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Steve Ritchie – Before The Mullet

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·1h 46m·analyzed·Jun 26, 2020
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.035

TL;DR

Silver Ball Chronicles launches with deep dive into Steve Ritchie pre-fame years and Atari pinball origins.

Summary

Silver Ball Chronicles premieres with hosts David Dennis and Ron Hallett discussing Steve Ritchie early life and career before his rise as a legendary pinball designer. The episode covers Ritchie's childhood, military service, early employment at Atari, and his first pinball design (Airborne Avenger). The hosts establish the show's format as a history-focused, beginner-friendly alternative to event-driven pinball podcasting.

Key Claims

  • Steve Ritchie is the best-selling pinball designer of all time

    high confidence · David Dennis introduces Ritchie with this title; widely accepted in pinball community

  • Steve Ritchie was employee number 50 at Atari in 1974

    medium confidence · David Dennis cites this as biographical fact from research; specific number adds credibility but not independently verified in content

  • Airborne Avenger sold approximately 3,420 units, not the originally estimated 350

    medium confidence · David Dennis attributes this correction to Steve Ritchie confirmation to IPDB; specific figure suggests insider knowledge but secondhand sourced

  • Steve Ritchie was denied design opportunities at Atari unless he had an engineering or industrial design degree

    high confidence · Direct quote from Ritchie recounting his early frustration at Atari; corroborated by Nolan Bushnell anecdote that follows

  • Steve Ritchie has Menière's disease, which causes hearing loss and balance issues

    high confidence · Multiple confirmations: David Dennis states this as biographical fact; Ron Hallett recalls seeing Ritchie wearing hearing aids in 2004; Special When Lit Pinball podcast episode quoted

  • Steve Jobs worked at Atari during the same period as Steve Ritchie and had poor hygiene

    medium confidence · David Dennis cites this as a story Ritchie told; attributed to Ritchie but presented as anecdote rather than verified fact; hosts treat it humorously

  • Atari pinball games all used wide-body cabinets exclusively

    high confidence · Ron Hallett confirms this as established fact about Atari's manufacturing strategy

  • Airborne Avenger current PinSide estimated value is $740–$860

    medium confidence · David Dennis references PinSide valuation; subject to market fluctuations but reflects current secondary market data

Notable Quotes

  • “If you want to see it, you can get closer and look into the cabinet. And there were all these relays and tons of wire and all this stuff and these shiny chrome-plated mechanisms. Then the guy looked at me and said, you know this is a Gottlieb, the Cadillac of the industry.”

    Steve Ritchie @ ~18:00 — Formative moment establishing Ritchie's early fascination with pinball mechanics and establishing Gottlieb as industry standard

  • “I started a design of my own, which I worked on at home only. I asked my boss if I could bring it in, and he said, no way. Pinball design is for college graduates only, industrial design degrees. I worked on it for one year. I was super pissed that my boss was such a dick.”

    Steve Ritchie @ ~37:00 — Key frustration moment at Atari that motivated Ritchie to pitch directly to Nolan Bushnell

  • “One day I became frustrated as hell and went to see Nolan Bouchnell... Nolan looked at my drawing and asked me if I did it all at home. I said, yes. I asked him if I could build it up and make it work. He said, certainly. You can have the cubicle next to Gary Slater.”

    Steve Ritchie @ ~40:00 — Pivotal career moment illustrating informal 1970s tech culture and Bushnell's entrepreneurial openness

  • “From the lobby of Atari, I could hear blasting rock and roll provided in stereo throughout the factory. Many beautiful ladies were running around, and it sure as hell looked like fun to me.”

    Steve Ritchie @ ~34:00 — Captures Ritchie's first impression of Atari's creative, energetic culture; contextualizes his attraction to the company

  • “I was blown away by pinball. I mean, I can only imagine what it would be like to walk into a manufacturing plant like that in the mid-70s and sort of see this interesting kind of fun game, the melding of the physical and the movement of the ball, your thoughts and ideas.”

    Steve Ritchie @ ~36:00 — Underscores the formative impact of seeing pinball manufacturing firsthand on Ritchie's career trajectory

  • “Steve Jobs, he would work at night for a couple reasons. Number one, Steve Wozniak... he would come into Atari at night and work with Steve Jobs... Nolan Bouchnell loved it because he didn't have to pay Steve Wozniak. Another reason he had him work at night is because at that time, Steve Jobs did not like to shower.”

Entities

Steve RitchiepersonDavid DennispersonRon HallettpersonNolan BushnellpersonEugene JarvispersonGeorge OppermanpersonGary SlaterpersonSteve Jobsperson

Signals

  • ?

    content_signal: Silver Ball Chronicles premiered on The Pinball Network; history-focused format designed to educate newcomers to pinball culture and personalities

    high · David Dennis states: 'when the Pinball Network first started, they were looking for some content, And I thought there was a space in the pinball podcasting market for something not so current events-based, something more historical.'

  • ?

    historical_signal: Deep archival dive into Steve Ritchie's formative years, military service, and early career trajectory; establishes context for his later iconic designs

    high · Comprehensive biographical timeline: born Feb 13, 1950; first pinball exposure age 7; Coast Guard service 1968-72; Atari employment 1974; Airborne Avenger 1977

  • ?

    industry_signal: Atari maintained formal credential barriers (engineering degrees only) that discouraged self-taught designers; Nolan Bushnell's exception enabled Ritchie's breakthrough

    high · Ritchie quote: 'Pinball design is for college graduates only, industrial design degrees.' Overridden by direct appeal to Bushnell

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Ritchie pioneered consistent Italian-bottom flipper arrangement in all his designs, contrasting with Atari's reputation for 'bizarre prototype' layouts

    medium · David Dennis: 'he wanted a regular Italian bottom which...just a standard flipper layout on the bottom your two flippers your inlanes and your outlanes and he was very and in all the games he has ever done he has stayed true to that'

  • ?

    product_concern: Atari pinball machines had electronics board placement vulnerability; components could fall from playfield onto boards causing shorts due to lack of shielding

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.321

0:00
At Charmin, we heard you shouldn't talk about going to the bathroom in public, so we decided to sing about it. Let a candle pour some wine. Grab a roll of soft kind for a little me time. Charmin Ultra Soft Smooth Tear. Wavy edges for my rear. So let the softness caress your soul. Just relax, you're on a roll. Let it rip. Charmin Ultra Soft Smooth Tear. Charmin Ultra Soft Smooth Tear has the same softness you love. Now with wavy edges that tear better than the leading one-ply brand. Enjoy the go with Charmin. the pinball network is online launching silver ball chronicles i'm uh i'm pretty excited i hope this isn't a goddamn train wreck because um i wouldn't be able to hear the end of it from zach if it turns out bad well if it is then then it's it's great right isn't that what people want they want train wrecks Hello everyone out there in pinball land, this is David Dennis and this is the Silver Ball Chronicles and with me as always is my co-host Ron Hallett. What's up fella? Hello, good evening. As always, we're just starting. I haven't always been here. We're just starting here. You are a big get for me. I'm very new to this hobby, and to bring somebody like the one and the only, Ron Hallett, one of the most experienced podcasters out there, to carry me through this, I think this is going to end up great. Wow. I don't know what to say. I've never been introduced like that before. Well, you are the star, and I'm the support here. No, no, no, no. David is the star of the show. I am simply a, what's it, like a fact checker. That's right. I was there. I've been here so long, I can tell you, because I was actually there. What have you been up to, Ron, recently? I've been working long hours, unfortunately, and dealing with snow and ice. Yes. Which you know about, too, because we're both in the Northeast. Yes. I'm in the middle of a snowstorm, actually, at the moment. So if I need you to send me up some supplies for safety and some road salt, I'll reach out for sure. We know all about that here in upstate New York. But I've been just kind of chilling. I'm going to be working on selling a couple of games, making some more room. That's good. You've got some tournaments coming up. Yes, we have some tournaments coming up. Did you qualify for nationals? Of course not. I did not qualify for nationals. What are nationals? I hear that that happens all the time, and I can watch Steve Bowden play in it. That's true. So what are we all about, David? So when the Pinball Network first started, they were looking for some content, And I thought there was a space in the pinball podcasting market for something not so current events-based, something more historical. So I started doing a little bit of research here and there, and I found that pinball history is pretty interesting because there's a lot of amazing characters out there. Do you have a couple of characters that we could reference there?

Steve Ritchie @ ~46:00 — Colorful period anecdote about early Apple figures; illustrates informal 1970s Atari culture and Steve Jobs' reputation

  • “My first memory of Steve Ritchie is meeting him at the 2004 Pinball Expo when at the banquet, he arrived to the banquet late, came up to the table I was sitting at and said, can I sit here?”

    Ron Hallett @ ~11:00 — Establishes Ron's long personal history in pinball community; frames his credibility as firsthand witness to industry figures

  • “At that time in the mid-70s, you had Bally doing a lot of their licensed pins and the pinball started selling more. It got to the point where you had pinballs that were actually selling like 10,000 plus units.”

    Ron Hallett @ ~28:00 — Market context explaining why Atari entered pinball market during this period; demonstrates mid-70s pinball demand surge

  • “So it's pretty amazing that that's such a focus of his, even though that's, lack of a better word, a handicap that he has.”

    David Dennis @ ~21:00 — Observation about irony of Ritchie's hearing loss despite emphasis on sound design in his games

  • “It was like the Stranger Things of its day.”

    Airborne Avenger @ ~62:00 — Dismissive comparison suggesting Airborne Avenger was middling/forgettable despite historical significance

    • Steve Wozniakperson
    John Robertsonperson
    Zach Minneyperson
    Zach Manningperson
    Atari Incorporatedcompany
    Gottliebcompany
    Williamscompany
    Ballycompany
    Stern Pinballcompany
    Silver Ball Chroniclesorganization
    The Pinball Networkorganization
    Special When Lit Pinball Podcastorganization
    Airborne Avengergame
    Terminator 2game
    Family Guygame
    Pirates of the Caribbeangame
    Black Knightgame

    medium · Ron Hallett: 'they didn't put any kind of real shielding over the stuff either. so like components would maybe fall off the bottom of the play field and just fall right on the board shorting it'

  • ?

    collector_signal: Airborne Avenger valued at $740–$860 on PinSide; considered low price for a piece of pinball history; rarity and repair difficulty (lack of Atari expertise) affect desirability

    medium · PinSide estimated value range; repair specialist John Robertson identified as primary Atari resource in North America

  • $

    market_signal: Pinball sales accelerated mid-70s with licensed games reaching 10,000+ units, prompting Atari (primarily a video game company) to enter pinball market

    high · Ron Hallett: 'It got to the point where you had pinballs that were actually selling like 10,000 plus units. So they wanted a piece of that.'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Atari committed exclusively to wide-body cabinet design across entire pinball line; design rationale unclear but may have aimed for visual spectacle and playfield complexity

    high · Ron Hallett: 'every single one of their games was a wide body. They only did wide bodies.' Hosts note width varied by manufacturer but Atari standardized on this format

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Eugene Jarvis (Airborne Avenger programmer) went on to become Williams pinball software architect; established his reputation in early 1980s with Space Shuttle, High Speed, Firepower

    high · David Dennis credits Jarvis for Airborne Avenger code; Ron confirms Jarvis later worked on major Williams titles

  • ?

    industry_signal: Apple founders (Jobs, Wozniak) worked at Atari during Ritchie's tenure; Bushnell capitalized on Wozniak's unpaid labor during night shifts

    medium · Ritchie anecdotes recounted by Ron; Jobs worked nights due to hygiene issues; Wozniak worked nights while employed elsewhere; Bushnell benefited financially

  • ?

    historical_signal: George Opperman's artwork for Atari pinballs (and broader arcade portfolio) was key asset driving player engagement; Stern employs similar art-forward strategy today

    medium · David Dennis: 'Atari really knew art gathered coins... George Opperman is probably one of the greatest assets that they had.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Silver Ball Chronicles positions itself as history/education-focused alternative to event-driven pinball podcasting (contrasts with The Pinball Show flagship); targets newcomers unfamiliar with pinball personalities

    high · David Dennis: 'something not so current events-based, something more historical... We're going to take this as being somebody's first experience into sort of some of the characters of pinball.'

    • 3:33
    I do voices of, I don't know, like, let's see here. If I were to do Stewie, I mean, Family Guy is an actual game. I could do that. I could try to do like, you know, Python, Angelo or something like that. But people don't know who that is yet. Yeah, the idea is we don't want to be too inside baseball. We're going to take this as being somebody's first experience into sort of some of the characters of pinball. Who are these interesting people? What is their history? But going beyond that, what are some of the machines they worked on? What are some of the quirks of those machines? And we're going to really deep dive into a lot of rabbit holes here. So if that doesn't sound like the podcast for you, you can always just flip over to the regular flagship program here, the Pinball Show. Yes, but you'll want to stay here. So this is going to be more for we're going to try to avoid a lot of insider stuff. This is more educational. If you're a newbie and you have no idea who Steve Ritchie is or his, oh, did I just give it away? But if you have no idea who Steve Ritchie is or Python Angelo or any pinball personalities or any games or the manufacturers or no idea, you're just getting into this crazy hobby. This is going to be your stop right here at the Silver Ball Chronicles. One thing that I really want to draw everybody's attention to is we want interaction with our audience. Ron and I are going to add bits and pieces here of all of your comments, complaints, and questions from our mailbag, and we can be reached at silverballbag at gmail.com. We're going to cover things from the basics all the way up to some more advanced stuff. Ron, this is our first podcast together. We haven't done this together before.
    5:18
    So it's going to take us, I think, a little bit of time to grow as a team, as it always does for most podcasts. I haven't even met you. That's right. And, you know, not many people have met me because I'm hidden up in eastern Canada, right on the coast, right above Maine. And I don't make it out much. I have two kids under five. And I guess going to the bar and playing pinball isn't really cool anymore and drinking on weeknights. Thanks, Obama. So you get to stay home and talk about pinball history instead. So I actually have a history degree. I was always a bit of a researcher, but that's not actually my background. I'm actually a retirement planner. I do investments. I do insurance. I'm in the financial industry. I wear a suit and tie at least twice a week. So this is kind of a fun outlet. And I am in IT, as are a lot of pinheads I meet. It seems to be a very high percentage of pinheads are in the IT field. I think it's generally nerds, right? Nerds tend to fall into the IT spot. 100% agree. I can almost guarantee that if you and I sat down and chatted, you'd be able to go through all the rules of games and a bunch of different things. I am very bad at that. I'm more like a Zach Manning. I could tell you how great the art is and how much I enjoy the screen, but I'm not going to get into the intricacies of code. I'm going to leave that to you on the go forward. Oh, we're in trouble then. I'm known as the guy that doesn't know anything about code. Well, perfect. That'll fit right in. That'll be great. So, Ron, I just want to let you know that this episode is brought to you by Dwight Sullivan's Code. If you don't understand it, good. You're probably too dumb to play it anyway. He made monsters for you, and you still don't like it. Screw you. Hey, I like monsters. Yeah, there we go. We always have some wonderful sponsors on this podcast. I think I'm the only person who likes monsters. So let's just dive into the topic here. This man is nicknamed the King of Flow, the best-selling pinball designer of all time, my favorite designer, and the reason why you know or will know what Meniere's disease is. Of course, I'm talking about Steve Ritchie. What's your first memory of Steve Ritchie, Ron? My first memory of Steve Ritchie is meeting him at the 2004 Pinball Expo when at the banquet, he arrived to the banquet late, came up to the table I was sitting at and said, can I sit here? And everyone's like, oh, sure. And he sat at our table. So that was pretty cool. Was this a buffet? Yes, it was a buffet. That's great. What does Steve Ritchie eat at a buffet? I don't remember. It was so long ago. He seems like he's all meat. He's no potatoes. He's no vegetables. That guy, he's going right for the guy that carves the ham, and he's eating just all ham. Someone at our table asked him, what's a dream theme that you would want to design that you haven't done yet? And you know what he said? I'd love to know. A pirate theme. Ooh. which is funny because it was one year before Pirates of the Caribbean came out, the Stern one, which he didn't do. He didn't do it. Steve Ritchie seems like a troll. He seems like he loves to poke fun. He's almost like the kind of guy that loves to poke fun at everybody around him and the industry in general, and I respect that. Yeah, looking back at it years later, I think he was just a troll. That's right. He was trolling us because they would have already known they were doing it by then because it was literally out the next year. So my first memory of Steve Ritchie was T2. So I'm much younger than you. I'm in my mid-30s. And I used to play T2 when we would travel from my province, New Brunswick, into our vacation province, Prince Edward Island. We'd travel on the ferry. And on that, there was a T2, and I would love to grab the gun handle. I'd love to shoot the ball across the play field. I'd double flip for about two seconds and lose the ball. It was amazing. Now, of course, at the time, I had no idea that there was a designer and teams behind it and how much effort and how much thought went into building T2. But that's sort of the first memory of pinball, and it just happens to be Steve Ritchie, our topic today. So that would be the first game you ever played of his, Terminator 2. It's the first pinball machine I ever played, actually. And that was because in 91, 92, there was nothing bigger than T2. And to be able to lock down a license like that, I mean, who's going to get it? It's going to be the guy who's the best-selling pinball designer of all time. And one thing's for sure, we're going to touch on T2 in our next Steve Ritchie episode, which will be further down the road as we get a few of these in. So one of the things that I was looking at is I really wanted to get some quotes from people. So I reached out on the Pinball Enthusiasts Facebook group and I said, can you give me some things that come to mind when I say Steve Ritchie? So here are a couple of great quotes. Some of these are pretty quality quotes and some of them make sense. One of them was, give me your money. My childhood nemesis. Another fellow, he said, Steve Ritchie, bow to the master. The last one, who can pass up a game with the best flow designer of all time? Flow, that's something we'll get into when we start talking about the evolution and the design of Steve Ritchie's feel on the play field. Are you a flow type of player? 100%. You love flow mostly. I love flow. The majority of my collection is still Steve Ritchie games. My first game I ever got was a Black Knight. Wow. So I'm all about kinetics, ball flow. I'm all about the shots. And that's really what Flo is. And that's where he gets the name the king of Flo because he sort of pioneered that style. Now, Flo, I think, probably came a little bit later into Steve Ritchie's career. And of course, we'll take a deeper dive in on the later bits of Steve's career in a following podcast. Let's get going with the early biography. Yeah. So Steve Ritchie's early biography. I've got some of the notes in our research here, and I'll just zip through a couple of these. So Stephen Scott Ritchie was born February 13th, 1950 in San Francisco, California. At age five, they moved to Pacifica, California, a place I've never heard of. His first experience in pinball was a local bowling alley at seven. His parents were in a bowling league at Seabowl and they would give Steve a dollar and he'd play 10 cent games all night while they played. At 10 or 11, while playing at the bowling alley, a tech came in to service one of the machines. A curious Steve Ritchie spoke with the tech, or as he said in a quote that I found, I was looking at it, and he said, if you want to see it, you can get closer and look into the cabinet. And there were all these relays and tons of wire and all this stuff and these shiny chrome-plated mechanisms. Then the guy looked at me and said, you know this is a Gottlieb, the Cadillac of the industry. That was about 1960 or 61. Ron, was Gottlieb the Cadillac of the industry in 60, 61? Ah, definitely, yes. They were the Cadillac of the industry. Now, are you saying that because they were as heavy as a Cadillac, these old machines from the 60s? No. They were the most profitable. They made the most games. They sold the most games. They were the Cadillac of the industry. They certainly had it all, right? They had, like, some awesome art. When you look at things like Sing Along, an old game from the 60s, it has some really odd art, and it's got some cool, fun mechanisms that just keep putting those quarters in. So Steve often describes his early years. He always says he's, in all of these old interviews that I've seen, he says he's a bit of a troublemaker. He was always very inventive at a young age. He tells a story in a couple of old podcasts from years ago where when he was an inventor as a child, he would ride his bicycle and he'd create parachutes where he'd throw the parachute behind his bicycle as they went down hills. I don't know why he'd do that, but kids are kids, right? That they are. So he, of course, loved rock music after hearing the Beatles. As soon as he heard that, he dove right into the Beatles and right headfirst into making music. And in fact, he was actually in a band who opened for the Doobie Brothers. What's your favorite Doobie Brothers song?
    13:31
    Maybe China Grove. Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one. I have a Doobie Brothers album and the name escapes me at the moment. Damn it. It's one of their live ones. Doobie Brothers Live? That's probably it. Steve Ritchie has Meniere's disease, which is a disorder that affects the inner ear. Ron, do you have anything on Meniere's disease? I actually have a friend who has this, yes.
    13:54
    Basically what it does, it gives you this sensation of spinning, causes balance issues. As it progresses, you will start having less and less balancing issues, but your hearing will start to go. So it's genetics, right? Is that what they say usually? I believe so. Yeah, okay. So it's not a good thing. So it's pretty interesting that, you know, and we'll get into this, I'd say, further in some of our other Steve Ritchie podcasts, is that sound and music and that auditory feedback is always so big in Steve Ritchie's games, but his hearing is, you know, it is failing, right? So that's crazy that that's such a focus of his, even though that's, lack of a better word, a handicap that he has. Yes, when I first met him in 2004, he was already wearing the hearing aids. Wow. And that was 15 years ago, so. Yeah, so I listened to the special When Lit Pinball podcast, their episode with Steve Ritchie, and he spoke to them and said, basically, if I'm in a loud room, I can't hear anything or anybody. So it's pretty amazing that that's such a part of his pinball machines. It was in 1968 to 1972 that he was stationed in Vietnam and Alaska in the U.S. Coast Guard. He was a tech who made wiring harnesses for radios and the like. I guess that would probably come in handy considering where he would move to in the industry. After returning from the Coast Guard, Steve quickly became a starving musician, and he really needed a job. So in 1974, he went to Atari Incorporated to become employee number 50 on the assembly line of the electromechanical tech area for wiring harnesses. That makes sense, right, Ron, because Atari was based in Sunnyvale, California, which is Steve Ritchie's home state. That is correct. They were a video game company primarily. Of course, they came up with Pong. and at some point in the mid-70s, they started dipping their toe in the water of pinball. Yeah, they were all about the quarters, right? If you could bring in a quarter, you know, they had, I would say, in some cases, the arcade game really locked down. They had that market at the arcade pretty much in hand with a few others, like maybe Midway. But they really, really spent all their time trying to grab quarters. and there's another half to that, which was pinball. You got to remember at the time in the mid-70s, you had Bally doing a lot of their licensed pins and the pinball started selling more. It got to the point where you had pinballs that were actually selling like 10,000 plus units. So they wanted a piece of that. What do you think he learned in the manufacturing line working actually with his hands building pinball machines? I think he learned what it takes to build a whitewood, which you would put to good use later on. And another thing, I think just knowing the way, and we'll get into this probably in a later episode, but he, even from an early period, he would always peruse the assembly lines when they were building his games. He was always very hands-on about how his games were being built. He always wanted to be there. He's always been very passionate about when they're actually being built, making sure things get done right, if there's problems, getting them taken care of. So I think that probably was the start of it being very hands-on, because originally he was one of those workers. He was building harnesses. I believe he also built test structures at one point. Here are some comments, actually, from Steve about his time at Atari. When I went to Atari to look for work, I was the starving guitar player in a rock band. From the lobby of Atari, I could hear blasting rock and roll provided in stereo throughout the factory. Many beautiful ladies were running around, and it sure as hell looked like fun to me. Yeah, I'll tell you, Steve loves to tell that story. Yes, he does. I've heard it many times. Continuing, they finally let me work in the engineering area. I got an offer to be the first employee in their pinball division, a new venture at the time. I worked in the prototype lab, and I was blown away by pinball. I mean, I can only imagine what it would be like to walk into a manufacturing plant like that in the mid-70s and sort of see this interesting kind of fun game, the melding of the physical and the movement of the ball, your thoughts and ideas. I mean, I bet you when he says I was blown away by pinball, I think he probably really was. So I guess what we'll do is we'll deep dive Atari and its foray into pinball in another episode. So we'll go deeper into Atari later on in some other episode. But Steve certainly had a lot of issues at Atari, one of which was his boss at the time. And it really appeared that there was a bit of an elitist culture at Atari or it really, I think, irked Steve that he just sort of came in as a line worker and could notice right away because he has – obviously, he has some passion and an innovative mind. that it really bothered him sort of the way things worked at Atari. Yeah, because as Steve said, I started a design of my own, which I worked on at home only. I asked my boss if I could bring it in, and he said, no way. Pinball design is for college graduates only, industrial design degrees. I worked on it for one year. I was super pissed that my boss was such a dick. And that's true. At Atari, they had this policy that you couldn't do the design unless you had an engineering degree, which is funny because an engineering degree doesn't necessarily mean you know how to design a game as anyone who's seen a lot of the Atari pinballs can tell you. Yeah, well, I can certainly tell you that just because you know how to drive a train, that has nothing to do with actually building a pinball machine. That is true. You no-sold me on that. You didn't even give me a... All right, go ahead. Read the next one. One day I became frustrated as hell and went to see Nolan Bouchnell, who, if you don't know, Nolan Bouchnell was the founder and president of Atari. Nolan looked at my drawing and asked me if I did it all at home. I said, yes. I asked him if I could build it up and make it work. He said, certainly. You can have the cubicle next to Gary Slater. No one on earth was happier than me. The game was Airborne Avenger. Eugene Jarvis programmed the game, and we became good friends. That's an amazing story, especially for me, somebody who's younger, that everything is so formal now, the way that you request a job or the way you apply for jobs or things like that. So I find this absolutely fascinating that he could go to a Nolan Bushnell and just tell him, hey, I was kind of doing this on my own on the left when I was at home.
    20:32
    And he's like, oh, yeah, just grab a cubicle next to Gary over there, and over here is the microwave, and here's your increase in salary. Like that is just crazy to think of that. Yeah, I heard him. The times I've heard him tell the story, it was just like Nolan Bushnell was walking down the hall, and he's like, hey, hi. I'm Steve Ritchie. I'm doing this thing. And he was like, sure, go ahead. What was it like before there was an HR department, Ron?
    20:59
    Good question. I do know one thing. Do you know who else worked at Atari at the time that Steve Ritchie worked there? No. Who else worked at Atari? Steve Jobs. Like the Apple Steve Jobs? The Apple Steve Jobs. That's crazy. And you know what Steve Ritchie said about him? That he was the nicest person he had ever met? He was a dick and couldn't stand him. I can imagine Steve Ritchie saying that. Oh, yeah. Steve Jobs said, yeah. What Steve said is Steve Jobs, there's too many Steves here. What Steve Ritchie said was Steve Jobs, he would work at night for a couple reasons. Number one, Steve Wozniak. Yeah, the other guy at Apple. He's Steve, too? Wow. Okay. So Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs' partner in crime, he would work his day job, And then he would come into Atari at night and work with Steve Jobs. So did he work with Steve Jobs or did he do Steve Jobs' job? Well, yeah, who knows? That Wozniak basically carried Steve Jobs' whole career. At least on the tech side. But Nolan Bouchnell loved it because he didn't have to pay Steve Wozniak.
    22:08
    Oh, of course. True story. He loved him coming in. And another reason he had him work at night is because at that time, Steve Jobs did not like to shower.
    22:15
    Oh, God. It was known to smell particularly bad. So that was another reason he had him working at night. That's amazing. All true stories according to Steve Ritchie. Well, I mean, if Steve Ritchie said it, that's my choice. Yeah, that's amazing. Let's get into Airborne Avenger, the first game that Steve Ritchie did at his time at Atari. So let's get into the stats. Well, I feel like I need something snappier than just saying the stats. I don't know. I guess we'll figure something out. So Airborne Avenger, what I'll do is I'll toss this in the show notes. Can you explain what the IPDB is, Ron? IPDB stands for Internet Pinball Database, and that's IPDB.org. They have listings of most every game and pictures and cool little factoids and sometimes software, manuals, things like that. It's like an encyclopedia of pinball machines. Very good. So we use this as a bit of a resource for our stats. And if you want to follow along or you want to take a look, that's where we get a lot of our information about the machine specifically beyond sort of the regular research. So let's start it with Airborne Avenger. It's an adventure combat sort of spacey plane theme. It's from September 1977. It's a solid state machine, which is an Atari Generation 1 is what it was named. It's a wide body machine. There was 3,420 produced. The software was done by Eugene Jarvis, and you'll know his name because he wrote the software for Space Shuttle, High Speed, Firepower, and Gorgar from Williams. The artwork was done by George Opperman, and he's only done the artwork for Atari. And as I said, I'll just toss the IPDB link in our show notes for a reference. Ron, have you played Airborne Avenger? I have played Airborne Avenger. Played it once. Didn't really make a huge impression on me. It didn't make a bad impression, like this is terrible, but it wasn't like, oh, my God, this is awesome. It was just kind of, eh. It was like the Stranger Things of its day. Oh. Very good. Oh, too soon. Too soon. And some background for Atari's, every single one of their games was a wide body. They only did wide bodies. So what's a wide body, Ron? Wide body meaning it's wider than the average game. the thing about the wide bodies is it depended on the manufacturer how wide wide body was ah so like so like a williams wide body would be different than atari some of them are wider and some of them are longer the bally's the bally's are wider but they're the same length like that the the playfield glass but like the old stern ones which we'll get into at some point in another show they weren't quite as wide and then and something like godly would have ones that were wide, then they had ones that were really wide. So there could be a whole episode on wide bodies. But the other thing I wanted to bring up about this particular game, and Atari's in general, the one thing that Steve Ritchie brought to the table, and one of his pet peeves, is a lot of Atari games have really bizarre flipper arrangements. They almost, like one of the best explanations I've ever heard, or descriptions of an Atari game, is most of the Atari games look like prototypes. They look like bizarre prototypes that were never made, but they were they were actual production games and one of Steve Ritchie's things was he wanted a regular I guess it would be called Italian bottom which there could be a whole other episode but just a standard flipper layout on the bottom your two flippers your in lanes and your out lanes and he was very and in all the games he has ever done he has stayed true to that and including this one and you'll see that when we get to his other his other uh atari game and all his other games but atari was not known for this they were known for really weird looking layouts that maybe weren't necessarily fun to shoot because most of them were designed by engineers and not necessarily game designers so did they so did they go with a wide body because they thought there'd be more stuff on the play field and it would be you know more exciting or interesting to see that is a good question so if somebody knows that they can you can write us at the silver ball bag at gmail.com and let us know why atari had to make all these wide bodies so one thing's for sure i i gotta point this out atari had some amazing art like i i would say the coolest thing about this machine is that back glass It got like Dolph Lernigan He's just this chiseled, perfect square jaw. He's got some laser cannon thing. He's got these sweet sunglasses. There's like planets. It's very cool. Who is the guy? Dolph who? It's like Dolph Lernigan. Remember the guy from... You mean Dolph Lundgren? Dolph Lundgren, right. I thought that's how it was said. You mean I must break you? Yeah, this is why you're here, Ron, to point out the fact that I have no idea how to say names. And someone will write in and say I said it wrong, but I've always heard it Dolph Lundgren. These Ataris, they had the boards in the bottom under the play field, right? Yes, a slight oversight there. That wasn't – probably that's not the best idea because what would happen is they didn't put any kind of real shielding over the stuff either. so like components would maybe fall off the bottom of the play field and just fall right on the board shorting it oh god that's horrible and they also would put the the score display instead of putting it on the back glass like every other manufacturer they had it on the apron so they had these humongous huge aprons and the score would be actually it was digital but it'd be on the apron where no one could see it other than the player wow so it was originally thought there was only about 350 of these things produced but steve richie had once confirmed um to ipdb that about 3420 were sold uh which would certainly put airborne avenger among one of the higher sellers that atari ever had actually i would agree with steve richie on this there's definitely more than 350 made i mean it's it's not it's rare but it's not super i have seen them at shows so joe wrote into the silver ball bag just like you can and he said seems like a good game for 800 bucks seems like a pretty cheap piece of history so the current pin side estimated value of the game is about 740 to 860 that seems pretty low for a piece of history though isn't it ron it's an atari if it breaks you yeah and i mean they're they're rarer games as far as is who knows how to fix an atari board i know the preeminent guy as far as atari repair at least from 10 years ago he's still around it's john robertson okay he's in canada he's a fellow fellow canadian like yourself but he's on the other side he's on like west coast i think he's in vancouver or something like he doesn't like snow at all but he was always back in the back in the day in the old days of news groups oh my god before pinside or any of that if you had atari questions you would always go to him he would also be he had a lot of the parts so if you have an airborne avenger seek him out because you may need him to fix your game there you go if you've dropped the balls off of the playfield right onto the board on the bottom he's your man yeah yeah very good very good so um atari really knew art gathered coins. So their arcade division on the video side certainly knew that art gathered coins. So, you know, George Opperman is probably one of the greatest assets that they had. And he's the fellow that did all of the art for most of these Atari machines. And, you know, it's sort of like Stern today, right? They know that artwork will drive you into that machine, even though, let's face it the atari's not the best players now but their artwork across their entire company was tremendous because they had not just the video games and the pinballs they also had when they started making the um the vcs probably better known as the atari 2600 yes which people don't know the original name of it was just the atari vcs video computer system i think it was sold exclusively through Sears originally or something like that. But it got the 2600 later. But if you remember the cartridges, they would come in these, the packaging, the art on the packaging was tremendous. They made the games look like the most incredible things ever. Well, I'll tell you, when it comes to me, when you look at something like a missile command, man, oh man, that side art on the side of that with the buddy with his helmet and the missiles going off, that's cool. That's what draws you in to do the coin because when you get up there and it's just a couple of lines and some dots and some blinking, that's not what's bringing the quarter. It's the art that's bringing the quarter, and Atari certainly knew that. So here we have a quote from somebody you may know. This is Dennis Creasel. Dennis Creasel owned a Superman, and here's what he says about his Superman.
    31:35
    And this is Dennis Creasel, of course, of the Eclectic Gamers podcast, and he will be on the pinball show. That's right, the flagship show. Yes, the flagship show. We were told to promote this or we would be fired immediately. That's right. Okay, maybe not. Dennis says, thoughts on Superman? Awesome art package. Aside from Steve Ritchie, it was George Opperman who was their greatest asset. I think he worked on every produced Atari pens art except Hercules, and it shows. This is really, I think, another relationship we could dive into here is Eugene Jarvis and Steve Ritchie. You know, they certainly had a very close relationship. Eugene Jarvis, of course, being the programmer from Atari where Steve had met him. And they'll follow along throughout their whole tenure together in pinball. And Eugene Jarvis, of course, one of the, I would say, most respected individuals when it comes to programming in the industry. We'll get a little deeper into him here in a few moments. Steve Ritchie and Eugene Jarvis might be one of the first, geez, that might be the first designer, programmer, super teams when you think about it. Super teams. Do they have like, do they have uniforms? Well, everyone thinks you had like Steve Ritchie, Dwight Sullivan that made a ton of games together.
    32:47
    You know, you have you have certain these super teams. You have like the Brian Eddy with Lyman Sheets with your Attack from Mars and your Medieval Madnesses. They're probably they have to be the first, don't they? Because Solid State just started. Yeah, sure. So you have your first generation of programmers coming in. Literally, they would have to be the first kind of super team. Well, things would get so complicated when you move into solid state. The way you're – you'd have to bend your mind to come up with so many different ways to get pinball to change beyond sort of that old electromechanical or old reels and counters. When you have a computer doing those things, that's – I think the teams would have to come much closer together now. And this would probably be the birth of probably one of the best teams to ever come out of pinball to work together. Yeah, I think a lot of it would be the designer saying, I want to do this. Can you do this? And the programmer saying, let me try. And then like a couple hours later, okay, I got it working. There's a lot of that. So what does Eugene Jarvis do now, Ron? I don't know. Eugene Jarvis is the founder and CEO of Raw Thrills, probably one of the few video game companies that actually makes money. Yeah, so they're the arcades in like entertainment centers, right? They're in the entertainment. They make the big games. They have like a Walking Dead game, a Jurassic Park game. Or Jurassic Park one, yeah. Yeah, the Terminator game. Yep, and he's also Josh Sharp's boss. Wow, Josh Sharp. Josh Sharp of the IFPA, the International Flipper Pinball Association. Yep. On a future show, maybe we'll get into more tournament stuff, but we don't want to lose too many people in the audience. Nobody cares about tournament pinball. That's right. So after the success of Airborne Avenger, Richie earned the license at Atari to do Superman the Pinball based on the comic book, and the final stages of production of the table, Steve actually received an offer from Williams. Ooh.
    34:40
    Other interesting factoids about Superman is, at least according to Steve, it was some of the most Whitewoods he ever did for a game, or close to it. He did a ton of Whitewoods that he was not happy with. It took a lot of Whitewoods to get the game where he wanted to. And if you don't know what a Whitewood is, again, for our audience, a Whitewood is basically, You have no art. You just have a piece of wood, and you're putting the play field elements around on the play field and just shooting it. Yeah, they're sort of just drilling the holes in, throwing some things in there, some flippers and some mechanics. Yep, see how it plays. And he had to do a ton of them for this game. And, again, he was working with his buddy, Eugene Jarvis. And this is for the, again, this is the comic book theme. This is not the movie, even though the movie was just out the previous year. So what I find actually pretty interesting about the whole Superman at Atari thing is that that machine actually didn't come out until Steve ended up at Williams, which is kind of strange. That is correct, and we'll get into that later. He actually had three games in the PlayMeter Top Ten simultaneously, including one for a company he didn't work for anymore at that point. I don't think anyone will ever do that again. Yeah, well, certainly not. No, of course not. In the final stages of production of The Table, when Steve received his offer from Williams, he was about 27. And I'll tell you what, when somebody gives you a call and says, hey, I'm from Chicago, I'm offering you a job if you come over here to jump ship to another company, you know, that's pretty crazy. So rumor has it that actually Steve said, well, you know, I can't just get up and go to Chicago just, you know, on a whim. So they actually said that they would come to see them. the Williams team would actually fly from Chicago all the way to California to see Eugene Jarvis and Steve Ritchie to sort of broker a deal. They really wanted him, obviously. Yeah, so it's funny that he sort of made one game. He's more or less working on his second game with Eugene Jarvis, which would eventually become Superman. And sort of the word is kind of out already, right? Like, hey, there's Steve Ritchie, there's this guy Eugene, they're over at Atari, they're looking pretty good. So it's interesting, right, because the industry is fairly small for the most part, right? There was only a handful of companies, coin ops and conventions were all fairly small. So obviously you'd bump into each other, I would say, fairly often. But it's so cool that just immediately this sort of young upstart, what you call them a super team, are starting to get their names out there. It's so much, in fact, that the bigwigs at Williams in Chicago are calling California and trying to poach them. Yeah, and you've got to remember, at the time, and still to this day, Chicago is the heart and soul of pinball. That's where all the manufacturers were, even then. Gottlieb, Bally, Williams were all in Chicago. Atari was kind of like this upstart video game company trying to do pinball. Yeah, they were just trying to diversify their portfolio, right? They weren't really trying to make a big splash. They were just trying to get the coin that was going into the Bally machine or a Gottlieb machine into an Atari machine. And not to get ahead of ourselves, we'll back up a little bit and get to Superman. So Superman, also a wide body, was finally released in March of 1979 after Steve had already left Atari. Over 3,420 produced. The software was by Eugene Jarvis. he stayed to the end of development. So he was there and finished the game up. Artwork again by George Opperman. And this was probably the best Atari game, I would say. Dennis Creasel of the Eclectic Gamers podcast and the Pinball Network, he had one of these Ataris, one of these Atari Supermans. And I would say he was quite pleased at the way it is. And when you open up their IPDB page, One of the coolest bits, I think, about IPDB is it's got these old flyers and these old sort of salesy items. It cracks me up, some of the wording that they have on these, because you can tell that they're really laying it on thick. Like super earnings for Superman or something like that. Right. I'm not even looking at it. I just made that up. It probably says something like that. Yeah. So the most famous superhero in century flashes into the world of pinball. it's superman the pinball game like it's just silliness right like it i love this stuff in a world where superman plays pinball that's that yeah exactly right like that's the i think one of the best parts about ipdb and it's also funny because you can look at the way sort of marketing was at that time like we're marketed so differently now in the way that you know everything is thrown at us in all ways now machines still have flyers but it becomes sort of less about the art and more about kind of what's going on in the play field or what are the potential but it was all about earnings and supercharging and it was always just cracks me up to read some of this stuff the other thing about superman uh per eugene jarvis one of the things that he he states he invented was the idea of a flashing light which we all know now like something's flashing shoot Like the flashing light? The flashing, like, shoot this, and this flashes, shoot this. Oh, very good. The inventor of Chase the blinking light. Before he came around, I mean, on EM, you had just had lights. You had blinker lights, like in the back glass and things, but you didn't have anything that was flashing at you, like, here, yeah, shoot here, shoot here. And according to Eugene Jarvis, well, actually, I won't say, I won't use the language he used when the interview I saw about it. He said he invented that. Very cool. Very cool. If I ever meet Eugene Jarvis, I will shake his hand because he is the only reason I know how to play pinball whatsoever is just a chase of blinking light because some of the time I have no idea what's going on. Thank you, Eugene. One thing that I found particularly interesting is when Williams was sort of in conversation, let's say, with Steve Ritchie and I would say on the periphery, Eugene Jarvis, a lot of people look at Williams, I would say maybe with rose-colored glasses, right? Williams in the mid-'70s is not the Williams we would know in the 80s and sort of the rebirth in the 1990s. Isn't that correct? That's correct. I mean, at the time you had Gottlieb, we're still probably number one. But in the mid-'70s, Bally started going for the licenses, games like Wizard, Captain Fantastic, paying for licensing. They started to make these games that were selling like 10,000 units. Williams was probably a third at the time. Yeah, so I guess you could say sort of the invention of solid state or what would become computer boards inside of pinball machines, that sort of arms race had drastically sort of changed the industry at that time. That is true. Gottlieb was – well, this will be a future episode, but Gottlieb made some decisions that would haunt them for years to come, and they went from number one to I would say a distant third. Yes, and I would say Bally and Stern Electronics, they really were able to sort of change the tide in their favor. But this sort of reinvention of the industry, this revision of their entire business model, you could say that Williams was really dedicated to take a big stab. And one of those things was to collect talent, right? That is correct. He wasn't the only talent. Other talented people who we'll probably cover in another episode, but people like Eugene Jarvis, people like Larry DeMar, another programmer just fresh out of college, Barry Osler. These are people who shaped the industry for Williams in the upcoming years. Yeah, Williams in the mid to late 70s was not the Williams that they would become. And according to Steve, this is quoting Steve. Steve says, Eugene and I used to go to the Time Zone Arcade and check out the pinballs and everything else. We used to laugh at their games, being Williams. It was like they drew half a game, held up a mirror, and then drew the other half. It was totally symmetrical. On the other hand, Bally and Gottlieb were making great stuff. Really, we actually said that. They need us. Oh, how cool is that, that at that point, Steve Ritchie and Eugene Jarvis going to an arcade, sort of checking out the competition and basically going like, man, these Williams guys, like, they need us. That's amazing. I could totally see him saying that, too. Yeah, so when they met with Williams, Williams wanted to change everything. They wanted to revamp their whole business, and they wanted to be super sleek. They wanted to be the company of the future, Steve would say. And in my opinion, Williams probably needed to change to survive, not necessarily just to innovate to increase sales. I think they probably still needed this to survive. What do you think?
    43:42
    It all depends. I mean, they still are making pinballs. I mean, they hadn't gone into the video game thing yet, which that's a whole other discussion, and Eugene Jarvis would be a huge part of that discussion. But as far as, I mean, they were making games like Phoenix.
    44:00
    I think that might have been one of their first solid-state games. Things like World Cup, not World Cup soccer, but World Cup, Hot Tip. That's what they were making at the time. Yeah. So in fact, there's a couple of interviews that I've listened to in doing the research here where Steve actually joked about hot tip that that was what they were bringing to the table. And you're facing things like a Captain Fantastic from Bali or something from God leave that doesn't suck. That's a tough one, isn't it?
    44:34
    We'll just leave it at that. Anywho, one of those good Gottliebs that people were buying because they were the Cadillac of the industry, even though they didn't realize it was a bad game. I have to disagree with Steve here. I like Hot Tip. Okay, well, I guess there's an idiot in every crowd. Hey, it's a better game than Captain Fantastic. Sorry. It is. It doesn't have a better back glass, though. No, it doesn't. The horse biting another horse is like, come on. No, yeah. You are correct. Because art is the only thing that matters in pinball. At this point, I mean, they're tidying up Superman.
    45:10
    Eugene still has to code this thing. Well, Steve Ritchie pulls the chute. He moves to Chicago from California, and Steve Ritchie would say that he left Atari very angry and scared, and that he was actually worried about moving all the way to Chicago from California. But I'll tell you what, he says that fear motivated him to produce a design. And that's when, and if Steve Ritchie is 100% truthful here, he drew his first game at Williams while he was flying from California to Chicago. Yeah, see, I've heard the same thing. He said specifically he was drawing the loop shot to his first game at Williams, which would be? Flash. Very good. So you've played Flash, of course, right? I used to own a Flash, so yes. Yeah, there you go. So you're a big Steve Ritchie guy. When I first entered the hobby about two years ago, I was like, I want to find a pinball machine. And I go on. Here in Canada, we use a thing called Kijiji, which is, I guess, like Craigslist, but it has a nicer user interface. So I get on this website. I get looking around, and I see a flash. And I did a little bit of research. Of course, it was overpriced, as most used machines are out there nowadays. But what I did learn from that machine was that there are some very unique and very cool designs out there. And to think that this was Steve Ritchie's really third design, his first standard body design, and it's a machine that we'll get into in a minute that just has all of these firsts. Very, very cool. I didn't end up buying it, but I think at one time I would love to own a Flash. It's a good game. I cannot fault it in any way. Yeah, so let's get into the stats. That sounds so boring. How about let's flash into the stats. How about that, Ron? Yeah, that's so much better. So Flash is a fantasy sort of God of Thunder theme. It was made in January 1979. It is a solid state machine from the Williams System 4 board set, which are the computer boards in the back. It's a standard body machine. It sold, okay, let's get this, 19,505 units. That is massive. That is Steve Richie's largest selling game. To think that he went from selling 3,500 machines to 19,505. That is a staggering number.
    47:47
    The sound on that machine and the software was done by Randy Pfeiffer. And basically the only thing that he did in his career of note was Flash. And the artwork was by Constantino and Janine Mitchell. And they've done a lot of Williams and Gottlieb art through the 80s and 90s. Man, oh man. Besides that name being difficult to say, it's staggering to think that Steve Ritchie's third game is the third biggest selling game of all time. Yeah, and a game of lots of firsts. What are some of the firsts on there? What are some of the firsts that this machine has done? Probably one of the biggest ones, it was the first machine that had the dynamic background sound, meaning a background sound that would change as you played the game. And in this case, it would rise in intensity. And it became pretty much standard of all games of that era. Everyone started adding that feature. So it's sort of like where there's a tone or a noise, and it builds and it builds and it builds. as your points go up, right? It creates like this level of anxiety and excitement. So it was the first machine that didn't have just dinging and binging, right? Yes. And I think it's the way it works. I believe all it does, it just keeps increasing intensity as you hit stuff. Very cool. And then it'll loop. It'll go all the way up and then it'll usually go back down. Very cool. And this was also the first machine with flash lamps, which is why it gets the name flash. And what is a flash lamp in pinball terms? Flashlamp is a light that is extremely bright And it will just It pulses Because if you left it on it would be extremely bright To look at and it would burn out quickly And Steve Ritchie saw I think it was a headlight Yeah it was like a taillight of a car And he's like can we get that in a game And they were able to get that in a game It's used in the lightning bolts in Flash So actually it's pretty funny Because when you sit down and you play Flash now and it's i mean it's fairly antiquated game it's got his challenge but it's a bit different if if if you if you knock down the series of drop targets in the front they drop down below the play field and then all of a sudden there's like a lightning bolt kind of uh insert and all of a sudden that just sort of flashes really quickly it's it's actually a bit anticlimactic uh compared to the brightness of games now yeah but at the time people were like whoa like i just did something important it was quite a simpler time the thing is steve ritchie originally had the idea for the background sound with superman oh okay right management would not let him do it they there was probably another reason he left because him and eugene jarvis had the um i think it's called the echoplex okay okay and and it would made a continuous background sound it's something he wanted to do with superman but they wouldn't it just they wouldn't let him do it so that's that's one thing he was definitely going to put in flash so we talked about atari right is that they were very sort of rigid and i called them maybe a bit elitist um you know that's pretty interesting stuff that that hey there's this thing and i mean would you say that one of the major reasons that flash sold so many was because of this sort of anxiety inducing sound 100 because no other game did it yeah they set it apart from any other game at the time it's also the first machine with a third flipper with a repeatable top loop and i mean who doesn't love a repeatable top loop really yeah that was a steve ritchie he wanted to do a game with the third flipper the side flipper and one of the things that bothered him he didn't like how a lot of other games there were a lot of other games with side flippers yeah he didn't invent that but like say captain fantastic steve uses steve ritchie would use as an example he didn't like where it was positioned he wanted to position a series of targets yeah he wanted to position it in a way you could do more than just hit a target you could do something with it so on flash you can hit targets you can sweep an entire three bank you could also loop and on a well this is a prerequisite on a well um well adjusted flash you can do the repeatable loop shot it takes some tweaking i found to get it to work right most of the time but yeah well i mean the game is 40 years old That's true. But you can get a repeatable loop shot, which was just something like I'd love to see the first person who did that like two times and was like, whoa. I mean, I bet you that that it would take it would probably take a while before somebody kind of realized that you could do that. They also, Steve Ritchie, it said, did some design tweaks to the flipper lanes, the in lanes, the way they come into the flippers, that they were just a little bit quicker, a little bit faster. And one thing that's, I mean, I would say kind of boring but interesting nonetheless, is that this is the first machine that was a black cabinet, and that sort of became standard in the industry when it came to machines. And you see that a lot, I would say, in the Williams of the era. Yeah, the black base with some kind of design on it, not always the greatest designs, some better than others, but we'll get to those. So Jerry wrote into the silver ball bag at gmail.com, just like you can, and he said, hi, Randy, Ron, and Delightful Dave, which are the best-selling pinball machines ever? I can only think of the Addams Family. So, okay, Jerry, I don't appreciate the name-calling. That's not very fair to myself and Ron here, but I'll answer your question. I like Randy, Ron. I'll take that. Yes, he is right. Addams Family is is it the second best or best well if you want to be really anal you can get to things like Ballyhoo which is what Bally named after which sold I don know 40 50 units It's like one of the earliest flipperless pinball, like tabletop pinball games. At the time, it was 8-Ball by Bally. Yes. Which had the infamous back glass of the Fonz, who didn't give his likeness to that. No, he just looked like the Fonz, but he wasn't the Fonz. Of course. I mean, everybody had jackets like that in here. Yeah, yeah. I mean, really. He was just a greaser. Well, he learned their lesson. They started actually paying for licenses after that. Remember that book with the greasers? What was that book?
    54:11
    Well, anyway, if you know what that book was that you read in high school that had the greasers, please send that in to silverballbag at gmail.com, and I'll read it in our next episode. If you look at sort of the top sellers at the time, I mean, it must be pretty staggering to have a machine just like this right out of the gate. So Williams, what they really wanted to do, I would say Jack Mattel, who was then the VP of sales, this is what they were looking for, right? They were looking to reinvigorate the Williams brand, the pinball machines that they had, and this is a prime example of just that, right? Like he must have been over the moon. Of course, when you see it sold 19,000, you're wondering, like, why didn't they go for the extra thousand? Yeah, so Steve Ritchie would say that towards the end of the run of Flash, he asked Jack Mattel, the then VP of sales, why he wouldn't try to push past the 20,000 mark. And that would put him up there with eight ball by Bally. And he replied, we want to leave the market wanting more. So, I mean, this guy is like a he's a proper shill, right? He's so salesy, like like that Zach Minney fella. We'll have to leave them wanting more. So was Atari holding Richie back? Do you think they were holding him back? I think they just weren't a pinball company. They were a video game company that wanted to try to make pinballs. But, I mean, after Superman, and the other thing to remember here, Flash came out in January. Superman's not out yet. It doesn't come out until, I believe, March. So there was a weird period where he has Superman and Flasher both out simultaneously for two different companies that are both his game. That's got to be so embarrassing for Atari. I don't think the designers weren't really known there. They didn't have their names on the play field.
    55:59
    So there were no pinheads then that were like, oh, my God, this is a Steve Ritchie game. Oh, my God. I don't think they even knew half the designers were. They weren't written on the games at that point. But the thing is, Atari just made Hercules after that, which was more of a novelty game really than anything, which is the largest pinball game ever. That's the one that's super huge. Yeah, super huge. Yeah. And that was their last pinball game, and then that was it. Then they just stuck with video games and the consoles. So I'll tell you, one of the coolest bits of Flash, I mean, besides the mechanics, like if we go beyond sort of the Steve Ritchie design, It's got to be the art, right? Like it is hardcore turn of the 70s into the 80s, right? Like there is some serious, serious 80s hair going on here with the back glass. It is something else. Yeah, some nudity too. It's – well, what Ron is alluding to here is down on the plastic. It's the left slingshot plastic. I like to dub this one the nipple plastic because there's like these little nubs that go on to hold the art plastic over the mechanics and it's strategically placed kind of right on this woman's chest like this is not a machine that's going to be made here in the next couple of years like it was a different world back then in the 70s and to translate what you said the plastic that goes over the post the acorn nut covers up the offending area It's strategically placed right over the female character's sort of nipply bits. The thing is, I don't think most people don't seem to like that art package for whatever reason.
    57:44
    I mean, I think it's a cool art package. I don't think it's amazing. It's just so unreal. Yeah, it's very recognizable, though, when you see that back glass. Yeah, it definitely stands out in the crowd. So it had some curb appeal, I'll tell you that. So, we have Flash, this huge success that's out. We have Superman, which is Atari's best-selling game. It's also out at the same time. As these two games are out, Williams, they come up to Steve Ritchie because companies like Bally are making wide-body games. Games like Paragon. Everybody loves a wide-body, right? Everyone loves a wide-body. Everyone loves, like, Paragon, Future Spa. They're making these type wide-body games. And Williams, they're like, we want a wide-body. and who better to design a wide body than our new hotshot designer who at atari did two wide bodies this is perfect yeah i mean this guy's got the golden touch right if you're going to get somebody to build the machine you know that you that you've got this vision for it's going to be steve richie so what game did he make well let's get into the stellar stats oh yes the stellar stats So Stellar Wars was his next game. It's a space sci-fi war theme. It's from March of 1979. It is a solid state Williams System 4 board set. It's a wide body. It sold 5,503 units. Sound and software by Paul Dussault. Dussault? Sounds good. Yeah, good enough. Artwork by, oh, Jesus, how do you say this again? Constantino. Constantino and Janine Mitchell. So we're getting together here. What do you think of this as a follow-up to Flash, Ron? Was this the knockout punch?
    59:31
    It's a Star Wars ripoff, 100%. It's Stellar Wars instead of Star Wars. And according to Steve Ritchie, he said, it wasn't fun for me to make. I had done Flash in seven months. They begged me to do a wide body, so I did it. As it turns out, 5,500 units sold. I'd love to sell 5,500 units of Spider-Man today. I put it together in six months, and when it came out, it was a top earner with Flash in the arcades, but I didn't know why. That's – how – what an amazing thing for Steve Ritchie to say. So this is 2007. This is way, way into the future, and he's like, I just put 10 pounds of crap in a five-pound bag, and I sold 5,000 units. Like, it's amazing. I have spoke to him about this game. One of the things he really was bothered with this game, and if you've ever played it – Actually, I don't think you've played it, but the plunge shot, you plunge the ball up into lanes. Right. Typical, that's a lot of games like that. But if you plunge it hard enough, it will actually go past the lanes and comes around like a U-turn through a spinner and goes almost right down the middle. So if you plunge super hard, it will literally go up and then right back down. So usually there's like these gates at the top, right? Yeah, this one goes all the way around. And in hindsight, he said that was dumb. He was not happy that he didn't think that was a good idea. Looking back at it, that was one thing he would change about the play field. Wow. But as far as the game, it's definitely one of the better Williams wide bodies. Because, honestly, most of their wide bodies, because they had the super wide bodies, like Pocorino and what was the other one?
    61:10
    Laserball. A lot of them are just not that good. This one was probably one of the better ones. I mean, one of the major issues with a wide body is that the ball just goes and goes and goes and goes, and it comes all the way back around to the flipper, and it just feels like a long time for the ball to get around, right? So it's a different feel. They're not bad. They're just different.
    61:36
    The funny thing about this is Steve Ritchie's not a fan of wide bodies because he feels it interferes with the flow. You can never get the kind of kinetic flow that he likes in a wide body. It's very difficult because you have to put the shots – when you put the shots so far out to the sides, it just hurts the overall design, which is funny because he eventually did do one more wide body. But that's way in the future. That's way in the future. There are a couple more episodes there, but if you can guess what that super pin is that he made, good for you. I'm not going to give you anything for it. Nothing at all? Nothing. I'm not even going to recognize you on the show if you send us an email to silverballbag at gmail.com, and you're like, oh, it was this game. I'm not even going to respond to it. I might read it. I don't know. I probably won't even read it. Anyway, what do you think? Was Stellar Wars stellar? It made 5,503 units, and they sold a bunch of them. It was a success, and this was the last of the three. So you had Stellar Wars, Flash, and Superman, all in the top ten earners simultaneously, all from the same designer. Yeah. So, I mean, I have seen a Stellar Wars for sale a few times. I do see them pop up from time to time when I'm kind of scouting out. You know, it did have, I would say, some very cool art as well. It's very square and blocky. It's kind of got almost like an old school – have you seen the old, old Battlestar Galactica? Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of got that kind of starship-y space thing going on. I would say it was a very, very cool machine. It was probably the wide body bit that did it in, I would say. If it were a standard body, it probably would have done well. One thing that's also pretty cool about that machine is it's got the pop bumpers. So it has three pop bumpers at the top. So traditionally, you'll plunge the ball, it'll go up to the top, and it'll fall down some lanes on the top and into pop bumpers. That's sort of almost a crutch of the industry. Well, it also has two pop bumpers way down the play field, right on the out lanes and the in lanes. It's right there on the bottom, which would, I'm sure, add a lot of chaos. And because it's Steve Ritchie, the flipper arrangement is still normal. Yes, of course. Which you would call normal, even on a wide body. So it has like ridiculously long in lanes. Yes. Like lane guides that go to the flippers. Yeah, so usually on a wide body, what they do is they'll spread out those slings, right? They'll push them further out on the machine. Or they'll have multiple flippers. They'll move the flippers around. Or do kinds of crazy flipper stuff or have like four in lane, out lanes on one side and all this kind of crazy stuff. Yes, Steve was more of a, I want kind of a standard bottom. I'll mix it up a bit when it comes to stuff above that standard bottom. But, yeah, it's kind of interesting. It's kind of a neat machine. I say if you see one, put some coins in it, right? I mean, everybody loves this. Try it out. They sold 5,000 units. It can totally suck. Yeah, it's got two spinners. I mean, come on. Two spinners is awesome. I'm still waiting for the sequel. It's this next game. Yeah. Solar Wars 2. What would the name of Stellar Wars 2 be? Stellar Wars 2 Electric Boogaloo? Stellar Wars 2.
    65:05
    Two Stellar, Two Wars. No? All right, on to the next game. All right, so at this point in Steve's career, I think he's getting into a bit of a groove. He kind of knows what he likes, what he doesn't like. You know, you're four games in. You're coming up on your next one. Well, you know, you do know what his next game is, right? It's in my basement. So, yes, I definitely know what his next game is. It's Firepower. And you are Firepower. Stats. Yes, it's a space sci-fi war theme. It's basically another Star Wars ripoff. It has the Death Star in the center of the play field. It's the Death Star. It's from February 1980.
    65:45
    It's a solid state. Again, these are all solid state games. He did not make any EMs. Williams System 6, which it pushed the boundaries of what System 6 could do. It's a standard body, 17,410 units. Another massive, massive. Massive seller. Software and Sound by Eugene Jarvis. They got him. They got him from Atari. Speech by Paul DeSalt. And artwork, again, by Constantino and Janine Mitchell. Yeah, that's – I would say a couple of things stick out here. One, what kind of sales numbers did they have kind of in the late 70s and 80s? If you had a decent selling game, what were you selling, like 3,000, 4,000? No, they had games like Grand Prix in the mid-70s that sold like 10,000 units. But they were – they didn't have a ton of those. Yeah, that was sort of the anomaly, right? Where it looks like Steve Ritchie's sellers are like the norm. This was also a, like, right before the video games, kind of the mid to late 70s, early 80s, you have a lot of 10,000 plus sellers in this before everything crashes. Yeah, well, we'll get into that, I'm sure, in another episode. But one thing that you mentioned here was that they got Eugene Jarvis from Atari. So after Flash, Richie gets on the phone, he calls up Eugene, he says, Eugene, you have got to get over here. So Eugene was a part of the original negotiations back in early 79 to come from Atari over to Williams. But I mean, it was a big concern for Steve Ritchie just to pick up and move over, let alone Eugene. He didn't know it was going to work out. Plus, he still had his commitments at Atari and a few other things. But now, Richie has gone to Williams. He's seen how the machine operates. He's right in the heart of the coin op industry. And he's calling up a guy that he knows is going to be a difference maker in Williams. And right out of the gate, you can see that their partnership has really paid dividends. Yes. Eugene Jarvis is literally a genius. He really got on the simplest level what coin op was. That's according to Chris Granter, legendary sound designer from Williams. Another interesting piece about Eugene is from Steve Kirk, who was originally at Stern Electronics, and later he did a little bit at Williams. And he would actually call Eugene the Steven Spielberg of video games because his games were so popular among all types of players. We're talking advanced players, casual players, tournament players. For some reason, Eugene understood coin-op. He understood pinball, and he was able to really translate that into his partnership with Steve. And his sound system that he came up with for Firepower, they pretty much used for the next four to five years of games. So he brought a bunch of things from, I would say, the mind of Eugene Jarvis that he just couldn't leverage at Atari for one reason or another.
    68:52
    And he was able to make a big difference at Williams. And again, this is another pinball machine from Steve Ritchie with a bunch of firsts ever in pinball. One of those firsts is lane change. And, Ron, I mean, I've only ever really known games with lane change. But what was so mind-blowing about lane change? Back in the day, if you needed to get in a certain lane, you had to nudge the game to try to get it in the lane. Yeah, so you would plunge the ball. It would go up to the top, and it would bounce around across some gates. and it would go in an A lane or a B lane, or later on it would spell words. And you couldn't move the lane that had the light on it, right? You would just have to nudge it to get it in. So Steve and Eugene just come up with this idea of, well, what if I move the lane? Yeah, this is another example. The designer and the programmer, and it was Steve Ritchie just saying, hey, can we get this lane to move?
    69:51
    And the programmer, Eugene Jarvis, saying, like, sure. A couple hours later there, it's moving. This is the first solid state machine with three ball multiball. And there were EMs that had multiball. Is that right, Ron? There are lots of EMs that have multiball. Lots of them. That's another common fallacy. This was the first game with multiball. Yeah, so Steve didn't invent multiball. No, he didn't invent multiball. He just brought it to the solid state era. Correct. Yeah. So it's also the first machine with what's called play field animation, which is basically flashing lights as the countdown for multi-ball happens. The lights pulse, which is part of the code of the System 6 board sets. It's also the first machine with Steve Ritchie call-outs. Can you tell me what a Steve Ritchie call-out is? Fire, power, like there's, I think it's 10 words on this, 10 or... So there's chips on the soundboard, right? And each chip has like one or two words. because that's all they could fit on there and they were expensive right so you had to then use those words differently right so you could say the fire power you and then you could just jam that together to make sentences make a sentence and they would do and if on those systems they had a sound test and it would go through all the words which is funny in itself you know power fire destroyed you it it's it's pretty funny yeah so so what like steve richie did the call outs for this machine right they didn't just hire you know a professional actor this was the first one and it would begin a long career of doing voices for his games other people's games video games um he's he's just very good at this always has been and on this particular game they did do some modification they did it like in a monotone voice and they did a little they did a little effect on it but you can see i played so many steve richie games i can now just i can hear his voice when i hear this it's like oh that's steve richie i think it's so cool that he's just like yeah i'll do the voice for that and he's almost always the bad guy he loves being the bad guy yeah and i when we get into our next episode with steve richie further along our podcast journey here, we'll get into some of the other voices he's done and some of the innovations within that, which is pretty cool. Now, this is the second machine with speech. It's not the first machine with speech. That was Gorgar. Which had seven words. I never can remember what they all are. Yeah, beat you, me, Gorgar. So if anyone out there knows what the seven words are, where can they send that? Yeah, if you know what the seven words in Gorgar were, you can send that to silverballbag at gmail.com, and I won't read it out on the air. Okay. All right, good. I don't have any prizes to give away. I can't get anything for you to give away at all, ever. The Pinball Network won't give us anything? They will not give us anything. I don't even think they have shirts yet. It's that bad. Oh, man. I know they don't have the domain. Oh, I'm sorry. Wah, wah. Sorry. Wah, wah.
    73:00
    One thing I wanted to bring up about this. Yeah, please, go ahead. The biggest deal about Firepower. is the feature when you start multiball, the game literally stops and gives you a full light show, dancing. It does a countdown on the display, you know, adrenaline pumping countdown, and the flashers go off. This has flashers in it also. There's two flashers. And it just, in its speech, you know, fire one, fire two, fire three. this began williams this is how williams would do multi-ball it became an event right it was like a yes it was an event they trademarked the term so no one else could use it at least for quite a while and when you get a multi-ball it is literally an event and the other manufacturers with some exceptions did not really take this approach like if you're playing something like fathom which is a game from Bali, you start multi-ball, it'll say attack diver, and it just releases the balls. Yeah, there's no pageantry. There's no excitement. I mean, there's some exceptions. I'll say things like Zenon will do a little light show and say, you know, exit one, exit two. But for the most part, Williams was the only one that told their player, like, this is a big deal. And even in their lean years in the early 80s, it didn't matter. if you started multi-ball, you were going to get some kind of light show. You were going to get some kind of presentation to let you know something cool was about to happen. Yeah, it was almost like the reward for getting something. You really got to feel like you were in there, that you were part of it. Very, very cool. And just as my opinion, they're the only ones who got that right. The other manufacturers just didn't. They just treated it as you have multiple balls in play. Yeah, the reward was that you got more points. the reward was uh we're releasing more balls yeah there you go and i i would say what's particularly kind of cool about this is i mean nowadays later on in the 80s when you would get you know multiple balls on the playfield you know usually that would turn into some sort of multiplier so you're so each switch would be multiplied by two or three well there wasn't enough room on the board because eugene jarvis had pushed that board set really to the brink and they couldn't build in a multiplier. So when you get multiball, that is the reward. Yeah, your reward is here's the blinking, here's the excitement. There's no jackpot, which that would come later. It's just you have multiball. This is cool. Yeah. I think probably, I mean, I certainly was not around in the 1980s when this machine came out, but it must have been unreal. And I think part of that was that it took dynamic background sound and I think really, really turned up the dial on that. And Sean Ledgerwood, he wrote in to silverballbag at gmail.com, just like you can, and talked about the Firepower sound package. Well, Sean says, Firepower was the second machine I ever owned and spent hours trying, usually unsuccessfully, to get multiball. The pulsing music that got faster and faster, adding to the excitement of the game, making you more and more nervous by the second. Fantastic. We thought we were on top of the pinball world. So Ron, have you ever heard of firepower with drop targets? Yes, I have. Yeah, so this is something I saw when I was looking this up. So I guess originally when they looked at making firepower, the way that that game is designed, kind of halfway up the play field, there's these stand-up targets, these round targets. And you hit them, and that ball comes back at your flippers really, really quickly. Well, originally Steve wanted to have those as two sets of three-bag drop targets. So a drop target, you shoot the target, and it clicks, and it goes down below the play field. You sort of get this visual excitement. It disappears. You've done something.
    76:59
    Unfortunately, they were unreliable, or as Steve said, that they were so crappy that they were making the game unreliable. And he reckons that if they had actually put drop targets in the machine, they probably would have sold 20,000. Do you think that's possible? I actually think it plays better with the stand-ups. So drop targets, I think it would kill the momentum and it wouldn't play as wild. The thing is, he was legitimately upset about that. Really? They put it on test and they just broke. They were terrible. Williams used what's called the horseshoe drop targets. They weren't shaped like a horseshoe, but the switches on the back of them were shaped like a horseshoe. And they were just notoriously flaky because each drop target would have almost like a mini little circuit board behind it. Okay. Yeah. And they were just very unreliable as far as registering. And they were quite terrible. Some of the worst drop targets you will ever see. So they went to the stand ups. So, I mean, maybe Steve is upset about that. And his true vision was drop downs. But in my opinion, I think what you lose on sort of the visual excitement and everybody loves drop targets shooting those. For some reason, they're just fun.
    78:16
    I think it's a better game because of it, actually. Agreed. What do you – so were you around when Firepower came out? Were you in the arcade scene at the time, or do you remember seeing them? I would have been too young to see above the glass, so I wouldn't have been playing any Firepower. So William Ratchford wrote in to silverballbag at gmail.com, just like you can, and he spoke about the amusement company that he used to work for, And he actually went to a Williams distributor open house where he won a door prize.
    78:48
    And by winning the door prize, you were able to actually buy a Williams Firepower for $1,000 that day. So what I find particularly interesting about this story is that there was a demonstration by the sales team. And rather than – usually what a sales team would do is they would put the machine out and they would tell you about the new drop targets, this or that, look at the earnings potential of that. But the sales team actually spent the entire time playing the game. It was that much fun, and they didn't really let any of the other reps play the game. Williams says that they took that machine right from the show, and they put it into a bar, and it took in $300.25 in seven days, and that's $0.25 a play. How about that? That's what you call a winner. So, I mean, really, when it comes down to it, you want it to earn, and this was a sure-fire win. So how do you follow up Firepower? Do you think he has another miss? Do you think he pulls out a Stellar Wars?
    79:48
    Well, again, Stellar Wars sold 5,000 units. It was not a miss. Instead, he pulls out innovation by making the first bi-level pinball machine. Yeah, we're talking about Black friggin' Night. Two levels of fun. Not just one play field. Two play fields. Double the fun. And I'm sure someone will write in and tell us that it's not the first spy level game, but as far as I know, it is. I tell you what like this this is one of the games that I enjoy I don love the game but when i see it i like wow that kind of a that that that pretty innovative it very very different and i could only imagine what it was like in a sea of sameness where something like this just sort of just rises to the top so this is from november 1980 it is utilizing actually the first game to utilize Williams' System 7 board set, and the first game to use their new drop targets, they're much better drop targets, and it's a good thing because this game has 12 of them. It's actually standard width, but with two play fields, sold 13,075 units. The sound was by John Kotlarik. Sorry, John. He also did Pharaoh.
    81:10
    Software by Larry DeMar. It was Larry DeMar of Adams Family World Cup Soccer. Legendary, legendary designer. We'll do a whole other thing on him, yeah. Of Adams Family World Cup Soccer, Jackpot, and Funhouse fame. The artwork was by Tony Ramuni. Ramuni? I'm probably saying that totally wrong. He also did Alien Poker. Just get a better last name. Special Force, Spy Hunter, 8-Ball Champ. There's a good game. Speech by Steve Ritchie. It would be, once again, the voice of the Black Knight himself. This was his first outing with Larry DeMar, first of two outings. They were two for two, I'd like to say. They did not get along particularly well. That's why they did not work together more times, because you would think after this game you would want them to work together more. Absolutely. Actually, you would think after Firepower they'd want to work with Eugene Jarvis more, But Eugene went more into the video side after Firepower. Yeah. So, I mean, you can really see that, you know, passion is a funny thing, right? And unless you can get that to mesh together, passion and working with individuals, you know, that can cause issues. And I think as much as Larry DeMar and Steve Ritchie are probably friendly and nice, you know, when you get working together, you're in close quarters. You're under time constraints. You want to do things, and the designer or the software guy or gal doesn't want to do those. You know, I think that that causes some friction, but oftentimes that sort of friction can really create magic. And in this case, it created a bunch of firsts. This is the first bi-level playfield, two playfields. First machine with the patented Magnesay feature. And the most exciting, the first machine with faceted inserts in the playfield. What is a faceted insert? Oh, well, I hope everybody is sitting down here because when you're talking about Steve Ritchie's biggest innovations, it certainly has to be faceted inserts on the play field. I mean, in a nutshell, what that is, is it's a clear insert or it's an insert you can see through. And it's kind of got like jeweling or cuts or designs on the bottom that sort of sparkle a little bit when you hit it with light. It's something that keeps me up at night. It's so exciting.
    83:35
    Yes, I've been told. I actually found an old article from an old coin op sort of magazine called Play Meter. And this is from the late 70s, the interview with Sam Stern. And in there, he says that you can't do a two-level play field, that a two-level play field will not exist. So his thing was that you can't get the ball to roll quite right. You can't get the returns to the playfield correctly. And I think that's pretty funny because, you know, Steve Ritchie didn't come up with the idea of a two-level playfield all kind of his own. He was just the one to do it first and do it, I would say, really, really, really well. As Steve Ritchie says, everything about the design was a headache. The biggest problem was ball clearance under the upper playfield and placement of components so that the ball never struck any of the components hanging below the playfield. It was also a bitch to get the ball time down because once the ball went up in the upper play field, it would not come down in the original design. I believe that many designers have had the idea, I'm just the guy who executed it. It was an obvious idea. He was able to execute, and really that's the big difference maker, is that he was able to sort of spend the time and the energy and really come up with a way to do it. Caleb Ball, he wrote in just like you can to silverballbag at gmail.com, and he said, Black Knight was my first solid state machine. I had one other machine at the time, an unplayable basket case EM, and my wife suggested I buy another machine. God bless her, Caleb. So I got this Project Black Knight for a screaming deal and have been tinkering and playing it ever since. I love that it is a popular title and has a lot of variety in shots and play field features. It can be extremely frustrating and challenging to play. Would you classify this as extremely frustrating and challenging?
    85:30
    I guess so. Yeah. It can be frustrating when it leaves the upper play field and just goes right down the middle. And Black Knight is known to have on the apron, right in between the flippers on almost every Black Knight, you'll notice the medals pushed up from the ball going airborne as it goes down the middle. It'll hit the little biff bar that's behind the flipper, and it just goes airborne and hits the actual apron over and over again. I think that's one of the reasons why I respect Black Knight. I understand what it is. I know it's a great game. I understand the history and excitement behind it. But when I get down to actually playing it, I can't quite get the feel of up to the upper play field and flipping the third flipper that's up there and trying to get the targets and get that loop, and then the ball coming down and right down to the flippers and have to be right on it. I like hard games.
    86:28
    I enjoy sort of the challenge of difficult shots and returns, but there's just something about sort of that old black knight. It just doesn't do it for me. But some people, wow.
    86:41
    Yeah, the one down in my basement says, yes, Ron likes it. It has one of my favorite shots in pinball. which is the ball goes down the right in lane, hit it up the left spinner, which is the ramp, comes around to the upper left flipper, straight to the lock.
    87:00
    That's flow shot personified. That's everything that is Steve Ritchie is in that shot. And the other thing is about that game that always bothered Steve Ritchie is the fact that Williams used 25-volt coils as opposed to Bally and Gottlieb, who were using 50-volt coils. So those are stronger flippers, is that it? Yeah, the 50 volts are stronger, and he really wished that they had the 50-volt coils on that game because of the ramps. Because if you've ever played a Black Knight, especially maybe at a pinball show in a low-power situation with weak flippers, it is entirely unfun to play. So is this the type of machine that if you were to buy one and you take it home and you're super excited, going on to a Pinball Life website and buying a flipper rebuild kit is probably a good idea?
    87:49
    Yeah, especially if you can't make the ramps. Good stuff. Let's talk about MagnaSafe. This is a pretty big innovation for this machine, right? Yeah, this was not done before, to my knowledge. which basically you have extra flipper buttons, or extra buttons on either side above where the flipper button is. You hit it. If it's lit, so you have to light your MagnaSave. So it is a little skill-based. If you complete a drop target bank, it lights one of the MagnaSaves. You don't get one for free. You have to do something. And when the ball comes over there, if you hit the magnet, it will stop the ball dead for a predetermined amount of time, which is in the settings, and then it will release it into the in-lane safely. For your next shot. So do you love it or you hate it? I like the MagnaSave. I don't like that implementation as much as Williams in future games, like Jungle Lord, Solar Fire, Grand Lizard, where they would use a MagnaSave. They would use a different method where it doesn't hold the ball. It's just like a pulse, and you get so many pulses, which you can build on. Okay. So you hit the button, and you have to time it, and maybe you have to hit it more than once to get a couple pulses in. But it's a lot more fun, in my opinion. So the idea is that underneath the playfield, by the outlanes, there's literally a magnet under there, right? There's large circular magnets. The playfield is actually cut, so it's recessed into the playfield. Okay.
    89:18
    And then you hit the button, and, of course, the ball is metal, and it sort of, I guess, more or less sticks to that. Now, surely that would create a lot of wear over the time, right? Mine actually has decals in both MagnaSave areas because the paint is completely worn away. Wow. Very cool. I like the MagnaSave. I think it's very, very cool. One thing that I always end up having an issue with is I'll save it or I'll try to save it, and it wiggles a little bit, and it still goes out the outline. You must be playing it at a show. Yeah, and I'm a bad player maybe. That has nothing to do with it. That's weak power. That's another thing about when you have magnets like that, it is very susceptible to low power conditions, especially at a show. I can't tell you how many times I've played Black Knight at a show, and you hit the magnet save, and it just wobbles.
    90:11
    And you're waiting for the magnet to go off, and you're, oh, please don't go in the outlay. Please don't go in the outlay. Ugh. Anything else you want to throw into Black Knight? Other than that was my first game I ever got. I still have it. So it's the first game that you purchased, and the exact one that you have is still downstairs? It's still downstairs in spot number one, specifically for that reason. But it's literally the first game you see when you go down to my basement is that one, and that's why it's there. That was 2004. I got it. Williams has this designer, right? Steve Ritchie. Everything the man touches turns to gold, right? It's like he can do no wrong. So what do they give him next? Well, unfortunately, video games took over.
    90:56
    Pinball took a hit. So there was kind of a little shift. Towards the end of 81, right? Mm-hmm. And the thing to remember, and just to give a little background for our listeners,
    91:08
    Eugene Jarvis, who we mentioned a lot, he went to design a game called Defender, which you may or may not have heard of. And that was an arcade game. And it was a humongous, huge, massive hit. Made Williams a ton of money.
    91:24
    So around that time, after that game, a lot of the programmers, like Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar, this would be after Black Knight, they decided, you know what, we should make video games. We'll leave Williams. So they all left Williams and Mass and formed their own company called VidKids. then came back to Williams and said, hey, we'll make video games for you, thus getting paid a lot more. Wow. And made games like Stargate, games like Robotron, classics like that. If you look at those games, you'll see VidKids, made by VidKids, but it was basically like Eugene Jarvis. So there's a flux going on right now. So there's a flux going. They're doing the video games now. So the pinball division now is getting hit hard. So what does Steve Ritchie do? Well, he makes Hyperball. And what's Hyperball? Well, let's start with the Hyper stats. So Hyperball is a – I have no idea what the theme is. I have no idea.
    92:34
    The back glass doesn't even really light up. I always think it's broken, and then it will occasionally flash. Like, oh, it does work. Okay. So, I mean, it's made in December of 1981. it's a solid state machine williams system 7 it's a special williams system 7 it's there's something different with the board that's only for hyperball a standard body they sold 5 000 units so again still sold now the sound was by tim murphy and it's the only thing he's ever done in pinball or at least he's been credited for and the software was by ed so shit ed Sacochi. Sounds good. He's from Solar Fire, Sorcerer, Grand Lizard, and the artwork by Seamus McLachlan. And he did Pharaoh, Warlock, and a couple others for Williams. So I know the listeners at home can't see our notes that I have here, but I have bolded, what a turd.
    93:40
    It was an attempt to kind of combine, I guess you would say, combine some video game elements like shooting things with a pinball element, as in they're like little mini pinballs. They're not as big as pinballs, but there is a hyper cannon, a cannon that shoots up to 250 balls per minute at targets located all around the playfield. So no flippers. Alpha numeric display in the lower playfield, and it's extremely confusing about what the heck you're doing i have played this game typically it involves the game starts and within 30 seconds the game will say condition critical and then and then it'll go dead and the game's over well that sounds like so much fun i could never figure out what to do on this game i think it involves spelling but involves something else well ever you know the one thing that kids love in arcades One of it is no time on the machine and spelling. Spelling. Yeah. And my podcast mate from the Slamto podcast, my other podcast, free plug, Bruce, he is the only person I know who knows how to play this game, who can play it for more than 30 seconds. To be totally honest, he knows way more about pinball than I do. He knows more about fixing pinball. He knows way more about the rules than I do. So Andrew Ladham wrote, just like you can, to silverballbag at gmail.com. Here's what he had to say about Hyperball. Hi, Ronster and Devo. I don't know what's with these people and these names. Hyperball, how can you not remember the opening sound? A pinball machine that wasn't. I sat in front of the machine for hours as a kid. Thanks for bringing back the memories. So he has good memories of Hyperball? I guess so, but, I mean, so the initial sales forecast for Hyperball were 50,000 units. They thought they had just the biggest hit of all time. They were playing this thing at Williams, and they're like, this is the cat's ass. What actually happened? They only sold 5,000. So what are they going to do with all those cabinets they made for it? Well, through my research when I was doing some things, it was obvious that they were not going to sell 50,000 units pretty quick. But they had already made the order for all these cabinets. And it had like this kind of unusual cabinet, right? It was almost like the back box, which is the part of the back of the machine where usually nowadays there's an LCD display. There used to be a DMD display or alphanumerics back in the 80s.
    96:08
    They had sort of speakers on the bottom and the back glass on the top, and it was unusual, right? It wasn't like your standard back box, and they had ordered so many of these that they just had them piled around the Williams area. So they actually had to use these excess back boxes, right? So they put them on other games like the Pinball Defender, Time Fantasy, and Firepower 2. They just had to get rid of these things. So when you find those machines, they actually look a little bit different than everything else, right?
    96:38
    Yes, and the other funny thing is this game, Hyperball, right? Bally, William's competitor, they got wind of this game that was being made, So they came up with their own version of it, like a direct ripoff called Rapid Fire. Oh, God. Which also uses a different cabinet and had the same result, i.e. it didn't sell anything. And they had the same issue, i.e. we have all these extra cabinets. So they decided to use them for, they had the Centaur Limited Edition, they called it, and they used them for that. And then they had the 8-Ball Deluxe Limited Edition, and they used them for that. So very similar results in both cases. So Steve, what does Steve think about Hyperball? What does Steve Ritchie think about Hyperball? He says, Hyperball was a frustrated pinball guy seeing the market taper off because video was taken over. I lost Eugene to video. There were space invaders. Eugene made Defender. I wanted to make a video game, but they wouldn't let me. It was a machine gun game. Haven't you always wanted to shoot a machine gun? How do I feel about it now? Well, it was our fault for delaying so long to get it to market. It's their fault for not doing something original. It was an experiment. It was fun. I don't think it was a failure. You can really hear that Steve Ritchie wanted to do something different. He came up with an original idea. He came up with the loudest game of all time. If you've ever been around a hyperball, it is the loudest game you will ever play.
    98:08
    I've never played one. I have seen one for sale. Oh, you've never played one? Okay. I've seen one for sale, and it was so confusing just to look at. And I mean this to play pinball, right? If I want to play video games, I'll play video games. If I want to play pinball, I'll play pinball. So what does Steve Ritchie, the best young designer, I would say, of all time in the pinball industry at this point, with a mind that turns out almost nothing but innovations, what does he do now? He leaves pinball. Why would he do that? He wanted to do video games. Well, because everybody's going to do video games, right? He's doing video games. So he started his own company, King Video Design. Of course it's King Video Design because that sounds like very Steve Ritchie. Yes, and he worked for years on a game called Devastator. Okay. It was going to be like a 3D video game. I don't think it ever made it. I think the video game market crashed, and I don't believe it was ever released. So his timing was very bad. He moves into video, and he actually innovates there as well, right? So this game he's working on, Devastator, has this interesting bit that's called automated conversion of videotaped color images, which basically turns objects into a video game system, which sounds super impressive, and I have no idea what it does. But he just continues to innovate. He just turns out all these ideas. And that's the thing, too. I think it needs to be clear to our listeners. I know Steve Ritchie now, he's going to be – actually, his birthday is coming up from our recording day. He's going to turn 70. And when people refer to a lot of his games now, it's like it's a Steve Ritchie layout. It's like, you know, very similar. Everything is always very similar. I think people need to realize that when he came into the industry, and we're going to go into this more in the future episode, some of his System 11 games, he was all about innovation all his games would always have some kind of super innovative or new feature on them and i think that kind of gets lost in his designs he does today yeah i think richie gets a lot of heat now but he gets a lot of heat now because oh it's the same thing it's the same it's just you know where all the shots are going to be before you even play it etc etc and a lot of that honestly a lot of that is warranted he has repeated and recycled a lot of his play field ideas, but you cannot take away the innovation that he created, especially early in his career. Yeah, well, I mean, as I said, I'm only a couple of years into the hobby. I'm not as deep in as you, and I'm sure some of the listeners here on the Pinball Network who have been around much longer than you and I, you know, you can't take away from Steve Ritchie that in every single one of the machines in his early career that we've looked at today, he has just innovated and innovated and innovated and come up with unique ways to interact with the ball in a structure where you've just moved into solid state. Like, how do you imagine new things? So if you sit back today and you're like, oh, I want to do this with the ball, like everything that I would tell you right now, Ron, is something that's already been done because I just don't have the mind to think about how to bend a ball around a play field. It's amazing. And wait till we get to our next episode, where we go into probably some of his greatest games ever, in my opinion. His System 11 era. But I'm biased. Yeah, so we're going to go into System 11 and his Williams WPC era. And what does that stand for? Williams Pinball Controller. And there's some exciting stuff to come up in there, Ron. Lots of exciting stuff. Yeah, we're going to see some super innovative designs, innovative new features. Sound. We're going to see, because the video game market kind of crashed, the pinball market almost died, but then started to come back. And as it started to come back, they started putting more money into it, more innovation, more new things, better and better games. And that's all going to be coming up in our next Steve Ritchie episode. That's right. So what we're going to do is we're going to sprinkle a few of these Steve Ritchie episodes along as we continue out. Hey, Ron, what do you think of our first episode? How do you think this went? Super informative. I learned all kinds of new things. That's right. Now, I'm sure you've taken a lot of notes and you're going to go home and study everything we've done. Tons of notes, yes. So, I mean, I think we've done fairly well for our first episode. Two guys I've never met. I'm just in my office here chatting to a random voice in headphones on a microphone. And I think it's worked out really well. I think we have a cool, interesting topic. and our podcast is a little bit different than everybody else's. It's going to be different. I'm saying if you were a longtime pinhead, maybe try to direct some newbies to this podcast because it's really, I'd say it's more for them than it is for someone because there's people out there I'm sure listening, it's like, I already know that, I already know that. But a lot of newer people in the hobby don't know a lot of this and it's just an effort. When David came to me with this idea, Yeah, I did, and I don't know if David knows this. One of the things I used to do for years is I would do a lot of walkthrough videos of various shows and locations with the thought of preserving this in case it goes away. And a lot of places have gone away, like the old Papa facility is no longer there. There's other arcades and locations that are no longer in existence that I've gone through. just trying to save, you know, to preserve the history of pinball as best I can. So that's what I kind of think of these podcasts as, because a lot of, like, Steve Ritchie is obviously still alive and kicking and making games, but, you know, one day he'll be gone, and hopefully there'll be this fountain of information out there for people to look into that's more centralized, because, I mean, how many sources do you have to go to? How many 15 years of podcasts and interviews did you have to look at to find this information? Yeah, I've been through a lot of recordings and a lot of old, old PDFs that I found online and things like that. And what we're doing here as a team, collating all those together and having a discussion and really preserving that as a testament to somebody as amazing in this episode as Steve Ritchie. I think that that's a pretty cool thing to do. Yeah. Thanks, David, for having me. Thanks to Dennis Creasel for recommending me. Of course, and Dennis Creasel is the producer-seducer of this podcast, so thank you to Dennis Creasel of the Pinball Network and Eclectic Gamers podcast. Ron, if people wanted to hear more about you or reach out to you, how do they do that? Well, I have another podcast, which is, I would say, completely different than this one. It tends to be a little on the juvenile, silly side and a little bit more R-rated, as we do have the maturity rating on ours. This is more professional, Ron. If you want to hear a lot less professional, Ron, you can tune into the Slam Tilt Podcast, which if you just do a Google search on the Slam Tilt Podcast or go to slamtiltpodcast.com, you will see all our episodes there, all the links are there, email, everything is there. Slam Tilt was the first podcast that I started listening to, and I still listen to it whenever it pops out the minute. I have it actually on auto-download. You're on the auto-download list. That's how important that podcast is. Incredible. You listen to us first, and you're still into pinball? You haven't been scared away? It's true. I've certainly learned what to stay away from. I'm not very good at self-promotion, but look for a new episode coming out sometime soon. Yeah, so I'm David Dennis, and if you would like to reach out to me, you can reach out to me at silverballbag at gmail.com. And I'm Ron Hallett, and you've been listening to the Silver Ball Chronicles. See you next time.
    106:13
    Remember to email us your comments, questions, corrections, or concerns to silverballbag at gmail.com. We look forward to all the messages, and we read every one. Please subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Play or your favorite podcatcher and turn on automatic download so you don't miss a single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review so others can find us. you can send us your comments questions corrections or concerns at our mailbag at the silverballbag at gmail.com there's too many bags there i gotta do that differently there's so many bags on our podcast