It should. That's what a game developer does. So 100 years ago when I worked at Williams in the 90s, well, in the very beginning I was excited because I was working in a software engineering department, so therefore I was a software engineer. And of course I wasn't, but it was fun thinking that I was. And then later when I sort of got my feet wet designing games, I became a pinball designer. And of course I never was. But I now look back and I realize that what I've ever always been is a game developer. And that's exactly what you're talking about. I'm good at creating, taking parts of ideas and pushing them together and turning them into something whole and keeping everybody on the same vision and pulling in ideas and throwing out bad ones and massaging as I need to. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. That's very interesting how you explain the process. Yeah. So I'm different than a game designer. Like, so Brian Eddy or, you know, John Borg or, you know, Steve Ritchie or, you know, all those guys that, you know, I work with right now. I'm trying to think. I think I'm missing a game designer. Oh, Keith. Damn it. Keith Elwin. Like, I love Keith Elwin, and I hate him because he makes great shit. So the game designers at work, I understand what they do, and it's very different from what I do. And it's taken me decades to figure it out. Yeah, and you're always learning, too, because look at how much pinball machines have changed since you first started doing it With the capabilities, what you can put in there, with the visual assets, all that kind of good stuff. You talked about the deadlines. You know, when we bring everyone in there, it's the skeleton's done. We're not going to be doing any drastic changes. Right. When you have a deadline like you did for Turtles, and it was released when it was, and you knew that in advance, Right. how far along in code do you have to be? And I don't mean what the number is on the code release. I've seen games released where they don't have the wizard mode, but you know what's coming. or there are other things that are going to be tweaked. Scoring balances always happen after the fact, and that's fine. No one frets over things like that. But how close does it have to be for you to be done before it can be released and you're satisfied? So it sounds like you're asking me, how do I define 1.0? So there's two things that happen, right? The game goes in a box at some point, and how much has to be done for me to be comfortable of it going in a box? Let me ask you this. When it gets released, you have a to-do list. You have a to-do list from day one. Are you at 80% when that game is released? Is there a number you want to reach? And again, I'm not talking about the code number. I'm talking about, okay, I still have to put this in. Let's just say for Turtles, let's just say co-op mode wasn't in, but you knew that was coming. Right. You could release it without that and still put that in later. I could put it in a box, sure. I wouldn't call it 1.0. No, again, the number means nothing. It's just... Well, okay, no, no, no. Okay, I know you say the number means nothing, but it means everything to me. Like, you're saying 80%, and I say that's 0.8. My numbers and my percentages are the same thing. Okay. So 1.0 means your feats are complete, means you've got everything in the game that you planned on getting in the game for 1.0, and it's all reasonably fun, and it's all reasonably polished, and it's all reasonably scoring good. And that's sort of the massaging that you're going to do later. is you're going to tweak the scores, you're going to add more lamp effects, and so on. So that's 1.0. 1.0 is if it never, ever got another code update, it would be okay. Gotcha. All right. Fair enough. And if it's not 1.0, you can't say that. But when I went into Turtles and we were planning it out, it had things that were going to be post-1.0 planned, and so that was good, too. So there's a line someplace before you're done that you're calling 1.0, and then after that we're going to do the challenge mode for the topper and stuff like that. So to you, 80% means 0.8 code. I get that. I guess what I want to say is... It doesn't mean like that. So that's not true for everyone. I know that. I try to stick to that because of my OCD. Okay, fair enough. I do know that it's not the same for everyone else, but I guess what I am saying and am complimenting Stern on is that in the last couple of years, a lot of these games that have been released have been near full code. You know, the only real exception that stands out, and we know why because of the timeline, was when Batman was released. Remember, it was the rush to get it out at Expo. It was Adam West's health. There were a lot of different factors in that. Yeah, it was the 30th anniversary game. Exactly. It was bare bones, but it was still a game. It still had scoring. It still worked. You could have a multiball, but you knew a lot more was going to come. Forget that game. I'm talking about whether it's Turtles, whether it's Avengers, whether it's Zeppelin, whether it's Stranger Things, Monsters, any kind of games in the last few years, they've all been pretty near full code. So has that been a directive from Stern to make sure that... Absolutely, yeah. I mean, we strive, you know, we move mountains to try to make that happen. And sometimes we don't. Some games were less successful than others, and some games were pretty close. Like when Turtles went in a box, it was like 1.0. Is the release date set in stone, and therefore you as the developer and the designer and everything else have to be in place by that such date, or is that a little bit flexible? So that's a good question. We're developing the game across months, right? So early on and in the middle and all throughout, we're constantly being asked, how's it going? Are you on track? Is it going to get done on time? Where will you be when we plan on going on a box on this date or that date? and if everything's going fine, well, I try to give them my gut feeling and now that I've been doing this for decades, I give a pretty accurate account of where I think we'll be on a particular day and then often they'll come to me and they'll go, hey, we're going to give you more time. I'm like, you're not giving me more time. You're just changing what it looks like when it goes in a box. The amount of time it's going to take me to get to 1.0 and finish the game hasn't changed. It's just if you push the game back, if you push the production back because of this factor or that factor, it happens all the time, then you're just going to change. Instead of being 0.85, we'll be at 0.88 or 0.9 when it goes in a box. So that date is set in stone. It's not. Well, it's set in stone until it's not. So the dates change all the time, but they're always set in stone. I guess what I'm trying to ask is one of my favorite things that any pinball company does, and Stern does an excellent job of this, is when a game is released, there are a bunch of machines already made, ready to ship out that week. So if that date is a hard date when they're doing the release, therefore the manufacturing has to back up at least a week, maybe two, maybe three, so that some of these machines can be made in advance of the release date. So these kind of ducks have to all align. Yeah, they're pretty good at aligning those ducks. But we start planning that out six, seven months before that, right? So when I was talking about how it always changes, I was talking about seven, eight, nine months out. You know they start they tell us the dates and they set in stone but then they you know like a week later they change and two weeks later they change But at some point they stop changing and that just the date Well, we know from some of the intellectual properties that Stern isn't the only one that dictates that date, too. I think Iron Maiden postponed a date that they originally were going to do for something they wanted to do. And that would be the case for anybody. I think, in fact, I know this to be true. Avengers was postponed a day or two. sadly due to the death of Chadwick Boseman. Yeah, that's sad. And you're talking about like at the last second. So let's say, you know, like June 15th, you know, is my current date. When we get to June 10th, you know, I know that within a couple of weeks we're going to start putting games in our box. It might not be the June 15th for lots of different reasons, but it's going to be really, really close. And to me, June, you know, five days or ten days is still, you know, is only a few seconds later. It's just, it might as well be the next day. And, of course, any code updates have to wait until those ones that are already in the box have already been shipped because you don't want to be shipping some at .8 code and some at .85 or things like that. No, we do that all the time, especially if we find a bug or something. Oh, really? Yeah, well, I mean, if my team and I are still moving ahead full steam, you know, like the train is moving down the track, And when I handed over the code, it was probably the night before, you know, the night before the games went in a box, I handed over code. But then the next day, we're moving on. Like, if I handed over 0.8, well, then, you know, internally, I'm now at 0.81 and 0.82 and 0.83 and so on over the next few days or so on. And then whenever we think that the game is significant, the code is significantly better, we hand it back over to the line again. We do another update, and we'll just keep doing it until we get to 1.0 and beyond. I'm fascinated by the process, and I would love to see how it all works for you when a play field falls in your lap, and you look at what the theme is, because that's obviously very important, and you probably have to research the theme if it's not something you're familiar with. Or even if you do know a little bit about it, you want to make sure you've got every aspect of it, like you did with Turtles, like you did with Monsters, and Game of Thrones. You have to know the actual product before you can do any kind of code. but let's just forget all what the theme is. When you see the play field. Well, the play field doesn't come for weeks until after the game has started. Right. So you've. Oh, so you know the theme before you see the play field is what you're saying. A long time before. Makes sense. I mean, there's lots of collaboration between me and the designer and the mechanical engineer long before the first play field is drawn. The only reason I ask that is because I know some designers have one, two, three, four play fields already designed. It's just a matter of applying that to the theme. But their lead programmers have been, you know, have been part of that from before they even started drawing the first one. So John and Elliot and I, at the beginning of Turtles, you know, we're like, okay. So Nickelodeon came to work and said, you know, say, hey, we want you guys to do Turtles. And then afterwards, I went to John. I said, John, we should do Turtles. And so John and I raised our hands, and George said, okay, you know, I'll propose it to management. And he did. and then it all came to be that we're doing Turtles. So then John, Elliot, and I start having meetings about, well, what's Turtles all about? What would be a good toy, and where would it go, and what should we do, and how would it look, and should we have a spinning pizza, and so on. And then John started making drawings, and Elliot and I, just like he kicks us, kicks me when I make a stupid multiball, Elliot and I would go, no, no, that's a stupid layout. Change the layout. It's very, very collaborative. He's in charge of the layout. It's his design. But he takes in input from the rest of his team right from the beginning. And every person on the team does exactly the same thing. Like when I'm making all my rules, the team is in my office telling me how stupid my stuff is, and I throw it out and make something else. So this process, again, just absolutely fascinates me. So I can't give you a theme because it may have already been done or it may be done in the future, and we don't want to talk about the future, but you've got to play field. I'm just thinking of what it was like maybe in the old Gottlieb days or when we first went to solid state. and the theme really didn't matter. Oh, it's space. Oh, it's cards. It's something that really wasn't a major license, but you still had to program these machines. So you'd see something like, okay, there are four top lanes. All right, I can do something with that, maybe a skill shot. ABCD. There you go. I've got two ramps. I've got two orbits. Okay, maybe I can do some combo things there. Yeah, million plus. Remember million plus? What? Million plus. That's an old rule from, that was really fun back in the day. When you see a ramp, you think million plus. Never mind. Go on. Okay, so there's two ramps, two orbits, but you've also got, oh, look, there's a scoop on one side, and on the other side there's a spinner. Okay, what can we do with that? There's sets of stand-ups or drop targets. You've got a lot to work with. I know when you look at the play field, you might look at it plain, no artwork on it, and go, okay, there are really only five shots on this flipper or maybe three on this flipper. And let's just say it's an Italian bottom, two flippers only, no third flipper. there's only so many different ways you can kind of create things I guess that's where the theme really is important because now you can integrate something that people are going to relate to if they're big fans of that theme yeah that's all true but a lot of today happens with the toy first the first thing you think of is well what kind of toys do you want in the game what are they going to do and how much space are they going to take up and where will they go and which flipper will interact with them or which flippers and you try to make all that work and then you look at what all that blank space you have left over on the playfield, and you go, well, now what shots make sense with this leftover space? Okay, all right. The toy. Good to know. I'm not designing a playfield myself, but I'm curious. I look at some of the older games. I like certainly the new modern games, but I also really love the older games, and some of the games that are just simple layouts and have no themes have really incredible rules, and it might just be like that one shot for all the points. Space shuttle, I'll give you a perfect example. To me, you can play a lot of different ways. You can spell shuttle. You can go for multi-ball. You can lock your balls. You probably hate a guy like me because I ignore all of that and all I do is I try to hit those three drop targets and hit the spinner over and over and over again and I still love it. Well, as long as you're loving it. No, but I mean there's... And we're talking about different eras, right? Like, so, I mean, modern pinball is now very different than what modern pinball was in the 90s, and you're talking about the 80s. So, like, for me, high speed changed it all, right? High speed made, pulled the story into it so that you were, you know, the physical things you did on the game, you know, evolved, you know, your story and progressed you through the game. And I don't know if the games before that did that as well. Did they? That's a great example. As we're speaking, tough time thinking of another example as influential as high speed. You're right. The game that got me into pinball, you know, really was a theme integration. No, it was all about the shots. It was about the magnet. It was Black Knight. Oh, Black Knight's a great game to pull you into. Another Larry DeMar game. I think Larry DeMar is one of, you know, extremely influential in modern pinball today, right? I mean, he sort of set the groundwork and the foundations for the place we went in the 90s. And then where we went in the 90s is what we've been doing in the 0s and 10s, you know, in the 20s now. Like, so, yeah, Black Knight and High Speed and Funhaus, right? All cornerstone games. All story-driven games, right? All, like, simple goals with fun things to do. Right? That's all Larry DeMar. That's a good analogy. It's one I never really kind of put two and two together. Yeah, that's a very good point. So in the last few years, we've seen a lot of young guns there, Dwight. We've seen Tim Sexton come into the fold. Raymond Davidson is now hired there. So these are guys that do code, that do rules, but they also really know how to play pinball. True. It's very exciting. So we've always had lineman sheets. We've always had good pinball players around. But now we have Keith. We have Raymond. We have Zach Sharp. We have Tim Sexton. So now pinball has taken a new turn. And that higher-end pinball player market is being serviced much better than it ever has been before. I always thought that I was capable of you know of of you know making those guys happy and I'm not I wasn even close to what like Tim and Keith can do and of course Lyman is a master how often do you play I mean are you in any local leagues there Do you do any tournaments No Well not since COVID especially but before that, I only ever played socially. So I never was in any tournaments. And so I love to play. I play every day, but I played at work. And then I played when we would go out and check out new games on tests and so forth. And then Josh Sharp would pull me into this selfie league where you would go to 255 and play games and then take pictures of your scores. Yeah. So that was kind of fun. And then every once a week or once every two weeks, we'd get together and have playoffs or so. So you don't necessarily have to play in tournaments or in leagues or anything like that, but when you're coding, when you're developing a game, you're really trying to please different audiences. Definitely the collectors, the home collectors, the arcade owners, and they will come back, fingers crossed. Right. But also the tournament players, too. It's probably difficult to find a happy medium that everyone will enjoy. It is. So I've decided to make myself happy most of the time. So I like games like Game of Thrones and Star Wars where there's this very, very light RPG kind of element to it, like Turtles, where you choose a character in the beginning and it takes you through a different path. Star Wars is like that. Game of Thrones has, you can buy different elements and choose your house in the beginning. So I've decided to make games with that sort of foundation. And then I do my best at appealing to the Keiths and the Raymonds when I release 1.0.