TOPCast 53: Orin Day

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Tonight we're going to be talking to a Dene East,

Sega and Stern programmer, somebody that worked on a lot of their games,

starting in 1994 with guns and roses,

Maverick, Frankenstein, Baywatch, Apollo 13,

Golden Eye, Twister, Viper and Mini Viper,

Independence Day, Space Jam, Star Wars Trilogy,

The Lost World's Rassick Park, X-Files Starship Trooper,

Lost in Space, Golden Q, Godzilla,

and then with Stern in their South Park,

Strikerslash, NFL Games in Playboy.

So we certainly had a lot of programming experience.

So now we're going to be talking to Orin Day of Dene East,

Sega and Stern, and we're going to be giving him a call right now to talk about some stories

in his time.

He spent as a programmer at Dede East Sega and Stern.

Hello?

Orin?

Yes.

It's Clay.

Hey Clay, how you doing?

Good, how you doing?

I'm doing good.

So you got some time?

Sure do.

Okay, let's start at the beginning.

When did you first get involved with Pinball?

I mean, was this a youth thing or a business decision at a college or, you know, how did you get involved?

Well, it was initially a youth thing that when I was a kid, we used to go to a resort down

Sastakia, Florida, that had two pinball machines.

They had a volley and a super soccer.

Volley by Gottlieb?

Gottlieb from 74 and 76, I believe.

Yeah, right.

The soccer was 74 and the volley was 76.

Volley is a cool game actually.

I'm not a big fan of super soccer or soccer, but I really liked Volley a lot of drop targets.

Volley is my wife's favorite game.

Well, it's got that lady on the play field, the kind of sexy lady, you know, kind of,

I think it was, I heard that that game was made with, you know, what were the two kind of,

I don't want to, Bobby King and somebody else?

Billy Jean King and, well, the guy has blue hair, so I don't know who he is.

Yeah, right, right.

It was kind of that, I think it was kind of in regard to that, you know, the loosely themed around that.

Yeah, yeah, but anyway, those two were great games.

And I really loved playing those.

And, problem was there really weren't a whole lot of mechanical pinballs around when I was, you know, eight or nine years old in places that I could get to.

So the really the only time I played pinball was at Easter time when we would go take a couple weeks at spring break and go to that resort.

Then when I was old enough to go to our Cades, a strange thing had happened.

There weren't any mechanical games anymore. They were all solid state.

And it was games, I think probably like Fathom and Centaur.

And I would play those games and I would just get killed.

I was no good at any of them.

That would last too long, much quicker than the mechanical games.

And for a long time I didn't play pinball very much.

I really did not get back into it until I was in college.

And then started playing games like Cyclone and Space Station and Fire and some of those, some of those Williams games.

Where were you going to school and what were you studying in?

I was at Duke and majoring in Physics and Math.

Down here in Durham, North Carolina where I live now.

And we had a wonderful arcade. It was called The Devil's Quarters.

And they had, at the time, they had probably between 12 and 14 pinball machines.

A ton of video games, a Czechs hockey, a couple pool tables.

And that was a place where I spent a lot of time playing pinball and playing video too.

I remember playing a lot of Super Basketball, which is actually the game where one of the cheers that the Duke students at basketball games came from.

But when they say, Boink, Boink, Boink pass when the other team has the ball and is dribbling, that came right out of Super Basketball.

Not a lot of people know that.

But sort of, The Devil's Quarters was actually pretty good in terms of getting not brand new games, but sort of second time around games that they would generally get Duke with Duke owned it, operated it.

Students worked there and Duke owned all the games, too bending.

And they would get the games that were maybe 6 to 9 months old.

So they would probably another operator had them, traded them in.

So they started to get the dot matrix games when they came along.

They had a number seeing a bad man there, sort of towards the end of my college days.

They got an Adams.

They had a Gilligan.

I remember playing all those games there.

And really enjoyed playing them.

And I decided to stay at Duke for grad school.

I was very close to going to Penn State.

But I went to Duke for grad school in physics and kept on playing pinball.

And while I was in grad school my first year, student graduated, got his PhD, and he happened to have a haunted house.

It was a haunted house that had come from Brady down in Charlotte, brand new, and it had been at the Devil's Quarters for many years.

Then just like all the property at Duke, the only way they can sell things is through the Duke surplus store.

So that pinball machine ended up over Duke surplus.

And my friend bought it, he fixed it up, had it at his house.

And when he graduated and went off to go look for work as a professor somewhere, he sold it to me.

So I ended up with a haunted house when I was in the department as a grad student.

And never really could get it working.

It had some electronics problems.

But that sort of cemented my love affair with fixing pinball machines not very well.

But to make a long story long, I only spent one year in grad school.

Sort of the job market for physics people was not very good.

A couple of people that I knew from grad school had gone up to Washington, D.C., and taken jobs at Goddard Space Flight Center, working as contractors for NASA, just outside of Washington, D.C.

And went up there and interviewed for a programming job, and got a programming job and moved up to D.C.

And it was a good job.

And a nice thing about it was that had good internet access there like I did at Duke, and actually started to read rec games pinball quite a lot.

What year was this?

I actually started reading that news group when it was created.

So that was like 90 or 91?

I graduated undergrad in May of 91.

It was in grad school from August of 91 through May of 92.

So I moved to the D.C.

And I got an apartment right across from up in Laurel, Maryland, right across from the Laurel Mall, which was sort of known for being the place where George Wallace was shot.

That was right across the street from my apartment. There was a plaque there or something.

But I didn't care about that so much as that they had a tilt over there at the mall, and I could pretty much walk right across.

And they had a decent line of other games. They had an Adams.

And then later on they got a Twilight Zone.

Not a sample game, but an early production game with the Green Lock Light.

They got that when it was new.

And they had a couple other games. I remember exactly what they had.

But we mostly played the Adams and the Adams and the Twilight once it was there.

In fact, we helped, we did a little bit of repair on them.

Me and Steve Yanke, who was very active on Reckham's pinball, he's active in the Maryland Free State Pinball Association.

He was one of the people who started that league.

And that was after I left that they started the league.

But I met Steve through the news group and a couple other people had got her to play pinball.

And we had a great time going around to a different arcade playing.

We did some work fixing the games up at the tilt because there was nobody who knew how to fix them.

There was an arcade that was up north of Baltimore that had probably seven or eight games, including a Jurassic,

which had just recently come out.

And we would just pretty much spend our weekends playing pinball.

Steve had an eighth ball of the locks.

And I actually got picked up.

I tried to get that haunted house working.

I went up to the old state sales and took the boards one by one and had them fixed.

And I don't know what it was about that machine.

It was a haunted haunted house because I just could not get it working.

And up buying a second haunted house.

I got it from Lloyd Doeburn, who runs Coenop Warehouse.

But back then he was running a place called Lloyd's Two Boxes that was right down by dollars airport.

Went down and bought that haunted house, the second haunted house, which was also a very nice shape.

I think for about $400 back then, nobody really wanted those games.

He had just rooms and rooms full of pinball.

It was great.

I had a lot of money.

I certainly would have loaded up on his stuff.

But as it was, I just got that one other game.

And played a lot of haunted house.

And spent a lot of time working and a lot of time on wrecking pinball.

And that was pretty much how I got to know the people who were at Data East.

Yeah, I was going to ask, how did you transition into this, and again a job at Data East?

That's right.

That there was an event that Data East did in conjunction with the off-broadway launch of Tommy.

And that event was at the Hard Rock Cafe in Dallas.

And they wanted to have somebody who was a pinball player to come out and sort of demo the machines and help them run some little mini tournaments.

At Hard Rock.

And I volunteered to do it.

I was going to be on a business trip around then in Alabama.

And I figured, oh, that's not too far to drive.

So I took a little vacation time and drove down.

They would have had Lyman do it.

But Lyman, who was, who had started there, I think pretty recently,

Lyman was on a trip to Spain.

I think there was a tournament over there or some kind of a show or something.

So he was unavailable.

So they wanted to find somebody in Dallas and I emailed Joe Camico and Lonnie Rob and said,

well, I'm not actually in Dallas and I'm not actually a world-class pinball player like Lyman,

but I'd be glad to go and help you out.

So they said, sure, and you know, sort of hooked me up.

I drove down there and I stayed overnight with the friend who family lived,

not too far outside of Dallas.

And went down to Hard Rock and spent the day with those guys.

I think it was Lonnie and Joe Camico and John Borg and Joe Blackwell and Jim Gorman.

And I brought some resumes.

Of course, I didn't have any game programming experience, but I had programmed,

when I had an Apple II, I programmed tons of stuff in machine language and assembly language and games and stuff like that,

just for fun when I was a kid.

So I had some professional programming experience and I sort of knew what they were doing.

And gave them some resumes and they said, well, you know, the pinball business is very small.

You know, there's only so many jobs. There's, you know, so many jobs that got leave and so many at so many at Williams.

And, you know, we've only got four or five programmers, but you know, if we ever have anything, we'll keep your mind.

So that was, I think that was right around October, 1993.

And so happened that I was going to be back in Chicago where I originally grew up.

That next weekend for Columbus Day, where obviously government employees, we got all those holidays that only government employees and school kids get.

All right, so I flew back to Chicago and they invited me to come in on Monday.

And I looked around at what they were doing. It was really interesting.

Of course, that was the Tommy games that they took to Hard Rock were those six pop bumper prototypes with the ramp that they were playing the drop the ball.

And had a little bit different ramp configuration.

Had a looping ramp on the left side. It was maybe a little bit more based on Jurassic than anything else.

They sort of put it together a little bit more quickly.

I think they built that game in six weeks.

Right, for that event.

Yeah. And so I got to see, I believe I saw, I think last action hero was on the line.

And I saw the, so I got to play the Whitewood of Crypt, which was interesting because I've never seen a Whitewood before.

And I spent all the time talking to Lonnie about pinball and what would be fun to do and stuff like that.

But I went back to my job at NASA and I was looking for work then.

Being a low level contractor in the DC area around them was maybe not financially the easiest thing to do.

I think actually when I started out, I was in a rent control department that I made so little money.

I did a little bit better after my first year there.

But I was looking for work and thought I might end up back down here in North Carolina.

But around the middle of November there was a post on Reckham's pinball that they were looking for software engineers for a data east.

And I looked at the qualifications and said, you know, I'm not even going to apply for this because you know I've given them my resume and I don't think I have those qualifications.

So I didn't apply. And about a week later I get a call from Lonnie.

He says, hey why haven't you applied for the job? And I said, well I didn't think I qualified.

And he's like, well of course you qualify. You know, we've got your resume and if you're still interested we want to bring you to Chicago for an interview.

So they flew me out. I think the weekend before, I think maybe the weekend before Thanksgiving.

And I interviewed on Friday morning and everything went very well.

I met a lot of folks and Joe took me out to lunch with Lonnie and out at Serrentos, which is a restaurant where we would found there on Manheim Road where it seemed like we conducted a lot of our game design business at lunchtime in later years.

And he made me an offer and I accepted and Kevin Martin actually came in and interviewed at one in the afternoon and he got the job.

He also accepted a job that day.

So I went back and told the folks at NASA that I was quitting and was going to start it.

Wait, wait, Kevin Martin is the guy that runs Papa, right?

Yeah, Kevin and I worked together at Data East.

It was interesting how the jobs opened up and there were two spots.

Joe and Camico and Neil Falcon and Lonnie Rob were having a meeting in his office discussing that they were going to add a programmer position.

And they decided that they were going to add one programming job that they were doing enough games and they maybe wanted to do a little novelty and needed more people in the head.

And as they were having that meeting, Christina Donifrio, who was one of the programmers, she programmed quite a few games.

In fact, she was one of the game programmer on crypt before she left and Neil Falcon or finished it up.

She knocked on the door and told them that she was going to resign effective the end of October that the job was too much for her that she didn't have enough time to spend with her family and her kids.

And that she wanted to go back to work in Zina, where she'd been before.

And that she'd accepted a job with them.

So all of a sudden, they had just decided to create one job and all of a sudden there were two.

So that freed up a little bit of money and they could bring in sort of two more junior people to fill in those slots.

And this was a pay increase over NASA?

Oh yeah, it wasn't a huge pay increase but in terms of absolute dollars but in terms of percentages, I think it was like a 20% raise.

And the other advantage was that basically all my family was there in the Chicago suburbs.

So when I moved back to Chicago, I actually lived at my parents' house for a couple months before I got into the department.

And it was like a 10 or 12 mile commute to the east.

That's amazing that NASA doesn't pay much money.

Well, the job that I had was in a great group but it was an astronomy group.

We were pretty much doing science.

And we had a lot of astronomers on the staff and the folks that had the PhDs were the ones who were better compensated and appropriately.

And we were contractors so it was sort of keeping this contract based on the lowest bid.

And they rebid the contract about a year after I was there.

And people's benefits got cut and nobody got raises and stuff like that.

But the change in the administration happened then when Clinton came in and there was sort of a change in priority of what NASA was going to do.

That there was a lot of money going into earth mapping and instead of high energy astronomy.

So it seemed like sort of the writing was on the wall there and I needed to make a change of some sort.

So when did you actually start work at the east?

It started on December 13th, 1990, 1993.

And what was your first day like or your first week?

What was interesting, I actually started working there before I started.

When, as I said, I interviewed the Friday, the weekend before Thanksgiving.

And I actually came back to Chicago for Thanksgiving, already had plane tickets.

And since I was going to be leaving, since I was going to be leaving NASA, I didn't try and just change my tickets around and just skip Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday.

I actually needed to go back and resign so that I could give them enough notice that I could leave.

But I actually went in the Friday after Thanksgiving.

And that was a very interesting day because Slash was in town and they were working on some of the initial designs for guns and roses.

So I actually got, actually came in and got to hang out with them.

And in the evening, I don't think Slash got there till like 430 or 5. He was not an early riser.

Did you know that Slash was going to be there? Or was that just, it was just dumb luck?

It was just dumb luck that that was when he was going to be there.

And I was just reading his biography. I got it for Christmas.

And a very interesting book, though certainly not for the kids, that his girlfriend at that time was from Chicago.

So they were sort of back for Thanksgiving, I think was sort of the thing.

So they weren't guns, wasn't on tour or anything like that.

So they just flew to Chicago and he was around and it was the perfect time to have a design meeting.

So there's Alba. He had some booze and that was sort of interesting to see in a workplace.

And of course he was smoking like a chimney. Neil was smoking, I think Joe actually walked out of the room and came back into the room wearing a gas mask.

Was he being serious or just being funny?

I think he was being funny but it was a real gas mask. I don't know if it worked or not.

It was funny and it was really sort of neat to see how ideas got on paper because that was John Borg had sort of his first wide body sketch.

Not even sure if it was an auto-can drawing at that point. They were transitioning into that tool then.

But he brought in that play field and they sort of started laying out inserts and figuring out game features.

It was really interesting and bringing out Joe's very famous tin of inserts and putting them on the paper and really sort of doing sort of that first layout of the play field.

What's Joe's tin of inserts? Is that like some impamist there?

I remember if it was like an old cookie tin or something that crackers came in or something like that but it was just this metal tin that was not bigger than a bread box that basically had a bunch of inserts of all different colors and shapes.

That's how we would lay out the rules for a play field that he would just dump this out and we'd find the right shapes and colors or whatever we wanted and put them down on the paper and then maybe sketch around on the paper or write down what it was or whatever.

The engineer would do whatever the designer for the game or the mechanic on the engineer would take that paper and go back and drop those inserts down on the play field and that's what we would start out with for our first white wood.

So when your white wood was cut there were they using CNC or was this all done by hand?

They were originally done by hand very early at the east but typically I think by that point what they would do is they would I think they transitioned into where they would take that drawing and they would send it out.

So we would have made our play fields at that time and we would just go ahead and make a white wood for us.

It was just no longer cost effective for us to have that whole group that we are doing the white woods.

So did you but the first game that you actually worked on wasn't really guns and roses and what was it WWF?

Well the first game that I contributed to was crypt because to sort of get familiar with their diagnostics and their stuff because I really hadn't been inside of their games all that much.

So it was to go out in the factory and play a whole bunch of the games that were sort of through the QA stage and into the QC stage but not into the box, go out and play a bunch of crypt and learn about what they were doing and how things worked playing with the glass off stuff like that.

And actually while I was out there found a few bugs and actually brought those back to Neofalkiner and John Carpenter who was one of the other dot programmers back then.

So that was really the first game that I did any sort of quote unquote software support.

Wait, wait, what kind of bugs did you find?

Oh, there was a display bug that I found and I think there was a shot that when you made it at a particular time that the sound would go out.

It would have a sound call that had some blank, there was a sound call that had too high of a priority and it would kill the music until you made another shot.

And I think there was also a scoring bug where it gave you a certain number of points and it actually didn't.

And it was like a decent number of points and it actually, you know, for a combo or something. It was like a three way combo and it showed the display effect and it didn't give you the points.

So the only reason I really noticed that it was early in the game.

And crypt had been on the line for quite a while so it wasn't like it was, you know, this, and it wasn't like it was the show stopping bug or anything like that.

You know, maybe I found something minor in the diagnostics, but my job there was going to initially be, you know, helping out with rules and stuff like that.

But the primary job was going to be programming dot matrix, which a lot of people, I think a lot of people understand it now.

A lot of people didn't get it. You know, I said I was the dot matrix programmer. Oh, yeah, you draw all those dots.

And I'm like, yeah, well, the software that I have draws them, but there's actually artists that actually create that artwork.

And then, you know, I add the text and add the text and sort of, you know, do the nitty gritty layout. You know, they would generally say how things should move across the screen and stuff like that.

Well, well, the artist would draw each frame in the animation. And then you would write the game glue that glued all that stuff together that made the animation actually play, set it up as a call so that because that was a separate CPU that ran unlike, like, say, Williams, where they had 168.09 that ran, you know, both the dot and the game code.

On your system, you were actually using a 6809 to run the game code on the CPU board, but then you were using something else on the dot matrix controller or different computer.

And so you had to call between these two computers, right?

Yeah, that's right. So generally, I would generally in programming display, I would set up the, I would basically set up with the, you know, what the calling convention would be or the interface or whatever.

You know, what the display effect number was going to be and what needed to be passed, you know, if it needed to be, if it needed to be, you know, a score value, if it needed to be the status of some lights on the play field or a row or a column of the matrix or something like that.

That I would set that up and generally I would try and set it up so it was, it was something that the game programmer already had access to that they wouldn't have to create this custom, you know, fancy thing or whatever.

That they would pass that and, you know, then I would render that appropriately, you know, like if it was, like, if it was one of those display effects where you had to complete targets on the play field to spell something.

You know, the game programmer would, would need to pass what the status of those lights were so that I could know which, which, which targets had been completed and which still, which hadn't been completed so that, so that I could show the player what they were, what they were supposed to do.

Now was that a, was that a 6809 running the code for the display to?

Yeah, it sure was that it was, it was basically a separate modular system like, like you described that, that the display programmer could go and program display and the sound programmer who at that time was Brian Schmidt who was working from his house up in Wilmet,

right by the, Evan some border he was right up by Northwestern University, that he'd been doing, he'd be doing the sound at home and, you know, I'd be doing the display upstairs that will bounce initially downstairs and then I moved upstairs at 1990 Janus building.

And then the game programmer usually lawning or kneel would be, would be downstairs and, you know, I'd work on stuff and the artist would give me usually a floppy disk because we didn't really have, we didn't really use the network for them for that quite so much back then.

The artist would, artist would give me a floppy disk and a sheet of paper that would basically describe how they wanted the art to get rendered and I would put together, you know, the art and do sort of a test thing and, you know, ask the artist, you know, is this timing good, is this what you had in mind.

And then I add in all the fonts and text and the descriptions and stuff like that.

And then I would make a paper sheet and take it down to take it down to the game programmer along with the ROM and say, you know, here's the, here's the new dots and, you know, here's these, here's these display effects and, you know, they would go ahead and put them in and then I'd come back later and, you know, we'd play the rule and see if it worked the way it was supposed to.

So, like, how did this work to like the CPU programmer, he would set up like, you know, display effect numbers that would relate to the animations that you were doing and like, how did you to communicate like, you know, that display 47 would be, you know, the animation for, you know, extra ball or, you know, how did you guys actually coordinate all that stuff.

Actually, usually the display programmer would be responsible for, would be responsible for, for setting it up. But one of the things that I did when I came in is that it seemed that sort of Lonnie had his preference of, you know, what the, what the dot effect should be, where, you know, where they should be in terms of, you know, numbered from numbered in, in hex from 0, 0 to ff.

And sort of Neil sort of had his own sort of set Neil Falconer had his own sort of separate code and he was, you know, expecting that, you know, this might be here and this might be here.

And one of the things that I did at some point, I think it was probably around the time when we switched back from the, from the, from the 192 by 64 display back to the 128 by 32.

But I sort of standardized as much as I could those dot effects and said, you know, that jackpot, for example, is always going to be effect AC and super jackpot timer is always going to be effect AD and super jackpot is always going to be effect AE and extra ball is always going to be effect B and stuff like that.

And I basically made a generic ROM that had sort of generic display effects that basically they could plug in and have sort of the simple rules and get a game going, you know, with those timers and those display effects and stuff like that.

And they would be the, for the most part, the same as the previous game. So they'd be easy to, it would be easy for them to implement.

Yeah, they could get rocking and rolling this way without having to, you know, get you, get the artist handing the stuff off to you, handing the stuff off to them.

Yeah, and that, that became especially important after, after I think golden eye when John Carpenter, who was, I guess I should talk about the staff really.

And then when I started, Kevin and I started, I guess I started on a Monday and Kevin started on a Friday. We both started the same week in sort of there right before, right before Christmas in in 93.

And John Carpenter was there doing, doing display programming and Lyman Sheets was there also doing display programming.

But he was, he was feeling sort of like he was ready to get a game. And then Lonnie Rock was there and Neopalkan was there. So we had that software staff.

Then when I'm not sure if it was when Lyman left or not that we, that we brought in Brian Rudolph. And he was there and program Batman forever and then did a lot of novelty games.

Of course, Kevin and John Carpenter got out sort of stepped out of the pinball loop and did the tattoo as fast as the video game, which I was sort of perfectly involved. And I did, I helped them do some art cleaning and edge cleaning and stuff like that.

Not any, not any code writing for that. But I stepped in, stepped into that. And when tattoo was over, Kevin actually left. And he wanted to move to Pittsburgh for personal reasons and went and started pair.

And John Carpenter's situation was he, he started out, after tattoo was over. He did some of the dots on some of the video modes on Baywatch and then did the majority of the dots for Batman forever.

And was set to do Golden Eye and they, him and his wife decided to move down to Florida that they thought that they would benefit from a warmer climate.

And at that point, Joe said, well, do we want to hire another display program? And I said, no, you know, I think I've pretty much got the hang of this now.

It's not so bad now that we're doing the back to the, back to the smaller dot display that it was a little easier to code. And I think I could probably handle doing every game.

And one of the, that was why it was really important to sort of have that generic round because if we were, if we had two games up and running at once, it was a little hard to work on both.

But it seemed that in those days we typically didn't have, we never had two white woods, we never had two white woods up and running anyway that needed dots.

And having those generic display effects made it a little bit easier for the game programmers too, that they did have these display effects and timers that they could call, that they could pass a bunch of text to.

So that basically it would, you know, show two lines of text and have a timer or stuff like that. But it, it took time for them to set it up and it was sort of a pain in the butt.

And, you know, it was, their time was better spent right in real code than, you know, hacking in these, hacking in these display things.

So, you know, I generally be able to step off of one game and, you know, do a little bit of support stuff for them.

Now, now, doing this kind of starting out with this generic display rom though, did that, I one thing that I've always noticed about the DADEs, the Sega, even current Stern games is that every game has, as far as display effects, a very similar look and feel.

And, you know, I guess there's something to be said about familiarity. But on the other hand, if you compare it to Williams, you know, every one of their games is very much different as far as the display effects, how things scroll, the fonts, you know, how the start-up sequence, you know, press start, you know, insert coin.

But all that stuff in the DADEs world is very, very generic. Did you feel that that was a detriment or you just were, you know, you had to do it this way just because there wasn't enough staff?

Well, there were, it's interesting that there were, as far as the attract mode and, you know, things like insert coin and stuff like that, that we did want that to be standard from game to game to game.

Now, sometimes we would change it like, you know, there's that press start display effect where it shows the-

The big finger!

...and flashing and the words press start and then a hand comes out and it compresses press start, you know.

Yeah, I call that the big finger.

For Jurassic Park, I seem to recall that we used a Raptor Claw instead of the hand.

Right. So we would do- we would do stuff like that, but there was- we did want to sort of have a uniformity across our games that, you know, we thought that it was good that that stuff looked the same.

Now, I will say that when I did games, I used a lot of different fonts. When I did Frankenst- well, the first game I did was Guns and Roses.

The second game I did was Frankenstein. I believe Frankenstein had 65 or 70 different fonts, which was a lot, but, you know, we did different things for different display effects.

And I think it was a game that- I think it was a game that came out looking a lot different from Maverick, which- which Lyman programmed.

And I think Baywatch looked a lot different from Frankenstein. And I think that Batman Forever looked a lot different from Baywatch.

Now, as far as fonts, how would you, you know, implement a new font? I mean, you know, it's not like- I'm sure it isn't like, you know, like you need a new font and word, you download it off the internet and, you know, put it in a folder and away you go. I'm sure it wasn't that easy, right?

Yeah, but, well, it wasn't. It wasn't. We sort of had two different ways that fonts might appear. That we would have fonts that artists would do that would be sort of specific to a game.

You know, like they might have a Batman font or, you know, a spooky, spooky big Frankenstein letters font or, you know, for a particular display effect, they might have an animating score or something like that.

And the way that we get the artist that they would give it- that they would- that they would give us those art files. We had a tool for them where they could turn.

I believe they would save their individual frames as- I think it was TIFF files. I'm not absolutely sure of that. And then it would get turned- now they save it as- they save it as bitmaps.

And then we had something that would turn the bitmaps actually into ASCII. That was- that was appropriate for the- appropriate for the assembler. And then we'd have to label each little ASCII drawing- they would label each ASCII drawing, you know, A, B, C, D, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever.

And then we'd have a big long table that would basically map if it was a score font, it would just be 0 through 9 in a comma. That would map that into an object that if we gave it the appropriate offset, it would know what character to draw.

Basically, basically we had a string drawing routine. And if you know you passed it 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, it would be clever enough to figure out that- and you passed it that in a- and that it was supposed to be drawn in a score font. It would be clever enough to figure out that it should go and get the 1 and put that next to the 2 and then put in a comma and then draw 3, 4, 5. Well, I actually would be 3, 4, 0.

And was this done all through like the- I imagine this was done through like a macro assembler or something?

Yeah, there was- well, there was a- Lonnie Rob actually wrote the original Data East 128 by 32 display system. And without going into a whole lot of detail, I'm sure that the pin main people know it all pretty much anyway by heart.

But it was a system that combined a lot of assembly language code with a lot of scripting. So that you wouldn't necessarily have- if you were going to draw a string, you would not have to- you would not have to really reinvent the wheel.

The string would be out in some table or some bank of memory and you'd tell it to draw this string in this font, in this color scheme and it would just go do it.

So initially if you were just sort of programming display, you might not have to know a lot of assembly language at all. And that was why- you know that was why it was sort of the entry level programming job for pinball.

But there were also some people who tried to do it and didn't have a really good eye for it and really couldn't do layout very well themselves. And the stuff that they did just didn't- wasn't necessarily very visually appealing.

Certainly I had a lot of learning to do but the nice thing was the first game I worked on, the first game I was sort of the lead display programmer on was working on guns and roses with Lonnie.

And of course Lonnie had written the system and knew everything that it did and you know could really give me pointers but he could also give me pointers on what looked good and what didn't.

Of course there was not always agreement on what looked good and what didn't in that group that some people would want as much reverse video and flashing and whatever that would be exciting for the player and it would attract other people to the game.

And other people would say well you know you're flashing it so much that I can't even read my score. So we had that system that was done by Lonnie and then lineman sheets while lineman sheets was originally supposed to be the dot programmer for guns and roses.

But and that was certainly certainly a lot of work for him because he had done the dots for Tommy and he ended up also doing the dots in the most part for WWF. I think I did a couple- I did like a week of work when he went off to Disney World, he went on vacation.

And I think I you know programmed programed a couple things then but he was supposed to do guns too but he got he got moved over to reading the display system for the 192 by 64 which was actually a 68000 system.

I think that was remember that was something that he if he had 68000 experience before or not but he stepped in and wrote a very nice system for that dot matrix display that actually had a lot of new features that we sort of ported back to the 128 by 32 standard sized dot display at the time of Apollo 13.

So how hard was it to program the 192 versus the 128 you know you got this monster size big display with more levels of shading and and and and and it looked great. I mean the Baywatch stuff looked really really good. How you know how tough was that compared to the you know to the you know the medium size displays it maybe.

It wasn't in some ways it was in some ways the loud and stuff was actually easier because you had a lot more space in fact in fact we had to be careful not to have too much not to have too much instruction on there you could fit a lot of stuff.

But the actual programming was was very similar you just had to be a little bit you had to be a little bit more careful because it was because it was 16 bit instead of 8 bit in terms of the instructions and that you had to be careful that there were ways that you could there were ways in your scripts that you could you could make the thing get really confused and and messed up.

But but I'm in an excellent job on that system it was it was I wouldn't say it was any any harder to program there were just there were just a couple tricks that that you had to that you had to be aware of and through some of the through some of the things that we that he did we could actually fit in even more art and more digitized stuff than we ever could before.

It was nice that we that we had we had to I think we ended up with two four megabit ROMs to 270040s for that for that display so we we certainly did have a lot of space.

Yeah you you doubled your ROM space basically right yeah exactly and you know the the code instructions were bigger because they were sick you know we're 16 bit but yeah you could certainly pack a lot more art in there.

And it was yeah it was really a lot of fun to it was really a lot of fun to work with it but you know it was just it was just unfortunate that it didn't catch on and that's really the Williams guys took that display and did a lot of nice things a lot of nice things for it with slots.

Right right that's right the Williams the WMS slots that's right they use that larger one ninety two display yeah like like X factor and and and some of those other games from that generation were I thought I thought had had had great play value whether they whether they made money or not I don't know but at least a couple years ago some of them were still going strong.

And what was the decision that was a financial decision to go back to the smaller one twenty eight display yeah it it pretty much was of course we made that transition from average and somewhere in the middle of maverick was when was when sega fully took over they already had a stake.

They already had a stake in the company in fact they had a stake in the company for a long time and that was when they and that was when they finally bought the rest of it and moved in and you know changes changes started to be made in terms of design.

Because of because of their ownership and you know sort of a different financial model and sort of the pinball market falling apart in the bottom line.

That you know we brought in this more expensive thing and you know unfortunately it didn't really it didn't really have a bump in sales that we really weren't we really weren't selling more games now of course we didn't necessarily we didn't necessarily have the greatest titles during that time.

Either you know maverick really didn't have the nostalgia and it was sort of brought in as a as a game that France France wanted the France wanted the card game with the drop targets.

That was the that was the real big sort of push for why that theme would be such a wonderful thing you know we're going to have we're going to have a drop target game again and you know that the French took one look at it and it said you know it was like they

just like they wanted a godly game from from the 1970s you know where's our captain card and that that wasn't what it was that but you know maverick and then and then Baywatch you know we did we did Maverick because without the French would buy a whole bunch we didn't

Baywatch because we thought the Germans would buy a whole bunch and they weren't they weren't so hot on half the off then I guess they were hot and cold on him or maybe the

Germans like to have a lot of people who played pinball didn't but we didn't sell a whole lot of that and Frankenstein you know they had a pretty good cast and you know didn't turn out to be the

the enormous blockbuster movie that we hoped it would be and by the time we were by the time we were a little bit deep into Batman forever we pretty much knew that the dots were going to be a lame duck that the operators wanted to be able to only stock one kind of display and I don't think I don't think the technical problems that we had with Baywatch helped us any

that I don't know if you're familiar with that that mod yeah the we mean we're the five volts fails going to the controller board and then the whole display goes out and then you guys had a special cabling modification that you could plug in that would help that

that's right that it was I think there was I think there was an issue of not enough amps getting there and I think there was also an issue of mechanical stability.

Right right I just fixed a maverick for a guy and basically you know I didn't have that cable but you know I did essentially the same thing you double up the five volts you double up the ground going to you know going to that controller you used new three sided try for

con pins instead of the original single sided pins and bingo you know it's it's all good to go yeah and it was funny we were we had that game at the trade show

and this is a trade show on arena we had yesman belief who I think is she she came out for the show and for one day we brought her in and she was signing autographs and and you know doing all this stuff

and you know really really dig in the game and the game is crashing in the video mode and it would crash like multiple times and we just could not figure out why.

There was actually nothing wrong with the code other than the code was exercising the process or so much that it didn't have enough power and it would crash.

That was the problem too many cycles. So what did you do fix that that was the the wiring.

Oh really all you mean the power consumption was the issue. The you know would the video mode was just about the only place that would make it crash.

So because the power consumption was so much because it was drawn so much current or whatever.

Yeah it was pumping it was pumping so many frames through and so much artwork that it was just that it was just too much that the processor was really being exercised and drawing a lot of power.

But the processor could handle it it just didn't it just the current limits couldn't.

Yeah you know or the processor was pulling too many frames off the ROMs and you know it was too much power draw.

Now when you did Baywatch did you get to deal with any of the stars on you got a hassle off stories you got a Pam Anderson stories anything like that.

You know not really the I think the most of the time the people that we worked with in on the games were were very cooperative.

That there were sort of there were sort of two issues that were there when it actually came down to the movie stars that it was it was the sound recording and the likeness.

You know would they would they do custom speech for us and and you know what could we do is what could we do as far as the art was concerned.

And we brought probably the first the first time I I found out that it maybe wasn't always such smooth sailing was when we were doing guns and roses that John Borg and Joe and Brian Schmidt went out to California to do a recording session.

And they're at the recording studio and they they had slash there and was you know recording guitar lick and his speech and stuff that he was saying but of course of course you know the recognizable voice is is not slash but axel and they're going to record axel that same night.

And he apparently got confused and his limo went to the wrong recording studio and you know he was late this was in this was in this was in 94 some of 94 so it wasn't you know it wasn't like everybody had a cell phone back then some people did but you know they have a trouble figuring out where he was supposed to be and he showed up two hours late and locked himself in the studio and was swearing in the studio.

And he was swearing in there for like 90 minutes on tape and then you know erase the tape and then you know he would there were some things in the script that he just wouldn't say he would say jackpot but he wouldn't say extra ball and you know all this stuff that was so.

And he say extra ball personality well why wouldn't he say extra ball don't know I mean it was just it was just axel he didn't want to say it so he wasn't going to say it and there was actually no way that that he could be convinced to change his mind.

So that's why there's that's why there's no extra ball speech in the game that he wouldn't say mystery that's why slashes voices the one that says mystery for that for that shot even though axel is the one who's on the piece of plastic that always breaks that's up above that hole.