you're listening to the head to head people podcast find us on facebook email us at Welcome, everybody, to the Head to Head Pinball Podcast. This is Episode 71, and my name's Martin, and with me each week... It's Ryan C., and Marty, our next guest has been responsible for the sounds coming out of about 40 unique pinball machines. And we're not just talking about any old pinball machines, Marty. We're talking the best 50-year-old pinball machines, like Cassie, Pinbot, F-14 Tomcat, Earthshaker, Whirlwind, the best 90s Bale Williams B&D era, Funhouse, Firezone, Adam's Family, to AAA Tiger, Indiana Jones. And let's not forget, he also worked at Stern, producing the sounds for Simpsons and Lord of the Rings. Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Grenner. How are you going? How are you, Chris? Hello, hello. Wow, that's a pretty badass introduction. Well, it's your history. You wrote that intro because that's what you did. You've worked on a lot of titles. Tell us about that. It's absolutely true. There is nobody in this business, there's nobody in the business of making sound for games that was as lucky as I was to stumble onto a community of computer music geeks at Northwestern University just outside of Chicago back in early 1984 and to have managed to stay in touch with them long enough to get myself to Chicago and working as a programmer. So I had a little bit of a resume as somebody who could spell C and C++ and assembly language programming and stuff like that. And to be there on their bulletin board when the announcement went out that said, hey, Williams Electronics is looking for a sound guy. And I had a master's in composition at that point from the University of Illinois. with a lot of computer music experience. I'd been working as a programmer for a couple of years, and so I had a couple of dots on my resume, basically. That was really about all it was to say that I could speak programming languages. And that was what they needed because they had just put the first Yamaha synthesizer chip into the first pinball game the month that they hired me. And I was the first guy to have to write music for that system. And so over the course of the next couple of years, I basically got to be sitting there with immensely talented and productive and awesome people holding my hand as I got to write music and design soundtracks in a way where, in collaboration with all those people, we basically invented the modern pinball soundtrack. and if you go and listen to a modern Stern game or a Jersey Jack game today, you're pretty much hearing a soundtrack that was where the people that were working on those pins back in the 80s and early 90s, that was the soundtrack that we designed. That was the model that everybody still pretty much follows. And so what was the culture like back then when you first started and pinball was sort of going through one of its heydays? What was that like working with all those people? It was, you know, it seemed really nice. It was, you know, I came, my immediate job before the one that I got at Williams as an audio engineer or a sound designer, I guess, or composer, was working as a member of a, I worked for a consulting company, and my placement was at Bell Telephone Laboratories, or at that point I guess it was AT&T Information Systems in Naperville, driving an hour and a half each way to work every day in this kind of mind-numbing job of testing network systems. Really exciting. Sounds awesome. It was a fine job, and the people that I was working with were cool people as well, but it just held very, very little interest for me. I didn't feel like I was a part of anything bigger. I didn't see the bigger picture there, you know, in any real way. And, you know, the experience at Williams was the first time where I got to feel like I was really part of the family of a group that was doing something, you know, especially cool and also really breaking new ground. You know, that whole, you know, interactive synthesizer, the whole idea of an interactive soundtrack, the whole idea of, you know, thinking about audio in an interactive way, that was just being born at that point. You know, I mean, you know, Pong had been around forever and, or, you know, for 15 years, I guess, at that point. And, you know, Space Invaders was kind of like my first experience with digital sound, right, as, you know, I think probably many, many, many's were. I had, you know, in the first couple of weeks there at Williams, we did a little field trip, and we went out and saw and listened to Marble Madness at a distributor's shop and, you know, played that game for a while. Super cool game, and that was actually the first game with the Yamaha chip in it that was, you know, that was released out to the public. And so we got to hear, you know, a little bit of, like, kind of what you could do. that was an Atari game. It was a pretty cool game. Modestly successful in the arcades. But like a super cool game mechanic. Really, really fun game. And something that really sticks in my mind. It's a cute little tune. Sounds very, very lively and interactive the way that the sounds of that game matched the visuals really nicely and stuff like that. But you asked about the culture and what it was like. The vibe there was that these were guys, you know, we're talking about actually kind of like a pretty wide range of guys, you know, backgrounds that guys had. You know, the Richies were California boys. They were self-educated. They were self-made. Both Steve and Mark, you know, were – I'm pretty sure Mark was not a college grad. If Steve is or was, I'm not aware of where he went to school. on the one hand, and on the other hand, we had guys like, you know, eventually Pat Lawler, you know, who had a degree in double E, up to Larry DeMar and Eugene Jarvis, who were just, I mean, they were literally geniuses, and, you know, were MIT guys, were Stanford guys, were, you know, really high-test, you know, brains and thinkers, and the thing that they all had in common was they got, on a really visceral, simple, instinctual level, they got what coin op was about, and they got what the whole notion of interactive amusement was about. And they, you know, my background in terms of things that I had done with games before this moment had been that I played pinball, you know, my first couple years of college, I played a lot of pinball. You know, a couple years after that, I really got into, literally, it was like Space Invaders, and then that was it, you know, for a while. So I got the very, very early pieces of, you know, of coin-op electronic digital stuff and then, you know, kind of drifted away from games for a few years, and it was coming back from, you know, from that time away into this place where there were all these guys that lived, ate, and breathed this stuff and who also looked at my background and said, oh, interesting, you know, computer music from a pretty high-test school. You know, you guys, like, invented a bunch of different aspects of computer music, so you get that we're, like, being really innovative here, right? And I'm looking at what they're doing, and they're like, God, you know, we were, like, working on this same stuff in school, just random, you know, just by dumb, pure coincidence, I had, like, a little two-minute tape of computer music, literally bleeps and bloops that I had made my last year in school, and that was my demo reel when I went up and went to Williams, and I interviewed at one other place a couple years before that, and I had this little demo reel that was literally, it sounded like Defender. It sounded like Robotron. It just sounded like those kinds of games, you know, and the guys heard that stuff, and they went, oh, man, this guy is actually like, he's making this stuff, and he's calling it art. We just want it to be sound for our little pictures and pixels on a screen, you know, but he's like making it, and he's going to call it art. We're like, we like that guy. We think that's pretty cool, you know. So what were you using at the time? I'm just sort of going to geek out on sort of, you know, synthesizers and keyboards and stuff. Because, you know... Do you mean like on day one at Williams or earlier? Sort of what got you the job, like when you're talking about bleeps and bloops? Like back then, like if you're talking mid-'80s, sequences were pretty primitive at the time. And I wasn't using one. No, that's right. Yeah, and so... Yeah, not at all, not at all. So, no, it's a great question. Were you sort of connecting your keyboards via MIDI? And what sort of instruments were you using at the time? This keyboard you speak of. Tell me more about that. I know, right? Because it's all virtual instruments these days. But back then... Well, no, I mean, even at that point, I was... The two-minute tape of bleeps and bloops was a single piece of Fortran code running on a supercomputer down at the University of Illinois. And it produced a stream of, you know, an output sample stream, you know, just like any kind of digital audio workstation today would produce this sample stream. You know, but, you know, these days when you turn on Pro Tools and you route audio to, you know, to a disk and you monitor it through your groovy speakers and everything like that, and it's all super real-time and super hi-fi and all that stuff, this was, I wrote all the code. You know, I wrote all, you know, maybe 1,500 lines of Fortran code to get samples, numbers written to a file. And that was a hell of a trick. Wow. Okay. And so that two-minute, you know, sequence of bleeps and bloops was literally an algorithm that I came up with to vary the start time and the starting pitch, the frequency with which a new note, you know, I defined a concept of a note where, you know, something started and something, you know, evolved and then ended. You know, we had a colleague of mine and I had sort of collaborated on coming up with a way to create waveforms out of this sort of weird phase modulation algorithm that he had developed, and we were basically making these monophonic, you know, one note at a time notes. It was just like a sequence of notes. And, you know, a note could be any pitch, any shape. It could change pitch. It could do anything that any kind of synthesizer could do. And the range of expression within that stuff was very narrow in terms of the timbre that it produced. It produced a very pretty simple sort of a color, a tone color. But in terms of the variety of the envelopes, the pitch shapes, the volume shapes, the rhythmic complexity that we were able to write into those algorithms, It was not uninteresting. It was not tonal. It was not in a key. It was not in any kind of a musical style that anybody would recognize, except to call it avant-garde, experimental, academic, whatever you wanted to call it. There was a fair amount of that sort of thing going around in the early 80s at that point. New music and experimental music was something that had kind of poked its little periscope head up into the mass culture. In Chicago, it happened in 1981 or 82, we had a very forward-thinking mayor who put on a show called New Music America that took over Navy Pier, a big sort of a touristy spot here in Chicago, and put on this week-long series of concerts and lectures. And basically the entire sort of academic new music community all kind of descended on Chicago. It was John Cage's 80th birthday, and we celebrated his birthday by doing this crazy piece out on the harbor of Lake Michigan called Toot and Blink. Anybody could participate, and you now have all the instructions that you need to participate in that piece. All you have to do is get out on the water in a boat that had lights and a horn, and that was it. And later on, you know, Cage just immortally, you know, reviewed the evening by saying, I could have done with a little less toot and a little more blink. On the whole, it was pretty cool. So that was new music. That was experimental music. And that was my environment, right, in the early 80s. You know, I was a composition student at the University of Illinois, and we were doing crazy shit like that. You used to play pinball. you know you've mentioned before that you grew up playing games like Meteor and stuff like that which had amazing sounds but like the background music back then to games like Meteor was just like a frequency like a tone that would just kind of increase in pitch exactly did that ever create an inspiration for you to say you know one day you know I wish I could work in Pimble to maybe make this better or was that just not part of your That would be a great, that would have been a great story to be able to say, yes, that's exactly what happened. But unfortunately, that was not on my radar at all. You know, I really, at the point where I was like developing the skill set that was going to turn into be a useful skill set for me as a, you know, like as a prerequisite for this job that I got at Williams, I was thinking about that stuff. I was thinking about toot and blink. I was thinking about experiments and conceptual music and really, you know, I mean, the best times and the best things that I did during that time to prepare me for the job were to expand my notion of what could be considered music. That's one thing. And then a second thing is to learn how to actually make the very, very fundamental physical building blocks of digital sound. You know, so those are the... Can we reach kind of the end point of that, like what you're just describing there, and then you implemented that, and then, you know, technology has advanced to a point now. Like, if you were in pinball now, for example, do you think there's any more experimental things to do, or do you think now that we've reached a limit that, like, you can do everything humanly possible that we can think of at the moment? That's an interesting question. You know, I mean, certainly that was a place where, you know, there were a lot of kind of currents of thinking and study going on at that point, and we were right at the beginning of something, right, that we are no longer at the beginning of, obviously. You know, it's 30 years later, and, you know, everything's evolved. Moore's Law, you know, is in effect and all that stuff. But I guess the question you're asking is a little bit like asking, is there anything new to be done in film or in film music or something like that? And I guess at this point, you know, the answer is probably not too dissimilar to what it would be if you were talking about film, which is, well, sure, of course, you know, that's why we keep going back and keep trying to do, you know, do something else to tell a different story. But we're now, you know, I used to say, and I still like to say that I arrived in pinball in 1986 just as the problem of getting sound out of a pinball game was ceasing so much to be a software or a programming problem and really starting to become a musical problem. And I was exactly the right guy to start solving that problem because I knew enough programming to be able to write music in assembly language, which is basically what we were doing, and I could get a chip, you know, a simple synthesizer chip to essentially kind of do what I wanted because I understood those very, very fundamental building blocks of how you made digital music. So once I understood what registers and what banks and what the technical procedure was to make the Yamaha chip make sound and to vary its content and its parameters to make different kinds of sounds, And, you know, once I was able to do that and once we had a kind of an operating system to construct, you know, soundtracks, you know, then we were kind of off to the races and, you know, and we had some pretty cool tools. And then it was just a question of, well, gee, can you make it sound like a Space Odyssey, you know, kind of a thing, which was kind of the musical problem for Pinbot, right? Or can you make it sound like a biker bar game, you know, which was the problem for Road Kings? Or can you make it sound like a... How much direction did you get at the start? So, like, Pat Lawler walks up to you and says, okay, me and you are working on Whirlwind. Yeah. And you create that awesome theme song that plays in the background. Now, how much direction do you get to create that? Is it just, did he just say, create something, like, fun and pimply that, you know, you're on this kind of, you know, Whirlwind might pop out of nowhere, you know? Yeah. Well, so, you know, Whirlwind is a, you know, if you could have, you picked Whirlwind, and so I'll answer the question about Whirlwind, and the answer would be different for every game you picked, okay? So the direction for Whirlwind was we're making this game about the storm is coming. You know, the line for that, you know, the tagline for that thing, you know, like in the Game of Thrones tagline, right, is winter is coming, right? In Whirlwind, the storm is coming, you know, return to your homes, you know, do not panic and all that stuff. That was Ed Boon, by the way. That was the guy who delivered those lines. Pretty cool. So ominous and threatening and intense and tension and suspense, and that was the direction that I was given. And you also have to know about Whirlwind that we went into that game thinking that we needed to make a game in, like, record time. We were on the most aggressive schedule that we ever were on any other game was Whirlwind. And we had Bill Futsenruder on programming. And when you work with Bill, Bill essentially hands you the soundtrack template already coded. And all you have to do is provide him with the assets, you know, provide him with the little subroutines that says, this is the main theme. Here's the, you know, the lock-lit theme. Here's the drop target sound. Here's the, you know, the return lane sound. Here are your slingshot sounds. and you would pass over an EPROM that had those assets built into them and they would just come out of the game. There would be no additional programming needed. Wow. He was so organized. He was just an amazing, amazing guy. So we went into that game knowing that we weren't going to invent anything new structurally, but we just had to make this game. We had to make it as quickly as possible because we were leapfrogging another game in the schedule for reasons I don't even remember what they are now. But basically we were just trying to get it done super, super quickly. And we did get that game done, you know, basically faster than any other game in that era. But, you know, the answer to your main question is that game was about suspense and about tension. And then, you know, when the storm is over, then, you know, things relax, you know, for a little bit and things like that. So I guess that's the answer is that that game was about suspense. and there's an ominous kind of a quality to that music, to me. That's what I was kind of aiming for. Well, then going back to the beginning then, so I'm looking back and I'm thinking, you know, it is your Rogue Kings and your Pinball Era. Did they sort of really understand what you were doing? Like, with the way that you were doing it? Yeah, like when you're introducing sound, did they leave you and just say, you know what, that's the computer music nerd, he does his stuff? or were you actually sort of telling them, giving them direction at the time? Oh, I see what you're saying. So in order to really fully answer this question, I need to go back and actually answer the first question you asked, which is what it was like to work with those guys. Because what it was like to work with those guys is that they had all of those guys, you know. I mean, DeMar not so much. He was a fan of music. He loved Broadway. He still loves Broadway. But Jarvis was a musician. He was a really good keyboard player, and both Richies played in a band. You know, Steve is a killer, killer guitar player, and Mark played bass. And all of those guys really knew, you know, rock music and pop music. You know, they knew, they were musicians, you know. And so I was walking into a situation where Steve Ritchie actually, you know, he came, you know, when I first met him, we spent like an hour or two together talking about, oh, I don't even know what, you know, rock bands and, you know, whatever crazy thing he was, you know, kind of getting into next. He just finished High Speed, right? But he was just, like, so friendly. And, you know, everybody said, oh, God, the king is coming over and, you know, and, like, oh, God, I guess I'm supposed to be scared of this guy or something. But he wasn't scary at all. He was, like, super nice. And at the end of the conversation, I said, man, it's really nice to meet you. You're being really nice to me. You know that? And he looks and he smiles. And it's like he knew that there was, like, this reputation thing or something like that. And he smiles and he goes, hey, man, we expect great things from you. Yeah. And that was, like, the most important thing that anybody ever said. You know, that was the coolest thing because it was like, okay, you're on the team. Let's go. Let's do it. You know, throw it out. It's time to make some music, time to make something cool. And that was what it was always about. It was always just about, well, what did you do? What's the cool thing that you did? And I would do something and they would go, you know, that's not very cool. You know, what can we do? You know, they could tell that I didn't, that I had a clue, right? They could tell that I, you know, that I was smart or that I was competent or something like that. But they were like, you know, that's too jazzy. It's like, oh, that's too many notes. Or like, what is that weird rhythm that you've got going on? You know, can we like just, they basically kind of reined me in, you know, from some of those crazy places. And focused my energies into a space where they're like, yeah, that's pretty good. That's nice. That'll work, you know. And they didn't, you know, to their everlasting eternal credit, they did not like suck all the creative life out of all of those weird quirks that I had. you know, because if you go back, you can listen to Road Kings, the very first game, all the way through everything that I do, you can hear the granarisms in all of my work. You know, they're still there. They're still there to this day. When I write music, I, you know, I put myself into those games, and now at this point, you know, 30 years later, my voice is fairly well set up. You know, it's like, you know, I sort of have things that I reach for, and they're just there all the time, you know. But I developed those things, you know, on those games and how to express those things in a way that worked as a piece of commercial music. You know, and, you know, the thing that you're doing with commercial music is that you're saying to the listener, this is the world that you're occupying. And you have about a second and a half to say that before, if you haven't said it by then, they're going to be going, what's going on? Right. And if you want them not to be thinking, oh, what's going on, then you better be really clear about what your message is. So you have to very quickly define the sort of emotional space that a work of art has. And that's what commercial music is for. That's what it is for jingles, for advertising. That's what it is for film scores, for TV, for radio, or for anything that's meant to say, hey, this is a, you know, it's true of pop music too, you know. This is a hip-hop, you know, tune. This is a country tune. This is a this or a that tune, you know. This is a piece of romantic, you know, classical music. This is a piece of Wizard of Oz music or, you know, whatever. Don't you think that pinball is so much harder though because you talk about a jingle, for example. I mean, a jingle, you create the entire thing and someone's going to play it from start to finish. You know exactly how it's going to be played. But for pinball, you're creating a collection of sounds and you have no idea where the ball's going to go. everything has to kind of like work in jail together. That's right. So have you ever felt that you created this awesome sound package that in your mind everything was going to kind of like work harmoniously and kind of have the speakers in a certain way, but then when it's put in the game, you know, maybe by the way it's implemented or maybe the layout is different, or have you ever felt like one of your sound packages hasn't been done justice? Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. You know, in terms of my pinball history, the answer is no. I pretty much, you know, the implementation was as good as it could have been in any of those circumstances. What was, what, undermined is too strong a word, but what altered the result from what my intentions were with pinball was always what you described, was the chaos that happens on a pinball play field. That was always the thing that won, you know. And so when you play, and in a way, that's sort of like the beauty of pinball, so that when you approach making a, you know, creating a soundtrack for a pinball game, you're walking into a situation where you do not know when something is going to happen. And therefore, the rhythm, you know, the result rhythm of what the actual soundtrack, the linear experience that the player experiences when he plays the game is not related is only kind of randomly related to the music that you write and the things that you put into the soundtrack that are rhythmic so you know when a ball goes into the jet bumpers and they go it's like that's the rhythm and it's the rhythm of flipper bumpers it's not the rhythm of any music that you could make with that when you make a When you, you know, in Taxi is a great example, you know, you make these figure eight, you know, loop shots and stuff like that. The sound of, you know, repeated figure eight loop shots, you know, it sounds a certain way in Taxi and it's cool, right? But it's not musical. It's a physical thing. A clearer and more obvious example would be like from Fishtails where those boat ramps that you shoot, it's very, very easy to just make repeated boat ramp shots, left, right, left, right, left, right. There's however many. There's like four modes that are driven by that sequence of shots in that game. And in each case, the thing that's happening is driven by the fact that the ball is going up the boat ramp and down the side and down to the opposite flipper. And that's the gesture, and that's the rhythm, The amount of time that that takes is the rhythm that it has. And it's different for every player, and it's different every time it happens, because you don't know how long the ball might chatter in the return lanes, or you don't know how weakly the ball might have gotten pushed up and barely made it around the ramp. Any of those things that vary the amount of time that things happen. But still, you hear what happens in that sequence, and you hear that... and the voiceover behind that is, woo-hoo, yee-haw, woo-hoo-hoo-hoo, and all that stuff. And all of a sudden, right? And so the rhythm of that sequence is something that is built up out of the physical, just a viscerally physical thing that's happening right there in front of you. There is a ball rolling on a piece of wood and then up a plastic ramp and then down into a metal wire form and off and the flipper strikes it again. Repeat, right? And that's what's going on right then. And who cares that it's going down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. You know, it's a nice song, right? But that's not the point of what's going on right there. That's just setting the stage. And when those boat rants kick in, you don't even hear those tunes. You don't even hear the tunes. You barely hear like, you know, maybe I guess with Fishtails, I think you still hear the bass line or something like that while that's going on or all that boat stuff. But the sound effects are completely taken over. And that is absolutely as it should be. You know, so that when you listen, you go to YouTube or something like that and you see a, you know, playthrough of something. and I had to do this to kind of refresh my memory of one of the questions that you warned me you were going to ask about Lord of the Rings. I'm like, what is he talking about? I don't have a Lord of the Rings. I haven't played one in years. But I had to go to YouTube and look, and I was, like, watching this thing go off and listening to the soundtrack and going, and this is not what this game sounds like when you play it. This is what this game sounds like when you record it and then present it on YouTube, you know, Because when you make something happen on a pinball game, when you make a shot and something happens, when you shoot that boat ramp and you go into one of those sequences or you're doing rock the boat, bow, bow, bow, bow, bow, you know, that's what you're doing and that's what you're feeling. And never mind that the tune is like this really rocking, awesome, you know, tune. That's kind of like, that's only the point to say, keep shooting, keep doing it, keep doing it. You know, you're still in this mode. And that's the only message that that thing is meant to deliver at that moment. But listening to it on YouTube, it's like, okay, well, there's this weird kind of rhythm, and it sounds kind of herky-jerky and kind of chaotic, don't you think? And I'm like, yeah, no shit, it's super chaotic. To a listener, to somebody who's experiencing it in a linear way, it's super chaotic. And what do you do with that, right? To a player, it's not chaotic at all. It is directly connected to what you're doing. You are making the music. You are making it happen. And so it's not chaotic. And that is the huge difference between interactive and linear. And, yeah, I mean, I couldn't – I don't think I can say it anymore. Yeah, no, it's funny because, you know, I was into pinball in the 90s. And then when I got back into it, you know, there was something missing with some of the newer games. And I could never kind of like put my finger on it. and maybe it is what you're kind of describing. And, you know, I guess they don't teach, like, there's no class you can take at school to kind of go over what you just kind of said about fishtails. But do you think that that's a skill that you just kind of developed or learned that some people don't understand, and they don't understand the importance of, like, that thing you described in fishtails where you're looping the ramps and it's increasing, and then there's this big payoff. I would have said that I think of the guys now, my colleagues who are making pinball sound these days, I still know most of them, right? Jerry Thompson is doing a really nice job for Stern and the guys that help him out making music and stuff like that. But it's a little hard for me to listen to many Stern games. They have a sort of a – to say that they sound the same one from the other puts it way, way too strongly. But the style of soundtrack that that shop has settled into and is doing a really nice job of, to me sounds like there's a kind of a predictable behavior to it, but that behavior includes what I just described. I mean, there are audio sequences that grow and that grow in intensity and that reach a peak and then dump you into a new mode. You know, that happens, you know, that's the bread and butter of pinball, and that happens with every game. you know, doesn't matter the shop, you know, that's happening all the time. I think, you know, I'm not, you know, everybody can, you know, somebody like me who hasn't made pinball sound now for like six years, you know, and that was just, you know, I didn't even finish that game, you know, gets to say one sort of thing about, you know, soundtracks these days or something like that, you know. Oh, yeah, we're not asking you to say you're better than what's going on, But, I mean, like the late 80s and the early 90s sound packages, I mean, like, they're fun. You can, like, you step up and you press the start button and, like, the sound that comes out of the pinball machine tells you that you're going to play pinball now and you're going to have fun. Whereas maybe it's got to do with, you know, the themes that are being chosen right now, you know, more original and more serious themes that, you know, have like a dark and a moody kind of feel and, you know, you're battling this thing that's not necessarily meant to bring out that cheerful, you know, pinball joy that kind of came out of the 90s. Yeah, maybe. You know, the fact that almost not at all is anybody doing original pinball anymore. It's not nothing. You know, I mean, you know, American pinball just did a pretty cool thing that was, you know, it was about Houdini, right? But it's, you know, pretty clearly, you know, that's a historical license. It's not a, you know, it's not a movie license, right? and Pat just did dialed in, right? So that was a thing. And so it is kind of happening, and I certainly encourage and hope that people will continue to press for more of that because I think it's desperately, desperately needed. One of the teaser questions, Ryan, that you sent me was just exactly about this, And I feel really strongly about this. I think that I almost kind of like don't care about licensed games. Making a licensed game, and I understand why we make them. I understand that we're essentially trading and we're partnering up with someone who's already invented some IP, and it's now our job to help sell that IP in our cabinet, right? And there's nothing inherently wrong with that method. And, in fact, we've made lots of really cool, fun games in that style, even some back in the 90s. I mean, that was what Indiana Jones was. In a way, that was what Twilight Zone was. In a way, very much so, that was what Star Trek, the original Star Trek Next Generation game that Dan Forden did the sounds for, all that stuff came out in 93, right? And those games were amazing. Those games were monstrously cool. And, you know, they worked with really strong licenses that really helped us to tell a cool pinball story, right? The very best, I mean, you know, by a mile, best pinball voiceover package ever was The Simpsons. No close competition. No close competition. And the reason why was because we started with material that was really great and had just an incredible depth to it, right? You know, season after season of just hilarious, wonderful, you know, killer, killer writing with voice talent that just like was for days, right? You know, voice characterization for days. Amazing, amazing stuff. And then you hand all that to Keith P. Johnson. And Keith P. Johnson was not only, he was an ask-me-anything guy about the Simpsons, right? He knew, he had seen every episode. He had stuff memorized. He had the books on his shelf. He was way into it. He was way, way into the Simpsons. And he knew everything there was to know about pinball rules. And he wrote the script for that game, and that script was inspired because he was able to take the rules that he primarily kind of worked up in that game and found something in an episode of The Simpsons where he could modify a word or two and make it be the perfect thing for the game to say at that moment. So that when you were, you know, I mean, comic book guy, oh, my God, you know, you talked about favorite call-outs, worst ball ever. That is funny. You know, you drain suddenly and he goes, oh, you were doing so well. You know, I mean, it's just epic. It's priceless, you know. Donuts. Is there anything they can't do? You know, I mean, it was just, it was genius stuff. It was genius, you know. Thank you. Come again. You know, all that stuff was just, I can't even, you know, I can't even begin to say how tremendously fun it was to work. It was always fun to work with Keith, you know, but that one, yeah. So going back a bit then, so, you know, probably to earlier licenses, right? So probably, I would say Elvira is probably your first license that you worked on. Yeah, exactly. But you've got Terminator 2, and obviously, you know, you've worked on Adam's Family, so let that sink in. You were the sound guy for Adam's Family. But my question to you is, do you have to approach sound design for those machines differently because you given assets or you know the palette of sound is already there Well so you know with let see you know we talked about so Elvira I will tell you is still to this day literally to this day, because, you know, at Zynga, where I work now, we are currently working on an Elvira game. And, you know, this is like the 20th or 30th game that varies people from the, originally from the pinball community all through the slots, you know, the slot games, you know, the slot machine game history of games and casinos. and now into the social slots games that we're making at Zynga, Elvira, you know, Cassandra Peterson has been part of that work right along, you know, ever since Elvira and the Party Martins. So that was not only the first one, but that started a long, long run, and she's just super, super cool. She's a little bit the exception to the answer to the question that you were kind of leading me to, But just to say that she was super flexible, super easy, as long as it was fun and good times and had plenty of room for that great double entendre humor that is everything about, that is what Elvira is about. As long as we presented to her and to our designers a platform for that all to just come out and flower and have fun with, then that was just going to work. And Cassandra was like super easy with all of it. You know, super, super flexible, you know, basically kind of dug everything we threw at her, you know, saw what kind of very quickly what we were after and got on board and was our partner and is our partner. You know, one of our most valued, you know, favorite, beloved licensors, license partners for sure. So that's Elvira. But that's different from, you know, from a Terminator, from an Addams Family, from, you know, from a Star Trek or anything else. Yeah. Well, that's right. Because Terminator 2 was your next one. Terminated to, and obviously, that's a much bigger license, I would argue. And therefore, people... Yes, it was. You know, the license holders are going to be a lot more, I'm assuming, hands-on and very restrictive of their license. How was that process? Well, let me tell you a story about that. Oh, my goodness. Well, so, you know, Terminator 2 was James Cameron's really big sort of like breakout movie, right? You know, he had done Terminator, which is a cool movie, but still pretty obscure. And then he'd done Aliens, which was a great breakout, you know, follow on to, you know, the Ridley Scott original. And that was a pretty cool thing. But T2 turned out to be the thing that really launched him into Titanic land, into, you know, Avatar land, into the space where he is like kind of like one of those celestial, you know, figures in movie directors, you know, Oscar winners and, you know, huge, huge, you know, kinds of guys. And so, yeah, it was a kind of a juggernaut project. and it featured Arnold who at that point was making successful movies and making a lot of money at movies and kind of was a celebrity himself and so yeah we were like in a whole other sort of a category of dealing with these guys and you know the fact that we had Roger Sharp on our team and Roger with the magic Rolodex you know Roger who just knew everybody you know somehow and he knew the executive producer of this movie the guy the head of Carol Co the movie production company and that was how we got the deal and what Roger and our people offered Carol Coe and offered Arnold to get him to do the game in the first place I don't even remember it wasn't about money it was about you're going to get a pinball game and it was more about let's teach Hollywood about another version of product placement, you know, because that was really all we were offering them. You know, a pinball shop didn't really have much more to offer other than, you know, some sort of cachet, you know, what a goofy little thing this is. And, you know, in addition to having, you know, in addition to having made, you know, tens of millions of dollars off the box office and videos and everything else that, you know, that they made from that thing, there was also, you know, you got to have a Terminator 2 pinball game or a video game in your, you know, in your game room or something like that. You know, that was your, the cool thing. So, but, so, but, but, but at that point, none of that had ever happened before. And Arnold was practically the first, you know, sort of like big celebrity that we had to deal with. And, and of course, you know, we wanted, you know, we wanted to be able to go and get stuff from the movie, but the movie hadn't been released when we, you know, we, we, we had to hold that, the game's release until the movie came out because we didn't want to, you know, we weren't allowed to release first, obviously. so we couldn't go in and say can we have the dialogue from the movie the way that licenses go now where we get a clean dialogue stem and anything that any of the characters says that we can arrange the rights to use we can say all that stuff which is more what we did then with Adam's family but with Terminator we didn't have access to that stuff and so we had to write a script and we assumed that we were going to get Arnold as the Terminator to speak it and they're like, well, wait a minute. You mean Arnold's going to have to go to a recording session for you guys? And we're like, yeah. And so we were ballsy enough or naive enough to think that we could ask that question and not get laughed off the lot, right? They're in production. The movie's in production at this point. So we go, well, yeah, and we're thinking to ourselves, God, what is it? I mean, we can imagine, you know, Arnold, this is a lock sequence and this is what's going to happen because this is the Terminator. You know, so he speaks like this. He's got a monotone thing going on. You know, give me your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle, you know, and all this kind of thing that's going on. But what do we want him to say? We look at our rules and we go lock sequence initiated. You know, I'm locked on, fire. You missed. You missed everything. You know, all this stuff that he says, fuck you, asshole. All those things that he says, right, get the extra ball. And we're like, what? the Terminator doesn't say get the extra ball. He doesn't say that, right? So we're like, okay, well, we need him to say that. You know, somebody's got to say that. And who else is going to say that? You know, we didn't want anybody else talking in this game, obviously. You know, so it's like, okay, well, you know, basically we needed him to say pinball stuff. You know, get the jackpot. Get the super jackpot. You know, get the extra ball. And they're like, can you, like, give us an example of that? And we're like, you mean like a sound-alike or something? And they said, yeah, yeah, could you have a sound-alike do it and send us a tape of that? And we're like, okay, sure, you know. So, you know, and I'm, like, sitting in Roger's office while he's having this conversation with this guy at Terrelco. And he's looking at me, and I'm, like, you know, shrugging and going, all right, sure, you know. That's what it takes, you know. So I get on the horn, and I, you know, call a voiceover shop and say, you know, I'm looking for somebody to do Arnold. You know, I need somebody to read a pinball script, you know. And this is like a Friday afternoon, and the guy at Voices Unlimited goes, sure, all right, I'll make a couple of calls. Give me your number. And so I gave him my number, and Saturday morning my phone rings, and I go, hello. And he goes, and I hear on the other end, hello, Mr. Grana, this is Arnold. I'm like, oh, okay, great. And I'm playing along, great. So say this, say, get the extra ball in the Terminator's voice. And they would go, get the extra ball. And I'm like, oh, God, that's awful. no way is it going to sound like that it's not going to sound like that at all beep beep beep oh hang on a second I've got another call coming in click hello hello Mr. Granna it's Arnold and over the next five minutes I had four different guys call me they waited till nine and then they called at Saturday morning and so I basically arranged for two of them sounded pretty good and like sounded less bad than the other two you know so I arranged for those two to come in and do a session where they did the voices. One of them was Fred Young. He was the guy who ended up getting the job. And, you know, we had him in, and he read our whole script, basically. And he has done so many games, and he's done such an amazing, amazing job. And he really cracks himself up. He's, you know, he'll say a line, and he'll laugh at it, which is fun. You know, I mean, Fred is great. I can't say anything bad about Fred. Fred is awesome. He's a great guy. But, you know, so he delivers this line, and he goes, get the extra ball. And we're like, oh, God, this is awful. You know, Arnold's going to hate this, you know. And so we send this tape off to, you know, to Carolco. And, you know, a couple days later, we hear back, and Arnold is like, not only am I not going to do this, you can't use a sound block. You can't do it. We're not putting my – we're not doing this. We're not putting my voice in this game. We're not doing it. I'm not saying this. And, you know, we're sitting in Roger's office, and Steve is looking at me, and we're looking at Roger, and Steve goes, if we don't get his voice, what are we buying exactly? And Roger basically said, you know, guys, you know, go back and keep working on the game. Let me do something here. Let me see if I can pull a rabbit out of my hat. and I don't, so I was not in the room when he talked to, you know, to the Carrico guy and I was not on the, you know, on the Carrico ranch where the guy talked to Arnold and talked him down off the ledge and basically said, look, you know, we'll just, you know, we'll come to your trailer, we'll do it on a break or something like that, it'll take you 15 minutes, it'll be easy, just do this, you know, it's good PR for the film, it's good for us if you just kind of, like, play ball you know, with us on this one and somehow Arnold said yes to it. So I did not get to go. They were on set. They were shooting the movie at that point. They were in San Francisco or someplace. They were shooting the big warehouse scenes. And so they were there. And Lee Orloff, who was the sound designer for the game, he was there. And he engineered the session. They did it in Arnold's trailer. They used two microphones that are five times cooler than any mic I've ever even seen. and they recorded this digital audio tape of the session that was, you know, like a three-page pinball script. He did every line twice. He did it just, you know, we gave him instructions about what we needed. And Lee was just amazing. He was like, you know, oh, wait, wait, there's a truck. And I'm like, there was? And I was listening later and I thought, oh, wow, there was a truck. Thanks, Lee, you know, stuff like that. And so this whole thing goes by and he delivers every line and everything sounds just like the Terminator because, of course, it was the Terminator. Yeah. And, you know, he absolutely delivered, you know, he completely nailed it. He completely, completely nailed it, including get the extra ball, which sounded exactly like the way that Fred did it. Fred exactly got it right. It was just such a weird and different thing that, you know, that we just had no idea, right? You know, we had no idea what that was going to sound like. And when we heard it the first time, it was like, oh, that's horrible. And then by the time we heard Arnold do it, it was like, oh, I guess that's really what it sounds like. Good job, Fred. you know so that was a super super goofy thing but the whole thing I mean the capper to the whole story of course is that you know they get to the end of our script and you know we can't say we can't swear at our game of course so we didn't have the fuck you asshole line in there you know but we got to the end of the thing and Lee goes okay I think that's it anything else and Arnold goes yeah and he gets completely out of character and leans down to the mic and his voice drops like a perfect fourth and he goes fuck you asshole and we were sitting in the studio listening to this tape that had come back to us and we were all just like yes yes it was epic it was like arnold said fuck you asshole directly to me it was like my fault that i had made him do this and he was like fuck you asshole speaking of uh speaking of assholes nice segue here so let's talk about adam's family so just a couple of rumours that I would like to have cleared up if you dare the first one obviously is that apparently Angelica Houston was being a little bit difficult when it came to being part of the Addams Family pinball machine so I want to first find out whether that's true the second rumour, and I've never had this substantiated is that apparently when Cousin It says its thing, the rumor is that apparently that's somehow related to Angelica Houston. I can't comment on the second question. That's pretty much admitting it. And the answer to the first question is that I can say, I can do more than not comment on the first question. I can say that Angelica declined to do a custom voiceover session, even when presented with the argument or with the offer that we made that some pretty famous actors have done this. You know, Arnold Schwarzenegger did it. and I'm afraid I can't repeat her agent's response to that offering, but suffice to say that she declined to do a session, you know, custom session for us for that game. And we were, of course, you know, we were a bit disappointed, you know, maybe even more than a bit. But fortunately we had, you know, we had Raul Julia, you know, in the, you know, kind of in the wings. And, uh, and that was just a stunningly awesome, amazing, amazing recording session. You know, um, uh, when you get to work with an actor of that caliber, I mean, he, he is an amazing actor. He is an amazing, amazing actor. And, um, and, and, and the difference that, you know, the, the, the thing that I, that I learned in that session, I had to go to New York and I met with him in a studio. Um, and he came and, um, and he, He seemed, you know, I don't know him. I know that, you know, some years after this he died. He passed away. I believe he had cancer. And so it's possible that he was sick. But I think the timelines don't really add up. He was alive for some years after that. So it doesn't seem like he would have been sick from that. But he just seemed out of it. He seemed like, you know, maybe I was thinking that he was like stoned or something like that, right? or on some, you know, his mind had been altered in some way. So he just seemed really dim and very sort of slow on the uptake. I felt like I had to describe things to him, you know, in a couple of different ways to get a glint of recognition in his eyes that he understood what I wanted. and everything seemed to take like twice as long as I thought it was going to take. And I'm used to running these sessions where what I'm trying to get from an actor is enthusiasm. And I do that by getting enthusiastic myself and modeling the behavior that I want them to show me. And if they don't do it, I give them more. I give them more energy to bounce off of and to try to get them to respond to me in that way. And, you know, 95% of the time, that's pretty much all it takes. And they're like, oh, that's what you want. Okay, yeah, I can do that, you know, because they're actors, right? You know, they can do anything you want. So this guy, this guy is like a, you know, this guy is a Shakespeare, you know, this guy is a knight of the realm, for God's sakes. I mean, he's an amazing actor. He's world class. He's Laurence Olivier territory, right? And I'm just getting nothing back from him on the mic, you know, or eye contact or anything. But then he would sit there and I would go, okay, so, yeah, give it a try. And he would go, all right. It's Cousin It! And suddenly this just massive voice would come out of him, and he would have completely transformed himself into Gomez Adams. And then as soon as the line was over, he went back to being Raoul Julia again. He was like this kind of like zero-affect guy. And it was just so interesting to see him just turn it on and deliver the line and then turn it right back off again. That was really something. That was a really remarkable session. And, I mean, you know, you heard the result. You know, the lines and the way that he delivers them are just, they're just epic. I mean, it was, that was a spectacular, spectacular speech package. Really, really nice. And, again, you know, he did all the extra ball and all that crazy stuff that we, you know, like to have a guy do when he does it. You know, he just nailed all that stuff. So, yeah, that was super fun. And so it turns out that Angelica, you know, who knows what she would have done. You know, I love Angelica Houston. You know, she is a spectacular actress, and I would never say a word against her. I would never say a word against her. Did you? And that's all you're going to say. Did you have a script planned out for her? I don't even think we got that far. you know we really what we did you know with with that is what we usually do whenever we get a chance to work with somebody custom like that is so we try to take something from the film or from the piece right and and adopt it to our rule set and and since our rule set kind of grows out of that that thing anyway and it's just sort of like an interactive version of a you know sort of like creating this mosaic of of of um character or something you know mosaic of story told um uh uh It's fairly straightforward to find things that, with a small alteration, will work in a pinball game. And so it would have been something like that that we would have done. And I think she says, you know, she goes, that's French. And all those kind of things. Gomez. And all those little clips that we do have. We were able to pay our $909 or whatever it was and then use anything that we found in the film itself, you know, in the Addams Family film. So that's what we had to work with, and that's what we put in, and then it worked out. It worked out okay. Yeah, it's okay. I mean, because you sold more pinball machines. We sold it. The game did all right, you know. What do you think of, so, you know, back in the days you were limited by kind of space and how much sounds and music and background things you can put in a game. And I'm not sure if you've heard about it. Have you heard about the Pinsound boards? Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah. So, you know, I think one of the first things that people did with it was try and find the original Twilight Zone track and put that back on the pinball machine. But some people say it doesn't sound exactly like it was meant to sound. So we're talking to the guy now who created the whole sound package for it. Have you heard a Twilight Zone with that package? Yeah. Actually, to be fair, I haven't actually heard – have I played a game with the few tracks that I – I dug that dap tape up, I think it was last year or the year before, and got it out there. And I guess I'm happy I did because it was interesting to go back and listen to those tracks again, having made them. They were the first things that we did, you know, not with, you know, not typing, you know, notes into an assembly line macro assembler editor, which is how we made, you know, sounds right up until the end of the WPC system, you know, the System 11 WPC stuff. But that was how we were doing it. And that was the first time that I got to just, you know, get into a regular, you know, real grown-up MIDI studio, right? And, you know, I had a couple of little synthesizers and, you know, my guitar and those tracks that we made. You know, we made them like that. And they sounded like they sounded. They sounded, you know, they sounded incredibly stilted compared to what we're doing now. They sound like, you know, late 80s, early 90s MIDI technology and constrained by just a strangulating restriction on memory that we had with the early DCS systems. I mean, it's kind of amazing that Indiana Jones and Star Trek, you know, when we finally got there and had to do a whole game, you know, with that DCS system, It's kind of amazing how much stuff we actually got into those games, and we did it by making the tunes just, like, extra short and cranking down the compression to just, like, painful levels. I mean, both of those soundtracks, you know, compared to even, you know, games just, even two or three years later, you know, sounded so, so much better when the algorithms got better and memory constraints started to ease a little bit. We were able to put a little bit more ROM and, you know, ROM space in. You know, things improved a lot. But you asked about pin sound, and I have heard the Twilight Zone package with my new sounds. I've heard other packages that have had, you know, the music, you know, reworked for modern, you know, synthesizer techniques. I've had a couple of the people who are working on that system for Nicholas and the guys at Pinsound I've had them get hold of me on Facebook or whatever and ask me to evaluate their pieces and stuff like that and I I'm truly ambivalent about Pinsound there's no question that the audio output hardware You know, the amplifiers and the speakers and stuff like that are superior to the factory, you know, pieces and things like that. But early on, they flubbed a significant piece of interactive mixing technology, and that is the ability for a sound effect or a fanfare or something like that to duck the background music or for VO to be able to do that. That was something that we implemented as early on as, I think, by the time we got to T2, we were doing that with VO, and the basic architecture of sound effects that were made on the Yamaha chip had a sort of a ducking mechanism built into them because there were only eight tracks of, you know, pitched, you know, FM synthesis going on on that chip. And whenever we made a sound effect, we stole four of them. So all that was left was the bass and maybe some rhythm guitar type instrument or something like that. That was all that was left of the music, all of the melody instruments. That's what we stole to make the sound effects that were all those weird servo motor sounds and stuff like that. That was all just synthesis, and we stole music tracks to do that. So having that level of interactivity, you know, we were talking about interactivity before. That's kind of part and parcel of what's going on there. So you're saying there's almost like too many sounds at once, and that's not true to what it was back in the day? Like you think it sounds better when a couple of tracks disappear when a sound effect plays because a person can concentrate on it? I do. I absolutely do. I think that I can imagine that I can imagine that if Nicholas if I had time to do this or if there was any money to be made in doing this or something like that, if I was given a pin sound board and unlimited budget to recreate the fishtails assets or something like that, I think that I could make them sound really good, right? I kind of think it sounds pretty good already you know I don't really feel the strong need to improve on what it was you know I mean Fishtail sounds you know Fishtail is my favourite sounding game it's like why would I want to do that right you said before when you were with Fishtail like you know when it's going up the boat ramp you're sort of really leaving the base there because you know we're obviously masking right when you've got too many sounds happening at once then you block things out. But you deliberately managed the sound for that. And I guess that's probably what you're saying about Twilight Zone is that when they've now got the new board and too many sounds are happening at once, there's a lot of masking, you're having too much, you don't have the opportunity to deliberately filter out sounds. Well, to be fair, I mean, you know, ever since DCS, that, you know, DCS replaced the kind of masking and the kind of prioritizing, right, that has to go on in an interactive context, you know, replaced the, you know, we pressed the Yamaha's synthesizers' limitations into service in producing a masking, you know, strategy for those soundtracks that, you know, we got to work pretty well. You know, we're pretty happy with the way that that worked out. In the early DCS days, the kinds of limitations that we had had to do with that we really could only produce four sounds at once, period. Right? Nowadays, you know, I just over this weekend, I got a note from Mark Turmel about a game that, you know, that we're working on together. He works at the San Diego office of Zynga, and we're working on something together. and he wrote on a collaboration chat Slack system that we have. He said, how many simultaneous sounds can I have in this game? And the answer is, well, 10 right now. And that's low compared to what a lot of systems can do today. But, I mean, if you think of something that's playing on your iPhone that can make 10 sounds at once before you start to degrade the frame rate of 60 frames per second in a match-three type game, And, you know, that's pretty cool. That's how far the hardware has come that just sits in your pocket that you can buy for $300, right? You know, what we have there, you know, built into a system, you know, that much hardware probably cost us $200 or $300 to put out there, and it sounded horrible, and it could only produce four sounds at a time. And coming from a world where we had – that was really mature, right? I mean, by the time we got to 1993, the Yamaha system, you know, we were making, you know, Matt Booty used to describe it as making the rowboat go 90 miles an hour. We really were just like milking every last cycle out of that system. And just, I mean, you know, I was super disappointed at the time that we had to bail on the DCS version of Twilight Zone because the DCS system just wasn't ready. And we had to totally scramble, and Rich Karstens and I spent like three weeks of nonstop, you know, super, like, you know, 24-7 recreating the soundtrack that we had in DCS and pouring it over to the Yamaha system. And we were only able to do it because we had that Yamaha system down so cold, and we could just make it work, you know. So that's what we did, and at the time, I was super disappointed that we even had to do it, because I was really looking forward to having that DCS package out there, and I was excited about it. It was new, and we needed to make that move and go in that direction. But when it came down to it, and later nowadays even, when I play at Twilight Zone, and I listened to that, or I listened to the playthrough on the CG Music website of some of that stuff that Marcel Gonzalez captured, that's really amazing. It's amazing use of that technology. How varied and how rich that Sonic world was in Twilight Zone specifically, it was once again sort of like in that sci-fi world, just like Pinbot was in that sci-fi world. And those are the games, to me, those games sound more themselves and more true to their genre than any other games. They're not necessarily my favorite. You know, like I say, I'm kind of a country bluegrass guy, and I really like fish sales. And it's not my, you know, none of them contain my favorite track, you know, which is the main theme from Taxi and always will be. but in terms of how well they are suited for their theme and for their genre, both of them, one is about outer space and a robot coming to life, and the other one is the Twilight Zone. It's like any kind of weird thing that you can imagine, speculative fiction and weirdness, and a synthesizer is the perfect tool to make a soundtrack for those things. So we really got a lot of mileage, and we really sounded really good, I think. Those games sound really, really good. And the idea that you could improve on the way that they sounded for reasons that are not, you know, I mean, I guess I'm kind of fuzzy on why you would want to do that. And I've said that exact sentence to Nicholas, and, you know, I haven't been convinced by any of his responses to that. So, yeah, I wish him well. You know, I hope that something interesting comes out of it. I'm a little concerned with the notion of who owns the IP, and I understand that he's made some progress talking with Rick at Planetary, in securing some kind of IP deal there, and I think that's great. But, yeah, I guess I feel like working on another one. I feel like working on a new one. Okay. So then after this, you did some music for a couple of Capcom games as well. So Pinball Magic and Airborne and Kingpin, which is going to be remade. How different was it working with Capcom? You mean from working at Williams? Yeah. And also working on the system, like whether there was changes to their process and how they implemented sound packages. To be honest, there wasn't actually that much different from the standpoint of technically what we could make, other than that we were limited in the Capcom system to two simultaneous sounds. So we could have music and speech, or we could have music and sound effects, or we could have speech and sound effects temporarily ducking the music with a fanfare or something like that. and so, and Foots was already, you know, Foots was there when I got there, and he had already kind of implemented this whole, you know, very elaborate layer system that managed, that made a pretty good guess about what was the most important thing for you to hear at any given time, and that took a little bit of getting used to, but other than that, we were, at that point, you know, everybody was making assets in this new MIDI studio way, right, because DCS had kind of won the argument and we were making DCS games at that point at Williams. And when I got to Capcom, we were still making, you know, we were making MIDI studio assets that would then turn into MP3 files or, you know, compressed files and the Capcom hardware would play it back. It wasn't that proprietary DCS thing, but it was essentially a multi-track, you know, interactive sound system, you know, similar to, you know, to the Spark system that Stern has or that DCS was right up until the end, and that pretty much every game kind of is now, right? It's just multi-track, you know, WAV file playback or some kind of multi-track playback system. So that part of it wasn't all that different. It was working with Mark again, kind of, but Mark was also kind of like the head of design and was busy doing managerial-type stuff probably more than he ended up wishing he had. Python had a lot more say about what was going on there than he ever had at Williams, and that was pretty interesting. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, you know, I mean, Python is a – it was. I'll give him an is. He's an immortal. He will never die. We will never forget him. He is a – he's somebody who – you know, Python did for pinball what somebody had to do, and he was the one who did it. And he did it in Pinbot, and he was the one who said, we're making a machine come to life. And that was Python's gift to the world. I mean, you know, he was the one who said that. And we made it happen in that game. Now I see you. That was what happened. And, you know, that's big. That's big. You know, we shouldn't forget that. I shouldn't forget that. So, you know, whatever, you know, wild and crazy, you know, stories that anybody could tell about Python, that's the most important one. So, you know, it was pretty chaotic, you know. There was a lot of drinking. There was a lot of throwing a party before the product was built, and that was a problem. Williams was not a friend to that operation. You know, they basically managed, you know, with legal means. You know, they managed to delay by about two, two and a half years the release of the first product. And I think that, you know, you get to do that because America is a great country, and you get to impose barriers to your competitors. And that's still true today, and that was certainly true in 1993, you know, when Capcom decided they thought pinball looked pretty cool. And, you know, it was pretty cool hardware. Pinball Magic was a pretty cool game Airborne, not my favorite game but it was a fun game Kingpin's pretty cool Big Bang Bar, that was a really great game that was a special game and you know how many more might we have had had Williams not gotten in our way basically for selfish reasons they didn't do anything illegal they could do it it's too bad though almost any company in that position would do it right to, you know, wouldn't have to be a holder or something like that. That doesn't make it right. Anyway. Fast forward a little bit to Lord of the Rings. Now, when I bought Lord of the Rings and I first turned it on and I was playing, I was like, man, like the sounds, like I like the sounds that are coming out of this, out of the speakers, but they sound like so like compressed or something. Like I couldn't make out who was doing the call-outs, if it was a light of wood or Gimli or Gandalf. And someone told me, oh, that's just because I think there's so much code in there or there's more call-outs and more sound than any other pinball machine that to fit it on, they either had to chuff stuff out or they had to sample it down to fit on the chip. Is that what happens? What did we do? You know what? I wish I had a definitive answer to your question. When you said that, I remember you emailed me that question, and I thought back, and I haven't had a chance to reach out to Keith to confirm whether we actually did that. So I can't say for sure, but when you said it, it sounded familiar, and it's possible that we found a bit to shave off somewhere, to buy us an extra 10 or 15% of space, it's possible that we did that. I mean, that was still the BSMT system, so we didn't have a lot of flexibility in that regard. There wasn't as much to do. And, you know, BSMT, you know, the dynamic range of music was limited. in answering, in going and researching the other question that you asked about that soundtrack, I got a chance to kind of listen to some more of it again, and it was interesting to hear all that stuff, and you're right about the quality of the voice. It doesn't seem to have aged well in that regard. Well, but the funny thing is that when the pin sound board then came out, or people say, you can upgrade the speakers, this, this, and that, And I guess once I play a game enough, like you were kind of saying with Twilight Zone, it's like that's the way the game sounds and that's what it was at the time. And I don necessarily want it to sound better It sounds kind of crappy but I enjoy that You know I enjoy that fuzzy speaker noise now because that what it is right Yeah, and, you know, I have something that I sort of stump for, or I have a little bit of a soapbox to jump on on this particular subject a lot, that I think it's worth taking a minute to make this point, that your brain is doing something there that is really valuable to a guy who's pushing the envelope with sound and sound quality and quantity that we were doing. And that is that if you present your brain with a particular sonic palette, it takes the brain about five or ten seconds to sort of adapt its expectations to that palette. And then it's just okay for things to sound like that. You might not know right off the bat what it's saying, and you might have to go online to your forum and ask, what does it say when you hit that ball rod the second time? What is he saying there? And you know you're going to find the answer, so that's not a problem, right? It's not that bad. Yeah, well, no, I mean, but you can, you know, think of an earlier, you know, you can think of lots and lots of earlier examples where things sounded far worse, you know, when CVSV was the reproductive mechanism and, you know, things just sounded horrible, you know. At least in that one, you know, we started with a basic thing, you know, it was 80 PCM compression, you know, for Lord of the Rings and, you know, that has its kind of like known limitations. There was a, there's a lot going on in that soundtrack because there's a lot going on in that play field. I mean, talk about real-time chaos. That game is truly chaotic, and it was interesting listening to that YouTube clip. I hadn't heard it for a long time, and you go for long periods. I was looking at a player get multiple jackpots, a couple of different multiballs and stuff like that, and he went for maybe a minute or longer without ever hearing the tune. At least the tune didn't make it through in the YouTube clip. Because all you were hearing was jackpot award after jackpot award, sound effect, voiceover, sound effect, voiceover, you know, sound effect, fanfare, sound effect, voiceover. And that was all that happened. You know, he just, like, went on a roll. And there was, like, a minute where he was, like, he couldn't miss. And, you know, jackpot, jackpot, super jackpot, super jackpot, you know, just it was just mayhem. And listening to what the audio result was of his play, I will go back and reassert the idea that the game made the right choices about what to feature. He was hitting shots that earned him a jackpot, and therefore the jackpot sound effect and light show and everything, that's what should have been front and center, and it was. You know, so those are the kinds of decisions that you make when you're putting sound, you know, priorities and soundtrack packages together. Those that's the interactive mix. And, you know, I would argue that we did a pretty good job of it. So but but, you know, in terms of in terms of actual space, you know, I don't have a good idea. But I do like the idea that our brains make these adjustments for us and say, you know, you can basically go into any sort of sonic world, and as long as it's consistently presented, you know, your brain is basically going to very quickly sort of just like enter into that world and be okay with whatever it is. And I think that's, you know, that's something that is useful to people who are designing systems that are, you know, kind of like trying to push the envelope a little bit. I think the brain also, like my memory banks, that's what my brain remembered from pinball. It's the sounds when I first pressed start on belly strikes and spares, that chime sounds. And I've totally forgotten it. And then when I played the game for the first time a couple of years ago, I pressed it back. I'm like, oh, my gosh, I remember that sound. And that's kind of what transformed it back. Totally took you right back, right? Yeah. It's not necessarily the art or the way the ball flows. it's the sound that kind of gives you that response. Yeah, like how long you've been or something. Yeah, absolutely. So in Lord of the Rings, you know, there's a lot of, you know, countdowns, and it's a game that kind of really stresses me out, but it stresses me out in the right way that I feel excited when I play it, because when you're playing a mode, it'll count you down. Seven, six. Was that your idea, or was that Keith's idea, or do you remember, you know, doing that game? It's really not my favorite thing to do. Keith felt that it was necessary, and I went along. Like I said, there's so much going on in that game, kind of simultaneously, that Keith felt that it was important to be able to draw the player's attention to what was the thing that he needed to pay the most attention to right now. so there's a bit more of that than so you believe like Liss is more in well that's one place where I think I would have you know in retrospect would I have changed that one you know maybe it worked out okay you know I mean I got used to it you know the way that it was but yeah it's it's not my first choice it wasn't my first choice then and we had to add it you know to satisfy, you know, kind of satisfy that, to solve that problem. I mean, it is true that, you know, I don't always get to win those arguments, you know. I mean, I didn't win that one, and I had to, you know, basically, you know, agree that, you know, that what seemed like the player experience was not clear enough the way that it had been and that something else was needed and that was something we could do. And so we did. So on call-outs, you know, you've said your favorite theme will always be the taxi thing. Do you have a favorite, either a collection of call-outs for a Pivmore machine or a one single call-out? Well, you know, I guess the, you know, I still go back to The Simpsons, and I just, you know, that whole, the whole voiceover, you know, script is just so inspired, and it's so much fun to listen to. So, you know, whenever I talk about it, I think I've got to go find The Simpsons and go play that some more because it's just so much fun and so funny. It's just so, so bloody funny. Really, really great. You know, I guess other than that, you know, I think back of, you know, highlight moments. Obviously, you know, the Arnold, you know, if you can, you know, if you play any version of that game that's now been produced, you know, has a raw minute that if you, if you, you know, get the random, the stupid random feature, you know, by shooting the little, you know, the little saucer on the far left side, and you, and you end up earning nothing, you know, it's very hard, I think, to find a machine that doesn't then say, fuck you, asshole. At that point, you know, the possible response is that that comes up and it says that, you know, I mean, it's that, that, that's just, you know, that, that, that's just never going to get old for me. I will always feel like I personally, you know, delivered that moment to pinball. That's my everlasting gift to pinball is that one line. But, you know, I mean, we, you know, Mark Ritchie and I, we have done, we did so many voiceover sessions and we did sound for, and voiceovers for so many games and we mostly wrote those scripts just kind of like seat of our pants. Neither one of us, you know, was really all that as a writer. You know, we just sort of, you know, found things that seemed to work and stuff like that. And some of the stuff that we came up with with Cyclone, for instance, was just a wonderful, you know, welcome, step right up, you know, here you, here you. You know, that character was a wonderful, wonderful character, you know, ride the Cyclone, you know. Those were fun and really, really worked exactly, you know, as you would think they would. And then, you know, also from that game, welcome to my house, you know, that is where Dracula came from. And, you know, and at one point you go into his little cave and he goes, blah. We used to walk into each other's office and go, blah. We got to freak each other out. It was, you know, it's a good thing. It still works. It still works today. It's still funny. So are you responsible for, you know, who's going to do the call outs and, you know, what they're going to be? Or is that part of the team? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you know, in terms of, like I said, the script, you know, I don't fancy myself really a great writer. And these days, you know, in my present job, I, you know, I have worked pretty hard to try and always have a writer available to me to write the scripts. I sometimes then edit them, you know, in the session. I'll find something that doesn't sound good to my ears as I'm producing the session. And I'll say, try saying it this way. And often I can improve on a line in the saying of it that didn't look right in the writing of it or something like that, you know. But mostly I don't write them anymore. I do still, you know, it's like the last thing that I've really hung on to. I still love to produce voiceover sessions. It's still kind of like my favorite thing to do. Okay. So then what we've noticed is that you do seem to have a preference for deep, booming voices. Where does that come from? Oh, well, you know, that's more about the CVSV system. That's more about the hardware limitations back in the day. it didn't produce women's voices very well at all the higher the pitch the less clear it was and it just worked better with a nice deep gravelly kind of a thing that was already had some distortion kind of built into it already so yeah that's a real thing that was like a hardware problem wow okay so do you think that lends itself well though to pinball machines to have like that deep voice telling you what to do or celebrating Think about the themes. Think about high speed and think about Pinbot. Pinbot Circus activated. It sounds good down there. It sounds nice. We were able to tune it. That one, we were able to put it right in the key of the tune, right? So that was cool. But things like F-14, having General Yagov be what it was, that worked out pretty well. Although, you know, Mark plays the, you know, plays the ramrod character, you know, where he's going, I'm locked on. And that's pretty high, you know, that's pretty high pitched. But that kind of thing, you know, as long as what you're doing is kind of yelling, then that's really more the energy that we want. You know, we want something that sounds loud and sounds big and sounds fierce. You know, those are the kinds of things that you wanted. And, you know, when you're doing, you know, big guns, right, you know, it's a battle scene. Road Kings as a motorcycle gang, kind of a Mad Max sort of a scene situation. F-14 is a dogfight. We're talking war here, right? So what is the right thing to have? And then you think about how those kinds of cultural decisions, maybe they were technical to begin with, But then it turns out that you steer yourself in those directions when you're thinking of themes of games to make. And you get to Mortal Kombat, right, you know, in 1990 or whatever. And they have Steve Ritchie, you know, in his best General Yagov, you know, monster voice, do, you know, ready, fight. You know, and that's Steve Ritchie, right? And, you know, and all the things that he says, finish him, all this victory, you know, Silver Zero wins. All those things are things that, you know, it's like, you know, and that was Steve, who already had a fairly kind of a deep voice. Now, and he doesn't anymore, but he did then. And, you know, and then we would drop him down. You know, we would lower the pitch, you know, another, you know, third or fourth or something like that to really give it that kind of deep, you know, meaty quality. And, yeah, it just kind of worked. You know, it was a vibe that, you know, seemed to work. It seemed like it was thematically appropriate. there were games where it wouldn't have been appropriate at all Cyclone was one of them Taxi was one of them we didn't use anything like that in Taxi and Taxi had some of our favorite characters in them the Santa Claus character was awesome that was one where we did have a girl the voice of the Marilyn character was Ken Fedeza's secretary Kathy Klein she was a dear you know Mark reprised his Dracula character right that was my that was me ho ho ho taxi that was me and so we had you know we basically did you know we just had fun with it you know we did all kinds of stuff like that you know we had you know the voices in fire were us trying to be a German or trying to be a you know Irish fireman and stuff like that You know, and then, of course, we get to the Indian characters from, you know, any of those games. It was this big. I am not kidding. You know, that whole thing. Wow. Okay. That was. Wow. Right there. That was actually. But that was fish sales. But, yeah, that was all. You will remove this bulldozer from the street. Oh, my God. Wow. And, you know, I can't. You know, you can't do that anymore. No way. It's better. They get removed up here from seasons. We're not invited to do that anymore. So then moving on then to probably the last game that we know, we believe you're known for, and that's Wizard of Oz. So we've gone to Jersey Jack. You've worked on that. Did you get to the end of that as well? No, no, I didn't. Yeah, so what happened there? Yeah, yeah. Well, so, I mean, and, you know, you're touching on something that I just need to explain. You didn't ask about this, but, you know, I got onto that project from a place where I had essentially retired from this business. I stopped working in this business in 2006. I went and took a position with a financial planning company that both of my brothers worked for, and I thought maybe I would just try my hand at something else. I had had a couple of reversals in 2005, and I saw some things coming that I didn't like very much and decided I would go another way for a while. I discovered some really interesting things about myself. It was a sharp and expensive lesson to learn them, and I was in the process of literally just having my soul sucked out of me when I returned to Pinball Expo in 2010 at Larry DeMar's request for the 20th anniversary of Adam's Family Release, where we got the entire team back together. And I hadn't been at Expo for a few years at that point. And it was just so cool to be back. It was just so much fun to hang with all of my colleagues and to be on stage, to tell that Terminator 2 story for the first time in many, many years to the perfect audience, to a thousand people who roared, who were on the edge of their seat and just roared with laughter. And it was the best story I've ever told. And I still love to tell that story because of the way that it sounded that night in October of 2010. So there I was. I met with Dennis Nordman. He was working on the early version of Wonelly, and he was looking maybe for some sounds for that. And I didn't make any commitments to him, but I did come back to my studio and played around with a couple of things. Never really went anywhere, but it was out of that meeting and out of having been there and stayed in touch with those guys that Dennis reached out to me and he said, man, you've got to talk to this guy, Jack. He's doing something really cool, and he needs a sound guy, and we think he should have you. And I'm like, you know what? I'm ready. I'm ready to talk to him. And this was like in early 2011. And so we talked, and he said, you know, what would you need? And we agreed on a price, and we knew that it was going to take, you know, at least a year, maybe longer to get it all done. And that was perfect for me because I was still working and selling insurance and financial planning. And so I basically went to my people and I said, I've been asked to write a couple of new tunes for this thing, and I want to say yes. I kind of miss it. And they're like, sure, yeah, go ahead and do it and, you know, keep us in the loop and stuff like that. And over the course of the next year, I just came back. I just, you know, it became the most important thing that I was doing. And, you know, the game was taking way, way longer than, you know, than anybody hoped it would for, you know, Jack to figure out how to make a pinball game. But, you know, it limped along and did what it did through 2011. And by the time I got to 2012, it was very clear that I was done doing financial planning. It took me until about February, mid-February, you know, early March before I actually said, you know what, I'm quitting. You know, I'm out. I'm just going to do pinball now. And so I did that. And right about that time, oh, I guess it was actually, it was like the week before the Super Bowl of 2012, where Steve Kordek turned 100. And at Steve Kordek's 100th birthday, I ran into Brian Eddy. And he said, hey, Chris, we were going to call you. And I said, oh, really, why? And he said, well, you know, we've got this startup company, me and Joe Kamenkal and Larry DeMar and a couple of other guys. We've got a startup. We're making a Facebook game. and we're coming up on the home stretch and we need a sound guy and we're going to call you. I'm like, great. And he goes, talk to Larry. So I walk across the room, you know, and say, hey, Larry, I hear you're going to call me. And he goes, oh, yeah, we're totally going to call you. And he says, are you interested in like a full-time in-house position? As a matter of fact, that's all I'm interested in, really, you know. So, yes, I'm absolutely interested in that. And it took a couple of tries at it. But basically, during the second and third quarter of 2012, I worked both on Wizard of Oz and on, as it turns out, the game that Brian and Larry and Joe were making was for Spooky Cool Labs, the company that they had founded. And they were making a Wizard of Oz-themed city builder for Facebook. And that was their game. So I was all Wizard of Oz all the time, having to keep the tunes separate because, you know, it was two different clients. You know, you can't do that, right? You can't mix and match that way. But, you know, I was just like, you know, writing Wizard of Oz music and finding Wizard of Oz themed sound effects for, you know, for Brian. And, you know, coming up with goofy dings and dupes and, you know, trying to figure out, you know, what Jack's game was going to sound like. And writing tunes for Keith and for those guys. And eventually, you know, October of 2012 rolls around, and on the same day, Joe came to me and he said, come into town for lunch tomorrow. It's time for us to bring you in-house. You know, we need to sit down and talk about what that looks like. That same day, Jack calls me up and he goes, so I'm planning my next game, and I'm trying to put the team together. So what do you think? Are you in? And so it was, you know, raining and pouring situation. And I literally, I mean, I had a legit offer from Joe. You know, he had actual money and he was offering me an actual position. He had an actual, you know, HR department. And, you know, he goes, here's the offer. It's this much per year and here's how it would go. And, you know, equipment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. With Jack, it never quite got that specific. and when it came down to it, I basically said, I'm taking Joe's offer. It's a real offer. It's a full-time job. I need the full-time money and I can't say that I've made the wrong decision. We've been extremely successful as a result. That company was purchased by Zynga in 2013 and we are one of Zynga's primary asset makers these days and I'm the audio director of that division and I've got like nine guys reporting to me and we're, you know, we're doing really well. And I'm, you know, I really, I'm working harder at a higher level than I ever have in my life. And I'm barely writing any music anymore. But I, my canvas and my instrument is way, way bigger than it was when I was making pinball So that part is really cool. But, you know, in the meantime, I was, you know, as we got through 2012 and things really started to heat up for us at Spooky Cool, I basically said, you know, there is no way that I can finish this game. And I contacted my good friend Rob Berry, and Rob finished it for me. You know, he did it as a subcontract. and that turned out to be a good relationship as well because Rob, he was already in the game. He's the voice of the Cowardly Lion in that game. And he had worked at WMS slot machines earlier, of course, at Williams Pinball as well in the 90s. He and I actually were in school together at the U of I back in the 80s, so I've known him forever. but he came in and he finished that game and then went on to start contracting with another division of Zynga and he is now my number one contractor still to this day with Zynga. I don't think he's doing pinball. I could be wrong, but I don't know all of who his clients are, but that's pretty much how that one went. I stuck with it as long as I could and still do a good job for Jack and at the point where I just, you know, I didn't have time to work on it anymore, I turned it over to a guy that was very trustworthy and did a really good job to finish the game, I think. So, yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Chris. Really appreciate getting a really good insight into all the different eras and, you know, what you're up to now. And, you know, we really appreciate what you've done because, you know, the games that you've worked on are, you know, the legendary games and a lot of them have actually, you know, it's actually the sound that's actually elevated them even further. So I just wanted to say thank you for coming on and appreciate everything that you've done. Well, thank you very much, you guys, Ryan and Marty. You know, it really means a lot that you guys would call and ask to do this. I, you know, like I started off saying, I am the luckiest guy to ever do the work that I'm doing. I was so in the right place at the right time and was embraced by this industry and have been embraced by this community really nonstop ever since. And I am tremendously grateful, and it means a lot that you asked. So thank you. No worries. I appreciate it. And we appreciate the work you've done. Pinball wouldn't be the same without the work that you've done. And what you've imprinted on those, I think it was 39 machines I counted, unique machines. So really appreciate it, and we hope to meet you in person one day. I hope so too. I hope so, too. It sounds like I'm going to be a pintastic here this, you know, in late spring, early summer of next year. And I'm always at Expo in Chicago. So if you ever make it over to, you know, if you ever make it here, you know, I hope we get a chance to see each other in person. And I look forward to checking out the podcast when you get it together. No worries. Sure. Thanks, Max. All right, guys. Take care. Bye. Bye. So there we go, Ryan. That was Chris Granat. What did we learn? Well, Brian Eddy. Everyone loves Brian Eddy. He's a beautiful smile. The pinball machines he worked on, AFM, Evil Madness. But now we finally have one reason not to like him. He drew Chris Granat away from pinball. So, definitely. It was great. He's so enthusiastic. He's retired and he's more enthusiastic than everyone else is about pinball. No, I know. You could just tell, like, there was this enthusiasm and passion in his voice when he was talking about it. So he obviously has had a great time in pinball. And as we sort of heard, he eventually ended up working for, you know, a mobile company that then became Zynga. So he had his heyday and loved it. And, you know, we've read through the list of the machines that he worked on. he has worked on some legendary games which people love and there's just very little criticism of those games so he can sort of just retire knowing that he's got this legacy this list of machines that everybody loves and that's a good place to be yeah and all this time I was kind of collecting games not knowing why I kind of held on to certain ones and like I had two White Star games and they're both Chris Grani games and just everything that ends up in my collection usually stays there if it's by him because, as you know, I'm obsessed with sound. I do know that. So shall we move to the news of the week? Well, there is some interesting news of the week, isn't there, Ryan? Yeah, Stern released a promo for a Primus pinball machine and luckily for us they released it on, I think it was a Friday for us or a Saturday, I can't remember. But at least we get to talk about it a couple of days later versus one day. after the podcast, which it usually is. So this is another kind of contract manufacturing game, except it was kind of initially advertised by Stern, unlike the Supreme one, which was totally separate. It is a re-theme of Wonelly Big UC Mills. 100 units are being made. I believe the price is, I don't have it in front of me, but I think it's $8,000. That's what I read. Sold a couple of hours after we record, so we won't know what the reception is. kind of sales-wise. They'll sell out 100, right? 100. Fuck all. They'll sell out 100. There's that many Primus fans that will go, yep, love it. I don't care that it doesn't have ramps and all that kind of stuff. I've got a pinball machine in my collection and it's Primus. Boom, there it is. This is just artwork. I mean, Supreme sold purely on brand and the hype that that brand creates. This is just pure art. And it's just, not bizarre, but it's like, you know, I was kind of thinking in my head, what's the difference between Primus and Mafia? Mafia has a new layout. It has spinners. It has an LCD. You know, you might think it's cool for that, but what it doesn't have, it doesn't have a license attached to it, and it has pretty average art, in my opinion. So, I don't know. Art is so powerful. It's the number one thing now. If you launch a Primal Machine without good art, Like, all of your good work goes to waste, no matter what it is. And I know this is a rethink, so they didn't really work on much, you know, layout-wise, obviously. No, they didn't really need to, and all the parts were probably there as well. Yeah. But look, the thing that really does stand out, first and foremost, is the art by Zombie Yeti, and it is just beautiful. It is... Yeah, something by Zoltron, I think his name is. Yep. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah, they really have made that machine look amazing. Amazing. So we've obviously seen it. It started as Woe Nearly. Pabst Can Crusher did a version of it. I think that was... Dirty Johnny did the art for that. Yeah. And now we've got Zombie Yeti putting his art on it. So Christopher Franchi's next, right? Yeah, it has to be Franchi or the group of no-names that did Star Wars. the funny thing is I kind of wish it was Spider-Man because I haven't played Spider-Man and it looks like a more interesting layout than Wonelly because I played Can't Crush a decent amount. Yeah, Spider-Man's awesome. I've mentioned it many times. Spider-Man Home Edition is awesome for a home edition. They need more of these simple layouts. I know that's easier said than done. But then, you know, people get excited because eventually, again, one of these smaller 100 to 200 run contract manufacturing games will come up. And you can't really say, oh, it's just this. Oh, it's just that. Because you probably haven't played it. I mean, if you don't like the layout, fair enough. But how many people have played Supreme, Pimple Machine, and Spider-Man Home Edition? How many people would have played it if they're making a new layout and it's limited to 100? And then they do that 10 times. That's still only 1,000 in the whole world, right? Yeah. So I'm not sure if they dig into the Stern Electronics archive for that or if they save that for another Beatles-esque theme. I'm not sure. Well, I mean, the difference is when you go back to the, you know, the back catalogue of Stern Electronics and modernise it, you've still got to build it brand new. Even though you've got a layout, everything else is new. when you've got Woe Nelly as your blueprint, all you've got to do is put art over the top. And because there's no LCD, you can just add music to it, which they've done. Bang, there you go. You've got your game. There is a DMD. It's just hidden in the apron. Like that is a very, very small DMD that you can, there's buttons in the coin door and you can scroll through, check order, set pricing details. Yeah, but there's not a lot of animation, right? No, no. No, there's no animation. Nothing's happening besides, I think, displaying the score, possibly, while the game is playing. So I don't think anything needs programming. The reaction to this? Yeah, well, it doesn't matter what we think. What does social media think of this? I don't think people care that much, to be honest. I think people are exhausted from the whole Beatles saga, if you want to call it that. And people just don't care about Primus, right? I mean, obviously a lot of people do. You know, the video's being watched, I don't know, 200,000 times or 100,000 times. I don't know, a lot more than a normal Stern video. So this is reaching a wider audience. And apparently, I mean, the way it works and the reason why you shouldn't care and get angry about it, get your pitchforks out, is Primus and I think Zombie Yeti maybe broke the deal and was involved. They approached Stern and they asked them to make it and they bought, I believe, 100 units of them. so this is a win-win for Stern. They don't have to do anything. I don't think they can lose money. It's just up to Primus to actually sell the machines. And as you said, there's only 100 units. The art is cool. People they're selling to probably have no idea what a good Kimo machine is versus a bad one. It's just a collector's piece. This is just a collector's piece Kimo machine, right? Yep, it is. And I was reading through the announcement post and the, I don't know, there was like 150 comments or something after it. And there was, you know, there was a mix of people that are positive. There was a lot of people negative. And then there was people in between just, you know, make a gag post just because, you know, 15 seconds of fame, you know, you can. But as I literally read every single comment, and I just, I came to the conclusion at the end that you're right, it doesn't matter. and it doesn't matter because I believe the people that are going to buy this machine are probably buying their first pinball machine and don't know better. It's just a pinball machine. I guess the only people that are really, truly angry are the ones that, like the small cross-section of people. Yeah, the middle of the Venn diagram, right? Yeah, the very small thing that really like Primus and really like pinball. I guess the same thing happened for Beatles There were so many Beatles fans that wanted something more unique And they had a picture in their head of what it was going to be like A friend of mine messaged me Because I sent the picture saying Are you going to get one? And this friend is a massive Primus fan And his reply back to me was You know what? I'm actually okay that it's not a machine that I want to buy Because I've just bought Deadpool And I've got a Monster Bash remake on the way It'll Save My Wallet. Okay, is that James? Yeah, of course it's James. Hi, James. And Jackie. She doesn't listen, but sure. Yeah. I still haven't listened to her Primus song, and I probably never get to play this, so I will never hear one. Since this was announced, I have... Well, I wouldn't say I've listened to their entire catalogue, but I would have listened to about five or six songs of theirs, and whilst I can appreciate that they've got, you know, fans that would like it, it's just noise to me. Are you saying that Primus sucks, Barney? No, I'm saying that they are not for me. Because I'm... Just because they're not for me doesn't mean I think it sucks. And I think that's probably the mentality, right? I think, like, this thing that they do, the Primus sucks. I think it's even on the artwork of the game, Primus sucks. Okay. Kind of like Metallica sucks. Metallica sucks, yeah. Anyway, Zombie Yeti was on social media trying to defend the pin, but it's just wasted. Everyone loves Zombie Yeti art, so he was trying to convince everyone that it wasn't Stern pulling the strings. It was, you know, the band. So don't get angry at anything. Just be happy. But you can't tell us a bit. We tried that two episodes in a row. It doesn't work, mate. No, I know. And I then think he's sort of just gone quiet on social media as well, which is probably the best thing to do. He went on, literally like 10 minutes before the show, I hadn't been on Pinside for like five days, like in short-wing threads. I banned myself from Pinside and I just went there quickly and there's just like 20 posts by him arguing with people on Pinside. Yeah. It's not healthy. It's just... No, it's not healthy, man. Because you know you're going to get, Zombie Eddie. You know you're going to get, so why are you doing it? He's just like, okay, I'm leaving now. You know, this is why stern people don't come. He's just like, you know you're going to get. No, I know. So you're trying to convince people that are absolutely never going to be convinced either way. They've made up their minds. Nothing you say is going to change it. Walk away. Enjoy your life. Mindy, we said we were going to read your Facebook comments, but since we interviewed Chris for so long, why don't you just read that one that someone told you to read? You'll have to read it out. Okay. This is from Greg Colton. More like a reskin, fake, limited, overpriced hype trash. read that, Marty, you're fucking ... ... ... Greg's upset because Marty called him that. No, it wasn't. No. No, no, no, no, no. I just want to let you know it was not him that I was referring to when I said ... Was it Auric? No, it wasn't. Okay. I hadn't actually read any comments from Greg at the time, so I apologise profusely that I didn't call you out, Greg. I'm sorry. It wasn't you. But he is actually a... Anyway, moving on. We got new hover code and we got new dialed in codes. I haven't really read through it, Marnie. I did. Yeah. I did. And I posted the, for both games, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 lines. Okay. So I think the main thing that happened was they updated the operator manuals. So they've got everything that's new in it. But there you go. You've got your code. Go and update your machines. Yeah. We've got some depressing news this week, Marty, that our friends over at the Slantle Podcast, Bruce and Ron, have decided to, well, not call it quit, but slowing down. They're pretty much not going to be doing weekly episodes anymore. And correct me if I'm wrong, but they started that trend, the weekly podcast. Before then, everyone was just doing it randomly. Is that correct, Snoddy? Okay. Okay. I've got a bit of a confession to make. Yes. Well, probably not to you, but to our listeners and to Slam Tilt. And I started listening to them probably, I don't know, whenever the episode was that you were on. Okay. That was like episode 50. Okay. So I really wasn't listening to Slam Tilt. And the reason why I bring that up is that, you know, we have been on record saying that we pretty much ripped off their podcast. And they went on Pimble Profile and talked about that as well. and it's hard to rip off something that you're not aware of. Okay well I ripped them off because I was very aware of it okay So you can blame it on me No but I think we morphed into something different Yeah But you know the weekly thing was good because it was every Thursday Now it's Wednesday, but every Thursday for almost two years, it was something for me to look forward to. And Ron would release it literally about half an hour before I had to pick my kid up from school. So it just became a habit that every week I would download the podcast, listen to it while I'm trying to pick up my kids, etc., etc. But, yeah, very, very sad. And it's one of the ones that I religiously listen to as well. And, look, we know that there are a lot of podcasts out there, and the ones that I listen to are the ones that are different to us. And that's why I'm saying, like, I think Slam Tilt are different to us. And they're funny as well because I like to laugh whilst I'm learning. and you couldn't see my air quotes, but when I said learning, listening to Slam Tilt. Yeah. So we wish them good luck in whatever they do and in true head-to-head style, we're going to copy them, Marty. We're going to quit too. Yeah. Yeah, let's do it. But look, the reasons, obviously, is that they're busy, you know, Bruce is busy with the Silver Ball Saloon. That's East Rochester, New York. But also, you know, Ron, who does, they both agree, does like his fair share of the work, he's sort of just a bit burnt out by it. And the only reason I want to say this is that there's a lot of work that goes into this, isn't there, Ryan? Yeah, and it's not just everything. It's organising guests can be a pain in the ass because one, you have to think of the guests and then two, you have to think of the questions and then you have to discuss the questions with your partner if you're doing a double interview. But it's also just every time a piece of news comes out on Pinball, you can't help to think of your opinions and then what you're going to say on the show as well. Yeah, all week. Which part of this is interesting that I'm going to talk about? And then sometimes it's hard to shut that off. I'm not sure how you go with it, Marty, but I'm finding it very difficult. That's why I pretty much almost banned myself from Pinside because when you have all these opinions floating around in your head, it's hard to shut off. Well, you're absolutely right. And, you know, when you've got a day job as well, and you've got to have the mental energy for that as well, sometimes it gets hard to do both. And you know what, you know, we've obviously been having some chats as well about how much effort that we go into it. And, you know, it's coming to the end of the year. And, you know, we're looking forward to a break from work and from, you know, the podcast as well. And I'm just going to say this, so this is going to sound a bit cheesy, but after the interview that we did with Chris Granner, I all of a sudden just had this spark today. I kind of just went, yeah, do you know what? Pinball is fun, and pinball people are fun, and this is what it's about. And so I just kind of got this renewed energy today. I just went, yep, I love this. This is great. I get renewed energy every single Monday, and then Tuesday is good, And it's almost like a cycle now, and then by Wednesday and Thursday, I'm just like, oh, man. It's every single week, but then every Monday I'm fine again. Yep, absolutely. We'll still do this after Christmas because, as you saw by our numbers last year, no one was listening to Pinball Podcast after Christmas. It's like a lot of people. That's right. So anyway, there you go. So that's that, too. Yep. Last week we had the Twirpies, Marty. Correct. It's our own version of the Twirpies, but it's the opposite. It's the worst stuff in pinball. And not that we want to promote negativity. It's just a bit of fun. Maybe some manufacturers can learn something off the results. It's cheeky, right? It's tongue-in-cheek. It's not meant to be taken seriously at all. So last year, I can't remember how many weeks we did it for, but we only got, I think, 110 votes. This year we had 110 votes within 24 hours. and then the Pinside moderation staff decided that they would, well, what I thought was delete the thread because I just couldn't see it anymore. No, neither could I. And I emailed the moderation staff. I'm like, hey, you know, I had to look through the rules of Pinside. What's going on? Because I didn't break any of the rules. I'm like, oh, yeah, you didn't break any rules, but we put the thread in the basement. I'm like, oh, I remember the basement. Like, I don't remember seeing it. Usually you kind of see this basement kind of, I think it was like Scared Stiff kind of logo on Pinside. You click it and it just has all these horrible threads. That's now hidden by default. So the default setting, unless you literally go into your settings on Pinside, and it's not even obvious. You just click a couple of things and you click make the Pinside basement viewable. And then you go in there and there's just these horrible threads. It literally is a cesspool. It is just the filth. And we're a part of it, proudly. Yeah. And I'm just like, this is good. It's good that threads end up here, but is our thread any worse than other stuff that's on there? No, no. At the time, I was a little bit angry, not too much, right? I had a look at the top page. It's just one page on pin sides, okay? Because I was thinking, I mean, the twerpies invokes a discussion, and the discussion can be kind or mean. It's up to the people participating. But I guess it's in the title, the worst stuff in pinball. So these are three negative phrases. Just on the first page, Marty, why Toy Story is a bad license. You know what I mean? Sure. Let's come in here and let's fight about a thing. How bad are the Beatles sales so far, right? Bad in capital letters. Stern's coil stops are worthless. Worthless, Marty. That's a friend of the show that did this one. And last one, the no rainbow puke club posts the worst color GI fails. That's four threads that are negative. Well, there was another one that you didn't... There was one I saw, because when I was looking for it, there was this thread that was the worst pinball machine ever made. Okay. That was just asking people to write in to say, what are the worst machines, and rubbish them. Put it in a vote and organize it really well and present the data in a meaningful manner, and it's bad. I could have emailed Robin about it or whatever, but you know what? I respect Pinside's made-up kind of Ryan Policky. It's fine. I do think there's too much negativity, but I do think that they should also enforce that rule more often, right? If you're going to get rid of that, then get rid of the actual trash that's on the website. Yep. Anyway, we have almost 300 responses now. So we have Facebook. We advertise it through other means. And pretty surprising results so far, Marty. I don't know about you. Yeah. I don't want to give anything away, but it's not as one-sided as you might think it is. Yeah. And some people kind of messaged me and said, you know, why isn't this machine in there and why isn't that machine in there, Oktoberfest for art? It's because the Oktoberfest pinball machine hasn't been, you know, yes, you can judge it on its art now, but it hasn't shipped to customers. So we don't know if it's going to have an art overhaul, if certain things are going to change. They showed a prototype. Yeah, it's not final. Yeah. So it's in the reveal area, but yeah. Yeah, and that's what we said. We sort of said when we announced it that it's got to be machines that are being sold directly to consumers at the moment, which is why we ruled out Mafia, because there's the sample machines, but the actual machines haven't been sold to customers yet. Yeah, we did jump the gun a little bit, because Primus Pinball was announced, and that was in the worst rumoured thing, but that doesn't matter, that's just one category. One person also said that Supreme maybe shouldn't have been in there, because that was a contract manufacturing game and not sold by Stern, but I don't know, consuming it still by a pinball machine. so yeah so it is still a new machine whether it's Supreme or whether it's Stern it doesn't matter it's still a new machine maybe I should have wrote Supreme by Supreme not Supreme by yeah that's right yeah anyway it's done yeah next week maybe I don't know the voting's slowing down a bit but maybe next week we'll reveal the winners slash losers for that yeah it'll be fun cool shall we go to social media watch watch watch watch There was a Beatles promo video, the second promo video. Yes, I saw that. I saw that. Now, because I think there was obviously criticism of the first one. Now, I am going to be, I reckon, in the vast minority when I say this. I don't see any difference between the first and the second. It has Jack Danger in it. Oh, I know it's got Jack the Ripper, and they even zoom in on his tats, right? Yeah. Okay. Was he The Beatles or was he Primus? He was The Beatles and Keith was Primus, I believe. So which one do you like better, Marty? Who's the sexiest pinball revealer of them all? Oh, I don't know. I think they're both awesome. How's that for a non-answer? I think they're both pretty cool, but they are nothing. They don't hold a candle to... Jack Danger is Primus. Oh. I'm watching the video right now. Okay. So let's go back. They're basically the same people, right? They basically are. So, and that's why I... The reason why I said they, you know, they zoomed in on Jack, because, you know, he's got the tats, and it's Primus. You know, cool, cool, cool. Cool to cool. so Keith Elwin's more of a classic like a classic Beatles guy because he's older and more suave I don't know I don't know why they did that but it was one of those things where I kind of looked at the one and went oh yeah there you go there's Keith and then I went oh yeah there's Jack Danger cool what I'm trying to get at Marty is that there's nowhere near as cool as the Japanese dude with like a million rings on his finger from the Supreme video and that's what I think they were trying to emulate like I think Supreme did that on their own and that was like the coolest pinball video ever probably the Supreme one yeah but that was better that was better there's also some footage today of Beatles Marty and it tells you how to start the game on the LCD screen using Supreme videos yeah using Supreme videos so I'm guessing it's like some it's a play-toler but Supreme can't have that because Supreme doesn't have an LCD so why did they ever film that I don't get it The Hobbit and I think Wizard of Oz has that you know Press, dart, and then plunger. And I don't think the Hobbit goes as far as showing you how to do the flippers, so that's one step forward. There you go. Yeah. Roger Scharfmany, we had a massive bit of news last week that he shaved his moustache. Correct. And so we decided to message Roger to find out the mystery. We're journalists, mate. We are. We're investigative journalists. That's what we do. We could pay big bucks for this. so so effectively you said to roger it was a very short email to him saying hey roger why did you shave off the stash and what did he say he said just a change of pace the last time i took it off was three years ago and there was admittedly less of a reaction to it compared to now maybe because my timing was different without a trade show to attend so the question remains as to whether people liked the way I look without. I think I look younger, but that's just me, and I'll be growing back the tush at some point. Should we do, like, a... A poll? Yeah, like, we do a Slam the Top 100, and a day later we'll do Roger with or without the Mustang. He's awesome now. Okay. Let's do it. Look out for that on our Facebook page. I need a good... I need an email, like, I don't think Roger's going to take a selfie for us, so maybe I should get Josh or Zach to take one next time. Anyone that's got a really good photo with and without the moustache, send it through headtoheadpinball at gmail.com. Okay. Wow. From top 100. Pinslam. Do Pinslam. The top 100 to 200. What happened last week, Ryan? I kicked your ass with a game I have never played and know nothing about. And I don't think I even had a compelling argument either. No, you didn't need to. It was you, but it was one of our worst. I'll tell you the difference is. The difference is... I'm going to tell you the main difference. I'm not even going to talk about the fact that you have a woman in skin-tight white jeans as your gift. I'm not going to talk about that because that's too obvious. The difference is Pinball Pool, which was my game, I actually genuinely love that game. And I just have these real fond memories of it. And I've been trying to get someone that I know, Marcus with his Ross Town Retro, because I think that would be great in his collection. It's because you've bullshitted so much money that when you say... Oh, people don't know. Yeah, people don't know if this is the Marty Spiel or if you actually love it. No, I know. I am a victim of my own success. Okay. So, let's do it again. Please generate a number from 100 to 200. Okay. 160. Blackout by Williams. Ah, yeah. I just went to Axel's house and played Blackout. It's an amazing game. All right. Please generate a number from 100 to 200. Okay. 132. Embryon. Great. Love it. Great wide body. This is only one year apart. Yeah. Okay. Okay. You have to go first, Marty, because you got the easier selection. So, Embryon by Bally came out in 1981, and this was the year of Bally. They didn't put a foot wrong this year, and this is no exception. It's a wide body, and what I really like about this wide body is that it's kind of got different sections of the play field. It really does utilize the wide body. You've got the right shot, which kind of feels like an orbit, but goes into a right hole eject. As it comes back, you've then got your upper flipper that can then knock down those targets for multipliers. You've got the left. It's not an orbit, but the left that goes into the inlanes as well for multipliers. You've got the dangerous shot in the middle. And if we're really honest, the middle shot where the ball is, the captive ball there looks like a woman's hoo-ha. There you go. I've said it. Everybody knows it. Look it up. A vote for Marnie is a vote for Jason Simba. But it's really cool. It's got some, you know, in lane, some drop targets on the left with captive balls behind it. It's got the really cool belly thing that they did at the time where, you know, the left out lane really comes back to the flipper and it's the in one. And what's particularly good about this game is the nudgeability of it. It really is a bit of a quirky layout that doesn't feel so conventional. You've really got to nudge it to get the most out of it. It's also got an absolute killer sound package and a killer art package. Embryon is an amazing game. And that's me being genuine, guys. I have played this machine a hell of a lot, and I love it. Okay. Well, Embryon might be the more well-known game, but the better game is clearly Blackout, because Blackout, Marty, we talk about, you know, we have a whole section of our, the section of Twippies, best light show. Well, what do light shows involve? It's usually the GI, because, you know, the GI are the lights that you can't see but provide the illumination. Now, Blackout was the first Williams game ever that could control the GI, and just like every game with new technology, they make it known and the object of the game is to get into Blackout World, you know, the GI goes out. Really exciting at the time. I was alive back in 1980 to witness this at my local time zone and just, wow, the people were just going crazy over at Marty. I've more of a gripe with Embryon, but I'll let you talk about, you know, why you don't like Blackout, which is going to be total bullshit, as everyone knows. No, it's actually not. Do you know what? I actually don't mind Blackout. I mean, it's like 1980s Williams really for me is just my favorite era. I tell you what, the real problem I've got with Blackout is that I think its layout is uninspired. Meaning that, you know, the pop bumpers, you know, bounce to the targets. Well, Gorga did that. You've got the right Orbit that goes up to the middle Well, Firepower did that And Flash did that And you've got targets on the left Well, every other Williams game did it It's a good game But it is just very derivative And pretty mediocre in a lot of ways That's what I'm going to say about it The artwork's fine it's just not really that exciting. It's okay. It's just, it's a solid B-. There you go. B-. There you go. We judge pinballs here on playability and not artwork, right? No, we judge them on everything. No one cares about the art. Come on. Yes, the artwork on Embryon is pretty cool, but this is the worst thing about Embryon. It is super duper wide. like the widest body you'll ever play on pinball. And because of that, you really feel like disconnected with the ball when you're playing. Once you get the ball up top, you kind of like lean over and you feel like you're playing a different pinball and not the same one that you're playing down the bottom. If you've never seen Embryon before, people, just literally just type in Embryon pinball in Google, have a look at how ridiculously big the pinball machine is and folks will black out. Are you saying a couple of extra inches isn't good? It's bigger than that, Marty. I got cramps playing it, basically. Okay? Sort of walk through a week. I was highly offended by the vagina. They pretend it's about space and it's just about a vagina. Well, it's about growing an embryon in space. What is an embryon? Is that like an alien egg or something? Yep. Okay. Blackout's about... It's a being that's been grown. Getting drunk and having a good time with your friends. That's what people do when they play pinball. They black out. Is that factual, that that's what blackout's about? Or has it got to do with the space thing? It's mainly about getting drunk and having a good time. Okay, cool, cool, cool. Made by the same person. So this is the same guy. And he realized the errors of his ways after everyone had quit Williams. There we go. Blackout. Total made-up bullshit from both of us. No, it's not. Embryon is one of my favourite games. I love it. Yeah, every game is one of your favourite games. No, this one is. No, this one was really cool because it was trying to be, and it was, successful in being innovative with a wide body. You know how, like, there's just some wide bodies... How successful was it? How many did they make, Marty? I don't know. 15,000? 2,000 units versus Blackout. 7,000 units. Check it. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? Britney Spears had many number one albums. Doesn't mean any of them were good. So did The Beatles, Marty. It's fucking, you know, there's data you can pull from that. It's not sales equals quality is what I'm saying. What does it say, Marty? What do the poor sales say about this embryon? It is a collector's masterpiece. That's what they thought when they were making it. We're going to make a relationship pinball so that in 30 years' time, this will be worth something. Well, I'm telling you, like you talked about the size, but really, Embryon is the next revolution in the science of supersized pinball. It's too late for that. I can't even read the fire? All right, let's move along. It's going to be a long episode. This week in pinball, Marty, what did you get up to? We did nothing together. I'm just going to put that out there. Look, boringly enough, I am right in the middle of preparation for Flipout, which is this weekend. The Flipout is obviously the event where there's going to be, I think we're now up to about 65, maybe 66 pinball machines. And I'm running... How are any of them EMs, just in case? Because I know people go to, they're running Newcastle, and it's awesome, and it's good for pinball. But a lot of people complain that it's a lot of EMs. These are mainly solid and D&D people. Yeah, it is. I think there are a couple of EMs, but really it's solid states and modern machines. And as you know, I'm running the two tournaments there, the main tournament and the Flip Frenzy. Yep. So there's a couple of things I've had to do. I've now actually got Cal D'Python Anghelo's Drains Tournament Manager, DTM. and I've got to say, this software is so amazing. He hasn't just built this software that does everything. He's actually thought to himself, okay, if I was going to hand this to somebody else to use that was as useless as Marty from the Head to Head Pinball Podcast, I've got to have that idiot in mind when I'm designing the interface. So it's really, really straightforward. And I've had access to it. I've been configuring it. It's ready to go. I mean, the famous last words, it's probably harder than what it is, but it's ready to go. So the tournament software is there. My streaming's set up. So most of my equipment has arrived. So I did a test stream last night where I could switch between four machines. So that all works. Did an overhaul of my interface on Twitch as well, so that looks different. there you go, ready to go cool and we've actually announced the machines oh, ok and I want to read them to you because I know you've seen them I don't actually remember them ok, so what you've got to understand is that I've tried to I've tried to have a bit of a mix of games from old to new and I also wanted to put a couple of little quirky ones in there as well. Some machines that probably people haven't played for a while. So here we go. First machine, Alien Poker. Okay. Do you know it? I think, didn't we have it in Slam the Supply? It rings a bell. I think I've played it. I don't know. It's one of my favourite games from that era. It's one of these ones where if you just flip about, sure, you're going to get some points, but if you really know what you're doing and you hit the targets at the right time, you'll actually get better points. What kind of theme is that? They just had so many poker games. They're like, let's just... It's aliens playing poker. Yeah. Did it have alien bowling? Because I know there's a lot of bowling themes. I don't know. And pool, like eight ball and nine ball. Well, there's pinball pool that we talked about in last week. We obviously had a robot playing pool, so, you know. Yeah, not alien though. No, it's not an alien. It's not the same. Attack from Mars remake. Okay. Yes, another game. Yeah. So, in a tournament, see how it goes. Dialed In. Yeah, another game. Yep. Medieval Madness, the original. Are you modifying Dialed In at all? I'm going to be modifying all of these games. Okay. Are you going to include a little note? I don't know. So, I can't hear what you've modified. I might. Yeah, you've got to mind it. Otherwise... I might keep it as a surprise. Yeah, no, I will. But I'm not going to know until the day. You know, I'm going to go and set up the machines really early, make some tweaks, and then I'll put the cards up. Phoenix. Yeah. Now, I put that in, obviously, because that was at Melbourne Match Play and was such a surprise hit. Okay. So, you know, in some ways, a bit like Alien Poker, it's a Williams from the time, but an earlier game with a simpler rule set, but that's a good challenging game. Strikes and Spares. Do you know that game? No, not familiar with that one, sorry. You're not, though? Pretty much lost your virginity to that game, didn't you? Come on. Terminator 3. Ooh, okay. So that's a bit of an interesting one. Now, the problem with that game is it's like this repeatable shot, almost like No Fear. You know the shot that you've got to get to multiball? Yeah. It's got a similar shot for this, which is just hit the shot, hit the shot, get to multiball. Doesn't Arnie say that as soon as you start playing? here, here and here. Here, here and here. Yeah, he does. So I've got to somehow make that harder to be able to hit that shot. But otherwise, I put that in there because I wanted it to be a machine that, you know, just doesn't do the rounds. Is this just for qualifying or is this going to be in finals as well? That I do not know. Okay. Probably. Just make it all up as you go along. We'll see how it goes. I haven't announced that we're going to have a different bank, so this will probably be the mains as well. They've also got to survive. and then the last one which has done the rounds but it's a good classic one is Xenon. Cool. So, there you go. Alien Poker, Attack from Mars remake, dialed in, Medieval Madness, original, Phoenix, Strikes and Spares, Terminator 3 and Xenon. How many people get, is it 16 to the finals? 16 A finals, the next A, the B finals. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to struggle with those games. Yeah. Well, that's what it is. There's obviously, there's a bit of a a slant towards the older machines. And I've done that intentionally just to mix it up because we just have so many tournaments that we go to where they're all, you know, CERN machines effectively. Yeah. Cool. So this week I had my Progressive Strikes tournament, the Fair Strikes tournament at Pinball Paradise, and it was the CERN Army event, the first one outside of the US, which was pretty exciting. there was 31 people there which was really good that's a great choice yeah and I think like I think 8 people were new I've never played a tournament before ever and 14 overall were unrated so a lot of a lot of new blood and that morning something happened and my neck seized up and I couldn't I couldn't move it left or right it just it just froze and I was in insane pain but I was running the tournament it had been 3 kind of weeks of me pumping up this problem to make people come. So I had to go. My wife was like, you're so fucking stupid. Just stay home. Like, you're injured. But I took crazy amounts of painkillers, went, and I was like, I'll be happy if I come second last because, yeah. But the good thing about pinball, Miley, is that you don't really need to do anything except look forward, right? You don't need to turn your heads left and right. That's right. Unless you're playing embryo, okay? Should we do that? Yeah, I do. But, yeah, I came, I was, before the, in the second last round, I was coming equal first with Jordan, and then I played Ghostbusters, and I don't think I've ever won on Ghostbusters. No. No one wins on Ghostbusters. The two games, Marnie, that I got two strikes on, like, you know, Is It Coming Last, were, it happened both by people playing the video mode and me not. every single person that played me on Star Wars played the video mode with like a 12 times multiplier, I think it was, and got like 70 million or something just by crashing into asteroids. And don't cross the streams. I think Jordan played it like three times. She played it once. I played it zero times. Anyway, forget about the pinball. I hate them. So what you're saying is that you were doing really, really well and then you had two games where you came last and you're out. No, the... Shitstrike. Yes, yes, yes, yes. No. Star Wars was first. So I came last straight away on my first game. Then I won like four or five games in a row. I came first. And then, yeah. Anyway, it was good. It was a really good atmosphere. I fucking love going there now. And they put even more machines in there. They put Guardians of the Galaxy there. They put Junkyard there. I'm not sure if I'm going to include Junkyard. Hey, we didn't include Batman because it just plays so fucking slow. So I asked someone what we should do to include the game, and they said put it on zero. Zero tilt. Yep. Instant tilt. Yeah, so you really have to, like, you don't want to, because you can get big fat bonuses on that game. So we'll see if you can include it next time. This week I want to alert everyone that friend of the show, Dr. John Carson, right, who's, has he been on the show before? I don't think he has. he appeared and he filmed this months ago but due to whatever schedule it is he's going to be on national TV in Australia Wednesday I believe it's 8.30pm on ABC there's a show called what the fuck's the show called? Hard Quiz it's one of, we've talked about this before it's one of the best shows because it's actually a comedian that does the show and it's a quiz that's hard right They pick their topics. Four different people pick their preferred topic. And then he asks ridiculously obscure questions. But that's part of it. He is really funny and he abuses the contestants. That's part of the show. Yeah. So Dr. John Carson is a doctor. He fixes people's mouths and they get all messed up. And he knows everything about it because he's a doctor, right? He needs to know it. But he didn't choose that. He chose pinball because that's his passion and his obsession. and so we'll all be tuning in, John, to see how you go. I might try and, you know, bootleg film it, and if he wins, I don't know if he's going to win or not. He has signed a disclosure agreement, so we don't know if he's going to come last or first. Okay, so for anybody that wants to watch this overseas, here's what you need to do. So there is a website you can go to called iView, which is... ABC is the television network, and they have their on-demand site, which is iView. It's not locked for the international people? I thought it was locked. That's what I was saying. Yeah, so if you've got a VPN, set your VPN to Australia and then go to iView, and that's how you can watch it. Cool. Should we go to 19, I think? Head to head Facebook page as well. Yeah, absolutely. Quickstop and Marty, what do you think of that game? Awesome, right? Best sounds in pinball. Super spin arm. Hey, oh, shit. We didn't talk about Metallica. Metallica got an update this week. Holy shit, how did I miss that? Oh, it did too. It got a massive update. Well, I say massive update. It had a very, very long changelog, but it was all pretty much about end of the line. Well, one thing that got released... Well, no, it does... Okay, no money, because crank it up is now easier. Yeah, but that could have been made easier anyway. Yes, but by default, which I'm not sure if operators are ever going to actually update their PMO machines. I know the one at Bayside won't. Crank It Up is now 12 instead of 15 hits per item. And the Grave, multiball Money, the Grave Marker multiball, four hits instead of five, which means as soon as you get the last drop target down, if you get it in there, you're in two-ball multiball. So I think that is now a better strategy than going for Sparky because four shots versus five. Oh, four ridiculously dangerous shots, though. Yeah, it depends. Versus the safe machine. It was not safe. It was straight up the middle. Oh, it comes back down. Anyway, this is the one weird thing about it. They added super spinner money, okay? So I'm like, oh, my God. They're going to... The spinner sound on Metallica is good, especially if you have a nice, big, fat subwoofer in your pinball machine. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Like, oh, my gosh, once it's super spinner, they're going to make it high-pitched. They're going to do something else. So what happens is that if you hit the four guitar picks, Marty, the left and right orbit, and if you have a premium or an LA, you might miss this because the spinners are in the way of the arrow shot. It turns red and it flashes both orbits. And it'll be lit for one rip, and it makes the exact same sound, Marty. And I was like, no. That would drive you nuts. It didn't drive me nuts. I'm just like, I'm pretty sure Lyman did it on purpose, so that he'll have a reason to do 1.81. I'm pretty sure that's also happening, Marty. Okay. Because he would never do that to me, Marty. No, he wouldn't. Yeah. Anyway, Quicksilver has a really good spin of sounds, and that was back in 1980 or 81, whenever it was. One of them came up, Marty, and I've already got a shit silver. You two really have a turd silver. Yeah, but I mean, I've included it in the tournament that I've got coming, so I've bought a whole bunch of parts, and I'm fixing it, this, this, and that. one of them came up and the guy wanted just insane amount for it, like just more than $10,000 for a month. Really? Yeah. And it took me like four days of getting to kind of come to a sense as to what it should be actually worth. And who knows what they're actually worth if people are paying, someone paid $11,000 for a nicely done one off Chuck Webster last week in the U.S. Apparently one sold for $4,000, that's $5,000 of the project. Anyway, long story short, We came to an agreement. I didn't kind of trust the situation to kind of have that horrible feeling that I get when I pay someone that he's going to say, oh, no, someone else suffered more or I've changed my mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm like, I'm fucking picking this up tonight. And it was the worst. You know, right now, the Carl Weathers, Marty? Yes. Sunny. Terrible. Sunny, rainy, horrible. So it was going to rain. So I couldn't even borrow my father-in-law's ute. So I called a favor from Peter Albertico. I was like, hey man, you've got a car, right? You said I can borrow it if I want. He's like, yeah, can I borrow it? And yeah, it was just the nicest moment because there was about four people helping me get this pinwheel machine in various ways. Eric Hansen came and he met me there and we, you know, it was my first, even though I have all these Stern Classics now money, I've never actually taken the head apart and embarrassing, it took a while to figure out because I didn't want to stuff it up. Anyway, it's a lot nicer, Marty, but it's still not. Like, I'm starting to notice all these weird things, and I wish I could combine the playfields, because everywhere that my shit silver has wear, this machine doesn't, but everywhere where my shit silver doesn't have wear, this machine does. And it's got Mylar on it, but it's like there's little pockets where it doesn't have Mylar, and it's worn there. And so I think I'm still going to get a new playfield. Maybe I'll get two and do them both up and sell one of them. I don't know. I'm getting a lot of people messaging about it saying, you bastard, why do you have to do Quicksilvers? Sell it to me, trade it to me. I will trade it for the right machine, but the people aren't offering the right machine yet. Fair enough. Anyway, Quicksilver. Lastly, Marty, is... Sorry, two more things quickly. Thank you for listening this far in people. A great opportunity. I know you've got your tournament coming up this week. This has been three weeks, but I just want to give people the heads up on it. It's 14 hours at my house. That's at 9 a.m. It's three tournaments. You can go to any one you want. Classics is from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Just like you said, Marty, every tournament in Melbourne is pretty much just tournament. That's what people have on site. These are my classics. Paragon will be there. Someone's done me in their Paragon. Maybe I should get Emery on there as well, Marty. Yeah, classics, best game qualifying, 16-play finals. Next is switch the match play from 1.30 to 6 p.m., 10 rounds of match play, and then three rounds for the finals. And the last one is shit strikes just for you, Marty. And seven or eight strikes, I'll figure it out, and that'll go to 11 p.m. So that's a full-day kind of event from start to finish. A lot of people, some people are missing out on classics because I think maybe it's just too early, but it's the only way I could cram in three tournaments in one day. I couldn't figure out a better way to do it. So that's filling up pretty quickly.