BlahCade Pinball Podcast this is the BlahCade Pinball Podcast i'm your host chris freebus aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world it's jared morgan hi everyone how are you going all right we're back with a regular show jared A regular show, that's right. Yeah, I know. It feels weird going back to the regular format. The regular format, yeah. So we've got this regular format show, and then we've got a special episode coming up the following week that's kind of timed with a PAX. Is it an online event, Jared? It is an online event, yeah. Not that button. Let's try this button. There we go. Hi. That's me. Hey. Sometimes you've got to know your hotkeys underneath without actually looking. Cookies are hard. Yeah. Yeah, so you're right. I use PAX. It's an online event, and I think it's like a side event to the main PAX sort of thing that's going on. So you'll have to wait and see. Wait and see, but I mean, it's no secret what we're going to be doing, which is we're having a Let's Play video and an interview at the same time with Rollers of the Realm Reunion. going on. It's kind of cool. They were like, hey, do you guys want to participate in this and do a live interview? We're like, yeah, okay. Yeah, let's try it. Let's give it a go. It was pretty fun. That'll be coming out I guess not next week, but the following week after July 10th, I believe. Yeah. So that's something we look forward to And we've Of course we've got stuff in the works over here That we'll be taking care of Trying to think Is there anything going on real quickly Just in general here Before we get into actual pinball talk Jared What's going on in your neck of the woods Oh Well I'm gearing up for BPAC Which is the Big event that Netherworld Runs in conjunction with this massive pub called Brewdog over here in Brisbane. We're going to have I think it's close to about 70 or 80 pinball machines and a lot of video games. I don't know the final number of video games but it's significant. They're going to be having a Donkey Kong tournament there. They're going to be having I think a couple of other side tournaments as well on the video game front. But on the pinball front, there's going to be a classics division so everything 80s and or up to 80s and sort of very early 90s before they go into dmds and there's going to be like you know um classic dmds and modern sterns it's gonna be a massive selection of games including two got leave system 80s which are going to be there um from me i'm donating pink panther and force 2 for people to smash away on there i like how you say you're donating them uh when really you're just you know you're showing off buddy well i'm totally showing off i'm showing shining like that's what it is it's show and shine like you do with cars exactly and and it's exactly it's exactly what what um everyone who's donating a machine is doing they're going look i'm giving it over and look we get a free entry into one of the events um so every machine you donate you get a free entry to something so So that's kind of nice that they're giving back to the people who donate their games. Right. But yeah, it's totally because I want people to see these games because down here in Australia, I think there might only be one other owner who has them in their private collection. And certainly there's none out on location anywhere that I'm aware of. So this will probably be the first time that anyone has ever played these, certainly in Brisbane, perhaps in Australia. So that's pretty exciting. But yeah, there's all sorts of other games there as well. Normally, there's a couple of really, really nice full restorations there. I think they had a Black Knight 2000 that was like a complete playfield swap. Looks like brand new plastics, brand new LCD displays. This thing was mint as it looked like it straight out of the box. And it was incredible to play. So yeah, you often get these little surprises. And the funny thing is, though, that this is the thing that made me change the way I do restorations. I was striving for perfection and having everything perfect, but there was a couple of games last year that presented very much as player's condition. But when you play them, it's like, well, who cares? They're still fun to play. You don't have a lot of time to go, wait a second, that paint line isn't completely straight. You're just concentrating on the ball flying around. and as long as the ball rolls smooth you really don't care and the and mechanicals are strong yeah it's like well this play is fun so who cares what it looks like it's got a bit of it's got a bit of bark off the play field as they say who cares right yep you know and that's exactly how it is so i mean i still don't i still think i've done a pretty good job on both these machines but like as far as you know obsessing over it like i did with star race it definitely wasn't to that level this time around yeah so it it just kind of reminds me of there's a uh there's a youtube uh youtuber that i i found myself watching even though i have no concerns about what's really going on in his videos uh i know his name is matthias i don't remember what his channel is but basically he likes to take uh pianos and do funky things with them like replace all the strings with guitar strings or oh right replace all the hammers with actual hammers. And it creates these really rather unique sounds. And then what he'll do is he'll call an unsuspecting piano tech to come visit him and go, my piano sounds really funny. Can you diagnose it? Just to have a laugh. And he lives in Sweden, and so it's not like these piano techs are local. So he starts feeling bad if he's made them drive two hours to come and visit him. stuff but the end result a lot of the times is they get a good chuckle out of it because yeah they're just kind of like you know what it's good to see somebody actually having fun with these things yeah um and and giving us something you know different to look at uh and a different sound altogether to the point that he actually had a software company ask him to record all of these things, and then they imported the sound into their digital piano as one of the filters that you could put on. Oh, they actually made it a profile. Yeah. That's awesome. So I just kind of think about that with pinball and going and playing it, where it's just like, hey, you know what? So long as it rolls, it doesn't matter what it looks like. As long as you can play it and it flips. Yeah. Doesn't matter. Exactly right. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to people being able to play these two. And, you know, thankfully, because I've done the hard work this time around, not that I didn't do hard work on Star Race, but, you know, I replaced literally every circuit board that could be replaced in the game. So I very much doubt I'm going to have the same downtime issues that I had with Star Race this time around. Yeah, so I think they're going to last the last two weeks. Are you going to be open for offers? I may be open for offers. You've got to be open for trade. Trade up in the world. That's what I'm open to. I mean, these games, I never am shy about saying this, they don't owe me much change from five and a half grand Australian. Yeah. So that includes purchase price of the original machine, plus all the stuff I put in them. Like their 5-5-5 would, I think, just cover costs. So, you know, if I could get 6-5 for one of these, I might look at selling, or if we could swap for maybe an early solid state that's in good condition, yeah. Well, that's what I'm thinking is that, you know, like you said, these two machines that you have aren't exactly readily available in Australia. They are not common. No. And so that's what you play up is to one of these collectors that would really like one and then would possibly want to really dive in and do a proper restoration on them, where you've already done at least the board work, so now becomes the aesthetics that they would need to really go nitty-gritty on. I mean, I know you do your job on it and stuff, but... If they want to, like, you know, two-pack clear coat and get a professional playfield restorer to go over it with a fine-tooth coat. Yeah. So there's where it's like, hey, I'll trade you my hard-to-find item that you wouldn't normally find in Australia for maybe your better upkept but rather easier to get, you know, Williams machine. That's right. like a mid-era sold state, something with an alphanumeric display, for example. I'd settle on one of those. That's where I'd just be like, what's that? You want to give me your Centaur? Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Shut up and take my money. That's right. Yeah, well, that's funny because a Centaur is... It's kind of the same as the ones I've got in that it's a single-level play field. There's no ramps. There's no modes and all that, but it's just a really nice machine. Yeah. So, yeah, I get what you're saying. I'd swap around. I would definitely swap one for another. And, you know, I'm open to ideas. So if you're reading this and you're going, because some people are over in the States and they will be actually traveling over for this, whether they listen to our show or not. But, yes, I am open to offers if you want to. Let's talk trading on these ones. All right. So we're going to dive right into our main piece, which is Playing Taps. Digital Pan, fellow fans, is about to go bye-bye, folks. By the time you watch this, it very well might. Once July rolls around, it's gone. Gone. Yeah. So basically what is going on here, Gord Lacey, he's the one that founded the forum, put it up there. He's been financing this thing all these years, and it initially started off as pinball arcade fans, and then wisely diversified out of that into just digital pinball fans. Gordon saw the writing on the wall, same as we did. Yeah. And that's why it's now digital pinball fans instead of the pinball or pinball arcade fans. But, you know, for a while there, it was a very thriving forum. Lots of discussions going on. It was incredibly vibrant. Yeah, it was great. It was a load of laughs. But since then, it's kind of fallen off the face of the earth. The user engagement is rather slim. And part of that is because a lot of that user engagement has moved over into Twitter, into Discord, into Reddit, you know, all these things. and just the form of that nature in general. Again, this started up in 2012, so 10 years ago. The internet has changed since then. It has evolved in a decade. And people are looking for... They don't really want to participate in forum stream style interactions anymore. They want to have that chat style interaction with people. in almost real time. You could argue that, well, forums give you that if there's a high volume of people writing, but at the same time, you can get the same feeling as a forum just by threading conversations under. We're in a different era since when that started, but I thought that today, since it's going away, we might get a little bit of a eulogy to it. We're going to reminisce a bit. Because, quite honestly, without that forum that Gord created, there would be no Blockade. No. Chris and I would never have met if it wasn't for that forum. No. Quite honestly, Zen wouldn't have the connection that they do with the audience that they do now without that forum. Correct. that's not to say that digital pinball wouldn't have risen like it has been. No. But I think the, in a lot of ways, I think we were all part of the same whirlpool of activity, and everything fed itself and made it all grow in a nice organic way. And since then, it's all diversified and shot off in different directions. But without that central thing, I don't think a lot of this would be how we know it today. And so for that, we all owe Gord just heaps and heaps of praise and acknowledgement. Gord is on Twitter. I believe it's at Gord Lacey. Go over there, fire him off a big old thank you. Just give him some love. That being said, he is open to keeping the site open if you want to pay the fee. Yep. There is an ongoing cost to license the server and host it each month. Yeah. So if you really want it, you can pony up the cash and it can stay alive. As far as archiving all the threads on it, forums tend to be quite a little bit like... There is some history on that site, which we sort of, in our shows now and again, we quote from um because you know a lot of the time we were participating in the posts that were discussing this particular particular items of history so that will probably go um there might be internet like way back machine um cuts of some of the posts because it's it's been up for a while it should be indexed but yeah it's um there's a lot of stuff that will go away which is that goes I just realized there's something that I definitely need to go in there and save because I reference it now and then, and that is the Zen Pinball Designers thread. All the tables that are out there and which designers worked on which table. Yeah, that needs to get put somewhere else if it's not already put somewhere else. Something else that got pointed out to me that I went, what? And then I listened and I went, what? I didn't even know this Jared I don't think either of you have these saved but our all of our podcasts are linked via Mediafire there oh the old ones? episode one the pilot is there oh wow I'm a friend of the show Jeff Strong who used to always participate in those shows he did a lot of the post production on the episodes initially And yeah, he was using Mediafire and just dumping it up there as a thing. I think we need to go grab those because I listened to the pilot episode and it was cringe. But there was definitely the seeds of what you all know today. Jared doesn't sound like anything like Jared sounds now. I was using a very crappy headset mic it was like a single little bar that went in front of my mouth I think we all were using a variation of headset mics I think I was probably using a LifeChat 3000 headset which I was using for office stuff at the time everybody was like but your mic sounds so good and I'm like that's because it's practically in my mouth I'm eating it in my mouth I then went and listen to uh the infamous episode three where we did i did a quiz at the end and unfortunately jared had left the podcast by that time he had some place to go um and this is when we were having like six seven people in the the podcast It was utter chaos when we had that many people And that actually the name of the episode is Utter Chaos. And there was a quiz where I was giving because there was a speculation thread on the forum of what tables did we think might be coming out in Pinball Arcade. And so I was taking the names of pinball machines and doing like, I was like, oh, there's an image of a rock and a spark. What table would that be? And the answer was Flintstones because sparking rock. And I was getting much groans and everybody was just like, oh, that's terrible. And then I was, there was there was an individual that was infamous on our forums named Heretic, who was an Irishman who always said he would come on the show, would find every excuse under the sun not to show up and be on there because he didn't want to hear his voice. And so I started doing a very terrible Irish accent imitating him. It was the worst. I mean, it's like I listen to it now and I'm like, boy, that barely sounds any different than me. It really didn't. In my head it sounded a lot different. But the joke was every single one of his answers was, oh, it's Adam's family. Yeah, I remember that episode. Until the very last one where I gave it was like, the clue is it's the Paramount Mountain, and Bobby King, who was the president of Farsight, is planting a flag on the top of it because that was there. We've got to get, Adam's family, we've got to get it. And so I said, so Heretic, what game is that? And he goes, Safecracker. And I totally forgot about that, and I just started laughing. I was like that's too funny yeah there was shenanigans and boy did we ever put a lot of effort into post production back then like there were like I remember having to do some of those shows where we used to do a bump in and bump out track well that was that was all Jeff and I took it over and then I went this is way too much work I can't do this and I just stamped it out but then we you know we started to evolve and move into more video based yeah once we got into video it was kind of there wasn't a need for the audio effects. Because otherwise, you'd have to do video effects. We're not doing those. That's right. We don't have a Steam deck, so we can't drop sim easily. I remember us joking that someone should give us more money so we can actually buy a Steam deck. Yeah. But no one ever did. Some people are really kind, and they do give us a few bucks here and there. Yeah, nobody ever bothered designing our logo for us. They made me do that. nobody bothered giving us a steam deck nobody uh or stream deck um i don't know we'd now and then ask for things and nobody ever gave it to us no um all right that's that's us though that's our history which interestingly enough i'm realizing uh come november we celebrate our 10-year anniversary 10 years doing this wow yeah talking about stuff and things stuff and things so what i I do want to do, I want to just talk about personally, you and I, how this forum affected us, how we both discovered it. And then we'll kind of reminisce about some of the things that, the good and the bad of digital pinball fans. I don't know which of us got on the forum first. Do you happen to remember? I don't recall. In fact, I'm even having a hard time recalling how I discovered the forum. I think I was just doing a random Google search. That is exactly how mine went. So the Pinball Arcade got announced sometime, I want to say, in late 2011, like November of 2011 or so. um and it was before christmas it was before christmas the game released on iphone i believe on ios in december of that year and then came i discovered the game in february of 2012 started google searching because there was the four tables that it came with which were Black Hole, Medieval Mad... No, it was Black Hole. What was the Stern Table? Was it Ripley's? It's Ripley's. It was Ripley's. Theater of Magic. Yep. And because that was the ballet machine, what was the Williams machine? Oh, I can't recall. It's going to eat me up now, but I can't remember it. It is. It's going to totally eat me up. It wasn't Bride of Pinball. No, because that was the first or second pack. Second pack, I think. Bride came with Medieval Madness. It was quite the killer pack. That was quite the killer pack. And I spent so much time playing those two tables. Ridiculous amount of time playing those two tables. So that was in February that I got it on the PS3, and I started doing a Google search trying to find out more about Pinball Arcade. And that's where I discovered fans. So, yeah, nice SEO there, Gord. And I became a member of it in March of 2012. Yes. I would have to quickly scramble and load up the site and try and log into it to see when I was a member. But I think it was definitely the same year And it probably would have been when Pimble Arcade came out on Android that I would have got interested because that was the platform I had. Didn't really have a PC platform back then. For ages, I was an Android Android all the time. Which I discovered listening to that first podcast. Because Jared had a special section just for him in the podcast called Android Talk. Yeah. because he couldn't relate to the console talk or well it wasn't even out on pc at that time no that's right it was just console it was just console and mobile yeah that's right yeah yeah um but clearly you were in it pretty quick you were in the forum pretty quickly i got on pretty as soon as i went oh there's a forum where i can talk with other pinball nerds about pinball yes i'm in for that um sign me up the strange thing is when i joined into it it was already thriving I mean, there was a lot of threads, a lot of categories. It was exciting to talk about because it was just like so much that could come into the pipe, so much speculation. And there were two tables coming out every month. I mean, it was just like the minute you started playing, there was already more coming along the way. and it was already so much better than what... Toten wasn't one of the tables, was it? I think that was the Williams table. Oh, yeah. It was Tales of the Arabian Nights. Was it Tales of the Arabian Nights, the first launch? Yes. Yeah? That actually is right. It was. Yeah. I mean, what a killer opener. Yeah, it was. It's fantastic. I mean, again, if that's what your opener is, that just set the bar for excitement. Oh, yeah. Gosh, there's so much that could be awesome. It's like there's modern Williams in these. It's not just old Gottliebs. Well, and to anybody that had the Williams Hall of Fame or the Gottlieb Hall of Fame that Farsighted put out previously, there was already a marked improvement with how the games played. And that was a marked improvement over any previous digital version that had been available of those games. Just visually it looked so much better, and the physics were better. And the only other thing that you could compare it to was, at that same time, Zen was out on the consoles with both Zen Pinball and just Pinball FX1, I believe. And the knock on Zen back then was, well, we don't have any nostalgia towards these tables, but void do the memories flood come flooding in when you see a williams or a valley table pop in oh yeah and so that was to answer your question i joined on if this is um regular date the 5th of august 2012 unless it's u.s date which would be the 8th of um may i think you would have been 8th of may there's no way that you were i think it's 8th of may yeah there's no way that you were in August because our first recording was, well, we were already doing chat room by that point. Yeah, that's right. We had an IRC room out. Yes. So that's what, I think that's what we're next going to kind of dive into. We, a group of us were on the forum, it seemed like daily. Oh, yeah. Just having a good old time ripping back and forth. Jeff was a moderator already. And was wielding the Banhammer along with Sean Dos Carlos. Oh, yes. And Gord. And the Banhammer was essential because things were getting toxic real fast. At one point, it was not an easy place to be sometimes. There were a lot of trolls on the forum. And I mean, vicious trolls. Horrible trolls. Shredding into people. um and but you started seeing these regular players and so the regular players were again myself jared um jeff narcolepsy time lord bill um uh sean there was this guy named skillshot and then heretic and they were basically the two drunken idiots um trying to think if there's any I mean, a lot of them wound up on our initial podcasts. Xenia was back in the day. He was labeled something else. I forget what his username was back then. But what we realized was a lot of the reasons why people were getting banned was because they were going off topic in threads. Yes. And we all said, you know what? We need a place that we can talk off topic. and just rip-roar. And this is where I know that, Jared, you came into prominence in my head was because of the IARC chat channel. Yeah. Because you seemed to have it permanently open. Yeah, I did. It was always open. Anyone could join in, jump in. And then if they were being idiots, I'd just kick-ban them. And that channel... Which is fun. That channel did a lot of waste. it wasn't easy to get into no but it's kind of what discord is today it actually is what discord is um it was it's actually irc for those who don't know what this is it's called internet relay chat um and at the time i was working for an open source company red hat and we use it all the time so i thought well heck let why don't we just use this i was on free node which is like a gaming a gaming server um and uh yeah i i just set it up on a whim to see if anyone wanted to come in and surprisingly people made the effort to jump in and it was great because you got to real-time chat and just shoot the breeze and we talked about everything but pinball it seemed oh it wasn't pinball related no in fact people came in and were trying to talk pinball and we often stopped doing that and just talked about rubbish. We often opened up a second channel just so that we could rip on the person that was trying to talk about pinball. Yeah, we really did. It was terrible. We were bad people. Yeah, we were not kind. No. There was a lot of mean girls going on there. There really was, yeah. We were bitches. But we also had, I don't remember if, I don't think Farsight was popping in at that time yet either. No, they weren't. But when we let them know on the forum, well, they saw the thread about the server, and these random people started popping in, and then they identified themselves as Farsight employees in the thread. And we went, oh, well, this is rad. Like, we weren't expecting this to happen. Yes, they were vaguely aware of us, and what wound up happening in that chat room, which we affectionately called the barcade. Yes, affectionately. Because, again, more than a few people were inebriated while being in there, and so it seemed appropriate. But none of us realized that there was an actual place called the barcade back east. Yes, LLC. Yes. And what typically wound up happening was I kind of always wound up being the moderator of the chat, trying to bring people around because we started doing little events inside there. I know we've talked about it here before. Yeah, we did. You know, five minutes and stuff like that. Five minute challenges. Yeah. And so then the idea became, because I just threw it out there. I went, you guys know that Farsight's only 90 minutes away from me. and then and Jeff had recently moved uh to California to Southern California and it was just haphazardly thrown out there oh you guys you guys should you know contact Farsight ha ha ha I was like yeah I should do that I should should I say hey can we do an interview because I was just looking for an excuse to go visit them and everybody was like yeah that's a really great idea and I went yeah what all right and I and I just kind of jokingly went hey if you guys can get me the contact information i'll do it and somebody got the contact information so i was like all right i guess i have to do it yeah i'm gonna go out there and do this interview i guess so me and jeff wound up going up there doing the interview and that's where it really sealed the deal of them knowing who the heck we were um and that opened up a really great line of communication um and once that line of communication was open between them that's then when they really started visiting the forum and then gourd went one step beyond and basically gave them special uh highlighted status in the threads so that everybody would know if they were an official he blew checkmarked them before blue check marks were a thing um yeah totally did like there was a clear indicator on that say oh farsight employee yeah um so yeah it was and then farsight really started using the site um as basically it was people like haids forum at that point like they they weren't paying a cent for it but they were absolutely using and abusing it at that point yeah for their own like for their own benefit like which we the fans loved because it was hey look at this interaction that we're having um yeah the sad truth of it that when we look at it now was boy were they spitting a lot of bs oh yeah they really were they were they were telling us what we wanted to hear not what was actually happening and that quickly became the catchphrase of that we all learned to love and hate from farsight which is yes we would like to do that yeah that's a great idea it sounds like something we'd love to do yeah it didn't mean that they were going to it just meant that they would like to yeah which was the the classic non-committal answer that uh we all know and Yes. And they started doing the 12 Days of Christmas there, which was a whole other fiasco. There was a lot of fiascos that wound up going on. But it did, I think, Jeff and I visited personally one other time because we recorded an interview with Norman. That's right. Norman's a great guy. Norman Sopansky. Yeah. And I've contacted him within the last year and said, hey, if you ever want to spill the beans on Farsight, and he goes, only when Farsight closes. Only when Farsight closes. And he goes, and then I'll have much to say. I just went, man. He still has too many. He lives near those people. Yeah And then I went up there I believe twice more myself on two other occasions Actually one of the times you went up there you actually got to play the never Arkuta cabinet. Well, that was the final time I went up there, and that was basically to get their side of losing the Zen license. Yeah. And that was a dark time. that was really tough for them but also quite hard for us as well yeah i'll put it to you this way the first time that me and jeff went up to fireside we had to sign in there was a receptionist at the front door you know the little desk there um it was bustling with people there was activity um it was relatively quiet still but um that's the big i'd never visited where gaming programming goes on i didn't realize everybody lived under headphones um totally dude and but there was a lot of people all over the place that last time i went no receptionist um that area was looked like now it was just storage of stuff uh there was hardly anybody around cubicles were empty all over the place uh there was no machines being torn apart in the work area as previously um that time they did show me the garage where all their former games just sat folded up uh wrapped in plastic which made me very sad mainly because they just literally ran out of floor space. They couldn't fit five seasons of pinball machines on the floor there. No, and they had nowhere else to store them. Yeah. And they weren't going to sell them, so they just sat there. I really hope they took the batteries out of those machines. I'm sure they did, but here's the thing that you've got to realize, too. This was up in the mountains where it snowed. Yeah. And their studio was essentially a very large house. Right. So when I say garage, it literally was a three-car garage with a metal roll-down door, concrete floor. That's where all those machines were just sitting. It was not climate-controlled. So they would have frozen in the winter and cooked in the summer. Yep. Yep. Really tragic. The rust on those machines would be phenomenal. Really tragic. and I imagine that they're to this day sitting there still. Yeah, because Fasto had a Ryan Policky that they got bitten when they did the Gottlieb collections because they had to rebuy all the machines again. Oh, it was the Williams collection. That's right, the Williams one. Yeah. Never to sell a machine again. No. But it's probably time for them to think about doing that if they haven't already. But then again, they never really actually restored the machines, which I learned. No, they took them in and they digitally retouched them. Yes, they did massive retouching. They did everything. If you ever saw what their genie play field actually looked like, you would wonder where they got that image from. Which is why the infamous Bones, not Bonus, was on the play field of that game for ages because they literally had to redraw the art. and they misspelt the redrawing. How can you do that? Anyhow. So there was a few years there where the forum was just cranking. Yeah. I mean, I look at... There was hundreds of posts a day. Hundreds of posts. It was actually a struggle to keep up. Yeah. I have over 8,000 posts there. Yeah. And I think I've got... What is my post amount? It's something quite surprising. 4,333 posts. Yeah. Yeah. That's a lot of posts. It really is. And eventually, well, eventually me and Jared also got brought in as moderators. But by that time, the culture had been established. Yeah, we'd stamped out all the trolls. Yeah. Other than Heretic. Heretic was the one troll we allowed. Just because we found him funny. and he never he A. knew when to back off and B. never got terribly personal no that's what we really had a problem with when people started to attack Fastlight employees and make personal attacks on other people we went nope you're not doing that that was a hard no from us as moderators and there are people to this day that probably still hate us for it because you know we did clamp down pretty hard on some folks because they didn't respect the rules and they were being being um toxic people and i'm pretty sure they still hate us today for it well i remember and again so i mentioned earlier there was a guy by the name of skillshot and he got so belligerent and so out of line that he was even offending heretic but that's something as heretic was not easily offended no and uh he wound up getting banned, at which point he then went on Facebook pages and started personally attacking members of whose Facebook pages... The moderation team. The moderation team. Yeah. And sending letters to Gord that were very threatening, and that's when he got seriously perma-banned. Yeah. He was using aliases to try and re-sign up as himself. Yeah, so think about that. And he wasn't the only one that was doing this. Think about that, folks. That's how popular this forum was. People were desperate to get back on it. Gord had a waiting list until, which was easy to manage until, again, the spambots started trying to sign up. Oh, yeah. That was punishing for Gord. Yeah. That was kind of when the spambots started going in. I think that was the beginning of the end for Gord, where he stopped caring about the forum. I was like, you know what? Yeah, you guys moderate it. Yeah, it's not worth my time. I've got people paying me money to do... Like, Glob was in web development, I think. Yes. Which is why he had servers lying around that he could just host things on. Yeah. So, yeah, it was like, this is actually costing me money, not just hosting money, but my time that I could actually be using on client projects. So, you guys look after it. So, I would say probably around... 2016 uh i think that's when the name change came down well because that would coincide with zen acquiring no that well that was 2018 but what we were starting to see was the writing on the wall in terms of farsight's not getting better with their product um they're not making any improvements and they're kind of coasting on their laurels and the bugs are getting more and more severe some people seem to think that the forum was nothing but a place that ripped on pinball arcade that everybody hated on pinball arcade that's not the case at all and i and i say that now having listened to just those first couple of of episodes of our podcast where we're heaping praise on it and oh we were and at the time it was the only game in town oh and it was just funny because uh the ps4 had version had just come out and time lord was just like it looks unbelievable, and the way the light is casting is amazing, and I'm just chuckling to myself now, going, boy, we were easily amused back then, weren't we? Yeah. But, no, basically discussions were happening with Gord where it was like, you know what, we might want to consider this no longer being about digital pinball, or about the pinball arcade, because at the same time, Pinball Effects 2 was now out and thriving, and Zen was doing all sorts of interesting original tales. Again, I still was on the fence on Zen. I still had no personal connection, and the ball still was a leaden weight. But, there was a lot of discussions. People were talking about it. A lot of discussion about Zen was actually really increasing a lot, and we were going, well, really, is it right to call it Pinball Arcade Fans anymore when we're talking about Zacharia and Magic Pixel doing their work, Zen and there were even some other smaller things like, I think was that too early for Pinball Wicked? I forget when they started developing but we had we started to see more of these outliers coming in to do digital pinball as well, trying to ride the coattails of Farsight with the popularity of pinball in general and digital pinball that was burgeoning in that decade. And not only that, but whole threads were popping up of, can you imagine if Zen did Williams and Valley Machines? What if Zen did what Farsight is doing right now? How would that be different? Those discussions were popping up. And that was kind of the start of... I know we started talking to Bob-omb Barbie, or... Bobby Bob-omb. Bobby Bob-omb. That's it. I'm like, what is it? Because Zen also had a form that looked very, it was the exact same form look as what Pinball Arcade fans was. Their form just wasn't as lively, but Bobby was the community manager over there. And she was occasionally popping over onto ours. And again, I don't know if that was Gord reaching out to her or she had reached out to him. But what transpired was all of a sudden there was a little bit of a link and communication to Zen. And I know that Jared and I got then in communication with Bobby because I had switched over to PC by that time. Yeah. And we were, and I know that I had scooped up a whole bunch of Zen tables in a Humble Bundle sale and some Steam sales, but we had a lot of gaps. And so we communicated to Bobby, and she was like, tell you what, I'll fill in all the gaps. Yeah, we went, what? Yeah, that was really, it was like, that was nice. Yeah, it was, yeah. So she was like, wait, which tables are you missing? Okay, fine, here's code for that, here's code for that, here's code for that. Boom, now you're up to date. It was like, oh my god. Yeah, that was really cool. Yeah. And so that was kind of this weird transition, but that was also when the thread started decreasing a little bit. I know I wasn't on there so much. we might have done too good a job moderating because the fun kind of disappeared from the forums none of us were using the chat anymore Jared and I were getting all of our chat out via this podcast yeah it was kind of a weird transition and then one day I get a message from Gord and he goes I want to say he was like he was like hey I don't want to put this over the forum you need to come here but you need to I need to chat with you he's like do you have do you mind if I call you yeah and I was like okay so I gave him my phone number and he calls me and he goes you're never going to believe who I just had a conversation with I said okay he goes I just talked to Zen I go what do you mean and he goes well this guy Mel Kirk he goes I I just I've reached out to him just for the sake or he reached out to me just and we and we were talking and he told me good they're getting the Williams license and I just went what are you kidding me and he goes no I go spill give me all the dirt and it was crazy oh I think I lost Jared uh oh Jared just blue screened of death dun dun dun well I'm going to tell the story anyway maybe he'll be able to come on back in give me one second here folks I'm just going to tell him come back I'll talk until then this is why we don't do this show live um so yeah he he uh he proceeded to spill the beans on everything that uh was about to happen with with all and i was floored and but the end result was that gourd goes do you want to talk to mel do you want me to put you in contact with him and i was just like absolutely that needs to happen by all means and so he gave me mel's contact information and made contact and that was when all of a sudden was like okay we'll talk to you but we gotta send you some nda forms uh so those all came in the mail signed all those fired him back and then the wealth of information we got and it was so tricky because it was like desperately want to talk about on the farm can't do it desperately want to talk about it in the podcast can't do it uh farsight's still releasing stuff and i'm still in communication with farsight can't say a word to them about any of this stuff i literally knew they lost the license before they knew that they lost the license that's what's um kind of kind of crazy to think about that i well i mean i can't say that for certain that i know that uh i knew that farsighted lost the license before they knew but it's possible that i did uh jared's back let me go ahead and uh there he is hey blue screen don't know why yeah so i just i i just did the the quick rundown of when we found out that we got to get in contact with Zen and sign a whole bunch of NDAs. That was a wild ride. That was so insane. Yeah. And there's, again, there's where we have to absolutely praise Gord, because without him, I don't think we would have gotten that intro to Mel and Zen. Oh, no. No way. There's no way that relationship would have established itself. and that has paid so many dividends not i mean obviously it's paid dividends to us uh and expanded what we do but again i think it's opened up such a line of communication just get information out of there and we had no idea that farsight would drop off the planet um and then would become the only game in town uh that was not what our you know we thought that oh, we're going to be talking to Zen, we're going to be talking to Farsight, we're going to be talking to Magic Pixel, this is going to be great. They could coexist, everyone could be happy. Yeah. But. No. Not to be. Now Farsight is pretty much completely dried up. They're not doing anything pinball related. Yeah, but again, by that point within the forum, when Pinball FX 3 came out, yeah, traffic picked up again on the forum, but it never got to the levels that it was when Pinball Arcade first came out. No. And again, I think it just has to do with there were so many new avenues for people to discuss the game. YouTube channels, Twitch channels, Twitter, Discord, Reddit. The fan forum just lost its place. It couldn't keep up with the times. Yeah, it just didn't remain relevant anymore. Yeah. It was just not really something that people needed anymore because there were easier ways of doing what they were doing on the forum. Which brings us to where we are today. I mean literally I go months without reading a single thing on the fan forum and notice that barely anything been posted Yeah I haven been on The only reason I logged on was purely by chance and I saw the thread about closing the forum down and I was going, oh, what? And even Zen was even starting, Zen wound up abandoning their own forum to come on to digital pinball fans and was using it to get beta testers and some behind-the-scenes stuff that wasn't being able to be communicated. But once they started managing their own Discord and Reddit, there was no need for us anymore. And by that point, they'd already figured out how to make actual contact with those that they needed to. Yeah. So the forum really just became an archive. Yeah. Which is why we're just giving you the heads up right now because there's going to be just a few days, if there's anything that you want to pull off of there, If there's anything that you want to save and archive for yourselves, do it quick. Do it while you can because it's about to go bye-bye. Death to digital pinball fans. Long live digital pinball fans. Vile digital pinball fans. Yeah. Anyway, on to other things, which we can't really show you, unfortunately. We're going to have to save that. But a new pinball show came out, which basically was announcing, hey, Bride of Pinbot, that's your next table, which is a big, huge hooray. Yes. As we were talking about earlier, it was one of the very first DLC that was in Pinball Arcade, and now it's finally coming here to Pinball FX. It comes along with the remainder of Season 6 tables, which were all the alphanumerics. So it's a very appropriate pack that the collection is coming out this go-around. So that's also Dr. Dude, Space Station, and Funhaus. Jared, you've had a chance to look at all these. We have a press build that we're able to look at. That's what we are not able to share with you, unfortunately. We can't share until it officially comes out. I'm going to save thoughts on Predapimbot for the moment. Those other three tables. my initial reaction is funhouse is dark and evil and i love the look of it yeah lighting has been well and truly revised in that table it reminds me of when i first ever saw the table uh i was in college i there was this arcade i frequented it was one of these arcades that was pretty much only lit by all the video games and pinball machines in the place uh with maybe some mild mood lighting and neon here and there, but a funhouse sat by itself in this evil little, like this is where they put the featured pinball machine of the month, basically. And it just looked dark and menacing and this freaking dummy head on the table. And it just creeped you out the way he talked and everything. And this is the first time I've seen it now in digital form where I went, that's what I remember. Right. That would have been a massive nostalgia trip. Oh, man. Because it's just Rudy is looking evil with the way the light is bouncing on him. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm very pleased with the look of Funhaus. The other two tables basically look fairly similar to how they looked in FX3. Yeah. with Dr. Dude and the space station. Yeah, I think Dr. Dude, maybe some of the light reflections have had some work done on them. Sure. The particle effects are obviously, again, doing with the particle effects that have been like with Monster Bash. Same thing. Where it's a little poppier, a little crisper. Yeah, they look good. I did notice for me, there was a, I mean, this is also just press preview stuff. They're probably going to fix it or you could just move my settings. But I think because Space Station is a darker table, I felt a bit of graininess creeping in on that particular table for me. It didn't look as sharp as the others. And I've looked at my settings in the game and they're all they don't have any of that motion blur stuff turned on. So, maybe, I don't know, it could just be that the other table's probably just so bright as well. Like they're you know um so yeah it's probably just that uh as for bright a pin bot i know both of us were excited to see what this is going to look like and for some reason we were both like oh it's gonna be so shiny chrome so when i booted it up i went okay it's not as shiny chrome as i remember but then i took a closer look at least at the table and so this was one of the knocks of with pinball arcade uh again this was like their second or third dlc pack i think was their second dlc pack there were so many low res textures uh and so many missing polygons oh yeah tons of missing polygons oh so much detail missing from the table and it was like what should be a gorgeous machine just didn't have that pop this thing is gorgeous detail all over the place the plastics It makes it look phenomenal on it. And the lighting is very nice and ambient. It's accurate. The lighting is accurate, and that's what you want. Yeah, the insert lights are giving a nice little pop because it is a table that has a good light show on it. It looks great. Yeah. The other thing that stood out for me was excellent job on the enhancements, guys. Very tasteful. they basically got a little bride wandering around on the side of the table and a phenomenal modeling of her and also motion capture I'm just imagining Deep doing all these poses I wonder if it was Deep doing it because he seems to be the motion capture guy I don't know he's a gymnast if he is there's some pretty interesting poses happening there but really Because we were wondering what was going to happen with the metamorphosis, and was it going to be affecting the playfield itself? No, the playfield doesn't get affected, but the bride on the side of the playfield gets affected, and she goes through metamorphosis. I wish she was bigger. Actually, in this case, I wish she was bigger. So let me ask you this, because I had that initial thought, and then I went, wait a second. So I had turned off William's, they call it William's action cam. Yeah. you turn that on it zooms in on her and now you can see all the details of her as she transforms yes i did see that happen once or twice um which made me want to go i just wish i could see him more um yeah because it she's very like probably one of the best models i think they've done so far oh absolutely it looks really spectacular yeah um the only model on there that i went there's over on the uh the the feedback ramp the plastic ramp over on the right hand side there's an apple yeah which mimics one of the stickers that's on that ramp but when the ball hits the apple it does this stupid noise that goes bing yes doesn't me too okay what is this like that was just like what is that noise why is that in the game it's a poor choice for a noise they could have done a better noise they just need to change it sounds like something you would see on I don't know the hurricane table or like a comedy style table it has a comedy theme to it and this is not a comedy table it needs to have a science fiction sound to it, not a cartoon sound to it. I don't know if Farsight if Zen will have time to adjust or fix that or if they even care to fix that. Probably not. Probably not, but it's one of those things. I don't even think they could just take it out and I don't think anyone would miss it at all. Yeah. It's the only enhancement on there where I just kind of go that takes me out. All the other enhancements are great. There's a little pinbot up at the top who looks down or his visor mechanic, basically like a floating head kind of does this little thing and looks down on your ball when it's up in the feed up there. Perhaps the thing that I'm most excited for that I saw in Bride. So when the ball comes down the plastic and it's going to drop down into that lane, Sam finally nailed what happens to the ball, where it doesn't just come and drop down immediately. No, it kind of does a little boom, boom, and then drops. Oh, yes. I want that in Whitewater because that's what is supposed to happen in those instances they finally nailed it I remember I think Farsight when they did a couple of these tables they actually put that in as a high coded effect it actually rattled around in the hole and then dropped and it was coded in so it would do that but I think in this case it does actually do a little whirlpool as it goes in it's really nice physics wise, mechanics how it plays it very much feels like the real machine I'm not noticing anything that I'm going well that doesn't feel right that doesn't seem like how the ball should be moving that's a weirdness happening up that little flip flop diverter Oh, at the... At the eyes? Yes, so there is some... They've got some work to do on the mechanics. Yeah, just a little bit of mission. I've had the ball sticking up there, and then magically... Here's the great thing. Unlike Pimble Arcade, where you had to call an attendant, Zen just goes, wait, the ball's stuck there for five seconds. Yeah, we're just... Ball disappears, pops back in the shooter lane. Unfortunately, it seems to happen when you're doing both of the eyes. You've just locked both of the eyes, or getting both of the eyes, And then one dispersion, and now you have to go through the whole sequence again to get it back in there. Yeah. Yeah. But that's why this is technically the beta that we're playing still. That's right. So they'll fix that. Yeah. It'll just be the reason being is that that mechanism, when you're looking at the game, has got a lot of play and a lot of lucence in it. And theirs doesn't. It feels very, very stiff when the ball goes through there. You actually see the ball slow down quite a lot when it passes through the flip-flop. So they just need to reduce the friction on that part, and that'll solve the problem. But it's kind of fun actually seeing the mechanical piece of it. The flip-flop actually happening. Yeah, it's actually functioning. Because it was a predetermined ball path in Farsight's version of it. You can actually see the ball completely ignore the actual ball path that it was supposed to go on and just settle into the hole. I will say that I miss with Pinball Arcade. they had all the custom ball skins and one of the ball skins was an eyeball and so that was my go-to ball when playing Bright of Pinbot so I could have two eyeballs settle in there I'm going to miss that not being a thing for that what is your thoughts so apart from those are all positive things that Zen has done with Bright of Pinbot the one thing that Zen can't do anything about with Bride of Pinbot is the coding. Yeah, the rules. The rules. Now, what is your thought about the rules, Jared? Because personally, I don't care that Bride of Pinbot isn't a tournament table. I've always viewed Bride as an excellent table to step up from a beginner table because there is a definite progression to your shooting. but it's that being said yes if all you're going for is the billions of points it becomes a one ramp machine oh it's always a one ramp machine yeah um but and that's like that's what that game's known but if you were to be learning it seems like it's a good machine to learn pinball on there is because when you're shooting the you know all the loop shots like the one that's underneath the skill shot area that loops back to the left flipper. Generally, I think the return's a bit safe at the moment. Yeah, it's very conservative. And very, very consistent, which it's not in the real game. It's quite variable. Which return is it variable on? The right shot. Oh, when it comes out of the pop bumpers? No, the little, the sneaky far right shot that you shoot into, it goes diggity-diggy and then comes back out to the flipper. The jackpot shot. the jackpot light shot that one, depending on how hard you put the ball into that slot determines how fast it comes out the back end of it sorry, the front end of it if you look at it from a directional perspective and it's it is it's too safe at the moment it'll be interesting to see what folks think when it gets released, because I think it's quite conservative, and this is on like, you know, the Zen Enhanced, what do we call it now? I don't even know what we call it anymore. Zen physics? The Williams physics. And again, I've got to couch that. These still aren't the official Williams settings. The Williams pinball physics, flipper physics are there, but we're still dealing with Zen table settings, being that the flippers still have a more severe angle and the hungriness of Outlanes has been set to easy. What they call liberal. If you're using what they tell you in the instructions. Not conservative. It's conservative for the operator, not conservative for the player. Yeah. So this is, in a lot of respects, it plays kind of like what the Pinball Arcade version plays where it's... The ball is a little more wild here, but it's still fairly... Fairly predictable still. Yeah. Yeah, it's safe. Yeah. Yeah. Not as wild as some of the other tables that are in the collection. Yeah. And they're still, like, as we've said, as we're still in early access, I'm not worried that Zen doesn't have the tougher settings put in yet. But once we get toward, I mean, we're mid-summer. Well, summer just started, technically. Let's say once we get towards the end of August, if we still haven't seen anything on that front, I think we definitely need to start rattling the sabers and really asking Zen, are you going to put in these other settings? Because we would like them. But they're very much still just introducing new things. I believe they're about to introduce custom tournaments, user-generated tournaments. Yeah, that's what was announced. Yeah, so that's the kind of thing that they're still working on, getting functions into the game before they start doing those little nitty-bitty things that 7 out of 10 pinball users aren't going to care about. So it's 30% of us that are going to be screaming bloody murder if we don't get it. just as you create art broad strokes first then final strokes there you go there you go um all right well that's kind of going to be it for our time today uh if you have any uh oh lost jared again um if you have any uh thoughts uh memories all that kind of thing about digital pinball fans please let us know hit us up we want to reminisce with you on the Twitters and next time like I said I think we're going to do a let's play of Bride and we'll probably do the volume six tables too just so you guys can see them in action in play and beyond that it'll be those things that Jared loves to talk about so much stuff and things like I said Jared just a blue screen of death again apparently so that's why he's not here but until next time folks catch you later