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#122 Nineball - The Classic Pinball Podcast

The Classic Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 47m·held·Dec 12, 2024
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

Detailed deep-dive into Nine Ball (1979) design, rarity, and restoration techniques.

Summary

The Classic Pinball Podcast Podcast Episode 122 features hosts George and Dave discussing the Nine Ball (1979/1980), a rare early solid-state machine designed by Steve Kirk. The episode includes detailed playfield analysis, restoration notes from Dave's work on the game, and gameplay footage. Dave explains Nineball's pool-table-inspired design, the evolving light matrix system, and unique restoration challenges like drop target shimming.

Key Claims

  • Stern produced approximately 2,279 Nineball machines between December 1980 and April 6, 1981

    high confidence · Dave discussing production numbers during technical breakdown

  • Steve Kirk designed only three games that came to fruition: Stars (SK-1), Nineball (SK-3), and Meteor (SK-5), with other designs remaining prototypes

    high confidence · Dave explaining Kirk's design portfolio and SK numbering system

  • Robert Quinn (artist/software) and Jorge Obregon (artist) each worked on only a handful of Stern games, primarily Kirk designs

    high confidence · Dave citing IPDB research on designer/artist credits

  • Nineball required 60 software revisions during development

    high confidence · George and Dave discussing why the game had stability issues and limited production

  • Dave spent 50-60 hours on the restoration of this particular Nineball, including new boards, LED upgrades, and drop target refurbishment

    high confidence · Dave describing restoration scope during playfield tour

  • The Kirk Post (mini-post between flippers) appears in all three of Steve Kirk's designs due to wide flipper spacing

    high confidence · Dave explaining Kirk's design signature and its functional purpose

  • Stern released approximately one new machine per month during 1980

    high confidence · Dave discussing Stern's aggressive production schedule in that era

  • Nine Ball manual contains incorrect schematics (Flight 2000 schematics instead of Nineball-specific)

    high confidence · Dave noting this as a known documentation issue affecting troubleshooting

Notable Quotes

  • “It's like a finely tuned Harley in a way. If you get it all right, then it's good to go.”

    Dave @ mid-episode during mechanical discussion — Encapsulates the precision required for early Stern machines to function properly

  • “This game is very much laid out like a pool table. It's all about shooting angles and shooting the rubber on a pool table.”

    Dave @ during playfield analysis — Key design philosophy of Nineball — pool mechanics translated to pinball

  • “How can you release a game to the public with 60 revisions?”

    George @ during technical discussion — Highlights business reality of early Stern: aggressive production schedule over stability

  • “People are assigned to that project in perpetuity, it seems like. So you know, a little bit different business model.”

    Dave @ comparing 1980 vs modern manufacturing — Contrasts 1980s rapid-fire releases with modern long-term game support

  • “Don't just buy it because you just want to stock it away and throw it away someday. You want to be the scalper and get big money for it later on.”

    Dave @ discussing Steve Young's parts inventory policy — Shows early parts scarcity and scalper behavior in collector community

Entities

Stern PinballcompanySteve KirkpersonRobert QuinnpersonJorge ObregonpersonDavepersonGeorgepersonGrantpersonNine Ballgame

Signals

  • ?

    historical_signal: Steve Kirk's design philosophy (pool table mechanics, Kirk Post signature) remains distinctive 44 years post-release; game holds relevance in collector circles despite limited production

    high · Dave's detailed analysis of Kirk's intentional design choices and their functional impact on gameplay; comparison to modern machine design practices

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Early solid-state machines require extensive mechanical tuning (drop target shimming, lifting mech refinement) to restore to original condition; estimated 50-60 hours per machine

    high · Dave's detailed restoration narrative: shimming drop targets, rounding mounting holes, replacing worn components, switch adjustment requirements

  • $

    market_signal: Low production runs (2,279 units) combined with age and design quality drive collector demand and pricing; rare machines command premium restoration investment

    high · George asking 'why is this game so expensive?' and Dave confirming rarity factor; comparison to other sub-2000-unit Stern games (Quicksilver, Stargazer, Sea Witch)

  • ?

    business_signal: 1980 Stern production model: ~1 game/month pipeline with simultaneous development; high capital requirements for parts inventory; contrasts sharply with modern 3-4 releases/year model

    high · Dave explaining Stern's aggressive 1980 schedule; discussion of unique parts creating stockpiling issues; comparison to modern post-release support model

  • ?

    product_concern: Nineball required 60 software revisions; game remained mechanically sensitive to adjustment (switch sensitivity, lock settings) throughout lifespan; documentation errors (wrong schematics) persist

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.321

0:00
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Classic Pinball Podcast. My name is George. His name is Dave. Hello, Dave. Hello, George, and Merry Christmas.
0:39
Oh, we're going there already? Okay. Merry Christmas. Sure, why not? Okay. Folks, I want to start with our most excellent correspondent and friend in Australia, Grant.
0:54
Grant sent us a couple of things that I'd like to start the show with. First thing is, congratulations, Grant, on new acquisition of Valley Rolling Stones. Pretty nice game.
1:10
Too bad we've already done that game, episode 75, if anybody cares. Grant's been looking for that game for a while.
1:21
What's that? Oh, yeah, Slim Pickens in Australia. Yeah. Do you remember the picture? Go ahead. I said he did okay. Are we stepping on each other now? I think we are. He did okay.
1:37
Yeah. No, it's a nice game. Anyway, so do you remember the picture of the rectifier board from that game?
1:46
Scott
person
The Classic Pinball Podcastorganization
Steve Kirkperson
Firepowergame
Flight 2000game
Taxigame
Pinsideorganization
IPDBorganization
Pinball Association of Americaorganization
Rolling Stonesgame
Chris Munsonperson
Brian Soaresperson

high · George's observation about 60 revisions; Dave explaining finely-tuned mechanical requirements; manual containing Flight 2000 schematics instead of Nineball-specific

  • ?

    community_signal: Parts supplier (Steve Young) actively resisted scalping behavior by limiting customer purchases of rare components; community norm against stockpiling for resale

    medium · Dave's story about Steve limiting hanging spinner sales to prevent speculation; framing as ethical community practice

  • ?

    content_signal: Episode 122 (Nineball) represents production recovery after technical issues in prior episodes; hosts acknowledge sound quality problems affecting listener retention; planning YouTube video release strategy

    medium · George noting lower-than-expected engagement for Taxi episode; discussion of software/editing tool changes; Dave planning YouTube upload with detailed commentary

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Early Stern artists/developers (Robert Quinn, Jorge Obregon) show single-game or limited portfolio careers; potential correlation between software revision burden and designer departure

    medium · Robert Quinn: one game (artist/software); Jorge Obregon: three games (all Kirk designs); Dave speculating software issues drove departures

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Nineball translates pool/billiards mechanics into pinball language: bank angles, precision shots, risk/reward horseshoe routing; represents niche design philosophy distinct from ramp/mode-heavy modern games

    high · Dave's repeated references to pool table design; discussion of angle-based shooting, bumper use, horseshoe risk-reward mechanic; Kirk's intentional flipper spacing for bank shots

  • ?

    industry_signal: Manual/schematic errors persist in early solid-state era; Nineball contains Flight 2000 schematics; suggests rushed production or poor archival practices; community members may need to create corrected documentation

    high · Dave noting Flight 2000 schematics in Nineball manual; mention of community members creating accurate schematics; impact on troubleshooting for technicians

  • ?

    venue_signal: Nineball and Meteor included tournament play stickers on majority of production run; shows early tournament standardization and venue selection practices by manufacturers

    high · Dave explaining sticker placement; reference to Pinball Association of America tournament designation; note that some production units (including this machine) lack sticker

  • ?

    collector_signal: Rare early Stern machines with design pedigree (Kirk, original art, low production) maintain collector interest and secondary market demand despite gameplay complexity and learning curve

    medium · Scott commissioning expensive restoration; Dave owning multiple units; pricing premium for sub-2000-unit machines; investment in 50-60 hour restorations

    • Would you like me to refresh your memory? Refresh my memory. Okay. I'll ask it in a question form. Why do people snip the rectifier off the rectifier board, put wires to it, and then mount it to the cabinet? I know the technical reason, but why are people that stupid?
    2:10
    All the different connectors were definitely fried. It was a butchered rectifier board. it would be they want to do a bigger heat sink whatever it looks lousy it looks stupid um i'm guessing given the price differential uh i'm wondering what a rectifier board costs there here what 60 bucks for a new one uh what do you think 120 150 i'm trying to remember on that rectifier board if that's the big flat one that goes in the back box. No, that's a back box one.
    2:49
    Yeah, so you're going to pay like $70 or something, I think. Right, but I'm saying Australia, double? Yeah, probably double. Then you've got to go and solder it in and so forth.
    3:03
    Okay, so that's number one. Second thing, do you remember the other email he sent with Flipper Craft pinball?
    3:13
    Refresh your memory. Somebody is making cabinets for classic games like Mata Hari, Gorgar, April Deluxe. There were Williams games. You can go out to their website. This isn't a plug for them. But I also saw on Pinside, and I think you would know this person, or you should. Do you remember a guy named Chris Munson?
    3:42
    Oh, yeah. Yep, I know Chris. Yep. Well, I read in a Pinside thread that he's starting to do classic Valley and Stern games for brand new cabinets. I think he was doing that a long time ago. There was a company, and I don't remember the name. But, yes, there was a company, and it's been out of business for 20 years, maybe.
    4:09
    But you know somebody locally to you. He was on our show. Brian? He's from Western Mass. He's a cabinet maker. Sound familiar?
    4:22
    No. I know Brian. Brian Soares, maybe? The guy that does all the re-themes? No, not him. He's down south. No, not him. Okay, I'll have to go back and listen. I didn't have enough time. Okay, so there's that. So then there's the third thing, and I don't know if you're prepared to talk about this now or you wanted to do it later. But I want to know what Grant sent us.
    4:48
    He sent it to you. Yeah. You said, no, wait, I want to guess. Is it a Roussac? Is it a T-shirt from CU in the Northern Territory? You can look at the acronym.
    5:08
    Some Tim Tams. How about some pods? Killer Pythons? That's a no and a no and a no. How about some Redskins? Definitely inappropriate.
    5:22
    Right. Definitely inappropriate. I can actually get the box and kind of show you live what it is. Okay. Might as well. Okay.
    5:34
    How far do you have to go digging? Not too far. Okay. Well, then I'll pontificate for a moment. Yeah, pontificate. So our last episode, I would have thought it would have done a lot better than it did, given that Taxi is a top 100 game on Pinside. Now, Dave and I had a brief conversation before the show, and I'll take blame and responsibility that we were inconsistent sound-wise, content. Well, maybe not content-wise, but sound-wise. So we probably lost quite a few people, and it's definitely reflected in our numbers. Not crazy, but enough to, you know, cause concern. Not griping, because, Dave, I've got to kill some time here. I'm back. Oh, good. Good. So that's that. Go ahead. Yeah. Basically, it's our content is good. The sound quality is good. We're using, like, you know, you're using freebie software and so forth. No, it wasn't free. it was $9.95. Okay.
    6:43
    You're cheap state. I made your point. Go ahead. That's why. Then they changed the rules on George. George is trying to edit the thing. I'm so busy.
    6:56
    I'm the partial talent on the show. I do the talent thing. George does behind the scenes on the editing portion. He has tools he has to work with, but sometimes the tools change crap.
    7:07
    Right. Everybody's familiar with the story. Yeah, he has all the locks. We've heard about this every show. You got the keys, but they changed the locks on you, George. That's what happened.
    7:19
    I'm too old for this crap. Anyway. Well, long story short, we got it sorted out now. We got to work around, and the sound quality is a lot better. It's a couple, two episodes back there. Not so great sound quality-wise. We are going to try to remaster that if we can. Yeah, but we got a really good game today. we do right we'll get that in a minute yeah so so i see a box in front of me i can't see what's in the box now that must have cost an arm and a leg to send a box from australia to your house yes it probably did well thank you grant it says uh and there's also this is duplicated for you and janice as well in here so he sent it to both so i'm going to give this to you as well when I see you. So it's a two for one? There's two of everything in that box? Yeah, that way, ship it all to me. Instead of shipping it separately, there's double the big bill. Smart. Smarter for Grant to do that. So Doc and Maureen, a little gift from Australia, compliments of Grant and Sue. What we got first here is some Australian napkins. A room with boxing gloves. Awesome. Boxing gloves. We have some Cadbury Cherry Ripe Coconut and Old Gold Rich Dark Chocolate.
    8:34
    Cherry and coconut. That's interesting. Is it a cherry that's covered in chocolate? Yeah, so it's cherry ripe. So it's Cadbury. Cadbury is good chocolate. Right. Luscious cherries and coconut and old gold, rich, dark chocolate. Okay, that looks good. That looks really good. Yeah. And I think the ingredients don't look too bad either. Did I check them out? Not too bad at all?
    8:57
    Let's see. This is a... Oh, an Australian flag? Australian flag, yes. Oh, that'll go up on my new flagpole. Thank you.
    9:06
    All right. And we get some balance. Oh, I thought those frogs alive. Frogs alive. These are made from real live frogs. Perfect. They gutted and froze, deep freeze dried, and now they're a crunchy frog. Great. The new world of water. Yes. Eat the bugs, George. Eat the bugs. And some beer koozies. There we go. This is Australia with all the Cape York Peninsula. Oh, perfect. It's got certain items on there so I don't look stupid when I talk about Australia. Right. Now you have a little map. Yeah. You have a little map there. Okay. That's always good. Visuals are always good with me. We've got a koala bear drink. Oh, isn't that cute? Isn't that cute? With a Christmas hat on it. Oh. Isn't he nice? Grant, you didn't pick that out. Your wife did.
    9:53
    And then I'm going to start wondering if you did. I think Grant knows that we like to drink beer, George, because now not only two, but a third beer koozie, which says Melbourne on it. Oh, and a Volkswagen bus. Awesome. They probably don't call it a trolley. They probably call it something else. Oh, a trolley, yes. They probably call it I think it's a Vespar. No, I'm just making that up. Let's see. And we got some foam padding. No. Oh, no. Okay. That's going to be part of our show.
    10:33
    Now, I wonder what the heck Vegemite was. I had to go look it up. Well, wait a second. So, I got an idea. So, one of our next upcoming shows, you and I will both open it at the same time. Yeah. How's that? That sounds good. Okay. Yeah. We'll do a live on that. That would be good. It says Vegemite B-Vitams for Vitality. It's kind of, it's got a little. You go read about this stuff. You're either a lover or a hater. There is no in-between. I think it's like Australian Brondo. It's got electrolytes.
    11:08
    This might be right up your alley. Well, it doesn't smell anything bad inside it, but I don't know. We'll try it, George. We'll see how it goes. I'm always game for one try.
    11:22
    And so all that stuff there, a duplicate amount for you and Janice. All wrapped up in here. Awesome.
    11:30
    Thank you, Grant and Sue. That's awesome. That is awesome. Wow, that's a good part. Well, I didn't guess correctly.
    11:39
    Well, now, why don't we just get on with our show? And on to the show. So just like the headliner, folks, we're going to talk about Stern Nineball 1979. Steve Kirk. Actually, December of 1980, George. Oh, shit. Oh, sorry. Let me handle it. I'll handle the classic Stern stuff, George. You're just saying that. You know what? I'm shutting up this time because the last time I tried. Well, wait, let me do the setup again. And I'm going to blame him this time for my ignorance.
    12:20
    This thing was probably recorded again 10 plus years ago. I went out and saw your neighbor again. He did a video 14 minutes long.
    12:31
    While you're introducing this game, please keep in mind that he could not tell me in that 14-minute video how to score the nine ball.
    12:43
    He didn't understand that. He didn't understand the wow, whatever the hell that is, and then the lights with the special. So as you're going through this game, please keep in mind my ignorance. I do understand other elements of the game and have some comments, but I'll let you do the honors. How's that? Okay, sure.
    13:04
    Sure. So I'll basically be commenting as I'm playing and so forth, back and forth. You're directing traffic here. I'm going to be the other side making side comments. I have lots of questions. This is a really cool game. but I don't really have a lot of knowledge about it. And we've talked about, I get all, I want to go everywhere with this, but go ahead. You start. All right. Well, first of all, notice the nine ball back glass that I have up on the screen there. It's flashing with the guy's fingers and the pinball. And you talked about this as a tease in our last episode. So that is very cool visually. Yes. He is charging up that nine ball with his hand. Now question time. Have you done a video on your website yet? Not yet. Nope. Okay. So upcoming folks, this is definitely a game you want to go today. And Dave, what's your website again?
    13:58
    It is pinball doctor.com. All spelled out. You can see it there. You can also see it on our YouTube channel, darker days, pinball restorations on YouTube. There you go. Okay. Continue. I'll shut up. All right. So this is a Stern 9-Ball. I have two of these, and my client, Scott, good guy, he bought a Firepower a while back. I restored that for him, and then he likes that, so he wanted a 9-Ball next. Oh, it's good things. I have two of them, one for me and one for sale. So I redid this game here. It was nice where it was anyway. It's a good starter, and then I just kind of went through it and made it really nice. this was made in December 17th of 1980 so right around the same time we're talking now this was made how many years ago? 44 years ago? something like that let's see production end date was April 6th of 81 how many of these things they make? they made 2279 ok that answers one of my questions what's the question? how many did they make? no, why is this game so expensive? not only is it good, it's rare oh yeah, all these classic Stern games are good and rare you get Quicksilver, Stargazer, Nineball and Sea Witch and I throw Flight 2000 and Stars in there too but yeah, those are all like under, like right around 2000 mark of production so this was a Steve Kirk game Steve Kirk only really did three games. He had many other ones he did, but nothing really came to fruition. So that's why you'll see the SK-3 on the Wizard's Hat.
    15:51
    I'll tell you about the other ones in a second. The art was by Robert Quinn and Jorge Obregon. Robert Quinn only did this game. That's it. Then he kind of went out. He also did the software, which is maybe why he did one and done this. Okay, your software didn't work out until we had 60 revisions. We still couldn't get it right. So maybe he's out the door. I don't know. Okay, so I read the same thing you did on the IPDB website.
    16:20
    How can you release? Well, I'm going to answer my own question again. How can you release a game to the public? Remember, we're talking 1980, right? 80, 81. Yeah. With 60 revisions, is that why this game is so rare that people just stopped buying it because it didn't work?
    16:40
    I don't know. Whenever I played this out in the wild back in the day, I never had a problem with it. It's all about having those switches adjusted properly in the lock. The lock switch has to be adjusted properly, and even the drop target switch has to be adjusted. Everything has to be just so. So it's like a finely tuned Harley in a way. If you get it all right, then it's good to go. but look at Stern even from today. They have a crapload of revisions still. No, that's why I said I answered my own question, but where you just said 44 years ago, normally when these games came out, they were complete and they didn't give a crap. Next game was already in the pipeline. Okay, this one didn't sell. Shove it out. We'll put the new one in. Yes? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, okay. And that's kind of different now when you only have, you know, three or four releases a year. You know, you've got a little bit more time. You know, people are assigned to that project in perpetuity, it seems like. So, you know, a little bit different business model. That's all. These games from Stern, they put out pretty much one a month during 1980. So that's a pretty aggressive production schedule. Get this thing to go and then produce a whole bunch. In the meantime, someone else is working on the next month's game. So they had a lot of stuff. Well, it's also a huge cash flow. Think about it. You're buying parts, and I know a lot of parts are interchangeable. Again, on this game, there is a unique part. I don't know how unique, but in my eyes, it's unique.
    18:19
    That's a lot of capital to put out, to put a game out once a month. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it definitely is. All the unique stuff that they had on the stuff. I mean, not all games have it. I mean, there's some games that have common mechs across many platforms. But in some cases, as you're probably well aware with games that you collect, there's sometimes that one part where, man, I've got to really search high and low to try to find that. Like, for instance, the spinner, the hanging spinner. That's what I was referring to. At one point, Steve Young had a stock of those, and then people started just buying them up. Steve would try to limit you from buying those. I was like, you know what, don't just buy it because you just want to stock it away and throw it away someday. You want to be the scalper and get big money for it later on. He was off to you. No more throwing on Steve. No, Steve gets it. He knows what's going on. So the art was by Robert Quinn, and same thing with software. So it's kind of cool we did the software on – I'll show you this part here.
    19:22
    Like the attract mode is a pretty nice attract mode. So he did all that. but he did the software, so the software didn't work out too well for him, so I guess that's why he quit the game, so to speak. Jorge Obregon, he also did the art as well, and he only did three games for Stern, and they're all Steve Kirk games, Nineball, Meteor, and Stars.
    19:43
    So then he quit the game for some reason. Let's see. So the artist's inspiration for the wizard design in the back glass came from a design in a t-shirt which can be seen in Roger Sharp's 1977 book Pinball on page 13. Now, do you remember that t-shirt? No, I do not.
    20:04
    Do you? I want to say I do, but I don't have that book, so I didn't know where to find the reference.
    20:12
    And the famous mini-post screw between the flippers was known as the Kirk Post because Steve Kirk put it in all his games. He put it in Stars, Meteor, and this game. That is something you absolutely need in this game. Yeah, he made the flippers so wide apart on all three of those games. They're wide apart, so you need the post there.
    20:36
    What else? Oh, Steve Kirk was also founder and president of the Pinball Association of America, organizing major tournaments since the 1970s.
    20:46
    Meteor and Nineball both have a sticker on the lower apron identifying these games as selected for tournament play, and these stickers were installed on the majority of each apron in the production run. Some games did not get it, though, including this one. This nine ball does not have that sticker.
    21:03
    He also placed his personal design number on the back glass, which is an SK3 on the hat of the wizard. Right, you were going to come back to this. What are the other two games? And let's see. And also in the order of which they were designed. So this is third design. So he had 12 designs, only four are ones that we know, which is Stars, his SK-1 on the jet wing, Nineball, of course, SK-3 on the Wizard's Cap, Meteor, SK-5 on one of the rockets, Pinstars Gamitron, which is sort of a stern in-between, before they went to Data East, they had Pinstar for about a year, and it has SK-9 on the launching rocket, a prototype game called Ramp Warrior. Sounds like right up our alley, George. Ramp Warrior. Oh yeah, great. Has an SK-13 on the truck's license plate while the production game Truck Stop shows his license plate laying crumpled in the street.
    22:00
    The other weird thing about Nineball is the schematics. The schematics show for lamp drivers so you can find where the lamp which transition does what. it's Stern's Flight 2000. They have Flight 2000 schematic in there instead of 9-ball. So a lot of these 9-balls don't really have an accurate schematic for your lamps. I think someone has it out there. Someone did it and made it available, but it's not available in their regular manual. Somebody's buying a lot of lamp driver boards.
    22:34
    Yeah, probably. I guess. If you can't figure it out. Yep. yes yes okay so you want to get you want to get into this or is there a preamble to tell us what we're to expect uh well uh the other thing about this game is i put i put a wheelie board for the main board also i also put all brand new boards in it too uh spent about i don't know 50 60 hours in this game uh all new plastics we're going to go with a merco playfield but the merco playfield was warped and had issues with the clear. I said, you know what? Forget it. This play field is a gorgeous original. It's already been clear-coated. We went with this one. All new drop targets. Put a couple LEDs here and there.
    23:21
    And... What else did we... Oh! The Scott software is incorporated in the Weebly board, which is like home ROM stuff. So on this one I did the home ROM. I switch on it. So this game behaves like Fathom in that when you have two ball multi-ball out you get two times play field value three times mobile three times multi-ball out three times play field value you lose a ball it goes down one play field value it actually will show that in the back box in your ball and play will flash between uh what your multiplier value in the play field is and what your ball and play is while that's going on in multi-ball the to answer the neighbor's question the wows on this game are extra balls first how How do you collect when the nine is flashing?
    24:13
    You have to, let's see. Because there's a post behind that, right? There is no target there for the nine. Yeah, but what happens is once you get all eight balls down, there's one target that pops back up, and it has the, let me think here.
    24:33
    You're going to play it. I'll have to show it. I want to see this live. Yeah, I think basically what it's going to do, I think it's going to basically have a flashing running. This matrix here is going to be moving these targets all around. So the one on the left here, that's going to be your virtual nine ball target. Wherever that light is, is your nine ball. Okay, let's back up a sec because people are going to be confused. So the essence of this game, this much I can at least talk about. you have eight targets, two four-bank target banks labeled one through eight. You have to hit those down in succession. And how that is accomplished is there is a light in front of each. And when the light is in front of the target, you need to hit that target down, go one through eight. There are two other parallel lines of lights. one is called wow and i think the other one is special yep i don't know how those work so i just want to make sure everybody that's on the left hand side in the middle of the play field it's uh it's it's a big piece of this game yeah so basically it's a it's a bunch of lights it's like three sets of lights in front of each target so they're all categorizing what the target's going to mean for scoring and for whatever so basically what can happen if you hit the lit target everything's and they're all going at different speeds too so the extra ball wow is going at a certain speed the special is going faster the nine ball is going slower that speed there the cool thing about this too is that eight ball shot it's that post is out of in the way making the eight ball a tough shot which is just like in real uh eight ball where you're trying to get that eight ball and call the pocket so it's it's similar it makes it a tough shot to do so That position, so people know, it's the upper target bank, the one closest to the flippers. And it's right next to a post. And I can see just even from the angle I looking at that a rough shot to get You got to be precise And this game is very much laid out like a pool table It all about shooting angles and shooting the rubber on a pool table So to get up here, you can't really get locked balls up to the upper left here directly. You have to bounce it off something. So you have to bounce it off through the spinner. It'll bounce over in there once in a while if you do the right shot. Sometimes bounce it off over here on the top upper drop target. It's a stand-up drop target kind of very unique on on this so the game's got characteristics like pool where you need to use bumpers in order to accomplish a shot yeah oh yeah bumpers as in bumpers as in a pool table but i guess the bumper on this game there's only well there's two there's one active and one that will drop one of those targets correct that dead bumper on the upper right top of the yeah So when that is lit, that'll drop. Oh, it's got to be lit. Okay. And how does one light that? Do you know? I think by getting the back and forth, it lights it up through, let me see here. Switches? Yeah, like switches, like a rebound lane or something. I think it will light it up back and forth. Okay. Yeah. Okay. That's how that works. so I know we are running a little bit low on time but well we can come back I mean we can cut it here and talk about the spinner and the horseshoe up top and continue and then you can play again because I think we're almost done describing kind of the play field yeah let's let's get let's continue describing it then I can do play in the next when we come back okay so the cool thing is to get a skill the skill plunge shot, a skill shot when you first plunge the ball, up in the middle there's a stand-up that's kind of hidden. You want to hit that right away. I never saw that, so okay. And when you do that, it lights up your spinner for maximum value. I believe it's all these scores. It's like 400 plus 900 plus 60 plus 2,500. I think that's equal to 5,000? Something like that. Oh, I thought you could only I thought only one was lit at a time, and it only went to 2,500. 45. No, I think it's 45. I think it's a lot. Well, I'll watch in gameplay. How's that? Yeah. Oh, here you go. Spinner scores 100 or highest lit value. Okay, so it must be 2,500 to spin that. Right, that's what I thought. Okay, good. That's right. And the two upper banks are for the multiplier, is that correct? Yep. Each bank down will make a multiplier. There are three target banks? Three targets on each bank? Yep. Okay. And you want to go around that horse. Every time you go around the horseshoe, it'll increase what the drop target, the red stand-up drop combo target, what it's worth. So it's kind of a risk-reward thing. You want to go around the horseshoe five times. It'll make that target worth 173,000 points, which is very nice.
    29:47
    If you go around the horseshoe one more time, you're back down to 10. So be accurate because... Right. Well, you also have to be accurate in hitting the horseshoe, because if you hit the target in the middle, it collects the bonus and it puts you back down again. Right, right. Yeah, no, this game is all just like pool. It's all about accuracy.
    30:08
    Yeah, it's a great game. In fact, I haven't played this in so long, and after I restored it, I was like, wow, you know, I need to restore mine. I need to put this up next to 8-ball locks. Yeah, no kidding. This is a really cool game. so scott you chose wisely having me restore this game for you because it's a great game uh i'm going to get into that too i have a whole story about that as well we get into into later about that kind of stuff but uh yeah i think that's uh let's see you're gonna go yeah after ball after you get the ball five in you know the number five ball in uh the yellow capture light lights to start uh locking balls over there you can lock three balls over there and then once you do that you're going to get multi-ball uh i think as well if you just put two balls in there and you get the nine ball i think it goes into multi-ball as well but we can find out for sure what that is i only have a handful of games and since i haven't played this in years i do own the game but uh i uh it's great to play this game and i need i need to do a lot more play test on it so you're not doing any worse than your neighbor trust me okay good that's good and i have to i have to say the other one which made no sense you should redo it is ron hallett has one out there from a long time ago but with no voice no description just play it's like oh god okay oh okay well i can't wait to do mine i'm gonna put mine out there on youtube you probably do very well if you do the description like we just did here and talk about all the different features and everything while you're playing, you'll do very well with it. I'll get everybody banging down my door. Hey, I want one of those. It's like, well, I only got one. One more left and it's for me. Ice bitter.
    31:49
    Yeah. I've got offers on that. What's it called? The nickel game upstairs. The skill roll. Have you repaired that yet?
    32:02
    Yeah, I had a little party over here recently and someone just kept playing it over and over and they kept playing it and it came back to life again just by kept trying to play it. And it just kind of made all the switches clean themselves, which is what an EEM does, you know, so it cleaned itself, whatever was the problem. We good? Do you want to move? Yeah, let's move. Okay. Call me back. All right, will do.
    32:36
    and those tones mean it is classic stern time those tones are from classic stern today it is nine ball gameplay so let's see what mr. nine ball the wizard has for us today by hitting the go button here we are going to try to nice I turn off the background sound because it's really annoying not a big fan of it has this ongoing background thing. It takes away from the game. It doesn't add to the game. So I took that out. I'm going to go for that skill shot at the top there. That 7,000. No, that it makes the spinner all the way maximum spinner value. Let's see if we can do that.
    33:20
    Bang! Oh, almost got it. Alright, here we go. There we go. Another one. And I'm going to go for the three target.
    33:34
    all right now we're lit i got spinner lit so the drop target goes to a reset every time you hit one of those targets yes because it wants you to get a lot of wear and tear on those things huh Oh, believe me, I had to rebuild these things and use, like, some... I went to the local glass shop, and they gave me some trim, sticky-back trim work that's just the right gap. I had to shim that for the drop target. I did all kinds of things with these drop targets to make them, like, brand new again, because they were beat the crap out of. Was it because all the slots were all worn?
    34:20
    Yeah, like, the lifting mech was all worn, loosey-goosey, so I would try to reset the targets. It wouldn't get all of them, so they'd have to go up and down, up and down a couple times to reset them. and then if you just redid it just with that little piece of shim material and you do that and call it done, you're not done because now the drop tarts in their down state are still sticking up a little bit like a lip. I wanted to be even-steven with the play field, so what you had to do there, I had to round out the mounting holes that hold that lifter plate to bring it down. I had to round those holes out just right. So there was all kinds of optimization going on in this game to get it to be, you know, day one from the factory again. So pretty sure we got it pretty darn close to that, if not a little better, I must say. So we have locked ball number one in the three ball. So you're shooting for target what, five? I want that flashing eight ball right there. Oh, you're already there? Yeah, I'm there. So I can get the flashing eight, or I can go in the capture. So, before you shoot... Too late.
    35:27
    Oh, I got the eight ball. Oh, man. That's skill. Now we've got two times play field. Well, I did have two times play field. That's all skill. I want to see you do that again. Oh, I'm freaking... I don't want to see you do that again. Okay. Extra ball was sitting there, too, and I couldn't get it. Dave lost both balls. That was kind of lame, but okay. But I do have the 77,000 super bonus lit at the end of the ball. Okay, so wait. So every, this is an important part. So every time you start a new ball, you're back to ground zero again, right? Yes, you are. You've got to restart everything. Yes, you do. Except for your multiplier's hold and your spinner value holds.
    36:14
    Oh, okay. Well, that's a big thing, a multiplier holding. Yeah. Okay. How many targets do you have to get down? Six to get to the multiplier? I need to get five down. Well, what do you mean to advance the multiplier? To get five down to make the capture go on. Right. I'm talking about the multiplier. You need to get a bank of three. Nope. One bank of three gets it to move. Oh, okay. I didn't understand that. Okay. Thanks for that. Okay. Continue. All right. Here we go. Ball two. All right, I'm going to go for the one target here in the bottom.
    36:57
    I really want that spinner shot. Oh, that's good. The spinner shot, you got one and it goes away. See that?
    37:08
    I don't know if that was a hit right now. Oh, I almost hit it. Okay, Dave's advancing the port. But you hit the target so you scored the .711, but you didn't get it five times or anything.
    37:30
    It's a 77,000 right there. And how did you get 77,000? I got all the balls down. I got a full rack. I racked the balls and the ball won. Okay. But now it goes away, so I've got to do that again. So that super bonus only stays for one ball after you did it. So I've got to do that again.
    37:59
    Okay, around the horseshoe, so it's the back of the net. Now, it went around the horseshoe, and good thing I didn't flip it all, because it hit the pin in the middle.
    38:10
    But when it went around the horseshoe, it hit the pin in the middle. I didn't flip, which is good. That pin saved me, and it bounced the ball right back up. so that feels like another game George I got a 593 last night I put up 2.2 million yeah this is a tough game to talk and concentrate and do the whole thing but it's a really I understand why people like this game but I always go back to the same argument or observation I don't understand why one of these companies doesn't make a new pool game just don't get it there's an attraction. I know this is a really great game, but you can make another really great game.
    38:54
    No, because you need to have an intellectual property, an IP on it, put a Marvel character on it, or the Godfather or something playing pool. Stop, stop, stop. Or Jaws playing pool.
    39:07
    I know Alice in Wonderland playing pool, George. Evil Dead or whatever the hell that is. Well, Evil Dead, actually, you know, I took a look at that game. I saw somebody, and it's like, there's a lot of cool little toys in that game. That's what everybody says, but it's like, okay, how often are you going to be playing it, and how often are you going to be repairing it? Yeah. Does it make a good game? Well, it makes an interesting kind of, you know, showcase. I'll play it. We say this every show. I'll play it. Will you buy it? No. If you're going to offer me a Minty Nineball or a Minty Evil Dead, I'll take the Minty Nineball all day long. Absolutely, all day long. Because this game you will not get sick of. That game you're going to get sick of eventually. This game you're not. I think this game is actually top three sterns. This, Quicksilver, and Stargazer are top three.
    39:55
    We've completed the triumvirate. This is game three. It's a long time coming, but this is a good one. I wish I was there playing with you. It's really bumming me out. Come on by.
    40:09
    Just hop in the car. I'll be there tomorrow. Now, continue. You should play another game. I'm going to try to get that stand-up target at the top there again. And I missed it again.
    40:29
    The post worked that time. So that dead bumper is lit. Yes, now it's lit. So that's going to spot a target for me. That's going to spot a ball for me. Now, can you hit that? And that's going to spot a target too by getting in that capture hole.
    40:46
    I went in the capture hole. Okay, now we're on Vols. You can hit that dead pump if you want. I want to. Yes. Now we're at the 8th ball right now. This game does a lot of targets. That's what I like about it. It really does.
    41:08
    Is this like one of the most targeted games? Yeah, this has a lot of targets. This has 14 drop targets. So it's what you call a target-rich environment, George. Where's my bell?
    41:22
    Ding, ding, ding. Sorry. That's okay. So here's the spot we've all been waiting for. So now I got all eight balls down. The nine ball is flashing. I have a ball captured in there, and it wants me to capture more in there. So if I throw a ball in the capture right now, it's going to start dropping targets one by one. And if it happens to land on one of the flashing things, right now the wow is scrolling through faster than the nine ball one. So right now it's scrolling through the little nine ball thing. So targets one through eight, one of them designated as the nine ball shot, right?
    42:09
    The blue moving light next to it, that's the wow. Wow. That's wow, right? Extra wow, wow. Wow, wowzers. Yeah. Wow.
    42:24
    Wow. Yeah, it used to be Whip It Out Wednesday on Opie and Anthony, but they changed it. Actually, it wasn't Whip It, it was called Whip M, Whip M Out Wednesday.
    42:37
    Not the guys, the girls. I didn't even think about that. That makes that game even funnier now. So it's M, Whip M Out, not It. Yeah.
    42:48
    So, yeah, so right now, all kinds of things to do. So I can shoot the capture hole and try to get this thing to score extra ball and or nine ball, or I can shoot directly for the drop targets and target you. It's a lot like a shooting gallery right now. It's another reason why this game is so great. It's a little shooting gallery going on right here. You've got to be very accurate with your shot. So let's shoot a ball here. All right, I just got the skill shot, and the ball went out. Yes. Well done.
    43:15
    Nicely done. But I think it's all going to stay for me. Yeah, it all stays. I did lose the extra ball shot. Now, you know what? I lost all that. I lost all my progress. Darn it. All right, well, so much for ball one. Hey, you know what? It had such promise. Can I... Go ahead, George. What? This would have been funny on your YouTube channel.
    43:40
    You do the whole description, you get it all set up, and then... Fail. Da-da-da-ba. Err. You know, that's from... Oh, the game show. What's his name there? That had a problem with the girls. Who cared? No, well, the other one. Yeah, the first guy. Bob Barker. Yeah, Bob Barker.
    44:05
    Bob Barker. Yeah, he wanted you to spay and neuter your husband or something. Oh, yeah, he's a big pet guy. Yeah, he's a big pet guy. He wanted to basically have the pets not procreate anymore. Okay, do you know where he lived in the next town?
    44:22
    No, I did not know that. Another game show. True sword consequences. Oh, yes. Parts of consequences. Parts of continuous marks offenses.
    44:34
    Seven ball. So what are you doing here? I'm going for the eight ball next. Okay, so now it's money. Oh, I got eight. I backhanded that eight ball shot. You did backhand it, and I did see that.
    44:51
    So does this game sound like other third game? I'd say it's a close cousin, but no. They use different sounds, but you definitely can tell it's a Stern from 1980. So they sound similar, but they have their own unique sound to them. They have plenty of sound palette to work with.
    45:14
    I think the sounds of this game are good. Oh, they're great sounds. I'm going to go back and nail that spinner shot because... because, ugh, almost got it. Oh, that's weak. That's a weak shot, and that's going to go away.
    45:29
    That could be it. Let's see. Yeah, that's over there. Oh. Oh, but the spinner shot, right? Isn't one of those spinner shots timed?
    45:44
    Yeah. Meaning, as soon as you hit it, you have about maybe two seconds before it stops, Well, when it stops, you hit it again, otherwise it goes away and goes back to 100 points or whatever. I'm guessing that's fixed and you can't... Yeah, that's fixed. You can't change that when those happen? You are correct, sir.
    46:06
    Too early in the technology, then. No, they could have done it. They could have done it, because they did it on cabin.
    46:17
    Okay. Oh, you bum. I didn't know that either. Thank you, Mr. Kim, I mean, Dr. everyone. Thank you, Dr. Dave.
    46:30
    Yeah, so that little extra ball shot on Fathom, you can change it from either being 7 seconds to timeout or 10 seconds to timeout. So I have mine set for 7. It might be even 6, but it's pretty minimal. It's a way better game like that. Okay, let's ride into, you had a party recently? we did we did have a party recently and uh that was and why was it called what was it 10 10 a 10 10 10 10 match play tournament so had uh eight players here a bunch of good guys uh and i invited uh scott the new owner of this game to actually you know have this part play his game in the tournament and uh come over to my house and play your game Right. Help me beta test it, because I only played a handful of games. So this term was partially to beta test this in a live environment and see if we can shake the tree to get the gremlins out. So we did that. What other games were in your tournament? We had Buck Rogers, which we just finished up a restoration on that one.
    47:40
    Stargazer. Quicksilver. Flight 2000. Bow and Arrow. Nineball, of course. Bally Blackjack EM and Bow and Arrow EM of course Fathom and 8 Ball Deluxe and it was called 10-10 for what reason again? okay it was let me think well originally it was going to be 10 players but we only had 8 we actually only had 7 because one guy Craig, what's his name Eric's friend Craig the cab driver he was supposed to come down and one of his employees called in sick. So then at the last minute, it's like, oh, dude, you're killing me. You just made an odd number. I need even numbers for this tournament. It's match play, head-to-head. So I had to draft Maureen at the last second. So Maureen was a player. She actually did really well. She actually beat me in the tournament. Don't let that rumor get out. Yeah, it's all right. I'll give it to her. She earned it.
    48:43
    Scott didn't do too well. Scott came in dead last. He only won one game to me. He won the game that I played him. Does he listen to this podcast? He does. Oh, yeah, he does. In fact, well, he's a great guy. He brought over some cool stuff. Maureen made a nice turkey stew for everybody.
    49:02
    I think Bob brought some really fresh bread, and John brought famous brownies, and Vince brought his brownies, and Scott brought this, like, I've got to bring a classic cake for a classic tournament. He brought this awesome cake from this bakery he knows of, as well as some cookies from this bakery, really high-end stuff.
    49:20
    And he made a comment to me. It's funny because I could tell he listens a lot. He actually remembers more things about the podcast than I do or probably you do. But I know what he was talking about. He basically said, well, I want to give you some cool stuff because, you know, that freaking French fry incident with that restaurant he did the work for, you know, that pissed me off. He said, you know, you've got a great guy here that's restoring your game and doing great work for you. He's a craftsman. And first you talk him down $100, and you don't give him fries for him and his wife. You just give him one freaking thing of fries, you know, negotiate it down. It's like that's not the way to do it. You've got to take care, he said, you've got to take care of your CPA, your lawyer, and your restoration guy. So that's what I'm doing here, he said. There you go. Good. Okay, so I have something else. So who ended up winning the tournament?
    50:14
    Winning the tournament, hold on, let me go back to my little thing here. I don't know exactly. I think it was, oh, you know who won it? Mike McGordy.
    50:23
    He swept it. Oh, that's cool. Who else was there? Was Benny there? Nope, nope. I didn't put Benny in this time. I wanted to change up a little bit. Yeah, plus Benny is a girlfriend these days. There you go. So he's got other things going on. Okay, good for Benny. Yeah, yeah. Did PJ come and did Stu come, the infamous Stu? You talk about Stu all the time. Yeah, Stu, I've invited Stu a couple times. He usually comes with Benny a while back. But this time I wanted to kind of change the lineup up a little bit. I wanted to do something a little different players.
    51:00
    And usually Stu doesn't usually play in the tournament unless maybe Benny does. But Stu's not one to really show up to these things anyway, very rarely. So I didn't throw it out that way. But I wanted to have different people. Basically, I've been to Mike McGordy's place a couple times when he hosts NEPL. So a couple guys there. Okay, there's a couple cool guys here. Does he listen to us? Who? McGordy. I don't think so. Oh, good. Okay. Hey, McGordy, your team blew it.
    51:32
    They didn't get one, man. Although I will say, you know, part of the tournaments here, it's not just about playing the tournament and get it done and taking things so seriously. It's having fun here, fun, casual conversation, blah, blah, blah. I don't have a hard and fast rule start and stop time. It was Saturday night. So I said, we're going to start around 6, something like that. But I started talking, and then people, Scott started saying, hey, what do you got here for a stereo system in your house? That looks really cool. I was ready to give him a quick sample of it but I knew time was getting late then McGordy said hey dog are we going to start soon he's getting kind of antsy he gets itchy he gets antsy he wants to watch a football game it's like really a freaking stupid football game why I want to shift gears I got another thing for you posted to Grant and I forgot something about Grant but I'll bring that up in a couple minutes your game list of upcoming. I'd like to talk about that real quick if we could. Sure. Okay. I want to go back to this tournament, though, but go ahead. Oh, go back to the tournament, then. Okay. Finish up. So during the tournament, you know, basically the winners and so forth, let me give you that. So we had Mike in first place, Vince, who I thought was going to be kicking ass. He's like a really good player in the regular NEPL. I thought, because he came in, he hadn't seen my place before. He hadn't seen the games. He goes, wow, these games are awesome. I've never seen such nice stuff. He knew them all. He's an older guy, so he knew them all, kind of. He said, oh, you've got a bow and arrow. I've got to play that. So he stepped up to bow and arrow. Game one, double rolled it, plus 50,000 points. Not bad on bow and arrow. You think? And he played something else. He freaking cranked out and said okay we going to have a problem This guy going to freaking walk away with this right but I think he lost all his mojo He came in and kicked ass and during the tournament he didn do as good But he still came in good enough to do second. It's not how you start. It's how you finish. So Mike got 10 points at number one. Vincent got six points at number two. Bob got five points. Well, Bob and Maureen and Keith had a three-way tie for third. So they had a playoff. So Bob got it at third. Then Maureen in fourth. Keith in fifth. I was in sixth place. John Day was in seventh place. Oh, Johnny. Actually, I'll take that back. John and me, we were tied for sixth and seventh. We didn't really do a playoff, so we're kind of tied in the sixth, seventh range, and Scott had the last place. But Scott had a good time anyway. You know, he had fun playing. So you, Johnny, and Scotty were circling the bowl, huh? We were circling the bowl. We couldn't – I just was – you know what? Because during the tournament, when you're trying to run the thing and play it, it's tough to do.
    54:29
    Just like when you were put on the spot about 10 minutes ago. It's – this is – You okay? I'm okay. I just have a – this little thing was just talking to my thing. Okay. So let me just say – so one more thing with that thing. So during the tournament, Vince came over to me, and he said, oh, there was some smoke coming from Bow and Arrow, so I shut it off. And I said, uh-oh, let me see what we got here.
    55:00
    What do we have here? Warning. Critical gendry identified in the break room. Critical gendry. So that's what happened.
    55:14
    I saw those pictures you sent. Man, that was toasty. yeah yeah so that was a toasty coil a pop bumper locked on um and so we shut it down for the night we just worked did other games to set up that one uh i went i spent i did a day spa on my own games yesterday the day after the tournament uh i worked on nine ball and um and uh blackjack so nine ball i mean not nine ball bow and arrow what am i saying nine ball bow and arrow and blackjack so bow and arrow the thing got melted so much it melted the coil and the pop bumper spoon switch melted into the plastic spoon so I basically just redid all that cleaned it up, new contacts, new spoons new coil for that one and I decided to rebuild the flippers while I was at it so then I played it after that and the game is really playing nice so that was playing really well but I spent the whole day working on that game and also I decided to refurb the game next to it, the Blackjack.
    56:17
    So that's what that was there. I think anything else was playing? We had a blast playing Quicksilver, too. That was a blast. The real highlights of the night were playing all the Sterns, because I have four Sterns up right now. So we're going to turn this into like a Sternament talk, but old school Sternament. I got a couple other things I want to talk about regarding Stern. Old Stern, not new Stern. Old Stern. Okay. Okay, but first, but first. So Dave sends Grant and I an email with a list of upcoming games that he's going to restore. And I'd like to go through all the games because some of them we've already done, unfortunately, but some we have not. And I had an epiphany when I was reviewing the list. And you'll understand why. So do we want to do Captain Fantastic if you ever get around to it? we can because I have a Captain Fantastic right here that I'm working on right now that is a pig of a game well when it becomes unpigged maybe your second game I'm going to run through the list pretty quick Gorgor we already did it I don't know what episode it is go back and look Nippet that's the happy days game right with the alligator yep I'm going to be doing one of those coming up soon any good I had Zipper Flippers it's a multi ball game, two ball, multi ball game.
    57:44
    Not a bad little game. Yeah, we should give it some time. We should do it. We should do it. We could even do the you know, I would suggest for the opening theme song for that, I wouldn't do the one day, happy day, you know, the happy day song. Yeah, we could do that. You want to go right into it? Yeah, we could do that. Yeah. Okay.
    58:03
    Eight Ball Deluxe, we did that. You made faces the last time. Indiana Jones. Yeah, we could do it. You do it again, and I can't even see you.
    58:18
    What's that? I do it again? You're making like faces. I know you kind of don't like this game, do you? Not really. I mean, it's kind of cool a little bit, and people like the game, so I'm sure people will listen, but it's not really... I said that about Taxi, and it didn't happen.
    58:36
    What didn't happen? People listening. yeah people like that game and they don't listen to it because I think they want like classic serves and classic values from us yeah I think so too but we're running out of games I have one in the wings but it's got to be on my end and I don't have all the video well no I don't want to do that skateball we've never done skateball somebody called Dave for repairs on a skateball day spa well i could always set up my my skateboard i get two of them okay well that's one we haven't done so anyway that so what's this class of 1812 game that's a galeeb system three that is uh okay we got another we got another okay so so doctor who we never did that right we did What's the one I always confuse this with? The game we did.
    59:36
    Dracula? No. I don't know. We never did Doctor Who, right? No. Did we ever do Ali? Yes. Okay. Because of the bell. I remember the bell. Oh, the bell. So here's one I think people would like. Yep. Monster Bash. I'm going to be doing one of those. That's what Scott wants next. but that's going to be probably a year out. I mean, I have a couple high-end restorations for the ramp game restorations coming up probably later next year. One for a friend in Florida who I'm doing a high-end Doctor Who restoration for that I got here. The one we just talked about. This one we just talked about? Yeah, that's going to be going to a friend in Florida. Right. And then he's the one who got the Haggis Fathom thing. Remember he was talking about that? Yeah, we talked about him. Yeah. So he's getting that one, and at the same time I'm going to be doing Scott's Monster Bash, but I'm going to be starting for the first time, I think I'm going to be doing my first cabinet re-decals of a cabinet. So I'm either going to go buy... You talked about that too. Well, but I didn't talk about this. I've heard you can now buy new cabinets for the Ramp Game Era.
    60:51
    Well, we talked about all the cabinets earlier on. But those are classic Bally. Those are classic Bally and Stern. Those aren't ramp game cabinets. They're different. So who makes the ramp game cabinets? I've got to find that out, but I know someone does. Oh, okay. I know someone does because I've seen every store do it online. But it's not just a matter of just taking the cabinet and put some decals on, here you go. No, you actually have to drill holes in it. You've got to drill holes for the legs. You've got to do – there's a lot of measuring and cutting. You've got to do a lot of do. You've got to do some stuff. Yeah, a lot of stuff. So the last game on the list, Quicksilver, we did that game too.
    61:29
    So now I'm going to come to this. We're going to continue with the Stern theme. So I forgot this with Grant. Do you remember Grant sending us that picture of the Cosmic Princess?
    61:41
    Yes. Yep, which is basically like Galaxy. So explain this to me, Lucy. those are what do they call those games knockdown games and you don't get a cabinet and you don't get a play field that's not a knockdown game yeah it was that's what it said that's what it says on IPDB again I have no other source so that's what I'm going with at least that's the story I'm sticking with right now I thought there was something else I thought Tim from Las Vegas Pinball had a story about different games that ship overseas and kind of take features out or something.
    62:27
    No, I don't know. This sounded really rare. $336 for the Australian market. Okay, sorry. We don't know anything about it. If somebody does, hey, we'll have you on. Write us or do something.
    62:44
    Okay, so I got a current today. You want to hear this one? Sure. Okay, I'm going to call this little piece, Am I Santa or Grinch?
    62:56
    All right. So there's a game for sale in Maryland, which isn't far from me. It's a meteor, hence the Stern thread, another Stern game.
    63:08
    This was on Pinside this morning. I saw it now. It was only posted for an hour. Okay. I'm not going to tell you the price. You're going to tell me. I took the pictures open, and I looked, and I go, man, this thing's unshopped. Then they got to the slingshot picture. The rubber looked like it had been on there for like 50 years. And then I said to myself, this game is being flipped. and somebody has gone out to Pinside, obviously, and our other places and determined what the value of this game is in this non-pinball person's eyes. With that said, it's not extreme. How much do you think they were asking for this game that definitely needed a Dr. Dave's shop job at a minimum?
    64:04
    The play field looked pretty good. I don't know how the gameplay was or anything else so the game looked okay a little flaking on the back blast but overall a plus game not a minus game are you ready? go ahead 1800 nope low I'm low for Meteor? you are low wow okay for Meteor that needs some help 2800 too high but 2300 right in the middle I looked, I'm like there are people selling that game all done already for that price who the hell it's definitely somebody who must have got it for a song that's all I could ever think of because the game looked like it hadn't been touched in years, so you know what that is that's opening up the can of worms yeah I have a Meteor, I've had like four of them and it's like I got sick of the game back in the day even though it's a Steve Kirk I think stars and nine ball are his better efforts okay I have some other stuff but it's kind of non pinball related do you have anything you'd like to talk about I do I get stories from the field okay let's see here okay so let's go with we last left our heroes where were we here the Tony Taxi Pickup Day Tony Taxi Pickup yeah come closer to the microphone that's much better let me go this way here oh that's not much better get it back here hold on how's this how's that that's probably really hot it's terrific Okay, I don't want to be too hot during the mic. All right, so I sold a quick draw that I was going to restore up. I've had it for about 10 years. What is this game I'm looking at? That is a Buck Rogers.
    66:15
    Okay, now I know why people like this game. It certainly isn't for the gameplay. Are you saying it's the hot babe with the moose hat on? if the horns were turned the other way she'd look like one of the uh the lodge members of water buffaloes on the flintstones the grand poobah lodge yeah the grand poobahs yeah i think that's what that is so uh yeah i'll get to the buck riders in a second so quick draw i had that for 10 years i was going to do all kinds of work on it i got it for a song um playfield looks like someone took a belt sander to it but i got a wade cross playfield when he was offering them and I had Bill Davis clear coat it so I had it all waiting for me. I had a brand new backless for it. I was going to do it but then I played it somewhere else and it's like, ah, it doesn't do much for me. Then someone on Pinsight said, hey, I'm looking for a quick draw. What do you want for yours? Well, I'll sell you the project game I got plus the play field for a nice price. He said, done, sold, send it. So that's out of here. I got some cash for that. I also got rid of the Project High Speed I had, so that's a friend of mine. I had a photo shoot done on the same time. This guy contacted me, Doug Levy Photo, and he gets a portfolio of engineers and artists. You talked about this. Yeah, so he actually came by and did it. So I got all that stuff. took some shots on Maureen too and her doing some live touch-ups so that came out nice I'll probably put some of that on my website I did a Blackwater 100 game in Chestnut Hill that thing was weird it couldn't find its balls in the trough come to find out it had trough optos in it and somebody did some repair work did some solder splash on it shorted one of the things out I found that hidden, so that was a nice little score and fixed that.
    68:23
    What else did we do here? We went up and did the Modzilla, did another Godzilla Modzilla up in New Hampshire. Let me see here.
    68:33
    Yeah, let's see. We were at Blackwater. Oh, I did a police force since we last talked. Yeah, we talked about those. Yeah, we did? Police force? Yeah, we already talked about them. Police force? No. No, what's Police Force? Police Force is a late 80s Williams game. No, you're thinking high speed.
    68:56
    Okay. George, George, George. You've got to know your ramp games. Come on. Data East Star Wars. This guy called me up near Beverly, and he got this game home use only from a person who worked on the Star Wars I don't know, something to do with Star Wars, but she had the game, got it from the company direct for payment for her services rendered or whatever. So she gave it to him. And he's a big Star Wars fan. He's from England originally. And he actually had a rare poster next to it of Revenge of the Jedi, which was supposed to be what they turned it into Return of the Jedi because Jedi's don't do revenge. So he got one of the early posters. And so I got it all spiffed up for me. he's going to sell that game. He probably got good money for it.
    69:50
    Dolly Parton finally got picked up right after that. Then it went up north to do that Godzilla and the other game, Jurassic Park. Did a monopalooza on both of those. Then went up to Guilford, up that way, up in Wimpisaki. Worked on this Twilight Zone two-day day sparring that. Needed a lot of work. No, let's stop there. Yeah. Twilight Zone. before I forget. Cloverleaf.
    70:19
    Yeah. So that medieval madness went in no time. Oh yeah, no problem. That went pretty quick. Yeah. So I went and did a little homework. Okay. How many Twilight Zones do you think are for sale on Pinside?
    70:38
    I'm going to say ten. It had to be all of that. Wow. what gives? I don't know. Maybe people are sick of Twilight Zones. Maybe they're sick of the Golden Earring song.
    70:55
    No, come on. No, seriously. That's like been a collector game forever. I found it very odd. Well, what goes around comes around. I mean, when it first came out, it was a dog. Nobody wanted to play it. Then it fell in love with the collector community for years, and now it's maybe not as, you know, not as, although on top of that, there is going to be the redo Twilight Zone all in black and white coming out soon. That could be it. People want to unload their originals and get this new one, you know, black and white. That's probably what that's about. You think, yeah, that's great. Fine. Somebody said that. That's what I'm thinking. I saw it. I saw pictures of it. That's the, my guy out there in Gary Shanling. the guy you call Gary Shanley he was going to be doing Twilight Zone and then he said I'm going to actually probably get that black and white one from whoever's doing them and he sent me a link to it I had no idea he wants me to possibly do a haunted house trip I can find one we're revisiting a lot of things that we've already talked about that's all right that's what good podcast too you got to go over and refer back oh we got we got to get everybody back okay well i have i have something if you're if you have more to talk about your uh exploits go ahead uh a little bit more uh i don't usually do i do i work on the ends but i don't usually do them unless you know special cases and kind of things so you throw them over the wall to Stu. Usually, but unless it's good money in the tree and they're willing to have me really do some good work on it, because I don't want to just do a couple things in Quebec. Oh, it's not working again. I don't want to have that deal. And this person was down the Cape with a 1969 Mids, which is a marble-themed pinball machine. You talked about this already.
    72:56
    How could I have? You have. But we did the Tony Taxi pickup on the 3rd of November. that's why we did the show right we talked about mibs what okay so maybe you know what maybe because i scheduled the call to go down there but i but i didn't go there i didn't go there yet now i went down there worked on it down the cape okay so go ahead so that's fine so worked on that if they were really uh very excited about uh that they've had it since in their family forever and no one had room for it and so she took it on in Orleans and wanted me to have it up and running for Thanksgiving so basically I got there like really quickly right before Thanksgiving and spent the day there they gave us some homemade bread and all kinds of cool stuff over there good people and they got it from Dugas Vending years ago, 1970 and so uh yeah did a nice day spawner they had a whole big family over thanksgiving they all played the crap out of it so they they had uh made some good family memories on it so i like when that happens that's really cool um and then from there oh then most recently uh i started up on that captain fantastic i'm doing uh dust and rust everywhere i had to take everything out of this game take it outside with the air compressor blow it all blow everything off with that i I actually got it to actually run. It has some hiccups, but it actually sort of runs now. So I'm still working on that. That's going to be a little while. I've had this game about a year.
    74:32
    And what else we got here? Oh, then I did the game lineup over at La Matri in Burlington. So I did the – they have nine games in the break room. You went back there again? Oh, yeah. No, I go there, like, every – probably every six months to do their stuff. Seems like you were just there. In July.
    74:55
    Oh, wow. It was July. Okay. Yeah, time flies. No kidding. They wanted to have me over. Everything was running pretty well, but they had this big Christmas holiday tournament party where they put all the games together, and they give away either a game or they give away some big prizes. So they wanted to have all the games shopped out. Right, ready to go. Ready to go. Tournament ready. Yeah. So Maury and I spent about two days there going through all nine games.
    75:25
    And I'll tell you, they just got rid of a couple games. They got rid of the Hobbit. That's out. They got rid of one of the Kiss games. That's out. And what came in was Jaws and Elton John.
    75:37
    Okay. They set up next to each other. I looked at the play meter on both of them. They both had about 1,500 plays on them already before we got there. And I will say the build quality on the Stern Jaws was better than the build quality on the Jersey Jack Elton, which I was very surprised about.
    75:57
    Really? Yeah, maybe Elton was made on a Friday night or Monday morning, but there were so many loose posts everywhere, like really loose. The flipper pawls for the flippers were all like loose and dangling. The screws were all loosey-goosey. I'd never seen it that bad before it was never really tightened up from the factory a lot of stuff that's not tightened up from the factory and they were still playing this? yeah, and even the girl who has me go with it she was the one who reached out to me when I was there working on some other stuff she goes, yeah, the Elton John it's really weird, it doesn't really behave like the other games it seems just kind of not really it doesn't play right I go, yeah, everything was loose on it that's why So now try it.
    76:45
    So I did all that to that game. That sounds like you did a lot of work on the game, but 1,500 plays. And if it got to, like, play 700 and it started getting janky, you know, another hundreds of plays isn't going to help it. Yeah. It just wasn't at the factory. It was not dialed in right. It wasn't tightened down all the way. Someone on the line there, I don't know. Forgot to really tighten down on the screws. They just got everything kind of in position and then forgot the rest. Yeah, I think so. Something happened. Sounds that way. So how was, did you get to play, we've already played Elton John together. Did you get to play Jaws? Yeah, I played a little Jaws. Played a little, he had a, it was actually a Jaws. Pro or LE? Premium. It was a premium. Wow. Which was nice because it had that upper play field thing going on. It was kind of cool. So that was kind of fun working on that. That's a good place, your customer, because they're rotating games in an app and whatever else. That's a pretty good place to work. Yeah, they got it. Oh, it is. They got, let's see, two Ghostbusters, a Kiss, Deadpool, Elton John, Jaws, Godzilla, Game of Thrones. They got it going. yeah so they get lots of lots of cool games there so they really like that um so that was that and then oh then i found out so so working on this um working on this captain i'm inside working on it right uh and chime box someone i don't know with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch uh went at the Chimebox and they kind of hacked the middle chime so it's like cut almost in two thirds or whatever. Do you need a new xylophone bar? Yeah, but you can't get them. I mean, you can get them on like the aftermarket eBay and nowadays Chimeboxes go for big money. Oh, I have two of them. I did all kinds of research. Years ago you could buy them for $25 for a complete Chimebox.
    78:57
    Mine. Would you buy yours for a dollar? No, mine came in a game that was probably $20. Wow, not bad. You know, a cabinet that just had a play field in it and, you know, some parts. You know, it was ransacked. But, no, I have one is incomplete, I think, but I do have one good one.
    79:19
    I don't know if it's part of the set or not. I haven't looked at them in a while. I'll have to go digging in the treasure chest and see what I got. So I started going on eBay. Well, first I was Googling around for chime boxes and chime bars, and it always brings you to Pinside. And then you get other people saying, hey, I need to get a chime box. And people are always looking, looking, looking. This stuff doesn't exist. It's like someone needs to make this stuff. Well, lo and behold, someone does make brand-new chime boxes now out, I think, in the Netherlands or overseas somewhere. And they're about $200. The plastic and everything? Everything. You're going to pay, including shipping, you're paying about between $2 and $2.50 for the box. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. But it's all brand-new stuff. And it's like, I don't want to go that far. Come on, I don't care how new it is. $250 for a chime box? I guess that's better than a $1,000 topper. Yeah, yeah. It actually does something. It does something, right. So it's okay, let's go on eBay. I used up there I used Chime Bar Could have worked but it the wrong Chime Bar It the small one not the middle one That not going to work Then I said okay how about a Chime Bar Okay I found a Chime Bar dirty complete not burnt out I cleaned it up. I used it. It was like $28.
    80:29
    Boom. Well, no. There's still some. You can buy it now. You can put a bid in or whatever or buy it now or make an offer. I made an offer like $35. He goes, no, I don't want to wait until the thing expires. So I made a special, while we're doing the day spas at La Maitre, while I'm there, I said, okay, I have a thing. It's going to end that day in the afternoon. So I put a note on my calendar to go look at it. And did I look at my note? No, I got so busy I forgot. So the thing sold for like 48 bucks it sold. So I missed that. Then I saw other ones on there for 100 bucks for a piece of crap one that's missing stuff, burnt out crap, for a junky one for 100 bucks. And it's like, yeah. Then I said, you know, let me just search some more. Lo and behold, the U-Duel Electronics of pinball, Marco Pinball.
    81:18
    Why they call it U-Duel because they're the most expensive, but they got it. They have chime bars now. They have their own brand new chime bars they have, and you can buy individual or buy them as a set. So I bought them as a set for not too bad of money, maybe $15 a chime bar, $25 a chime bar. and so I got them and so now you can get them oh your box was good the standoffs were good on it too yeah because I have all that stuff the standoffs I got you know there's grommets and they're brand new did you get them already they're nice and shiny they're brand new I haven't got them yet I ordered them I haven't got them yet stay tuned we'll let you know if they're any good and on top of that another thing they have that no one else has is they have the stuff that wears out frequently on ballys, especially Captain Fantastic. There's a lift bar, same with Nineball over here, that they lift the drop targets. But so many times they're banging up and lifting up so many, and they do it really hard, too. The coil is really strong, and it creates a lot of metal-on-metal wear and oblong holes, and these rivets kind of come loose and get worn out. And they were unavailable before, but now they carry them. So I got some of those, too. Well, he must be buying the rights from Planetary to reproduce some of this stuff. Because, you know, he's got to put his beak in it, you know, Planetary. But that's great. I mean, if somebody's manufacturing stuff, that's awesome. This stuff's been needed for a long time. People have been using used crap for a long time to get this stuff to work right. So it's good he's providing that. You are paying up, but if he's the only one who's got it, you're going to pay him. Trust me, they know that. They know that you're desperate and that you're willing to pay. Yep. Because if you don't, you have something that doesn't work. Exactly. Exactly right. I'd call that smart marketing in my book. Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah, more power to them. So you want to hear something weird since you're talking about eBay? Sure.
    83:26
    Okay, first question of you. This is a personal question. Do you have concert tickets, subs from when you went to concerts since you started going to concerts?
    83:38
    I've got very few. I never really saved them. I should have. I never really did. Okay. So you have some. Yeah. Okay. So you know my friend Jack, right? and when I went away to college in the mid-70s, he and my friend Joe started going to a lot of concerts at Madison Square Garden. So I'll send one after we're done. The stubs from Madison Square Garden tickets from the 70s are very distinct. And he had them for bands like Queen, Yes, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles a ton of different bands, right? And then he had the Ticketron ones which had the band names on it but the reason I'm saying this to you is, when you go to a concert now there really is no such thing as a quote-unquote ticket Rare Well, you can still get them for it, but no one does out of convenience, they'd rather just show their phone But I'm saying the physical ticket is almost an obsolete item. Yeah, it's obsolete. Yeah. Yep. So given what I told you, and it was quite a few, but I think the ones that to me are worth money are the ones that are from Madison Square Garden because of their look and feel. And you'll understand that when I send it to you. How much do you think he got for a bunch of paper? And that's what I would call it, a bunch of paper. Was it all grouped together or was it individual? No, all grouped together. One thing, you put it as a buy it now. How much do you think you got for these things? And they sold, I'll give it to you one more clue. They sold in less than 10 minutes.
    85:30
    Okay, so how many tickets? Like how many different? Oh, I don't know, probably 20 or 30, something like that. Oh, all from the 70s?
    85:39
    Yeah, for the most part, mid to late, maybe early 80s. I'd say he got, I'm going to shoot a crazy number, two grand. No, no, no, no, no, not that crazy. A hundred bucks. Oh, okay. Well, that's reasonable. Someone's going to mount that in a matted frame. No, I know what they're going to do with it. It's just, to me, I have mine, so it got me looking. And the reason I'm telling this story is I reconnected with a buddy of mine, and he contacted me. He's like, do you have your tickets? And I go, yeah. And he goes, I threw all mine out. And this guy, I went to a lot of shows. Jack went to a lot of shows. This guy went to more shows than probably 10 people combined. He was always going to shows. That's like Bob. He threw them out inadvertently. That's like my friend Bob. He's my concert concierge. I basically go to him for any kind of concert info.
    86:37
    So, yeah, I thought that was an interesting thing. But it made me think. So some of the bands that have already been done as pinball machines, right? Queen, ACDC, Led Zeppelin, Rush, et cetera, right? Yeah. So I'm going to go microcosm. Another question is, would you consider Rush a prog band? Do they have that label or no? No, I don't think so. Okay. No. Okay.
    87:05
    Let's not include them. But two shows that I saw were Emerson, Link and Palmer and Yes. Forget about Emerson, Link and Palmer. I don't think they would ever stand a chance of getting a pinball machine. But do you think Yes ever would?
    87:20
    No. They had some really cool album covers. Artwork would be pretty cool. The songs aren't bad. A little long. If they're going to make an ABBA pinball machine, they should make a Yes one. Okay. I mean, you know, the Pink Floyd debate's gone on and on, but, you know, I think they should make one of those, too, but whatever. It just got me thinking, the pinball connection to the concert connection to the concert ticket's a little laborious, but you get the point. It's funny, having Scott here and talking to him about, you know, the new games, and he's like, kind of disgusted. He goes, you know, Dr. Dave, you know, they're putting out games like Alice in Wonderland and, you know, all this other stuff they're doing. And, you know, it's just like, he said, it's all the same crappy shots. And so, you know, he was all like, it's all delay of game. It's all a TV screen and this and that. And it's like, I just want to play pinball. It's like, yeah, you and every other classic person, classic pinball person has the same idea. I'm back to the classics, my friend. That's where it's at. Oh, yeah, that's what he has. He's got a firepower nine ball. The only other one he's going to go for, he wants a monster bash really bad. And he has all kinds of ideas. He wants me to mod it out, too. So I'm going to make a nice, a sweet Monster Bash and a sweet Doctor Who are coming up. Hopefully, hopefully next year if I can make it happen for both of them. That's the plan. I got a, I got a Buck Rogers here on tap. We could do a little quickie thing on this too, since it's not the, if you compare Buck Rogers to Nineball, Nineball all day long. But Buck Rogers is not a bad system one. How, how much time do we have? we have you got there are 20 15 this is 15 minutes 15 okay give us the five minute rush job then we'll close out unless you have something else beyond this okay let's see here so this game was done by Art by Gordon Morrison, of course. You can tell, you know, cool Gordon Morrison artwork for Gottlieb. Designed by John Burress. Now, John Burress kind of made a lot of... Think about that name for a second. Yeah, Burress. Well, there you go. You should have a burr in your ass if you got too close to a shrub. I mean, the only other game that was notable that he did was really a good job was Black Hole. otherwise he did stinkeroos like cavemen or caveman rack them up rack them up ice fever uh bounty hunter raven hollywood heat is ice fever a really bad game it's terrible that's a hockey game right yeah i had i had a i got i got one uh for a song basically get rid of this thing.
    90:22
    I picked that up and sold it. That's a cool back glass, though, for hockey. Yeah, kind of a blocky hockey bag. They're like blocks. Who's that one who does the pointed people on pinball? That's Williams.
    90:35
    It's kind of like in that style. A little bit. Kind of. Monte Carlo, Spring Break, Arena, Victory, Diamond Lady. These are all pukers. Lights, camera, action. Crap. Oh, my God. So he did all these stinkaroos. The only one that he did was any good. He must have been the low man on the totem pole. I think so. He must have been underneath the totem pole. He did do one of the rare Gottlieb Eclipse. Only made 193 of those. He did that one, too. I never really played that one. Pink Panther, Mars God of War, Astrid and the Aliens, Star Race Tour. Well, he was busy. He did a lot of games. He was employed for a long time. Yeah, but even the Buck Rogers, I want to like it. It's almost a little bit like a joker poker, kind of. The four drop targets on the right, you cannot hit the lowermost target. Yeah, how come that's so low? It's like almost to the top of the… You've got to kind of luck it over. It has to luck over. Yeah, you can't even hit that from the left flipper. Nope, you cannot. You hit the end of the slingshot. Right. You can't get it. It's like a Dolly Madison zinger. You'll want to buy it, but you can't find them anywhere. Same kind of thing. That is really, yeah, that's bad design. This game's all about getting the yellow drop targets down in the center. When you get the whole bank of four down, two and two, you get a multiplier. When you shoot that middle ball. The boop ball? The boop ball kind of thing. Well, it's a boot ball, but it has a little measuring device in the back of it. Is that a meter? Yeah, how far did you get it? You want to bang that thing on ball, you know, first hit. Bang it all the way back. If you do that, extra ball will light up to go, you know, extra ball feature will light up. You have to go get it. It'll also light up a score bonus. Yeah, score bonus lights up as well. and if you get it on two, three or four you got a lot less things you'll get you get other little prizes but not as much as that one I think you'll light up the drop targets instead of getting all four down just get two of them down to get the multiplier I think spelling buck at the top will make the red drop targets light up for special I believe your customer's got a nice game yeah it's a gorgeous game it's pretty looking but I don't like that. Now that you pointed that target thing out, I really don't like the game. Because you can't even hit it from the left flipper. Now, notice that back glass. That back glass, that is a BGM. Yeah, you didn't give it the treatment, though. What's that? Oh, her treatment. Yeah, her treatment, yes. Well, the owner is an older woman. Oh, okay. Never mind. So what I did do, though, I did make the, for blinkers, instead of blinking the lady, I blinked his gun. His gun is blinking. I think you could blink something else on him if I'm looking at this picture, right? She might like that. Ah, well, again, I could do that.
    93:49
    I think my friends Chris and Mike might like that. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, hit that bell. Woo, woo-hoo. Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way. How about that there? Yeah. I like me now.
    94:12
    Okay. Now we're cooking. So this has been a family heirloom. She's had it forever. It was in this Masonic Hall in the basement forever, and then they put it in the shed, and I picked it up, I think, two years ago from the shed before it got really cold out, and the back glass was trashed. I sent it off to BG Resto to Parts Unknown. He had it for a god-awful long time. He did a good job. You talk about this. He did a good job. He did, because basically he has a new process. That looks really good. I mean, that looks really good. I mean, I'm not up close, obviously, but, man, it looks – that's a sexy-looking backless. It's darn – it has mirroring on it. So what he does is he actually strips off all the artwork, leaves the mirroring alone, doesn't touch it, and then throws artwork on top of the mirroring, and it comes out great. you know so but he because he can't do mirroring uh mirroring probably because of the chemical process yeah they don't allow in this country now you can go like the coos back glass i had for nine ball that is mirroring because overseas you can get away with that chemical stuff but over here you can't so that's how we do it over here but uh and i could have got a buck rodgers from him as well, but I like he doesn't, I still like his product. I like BGRS's product. I just wish he had better customer service. He's a one man band. Leave him alone. You got your back glass. I did. I want to use him again, but it's like I got to basically know that, okay, I'm not going to see this for a year or more. Correct.
    95:48
    Expectations are now set. Even if he says it'll only be a couple months, don't believe it. Okay. Enough trashing on him. Right. So do you have anything else to say about this game or close out? Don't say one more thing. Just think about it for a sec.
    96:09
    I don't. Well, I can play it. I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. Okay. I put a Pascal board in this and along with the Pascal sound card. and the Pascal Soundcard has an option where it has a deluxe sound better than the original.
    96:30
    And so instead of having a boop, boop, beep, beep, that kind of sounds like a catchphrase from 1980, this one has, it almost sounds like a little tweaky, a little beady, beady, beady, beep, that little guy, the little pain in the ass. it sounds like him and it sounds very kind of like a computer-y technical sound from that time frame, you know what I mean? It's still not a wide range of colorful rainbow sounds, but it's actually better than the original sound. If it was my game and I was going to keep this game, I'd put a chime box in it. Okay. But I'm going to keep it original, just make the sounds better. But that's the Pascal and there's all kinds of cool features and a track mode and put your name in and all that good stuff.
    97:23
    So yeah. I think that's all of this game. Along with a whole bunch of hours of work and a playfield protector. I put that on there too.
    97:31
    Good looking game. Let's close this out and we've got to do one more before the end of the year. Okay. I promised but I have a couple of new ideas alright ok alright we have to do one more game before the end of the year no we have to just do one I promised one show but I have an idea low impact ok low impact it will be good it will be appropriate we will be good we will be classy relevant fun exciting riveting how many more adjectives do you want more no I'm sorry all out okay say goodbye to everybody you don't well you probably should wish them a Merry Christmas I do have a Christmas story hey wait a minute before we do that is that a different way of saying it No, I should... Yeah, right. Yeah, one more thing. I should play a game of this Buck Rogers here. Okay. You just said that. And I said no, but go ahead. You want to play it. Play it. Let's do it. Why not? Go ahead. It's here. Go ahead. Here we go. Go ahead.
    98:56
    Hear those cool sounds? Oh, they're riveting. They are. Oh, skull shot. Oh, a little floaty there, dude. well it's a Gottlieb Gottlieb's float oh okay that's probably why I don't own one in Christmas language it's like that's my target you claimed all about it you got it Christmas language it's Bumble's Bounce you know that you got it again it's not that hard oh okay you bounced it off the bank where the targets were not on the ride but that was a pretty good one I'll give you I'd like to see you do it again alright let's see what I can do here it's not a bad little game you know oh you got that down that is the shot oh there she goes I got a pin the left or right slipper if you bounce it off the target bank you can hit that target that last obstructed target yes well it's a target game so it's not bad It is. And it's got a pin. It's got a pin in the middle of the flippers.
    100:14
    Oh, it's got a post. It's got a post. Yeah, it's a pretty good-sized gap. Yeah, it's not bad. It's not bad. There's a lot worse games. Of course there is.
    100:29
    It sounds like tweaking. There's a ball. Did I get it? Oh, I almost got it. I got it. Four out of five dentist surveyed. That's what I got.
    100:39
    Oh, okay. I see. There's lamps underneath. Okay. I like that. That's a cool feature. What's that? That means end of the game.
    100:56
    That's pretty annoying. Is it, though? Yes. You want another round or are you good? You can go one more time. if you'd like.
    101:07
    We'll see how many people hang on to this part of the video. This could be the bonus feature. I'm just going to... Well, maybe. We'll see.
    101:21
    It's actually not a bad game. It would be much better if I was playing it. That's the hard part when you get all the fun and I just sit here and watch. Yes. It's not much fun. we get to watch a real pro play pinball George it's like watching a tournament right most people like I said we'll see how many people I now think I have analytics that show me how many people stay and how many jump out of our podcast I think but I haven't mastered that yet that's something they just bring crap on you and say oh here's something new Oh, that's interesting. Why didn't you put an email or tell us about it or whatever?
    102:09
    So speaking of Christmas, I'm going to be delivering this game in time for Christmas. Christmas week is when she's going to get this game, so it's going to be under her tree.
    102:17
    Awesome. That's going to be kind of nice. Awesome. I'm also picking up that nippet while I'm down there delivering this. It's in the same town, so the nippet's going to be coming in. I'm going to be babysitting my mother's house down there. So I'm going to put the nippet in her living room and work on it during Christmas week. It'll be a game to play.
    102:38
    Is she going out to see her brother? Yes, she is. Okay. Yes. He's actually coming here under double-secret probation without telling anybody. Him and his wife are going to come here for a night and then go into Boston. I still don't know what they're doing. They said, oh, keep it under your hat. Oh, no, you don't say anything. Stay out of that. I am. I don't know why they do it that way. That web of doom. Anyway, let's wish everybody a Merry Christmas.
    103:07
    That's a decent game. Not as good as Nineball. It's good that we put this at the end of the show. Merry Christmas, everybody.
    103:15
    We will return with something. I'm not going to promise a long program, but we will get back to you with something by the end of the year. I've got a couple ideas. and with that said Dave I'll let you go oh if you nobody dares I have not gotten an email in months people hate me if you don't hate me you can actually get on the program you can actually ask a question you can actually suggest something you can do almost anything but you don't but it's theclassicpinballpodcast1 at gmail.com I welcome you to email me. In fact, I got something. If you want to email us with what's a game you want us to cover. How's that? They can, we'll get to it. I got some, we got a plan the first couple months. We got a busy early part of the year again.
    104:13
    I know I have 12 games. Because it's going to be whatchamacallit season again. We're going to start going to shows again. I do have 12 games in the queue for restorations here that I'm going to be doing. So I've got 12 games over the next year or two that I have to get through. We talked all about it. I don't think so. There's new ones that are coming in, not 12. I've got a whole segment on it. I'm leaving this in. All right, leave it in. I don't think so because I just got these ones fresh. I got some other ones fresh that came in. I went through the whole list. Do you want me to go embarrass you right now? Yes, please do. Okay. Captain Fantastic, Gorgar, Nipbit, Eightfold Deluxe, Indiana Jones, Class of 1812, Doctor Who, Monster Bash, Quicksilver.
    104:57
    Uh, did you do... Oh, no, stop. We talked about it. We're good. All right. I'm worried about you. What are you doing in between the times we're spooling? You, something's... I must be spooling. You must be doing something else. I don't know what you're doing, but anyway.
    105:23
    Go ahead. Anyway. Well, anyway, this has been the Classic Pinball Podcast, wishing you a blessed and merry Christmas,
    105:31
    and keep warm out there. Happy holidays! All right, this is It's the Holiday Season with Bing Crosby. Take one. You ready over there, Bing? You're goddamn right I am. Ha ha ha! That's what I like to hear. Let's roll it!
    105:57
    It's the holiday season With a whoop-dee-doo and dickery duck And please be sure to suck on my c*** Oh, he's coming down the chimney down Yeah, they're coming down the chimney down I'm sorry there, Bink. What exactly did you just say? You know, he's coming down the chimney, like Santa, Santa Claus. No, after the dickery dock part. I don't know, man. I was just scatting, seeing what feels right. Well, it looks as if our time has just about run out. Just enough left to tell him who the sponsor was. Who do you call when you want your pinball machine restored? Dr. Dave! Who? Dave! D-A-V-E! Yeah, Dave! Right. George, you don't know what you're saying You're under their control George, we've had it with you Say no rodeo, bro dad Hasta la vista, baby