. I mean, what else? So at the time, they're doing Ripley's, believe it or not. Ripley's was right before Elvis because I remember I was on the factory tour, and they were giving out the shrunken heads. Yes, and the Sopranos. We're talking NASCAR.
    47:14
    He is probably right. He did get the better. Sopranos was pretty big. Now this, he's also pioneered something that has never been done before. That's not true. The same production time with something a little bit different besides a back box that we're trying to get rid of. And, of course, we're talking about the limited edition. You mean like when he did Black Knight limited edition? Heard in our previous episode?
    47:40
    Mmm. But it's not that it was a run after, though. It wasn't a simultaneous run. That's true. And it also didn't come with a certificate of authenticity. which sounds fancier than it actually is. And, of course, they also did Adam's Family Gold. Monopoly. They didn't run that at Parallel. Which was – Yeah, but that was – Monopoly, like, you can go back to our Pat Lawler, our very first Pat Lawler episode. That was a marketing gimmick done by Pinball Star and Jersey Jack, the forever salesperson. Now, it's different. It is different. The Monopoly LE is different. And they're like – I think they're called Platinum Editions. And they also have a certificate which says you're square on the board. So I wonder who Boardwalk and Park Place got today.
    48:36
    Somebody is more money than I do. But they had the Elvis Gold Editions where they had the gold trim. Yeah, the one I played was a gold, actually. Wow, so far we're fans of T3. We like Elvis. What's the next game? The next one is World Poker Tour. Yes. And, of course, this is 2004. Let's get back in our time machine, Ron. Yeah, back when poker was really big for a year or two. Poker was huge around 2004. And this is sort of my high school years. Wow. Way to make me feel old. Yeah. Well, you are old, Ron. The NHL lockout happened in 2004. And as a Canadian, this was a national disaster. Yeah. Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't have mass suicides or something. We had a difficult winter. Did you curl instead? Do curling? Well, I mean, curling is great, I'm not going to lie, but it is not NHL hockey. So the networks, particularly here in Canada, I think it was probably NBC down south for you folk, they needed to fill their space. And the first thing that they could find was television poker, because they could build characters and they could look at people in sunglasses and people could win big money. So poker became a very big thing. Do you play poker, Ron? I know how to play, but I do not play poker. Yeah, I'm not a gambler. I'm particularly frugal. Now, I'm not, you know, Ron Hallett Sr. frugal, but I am frugal. World Poker Tour, of course, this started in 2002 in the United States. It's now on its 21st season on television. It is the world's biggest poker tournament brand. And in June of 2015, after a string of sales and movements, was sold for $35 million. But we're not a poker podcast. We are a pinball podcast specializing in history.
    50:53
    So, of course, Stern sees an opportunity in a rising brand. Of course, a rising brand means that you've got to get a pinball machine out there. You need a top designer on a top brand, a multi-million dollar brand. That's where you bring in Steve. And what does he say about World Poker Tour? Steve says, on World Poker Tour, they called me into the office and told me over and over again, I need to make this game for them. And I resisted heavily. And they yelled at me some more. I said, no. The final bit was Gary Stern yelling at me to make it. So, yeah, if I wanted to make a game at Stern, I had to say yes. I hated it from the first moment. I want to make that clear. Wow.
    51:35
    Ouch. Woo. So this is from this TopCast episode. Oh, yeah, yeah. Around 2009 or 2008. It was probably 2008. It had to be 2008 because it was before everyone got fired. He was working on Spider-Man at the time. He is two years away from releasing a game and talking that game down. Right? Now, it's not being sold anymore. It's off the line, and we're moving on. Yeah, and it didn't sell well anyway, but he did not like doing that game. This is, of course, a gambling poker card-themed game. It is February of 2006. This is a Stern SAM board system, S-A-M. We have no sales info. Sound by Chris Graner. Software by Keith Johnson and Dwight Sullivan. So we are bringing in two of the modern-day champions of pinball code to do this, so it's got to be good. It's deep. Artwork by Brian Rude. Of course, he did Stern Star Wars and a few other art packages along with the pinball history. Of course, the IPDB link is on our social media feed. The art is not stellar. Let's talk about Buddy's Hand.
    52:50
    Okay. So on the back glass. Buddy's Hand? Who's on the back glass? Do you know who these people are? I have no idea who these people are. There's an older fellow who looks very stern and angry. There's a lady in the middle, and there is a yuppie on the right. the man on the right side, when you look at it, it's actually the left side, but it's on the right side. His fingers are in, like he has his arms crossed in front of him. I never noticed that before. Thanks. Now I'm not going to be able to unsee this. So he has his fingers are sticking up out of the, I don't know, what's that called, like the crook of your elbow when you have your arms crossed, and his wrist is hanging below his arm. And how long would you say that that man's hands are? Yeah, they're really long hands. Like we're talking 12 inches, 12-inch fingers? It is awkwardly creepy. This is the first Sam game. Big deal. And if you followed our other Steve Ritchie podcast, a lot of the firsts tend to be on his games. First System 7 game, first System 11 game for Williams. First bi-level game. Yep, the first, although I'm sure there's an EM from the 30s that's bi-level. That would be correct. First game with faceted inserts, which is an insert with, like, jeweled underneath. First game to play a complete, we're doing it high speed now. But this, the SAM system was great for us collector types. Oh, I would think operators too, although I don't think they ever updated the code. But for the first time, you could easily update the software of the game without needing to burn a ROM chip. So back in the day, you'd have to go to a distributor, distributor, or you would have to go to, you know, a third-party sketchy person, and they would have to give you, like, a chip. Or you had to have a chipper. Yeah, and it has legs on it. So you take a thing, and you literally, like, wiggle it and pull it off the board. It's got these legs, which are easily super bendable and breakable. and then you have to put another one on and just wiggle it ever so gently. Just get it in there. And then, oh, one of the legs is out. You've got to kind of like bend it just a little bit. Okay, don't bend it too much. But now with Sam, you can just take a thumb drive, put it in there, update, done. Big deal. Big, big deal. You know what else I find really interesting about World Poker Tour is that it has an SRP or Steve Ritchie Productions logo. All his games up to 24 have that. Interesting little fact. Now, this also has an upper play field. A very good upper play field. I was about to say. One of the best upper play fields, they say. I have never played a World Poker Tour. I feel like if I stood up to it and I saw that man's hand, I don't think I could play it. It has a ton of drop targets. It is the most on-steverchy-looking game that he did. it's the one time he deviated from his usual approach. It's interesting that he would do that, that he would try something so radically different. Like Steve Ritchie by this time, he's doing the third flipper into a loop or a ramp. He's done that a million times. He's done upper play fields a couple of times or bi-levels in his earlier career. It has these weird dot matrix displays built into the play field. It has a huge, almost eight-ball deluxe-style drop target on the left. When you plunge the ball, it goes right into an up kicker. That goes right to the upper play field. And it's got the little mini flippers up there, and there's a lot of action, a lot of action up there. Cool ace-in-the-hole lock shot. It also has a 360 ramp, which is pretty cool on the left side, which is not really a Steve Ritchie thing. That's like a John Borg thing. And there is a up post that stops the ball a lot, which is also very non-Steve Ritchie-like. This is a very non-traditional Steve Ritchie game. And would you say that it actually turned out really good for being a non-traditional Steve Ritchie game? From what approach? If you're talking sales numbers, no. Yeah. Well, I mean, that probably comes down to theme. And the market. But I remember when this came out, there was a point where a distributor in Canada actually had these games and had World Poker Tour and Wheel of Fortunes for $2,600 new in box. Now, this is when a new in box game you could get for just under $4,000. And they were selling for $2,600. I should have got one of these. It's something else. Now, it also has a transparent upper play field, which is very much like Black Knight sort of raid. And Elvis, I think, has the same thing. Yeah, so there's a lot of, it's a pretty unique kind of game. But the people that talk about this game, it's less about the play field and more about the code. Yeah, I don't really know what I'm doing, so I know it's got to be a good code game. This, of course, is Keith P. Johnson, and he's really, really rising up, right? He did a little bit of work on Pinball 2000 and that team. Then he really busted it out on Stern with Lord of the Rings and Simpsons Pinball Party, both of which are coding masterpieces and probably the peak, in my opinion, of Keith's coding. Keith's got the buffet, right? Like, he's the new lineman. He's the guy. And this game, I haven't played enough of it to make an opinion, but apparently is right on par of that. And the wizard mode is actually called Kiefer Invitational. Keeper Invitational, named after himself. So awesome. So what do you think Steve would, how do you think Steve would put World Poker Tour along in his legacy? Steve says, I have no remorse, nor do I feel a slight bit of guilt, nor do I feel it's inferior to any games in terms of playfield design. I'm not ashamed of it. It's fun as hell to bat around that ball in the upper playfield. It's the best little playfield that ever was. And he would actually say that that upper play field is probably the best upper play field that has ever been in pinball until Pat Lawler's upper play field on Family Guy. Very cool. So some high praise, actually, from Steve Ritchie to Pat Lawler. But at this point, we have a game that Steve chose that he thought was a mistake and two games he didn't want to do. So is he going to do something he wants to do? So he's doing pinball, but he's not really enjoying it. You know what I mean? Like, he's like, hey, Gary, I want to come back and do pinball. And then he does a turd movie, and then he's forced to do a bunch of pins he doesn't like. Well, Steve says, after World Poker Tour, I was like, I don't give a damn. I want to do Spider-Man, or I don't want to do anything. I'll go back to doing redemption games. Gary says, okay. But Gary thought Spider-Man was too juvenile. Oh, my. Keisha lived under a rock. This, of course, is based on the Marvel character Spider-Man. Spider-Man in this game is based on the Sam Raimi film trilogy from 2002, 2004, 2007. I saw the first two. Should I not see the third? No, it's okay. It's on par. Everyone told me it sucked. It's not great. But they do progressively get worse, right? It's like all trilogies. They tend to sort of... Three Goblin was awesome. Well, actually, Doc Ock was cool. Doc Ock was very cool. So this Spider-Man trilogy was the Spider-Man trilogy of my high school, or my high school years. There's that famous scene in this movie where Spider-Man is hanging upside down in the rain, and Mary Jane, like, takes off his lower part of his mask and gives him a kiss. which is like a big, big, you know, movie moment. That whole movie and everything around that was a huge part of my high school years. And that had nothing to do with me being a nerd and everything to do with it being really big in pop culture at that time. Nerd. Yeah.
    61:09
    Now, of course, Tobey Maguire and this introduced Kirsten Dunst, or reintroduced her as more of an adult type of star. James Franco, who played just an amazing role, and, come on, Willem Dafoe. This is a great cast. The budget for the first movie was $140 million, and it made $821 million in that box office. It was the highest-grossing superhero film of all time, right? Because before this era of superhero movie, my high school years, We're talking like the Batman from the 90s, the early 90s, and whatever the hell happened to Batman with Joel Schumacher. And, you know, Superman 78, right? That's the kind of, those are the superhero movies. This was sort of the beginning of that modern day Marvel superhero movie. This film, the first film in the trilogy, was the first film to break $100 million in a single weekend. It was a cultural event for all high school kids and older nerds like yourself, Ron, to go and see this movie. The second film did $783 million, so slightly less than the first one. And the third film actually did more at $890 million. So this is a blockbuster franchise. And it's funny that Gary Stern thought it was too juvenile. I guess he's still thinking Amazing Spider-Man, the comics, right? Or wouldn't it be funny if at the time he thought it was a comic book-based theme, so it's too juvenile, when Stern is literally now done seemingly every comic book game they could possibly do. Yeah, it's funny how he comes around, eh? Money convinces folk, I think, sometimes. So June of 2007, this is a SAM system. It sells 3,750 units, software by Lyman Sheets Jr. Of course, we all know him from Attack from Mars, ACDC, Batman 66. He is a legend in pinball circles, especially amongst the tournament folks such as yourself. Sound and music by, I think, my favorite music person, David Thiel. This is the first time David worked with Steve. David would do Tron, Stern, Star Trek, Iron Man, The Hobbit. He also did Time Machine back in the data east. Artwork by Kevin O'Connor, Mark Galvix, Margaret Hudson, and Mark Schrodenberg. Schroden? I don't see a W. It's like a Schoenberg or Schoenberg.
    63:45
    Schoenberg? Honest to God, people might think that this is funny, that we are screwing up these names, but honest to God, I look up the phonics. I try to say these right. I even cut out banter between Ron and I about how to say these names because it goes on for too long. So it's not a joke.
    64:10
    I really try here. We've seen a few of these Stern-era and modern-day-era machines that have no sales data. So here's another one where I'm able to tell you how many units they did. And I get it from an interesting source this time. It is, again, Steve Ritchie. Thanks, Steve. I wonder if Stern was happy with that, giving out these sales numbers. But isn't that interesting? Like, this was a big seller, right? Like, people are like, oh, man, yes, we see Spider-Mans all over the place. And they're only selling, like, 4,000 units. Mm-hmm. That's a lot of units. When you're thinking about it now, and you're like, oh, we have to think within our niche, eh? You have to think within your time zone. No, your time zone. Your time period. Right. Even nowadays, 4,000 units is a big deal. Stern would kill for 4,000. Right. So we think that they make these big smash-out numbers, like, oh, my God, the Mandalorian. They're going to sell a million Mandalorians. Well, no, they're not, which is crazy. If they sell 4 or 5K, they'll be thrilled. They will buy Brian Eddy a new polo shirt. That's how excited they'll be. Around this time, George Gomez would do a podcast in which he was talking about playing some of Steve's games. And just to let everyone know, George Gomez was not actually working at Stern at this time. Yeah, he wasn't an employee. Yeah, he was a contracted hand. I believe he was working at Midway at the time. All the games he did for Stern in the era, he was doing on his free time, really. He was working full-time at Midway, and then he would work on the design at home, which is kind of crazy. But George says, I saw it very early on a few months ago. I was out in the factory, and those guys let me shoot it, meaning Spider-Man. And it was a lot of fun. And it was just a really very crude Whitewood when I saw it. So George Gomez would say that he got to go to the factory while he was doing some of this contract work. He got to play the early, very sort of stripped-down Whitewood. And he would say that Steve Ritchie had some really cool toys on there. There was a goblin toy, which he had constructed, which was sitting over the left bank targets. He said he loved this stuff. George Gomez, of course, is an epic designer and would continue to be an epic designer and builder of everything that is Stern Pinball today. And he was really, really impressed with Cider Man. He would say, I think Steve's all about fun. He's made some outrageously fun stuff that I enjoy. To this day, I come home and I play my Terminator 2. I love to play this thing. So George Gomez loves Steve Ritchie. I wonder if he does now. But we'll get to that. There's so many cool toys on this game. Is there not? This is a cool game. You have one of these. You have a Spider-Man Black. I have a Spider-Man Black. Can you explain what that is? It is a limited edition. Once again, another Steve Ritchie thing. And he insisted on the real back glass as a mirrored back glass instead of a trans light. and has alternate art for the cabinet. It's with a black theme. It's the Black Spider-Man. What was it, Venom? Or is he Black Spider-Man? I never saw the third movie, so. Yeah. So I had no idea. Like, Sandman, I was like, who's that? When I first saw it, I had no idea who that was. This game is awesome. I've played this quite a few times at a buddy's place, and I love this game. I would own this game in a hurry. It has, I think, the first appearance of the Web Slingers, as Steve Ritchie would call them. Basically, you have a vertical up kicker, and then you have a piece of curved metal that makes it so when it fires up, it curves around into a habit trail or the play field or whatever.
    67:59
    And he just used that term from that point forward whenever he used them on a game. He would call it a web slinger. So let's – yeah, this is where an era where there's a lot of leeway in what they're putting in the games, right? So if we go left to right on the play field – I love this game, so we're going to talk about it a little bit more. We've got the big, fat, wide Steve Ritchie orbit spinner. We've got a light lock stand-up target. You've got the side ramp from the third flipper, that warp ramp, if you will, from Stern Star Trek. This one goes up through a one-way gate and hits a target, which is Venom. and when you hit that target, the kinetic satisfaction that you get from that, and that's a Steve Ritchie term, where it just hits that, you're just like, oh, yeah. I thought that was a Keith Elwin line. I think Keith stole that from Ritchie. Oh, he stole it? Okay. But if he didn't steal it from Ritchie, I'm not going to acknowledge that he did make it up. So then it comes down the left habit trail, metal habit trail, into your inside on the left flipper. then you have a really smooth plastic left ramp, which feeds into that left habit trail, metal habit trail. You have a three-bank drop target bank, which goes, well, it's a stand-up target, but it's a motorized bank that goes in. Think Attack for Mars or Tron. Actually, yeah, Attack for Mars is what he was paying homage to with that particular placement. Yep. Behind that three-bank drop-down mechanism, there's two stand-ups, and then there's like a saucer into a vertical up-kicker. That vertical up-kicker goes behind the Sandman toy, around this what you call the web-slinger mechanism. Piece of metal. It's really just a piece of curved metal. Yeah, and then that goes into the pop-bumpers. Then you've got another ramp to the right of that, which goes down to the right-hand side habit trail. Then you have a magnet in front of the dock aux saucer, which goes into another vertical upkicker metal ramp thing onto the other side. And then you have the right-side orbit. And then you have a shot behind that upper flipper, that right-hand flipper, which goes into the Spider-Sense shot, which is very Stern Star Trek-ish. First time he did it. This is stacked. There is so much, like the Doc Ock mech moves up and down, right? Like it physically moves. It's not just a flat stand-up piece of plastic. So does the Sandman. He moves. Green Goblin moves. Originally, Green Goblin actually moved up, like left to right. Yeah, Green Goblin was originally on a motor. He moved back and forth. They couldn't get it to work quite right. So they scrapped it. This is stacked. This is a stacked game. And you can see that there's a lot of inspiration here for a couple of his other games that are coming along the way. But this is a game that I would love to have in my collection.
    71:11
    Its peak has to be that he is working with Lyman Sheets. And it's the first time working with Lyman. So what do you think it's like when you're working with Lyman when you're a Steve Ritchie? They both have very strong personalities. and they only worked with each other twice, so I'm thinking there's a lot of butting heads. But mutual respect to industry legends, right? When they're working with each other, they're probably butting heads.
    71:37
    Steve Ritchie wants the code to always be chase the blinking shot, keep the ball moving, never stop, right? Where I think Lyman does a lot of that, but he also wants to give you a moment to enjoy a moment, right? Some fanfare. Ah, the moment thing. Yes, there's definitely some moments. Where would you rate this game, Ron?
    72:02
    I love it. That's why I still have it after, man, 14 years, still have it. Yep. So let's talk about the downsides. Well, the art is not stellar. A lot of the art was ripped off of different sources, and then there's a lot of Photoshop stuff, like for the slingshots and some of the plastics. A lot of the plastics are Photoshop. And very low res, too. It's not the best. I mean, Tobey Maguire is okay, but you don't want to see Tobey Maguire every time you play pinball. Because when I see pinball, I don't think Tobey Maguire. The callouts on this are something else. Yeah, they got, what's his name, J.K. Simmons. Yeah, J.K. Simmons as Jameson. And they rule.
    72:53
    Outstanding. That's when I keep – a lot of the games now will have like five or six people doing call-outs. This game literally has him. All the rest of the call-outs are from the movies. And he just kind of narrates you through the game. And it's perfect. And he's over the top. As he should be. And he is Jonah J. Jameson, right? J. Jonah Jameson. He's not J.K. Simmons playing the role. And there's so many great lines. when a mad scientist invites you to whatever, don't go. Awesome. Super villain and the best he can do is rob a bank? I love those lines. Yeah, he is his own character but he is the character, which is pretty cool. Now, Stern also did a vault edition of this. Much later. That was years later. We're talking like, I don't know, four years ago. It's 2020 now. So I think they did that in 2018. Yeah. They did the vault. And in my opinion, The vault that they did is they used the art of Ultimate Spider-Man, which was, again, the Spider-Man in my high school years. Now, I didn't read. I'm not a comic book person. I'm a nerdy, but I'm not a comic book nerd because you people are really weird. I will say Ultimate Spider-Man is some of the most amazing comic book illustration I have ever seen, and the comic art version of this game is stunning. The art is better. Well, they improved the magnet. The Doc Ock magnet is much bigger, so you don't get the wear around it. They did remove a mech. Green Goblin doesn't move anymore. They removed the coil behind him. They also took the plastic from those web swingers and replaced it all with metal. So not just the curvature is metal, but also the left and right side are not plastic. However, the call-outs were all new, and they are not good. They are not great. No. I was wondering, can you put the regular software in there and would it work? I was curious about that. If you've done that, let us know. Shoot us an email. Yeah, I'm curious if any of our listeners have ever done that. Can you actually use the original Spider-Man software in the Vault Edition? Yeah, if you want to see somebody's soul being crushed by the call-out and sound package of that Vault Edition, check out Straight Down the Middle, a pinball show on YouTube, and watch Greg Bone just tears and anger and sweat on his face. It's amazing. This pin, Ron, is still in the top 100 on Pinside, and as of this recording, it was 20 when I did this, but they've released a lot of games since I've written this episode. It is number 25. So this is a game which is, I don't know, 10, 14 years old, and it's still, with the iffy art, is still a top 25 pin of all time. Yeah, bad art doesn't make a game bad. It just makes it less appealing to look at. Well, then they did the 500 limited editions, which in addition to the other stuff I mentioned, it also had chrome side rails that basically chromed it out, like alternate artwork. And it was only, I'm trying to remember, $400 or $500 more than the regular one. Oh, and it had a shaker motor included. Imagine that. And they are now more than $500 more. Because I remember, even then, your typical Stern, Neuenbach's game was just under 4K, and that was a little over 4K, the LE. And the LEs came out after all the pros. $4,000. Look at all the crap in there. Yeah, and I think because the LEs came out after they had some fixes for the back, there's an up post in the back, and if I remember, there was issues with the ball blowing by the up post. There was some extra padding or foam or something they put in there to fix that issue in the later pros, and then all the LEs already had it. So you actually made out getting an LE because you got one after all the other games. Yes, and oddly enough, in the code, there is an option for you to turn on the shooter lane entry, which is behind that third upper flipper, where you lift the upper flipper and it will go back into the shooter lane just like a game in the future, but it was never actually implemented in this machine. So what does Steve do after that game? I mean, obviously, he finally got to make a game that he actually liked. Now, did you know that Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather was nominated as one of Canada's greatest Canadians? Dudley, do you write?
    77:45
    That's offensive. Oh, sorry. Tommy Douglas was the leader of the Saskatchewan Party and the Federal New Democrat Party, or NDP, in the 1960s and 1970s. Was he a Mountie? He was also one of the creators of the government's single-payer health care system, and he is widely known as the father of Canadian Medicare, Kiefer Sutherland's grandfather. Isn't that amazing? That's amazing. I wonder if our Canadian listeners hate me. I think there's probably more than just the Canadians. Oh, wow. Okay. So the reason I bring that up is because the next, oh, gosh, it's 24.
    78:30
    The action TV law theme terrorist taker downer. Not a fan? I took criminology and political science in university, and I can't watch this show because it is so outrageous. Like, obviously you have to suspend your disbelief for all forms of media. I gotcha. This TV show is really difficult to do. Is it like when you watch movies and you see them give, like, CPR, and if you've actually had CPR training, you can see it's totally not even close to the way you would actually do it? Yeah. First you have to start with breaking their ribs.
    79:07
    Unless you break the ribs, it's not as much fun. Just things like keep your arms straight, don't bend your elbows, and then I see people just literally pushing with just their arms. It's like, that's not how you do it. It's like my wife, when she watches people do coding and things on television and hacking. She's like, that's not how you do it. Oh, you mean when everything makes a sound on the screen when you type? Yes. Because that never happens. Or enhance the picture, and then somehow it gets clearer? Oh, yeah, it gets clearer. Enhance. 24 is all of those things wrapped up in one bouquet, and it was huge. This is the post-9-11 terrorist show. It's all last minute. It was cool. I'm not going to disagree. It was not my thing. But the game was from February of 2009. Unknown number of sales. This is music and sound by Ken Hale. And you'll remember him from such classics as Raven and Big Buck Hunter Pro. Of course, software again. Lime and Sheets, Lonnie Robb and Dwight Sullivan. It's a team of coders this time. And Kevin O'Connor on art. It was originally supposed to be Dwight Sullivan's game, and then everyone got fired, which we'll talk about. So it became Lyman Sheets and Lonnie Roth's game. 24 was the TV series which aired on Fox. It ran from 2001 to 2010, with one season in 2014.
    80:36
    I think it also had a movie. It was an American action drama which unfolded in real time. So there were 24 episodes in a season, and each episode you watched was an hour of the 24, which is actually a very cool concept. So this unfolded as a political thriller. It starred Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer. He was, of course, Jack Bauer was an ends-justifies-the-means kind of government agent. It didn't matter what he did. He could do whatever he wanted, requisition any car he wanted, as long as he got that terrorist to tell him where the bomb was. Did you watch 24? No. Yeah. I couldn't do it. By the time they made this game, I would say it was kind of nearing the end. It was huge, though. 24 was huge. It was like water cooler cool kind of show, and it was not for me. It was a hot property at the time, I think. It was, of course, on its way down, but it was a hot property, especially when you're talking to somebody like Gary Stern, who might not necessarily understand what's cool, because he's in his probably late 60s at this time. During the fall of 2008 and the spring of 2009, something happened, and it did not go well for all of manufacturing. Dun-dun! Find out what it is next time in our next episode. Thank you. No, no, we're going to tell them what it is. We're going to tell them what it is. Oh, oh. the Great Recession of 2008. So this is an interesting part of my life because this is the year that I graduated university and the year that I moved to Toronto from my province of New Brunswick,
    82:19
    or as we call it in Canada, Toronto, and I did my financial licenses in the midst of the largest financial meltdown the world had seen since the 1930s. So it was an interesting time. It basically killed all manufacturing. And what really is Stern Pinball, besides a lifestyle brand? Their manufacturer. Not a good time to be selling $4,000 toys. We're going to do a whole episode and topic on the Great Recession, how it stemmed through the United States real estate market, how it affected pinball in general. We'll talk about that in Pinball is Dying, the Stern version of that one. The real estate market created a bubble which had a collapse that spread through all the banking that forced the government to step in and do some bailouts for banks. And all in all, there was a lot of politics being played. There was a lot of hurt that happened around the world. And all manufacturing went into survival mode. So you can imagine a niche amusement manufacturer like Stern Pinball. Things had to change, didn't it? Yep, I remember this vividly because this was October 2008 at Expo. Right after Expo, I believe the week after Pinball Expo in Chicago, Stern fired everybody. They basically, well, Pat Lawler had already quit during CSI, so he was already gone. Steve Ritchie, they basically said, your services are no longer required. And, of course, he's a contractor, right? They just canceled his contract. It goes back to the thing where he said he didn't have – he just had a handshake agreement. I think they just said goodbye and didn't pay him anything, in my view. So they fired Dwight Sullivan, Keith Johnson. They kept Lyman and Lonnie Ropp, and they just trimmed down their sales force, and they just fired a ton of people. They basically went into survival mode. They couldn't keep the overhead, being the salaries and all of that stuff for all of these people, if they weren't selling anything. And quite frankly, this was a big problem in pinball. But when you think about, you know, Ford Motor Company, you know, Chevrolet taking a big government, you know, loan to keep them afloat, Chrysler, right? There was a lot of serious major issues in manufacturing in general amongst, you know, big manufacturers that have massive capacities and massive margins. That just isn't pinball. And one thing that's particularly interesting, there was a new interview with George Gomez on, oh, God, I hate to say this, just another pinball podcast. But the worst podcaster, Joel Engelberth, he spoke to George Gomez, and he had some nice little inputs about what kind of happened around this time. And Steve Ritchie, when he was let go fairly unceremoniously, along with George Gomez and the others who were contractors, Steve Ritchie did not take that well. He did not. But the game itself, he had completed the play field, and the game is as he designed it. Nothing was cut or changed from his final design. Dwight Sullivan was gone. He had some other ideas on what to do for the game, but that was all scrapped. It was taken over by Lonnie Roth and Lyman Sheets. I always thought it was interesting that they fired, like, all the ex-Williams guys. They kept Borg, you know, and they kept Lyman. And you say, well, he was Williams. Yeah, but he was a dad at East before he was at Williams. And Lonnie was always at Williams. You know, Keith Johnson was a Williams guy originally. Dwight Sullivan was a Williams guy. I just always thought that was interesting. It was survival mode. There's no other way to say it. And really, can you blame them? No. I mean, everybody wants to give everybody a job. But, you know, stuff's got to happen sometimes, especially when you're talking about this time, which I don't think people, you know, Now we're quite a few years out from that, and people kind of have short memories. It was a lot crazier than people can kind of remember. Yeah, and the thing about 24, that was Stern's last full-featured game at the sub-4,000 price that they did. After this game, after 24, came the NBAs, the Big Buck Hunters, Iron Man, your stripped-down games. We get Mick on a stick with Rolling Stone here coming up. We get into some hurting years. Although Iron Man became bigger down the line, but when it came out, it was seen as a stripped-down game. Yeah, it was pretty bad. So what was the game 24? What was some of its gimmicks? I like 24. I mean, it has horrifically bad art, especially the play field. It's just all inserts. It has famous call-outs or infamous call-outs, depending on what you think. Chloe O'Brien, was that her name, from the show? So she's, yeah, Chloe. Hi, Chloe O'Brien. She's in the game and gives some of the most uninspired call-outs ever. But I guess that was her character on the show, I've been told. So the opposite of J. Jonah, James. Jackpot.
    88:08
    Jackpot. You know, call-outs like that. But it's got some cool little toys. It's got a suitcase. You lock a ball in a suitcase and it closes. Nothing says pinball like a suitcase. It's got the sniper, the door-like thing. The thing flips open, and the sniper's there, and he fires his gun. It's got the Cactus Canyon-like drop targets that pop up on the play field that you hit that are supposed to be terrorists. Of course. It's got an exploding safe house. Yes, the safe house that the front of it just, like, falls down. That was the best explosion noise I've ever heard. Yeah, and, yeah, it also kept Steve Ritchie's streak alive of the five targets on the left because he did it on Spider-Man and he does it on 24. Very cool. It's an okay machine. It shoots really good. It's a flow monster. I mean, it does have an up post that stops the ball to show you. I think it's when you complete a scene. But I never had any issues with it. It does have Kiefer Sutherland at least some. I think it just has the following takes place between something, something, and something, something. I think that's the only call out from him, which is just from the show. The rest is me. I'm Chloe O'Brien. Oh, gosh. Hey, Pinheads. I just wanted to let you know that when I'm not making cheesy jokes to make Ron laugh, I'm David, the financial advice guy. At Dennis Financial, our advisors strive to provide a return on life for our clients, not just a return on investment. The value of advice is something that we take seriously. A valuable financial advisor doesn't just provide investment and insurance advice. That's because an advisor takes the time to gather intimate knowledge about their primary client, understand their personal preferences, recognize their fears and hopes, and gain knowledge about their client's errors before providing financial advice. If you're looking for a more human dimension to your financial advice, Dennis Financial Inc. has you covered with advisors licensing most Canadian provinces. We're also doing secure online meetings to engage with clients who need advice but don't necessarily want to wear pants or leave their house. Contact me via email at david at dennisfinancial.net for a free rate quote and a copy of our value of advice e-book or check out dennisfinancial.ca. Insurance solutions provided by Dennis Financial Inc., Canadian residents only. Let's get into where Steve ends up after all this time. He's doing some redemption games. He's doing some odd jobs here or there. Yeah, he also, he was not happy with the getting let go, that he was a frequent poster on RGP, which for those who don't know, that was Wreck Games Pinball. It was before Pinside Days. That was probably the main pinball message board if you will I think his screen name was King NDI if I remember And he posted there things like he called Gary Stern the Antichrist He started going to shows, selling a lot of his personal memorabilia. He sold his personal Robotron that he had that had special software on it where it was like his family as the different characters, instead of Mommy, Daddy, and was it Mikey? It was like him and his family. Yeah, Steve was having a hard time. He started going to shows, selling his things.
    91:39
    He's selling a lot of his CAD drawings. He was actually, after 24, the next game he was going to do was Avatar. That was going to be his game. And he had a CAD full drawing for it, like all ready to go, which I have somewhere in here. Really?
    91:57
    Didn't have one really big ramp. No, no, it did not. and he, I think at the time we're going to pick this up, he was living with a collector in California somewhere on his ranch, I think, if I remember. Anyhoo, let's pick it up here. It's been four years since the financial crisis, so, of course, it is a start of a new decade. It's 2011. The aughts are gone. I have grown up. I am now more of an adult than I've ever been. Queen Elizabeth has had her diamond jubilee Which is her 60th year on the throne Really? Also, The Dark Knight Rises was released in theater You remember that? Is that the one with Bane? That was awesome That was the first movie I saw on IMAX And it was also the first time I had ever had Taco Bell And I also learned that Taco Bell is nature's Drano Okay The Mars Curiosity rover successfully landed on the surface of Mars. It was a good year, right? 2011, 2012? Yeah, but who cares about that? The most important thing was that in March of 2011, Steve Ritchie returns to Stern. And this was announced. He was actually at the Texas Pinball Festival in 2011. And the seminar is out there somewhere. It's either Pinball News or YouTube. It's out there somewhere. I recommend it, where he starts off his seminar by saying something like, Hi, I'm Steve Ritchie, and I make pinball machines. And he got a standing ovation.
    93:32
    And at the seminar, he said, I'm going back to Stern. I'm going to start on a new game with Lyman Sheets. He's coming back to Stern, and we're starting like Monday. Something along those lines. He was like, holy crap, yay! Yay! Behind the scenes, Stern Pinball had actually changed a lot of his ownership structure. It needed to be bailed out, and it was bailed out by an investment consortium. The investors, yes. The investors came in and bailed him out. I don't know any of the other financial information, other than somehow through all that, Gary Stern still kind of stayed in charge. Yeah, so Gary Stern, you know, still involved with Stern, although a large part, we are not privy to any of that. I don't know any of that. That is a private company, a private investment firm. So it's all on their books. It's not sort of public knowledge. But there is some sort of ownership change there. Something similar happened to the investment firm, the investment dealership that I was working with in Toronto somewhere around that time. And very similar structure is that, you know, they needed a bailout. they went to somebody who was a big brother, and then that big brother came in and invested. A big person who was involved in then sort of rebuilding the team and the teams at Stern was George Gomez. So he was brought in, no longer a contractor or somebody outside. He was brought on as an employee, and he was given the task of building those design teams and creating basically the platform that would become what Stern is today. One of those people that George wanted was Mr. Steve Ritchie, and George Gomez was integral to getting Gary Stern and Steve Ritchie into the same room and discussing things that maybe they didn't want to talk about, but eventually Gary Stern and the new ownership brought in the legend, the king, Steve Ritchie. And, oh, man, did he kill it on his first game. Killed it! Yeah, I have this one, too. AC-DC, of course, named after the Australian band of the same name. Very nice, yes. March 2012, we're still in the Sam System board set. We don't have any sales numbers about this game. Lyman Sheets Jr. on software. John Yossi on art. Of course, he did Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. He's done Whirlwind. He did Adam's Family. You know, an absolute pillar in pinball art. And sound by David Thiel. my favorite sound person. I've heard over 5K with the sales numbers. Because they have so many different editions. So we are talking big.
    96:38
    And they still were printing this out when I joined the hobby in 2018. So ACDC is pretty good, isn't it? That's why I have one. I think so. I played a bunch of ACDC two weeks ago in an arcade one town over. And I really like this game. It is the ultimate Terminator 2. Very good analogy there. It's also the third consecutive game with the five targets on the left. So we're doing a little rinse and, you know, it's a greatest hit Steve Richie game. Oh, it is the greatest hit rinse and repeat design. It has the two ramps Terminator 2. It has a bell where the skull would be. It has the cannon. It's on the swing this time instead of on the right side. the orbits reversed from Terminator 2. It goes the other way. It has a diverter. God, I love diverters. The premium has a diverter, yes. We should talk about that. So around this time is when Stern started doing their new three-model system. So the new investors have come in, and they've done some market research. Yeah. And that market research says they need a pro and a premium alien. Yeah. Well, they started with, I think it was, they had Transformers, had the regular one, and then the LE. And Tron had the regular one and the LE. Now it's like, okay, we'll do three different models, the Pro, the Premium, and the LE. Yeah, if we're going to put the time and the effort into the LE, the design of the LE, the code of the LE, we might as well sell the LE as a Premium, a middle tier, and make the extra margin. Well-played investment firm. It was well played because multiple manufacturers have, after not doing that method, have kind of gone with that method to the point where, like, Jersey Jack has what the standard edition is the pro,
    98:34
    and then the LE is the premium, and the collector's edition is the LE. Yeah, and they've even forced spooky pinball into that. Yeah, they use these models. They use this model, but they just call it differently, which gets confusing. I wish they would have just agreed on terminology. Yeah. It's very, very, very good. Now, let's get into some. Let's get a little granular. Let's get in here. Yeah, this is a lineman game. This is coming up with a way to use the songs. Every song has its own shots. Every song is kind of its own thing. So one song is a spinner song. One song is a ramp song. One song is a drop target song. A particular drop target. So another song will be for the cannon. and another song will be for the Hell Playfield. Well, if you have a premium or LE. One other interesting, quote-unquote, innovation, which was actually borrowed from somebody else, are RGB inserts, so color-changing inserts.
    99:35
    And that, of course, is borrowed from Jersey Jack and The Wizard of Oz, but it's implemented here in a very smart way, where when you're chasing an arrow, that arrow is changing colors or strobing different colors or different rates based on some of the modes you're doing. So Lyman is all in on trying to do things very, very different. Yeah, and they're still on the SAM system, so it starts getting more and more complicated. There's more and more extra little mini boards to run a lot of this stuff, which will necessitate a new architecture soon. They're starting to max out the platform. Let's start first with Pro Premium LE. Let's start with Pro Artwork. Oh, my God. Everyone hated the Pro Artwork because in the center, in the way Steve Ritchie would always design these, he would do the Premium LE first, and then they would strip stuff for the Pro. Now, in the Premium and LE, it's got a play field underneath the main play field with a window. You look through and play. Think of like Congo. But one of those deals where it's got the little mini play field underneath. So on the Pro, there is no mini play field. So what do you do? You put a big picture of Angus Young's face. Now, it's hand-drawn. No, it's not Photoshopped like the rest of the play field is. It's one of the only hand-drawn parts. But it's like that famous Angus weird lip thing. And it looks horrible. So bad, in fact. They actually made an alternate version of this machine that did not have Angus in the front. It had the band members all collectively together. Yeah, they made so many versions of this game. The original Pros did not have the color-changing LEDs. They just had this regular incandescence. So then later versions of the Pro had the LEDs. They had the bell. The bell on the premium in L.E., it actually hit it and it swings on the pro. There was nothing to hit. It was just literally like a scoop. On later versions, they made it actually swing on the pros. They just did. I'm confused. There's so many versions of this game. The TNT drop target, so there's drop targets kind of right in that Terminator 2 spot next to the ramp. Those are stand-ups on the Pro, and they're drop targets on the Premium. The same thing for the targets on the left side, ACDC. On the Premium LE, if you have the TNT targets down, there's a stand-up in the center. You hit it, and it makes the – what's that thing called? The plunger? No, it's not called a plunger. You know, the explosion thing that they have in the old West shows? Cartoons where they put dynamite and they run it to the thingamabobby and then they push down on it. That thing.
    102:37
    I'm thinking plunger. That's not called a plunger. It has a term. Shoot us an email. Silverballchronicles at gmail.com. Tell me how right I am. It's definitely not called a plunger. But, yeah, it's got – we got the old spinner in the usual left spot. Steve likes it. And it's a thick spinner, right? It's got that wide – so you can backhand that spinner. You can backhand. It's a Steve Ritchie game, so you can backhand almost everything. Plastic ramp. Plastic ramps. We have a cannon on the sling that obscures any shots on the right side. It is a very poor place. It is hard to see anything over there. But that is ACDC. It is. You want to talk stacked. This is stacked. There is a lot, especially the premium. Oh, upgraded speaker. He used a slightly bigger woofer in the cabinet. Got a 12-inch. And if I remember, with this one, it was the pros came out first. They had issues with the lightning bolts. It has lightning bolts, the little plastic lightning bolts that are above some of the stand-ups, and they would get hit and break. So they put metal backing, they started putting metal backing behind the lightning bolts, but then that made it so you couldn't see the light through them anymore. But at least they didn't break. The original model of the under the playfield hell, it's sort of a devil-shaped thing. It's got two mini flippers. It's got like an orbit and three stand-ups, which is kind of neat. And it's in the shape of a face of a person, the inserts. I think it's actually quite cool. It had an original version which was attached to the playfield, and once that went hazy with a chipped ball, you were done. Later models had ones that you could remove with screws to buy a new one to stick it on. But on the original ACDCs, it wasn't removable. It was actually just a huge insert. And on their initial, all their LEs and their initial premiums, they screwed up the clear coat and it became like this haze. And that's the version I have because I have one of the early premiums. I like to think of it as, it's hell, it's smoke. This game was such a big seller. And back in the day when they would make a relative big seller, Back in the day when they would have a big seller, they would literally sell all those units in like six months. And it would be on the line and off the line like right away. Well, this one, the new philosophy is run it till it's dead. Yep. It got a little wishy-washy with the way they were running it. So they ran a pro. They did the pros first, and then they did the LEs next. So then there was a back and black LE. and a Let There Be Rock LE.
    105:23
    So there's two LEs. Then they did the premiums. So then they did the premiums, which is the LE without the fancy plaque and stuff. Then they did a Lucy premium. So what's a Lucy premium? It's got a hot woman on it. Basically. That's the whole idea. And supposedly she's part of their artwork on one of their tours. Yeah, it's like a voluptuous Satan rocker. Yeah. This is not living room household. It is, in my opinion, really, really good art. It's better than what they had. When it comes to rock and roll art, it is much better. It is hand-drawn. It is what it is. Let's put it that way. It's the better one. Then they had the vault edition. So then they ran them again as vaults. Which are like, it's been, I don't know, like what, six years and we're just going to run them again? I don't know when they called them a vault or not. So they had the Vault Pro, the Vault Premium, and the Vault Lucy Premium. Which were slightly different because the drummer, Phil Rudd, he got in trouble. He tried to arrange the, he wanted someone killed. Yes, he was arrested. He was arrested because the person he was asking to do the killing was like an undercover cop. and, God, I hate when that happens. Somehow he got off, but at the time it was still a thing. So he was erased from the artwork. It got dropped, however. So he's back with, like, their latest album. He's on it. He's in all the videos. So I would assume if Stern ever ran it again, he could be back in the artwork. So this machine is very much seen as the resurrection of the pinball industry. This is the beginning of the long climb up the mountain. Yeah, I put Tron up there, too. That was another one. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, the late, like 2010, when Tron came out, Transformers, when they actually did an LE, it's like, well, they're doing LEs. They've got to be doing a little better if they're doing different versions. Yeah, the new ownership has kind of made some changes, but it's not just the new ownership. It's also sort of the great recession is very much in the rearview mirror. The recovery, although taking a very long time to begin, has started. Unless I'm missing anything, ACTC might have been the first game that they, the three-model thing that they do now, in the order they do it, like the LE first, well, pros first, then the LEs, then the premiums. Yeah, it's, you know, I would put this machine up there with, you know, Space Shuttle as an important pinball machine, sort of in the history of the ebbs and flows of pinball. And in fact, Peter Morrison, one of our, you know, pinball brethren out there, he would say this pinball machine was one of the most talked about pins on Pinside back in the day. Pinside hated it initially, but the bandwagon love came after a few code updates. Steve Ritchie and Lyman at their best. Pinside loves Lyman. So now we are getting into the online internet culture critiquing games and the excitement around those games as they're released. Very exciting. So let's talk about my favorite Steve Ritchie machine. Airborne Avenger?
    109:01
    Ron, do you like lens flares in your movies? No, I hate them. Well, Ron, you're going to love 2009's Star Trek by J.J. Abrams. I hate J.J. Abrams. He ruined two franchises. I mean, the first Star Trek, it was kind of cool to see everyone not old, but when they did the second one, oh, they're so bad. I disagree. You're wrong. That's okay. I don't like J.J. Abrams very much. I do very much like his the first two Star Trek movies I kind of like the third one's good the first Star Trek of 2009 the reboot Star Trek the one that we're talking about now man oh man that's almost a masterpiece in fact lens flares aside no but the first two were used for this game and we're about to talk about based on what they call the Kelvin timeline which is a nerdy way to say that it's not connected to the original series and the next generation and the new show Picard and all that stuff and Deep Space Nine. All that is kind of like its own timeline, and this is its own splinter timeline because they use real time travel in Star Trek and not that really stupid Back to the Future stuff. People don't just fade away. That is ridiculous. Anyhoo, so this is a reboot, and this was, let's call it like what it is, like basically the first actual real reboot of a franchise that has existed. So before you didn't really have reboot movies where you're like, let's just throw everything out and start again. You always kind of had to find a way to continue. I don't see this as a reboot. These are prequels. This is like young Kirk. Yeah, but it was a reboot. They restart the James Kirk thing. They wanted to restart Star Trek because after Nemesis, we can all agree, you jump the shark. They needed to inject some excitement Actually, I never saw Nemesis Oh, don't Don't do it It's bad I managed to avoid some of the bad ones I've noticed It's worse than the motion picture I missed Star Trek V, which everyone hated But I saw VI was great Undiscovered Country Yeah, the one with the Klingons have pink blood Yeah, oh, so good Anywho, nerding is way out of the way We're talking about pinball Woo! Yeah, so basically what happens is they time travel back to James Kirk and Spock and McCoy in an alternate reality. This stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, who kills it as Spock, Eric Bana as the bad guy Nero, and I'm going to say it, Carl Urban playing probably the greatest Dr. McCoy anybody could imagine. It also stars Leonard Nimoy as the original Spock, who goes back in time. Super, super cool. Actually, when Leonard Nimoy passed away, my wife and I were still living in Toronto, and my wife took me to a special movie screening of this movie, where the music was played by the Kitchener Philharmonic Orchestra, live, while the movie was playing. And it was something else stunning. It is released in May of 2009. It has a budget of $150 million. It did a $385 million box office. Adjusted for inflation, this beats out Star Trek First Contact as the best opening of a Star Trek movie ever and was the highest grossing Star Trek film. This holds a 94% approval Rotten Tomatoes score and it is the highest-rated Star Trek movie behind Star Trek First Contact. Oh, that's lame. Wrath of Khan is number one. Come on. Brought Tomatoes has lost all credibility. Fail. Anyway, it spawned a successful sequel, which was Star Trek Into Darkness, which, of course, had the Star Trek cast, and Benedict Cumberbatch is Khan. Yeah, Sherlock is Khan. No, doesn't work. Yes. No, it was good. I've seen it. No, I will fight you over Benedict Cumberbatch. You can fight me. Ricardo Montalban would kick his butt. Yeah. What is he like? That guy's like 80. Well, Ricardo Montalban's dead, but when he was conned in the movie, when he was 60 years old, he would beat him up. Benedict Cumberbatch would kick the crap out of a dead man. Is there a pinball in here somewhere?
    113:38
    All right. So the second movie has an 84% Rotten Tomatoes. So they picked a blockbuster franchise. and they jammed both of those movies into this pin. So this is, of course, a space battle sci-fi Star Trek theme. Called Star Trek. Yeah, this is October of 2013. We're still on the SAM system. We don't know the production run of this, but man, oh man, they ran this forever. I think they even ran it last year in 2020. Well, 2019 for sure. Software by Lonnie Ropp, who is Bruce Nightingale's favorite pinball programmer. Tanya Kleiss, who is a name that has become very popular since Deadpool. Weishen Cheng, who, of course, works at Stern as a backup programmer. And there's also some late code additions by Dwight Sullivan. Artwork by Greg Freris, Kevin O'Connor, John Yosey, and Stephen Martin. Sound, and probably his greatest sound package, David Thiel. Or second, it's probably second best. Tron, obviously, David Thiel. More trivia is originally the software was supposed to be Lyman. This was going to be another Lyman-Ritchie game. But Lyman got taken off this to do Metallica. Yeah, I guess. This is probably my favorite Steve Ritchie pin. I mean, it's Star Trek. It's the theme, right? It's also, my goodness, the flowiest flow beast, greatest layout of all time. So if you think of ACDC being basically the perfect layout refined of T2, Star Trek is basically the perfect refined version of Spider-Man, don't you think? All right, I'll go with that. All of your, you know, problems with Star Trek aside, when it comes to layout and layout alone, it is Steve Ritchie's greatest. It's his flowiest game. I'll say that. Nothing flows quite like Star Trek. God, does that fence hurt your butt?
    115:43
    You're always sitting on that fence. I'm always sitting on the fence. You're always sitting on the fence. Okay, so let's jump into this. While I was doing my research for this Ron Hallett, I found something particularly interesting. Oh, did you now? And I was around this time, so I'm going to see how your research is. So I found a YouTube video. and starring in that YouTube video of somebody who's talking about their Star Trek LE from January of 2014 is Ron Howard. Oh, is that the one where I talk about all the issues I had with him? It is. And my favorite part is when you awkwardly look at the camera and say, hello there. Like you're almost like a murderer. It's awesome. I'm going to put the link in the show notes. There's another video I did, Chris Bucci, where I played it for him that I'm in. That's much more pro, pro, professionally done than that video. You have always been a pinball influencer, haven't you? A pinball influencer. A pinfluencer, if you will. We're talking YouTube unboxing, more or less, video from 2014. You have always been ahead of the curve, haven't you, Ron? Always ahead of the curve. And that's why you make this show better. I didn't get stuck with one of those deadbeats like Joel Engelberth. I got you.
    117:00
    So you had some critiques about Star Trek, particularly the LE, didn't you? You want to tell me about some of those? Oh, God, that video was so long ago. What did I say? My particular LE had all kinds of weird issues. They ran stuff wrong. I had to fix a bunch of stuff with it. You were not a big fan of the rattling backless. The ship? God, I had so many issues with the ship. On Star Trek, well, on the Pro, the ship just has like a single coil, and whenever you hit the target below it, it moves around. Think like Green Goblin. It just jiggles. Yeah, it just jiggles. It's like a fighter on a spring. That's basically what it is. It's a big vengeance ship on a spring. On the LE Premium, it's more complicated. It moves all over the place, and then it crashes. The whole thing moves forward and down and then locks. The first time I played mine, it did that, and then when the mode ended, it wouldn't come back up. It just stayed there. So I had issues. I had the ship apart at least three or four times. And there's times where the ship will actually pull the wires off. Yeah, if you don't do it, yeah. You have to feed them through correctly. And then once my mom played it and the entire ship fell off.
    118:11
    The screw sheared off and it just fell off. They also didn't have those aluminum protectors on the plastic ramps that got hammered a lot. Yeah, the cool story about Star Trek is the version that you see now is not the version that was supposed to come out. And you can see that version online. You head out to Stern Pinball's YouTube page, and you look at their original Star Trek trailer they did. And you are keen-eyed. You might notice, like, hey, that's different. on the left side of Star Trek when you hit it in the scoop on a premium in LE it has a vertical up kicker that fires it up into a web slinger as Steve Ritchie would call it back to a habit trail that was not the original design was it actually would fire it up and back towards the warp ramp via a habit trail so it actually go on to the warp ramp come all the way around back up to your right upper flipper That was the original design. That would have been so freaking cool. I wish they would have kept that. But in testing, Stern does a lot of low-power testing. They will test games at low power to see if stuff still works right, and that did not work at low power. So they could not use it. They couldn't have a situation where the thing fired up and then just couldn't get out of habit trail and kept firing over and over, so they had to scrap it. And this LE is basically the last of the greats. It is the last of the great LEs that was really different then. Because now most of the LEs are just improved or different art and maybe a real backlash. Other than that, it's the same as a premium. So the Star Trek LE, it had these side blades that had a cutout picture of the new hot rod Enterprise. And it had lights. Think Hot Rails from Guns N' Roses or the new Led Zeppelin things. But you can see them through the inside and the outside. This was the last real alley they did. To give you an idea, my podcast mate on my other podcast, Lampto Podcast, Bruce, he had a premium on order. Then he took the factory tour, and he saw this. Because the alleys weren't out yet, but they had one at the factory. And he saw those lasers.
    120:31
    And he called up and said, I changed my order. I want the alley. Call me crazy, but I actually like the premium better. I like the action shot on the side art better. But the LE has extra lighting in the head with the Starfleet insignias. It's got the different speaker panel, the lasers on the side, different art package, and it's all blue trim. Gorgeous. And that's the Starfield projector on the LEs and the premium. It's just like a laser pointer. It just gives like a – it's a cool effect. 100% RGB inserts across the entire Premium and LE. Premium and LE, which they actually had to make two different play fields for it. The Premium LE play fields, the inserts are just clear. On the Pro, they're colored. They have different colors. It is amazing. It's just so wonderful. But I've got to tell you, the sound package on this. Well, the funny thing, when this game first came out, it had very early software, and a lot of the call-outs were obvious placeholders done by staff, by Stern staff, and they were bad, really bad. Because they had Carl Urban that eventually would do call-outs. Yeah, eventually. From what I remember, he came in later. Like, the game was already out, because they recorded all his stuff in New Zealand. I think that's where he's from. And he sent it in, and when they first put it in the game, it was way louder than any of the other call-outs. They had to do some balancing with that. And they didn't originally have the medals, the whole medal structure, which Dwight Sullivan came in at the end, and everyone thought he put it in the game, but I guess the medals were always in there. They just weren't implemented until he took over. Yeah, they didn't have time to sort of finalize and polish it all up, and that's more or less what Dwight did, contrary to what Bruce Nightingale would say. This is the second game by Steve Ritchie, which had the lockdown fire button, which is basically a Stern staple now, the first one being ACDC. Again, more Steve Ritchie innovation. When you hear this machine, you know it's there on location because it gets up into the pops, which is a very safe pop area. It's not very dangerous. There's lots of pop action. And up there, those lanes also do your bonus multiplier, and it makes this transporter noise that is very distinct, and you can hear that on location like crazy. And it might have one of the sweetest side ramps ever. When you start looping it over and over. That repeatable side ramp is insane. Yeah. Does the artwork suck? It's hand-drawn for the most part, but it's very, it doesn't suck, but it's not great. Let's put it that way. Yeah, I agree. I'm not offended, but I really like it. I think it fits the theme very well. I don't know really what I would like, would I want a bunch of the characters hand-drawn by Christopher Franchi on the playfield? Probably not, actually. I think this fits really well. I'm trying to think if there's any other notes about the game I can think of. It does have a ball hang up in the pop-up area that they tried some fixes with. One of them was just putting a screw right in the playfield so the ball couldn't get stuck on the one pop-up. Ah, the old screw in the playfield. Classic. And I always had issues with the drop target. As a single drop target in front of the ship. The original Scott Denise. Not really. There's a magnet behind it, so it's really not the same thing. But it controls. It can go up or down. It can, well, drop targets go down. But it can control itself. But I always had issues with, like, double hits. You would hit it. It tries to go up, and then it falls down and gives you a second phantom hit. I've seen multiple Star Treks with that issue. It has one of the sweetest shots in pinball, which is shooting behind the flipper into the shooter lane. Spider-Man makes a return. He took the Spider-Sense shot and made it better and made it more a part of the game. And he made that side ramp, made it repeatable, made it better. Okay, we've gushed over Star Trek enough. And they made a ton of them. They made a lot of them. This game is a masterpiece. It's not overly complicated. It's fast. It's flowy. It's a great theme. And are you going to ask me the question everyone asks me? Why did you sell it? I have Spider-Man, and Spider-Man has more of a soul. Sorry.
    125:02
    What's more of a soul mean? I've asked you this before, but let the... The game has more of a personality to me. It's the call-outs, it's the Jameson, it's just... The Lyman Code. I love a game where all I have to do is chop wood. I'm a tournament player. You don't have to chop wood. I mean, you can just play it to get to Spider-Man. and you can play to just get to Battle Royale. That's all I ever get to. I'm never going to see the Wizard mode. Actually, Wizard modes in both Spider-Man and Star Trek are going to take you a long time to get to. Just put it on five ball, man. Oh, God. Star Trek has, what, five-year mission. Basically, there's a grid in the center of the play field. You complete it once. It's, what, Kobayashi Maru? Yes. And the second time is Enterprise Amok, and the third time is five-year mission. Yeah, and each time you complete one of those, like, sides of the triangle, it gives you, like, super ramps or super props. Yeah, you get, like, rows and stuff. You get different, yeah. And then you can stack those rows vertically. It's a very cool game. And, you know, it is simple, quote, unquote, simple code, but it's brilliant. I hope you're enjoying this latest episode of the Star Trek Appreciation Club podcast. That's right. So they did a pro, a premium, and an LE run. Then when, you know, eventually down the road they vaulted both the pro and the premium, just like they did with ACDC, and they called it the vault. Then they vaulted the vault. They vaulted it again where then they added the LEDs to the pro. Pro. But they didn't use, of course, they didn't use the RGBs. They just used instead of incandescent bulbs. Then they vaulted the vault vault for a Final Voyage edition. And what was the big difference between the Final Voyage edition on the Pro and Premium run? I don't know. It was a sticker. Oh, wow. Yep. It has a sticker that said Final Voyage. It's kind of like the original Black Knight LE. It has a sticker in the middle that said LE. Yep. Nice. That was the Final Voyage Vault Edition. So if you've got that sticker, that's worth more. Okay, so his next game. This is where things get weird. Weird? He does Game of Thrones, which was a big license. It was really hot at the time the game was made. Did you watch Game of Thrones? I never watched Game of Thrones, no. What? I ask you every month if you watch any of these movies or any of these shows, And you don't watch any? I don't have TV. I don't have cable. I'm not watching. Nobody has cable nowadays. It's 2021. It wasn't then.
    127:51
    It's 2013 we're talking about. You didn't watch Game of Thrones? Nah. I didn't really have an interest. What are you watching right now? Tell the people, Ron. I don't watch television shows. I watch occasional weird movies. Do you read? No, I don't really read either. Unless it's a manual or something. Ron, are you a serial killer? No, I go on this thing called the Internet, where you can just watch anything you want at any time. It's great. But not TV shows. Just go YouTube, watch videos. What's the problem? There's only so much Zach Minney you can watch on YouTube, man. Who? Oh, sorry, sorry.
    128:23
    Wow. So Game of Thrones. So this doesn't quite seem like a theme for pinball to me. Really? I don't know. I just don't. There's this one and Stranger Things. I just don't feel like that's a pinball theme. It's a super popular show. It made sense. And as you've noticed, the super popular show is a really good theme. Steve seems to get them. Yeah. He's the guy that ends up getting these big, big ones. He's always got them. Since T2 on, he's always been give Steve the big one. This is. So with this game, he's back full time here with his guy, Dwight Sullivan. You know, Dwight finished up Star Trek. But with this game, they're back together. So this pin is based on the HBO show Game of Thrones, which is based on the book by George R.R. Martin. Now, he didn't finish the books yet, right? So they kind of went off script and everyone hated the last season. How do you know all of these references if you haven't seen any of these shows? See, that I know. And I know it has lots of violence and nudity. Well, yeah, it's HBO, right? HBO loves the lady parts. and the stabby parts. So there's two significant differences in Game of Thrones Pro and Game of Thrones Premium LE, right? Like, this is where we're starting to see some serious, stark differences. Now, between the Premium and the LE, there's not as much of a difference, but between the Pro and the LE... Yes, well, it depends how much you're into art, because I know some people who hated the LE art. So this game was released in 2016.
    130:10
    Steve Ritchie did the design. The art was by Greg Freras, Steve Martin, Stephen Martin, and Dave Link.
    130:18
    Dots and animation by a gentleman named Chuck Ernst. This is one of his first games at Stern and the team that he's leading there. We've got mechanics by Tom Capera, who, of course, we know from other episodes and being the master of all things. Master of Max Mechanical. We've got Brian Schmidt on music, sound by Ken Hale, John Hay, and we're seeing somebody here almost for the first time, not for the first time, but the first-ish time since we've talked about him, Jerry Thompson, who is the amazing sound person at Stern at the moment. Software by an all-star lineup now. We're not getting just one or two people now. We're getting Dwight Sullivan, Waysen Chung, Tanya Cleaves, Lonnie Robb. Dwight Sullivan was definitely the lead on this game. He was the lead, that's for sure.
    131:19
    Stephen Martin did the backlash. Greg Ferrer sort of did everything else. How would you describe the art?
    131:29
    Polarizing. On Game of Thrones art. My wife, although not a big pinball player, does enjoy pinball. She enjoys playing the games, but she enjoys, you know, the aesthetics of pinball, which is, you know, it's funny enough, it is an art piece, you know, amongst itself. Now, real art people would say, well, pinball can't be art because art is just for itself. This is a machine that does a bunch of things. But as an all-over package, she hates this game and would never own it just because it bothers her that much. The other reason she couldn't own Game of Thrones is because South Park did a parody about Game of Thrones in which they joked and made a funny song about the Game of Thrones song in which she cannot get out of her head. Da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da. Yep, and that song is in the game. So you talked about Dwight Sullivan being the codemaster on this. Oddly enough, this machine was finished in 2015, and it had a software code update which overhauled a lot of it and a lot of the premium LE in 2019. And that's because the code on this is you have all these different houses you can pick, and they give you different abilities.
    132:54
    This is something else. This is why I would want a lot of knowing what houses to pick, when to pick them. They have different power-ups and what's the best strategy, et cetera. And then you had the houses fight each other, and then if you won, you got to combine those houses. Yeah, there was a lot of updates to try to do some balancing with the scoring, et cetera, et cetera.
    133:23
    It had drop targets on the left. It had a drop target, a single drop target in front of the ramp, which led to the upper play field. The premium LE has an actual upper play field, not a piece of Lexan with the stuff on it. This is an actual wood upper play field.
    133:40
    And the upper play field has in lanes and full-size flippers. And a dragon. Which is cool. And a frigging dragon that moves, man. And it has this really cool battering ram mech, which I don't think gets enough credit. It has an iron throne that the ball can sit in, if you will. But it's almost impossible to get the ball to sit in there. And, yes, the battering ram, when you hit that, when you get in a multi-ball and you get jackpots and you hit that battering ram, you get the getaway super jackpot animation, basically. It's what you get. And it's awesome. Dwight Sullivan reused that awesome idea that he did on getaway. It just does this spell out.
    134:27
    You just want to hit it over and over again. The light show is something else on this game. So when you get up to that upper playfield and you get into, like, what they call, what is it, dragon multiball?
    134:40
    Or dragon jackpots or something? The RGB inserts will glow from the dragon's mouth on the top playfield. And it goes down the top playfield, then down onto the main playfield. Like fire is spreading down along the playfield. It is awesome. You get into, like, winter is coming, which is a wizard mode, and it's white, and it sounds like you're in a storm, and the lights are flickering. This is the game, that's why it's all the really guy's reputation of just blinding the player, just out and out blinding them, because there is, like you said, winter is coming.
    135:22
    Default settings, it will blind you. It's awesome. I like this game a lot. I've played it a few times. The problem is, to really enjoy this game, you have to have it in a home setting. You've got to play it a lot. You have to take the good with the bad, right? Now, tournament players, I've been told, much prefer the pro. It depends. Why is that? I prefer, and this is probably one of the first games I could think of where a lot of people were like, you know, I like the pro better. It doesn't have the upper play field. and it flows much more because of that. It's not there. There's less stopping and there's way more flow.
    136:08
    So the ball is always moving. It's got two crisscross ramps, which are pretty cool. One ramp goes up and over the other. The other one goes in the middle, and they're kind of in the middle. They're not on the outside. The ramps are entryways or in the middle of the play field. One kind of goes up and to the left. One goes under and to the right. So they crisscross. They're really neat. And the lock is cool. It's got like a chop thing. It's supposed to simulate it chopping you.
    136:37
    Yeah it like a sword and it on a coil and it hold the ball and then it lift itself up And interestingly enough when the ball goes up that green ramp and crosses the switch it will release any locked balls from the lock down even quicker. Yeah, Lord of the Rings.
    136:59
    Very cool, very cool. This one also has a dragon, the pro, but not on the upper play field. It also has the throne, but you can't put anything in the throne. It just sits there. Mm-hmm. Kind of boring. But it's cool. It's a cool game.
    137:17
    I think it's criminally underrated. It is a little bit of rinse and repeat. They sold a good amount of them. It's fairly popular.
    137:27
    You've got a really wide left spinner into the orbit. It's fan layout to a T. And this is Steve Ritchie's first Spike game. We don't have the LCD yet, but we have Spike. You might say, what's Spike? That's their new board set, their new board system, which I think Alignment Sheets did a lot of work on.
    137:52
    Basically, we finally have stereo. Something awesome with the sounds on that Spike system. And Jerry Thompson, who's the sound person, the sound lead on this game, he is in his element when we talk about in future episodes about the Spike System. But it's still got the dot matrix for now.
    138:16
    Yeah, but man, the animation on that dot matrix is amazing. Well, now let's get into something here. Okay, this is stern saw an opportunity to partner with probably the biggest pop culture brand of all time. Pokemon? Oh, no. I'm sorry. Why? Why do you do this to me every month? I'm talking Star Wars. Oh, yeah. And none of this J.J. Abrams Star Wars. No, the proper Star Wars. We're talking original trilogy Star Wars. None of this prequel stuff.
    138:54
    There's no Jar Jar Binks. We are getting the Star Wars that we want. Well, they use the specialized edition of the movies. so I didn't get exactly what I wanted but yes. You're getting a little bit. Yeah. It's close enough. It's close enough. We're not going to go into a Star Trek love fest here about Star Wars. Steve Ritchie got to work with Disney and Lucasfilm and he had a name for them. Oh. I know because he told it to us when we went on a factory tour and he was our tour guy. Oh exciting. He called them Bukist Film. Oh no that's not good. He was not happy with that. So this is August of 2017.
    139:34
    This is the Spike 2 system. We don't have any sales numbers. We have sound by Jerry Thompson, software by Dwight Sullivan again, artwork by a million people, and I can't even tell you who they are, but my god, too many cooks in the kitchen. But thank god for Randy Martinez, who came out and did the comic book edition to save the arse on this. Star Wars is not a bad game. It's one of Stern's best. I am contrarian. Most people are contrarian to me on this. The first few times, so I haven't played this a lot. Let's put it that way. First of all, you own it. You've played it a lot. I've seen you stream it. It is a thing of beauty when you are. I will be streaming it probably right after we're done recording. When you are battling this machine, it is something else. I am not a top 1,000 player like you, and I haven't played it very much. I've played it probably a dozen times. But the more I play it, the more I love this game. There you go. Let me go through a few of the things here. Okay. The first time I played this game, and Everybody, you're listening to a pinball history podcast, a niche hobby. You've all played Star Wars. You know what's going on here, okay? You plunge this ball, and it has the Steve Ritchie across the playfield plunge. And it's got this stand-up bank of targets under a screen. Yep, three bank, the old three bank. And you hit that bank, and that is going right down the middle or out the left end line. So you don't do that. you've got a, what is it, like five bank on the left side of drop targets.
    141:25
    And you can plunge into those. But you don't want to do that because it goes right out the left. Well, the left has five drop targets.
    141:34
    Yeah. But you don't want to shoot into those five drop targets because it's going out that left. Well, I'll stop you right here because in the latest code revision, you get a ball save even if you train twice.
    141:46
    So it is. So that takes your argument right out of there. The left out lane in Star Wars is so big that you could drive Spaceball 1 through. Okay.
    142:00
    And if you don't get that reference, throw that into your Google machine. It is massive. Like, huge. Even if you move the left post all the way to the quote-unquote easy setting, it is still like two ball widths huge. So you have got to be on all the time when you're playing this machine. You've got to be on the ball, just right out of the gate. So again, Steve Ritchie gets the huge license, gets to work with a difficult licensor.
    142:32
    They did have full access. They were able to use all these clips from Star Wars, the full John Williams score, which is awesome. The only thing that they could not use, I learned in a podcast, which I think was on it with Jerry Thompson, but I can't really remember, is they were not allowed to use the video clips from the movie of the speeder bike chase from Return of the Jedi with the troops. I'm almost positive those clips are in there. Yeah, but they are of Luke and Leia, not of the Stormtroopers. And the reason is the Stormtroopers were in a union. Not the Stormtroopers. The actors of the Stormtroopers were in a union, and they own the rights to all of the clips of them on speeder bikes. Wow, that almost sounds like fake. Because I heard they couldn't use Admiral Ackbar either because he's a separate license. which I don't understand how he's a separate license. The first time I played Star Wars, I put a ball right out the left out lane, and I got a ball save. Here's your ball back! And then that went right down the middle. And then the second ball I played, and I hit that three bank target and went right down the middle, and I got, what's the other call out for the ball save? Ball save! And then it went up, it hit the five bank target, and went out the left out lane. The first time, and I immediately go, this game is horrible. This is the worst game ever. How is this fun? And then I played it a few more times, and I got to the point where I was like, okay, you have to kick the crap out of this game. You can't just nudge it and bump the ball around, right? It's somewhat mean. Like, you have to physically fight this machine. It's not, like, lazy. It's like you've got to frigging kick it. Now, the big difference is in the versions this time. We have the premium LE, you have the Hyperloop, which is cool when it works. That's one of the reasons I ended up with a Pro. So it's like the high-speed loop, right, where there's a magnet. It's like a getaway loop, except it goes all around the play field. The issue is when you feed it into the loop, it goes up like a little mini ramp will come up to get it into the loop, and it rejects the loop. Two fingers pop up out of the play field, and you kind of... Yeah, and it rejects a lot. Because there's a magnet in there, sort of like the T-Rex. Well, once it gets to a certain point, the magnet gets it. But it just, a lot of rejects. It's not entirely smooth. It has a Death Star that cracks open when you blow it off. Now, does that reject, does that bother you because you're a tournament player and you're missing out on points and all that stuff? No, it bothers me because it's clunky as hell, and it rejects a lot, at least when I played it. And you can't backhand the shot either because it... I've played it a few times, and I have got rejects, but I would say it's like one out of every five. Yeah, but not just that. The actual Hoff shot will reject because it's different over on the other side. It comes around, boom, and it'll just bounce right out, and it doesn't count it. That gets frustrating.
    145:53
    But it's a cool little feature. The Pro does not have the Hyperloop or the exploding Death Star. It's just a static Death Star piece. And it has plastic ramps instead of metal ramps.
    146:04
    So when you're talking speed, it is super fast, because plastic ramps have less friction than a metal ramp, and they don't kind of clunk up quite as the same as a metal ramp. It's like plastic ramps suck a ball up. I don't know how the physics works on that. I'm sure Gomez and those guys get it, but it is cool. Where this game really was polarizing was the use of the action button and the multipliers. Yes. So when I play this game, the reason I like it so much is because I don't care about the multipliers. I don't even pay attention to them. I don't know how to start them. I don't know how to move them around. I don't know what the green versus the red, which I think is on and off. I don't know if I'm supposed to chase them around the play field. I think it has something to do with the three bank. Yes, the three bank. I don't care, and I enjoy it. You don't have to care. But that's exactly it. People are like, oh, well, the multiplier is horrible. This is the worst game ever. It's like, well, don't play with the multiplier. If you have, like, a 20x multiplier on the Death Star shot, and you hit one of the hurry-ups, and you get, like, a billion with one shot, you'll be liking the multipliers. Yeah, but it's not – I don't have to put everything on that. Should we also talk about the – so this came out. I would say the year before I joined the hobby. So I'm still not allowed to have an opinion on the hobby. And it was polarizing when it came out just because. And when it came out, it crushed a lot of people's feelings. It doesn't have a lightsaber. It doesn't, you know, it should have more magnets. Like the ball should go across the play field like Dracula because it's the force. There was so many. The artwork is terrible. The tie fire on a spring. The Death Star cracking open is lame. There was, yeah, it was a very polarizing title. So what the hell happened with Star Wars? It seems like when you play it, you've got a game that is like, this is Steve Ritchie's fastest game ever. It's fast. It's fast. And you've got a left and right orbit, which is like a rocket. You've got next to that, you have a horseshoe, which is very much like No Fear. but it comes at you even faster. Yeah. Then in the middle of the horseshoe, you've got a ramp which goes to the left, and on the Premium LE, it goes to the left with metal, and again, it's faster with the thing. It has an up post to stop the ball on that ramp to start modes. It has the three bank of death under a screen, which basically says nothing. Then it has a ramp that goes up and around, and then on the Premium LE, it has this hyper mode. And the plate fill was polarizing. The software was also polarizing. There was nothing. There's nothing in the middle of the plate fill. In fact, the shots are so far back. It's amazing how they're even ramps work. They're so far back. But this was also polarizing in things like when you start a mode, if you drain out, when your next ball starts, you're still in the mode. You have to finish everything. That pissed people off. Yeah, there's no timing out here. one of the critiques of the artwork in general is that they put a bunch of inserts and stuff in the middle to make it look full and I don't agree with that commentary I think they put a bunch of inserts and images down there because there's a lot of modes there's a lot of wizard modes it has the hot dog inserts which are a Steve Ritchie staple if you played High Speed if you played Firepower has them Where else? There's something else that has them. Oh, Star Trek. They're the shields. Steve Ritchie loves his hot dog inserts. Now, this is one of the first LCD Spike 2 games. And they're still trying to figure out how to properly implement the LCD. But in this case, you have the assets of the movie clips, so it helps a lot. What does Steve say about it?
    150:12
    Here's what Steve says about Star Wars. It got intense on Star Wars. I don't hate the game. Wow, he says that a lot. It's like his life. I don't hate the game. There's a lot about it that makes it one of the most authentic games we've ever made. There's actual footage. There's speech from all the cast. It isn't the game itself. It's the vibes that came with it. The vibes that came with it. Now, this is from an episode of Special When Lit, a former podcast of Ken Cromwell.
    150:40
    And they also talk about Greg Freres. They talk with Greg Ferreres on the art and Chuck Ernst on the video assets, along with an episode of Steve Ritchie. And you get little clips and little bits and pieces. People are very scared at Stern, and so they should be, to say what happened with Star Wars, this original Star Wars game. They're very cagey, right? They won't tell you, even in private, kind of what happened. They'll tell you little bits and pieces. Because they want to continue to work with Disney. They don't want to piss them off. Because you are crazy if you come out and say anything bad about Star Wars. In fact, there was a person who did an interview with Kaneda on the Kaneda's Pinball podcast. I can't remember. I think it was Jody. Dankenberg? I can't remember who it was.
    151:37
    And Stern heard the podcast before he had released it. and this is before Kaneda burnt all his bridges at Stern, and they would not let him post it because there was some critical conversation about what happened around Star Wars. So they are particularly sensitive about what the hell happened during this game. And you can kind of see, when you look at this machine, that there is a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen thing. Stuff is a bit of a mess. They did an alternate artwork package later on, the comic book edition,
    152:05
    I think to try to help with some of the criticisms of the artwork. But all you need to know about the licensing hell is the topper.
    152:12
    Star Wars has a R2-D2 topper, which is awesome. One of the greatest toppers of all time. But it took, like, two years to get approved. It was a running joke. You would take the Stern tour during Expo, and you would see their Star Wars with the topper on it. So you knew what the topper looked like. You knew what it was. But it just took that long to get it approved. It was insane. Mind-blowing. And then it showed up, and it's like basically made with Sharpie. And there's like, oh, yeah, man. Have you seen it? I've got one. It's awesome. It's called my topper. I would definitely own a comic Star Wars, either the premium or the pro. I really, really would. I like the premium art better because it's imperial. The imperial. Yeah. Money aside, the fact that I just don't have, you know, $11,000 Canadian to buy a premium or whatever. Money aside, if I just had, you know, somebody's like, hey, I will give you this, too. I'm like, I don't want my pinball muggle friends that come over and be like, wow, pinball, right? And to do the plunge of death and to have that game just rip them apart. Wow. Because I think that that would just crush them, right? And when my friends come over, I want them to have fun when they play pinball. I don't want them to be destroyed. Well, speaking of getting crushed, the next game, Steve was sick of the licenses.
    153:41
    And I think with the combination of his tenure and all the hits he had, they decided to give him a chance to do a non-licensed game, which it still was a license. They gave him a lot of rope. And I'm surprised that, one, they took the risk, and, two, he was able to convince them to take the risk. So he did a third Black Knight game. So it's really not an original theme. It is a license. They had to pay Williams for it, but he could basically do whatever he wanted. He didn't have to worry about Disney or Lucasfilm or whoever. Black Knight, Sword of Rage. So this is the third in the trilogy, Sword of Rage. And I remember when the trailer for this game came out, it came out right after Texas Pinball Festival, and it was the single greatest teaser trailer CERT has ever done. Absolutely ever.
    154:37
    As soon as you saw this, you were like, oh, my God. So I joined the hobby in the summer of 2018, and that's not very long. Like, let's call it a day of spades. Yeah. I came in right after Iron Maiden was released and right at the Deadpool slash Beatles release. And, man, I was like, oh, Deadpool, that is awesome. And then I'm kind of I'm still learning about sort of pinball and the history of pinball and who the designers are and all those things. Things that you didn't do 20 years ago. Nobody looked up on the Internet who are these designers and who are these artists. Nobody looked at that because you couldn't find that information very easily. But I did, because that's kind of what I like to do. Then I was like, oh, I know Black Knight. And then this thing was released, and I'm like, oh, the heritage, the lineage of Black Knight. That's such a good idea. But this pin did not sell. Not a surprise. The licenses sell. Non-licensed games do not.
    155:40
    But it was the best artwork in a Steve Ritchie game probably since No Fear, I would say. Yeah, I would probably agree with that. Star Trek, we had mentioned, is not necessarily offensive, but it's not really great. And everything since then was real. And I remember the premium, I was surprised it has blood on the side of the cabinet. Cool. Steve Ritchie got a lot of crap since probably ACDC that none of his games had any toys. So he created, I still think, one of the greatest toys to ever go on a machine in the last 10 or 15 years. And that is the Black Knight himself. So when Steve Ritchie released Black Knight in 1981, the bi-level game, Black Knight 2000 in what, like 88 or 89? 89, yeah. You know, the idea was that the Black Knight was an adversary and you're battling the Black Knight and you're fighting him and his minions. In this game, you are literally fighting the Black Knight. So halfway up the play field is a toy with a spinning mace that goes forward and backward, a knight with like a 3D printed helmet with LEDs that change, and a friggin' feather in his cap. Come on, man. And on his left hand, he has a shield that goes up and down, which can hit the ball back at you, it can stop the ball, or it can open up to reveal a scoop behind it. This has a couple of three drop targets on one side. It's got two spinners on the Pro. It's got an upper play field because Black Knights are upper play field on the Premium LE.
    157:17
    It's got an awesome ball lock on the Premium LE. But this machine, it struggled a little bit, didn't it? It's another, it's an all-right flipper, kind of like Black Knight 2000.
    157:30
    It has the Premium and LE with the upper play field. The original Black Knight, the upper play field has two flippers, two three banks of drop targets, a loop shot to a lock. And a pop bumper. Oh, yeah, and a pop bumper. Black Knight 2000 has one flipper, three pop bumpers, repeatable loop shot, three lanes on top, three more lanes on the bottom, a motorized three bank that goes down and exposing another ramp that goes to a lock area. So you've got some stuff to live up to. But on this game, the upper play field is basically the Lexan thing again. It's not like a wood play field. And it's got a lock shot, a loop, and I think one target. And that's it. When this was released, the loop shot was so difficult. It's so fast. They had to release a second little update, which was like a post, to slow it down, which pushed sort of the rubber out a little bit to help it get kind of a bump to go around. It does have an amazing lock on that upper play field, if you ask me. The way that you can hit that lock and it makes this shink noise when you hit it is just amazing. It is amazing. And the thing is, it has the upper play field. The premium and the LE, a good player can play forever. But the Pro is like one of the most brutal games that you will get killed quickly. It's like one of the biggest differences in difficulty, I think, between a premium LE and a Pro that I can think of. My wife loves the Pro. She likes the LE. She loves the Pro. She loves this game. And I'm like, I like this game too, but there's other games that I would rather spend the dollars on. And that's the problem, I think, of this pin. One of the things that I do find very cool is that there's a mod on that some enthusiasts have done where they take that left spinner shot, it goes all the way up into a saucer on the Pro, and then it is a vertical up kicker and one of those, what do you call it again? Spider? Web slinger. It's got like a web slinger metal ramp that goes on to the wire form, which goes back down to the right flipper. Well, these individuals, what they have done is they've made various ramps where you turn that vertical up kicker into a ramp, which then goes down to the left. Jessica's sword. And some people have made it into a sword or just a regular habit trail. Makes the game that much better. It really does. But the star of this, besides obviously the Black Knight himself in the middle, is Tim Sexton on code. Yeah, at this point, I think Steve had blown through all the coders. we know it's relationships with like Lyman he worked with twice he had Larry DeMar twice was it for that relationship and I think by this time Dwight, he was like yeah I've had enough too. You just need a break right, Dwight's worked with him quite a few times but you need a break. So if I remember Steve actually said, you know, what about the kid so Tim Sexton got his meaning the new guy. Tim Sexton so he got his first lead coder in a game and I think he did a bang up job To full disclosure here, Tim Sexton, we used to play tournaments with him all the time, and he was on our show frequently, my other podcast, all the time. And we still talk to this day. So I almost feel like I can't say anything because it would be like, oh, your opinion doesn't mean anything. To me, the software was, well, honestly, I think the software is the strength of the game. I agree. The animations. This game had some of the first really good LCD animations that Stern did. Oh, Chuck Ernst and his team there.
    161:30
    So what you do is you fight his minions before you get to actually fight him on the LCD screen. Some of the critiques are that, well, there's no magic on the play field. You're fighting stand-up targets and this spinning mech toy and, you know, cartoons on a back box. But I'll tell you what, it's still awesome. I don't care. The highlights, of course, are the call-outs, which were done by Steve Ritchie as the Black Knight, insulting you in every way possible. And the music from the game is probably the most metal music ever in a game, even more metal than Metallica. It's got Scotty Ian from Anthrex, and it's got Brendan Small from Metalocalypse fame.
    162:14
    And Brendan Small is also the guy who did the voice for Sparky and for, what's his name in Aerosmith? Jackie. Oh, the Jack in the Box character. And they had, I want Ed Robertson's in the game of Barenaked Ladies. He's the voice of, what, a skull or something? Bernie. Bernie the Skull. So, funny story. So Ed Robertson, of course, is, you know, a pinball ambassador, right? He is something else when it comes to pinball. He's in Disturbed quite often, and they said, hey, let's do this character. So he's in his cottage outside of Toronto, I think, and he's doing a call with Tim Sexton and Steve Ritchie, and they're feeding him the lines, and he's recording these high-quality recordings on his side. But what people don't really realize is that Steve Ritchie has a lot of hearing problems, and he's trying to talk on the phone to somebody on the other side and hear his calls, and he's critiquing Ed Robertson. And Ed Robertson tells this story, I think, on one of the final-ish episodes of Head-to-Head Pinball back when he did an interview with them. And if I'm mistaken on that, please let me know, guys. It might have been Final Round Pinball Podcast, but I'm not entirely sure. And it's a hilarious, hilarious story. Here's what Steve says about Scottie and he has performed his own rendition of the Black Knight 2000 music is an incredible style. It totally rocks. The first game we played the music through our game. Everyone in engineering gathered around the game and marveled at Scott's powerful and driving music. It makes me play better. Black Knight sort of raises a true battle game and the music reinforces our feelings of urgency and the need to stay alert and play hard to beat the Black Knight.
    163:59
    That's the other thing it has. It plays the Black Knight 2000 music. It also has a retro mode where you get the original Black Knight sound effects. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I think it's a great game. You know, I'm not as critical of it as a lot of people. I don't know if that's because I'm a Steve Ritchie apologist or I'm a Stern Schill or something. I don't know. But I really, really like it. Well, you've got the power. You've got the might. But it's great. This game is great. Although, if you put this game next to Amanda, that's going to be a tough decision. We got one more game.
    164:40
    We're looking at David's old notes here. He has, like, Steve Ritchie in retirement. We don't even have Led Zeppelin yet. That's how old the notes are. Yes. Steve Ritchie's latest game. Still in production, I believe. as we speak. Led Zeppelin. So Steve Ritchie, in his last few releases, when you say Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Black Knight, and Led Zeppelin, he has like an 18-month turnaround. Most designers like Borg or Elwynn, they're banging out a game. Usually a year. Game of the Year. Yeah, they're done in a year. It's on the line. Elwynn's like a clock in some cases. this one was released in an odd period it was sort of like december of 2020 we're in a pandemic year we don't need to talk about that you know we don't need ian who's emailed the final round pinball podcast email us and we're not allowed to talk about the pandemic anymore but this is a spike two system it's currently in production it's running pro premium and of course the le we've got software by Tim Sexton with a backup of Raymond Davidson and Dean Grover, mechanics by John Rothermill, artwork Greg Ferreris, and of course, the Led Zeppelin team, animation by Chuck Ernst's team, sound by Bob Baffey. I didn't know call outs were Brendan Small again. Doing his awesome British accent. This is one of the largest licenses in music available. We've got the Beatles. We'll talk about that some other time. Led Zeppelin's a big one as well. And this is Steve Ritchie's favorite band. In fact, during his Ballywilliam days, he would often go into his office, close his door, and play Led Zeppelin on an electric guitar as loud as he could to disrupt anybody. This is a passion project. And Led Zeppelin, being they own all their own stuff, so you know that working with them may not be easy. But from what I heard, it really wasn't that bad. They just had, they wouldn't give them Stairway to Heaven, as for one of the songs. But I don't really mind that. I don't know how exciting that would be, listening to the first five minutes of Stairway to Heaven, or when you're playing a pinball machine. Yeah, you've got to kind of skip to the last minute and a half. So this was also polarizing when it came out. But the artwork, a lot of people didn't like the art. I actually like the pro art. It's based off Led Zeppelin albums. The pro art, the cabin is based off of Led Zeppelin III. I think as a Led Zeppelin fan, I think these machines are basically artistically perfect for Led Zeppelin. I know it's not Chris Franchi's hand-drawn art. It is the same Led Zeppelin pictures we've seen a billion times. Led Zeppelin III, which is that cartoony, you know, pop-arty looking thing, and the burning Zeppelin from the Led Zeppelin I album. I understand we see that over and over again. But that's Led Zeppelin.
    167:56
    I'm sorry. And it is perfect. That premium package is gorgeous. But what are some of the issues with this thing? Well, the Premium LE have the extra toy, the Electric Magic, which is a spinner that actually rises up from underneath the playfield. And you hit the spinner enough times, and then there's a magnet underneath that will stop the ball, and then it will go back underneath the playfield to lock the ball. It's a cool little toy. It's got a really cool sound effect. And it's very close to the player. So when you hit that spinner, and it's an opto-spinner, it is going like a rocket. Now, it's got the Icarus dude. So it's got this nude guy with wings. I guess he's the Icarus dude. Which is the record label of Led Zeppelin. Yeah, it's one song. So if you hit below him, he pops up in the air. He's not anatomically correct, which I find odd. Well, yeah. It's got a big Zeppelin on the left side. I almost want to get them like little MeUndies and just, like, stick them on. Oh, my. Just have these little, like, tidy whiteies. It appears very barren. I mean, that's what most people say looking at it. Especially the Pro, because the Pro doesn't have the electric magic, and it doesn't have the left side ramp. Yeah, but the thing is, the Premium, if you count the ramps, there's four ramps. So, and even the Pro has three. And they're metal. The Pro, where the side ramp is, instead you just hit a target. The Hermit target. And the Premium and the LE has lighting on the side of the cabinet. Expression lighting. It's like RGB LEDs. They're sort of like pin stadiums. And they're cool. And it's got, it plays all, you know, basically your well-known Led Zeppelin songs. It's everything you'd want in a Led. If you were a Led Zeppelin fan, this has everything you want. your higher level players, it's got some interesting rules. I think again, the star is the code. The code in this game, I'd say, yes. If you don't know what you're doing, you can just hit lit shots and it's fine. It shoots great. And the lit shots automatically change based on where in the song you are. So when a solo, a guitar solo starts, you need to start making shots because it's a guitar solo. Steve Ritchie gets a lot of crap because a lot of his games are chase the blinking shot. Well, this is chase the blinking shot, but it is smart and it is dynamic and there's high-level deep nuance for deep players. There's easy, dumb David Dennis shots. Yeah, if you just want to shoot the ball around, this thing shoots just fine. It's great, but you can tell that Steve Ritchie struggled with things that may or may not be in this machine. And let me, I have no idea. This is pure speculation. I have no inside sources. I don't know. But I'm just saying, you've got lead zeppelin targets. So LED on the left side of, on the side of a ramp are stand-up targets. I 100% guarantee that Steve Ritchie wanted those to be drop targets. And they're not drop targets. There's three drop targets. ZEP, Z-E-P, Zed, by the way. ZEP.
    171:25
    Right. It's got ROC stand-ups, R-O-C stand-ups on the right side. Or, I guess, the right side. Yeah. But I guarantee that those ROC targets are supposed to be drop targets, like ACDC or... Again, David Dennis has no inside information. I don't, but I'm telling you, I guarantee that in the original Steve Ritchie version, all of those were drop targets and all of them were taken out except for one bank of three. It's got one of your 360 ramps on the right there. It's got the skinny spinner. One thing I forgot to mention, actually, was I think Game of Thrones was the last game that Stern has made with a regular spinner.
    172:05
    What I would call a regular spinner. The regular size and not the super skinny spinner. And Steve was like the only one who ever kept using it. Yeah. This has the skinny spinner. But Steve Ritchie is no longer at Stern. this was a recent development we were actually the original notes we were going to stop at a sort of rage but we got to kind of put a bow on this because this era of his career has ended so go ahead jump into the jersey jack pinball podcast hosted by ken cromwell who did this podcast the second he got back from vacation. And he speaks to Steve Ritchie not only about his red shoes, which are the first time he's worn non-black shoes in probably 25 or 30 years, and he talks about how he left Stern Pinball. In a nutshell, if I could just tie just a nice little bow on this one. Oh, I can do this. I have it right in front of me. I like tight little bows here. So in March of this year, he decided he was not having fun at CERT anymore. Just wasn't feeling it. So he started negotiating with Jersey Jack. Well, he got in touch with Jack Guarneri. I didn't know Jack still had that much power at JJP anymore. He may or may not be. It might have just been the conduit. I'm sure he met with the investors, which I think the investor team is like a father and son. So they would have to agree to hire him. But they met several meetings over the course of many months and came to an agreement. They ironed out the details. So then on July 26th, I'm guessing in the morning, C. Richie came in and just handed in his resignation and left. Bye-bye. Do you think he handed in his resignation and they asked him to leave? Oh, I think he just left. That's what he said. Because usually he'd give two weeks. Yeah, he did not give two weeks. He just handed in and he left. later that day at around 3.45pm Eastern Time on the Pinball subreddit, a post appeared, the anonymous post saying Steve Ritchie Nobody posts on the Pinball subreddit Steve Ritchie leaves Stern for JJP and everyone was like, what? See, I first saw it on Pinball Enthusiast's Facebook page and I thought that was crazy because if you and I know and our viewers will know that Steve Ritchie does not get along with Pat Lawler or hadn't in the past. And it seems like if there was any company that didn't need another designer, it was them. Yeah, it's the one that can't get any machines out. They do one game every year and a half. So why would you go there, especially at his age? He's 71 now. You would think he'd want to be cranking out games as quick as he could. But, yeah, I guess he said he – well, you can listen to the Jersey's Back podcast, but I guess he just kind of drank a lot for a week. He's head. Yeah, he obviously, it was obviously difficult to leave the family that is Stern. You know, he's had ups and downs with Gary. You know, George Gomez and him, I'm sure, have their issues. But the reason Steve Ritchie is Steve Ritchie, and even his, like, last games of the last few years, which have been a little rinse and repeat, and in my opinion are still great games that I would love to own, That's tough to leave that family. So on August 2nd, the next Monday, he walked into Jersey Jack for the first time because all the meetings they had were, I assume, all remote. So this was the first time he was actually there. And it's only like a few blocks from the Sturd factory. It's not like it's far away. Yeah, they still go to the same restaurants at lunchtime. And they filmed him coming in, took pictures, put it all on their Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. So he is there. He will have a larger budget to do what he wants to do, and we'll see what happens. Probably sometime in 2024 or 2025. Ken Cromwell on Facebook posted that he was very excited to work with Steve Ritchie, and I'll tell you what, I'm pretty excited for Jersey Jack, the team at Jersey Jack, to be working with Steve Ritchie. I replied to that post by Ken Cromwell, and I said, I am excited. There's going to be so many drop targets. And you know who liked that post? No. Albert Agar. But you know who else liked that post, Ron? Steve Ritchie. That's right. There was also another post that said, I can't wait until Steve Ritchie fixes the weak Jersey Jack flippers. You know who thumbs up that post? Albert Agar. Uh, no, Steve Ritchie. Whoa! I mean, now he's obviously a Jersey Jack. There's no talk of retirement now that you've just moved to a new employer. But the question does come up to Steve Ritchie all the time. Steve Ritchie's turning 72 next year. You know, what's going to be his final game? Is he going to retire as a pinball designer? Well, I mean, Steve's health, I'm sure, is okay. It's probably not great. Steve last year quit smoking, and I think he's kept it up. Well, he's quit smoking several times, and then he was doing the vaping. Then he had a really, I think in 2019 he had a really bad episode where he couldn't breathe and all that, so he finally quit the vaping too. So hopefully he has stopped. He has continued to not do either.
    177:37
    Steve says, pinball is different today. It puts me in front of my computer all day working. If I'm not in front of the computer, I'm not advancing the game. I'm not getting enough exercise. There's a group of us who do laps at the factory. It takes seven minutes to do a whole lap going around, up and through the lines. We try to get moving. I've got to get my steps in. And when I get home, I work the other steps off on the treadmill. So, you know, Steve knows, you know, things are different when you're a little older. And he wants to keep making pins for us. And thank you, Steve Ritchie, for doing those things. That is awesome. And do not retire because I want to see some awesome designs.
    178:19
    So is Steve Ritchie too old, do you think? Has he done it all? He's made innovation after innovation after innovation. He's done it all, but I'm really curious to see what he does at Jersey Jack. Well, I mean, I think it's best to let Steve answer about sailing off into the sunset. Steve says, I'm totally enjoying what I'm doing. I don't want to quit no matter what. I think I'm going to end up going to work every day until one day I don't go to work. I'm having fun. It's mostly fun. Do I think I'm at the peak of my career? No. The next game will be better than those. That is what we try to do. We try to top the next thing. If I live to 120, I figure I can do another 30 more machines. I don't know. We'll see what happens. Everybody, thank you so much for joining us for our third Steve Ritchie episode. Can you believe that? We've done three full episodes of Steve Ritchie. And this is a doozy. Podcast better.
    179:18
    Stewie, what do you want to do? Yes. Okay. As always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to civilprotocols at gmail.com. We look forward to all the messages that we read every one. Please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcaster. Turn on automatic downloads so you won't miss a single episode. And now our direct RSS feed will actually work correctly. Right, David? Yeah, thanks for that. No problem. Remember to leave us a five-star review wherever you found us or on this week in Timbal's promoted database. That way more people can find us. Want to support the podcast and need a new shirt? Swing on over to civilballswag.com and pick up a Civil Ball Chronicles t-shirt to help us keep the lights on.
    180:11
    Thank you. the eventful day. Well, not for me, but I'm sure for some people. Oh, man, oh, man. I'm reading through the SEC filing. Woo-wee. I like primary sources. I don't want to hear a bunch of people trying to speculate on what's going on. I'm going to read it and actually know what's going on. Of course, you guys don't care about that down there. Wouldn't that be 50, though?
    181:07
    Isn't 50 diamond? No, I think 50 is... I looked that up. Don't make me doubt that. Well, I thought there's like silver was, oh, maybe 50 is gold?
    181:22
    But wouldn't diamond be like even more? Yeah, no, 2002 is diamond jubilee, 60th anniversary. Wow. Okay, I'm wrong. Again. That's two months in a row. Wow. I'm sorry. You should be.
    181:36
    Oh, you want to hear a funny story? So I'm sitting in my office here, right? This is where I record my podcast. I'm sitting in my office. I'm doing work. My dad rolls into the office. He's the principal to the firm. And he comes over and he's like, hey, did you talk to Stu today? And I'm like, Stu McVicker? And he's like, no, Stu. And he says the guy's last name. And I'm like, oh, right, right. Yeah, I don't think Stu McVicker. Why would my dad ask me if I was talking to Stu McVicker? Well, he is famous. I'm surprised he hasn't come up in one of our shows, you know, that Playboy launch party. The Valley episode, you know. But, I mean, that was really before his resurgence. Right. He was very much under the radar for a while.