thanks for tuning in to loser kid pinball podcast we are on episode 164 it's gonna be an epic podcast as always with me my co-host scott larson i'm josh roop and if you are looking for the new king kong myth of terror island today is the day to be hitting up flipping out pinball with zach and nicole many they will get you hooked up uh if you want le i don't know if you can get one but hit them up. You better jump on it. Yeah. Yeah. They're going fast. I hear these are sounding like hotcakes. This game looks insane. And there's no one better to talk to about this than the goat himself, Keith Elwin. So, Keith, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. I know it's a very busy day. Again, you're the unofficial official third host, right? Exactly. I hear that Travis Murray is trying to vie for your spot, though. So he keeps trying, but Travis started his own podcast, so he doesn't care anymore. I go on his podcast and he doesn't show up. So yeah, that's what happens. You had to go to like a local 7-Eleven for their internet. So you catch the last 30 minutes of the podcast. Wasn't he walking around in the podcast? It was like he was walking around his house trying to find service. Yeah. Yeah. He had just moved in, didn't have any service. that's like paying five bucks to the gentleman at 7-eleven don't you hey can i get a slurpee and the wi-fi password yeah okay okay so we have Keith Elwin we are we are trying to be very careful about keith stein because he has a very busy day this is release day um just a quick recap in case you are living under a rock uh keith burst onto the scene with Iron Maiden, which is right above my head, and then followed it up with Jurassic Park and Iron... Sorry. The Avengers. Yeah, Avengers, Infinity Stones, and then Godzilla. He also just sneaked in a Bond 60, and now he finished up with Jaws, and now he's on to King Kong. So we can definitely solidify Keith as the King of Monsters and and has sold more monster pinball machines than anybody in history. So again, Keith, welcome to the show. We always love having you on because of the insights that you bring. And okay, so how has the release been? Just want to get your feedback on that. It's been a strange day, man. I walk in my office, and there's a banana sitting there. The banana flippers are out. It's great. Did you originally put banana flippers in it? Yeah. Did you leave the banana flippers in the coin box, though, as like a mod that you could do? To answer your question, there is a pro behind me that has banana flippers in it, yes. So I've had these banana flippers for decades. I don't know where I came across them. And I used them once, put them in ACDC as a mini tournament at my house. Everyone's like, oh, my God, this is so hard. This is great. and that's the only time I've ever used them. And then when we were developing Kong, it was like, yeah, for the hell of it, I'm just going to put banana flippers in the pro. And everyone went crazy. So it turned off extra balls, made it extra hard, and we're having competitions to get the highest score with banana flippers. Yeah, it totally changes the game, obviously, because all the trajectories that you've memorized over the years, they go right out the window. Can you trap up on banana flippers, or do they kind of oscillate? That's pretty much all you can do, yeah. drop and sling it's very hard you probably have milliseconds if you're shooting anywhere than up the middle it's got this nice little friendly zone at the middle but if you're trying to shoot the side you either flip and miss or you're just going too soon and up the middle they're pretty infuriating but it's hilarious if you've been playing pinball a long time so yeah everybody's looking at pinball life now see if there's banana flippers for sale god they were so expensive it's serious they're very expensive did uh is that why you had a cart of bananas also that you posted a picture of today yeah well uh our producer kevin was uh rolling around the banana cart getting that we're in a banana so i got a picture of the cart before that emptied that's awesome okay although i am super excited for kong i was secretly wondering if this was a Donkey Kong, if this was a tease for a Donkey Kong as opposed to King Kong. However, King Kong is perfect. It's right next to Godzilla. Now the question is, did you know that you were going to be working on both of these themes or did Kong come after you had already started working on Godzilla? So after Godzilla released, George was like, hey, let's do King Kong. And I'm like, no. How are the monster games? he's like well think about it think about it i was like all right and then when jaws popped up and i was like yeah sure i'll do that and then we're getting near the end of jaws cycle and george is like and a king kong you know king kong and uh you know he he kind of grilled me for three days and finally all right i'll do it if you give me another bond style on the side just Yeah, that was fun. I love Bond. Okay, I will say this. Okay, I think it's genius, by the way. George is 100% right on this. Having King Kong and Godzilla, because anybody who has Godzilla is going to want the complete package. And the one thing I really want to know, is there a secret Kong versus Godzilla mode in the game? uh obviously that's a multiple license issue okay con versus giant lizard radioactive lizard guy i'm not gonna lie and say we don't have some funny call outs okay reference a lizard a name but uh yeah yeah we're actually you know we're always looking into that but like i said it's pretty complicated we're going to need three different licensors on the same page to do work with our own IP, which is tough. Yeah, definitely. It's 100% not off the table, but it's tough. If you've been in the hobby long enough, you know that there was originally a Data East King Kong and as soon as I saw this, that King Kong artwork front and center is very similar to that Data East. Did any of that original game inspire what you did here? just or just the art um so uh kevin o'connor was started off as the sole artist on this game and it was kind of a tribute to him so i uh i was like how do you feel about you know taking this project you work so hard on that hardly anyone has seen you know kind of doing the same insert arrangement and artwork down by the flipper area and he was you know he was all for it so i was like all right you know we'll make it work so that's how that came about that's awesome for those that don't know kevin o'connor is one of my favorite he did world cup soccer that's the one that's famous to me he's he's been around for he's a legend and you know gomez was not lying in the in the trailer when he said between Greg Freres kevin o'connor and and uh jeremy packard zombie yeti and this is quite the legendary lineup of artists what why did all three collaborate on this one project so i was really trying to get Greg Freres to do this project i knew he was retiring soon you know it's kind of come on man let's it's just one last rodeo and that became the uh the project code name was rodeo because we were trying to get Greg Freres to do one last rodeo with us he's like nah nah I'm good and then um like two months after he retired uh Sebastian our then art director uh reached out to him he's like he's like you know what I'll do the play field. All right. Awesome. And then as we're getting closer to the end date, Jeremy jumped on to kind of help bring it to the finish line. So basically the compositions, a lot of the compositions were Kevin and Greg, and Jeremy did a lot of the cabinet art. Nice. You know what? The play field art, it does have a little bit of that retro feel. Yeah. And it doesn't feel like any of your recent games because it feels a little bit more of that kind of blocky 90s stuff. And in many ways, it's a total throwback. I love it. Yeah, it's definitely Greg's artwork. You know, other than the middle part, which is inspired by the old King Kong and Kevin's artwork, Greg pretty much filled in the rest all around that. Go ahead, Josh. I would say just this artwork looks really amazing. And one thing I've got to to congratulate the whole team on on this is is the fact that you were able to tie jungle with city and make it look cohesive because it's you're definitely like the left is more of a static of the jungle with New York being that upper right and right side. Was that hard to kind of gel and whatnot or was it just it's King Kong and it just makes sense? It was. The only struggle I really had was the gong had to end up on the right side, which, you know, higher up than most of the other jungle artwork. That was really the only struggle with that. Otherwise, yeah, it was pretty much jungle at the bottom and then kind of fused into New York City in the upper right. And if you've ever read the book, you know, like the New York scene is like six pages. It's really an afterthought in the book. it really is that's what's what's funny though is is iconically you look at king kong and you think of the empire state building you think of him hanging off of that but really new york's not actually a ton of the to the to it so no it was mostly about you know interactions and then you know trying to rescue ann it's very little new york which was crazy i had no idea until i started this project and read it and i was like that's it so he escapes the theater and climbs a building okay so so okay king kong is a little bit like godzilla in that there have been so many movies so many different ways that the story has been told and retold so on king kong so this is actually the first that i'd heard that it was a book i really had no idea i thought it was like some silent film from like the 1920s or something so you have so many options including the the the latest Kong iterations and then getting into Kong vs. Godzilla, all those things. So what do you bring from all that material to tell your story in the game? Well, we have to tell our story because we don't want to infringe on anything, a particular thing that happened in a movie that didn't happen in the book. The only request I got was, you know, we can't do a damsel in distress. We've got to make Anne more of an explorer type. She's just not there, just constantly needing rescue. So I kind of came up with kind of a Tomb Raider vibe. They're there looking for treasure. They're archaeologists. Carl Denham's there filming the whole thing for the newsreels back in the theater back then. So it's kind of the whole vibe of the movie. They arrive at the island. They're looking for treasures. so part of the game is you're actually looking for treasures we have a bunch of different treasures and then they you know they come across kong it was kind of just kind of picks up with the book uh from there on where you know they come across kong and a lot of the adventures happen uh are similar to what happened in the book all the way up to new york so so you're you're speaking of uh like kong and everything in the jungle whatnot But when I look at this game, I see a lot of throwback to Congo and to Indiana Jones. And I even felt some of it in the sound clips. Did those two games kind of influence this design? Because even the airplane in the top right above the wire form is something similar into Indiana Jones and stuff like that. Not so much Indiana Jones. Yeah, definitely has some Congo vibes. if you look closely some of the hieroglyphs in the artwork near the bottom you'll see some easter eggs from Greg Freres in there kind of like Congo did, Kevin O'Connor did the same thing with Congo but yeah you know obviously if it's a jungle based game it's going to have kind of a vibe of one of those two but I would say yeah I would lean more towards the Congo than Indiana Jones Does it yell hippos? Hippos! There are some references to hippos, yes. Yes, yes. Not having a literature made it super fun to do any kind of script work. So this was kind of just do whatever you want then, huh? I mean, to a point. Yeah. I can't do something that Seth and George will look at and be like, what were you thinking? Okay, so did you have to go through any other – King Kong is typically associated with Universal. And so did you have – or because you were going off the source material of the book, is it so old that you had a little more – kind of like a Wizard of Oz book that you could go through or Alice in Wonderland or something like that where you're not tied to anybody who's holding the license? Or did you still have to work through licensing? Nope. We just – as long as we kind of stuck to the book and their characters. We didn't have to deal with anyone. Hmm. So, okay, so here's the question now, because we all know the dance that goes along with licensing and them having influence over what you can and can't put in the game tell me about the freedom that you can have while having the story to tell in your own way but also not having to go through approval I can see it as being a little bit of a double-edged sword, and I would argue that sometimes having that stopgap will help you keep you focused and keep you on goal. But at the same time, sometimes it can inhibit something that's really cool that you want to put in the game. Yeah, this is a double-edged sword. I mean, yeah, technically it's unlicensed. I can do whatever I want, but I pretty much have to follow the guidelines of the book, which is the only public domain of the property. So if I start veering off, oh, Kong battles a robot Kong in outer space or something, then Toho is going to say, well, hey, we have Mecha Kong. So I really had to follow kind of a straight line of the story, but we can embellish it in our own ways. But it pretty much sticks true to the book other than, you know, the backgrounds of the characters, what they're doing there and how it ends. Does that also give you some freedom into like the bill of material? If you, if you don't have to worry about paying for a license, does that, does that help you and say, Oh, cause I know I, Josh sent this out and it, it's a crazy list of all the things that are in the game and you have the Kong sculpt. You have the custom gong sculpt. You have the four drop targets. You have the log diverter. You have the airplane, the punch kickback, the bouncing spider with the magnet underneath. And so that's – You forgot the subway that also you lock the balls in. Yeah. And the kong mech itself that – yeah. Yeah. No, they were actually separate bombs. Oh, okay. Okay. That extra money probably went to pay the three artists. I don't know. That's a decision on the other side of the building. But our bombs all stay the same no matter licensed, unlicensed. That's actually good to know because we have speculated behind the scenes many times about, okay, if you get – is it detrimental to get a mega license because you have to recover the money? I didn't know that. Obviously, that money will come from somewhere. Sure. It's generally not the game bomb itself because we pretty much have a static number that we work for. obviously as inflation goes up that number kind of slides up a little bit but there's nothing crazy oh this is unlicensed you can do you can have 20 mechs on it that's not going to happen you can have lasers in the back glass yeah do a smoke show but then it gets vacuumed out after each game so I mean there is a ton of mechs in this though like is there anything that didn't make it because there it feels like you put the kitchen sink in yeah um we did run out of coil drives and we are, I really, I originally wanted Kong's mouth to move and it's got the point. Well, if we have that, we have to pull out something that's cool. And it was like, so I kind of had to give and take on that one. Okay. Was the mouth moving? Was that the goal to eat the ball? Because I know everybody wants Kong to eat the ball. Yeah. I mean, a very, very small ball. Kong does eat the ball, just not on the play field. Oh, that is amazing yeah i'll make everyone happy when they get an extra ball i i really wanted to see uh kong as like the potato sculpt uh like in jaws when it uh it just looked kind of odd when when you were trying to work on that oh yeah yeah yeah rocking out the playfield uh i don't think we ever had a phase that bad I had an old 3D print somewhere, but it looked pretty much just like him. Just unpainted. It never had that many iterations. You brought one to Expo, and it looked like a potato that launched out of the playfield. Yeah. Well, that was a unique mech. That's when the shark ate the ball. We didn't want to spend a bunch of money, because we weren't sure that mech was even going to work, much less survive. It ended up just getting cut anyway, so they never finished it. They're like, well, here's your neck. It's like Harrison. Yeah, it looks like a baked potato. I guess I didn't get too far on it. Well, if you have a vegetable, if you do a veggie tells you now know what. Oh, my gosh. That would be amazing. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. To answer your question. OK, there was a drop target in front of the cave on the white early Whitewoods. but actually i deem that to be too annoying because it'd catch air and jump over the flipper and say yeah this isn't fun yeah so you usually aim for a good balance between like stop and go but more but a lot of flow i know that you've stuck you've kind of kept away from scoops and stuff like that and then you know if if if the theme deems it appropriate you put it on like with godzilla there's a lot of flow there but to stop it you had the scoop in this game i know there's a little bit of stop and go with you got kind of i don't know if you consider a scoop because it does go to a buck they're underneath the punch um and then you've got like a subway lock and then i'm trying to think i guess where there's one more spot where it kind of stops is that kind of the cave there's two bucks on one wire for him okay okay and so is that kind of I don't know. Is this still as flowy as your other games, I guess? This flows extremely well, I'll say. So the little thing on the right, the little punchback thing you're talking about, I actually designed a whole game around that shot. It was originally to do something else, but then it wasn't working as consistently as I wanted. So I tried just sticking one of those kicker targets in there and firing it back at the upper right flipper. And I was like, oh, wow, yeah, this is awesome. and so you know if you hit it too slowly or sometimes we actually want to stop the ball in a little dump out scoop there it won't fire the target so the ball will spiral around hit the target and drop into the book for locking island locks and starting New York City events but other than that it fires the ball right back at you so yeah this game it's really fast the magnet kind of down there by the flippers the Sweepable drops also kind of ricochet and go all the way around to the upper right flipper if you do it right. We have rules dedicated to that. Amazing. So the gong, I know it's on the Pro, it goes into the scoop. But on the Premium, is it a kickback behind the gong as well that shoots back at you? So there's two coils on the gong. And what they do is they latch a spring. So when the gong is locked, you hit the gong. It fires the ball back at you. and then it kind of swings a little bit. What should qualify it in island mode? Those two coils unlock the gong, and you can shoot through it. It's kind of a swinging target, kind of Mando style. Nice. So you are known for having a lot of creative wire forms. I don't see as many plastic forms on your games. is is there a fascination that you have with having the wire forms because the wire forms have very creative paths that move all over the place and you godzilla you have the crisscross on infinity quest you have you know the big launch that goes all the way around the game probably one of the longest shots in pinball uh tell me about why what are your thoughts on putting the habit trails in uh you can do more with them uh you know obviously i can't have plastic ramps crossing the playfield for numerous reasons uh one of which is if you ever worked on arabian nights and put too much weight on your arm and watch that thing uh they're you know they're fragile they they obstruct your view i i think the wire forms are just clean and neat and like i said you can do more with them it's easier to do helix and whatever else you need done and you can kind of see through them a little bit better than the plastic as well especially with those cross shots that you have going on it looks much cooler i that's one thing another thing is um do you calculate on the shape of the form to see how much speed the ball is going to have because so an example would be like lord of the rings how they have that that habit trail that that the seesaws back and forth and it really slows the ball down. Is that what you take into account when you're designing a helix or a habit trail? Yeah. Yeah. You'll see, we have the wire from the drums on the left side. We have it doing a little S curve to slow the ball down a little bit. Obviously if you place it, you know, balls are going to be flying around. So on the biplane draft, the one that does the helix, we actually have extra wire on the top because it's flying around that helix. so it's actually held in with gravity at certain points and then it goes back to a regular wire form. And for the slow ramps, we call it the Cliffs Ramp. It's a ramp that crosses over from the upper left flipper to the upper right flipper. That one's fairly slow, so it's only on two wires, and then it has a unique dump off at the end. So instead of kind of just dropping by the flipper, it actually pushes the ball back up the right orbit a bit for a nicer setup shot. well i know that like on godzilla that gomez is the one that told you actually to put the spirals and stuff in because to slow down the ball right he's like how can you design avengers and design a ramp like this and i was like i was trying to save us money she's like no put a helix in it i was like all right so how dare you it's a true story i was petrified of how uh over godzilla was over budget but george is like no you gotta gotta you can't do avengers and do a boring ramp game like this so yeah we added the uh the helix which one the helix on over the tesla shot area the right upper yeah i originally had a helix there and then harrison was like oh that's gonna be so expensive and then It's like, all right, so we did a version two without the helix. And George said, no, get that out of here. Put the helix back in. It is. I like that all the wire forms, it does make the – part of pinball, the fun, is just watching the ball move around and move all over the play field. And having those extended ball paths really capture the experience for me. so that that's one thing that i i i suspect connects a lot of people with your games is that even when they do something even something simple it looks really cool with the ball moving all the way around yeah and i admit if you just look at a picture of this game you're not gonna have any idea where any of the shots go because it's really hard to figure it out still i'm still trying to figure it out so yeah we have this diverter so basically it's almost like a mini play field it's not a mini play field because we have this floating uh upper left flipper and there's a little divert it's like a dynamic inline that pops up to feed the upper left flipper and it stays up for a few seconds drops back down so you have a few seconds to hit the drops otherwise you know you can fall back down into what we call the river or you can use it to shoot the cliff's ramp across to the other uh flipper so we can use this so you can actually keep comboing those two shots, kind of like a figure eight. If you shoot the clips ramp and then there's a shot above the biplane ramp that'll feed right back into the diverter. So there's one mode where you're trying to cross the chasm and you can actually just keep shooting the figure eight between the upper two flippers for a while. But obviously we don't want players to do that all the time, which is why we have the in lane on a coil. So, you know, on normal play, it's not going to be up for very long. You can also use the action button to bring that diverter up for a few seconds too. kind of like flip lock a little bit so if you shoot the center spinner it comes around it'll almost always bring that diverter up but sometimes you're shooting the drop targets from the lower flippers and the ball just kind of ends up in that area you can yeah you hit the action button to bring that diverter up to feed the upper left flipper otherwise it's going to dump down the little zigzag uh river thing we have gotcha i did did i see this right in the trailer as well you guys didn't really talk about this but is the center a spinner that feeds to the left orbit that's also a spinner yeah so what's the purpose of a double spinner on the same trail because it's the shot on the left is an orbit to the upper right flipper okay so so okay so you have a spinner spinner from the left flipper and a spinner from the right flipper so shooting the right the the spinner in the middle is going to activate both spinners but if you shoot it from the right flipper it's just the left spinner nice so go ahead josh i was just i was just thinking because like in godzilla like you get a bridge bonus by hitting so many switch hits so using that double spinner to your advantage could really if you have any switch modes in this in this game it could really the trade-off is the center spinner is a little bit of a tighter shot than the left spinner okay you're already thinking about all this man you've already got this all down It's like he's been looking at this. Okay, the very left side of it, what am I seeing there? Is that like a kickback on the far left? Because I see you have the out lane, but then you have a lane past the out lane. What is that? So that's called the river. So when that diverter for the upper left flipper is down, it'll drain down a river. It's a zigzag path. It's a translucent sculpt of a river area. and zigzags down basically because we have some modes where you shoot the uh the center spinner and it goes all the way around and it goes through the river and then feeds the left flipper and this is the the dreaded outlanes actually your in lane and your inlanes your out lane right no no there's a uh there's a left in lane there's the out lane to the left of it and the lane to the left of that is just a feed from the the upper area to the bottom of flipper It doesn't appear that the ball will accidentally Fall into the river There is a spot there but I bet that that not it does okay it does you guys will see tomorrow we gonna stream so okay nice so tell me about the modes in this game i put in the quarter and and the you know the theme music comes up what are my how many options do I have the modes to start off with? So our main mode is King Kong climbing. So around the play field, we see climb arrows. So when you start the game, you'll have a set of climb arrows. You complete that set of climb arrows, it awards you one of the windows on the building. You'll see there's probably maybe 10 or 12 inserts in the middle of the play field that are windows. For each one of those you complete, you get award, a mode, or a perk. and each time you complete an entire floor in the building it lights a New York City event it's going to be selectable events right now we just have one one in there it's called stage bright but in the future it's going to have a bunch of different things you can choose from that take place in New York City so that's the whole climb feature the pit is a magnet the spider that's kind of the bozo multiball, if you will. You hit the pit like three times and it lights one of the three different multiballs that are in the pit of the three different creatures that are in there. Obviously, it's a little dangerous because of the magnet, but it's there. You know, if you get a couple hits in there, he's like, well, I've got to go for it now because that's a multiball. Then we have the King Kong multiball. When you complete the Kong drop targets on the upper left there, you'd be light in the center ramp for the King Kong locks the gong is like I said when it's in the bash state it will throw the ball back at you and then once it's unlocked once you do that enough you shoot in there, it shoots into the buck and you can start one of the island scenes so I think there's six island scenes collecting King Kong letters is pretty big you do various switch hits will eventually light the gong to collect the King Kong letter or you can get it from certain achievements like skill shots, doing well in an island mode will also spot you King Kong letters if you spell King you'll light a mode called Dead Eye which is it's basically a tribute to Skillfire in Congo where it's basically a it's a mode with nothing but skill shots. The difference being after you hit enough of them, you light a jackpot and you plunge to a different area to try to collect that jackpot. Then you have the biplane modes which is you shoot in the biplane ramp. You shoot that enough, it'll start a biplane attack. Then we have king combos which you also activate with the drop targets. It's a bunch of combos. You work different different combos with different reward thresholds and one of those is power up which it's not in yet but eventually the combos are going to light your power up and then the last real feature is it's called the lost temple every time you hit the punch bag target or the gong it'll light what's called the lost temple and then when you shoot the center spinner you're trying to solve kind of a puzzle a Mayan puzzle kind of like you do in video games You're trying to figure out the cipher. All you're basically doing is hitting the lit drop target. Just one lit, you have to hit that drop target. You do that four times, fill up the whole glyph, and then it unlocks that target behind the drop targets, the treasure target with Gary on it. You hit that, and you collect a treasure. There's a lot going on. It sounds like it. One of the things I love about your games that I feel like no one really else ever does is there something going on in the background that is achieved like pushing you further to a different goal so like in jaws it's bounty hunt you know you're getting your spinners you're getting your stuff like that uh avengers you're collecting i know the avengers is actually the main part of the game but you know you're collecting the avengers you're doing this but is is there anything like that in kong that you're trying to do yeah it's the climb feature it's the climb feature okay that's always active it's active during multi balls wizard loads everything that's something you're constantly progressing through and i just say that lights other wizard modes that you collect via the new york city insert in the little punch bag area i see you got a little friend with you there up on the front screen you said he just got printed he's wet on the right shoulder uh no this was uh this is a 3d printed sample that we got months ago and it's still wet yeah i don't know why so yeah all our sculpts are uh are uh roto molded so this is the 3d print very very nice 3d print yes but it is a 3d print and just the paint just doesn't dry so you can see where i've touched it yeah so is it just the right arm that moves up and down or just the it looks like the left arm moves too right yeah both arms move the torso moves everything half a gorilla does okay the one question I have is when I saw this I was I am a little bit concerned about you know the original Avengers when you have Hulk back there where the arms go up and down and it seemed like the ball always gets stuck in there so how is it because the way you position I mean it's far in the back on the back right and so it's it's less prominent than the hulk was but how do you prevent like ball hang-ups because that is that is the nightmare of the designer he's actually in the back panel so the only interaction he has that the ball can get stuck is when he grabs a ball on the ramp oh so that's intentional uh there's no way for him to accidentally trap the ball oh okay he can also punch the glass when you get a replay are you serious yeah that's awesome it hits the glass that's so great you know they had a shark fin in here but they kept launching off the shark fin and it landed in his arm all the time so yeah yeah no it's this was designed to be off the play field and interact with the balls coming both on the ramp and then he obviously bashes the train to flip it over and dump all the balls out when you start a design and you get a a theme what is the first thing you do besides putting you know this the bottom the bottom flippers in how do you start engineering a play field um yeah that's a tough one uh usually i try to have a couple shots in mind that i want to do then i try to figure out you know what kind of toys is this gonna have and then i fill in the rest of the shots generally like i said this game was completely designed around the right orbit punchback thing and everything else just kind of looks like all right i want to have a giant you know gorilla in the back right corner uh this this spiral thing is an interesting ball path and it also it's flat so i can have this big gorilla taking up you know the entire you know quarter of the the play field in the back right corner there and all the rest of the shots just came through um i really wanted to do i really wanted to do another floating flipper upper flipper like i did godzilla's meaning there's no nothing behind it and so I was like well how can I improve on that because I don't you know I like repeating myself unless I can you know at least prove upon it slightly so I was like well that's when I came up with the you know the disappearing in lane for the upper left flipper it's like okay if I make this a diverter boom it's a floating flipper that's suddenly not a floating flipper so now you can easily feed it when you need to and if you need it to go through it will just ignore it like I said it's kind of it's like a mini play field that's not a mini play field there's no pop bumpers either right nope is this their first game that actually has a shot behind a flipper too i mean excluding like a floating flipper but like on the right side you shoot behind it it goes into a right well whoever filmed that was holding up the right but you don't need to hold the right flipper up to shoot that shot oh okay yeah but yeah you can but uh you don't have to oh it i got you know spider-man vibes i'll you know start to like a lot of me that too and i was like no you don't have to hold the flipper up it's a normal shot oh okay yeah that would yeah whoever filmed that come on now i mean i'm not saying it doesn't make it easier but you don't have to do that yeah style points actually uh some of the modes you get more points for not doing that so similar to iron maiden yeah forgot about that okay so on the uh the subway car, that is a physical ball lock. Correct. Yeah, so you can put that in there. It seems like you – it's almost like the Turtles van and the bridge breaking that you did in Godzilla had a baby, and they made that. So is that a physical ball lock, and can you steal locks? How many does it hold? It holds three balls. You cannot steal locks because, come on, you know my tournament past. I can't do that to people. Yeah, I know. I know. The train was actually a pretty late addition. I originally had Kong grabbing a ball, if you look at his hand. Yeah. Having him grabbing a ball, but then releasing it was a problem. I said, well, we can throw it. And he's like, well, yeah. Nobody was a fan of that. So he's like, well, what else can he do? I was like, well, you can have him dump over a train full of balls. Everyone thought that was the greatest thing. I was like, yeah, all right, let's try it. It looks cool. I was like, yeah, that's actually pretty cool. Yeah, so what started off as like, yeah, but maybe let's just try this. And then it's like, oh, actually, this is really cool. How quickly? It looks like it reacts pretty quickly when that kickback hits to that upper flipper. Is there any? No, it's not quick. You just have to expect it. I think the first time people play the game, they're expecting that to be a right orbit, and it's not. and say because they're like whoa wait what it's coming back yet the left orbit also feeds to the right flipper yes man you confuse me sometimes on your ball paths without giving hands i i you know i'm sorry i told you if you look at a picture you're you're gonna assume the ball goes somewhere where it doesn't actually go and that's great you know uh seth was actually complaining to me he's like you know he's like i don't know what to call these shots because this isn't an orbit and i was like yeah no it's not i don't know what to call it either i love that i love those shots it's it's it reminds you kind of theater magic style right where you're shooting it feels like it's far enough right it should be in orbit and all of a sudden like turns into a ramp and it's like wait a minute what's going on here that's what that is one of my favorite shots of all time is on jaws that right orbit to ramp whatever it is it just it feels so satisfying geometry like from the geometry to hit that and it doesn't feel like if you hit it solid it doesn't reject and even then like there's a little bit of give to it it's just i feel like a lot of your shots do that it's same with avengers avengers did that as well on the right side it's just some of these shots they just feel so good when you hit them so yeah i love that shot on jones too i said i this i think this is a game where i actually have a left orbit i don't think any of my other games have a left orbit where it traditionally would be. Yeah. I guess you don't. I was going to say maybe Iron Maiden does it. No, no, because Iron Maiden, the orbit is kind of a center. It's a center type thing. Holy crap. The first time in the orbit. I only had one and I hated it, so I made it do the return instead. The loop-de-loop. And that is a really cool shot too where you feed it from the upper and it comes right back at you through that left side. See, again, that was a pivot. That was originally a giant helix. And then Hurston's like, I got bad news for you. We're out of room because we couldn't – it didn't have enough space to do an entire helix. So it kind of just took the helix, cut it in half, and bent the wires backwards and said, well, let's see if we have enough inertia to do this. And we did. He's like, oh, great. This is actually one of my favorite ramps in the game. Is there any – because one of your – I would say maybe a signature, I don't know, is the 180 ramp. you've got it on jurassic park you've got it on there's a lot of games that you have is does this have a 180 in it as well no it does not okay i don't want that to be my signature ramps you know this doesn't have a newton ball i know everyone's probably predicted it would uh yeah doesn't have a newton ball no 180 ramp you know trying to do different stuff yeah no it all it's all working out great and i just know like with with dress park you had that And I think Jaws definitely had that as the wave ramp or whatever. But, yeah, I just didn't see that on this. I know that some people do complain about the 180 ramps. But you know what? If you hit it better, if you hit it more on, you don't have to worry about it. I like 180 ramps. I like 180s. Yeah, I love them. I like them. But like I said, I try not to repeat myself too much. And since Jaws had two of them, I was like, yeah, I'm fine not doing it. Yeah. looking at the color scheme this is a very poppy color scheme like it so i i'm i'm wondering a little bit and maybe jeremy can talk a little bit more to this that there is a question about well it's kong should you do more of like a subdued you know subdued color palette but this i mean this has purples in it it has it has greens it has it you know fuchsia i think well i i don't think that was really a jeremy's call that was uh kind of set up early by kevin o'connor i think it's kind of a throwback to the color palette of the original kong sure as to why uh that was done because like i said jeremy came on pretty late to help finish up the cabinet art so it was you know those colors were already in place why did they only make 10 kongs the originals the the data east ones uh from like gary said uh one it wasn't a good game and two back to the future is on his tail oh gotcha okay i just like it's it's just a really cool game and it's you don't see a ton of them because they only made a handful of them and did you guys did you play this did you play the original kong much while you guys have an original kong there no no no i haven't played one of those 30 years i mean it's whenever it was at expo a long time ago time time to get people to bring more kongs out to expo i don't know i heard one of them burned down or something there's only nine left okay i i will say when i heard about the fires in la i was i i was legit thinking i obviously a terrible thing but i'm thinking those are a lot of expensive houses i wonder how many pinball machines were in there yeah am i the only one who thought that i'm sure yeah that's that's why you get your insurance company to call flipping out pinball to send you a new king kong to exactly yeah upgrade your collection anyway right yep yeah there's the silver lining right there get the godzilla and the con to go right next to each other i think i the my the problem is i need to figure out a way to get Godzilla and Kong next to each other. I'm out of space, but I don't know how it's on me to modify things. You need smaller games. Safe crack. Get a Revenge for Mars. Is Revenge for Mars really that much smaller? It's like a foot smaller, but it still covers the same footpath. There's more room for a monitor and boards, but I think it's pretty much the same footprint. Yeah. yeah well is there anything else like that you were just excited about this game that we haven't touched on yet Keith? Yeah what are the things that we should have asked that we're not smart enough to ask oh um I'm excited to be able to watch the stream to see the flow of the game the sweepable drop targets are so satisfying that you know I like this so much Quicksilver. I just like, I want to do my own take on these. And I think it's, it just works. First try, which was really weird. We had the first Whitewood. I just kind of guessed how they should align and then we never moved them. So it's still my favorite part of the game. It's just sweeping those, how they come all the way around. You shoot the biplane ramp for a sweet combo. You know, it's just fun things like that. Fun pinball moments. This game has a lot of energy, the music, the sound, Jerry Thompson, killed it uh it's it's very high energy fast-paced game you know as opposed to kind of a slog adventure you know type of game which i don't i'm not a fan of and honestly that's that was petrified when jaws came out because i thought everyone would think that because to me you know it's not my style really is i have kind of a slow you know long story based game but uh people really like it and I was like that's amazing because I was so scared this is boring, this is no energy, this is the movie though this is what, if you've watched the movie, this is not action packed but this game is a lot more action packed I don't know, I had a lot of fun making it and I hope everyone gets to enjoy it I did want to follow up on one thing and I thought about this before sweepable drop targets, so how are they engineered differently than your standard drop targets. It's all about the angle. So, you know, you get a nice trajectory path. You get those targets kind of aligned in that same trajectory and you can sweep all four of them if you do it just right. You know, because Maiden had the sweep feature, but that was a three target bank and that was kind of a little further in the middle. So it's all about that angle, man. If you ever played classic sterns, they live on the sweep. Things like Flight 2000, you shoot that spinner and it almost tries to sweep by itself. You don't even do anything. It was always one of my favorite features when I was playing those games as a kid. Spinners and sweepable drops. I can design games around those all day. How many spinners does this one have? Two optic spinners. So the real question that's on everyone's mind that I know that you've already seen. Huh? Does it eat the ball? Does it equal? No, no. So they noticed that when the gong was released last week, Rick Nagel's initials weren't on the gong. Poor Rick. Huh? I said, poor Rick. I know. So why did he quit Stern? Yeah, yeah. And why did he start Nagel Oil? How's his new job? Yeah, Nagel Oil is doing well. He's on the gong. He's just on the side. Oh, gotcha. I'm sorry. It's hilarious. Those glyphs wrap around to the sides. Oh, okay. Gotcha. No, it's funny when people start speculating. They're like, oh, Rick's initials aren't on there. He must have quit. He's done. He's done. You know, RIP, Rick. RIP. You had a good run. You had a good run. Well, you know, there's a lot more of a design team than five or whatever there was room for initials for in the front. So, yeah, they wrap around. How did the gong – the gong feels a little bit like the swinging bell in ACDC. So, like, can you tell me, was that an inspiration or was it just your own way of doing things? oh you know actually i really like like that on acdc um i wouldn't say it was an inspiration but you know i kind of i was kind of hoping for the same swinging feature whereas acdc you know you kind of hit it and then it hits the ball back at you yeah yeah i wasn't looking for that i really wanted the gong to fire back at you so we put a really heavy spring on there and then there's times where i wanted to shoot through or unlike acdc good luck getting it past it so this you The coil releases you. You can shoot right through to the speed buck. Awesome. I don't know. Everyone, I haven't heard a negative thing yet. I'm excited for this game. I'm slightly jealous of Scott. I won't be there Thursday, but Scott gets to come up and hang out with you, go through Kong and play this and give it a try. Yeah, man. Just congratulations. It's another home run. Thanks. This is the best day because then I can move on to the next project. You can actually talk about it and move on. I started this thing a year and a half ago. It's always great to like, all right, time to start something else. I'm ready. Okay. Another thing people are going to ask about accessories, are they in some state of development? I know the goal would be to have them pretty close to launch because if people are buying the game, a lot of times they're just like add, add, add, and complete package. Yeah. hopefully they will be soon okay most of them are done or still working on the topper hopefully people really like this topper I really like it so Harrison Harrison design is designing this topper and I think he did an amazing job wow actually the two questions our audience always loves us asking I don't know why but we'll do it anyway how many designs ahead are you Keith and how many flippers are on your next game yeah uh three flippers are my nice game and that's that's my where i'm at designing i haven't i haven't gone forward wow you you're only one design you're on the current current design after this and that's okay but but it is a it is the center it is a flipper that the action button changes where it goes it flips left or flips right right yeah it's on a turntable yeah yeah Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, my days of working ahead are over, you know. You can only do that for so long. Yeah. Well, it's because they've got you also teaching classes down there how to design, right? Yeah, exactly. I'm also cutting up clips for JAWS still. You know, it's just once you have a lot of projects under your belt, you're just constantly having to maintain them for various reasons, you know. Yeah. Okay. That is actually a question, though, since you don't have since this is an unlicensed, you know, unlicensed theme. You have to actually develop all of the LCD stuff. Yeah. In addition to that. And so that can be challenging, too, because if you have movie assets or something, it's easier to to just grab a clip and throw it in there. But this you actually have to have an animation department do something to make it interesting. Yeah. So again, we're talking about the double edged sword. Is it great having assets? Yes. Is it tough having assets? Yes. I experienced that with Jaws. I was like, all right, I'm going to write a mode around, you know, these guys fishing. OK, how do I do that? Well, it's got to match what's going on on screen and not much is going on screen. Two dudes like casting the stars mode. It's just classic. That's why I gave it to Elizabeth. It's like, have fun with this. It's like it's so tough to write rules that actually match what's going on the screen. And whereas with this, I could say, all right, you know, King Kong is battling a T-Rex and then two other T-Rexes come out. It's like, yeah, so we can just make this stuff up. Obviously, it's more of a drain on the animation department. But again, I get more freedom in what's going on on the screen and with the rules. I guess one of the questions I actually did have before we get past it. Impractical Joker's Brian "Q" Quinn. How the heck did he get involved in a project like this? Well, you know, I have no idea. We were looking for voice talent and Jody was like, oh, Brian "Q" Quinn wants to be in on that. He's like, oh, OK. So it all happened within like a week. Oh, really? We actually have – this is the most actors we've used. We have – I think we have four different voice actors plus Brian "Q" Quinn did – so we have some of the sailors, and he did some of the Kong grunts and growls. He did one of the characters named Jimmy who's kind of a minor character, but he did a great job. I love the video because it looks like he's recording his kitchen. There's like a fridge behind him and a radiator. Like I said, this was all put together last second. He was like, yeah, I can do this. Oh, that sounds great. So, you know, we got him a script. It happened so fast, it was crazy. But, yeah, we have, like, Rick Zeke from Godzilla. His daughter actually did some voice work for us. And a couple other, you know, his actor friends helped us with all the voices for the characters. Well, that is one thing that's actually been exceptional in your games, is that, like, the voice call-outs for Godzilla, the voice calls for Iron Maiden, They have been spot on with not just detracting because there are some games where you play and you're like, that's not exactly how I want the voices. But it's you. You guys have been able to merge very well your themes with the right actors. And I really appreciate that on your games. Yeah. When we can choose whoever we want, it's great. You know, sometimes you have to work with the studio's actor. You know, if they're having a bad day or don't want to be there, it makes it tough. there yeah well even the lines the lines are great you know some of those some of those lines are just so quotable from all the games you know we definitely have some reused quotes from other games for sure any chance there's a shoot the wamps in this one uh there's a big chance of that there's also a shoot the whiver yeah love it well we know you're on a tight schedule today keith and We know you got an appointment coming up here shortly. We appreciate you coming on again, man. Congratulations. This is epic. I'm excited to play this. Scott, do you have anything else for us before I do the outro? You definitely need to buy this game. This is one of those where you look at it and you're like, yeah, you need to have this in your collection, especially if you have a Godzilla. Absolutely. It's necessary to have it in your collection. At least wait to play it. Play it. Okay. I'll play it on Thursday, and then I'll tell you that I'm really going to order it. I will play it when it's in my house. No, you're right. Do get your hands on it. The Pinball at the Zoo is coming up this weekend. This is going to be the first appearance for Kong there. If you can get to the show, get to the show. Get your hands on Kong. It's definitely going to be worth it. I think we're also coming to the Golden State Festival. Perfect. And the Seattle Tacoma Show will have a big booth there, too. so it sounds like you guys are going to be all over the nation here in the next couple of months so there shouldn't be a reason not to get out and put your hands on it josh you should definitely talk about uh so our patreon that we're working on uh josh started the patreon the whole goal of the patreon is actually to to really help fund us going to these events so we can get stuff for you and i i big thank to thank you to stern and zach sharp because we actually have two people part of the, the winter kids club. And, uh, we, we reached out and both of them wanted to come. So if you want your chance in the future, um, join the patron. Also send us feedback, tell us what things you would be interested in the patron. All the money actually goes directly back into really, uh, providing material for you in the podcast. So we want to make sure you, you get any value for your money. The whole purpose of this is just to keep things going and to bring you a better product. And so definitely check that out. And if you are interested, join the high level, and then we do a random drawing to see who will be able to come with us, and we'll contact you. And so it's – we can't pay for your way out, but it's an opportunity to come out with us, and you can help support Josh and me by getting us out there. Yep, definitely. If you want to get a hold of us, we are LoserKidPinballPodcast at gmail.com. If you want to get a hold of us on any of the socials at LoserKidPinball, subscribe, subscribe, all that jazz. You know how it goes. thanks again Keith Scott give us our last words bye King Kong actually you know what I want bang a gong that's what I want in this game I know what you want oh yeah