Welcome, welcome, welcome to our very first episode of In Before the Lock. You've got Rob from The Electric Playground and welcome Davey from Stumble Pinball. So great to have you. Hey man, how's it going? Yeah, yeah, good to be here. So I guess we're doing this. What? I guess so. I don't know. Are we? Is it streaming? Is it happening? I don't know. I should probably check Twitch and make sure this is actually live. Nah. Nah. Don't do that. No. All right. We're good. We're good. Who cares? It's happening. Well, welcome to those that are joining us. Super cool to have so many of you show so much interest in checking out the show. This is recorded. So if you miss it, it's going to be out there and we're going to be on YouTube also next week. So this is our first attempt at streaming in pinball. And we're here to talk about mods because that's what we do. What's up, guys? Welcome to the very first episode of In Before the Lock. You've got Rob here and my co-host Davey. Davey, how you doing? I'm very well, thanks Rob. Very well. Yep. Your audio sounds great. I'm excited. We're here. Like, I don't know. I don't know what's going on. I mean, we literally just planned this like a week ago, although I think I threw it your way like a month ago or two, so. Yeah, he came up with the idea a little while ago and I thought it was a good one. There was a couple of technical hurdles to overcome, obviously. Neither of us are that au fait with streaming at all. So we had to work out internet issues. We had to work out camera issues. But we're here. We're doing it. So, I mean, what is the idea? What is the idea? What are we doing? Do we even have an idea? Well, all right. Hang on. Let's hold on for a minute. like we like each other but we no one else knows who we are so uh davy and i are mod makers in this amazingly creative space uh known as pinball uh i've owned pinball machines for like i think i guess like 20 years has it been a while for you that's amazing man no uh much much shorter probably six years six years and it's like people people mod these things i hear yeah yeah they mod them it's um but it's kind of a newish concept really i guess um i think you know i talked about this little a little bit in the seminar that i did recently that we'll sort of get to later but um you know the idea of modding games probably you know it's only been around for you know i'm not even sure really i mean twilight zone attack from mars these were sort of the big mods that sort of came out i think around 10 years ago around that um maybe 2007 2008 i'd be able to check my notes but um yeah the attack from mars uh saucer mod came out and sold in bucket loads and then i guess the mod scene's been growing ever since um to the point where it is now where there's a lot of people a lot of you know amazing creative people um who are you know submitting some you know intent you know incredibly fantastic mods uh for you know all the new releases and old games as well um yeah yeah i mean it's i it'd be interesting to know what the history of it is i kind of have a theory it might be around like when led lighting started to come around and people were making like very small tweaks and that kind of grew from there but you know for those of you that don't know anything about this space i mean like pinball is this amazing game and amazing story and and there's so much opportunity to even involve more things so like a really easy thing to do is just buy some toys off amazon and throw them in your game and add an extra ninja turtle or whatever but there's also a whole community uh of people making specific mods for games actually tie into the lighting and tie into the interactivity and davy and i both do that in different ways so davy makes some amazing stuff that goes under the glass or inside the game and uh i make stuff goes on top of the game kind of like this little lit up 007 sign you see behind me yeah uh so so topper yes i should mention it yeah right seo seo yeah so so we decided to do a show because the other thing that's challenging with this is like it's kind of hard to find this stuff and like you know this is this show isn't about our stuff necessarily although we'll tell you about it whenever stuff's coming up we want to talk about some of the stuff in the community so hopefully Some of you guys watching, gals watching, or we're talking about your stuff. So this show needed a name. It needed a name. We had to figure that out. In Before the Lock. In Before the Lock. Yeah. What does that mean? Well, okay. All right. So yeah. Okay. So Pinside is one of the, well, is the biggest pinball forum in the world. It's where we all hang out. It's where we all talk about pinball. It's where all the new game releases occur, you know, and it's where the community resides effectively or, you know, the online community, the online pinball community resides. Now, you know, because it's, you know, quite a big thing, it's got its own culture, it's got its own saying, it's got its own, you know, identity, I suppose. and now in before the lock is a saying that, look, I don't know whether it originated on Pinside, but I certainly noticed it for the first time on Pinside. And it's what happens when a thread on Pinside goes, as we say in the UK here, pear-shaped. Is that a US expression, pear-shaped? Yeah, it's a thing. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it just goes haywire. Now, that might be because people start getting political or people start insulting each other. or somebody's business is getting dragged through the mud or whatever it is, it's a thread that goes so badly wrong that it's only a matter of time before a mod steps in and shuts it down. So when the, you know, when pin sliders get wind that a thread is blowing up like this, everybody starts piling on and giving their two cents or, you know, some people just jump on and write, you know, IBTL, which stands for in before the lock, with the idea being the thread's going to be locked i'm getting in before that happens it's funny because i i've spent a lot of time on pin side and for some reason this whole thing has eluded me maybe i'm not yeah right threads i thought yeah i thought that it meant like you got to get that mode started before the last lock because it sets up the optimal story so whatever i like my version better yeah you know whatever it means to you man but the more important question The more important question, Davey, is like, why would we name our show that? Because we want to be super controversial. You know, we want to slag everyone off. You know, we want to be shut down. Oh, yeah, absolutely, man. You know. Well, look, we're going to be a tad controversial. We may have some opinions on some things. It's not meant to offend anybody. Really, we want to celebrate everybody. But, like, look, there's a lot of options for stuff. um so we're going to be right up on that line of whatever i guess our comfort level is on that um so so so so moving on i mean we talked yeah go ahead having said that i was just gonna say having said that you know and i think you'd agree with me here we're both uh you know real uh believers in the you know in in in propping up the community and uh you know and celebrating that community and you know all of the all of the people all of the creatives within it you know I think there's some incredibly talented and creative people within our modding community and pinball in a wider realm. And essentially, that's what I hope this show is, is this celebration of those people and helping to raise the profile of these mods that people might not have seen. Totally. I mean, so many creative people in this space. I come from the video game space and I always used to talk to people because we worked with kids a lot. And it was like, look, you like music, you like writing, you like marketing, you like graphics, you like coding. It's all there for you. But what wasn't there is physical things and electronics and physics. And that's what's so awesome about pinball. And look, in the grand scheme of things, pinball is taking off. And it's because people are moving away from things that they were doing that were known as their professional world and investing time in pinball because it's great. And that's that's exciting. So so, you know, we talked a little bit about our goals. Like we want to expose more mods like that's going to be kind of the key kind of thing about the show. So if you're tuning in, you know, you're going to learn about some new stuff. You're going to hear about, you know, what we're working on and some of the trends in this space. Speaking of what we're working on, Davey, you've got a lot of stuff going on, at least it seems like it. Like what's your kind of latest and greatest thing you're working on? at the moment we're just trying to get stuff out as quickly as possible and not make mistakes while we're doing it we've got really long lists for all of the Godzilla mods and we're still getting through those with the hope that we can get through those in a reasonable amount of time before we can start on the area Is that the noodle bar? Have you discontinued anything? No, well we sort of discontinued stuff and then we started it back up again and then the list blew up again and um i mean it's been a roller coaster a fantastic insane roller coaster um and you know it's always this juggling act of you know trying to make sure that we get uh the popular mods in the hands of as many people as possible because that's a wonderful thing um versus focusing on new stuff or having the ability to focus on new stuff and to move on with those new things and it's it's you know it's a juggling act so the moment when we're trying to complete all the godzilla stuff which is the tokyo neon mod which is a small sign that um that is like a neon tokyo sign that sits uh sort of uh to replace one of the existing signs in godzilla the noodle bar which is a replacement for a building in the back of godzilla and the lolly ufo which is a mod kit that sort of goes all over the place um so you guys yeah i mean you guys for anybody that hasn't seen it you got to check out this tokyo tower mod for for godzilla i mean like if modding had like a a 1.0 and a 2.0 or whatever like as soon as that mod was out like the bar got raised so just really freaking cool stuff and uh yeah so we can talk about all your stuff uh yeah for for a while uh we have two products underway right now we've got our twilight zone topper which is awesome and the feedback on it unbelievable yeah been fantastic uh we actually so we just launched that in march this year that was the beginning of our company um so we're we're moving quickly we've got one new one uh in uh shipping i guess starting starting in november right later in november which is a godzilla right godzilla is like the most heavily machine totally totally this thing's like super interactive does a bunch of stuff we show you all the videos but we're trying not to push our stuff too much here so you guys go look that up but it's got some amazing technology associated with it too doesn't it you know you've totally implemented some really do you know how many pin side messages i've got like hey ask davey about his text so that i don't have to buy more things to put in my thing and it's like but we're trying to figure it out too it's just like yeah yeah yeah and um working with closed systems that's part of the exciting that's part of the exciting journey of mod making is to work out you know ways of making these things more interactive i mean i know for you guys and for me one of the most exciting things uh that you can do with mods is to make them so they feel as much a part of the game as possible and the best way of doing that is to listen to the game and to respond to things that are going on in the game and to you know follow the leads um of you know the game is totally so um you know you know and there's various ways of doing that you know um let's you know we probably won't get into the technicalities of doing uh you know of how we do that now because it's a big conversation i will say that for another time but um you know it's always great when you see people uh implementing new ways of doing that and you know you know going and hitting them up at shows and saying oh you know talk me through that how did you do that totally yeah i mean look like uh you know we actually just came from expo uh expo in chicago uh schaumburg illinois just in the last week or two uh davey flew all the way in from australia which was sweet to see him there from london oh london sorry sorry originally yeah yeah London on the way in. It's confusing. We'll fix that in post. So we were both there and we do have, we have an agenda for this episode. So a little flash there at the bottom for you. We're going to talk a little bit about Expo and then we've got some other fun stuff coming up. I think, I think we both took a bunch of photos and want to share some stuff. You want to dive in on some of the highlights of the show for you? Yeah. Yeah. at least if we uh if we cut to a different video then i won't have to worry about um you know yeah focus on the camera okay so uh yeah let's do it yeah yeah good good good um so look uh you know the most exciting thing about expo uh this time around um was that we got treated to uh two three new machines that hadn't been seen before um yeah i mean it depends on what you count as a new machine but yeah it has to be you have to be able to play it right yeah yeah yeah yeah so definitely two um and a brand new company as well and you know uh you know uh so we were both at tpf which was another show in march in texas and there were how many machines five new machines there oh yeah i think maybe even six it was a lot but six years and then yeah and then what six months seven months or whatever it was later um where we're at another show and there's and there's two more brand new machines released you know an amazing time in pinball and uh and you know the biggest uh hyped up game uh of the show i think would be an accurate way of saying that is lab um brand new company uh barrels of fun um this is their first ever game it's a massive license uh you know david bowie are we back all right guys i don't know what happened there we'll piece that together so you can see the whole thing uh hopefully we're live again i was gonna i was gonna check it and you wouldn't let me check it uh all right so we were talking about labyrinth it's the balls let's move on to the next one yeah Yeah, that's the headline. Labyrinth, it's great. Move on. We're actually not really too sure what we showed and what we didn't. But instead of just re-going over the same stuff again, we're just going to move on. So we're going to move on with the next game that was at the show, which was by JJP, Jersey Jack Pinball, Elton John. um yeah this so it got uh i think i mean the the rumor that it was going to be elton john by jjp was sort of like a pretty badly kept secret everybody was like this is going to be terrible that was kind of a general you know feeling amongst the pinball community you know why are you choosing elton john this is a rubbish theme it doesn't suit pinball etc etc etc and then they kind of dropped it and you know I watched the the announcement video whatever and I was like looks okay but I wasn't like oh my god I was amazing but then we all lined up as you can see here in the in the lines for for waiting for Elton you know we saw the game itself and it looked you know pretty damn sexy I think you'll admit this is the god I can never remember was it C Platinum Ellie this is the Platinum yeah And it is damn sexy I mean a lot going on Color guys on this one Yeah, so the artwork on this one was done by, well, I was talking to Barry from Dutch, and he said that his friend did it, which is the reason why he has to go for the Platinum, because his friend did the artwork. So that's really interesting that his friend did the artwork for this one. and I'll just quickly, okay, there it is again. I mean, look, it's a good looking game, no mistake. But this is the artwork for the other one, which is the CE. Is that right? CE? I think it's platinum and this is the old, I don't know. It's the cheaper one. Yeah. This is the cheaper one. I like it better. I mean, the art on this one is great. yeah it's really cool isn't it it's really cool um so this one's by franci um so yeah two different artists to do the two different uh cab arts for both of those two versions but you know interestingly they're both really well specced you know you can see that they've they've sort of got uh the inside cab art can you see my my mouse when i'm doing this i don't know whether you can or not yeah oh cool okay so uh so they've both got this inner cab uh art blades going down the side here um they've both got toppers different toppers um but they both got toppers which is still an amazing thing um and you know there's very well there's there's no difference to the play field as far as i remember um i don't think there's any difference to the play field no i I think it's just the cab art and the topper. And then also it's got the painted, I think one's gold, one's silver. Yeah, yeah, okay. So there's a lot of interesting features to this. You know, things to notice straight away is this LED wraparound panel that they've got going around the piano. I mean, instantly I saw this and I was, you know, from a mod-making perspective, I was like, that is cool what they've done there. um you know uh you know there's been uh recently released uh minute one mil by one mil leds that have hit the market uh i don't know when they hit the market i got notice from it from a friend um but i think that's what they're using here just in really high density um and on a flexible pcb so it can wrap around the the piano i mean that's super cool it's never been done before yeah i mean i think they've got such a big screen i love what labyrinth's doing on the back panel a little like this element in particular is almost as good as another screen for me just because it's got that nostalgia kind of old school vibe to it yeah yeah um the elton john uh wording here is all lit as well sort of in a very sort of showground uh lighting kind of way i mean it's it's a very good looking game um and when i shot it i wasn't expecting it to be as fun as it was it was it was ridiculously fun um so you know i you know i was essentially slagging this title off before before i played it and then after playing it i was like oh shit yeah i mean i think universally people were kind of like what this is a weird move for jersey jack yeah after arguably you know mediocre titles but i think everyone also had a different tune now we'll see how how it does in terms of like how many people are bringing in their collection but beautiful yes yeah yeah Yeah, beautiful game. And the other point to make as well is that, you know, while games like, well, look, Jersey Jack are a more is more kind of company, you know. You know, they just throw everything at it in terms of lighting and rainbow effects. And, you know, I mean, they've got a very camp approach to making pinball. And that doesn't work when you are making games like Godfather, you know, which should be more reserved, darker, more moody. you know their their rainbow led approach to pinball doesn't suit a title like that but for a game like elton john i mean it's like it's perfect and that's what i failed to grasp when you know they announced this was going to be their next title um so yeah impressive very okay what else do we uh what else like all right let's okay so just very quickly i think we're probably doing really badly for time, but let's have a quick look at Alien, which is an existing game from the Pinball Brothers, but they've just announced that they're re-releasing it with Ripley footage. So Sigourney Weaver, I think, probably didn't sign off to the original version or didn't sign off to her footage being used. They couldn't reach an agreement or whatever it was, but they are in the process of reaching an agreement to use Ripley's footage in this version of Alien, which is a great thing for Pinball Brothers. I don't think the deal's been finalised yet. It's still subject to approval. You can see that Sigourney Weaver's likeness is not actually on the back glass. I had a bit of a chat with him about that, as did, I think, a lot of people. but all in all they've got new sculpts in the game there's a new alien at the back it all looks beautiful I think this one is quite a bit more affordable than the other models absolutely yeah what is this? what is this? what is that thing? yeah okay so Lior is now working very closely with both Dutch and Pinball Brothers and this is the new Lior top art for Alien you know I mean Lior does incredible work very detailed you know and and you know I was told that you know I mean Lior's Israeli he is in a war zone at the moment effectively he had to take this topper to the airport and put it on the plane himself is what the story that I heard in order to get it to Expo in time to show it off you weren't allowed to touch it because it was a prototype and i think you know it was like thrown together not thrown together obviously but it was put together at the last minute um but you know you can see the detail and the uh the work that has gone into this you know those those little alien pod thingies that hatch new aliens are all lit up there's you know beautiful lighting in the in the back back section here uh you know great detailing on the alien i mean if you're an alien fan this this should be right up your street i would imagine yeah super cool um and apparently there's a lot more to come with this right i think that we've even seen some new paint jobs on this since so pretty early oh okay for them pretty pretty i think he said it was broken in 27 places which oh my god yeah mad respect for for bringing something out letting us see it uh which a lot yeah i mean it looked great to me look great to me and yeah you know big uh big respect to leo for like you know making these amazing uh uh relationships you know recently in the last six months with all these with all these big manufacturers you know he's doing incredibly well so that's great i think we have a question from the audience what is oh what do you what is your response okay it's not really a question but i'm curious your response it's all right hang on what's the question uh alien pod thingies eggs that's from slippy hey slippy how you going man good to see you um all right are you are you through are you through i cut you off there um hello sorry for bothering you i wanted to offer promotion oh no don't read that don't not that one okay that's just that's that's called we yeah these are the things we need to kill isn't it where's the spam filter rob this is your job you need to be removing stuff hey man i gotta start with keeping the stream alive before i can is it my turn or you're still going i cut you off all right uh yeah no yeah i'm still going um okay go so the next thing that i want to talk about is uh the homebrews yeah um so these are considered homebrews i suppose i mean look funhouse and whirlwind 2.0 are done by pedretti they're not a homebrew company swords of vengeance i think still could be considered homebrew um But anyway, there was a showing of these 2.0 games. I didn't get to play any of them, but they were there, and that's great. We're going to quickly move on just so that we're not going to run out of time. These are some of the other homebrews that were in the homebrew section. We've got one called Beer Fest. What is that? Ghost in the Shell. Animal House. I think we still see the last image. Oh, whoops. So sorry. That's because I've not done this. there we go is that better nope is this better yeah look at that yeah okay this is what's going to happen folks you know consummate professionals okay so yeah we got beer fest uh ghost in the shell animal house mass effect um this was a nightmare before christmas you can see the play field i didn't get a chance to play i didn't get a chance to play any of these uh home brews actually i did play beer fest actually i played that um uh whoops gone the wrong way uh this was beavis and butthead uh unfortunately i think that was off what's that i i got to play this one it was it was did you it's yeah it looked like it uh it was yeah it played pretty pretty solid i mean a lot going on with this one and really cool end sequence uh i won't give it away hopefully i'll get a chance to play it someday but lots of really cool integration with the assets yeah every time i was over there there was always somebody on it so i didn't get it didn't get an opportunity unfortunately um this is another one i showed i can't remember which one this is and i didn't take a picture of anything that would describe it but i mean It looks amazing, some incredible work done there. And then, okay, so this one is called The Magic Forest. Now, this one is done by a guy called Lynn, who has also done sort of the Haunted Antonio Cruz. He's done a bunch of other machines as well. I got a good chance to have a speak with him, actually, and he's a lovely guy. He's using a lot of, he's a games developer by trade, and he's got a really cool approach to making pinball. A lot of Pepper's Ghost-type effects in all of his games, or in a lot of his games, particularly with Haunted Antonio Cruz. And just, you know, very interesting games to play. I played Magic Forest for a good long while, and it was, you know, just a very unique game, and quite fun to shoot, actually. So, yeah, I was really impressed with that one. But, look, this is the game that stole the show out of the homebrews in Expo. This is 8 Ball Beyond, and it has been made as a sort of a love letter, I guess, to the 8 Ball series of pinball machines. There's three games, like, you know, properly manufactured and released 8 Ball games before this one. This is obviously a homebrew and the idea is that it has taken the best or the most interesting aspects of those previous games and combined it into this machine and then put a twist on it. Now to just give you an indication of, let me see if I can just zoom in here. This is a really bad image I'm afraid so the resolution is not going to be great but this is the series of 8 ball games. The original one, 8 Ball Deluxe, which is probably the one that most people probably know and love the most. And then 8 Ball Champ here. Now you can see there's been, so there's no upper flipper here. There's an upper flipper on the left here and a row of drop targets on the right here as a recipient for that left flipper shot. And then on 8 Ball Champ you can see that there is another upper flipper here shooting, I guess, these targets. I've not actually played 8 Ball Champ so I couldn't really comment on the functionality of that game, but certainly 8 Ball Deluxe is the one that gets all the attention. So you can see that those drop targets have been reproduced over here on 8 Ball Beyond, except with a right flipper shot this time. there's other aspects to it here that have this this you know this kinky sort of bend up here which I guess you could you could have you know look at these other games and it could have been pulled from there as well you know this upper shot here is sort of you know you know very much been replicated from these other games as well so yeah it's it's really just now are you there Rob yeah okay man so this is this is the this is the bit that I wanted to show you as well that um now have a look at this man oh i haven't seen this oh wow man yeah look at this so this is just it's yeah so this is this is a white wood uh which means that this is a version that was before all the artwork that they did on it but have a look at this trick shot right so this is this is trying to i guess be like a like a snooker trick shot so you hit you hit this u-bend it gets stalled on the drop target you then hit the drop target and then shoot both shots into the scoop i mean that's that's amazing and i assume that's playing on repeat because that's some pretty yeah it actually looks like it's just them doing it yeah i know i know i could i could literally watch this all day but if um i mean look if the manufacturers aren't paying attention to stuff like this, then they're fools because this is, you know, this is, this is an amazing thing, an amazing idea that he's done here. Um, yeah. And I hope I look, I wish him all the success. I hope this gets manufactured cause I'll mine one if, if it is. I mean, that's brilliant too, to like do that into the eight ball. And, and this is such a, this series of games is pretty classic. So this one, this one has a lot of potential. I mean, for the right manufacturer, you know bringing this to market i think i think there's a world where that could happen so that's exciting yeah yeah yeah absolutely so uh tell me tell me your expo uh impressions rob yeah expo highlights um so guys uh i know we missed about the first four or five minutes due to the streaming issue but we're going to post it all together um we're going through expo right now uh we've got a full agenda for you guys we're going to talk about some specific mods and we've got a couple little fun segments so stay tuned for that um so so for my uh expo highlights uh my first one was one of the homebrews uh this one's called trash lands and it's still in this whitewood stage that you were talking about uh but what was so cool about this game is just the amount of like interaction in it so uh one one thing to note is the cabinet is is different right but it kind of needs that because it works upwards um this is Ryan McQuaid uh with american pinball who actually is known for a homebrew of himself he did sonic spinball um and uh this this homebrew scene is really cool because especially for davy and i who are like so into modding it's like these guys just take it to another level in terms of like our skills are our skills are not not even comparable uh especially this one i mean you've got this like back uh vertical play field it goes up to this upper play field and then you've got this like lower play field down here in the bottom left hand corner which is and which is ranked back that way isn't it so yeah it's it's a yeah the flippers coming up and all this stuff works i'm not really sure how seamless it is all coming together but super impressive and looking forward to seeing this one uh coming together uh this black and white uh twilight zone was the highlight of the show for me i guess it's been to some other shows but the level of detail from like a mod perspective i mean this is like a mod class all of its own um if if you don't know this game you can probably imagine it's in full color what this this uh mike has done with great american uh pinball is basically turn this thing completely black and white top to bottom it's it's absolutely gorgeous uh apparently no one's actually even played it because he certainly wouldn't play it but uh very very do you know why do you know why it was unplayable like well i think there was some rumors that like the play field couldn't handle the ball action but i asked him that and he was like no that's not true he's just like we we may we may want to do some more of these to make them playable but he was like this one in particular. I mean, I'm sure he's rolled the ball around, but allegedly not played. It's absolutely gorgeous. I did hear people, I did hear stories on the floor where people were offering him like 20k for it and he was saying no. Yeah I mean he was describing some of the things that he had to do to make this happen I mean changing the play field with black and white is one thing but finding all these replacement objects that are all black and white And like there's this is this is a sight to sight to be seen. Yeah, incredible. What else? So so this actually wasn't at Expo and you'll soon see why. but a gentleman from the netherlands uh shared this with us and he has literally turned his garage into an actual twilight zone pinball machine um and this is this is like look at this that's actually a flipper oh my god have you did i show you this davey at the show no man no This is the first time for me. I mean, like, and it's a highlight for me because, one, he has our Twilight Zone topper, which you're going to see shortly, but also just the community side of this. Look, the ramp up on the wall. I mean, like, this is like modding your game room here, which is insanity. He's clearly a big fan of pinball. You think? I'll go forward a little bit here. zoom us through this check this out okay yeah awesome oh my god clock million does it do anything does it I don't know the ball the ball apparently rolls yeah oh my god so he's got a ball on there as well he's got a ball on there as well so you can actually push that along but super cool and quite the collection totally super super fun humble guy so that was awesome gotta gotta give a shout out to my garage I know I know. I've got to give a shout-out to an amazing award that we received for our Godzilla Topper Best Model Show. So thank you to whoever it was that contributed to that decision. We're certainly honored. Here's a photo I got. This is with Don at Don's Pinball Podcast giving us a shout-out. So just community-wise, it was really cool. And then my highlight of the show, for multiple reasons, was this one-of-a-kind, I assume, St. Louis, which is where I'm from, St. Louis, Missouri, Godzilla topper. You've got the arch in there. But it had a literally like this like Tesla coil that would shoot out sparks when you activated a certain mode. It was loud as all hell. It was loud as all hell. And I actually knew the sound because I had bought one of these with the consideration of putting it into a topper. And the fire hazard alone was like not going to happen. There's no way you're going to get that CE certified, bro. Yeah. So we got a comment coming in. I got to say what's up to Don. Hey, Don. Shout out. Hey, man. How you doing? John, thanks for showing up. So yeah, those are – We're actually doing it. We're actually doing it. We're doing it. We're doing it. Yeah. So those are my expo highlights. Yeah. Cool, man. All right. What's next on the agenda? Yeah. So moving on, we're moving on to it's a mod, mod, mod, mod world. We're going to talk about a couple of mods that have caught our attention recently. And these things are hard to, you know, keep up on. If you don't own the machine, if you're not on the pin side thread, if you're not on the Facebook groups, like you're going to miss this stuff. And that's a big part of what we're trying to do on the show is like bring attention to some of the stuff that's out there. So I've got one and I think, David, you've got two. So go for it. Let's see what you got. Yeah. Yeah. Two or three. Yeah. Do you want me to start? Yeah. Go for it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll just give a I just wanted to give a quick shout out to the UK crew. So let me let me just get my. OK, so I'm just going to share. Yeah, so this is... There's two guys in the UK who are sort of contemporaries of mine who are doing incredible mod work. First of those guys is John, J85M, who's been working, you know, tirelessly to bring a number of mods to market. This is probably the one that's had the biggest sort of impact for him and it's the Bond Shooter. So let me just play the video for that quickly. We got the sound coming, baby. Does it play sounds? Oh, no, I thought I'd... This thing is sick. I mean like... Yeah, I mean it's great, isn't it? Yeah, I just love watching this video. Yeah, I know. So well done. Yeah, so it's obviously the Bond gear stick, isn't it? From his DB whatever it is. I'm not the most massive Bond nerd, but anyway, it's got the button and it shoots the ball when you click the button yeah i mean how cool is that that's so good so amazing so wait does the does it come out like that or is that just for demo purposes uh that's just for demo i watched a different video i don't think that's supposed to do that yeah no this is just this is just me being all prepared or maybe it has an extension rod with this like thing for turning on the power like i did you see that uh i didn't i didn't see that no um we're gonna have to cover that on another episode because it's quite the contraption uh but anyway keep going keep going yeah so look he's done incredible work with this you know it sold really well he's he's you know the the quality level and it's really good um but yeah he's you know he's he's i guess he's new to the modding scene so you know we we talk a lot behind the scenes um about what it takes to uh you know to be a bond maker and to uh you know bring products to market and uh you know the reality is is that um the creative side of mod making is only you know like a tenth of the battle um the rest is you know logistic it's about getting parcels to people it's making sure they get to the right person making sure that they've asked for everything if there's special requests you know like there's there's a there's a whole organizational uh you know learning process to be had when you're sending out mods and um you know and you know we talk a lot about this you know behind the scenes to you know myself and john and myself and other mod makers as to how best to approach these problems in order to you know scale particularly if you get a hit you know you can go from like you know 20 mods in a couple of months to like hundreds and suddenly you need to work out how to manage that without screwing it all up. And it's difficult. You know, it's probably the most difficult part of mod making is managing that process. And it's not glamorous. It's not necessarily fun. But it's absolutely key in ensuring that, you know, you maintain a good reputation and that people, you know, are happy with what they're receiving. Yeah, I mean, it's like you can start off with, you know, thinking you're going to sell 25 of these and you kind of build this plan and then it ends up being more and it can actually not only hurt those 25 but it could hurt the next 50 because you start thinking about how can i make this more efficient because they take yeah you know i bet that thing takes four or five hours to make yeah it does and yep yep and that might not work for his his plans you know so it's it's super interesting but but the community is generally very patient i would say as long as you're actually like absolutely yeah yeah yeah no without a doubt i think as a as a uk guy or as an australian living in the uk when i first started posting on pinsight like i was i was really scared of the response that i was going to get you know i thought that you know i'd be seen as an outsider or um you know people you know just wouldn't be very kind to what i was doing i suppose and like the opposite is true you know you know i've i've i've only you know probably 99 of the time had just absolutely positive experiences from dealing with people and i feel very appreciative of that yeah for sure for sure well this one this one is super cool and i love the theme integration i mean like that's yeah that's a no-brainer but this that mod was not trivial to make so kudos yeah absolutely yeah yeah so we're going to talk we're going to talk bond mods for a little bit aren't we have you got a you got a bond yeah i mean i got i got my bond back here um we're not going to talk about that amazing topper from stern but i it is it is a favorite of mine um so so this one this one's pretty cool because um it's controversial actually just in the nature of what it is so uh gum nut along with um he's from sydney and he's got a partner in this who does a lot with wire forms but what they've essentially done is like modded the ball trajectory uh with this mod which i've been on some forums for like godzilla where people have floated this stuff and it's gotten pretty ugly and that's unfortunate because like that guy was just making it for himself but yeah this one's actually taken off i i mean i think i think he's got about 75 people lined up i know i'm i'm on the list and basically really you know from what what you got here is you've got this this kick that kicks out the ball into the middle of the play field and it can cause some straight down the middle type situations but it's also just you know not as interesting as if it came over here so basically what he's done is he's created this all right this is a little rough around the edges because it was an early model but pretty cool he's thinking about theme what it does is it kicks the ball over and into the the left flipper um so i think this is a bit of an older video he's probably wishing i wasn't showing this one because it looks a lot better now uh but uh it's all polished and it's like it looks like it's top of the line and what this is doing is like anytime it goes over into that area it's giving you access to some key shots I think there's actually four shots coming from that flipper, including the one that you might have gotten if you left the ball, you know, based on the original design. And have you read the thread recently, like in the last week or so? No, fill me in. Yeah, because, well, because basically it's two guys, isn't it? Two guys in Australia who are sort of working in conjunction with each other. There we go. One of them lives in Adelaide and one of them lives in Sydney. and so they've been sort of sending this thing back and forth like fiddling it trying to make it sort of as good as it can possibly be but they kind of decided amongst themselves that's not good enough so i think the guy that's in i think this is i think the guy in adelaide is driving with his son to sydney in order to spend a weekend with this other dude in order to like really dial it in um and like and like adelaide to sydney is like a i don't know it's like a 12 hour drive or something you know Australia's a big place like on the whole of Australia it's like this much and it's still like a 12-hour drive so yeah I know they're they really want to get it out before I think they committed to like before Christmas um right yeah and uh but yeah I'm excited about this one I mean I don't I think one thing that's that's good about this is like I I personally can't envision how so this game's still in development they're still changing code I can't personally see how like this decision as a owner of this game would come back to bite you from a code perspective yeah um so i'm hopeful for that but rob can you explain to me so are they changing the coil in this kick out at all like i think i think they're changing the scoop so it's a it's a super strong coil yeah that kicks it way up the play field and i think they're kind of just redirecting the ball and it's already got enough strength to kick over um honestly haven't It's a strange one, isn't it? Because you would think that... Based on the price, which is a... Go ahead. Well, I was going to say, you would think that, like, with a super strong coil and it having, like, a super strong kick out, it's almost like this was supposed to be there in the first place and it was a design decision to remove it. You know, because otherwise you'd just have a weak coil, like, flicking them all out, right? Well, I know one thing, like, so George Gomez is, like, really big on getting the ball into the pops. I haven't personally seen why the ball being in the pops is so damn important. but I know that for him he's like you want the ball in the pops it does kind of build this kind of like if you get enough pops it gives you a reward but this game is cool because it's come along such a long way um one thing is it used to take like three hits on the right ramp to start a villain mode now it only takes one so this is a little less important to have but anyway I mean I'm excited about it I'm I'm I'm yeah look it's it's it's like what you said earlier you know there's been a couple of these mods that have been released that you that you know i consider sort of game changing mods you know they do alter how the game is played and they are contentious because people are traditionalists generally they want to see the designers uh intent uh carried on you know and so when you know there was another one recently for rick and morty where somebody created something called the Jerry Ramp, which allowed easier shots into the garage. I think that one can be more easily seen as contentious to this one, where this one seems very much like it's improving the quality of something that needed improvement. Yeah. We'll see. I think it's going to have a lot of potential, so kudos to those guys on putting themselves out there on that one. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more on Bond, shall we? Right, this is another UK friend of mine. Shout-outs to my good friend Paul Jasboosh, who has created the Bond laser mod. Have you seen this one, Rob? Yes, I have. And I'm not a big fan of some of the stuff I've seen people put up there, because that's a pretty obvious spot this one is definitely i mean classic moment and there's a lot and you're involved with this one or is that is that yeah i'm doing the board work on this one yeah are you doing the tech are you the tech guy yeah yeah yeah i'm the tech guy i'm the tech guy yeah so uh so yeah so this is a little bit of a blind man trumpet moment um but like it's all Paul's concept, it's obviously all his sculpt work. Paul owns a toy company, amazingly, what an incredible thing to have. So he's got a lot of, and this is actually, this is an old video, so it's changed a fair bit since then. I think the laser's a lot more shorter. Anyway, so you can actually see the dots sort of moving along the play field. I'm going to blame Paul for not updating his video on that one. I'm not going to be able to find So were you involved in the early creative process on this? It was all Paul's idea, but the concept of it is that it's kind of a mini-game in that section. So hitting one ramp will start the laser, or two ramps or whatever it is, and then the idea is you have to hit those ramps a consecutive number of times within a time frame before Bomb gets his knackers burnt off. if you hit it within I think it's 20 or 30 seconds then the laser sort of flashes green and you've won the mini game and if you don't then it glows red and Bond loses his knackers so it doesn't move right yeah it does the laser moves along it does yeah yeah so I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to you want it do you so the idea is that that laser like because there's an LED strip under there right so the laser sort of moves up getting closer and closer to his knuckles and that's what represents the time running out so the laser doesn't move the visual yeah that's correct so just because we're talking about mods like was there a point where you guys were talking about let's try to make it move and you kind of abandoned that or what's any insight on that process? No No, no, no. I mean, generally when other people come to me with stuff, like I'll sort of provide sort of input and suggestions and stuff, but I'll really just let them run with it. Particularly when I'm just being sort of, I guess, a board supplier or a tech supplier to these guys, you know, it's their creative vision. And I don't want to sort of stifle that in any way or even take the credit for something that has been, you know, their idea and their concept. and you know look generally these guys are coming up with such great ideas anyway I just kind of add a bit of you know technical I guess panache to whatever they're doing just light up some LEDs and stuff but the rest is all in I feel like I feel like my questions are making you uncomfortable they are actually can you ask more questions that make me seem like I a better person than I i actually am no this is cool i mean like this is a great example of one that like nobody knows about unless they own bond right and even then you gotta you gotta dig for it so super cool dude when is that one coming out oh it's out yeah um okay let's see i think we've uh maybe send him 100 boards so um so i think he's maybe fulfilled the first 100 and i think you know i'm not sure what the list is at at the moment i mean we could probably check couldn't we let's see oh yeah look 120 on the list so we'll probably probably pass this 100 uh past this 100 point um we'll probably do another short run of 50 um but i think i mean based on some of the conversations that i've had with paul over the last couple of days he's going to shift back onto the atomic Godzilla, which is his very, very popular Godzilla replacement for the little figure on Godzilla, which has just been, yeah, smash it for him. I think the list is sort of approaching a thousand now. So yeah, I think he's shifting back onto that. So we're sort of getting a few boards ready for that as we speak. Very cool. Should we talk about a couple of, go on, you go first. Well, there was one mention of a Venom Spinner. Do you know what that is? Oh, look. Don just mentioned it to me. You need to feature my Venom Spinner. Yeah, okay. Let's hear about the Venom Spinner. I don't know about the Venom Spinner. Let us know how to find it if that's actually a thing. I'm super curious. Did you have one more or are we moving on? I was going to quickly give shout outs to T. Diddy as well for his Drake building, I mean that's been an incredibly popular Godzilla mod as well for the centre building I think he's just reaching the end of his list now but congrats on that Tom that's been an awesome mod done great work on that, can't wait to see what you do next as well and then finally I was just going to talk about Greg Medicinal as well who's just recently shifted back onto his Elvira mod. Now, look, this wasn't available for a long, long time. You know, Greg does beautiful hand-painted sculpt work. His style is very conducive to this kind of dark, spooky sort of theme, so perfectly suited to Elvira. But look, the bad side, I guess, to him getting back into this one is that his mods were getting ripped off by some dude. And he spoke about it in the thread. If you want to check out the details, go on the thread and look it up. I don't really know the specifics. But he made the decision to revisit this one just because he wanted people to get the real deal, I guess. And I guess if other people are trying to profiteer on his hard work and his creativity, that's not cool. Again, that's a contentious argument to have, whether it's cool or not cool, and people have different opinions on it. But look, I'm a Greg fan, so if people want this mod and Greg's willing to do more of them, that's just a great thing for both Elvira and for Pinball. So yeah, if you want to get back on the list, then jump on because Greg doesn't tend to keep these things on forever so when it's gone it's probably going to be gone we had a recent update to Elvira the blood red kit there's the thumb oh is it? did it do it? movie magic this is the thing that we noticed yeah look so is he making a black and white one of this or has that been announced? he is mate the blood red Elvira is one of the sexiest pinball machines that I've ever seen in my life I don't even know that I'm getting one yet I haven't got confirmation from our distributor that he's even getting some but I thought I'd order the black and white kit from Greg just on the chance that I managed to score one yeah so I don't even I don't even know where I am and I'm ordering one getting a little hot and bothered over there it seems yeah always my default state awesome alright So that is that's the end of our mod roundup. Although we want to talk a little bit about what we're working on, just because we know a lot of you guys are here to support us. When we have new stuff coming out, we're going to share that with you to keep you up to date. Sometimes we'll kind of talk about some of the nitty gritty with it, because I know like just the mod making process is really interesting to people running a business, trying to figure things out. So for the electric playground, super busy right now in manufacturing. we're getting the latest batch of Twilight Zone out the gate we hand number each one which it's not a selling feature, they're just numbered so we know which one you have, but we just got through our 100th unit so that's super exciting to get our 100th Twilight Zone out the door and then Godzilla, we've got our first batch of I think 25 orders going out later this month we've got the boxes ironically it's always the freaking boxes we're waiting on the boxes to show up this is the thing we were talking about earlier the things that can screw you up that have got nothing to do with I mean you do fancy boxes and it bites you in the ass but yeah so that's coming and then we've got some more stuff coming next year which will keep you guys updated what are you working on Davey? we've again like we we sort of you know you've you've got your heart set on like just doing the entirety of a particular run and then you know we we get 100 led boards in that were 100 perfect the last time they came in and then suddenly 50 of them don't work and have to go in the bin um and then that screws everything up because you know you're then waiting on more boards to arrive and so it just becomes this sort of juggling act of uh you know stock and inventory and inventory management and so yeah we were working on the noodle bar luckily we've got um tokyo neon and lolly ufo mods for godzilla sort of ready to go so we quickly shifted focus back onto those while we wait for these more boards to arrive um and you know this is this is the juggling act i guess of mod making and keeping, you know, keeping the ball rolling and making sure that you don't have like, you know, two weeks or three weeks of downtime. Because, you know, like you make promises to people, you say, you know, it's probably going to be November that we start shipping these out. And if it's not, then you'll start getting emails and PMs. And, you know, of course, that's that is all part of it. And, you know, I love talking to people about those kinds of things. But, you know, you need to keep things moving and it's a tricky thing. So we've been doing that juggling act and then trying to gear up for the Area 51 mod for Foo Fighters, which is the next big one that we haven't started yet. Is that the one for the upper playfield? Yeah, that's the one, man. Yeah. That's cool. You can probably just see it lit up there in the background. Squint, squint real tight. Yeah. Very cool. All right. We got that out of the way. So we got one more segment for you guys before we wrap this up. thank you for being here with us we got about 25 listeners uh which is awesome to have on the first show thanks so much guys for being here thanks so much yes uh so so this one we're going to call on the spot um and the the idea here is that i'm gonna float a topic i've got my answer prepared because i'm floating the topic and davey's gotta come up with his while i talk uh so favorite shot and pinball um okay so that's you got it thinking about it so i'm thinking you go first then i'll have a thing yeah so so you know favorite shot and pinball is probably typically going to be related to a machine that you owned um or at least in my mind it is and my favorite machine that i've owned and one that i don't have in my collection any longer but i want to is stern's jurassic park keith elwin game amazing and i just love the smart missile shot um this is a situation where a little bit deeper into the game you have a couple opportunities where the ball is coming down the left end lane and it gets stopped by a post you see that ball gets stopped by a post in some other situations but this one in particular is then going to give you about five seconds to flip through five or six potential perks and all of them are quite fantastic especially if you're really like strategizing for your game and you then have to quickly select what you want and then there's some pretty cool sound effects and then you basically have to like shoot all the way up to the back corner of the play field uh through the pops but not only through the pops um you've got this situation where there's a ball a kinetic ball on a truck if you play the game you know what i'm talking about and it's actually always positioned to be in the hard hardest spot so you got to thread it past the kinetic ball through the pops into a target in the back and if you get it you know you got extra ball you've got start uh the raptor multiball uh start chaos i think may be a situation but it's just it's just like a real payoff situation super satisfying when you nail it yeah totally so kudos to the designers on that one davy what are you thinking favorite shot in pinball uh i mean look i got a bunch i think um but look it you know and probably my, well, I've got two favourite games of all time, really. One of them is Creature from the Black Lagoon, which I feel a very strong emotional connection to just because of my history with it. I'm not going to get into it now, but the other game is Diner. And that, I mean, that's the one that jumped out to me when you mentioned the question. In Diner, there's a clock in the backbox, which represents the jackpot that you've built up over the course of the game. And it starts at 1 o'clock and goes to 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock, 4 o'clock, all the way up to 12 o'clock. And you can build that up by consecutive hits to the left ramp. And the ramps on Dyna have a crossover in the middle. So it means when you hit the left ramp, it goes back to the right flipper to hit the left ramp, right flipper, left ramp. So it's like a continuous shot. and I know some people don't like those kind of shots but I really enjoy those consecutive repeatable shots just because if you can really get them going, it's a real buzz, right? So if you can keep those shots going over the course of the game, then you build up that jackpot to like 12 million and then if you collect all the characters, there we go, you've got Diner Army. Look at that, super professional. Yeah, virtual, virtual Diner. That'll do, that'll do. Is this the right game? Is this the right one? It is, mate, yeah, yeah. I bring it up because a lot of people haven't played this one because it's kind of a deep track. System 11. Yeah, yeah. And it's quite a rare System 11 as well. So I was really intrigued by what you're saying, but I was having a hard time visualizing it. So it's... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So you see where it says Dyna on the left there? So there's that left ramp. And that left ramp then comes back to the right flipper, goes up the left ramp, right flipper, left ramp, right flipper. so you sort of build up your bonus you build up your bonus for that then all these characters in the middle here you collect those over the course of the game by hitting drop targets and various other things and when you collect all five of those characters then dine time is lit for a certain number of seconds now dine time is the right most shot which is that what do you call it? gobble holes I think you call it a gobble hole yeah it's not an easy shot but if you hit it and dine time is still going when you hit it then you collect on the 12 million bonus and it's one of those ones it's time shot and if you get it and you've built up your bonus to 12 million it's just one of those great, I think I've only done it twice and probably good players will be shaking their head because it's probably a lot easier than I remember in terms of it being a difficult pinball thing to do I mean, it's an angle. For me, yeah. But, you know, it's one of those moments, and I'm sure we've all had them on pinball, where you literally fist pump like that guy during the Toy Story promo thing. And it just feels really good. And pinball's all about those moments. So, yeah, that's my one, Rob. Awesome. Well, as of today, our favorite shots in pinball. All right, so we're going to wrap things up. we're going to we've got a couple things show notes for you guys but we've got a cool kind of segment plan for next show so Dave you mind telling us about that one? Yeah we're just trying to come up with some cool ideas that could be a little bit sort of interactive with the audience I guess but also really drill down to sort of what it means to be a mod maker I suppose I had a couple of questions during seminar at Expo about you know how we go about choosing what mods to do for pinball. And it's a great question because it's really multifaceted. There's actually a lot of thinking that goes into doing that. And it's not just, oh, that would be incredible for that game. I would love to do that. There's more things involved than that. But what I thought would be fun was to get a random game from the audience. So any game, it could be probably not EMs because they're not the most, you know, mod friendly games in the world. But let's say, let's say anything from like, you know, early, early Sterns and Bally's and stuff onwards, you know, choose any game. And we'll take a look at that game on the spot without any preparation. And Rob and I will talk about opportunities that that game might have. We might look at the playfield and see that a particular sculpt on it could be improved or we might be familiar with the game and realise that certain shots, if we wanted to do something that was game changing, we probably won't. But those are the kind of ideas we'll be looking at. Rob's obviously more predominantly focused with toppers, so I might look at the playfield and Rob might look at the topper, but we don't really know the format yet. So what would be great is if we could get some ideas from anybody watching about what games to take a look at, and yeah, we'll have a look at that for the next game. Should we wait until the next stream before people announce that? Yeah, so no need to chime in now, but at the start of next stream or pretty quickly in, we'll kind of open it up and we'll cherry pick some ideas based on what's coming in and maybe talk about a few even. So that'll kick off our next episode which will be two weeks from now fortnightly on... It's going to be a running gag, isn't it? Fortnightly. Mine doesn't do it. I think I have to like... No, you don't. You must not have them at Mac. There we go. November 20th. I'm going to go outside. this is 5 Eastern and 10 GMT messed up the timing on that so guys thank you so much for being with us we're going to be on YouTube next week we had to wait for our grace period to go live on YouTube which apparently is a thing and we'll have some kinks worked out for you guys if you got any topics you want to cover if you want to be on our show one day if you want us to cover a mod we're all about pushing your guys stuff so hit us an email at pinball at gmail.com and then we do have a website up uh in before the lock.com and we're gonna piece together this episode in two parts uh post it up for you guys we may do it in audio too uh but davey i mean thank you so much for like taking this on with me this has been awesome thank you for suggesting two weeks yeah yeah and uh nothing can keep us apart we're nothing can keep us apart yeah 10 000 miles in the atlantic ocean can't keep us apart bro is the atlantic pacific well we'll do we'll we'll do it together at some point maybe maybe next year yeah that'd be cool all right let's do that all right episode one signing off in before the lock take care everybody have a great night