TOPCast 63: Keith Johnson

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Well welcome all you pinball fans, this is Topcast here, Shaggy running Topcast for you.

Live today and we've got a very very special guest.

Somebody that I've been trying to get on the show for quite some time and it had a hard time getting them on.

Mostly because I think it's in the whole thing and he just couldn't do it.

But do some circumstances, he has gotten his hands untied, sort of speak,

and things have changed a little bit in the pinball world, at least for him and probably for a lot of us in the last week or so.

And we hope to talk to him about that.

So right now let's get running.

Special guest.

Special guest.

Alright, I'd like to welcome Keith Johnson to Topcast today.

We're going to be calling Keith up right now, but Keith has been first to actually work at Williams Valley in the late 1990s.

And his name is business associated with Revenge from Mars.

Though I'm sure he did some other work there and we're going to talk to him about that.

But that's the most notable thing that comes up on the pinball database is his work on Revenge from Mars.

And then of course the pinball division of Williams closed in 1999.

And then he slid over to Stern pinball and started working on some games like Striker Extreme, Sharky Shootout, Hyrule or Casino, Austin Powers.

Of course Simpsons pinball party, Lord of the Rings, Elvis, World Polk or Tour, Wheel of Fortune.

And he's had a couple other games that they've been working on too that we'll talk about some newer games in that.

But anyways we're going to give Keith a call right now.

Hello.

Keith it's Clay.

Hey, how you doing?

Can you hear me okay?

Yep, I can hear you fine.

Okay, so you're ready?

I think so.

All righty.

So let's talk about how you got into pinball, like what your first memories of it and your whole, you know, how you came down this winding, strange path.

Well, I always played pinball as a kid.

I remember in the 70's going to the boardwalk during the summer on the east coast, I'm from DC.

So we get a like, Reho with the Chosen City Maryland, that kind of stuff.

Before there are too many video games out, you know, I'd always go up to pinball games and play them for a little bit.

And that kind of changed once the video game started coming into Vogue.

And I played a lot of video games for a long time, you know, Space Invaders, Blacks and all those kinds of things.

So I was really more of a video game player for a long time.

And then as a video game model started switching to more of a, just try to get the next quarter, you know, keep playing.

And then I got a quarter, you know, keep the game going, that kind of thing.

I kind of found myself going back to pinball around college.

And college is when I started playing, like really seriously, and you know, eventually started going to tournaments and that kind of thing.

Yeah, you're a pretty good player, right?

Yeah, I'm one of the better ones probably, yeah.

Okay, and so what school did you go to and what did you major in?

Virginia Tech, guys, study computer science.

Did you know Duncan Brown at the time?

I didn't really know Duncan until later, not until, not until Williams.

Okay.

But I mean, I knew that, I knew he was originally from Charlottesville and stuff, yeah.

And what, what was your first job out of college?

I worked at a little company called Advanced Systems.

They were, they were basically Microsoft shop, you know, do things like access and Excel.

Custom solutions for, you know, various size businesses and that kind of thing.

And what were a lot of Microsoft work and then from there, what your company called DataTell,

which specializes in software for colleges, you know, running their, you know, like class scheduling or, you know, financial aid stuff and things like that.

Basically anything that a college needs to work at, you know, that company did.

And so how did you get, how did you get your foot in the door at Williams Valley?

Um, honestly, you know, I'm sure a lot of it was, you know, I've been active on RGP for a long time, you know, over 16 years.

Um, so, you know, I, at one time or another, I've had contact, you know, with all kinds of people, you know, that, you know, before they worked there,

after they worked there, you know, whichever.

Um, and then a lot of us, you know, we started hanging out on a, a NIRC channel, you know, a lot of pimbalded enthusiasts.

And, um, at one point Larry made a comment on IRC that, um, about looking for people and I just asked him, you know, I don't say, you know, that might be interested.

That was late 97.

So I went over to Williams during expo 97 and met with a bunch of people and, you know, talked and said, yeah, okay, um, I'm definitely interested.

It was mostly for slots because there weren't any pimbalded enthusiasts at the time.

So you started, you know, all the kinds of slot machines that they're working on.

I hadn't really been to Vegas or anywhere, gambling in quite a while so I didn't know with the state of slot machine development and that kind of thing.

So it was very tricky to me, you know, they're, uh, it looked like it would be fun to, you know, develop slot machines the way they were doing them.

You know, things that are just, you know, pull the lever and hope for symbols to come up.

You know, the bonus game aspect, you know, really appealed to me.

You were working on, you were working on this in the spinning real division, working on the dotation slots then.

Yes, that's correct.

Yeah, I, um, yeah, I didn't, I didn't do anything about the job until, uh, I told an idea.

I wanted to see what the review of my current job would be and if they pay me more money and that kind of thing.

And, uh, I was a really satisfied with what they offered me.

So I eventually, um, talked to Larry again, it's like, you know, I'm a book, I'm interested in coming over to Williams.

Um, so at the end of March, 1998, I was up there.

And what, uh, what slots did you work on there?

Um, neither of them were produced. I was only in slots for probably about six months.

Um, I worked on the, uh, double winning streak slot machine, which is, uh, same as winning streak, but, um, the goal was to get the symbols both the same, the same in both the dot game and the base game.

And also to have if winning streak, winning streak would be wild anywhere, but if they're on the line, they'd score a double.

So, so, uh, basically did a math sheet for that and got it working.

And, um, and then, uh, I was also working with Scott Somiani on five line mermaid gold.

Now, did either of those games ever get released because I've never seen those two.

No, neither of those were released to my knowledge.

Yeah, because I, uh, double winning streak one was going to be for Delaware only because of, um,

the settlement of the tell us patent with IGT back then.

Right.

So, basically we weren't allowed, Williams wasn't allowed to do anything virtual real wise except for Delaware.

Does Delaware require a certain number?

I like a cap on the percentage that any one company could, you know, penetrate the market or something like that.

So, part of the deal's IGT was, okay, we can use, you know, the tell us patent in Delaware machines only.

So, so double winning streak, you know, wouldn't have, wouldn't have made it anywhere else other than Delaware until, you know, the patent expired or whatever.

It just for the sake of our listeners, the tell us patent it basically said if, if you had a real and it had 11 symbols on it,

it basically meant that there was 22 stops between, you know, blanks and symbols.

And you could divide the real into 22 pieces of pie essentially.

But the tell us patent it said, okay, well, instead of 22 pieces of pie, even though there's only 11 symbols on there, maybe you could divide it into 72 stops.

And then you could have much, much longer odds.

But, but IGT had a patent on that.

So, and there were actually the gaming commissions had problems with this whole thing because, you know, dividing, you know, the real into more slices than there were symbols was kind of, you know, intrinsically kind of wrong in a lot of ways.

Well, yeah, Vegas has a lot of rules in terms of what players perceive and what, and what actually needs to happen.

Like, for example, if you represent something as a deck of cards in Vegas, then it literally has to be a straight up deck of cards.

If you represent something as a die or dice, then they have to be straight up, you know, one in six chances.

That wasn't, you know, they got away with that with spinning real stuff in order to, you know, make better payouts and that kind of thing.

But there were certain rules that the most, the rule I remember specifically is that one symbol could not appear more than six times as often as an adjacent symbol.

So, like, if you, you know, if you see megabucks above or below the line, then, then if you see that like 12 times and two times, you have to see it on the line.

You know, that kind of thing.

So, when you were, you got over to the pinball division. Was this because of pinball 2000?

Actually, what happened was that, you know, I got there and, you know, I saw everything that was going on with the division of pinball 2000.

And, you know, got to be different to those guys, obviously. I knew a lot of people before, you know, I even started there, which kind of helped.

I mean, I admit, Lewis, Lyman, Greg, I'm sure a bunch of other people before they had started in the pinball industry.

Just to be clear, that's, just to be clear, that's Lewis, CozyR, Lyman Sheets and what Greg Dunlop.

Greg, Greg Dunlop, yeah.

Okay. Just want to be clear for people. Sorry, sorry, sorry to interrupt.

No, no, no, no, no.

So, what happened was that there was a big restructuring that summer of 98.

You know, basically, the spinning real division wasn't going to be under Larry's purview anymore. He was going to solely oversee pinball.

So, there was kind of a reorganization of people and Lyman asked Larry for me to be on a revenge from Mars team.

And so, they offered me the position and, you know, it's like, you know, it's think of swim with pinball, you know, there's not really any, you know, there's probably not going any going back to promising if you choose this.

And as I go, I want to do pinball stuff, you know, that guy who would take it.

So, looking back on the revenge from Mars team and started my pinball career.

Looking back on that decision, was that a good choice or a bad choice?

There was a good choice. I mean, working on revenge from Mars and, you know, seeing what all the guys are working on and, you know, what was coming up down the line.

I mean, I absolutely would have made that choice. I mean, I didn't go to Williams to work on some machines. I went there to work on pinball eventually.

So, but I got the chance, you know, I was like, well, yeah, I'll take the chance.

Now, what was your responsibilities on revenge from Mars?

Well, first, you know, we're just kind of, everyone was messing around trying to figure out, you know, what was fun, what was doable, what we wanted to see in the game.

I mean, we went through a lot of stuff, a lot of time when we were just playing around with stuff, trying to see, you know, what was compelling, what was, you know, what you could pull off at the ball or what you could pull off with, you know, the graphics and that kind of thing.

So, we were playing around with stuff. Eventually, my responsibilities were, we had like nine modes in the game, three multi balls and we just did beat everything up equally among everyone.

At first, there was just Lyman Dwight and myself and then eventually Grand West came out of a game team as well.

So, I worked on two modes, Paris and Peril and Mars needs women. One of the bonus modes too, the Martian tank thing.

And then I did the final mode in the game, the attack Mars bit.

Now, what language were you programming in on Slot and then what language were you programming in on revenge?

Most of those were C, C++. So, Slots was C, was C also then?

Yeah, yeah. That's where they were making a lot of use of C++.

So, was this a language that you were pretty familiar with before you came to Williams Valley?

Yeah, yeah, I had done it in college and I had done it at my previous job data tell and to a lot of extent, my job before that advanced system.

But, yeah, I was pretty familiar with it.

Yeah.

Now, about when you got done with revenge, what was your responsibilities were you on Star Wars or were you on Playboy or what were you on next?

Now, we were assigned Playboy with Pete and Scott. So, Pete and Scott and Scott, for me, they were the designers of the game and Dwight and I were doing Star Wars 4.

And so, hot at house game. And that was the route we were going down. We actually designed a hot at house and we're moving between rooms and stuff like that.

And then later on in the process, I got switched over to a Playboy game. And so, we started changing stuff around.

We basically restarted from scratch and you know, started trying to cover some rules for that game.

And we hadn't gotten all that far with it. We were about to sign the contract with Playboy. I believe the week after Expo, when we shut down on Monday after that.

So, so, Playboy was not never playable.

There was never what?

Playboy never became playable.

I mean, there were some rules in it, but there really weren't that many. I mean, there was some stand-up targets that did some stuff and I just finished the start of a multi-ball right before you know, took a couple days off for Expo.

And then that was that.

Were any of the graphics done for Playboy?

No, I mean, it's got to been messing around some stuff himself. And so, we got some things into the game.

We kind of got like, we had this calendar rule where you hit targets and fill in letters of each, you know, month, you know, for the year, you know, January, February, March, all that stuff.

You know, the goal being you light up the entire month and then eventually, you know, depending on how many you load off, you'd start, you know, kind of almost like a multi-ball band is kind of thing.

I mean, that rule never really got flushed out, you know, but we did have things. We did, you know, spell the months and have lights light up and that kind of thing.

Is there any version of the haunted house game that survived?

Well, there is some code checked into the, you know, checking the version control, but it didn't it didn't do a whole lot.

So I'm sure there's code around and you know, the way may even have it for all of you.

But, you know, there wasn't a whole lot to it at the time.

And did you feel that that was a pretty good theme that that was going to work well with the pinball 2000 platform?

And what was looking forward to at least some game design was looking forward to the haunted house game.

I mean, we just figured there's so much we could do, you know, having all these different rooms that you could go through and having different things happen in each room.

And just, you know, having a spooky team in general, everyone was really looking forward to it.

And then, and then interest weighing significantly after it became the Playboy game.

Well, yeah, but I mean, there's a lot you could do with the Playboy theme too.

No, sure, sure. We just, we just never got to the point where, you know, it had been fully flushed out so to speak, I guess.

Yeah, there could be some great home roms for the Playboy one.

Oh, no doubt.

Well, anyway, so when, after the X-Po 1999, when, you know, when Monday rolled around, where you at work when that, yeah, I mean, I, I come in a little bit later.

I usually get there around teniseau. And so I got there and, you know, I saw, I saw a Greg at work first and I mentioned something to him.

And he's like, oh, you should be downstairs. And I was like, oh really? What's going on? You should be downstairs.

So I started heading back and then everyone else was coming back from the meeting and, you know, I found out pretty quickly after that that Fimba was being shut down.

And, you know, that was that.

Well, when, I mean, did you see this train wreck coming at all?

No, I didn't personally. I mean, there had always been gloom and doom talk around the office. But after, after Revenge and Star Wars seem to be doing pretty well.

I was like, okay, we can definitely make something of this.

So some people were still down, some people were still up. You know, I was one of the people that was looking forward to it.

I think, I think Wizard Box would have been a pretty good game. And I think, and I think Playboy would have been, it wouldn't have probably wouldn't have been as good as Wizard Box.

But it would be a game that those two games would have been more pinball than what the previous two games I think were.

I like the biggest complaints of the previous two games were that, you know, all you had to do to do anything was, you know, shoot up the middle.

But that was on purpose. And I think it was the right decision to get, you know, people that weren't very good at pinball, you know, further into the game and see things happen and stuff like that.

The next two games probably would have gotten away from that, to some extent. And, you know, would have been, there would have been more pinballies than just shooting up the middle.

But it was the right direction to go or not, you know, I'm not really sure. You know, we don't really know how they would have done comparatively.

Now, were you, were you involved like in the initial meetings with, you know, how pinball 2000 was, had like two different limbs of the tree sort of speak where you had, you know, you had pat and gomes and then you had pop a duke.

I mean, were you, did you come, were you in on any of those meetings? What was your feeling on that?

Well, that stuff had pretty much been decided before I got there. After I got there, Pat and George had already demonstrated the hollow pin thing.

And in fact, one of the first things I saw when I got there was Cameron messing around with the play field and hitting this thing, hitting this big, you know, basically hitting this spaceship in the middle of the screen.

And, you know, I was, I was instantly blown away with, you know, all the possibilities, all the things that you could, you know, that you could do as a result.

So, I was really excited when I thought, I mean, I didn't know anything like that was in the works and when I got there, it was just like, whoa, man, this is really cool.

And were you like sworn to secrecy type thing?

Sure, sure, yeah.

Yeah. And did you production?

Yes, I did.

And what, you know, how did you feel that the crowd reacted to the whole game concept?

I think everyone was really, I think everyone was really excited about it. Everyone was like, you know, everyone had a good time with it.

No one had really seen anything like it, you know, you're playing a pinball and you're hitting these virtual Martians and stuff like that.

I mean, I think that, you know, the game wasn't finished at the time.

You know, I know that we had Paris and Paraldon, we probably had Alien Abduction done.

I think we had the Barn Mode done.

So, I mean, there were definitely a number of things that people could see and experience.

And I think that I think people were pretty excited, which was what they saw for them as far.

So then on that Monday morning of, you know, in October 1999, you know, after they closed, I mean, how did you get, you know, the pinball division was shut down essentially?

How did you get over to Stern? I mean, how did that transition work?

Well, again, you know, most of us were still hanging out on IRC and stuff like that.

And Lonnie started showing up and I'd met Lonnie. I originally met Lonnie probably back in IFPA3 in 1993 the first time I met him.

And it I'd seen him, you know, at X-Pose and stuff like that and you know, talk to him.

So, you know, I just basically asked if there were any positions possibly available at Stern and probably the next week I was in his office.

We talked for about three or four hours, I think.

And I care about if I type a Gary that same day or if it was a later day, but basically, you know, I talked to Lonnie and Gary and, you know, probably had a job offer within a week or so.

The same time I've been talking to Midway because everyone in pinball was talking with Midway and I had a job offer from them as well that I turned down and the go work at Stern.

Were you the first Williams guy to go to Stern?

I was probably the first person to interview to why it started about a week before I did because I went on the Williams trip to Disney World.

You know, the celebration for getting revenge and star wars done. That had already been decided and planned and paid for before the shutdown.

So, we went for the week, the last week and it was a week right after Thanksgiving as I recall.

And so, I started at Stern, then to the Monday after we got back from that trip.

And how was the, you know, the corporate environment different at Stern compared to Williams?

You know, the culture as it may be.

Well, it's Stern, everything.

I think that the biggest joke that Dwight and I had for a long time was that every day we'd see something that made us shake our heads and wonder how there was still in business.

It was just amazing that how things came together and got designed and how things were kind of like pushed in at the last minute.

I don't know. It was just remarkable that the engineering that occurred at the last minute and actually made it into a finished game.

I don't know. Things just weren't as structured and as planned out, I think, because they weren't Williams.

Could you give me an example of what, you know, one of the things you shook your head at?

Oh, man. It's such a long time ago. I don't, I don't even remember offhand. I'd have to think about it a little bit.

It may be Dwight remembers better than I do.

But I don't know. There was, right when you first got there and they were working on Striker Extreme, there was an upper foot bar on the game.

But there was absolutely no feet to it. It's like if you remember that you shoot the goal and then it was popped up the middle that the goal set into and that you could shoot.

It came all the way back to the lower left foot bar. And like, well, there's no feet on the upper foot bar. The ball should come from the goal or the popper up the middle to the upper foot bar.

So it's something feeds it and you have an opportunity to actually make that side ramp shot that you put all this money in.

So that change actually and you know, is what wound up shipping.

If it didn't, there was definitely not as much thought put into some things, I think, as it was a term. But they didn't, as a willowance, but they didn't have as much time to think about certain things either because they were always getting the, they were always getting the next game.

They were always getting the game done and they were always working on the next game. And it seems like that what happened most of the time, and one of my biggest complaints about the company was that mechanical department didn't get everything fully done until production.

So we're like, you know, working with, you know, kind of half-assed hardware for the most part. And, you know, so we know how things are supposed to wind up and hopefully they wind up working correctly.

But for the most part, you know, we just didn't have any time with the final product.

Well, you know, that is ultimately one of the biggest problems the company has, I think.

Well, why were the, why were the timescadels so much more compressed at Stern compared to Valley Williams?

Not as many people for one thing. I mean, you didn't have all the different design teams or, you know, whatever. I mean, and when you have to get things done, when this fires would be put out, everyone has to kind of drop what they're doing and get the game to work, get the game.

It's about to go into production to work and to, you know, be buildable and be fun. And then you can go back and do what you were working on and, you know, whether it's the next game or the game after that or whatever.

You know, too many things happened where things had to be dropped and you had to get going on on the current project and then you could go back and work on, you know, what you're doing again.

So it's just mostly a lack of resources is really what you're saying, just they didn't have as many people on, you know, or you couldn't throw as much money.

So well, that's, you know, I guess that's the kind of part of the beauty of the whole thing, huh?

I suppose.

So what did you end up doing on Stryker Extreme?

I finished up some dot work on that game. I believe it was, I believe Orrin did most of the dot work.

He was doing a contract for, for, uh, Stern at the time. And I think his, uh, his number of hours have been used up and Dwight and I got hired.

So I was, uh, I was putting in some additional display effects or tweaking some ones that lining you the tweaking and that kind of thing.

So that's basically, that's basically my contribution to the Stryker Extreme was, you know, finishing up that work.

So you went from programming and, and C++ at Williams Valley in both the slot in on revenge. But now you're doing 6809 assembly language, right?

So was that a hard transition?

Was that so you're doing basically a Valley Williams, you're doing C++ programming. Now you're doing 6809 assembly language. Was that a tough transition?

It wasn't too bad. I mean, I had seen some code when I was at Williams.

And I grew up with an Apple II personally. So, you know, I had a decent feel for 65 or two.

So, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't horrible. You know, and I pick up stuff pretty quick. I mean, you know, I hadn't really written much 6809, you know, before I started at Stern.

I pick it up pretty quick and got, you know, got a high roll or casino done within a year.

I mean, I probably started six months after I started at Stern. And then the game went into production, the, you know, at the end of the year.

Now, did you work on Sharky's shootout also?

Yeah, again, that was mostly doing that work on that game.

No.

Dwight had been working on kind of like, Williamizing a bunch of the Stern operating system, you know, making it more like, making, basically making concepts of game development more like they, you know, we remembered it at Williams.

So, he was doing a bunch of that stuff. And I did a couple things. I think I wrote the, the SoundRequest system, you know, while he was doing some other things.

And, you know, so I helped out with the operating system a little bit and then started doing all the, started doing all the dot work for Sharky.

Lonnie was helping a little bit when he needed to.

And then, then after finished up with Sharky's, then, that I started working on High Roller.

The Roller. So this was really the first game that you were at from the ground and got a large influence on?

Yeah. That would say that, yeah.

And how much, I mean, what were your responsibilities on High Roller, casino?

Well, it was basically, you know, with some input from John Norris. I mean, I basically designed all the rules from the game.

And, you know, it was responsible for programming all the rules, all the choreography, all the devices.

I mean, that game, that game had three different devices on it that, you know, again, you know, it's kind of a 6809 semi-newbie.

It was, it was a bit of a challenge to get everything going. You had the roulette wheel.

You had the stepper motor ramp and you had the auxiliary display in the slot machine.

And so it got all three of those things working and, you know, it just became together pretty well.

There were a lot of problems with it. There wasn't any really debugging in the system at all.

I mean, the only thing you could kind of do was maybe print something out to that matrix display, if you didn't fail in the wrong place.

So, one of the things I did after I was done is I started rewriting a lot of the operating system to get rid of a bunch of inefficiencies and put in some actual, helpful debugging stuff.

And game development was a lot smoother after that, I think.

So, were you basically trying to William's eyes? These guys? I mean, it sounds like you guys were, that was kind of like, you know, I don't know, was it an underground strategy or in everybody who didn't mind this happening or was the resistance?

I don't think there was really resistance. And the main stuff that the Dwight and I were doing really only affected software. So, you know, Lonnie was on board with that.

So, our goal of making game development easier and basically, you know, making it easier to make better games, you know, I think everyone kind of had to get on board with that. How could you not?

Right, right.

So, were you happy with how high roller casino came out?

Yeah, for them both part. I mean, originally when it came out, you know, there was a lot of stuff that seemed kind of slow and boggy about it.

And that was really one of the main reasons why I decided to go through and try and optimize the operating system.

Because, as we knew, everything could run a lot faster. I mean, the game was doing way too much work in interrupt, you know, basically using up all the real time.

So, just kind of moved a bunch of stuff out of there. And, you know, freed up time and also added features like we started getting easy duty cycle of coils.

And then we got the dim lights and, you know, a bunch of stuff like that. And so, the game's ran a lot faster, had more features. You know, it's kind of a win-win win, I guess, in terms of kind of getting everything.

You know, just getting a better development environment, getting the games able to do more and eventually getting the games to be more fun.

Now, when you said duty cycle in the coils, you mean they weren't doing that before?

They could, like, one or two coils, the way they had it set up, but it wasn't, there was a very complex and strange way of doing it.

So, you know, we just came up with a way of doing it kind of generically and, you know, could duty cycle any coil.

You know, the thing you have to understand is that that system, you know, was basically...

It had basically been written since the Asia War days, you know, that's when it started out.

Yeah, that was their first game.

It was in there that is basically, you know, original 6800 code. And as time goes on, you know, there was, you know, some 6809 stuff got added into it.

But by and large, a lot of the code was the same from the initial days of the company.

Right, laser war being the first game and actually it was really developed by incredible technologies not by anybody there at Dede East at the time.

Yeah, that's correct. You know, Lonnie did most of the work on that game and eventually obviously came over to Dede East at the start.

So now, your next game up was Austin Powers. What was your responsibilities on that game?

Again, there was mostly dot programming on that game.

Kind of had fun with it, you know, there was a lot of...

It hadn't really had time or had, you know, had much opportunity to play around too much with display effects and doing different things with them.

I think you'll see a big transformation if you go back and look at games is to what was done with the display on games prior to Austin Powers and then what was done on Austin Powers and with games after that.

Really had time to play around and get things looking really good.

And, you know, I got a better understanding of the scripting system and, you know, how to do more advanced effects and that kind of thing.

So, I mean, this is stuff that, you know, that Sega or I did at Dede East and Sega were doing back when it first came out.

But I think at some point a lot of the stuff got to be kind of a lost art as people left the company and there was a much time to work on games.

So, we started, you know, basically resurrecting the game with the laser display system and I think Austin Powers is kind of a leap forward in what had been going on at the time at the company in terms of how that display looked.

Now, were you would charge any of the rules or play field layout or anything of that sort on Austin Powers?

The play field was all done by Lonnie and John Bord. You know, they wanted a, Lonnie's big thing was that, you know, they wanted to do a tack for Mars style play field.

You know, I guess basically a fan where you had something interesting at the middle of the scene that, you know, you should have enough times and a modes would start and that kind of thing.

So, that was all Lonnie and John. I probably wrote the final mode in that game, the Moon based multi-ball on his I recall. I haven't played that in so long that, you know, I don't remember it too well.

But I do remember writing that. But for the most part, my responsibilities were just getting this play effects done. And taking them out when they weren't approved by Michael Myers or by Newliner, whoever.

Yeah, how much of that game, I mean, there was a lot you could have really done with that game. Was there a lot that was not approved by Mike Myers for that game?

There were definitely a bunch of quotes that got ripped out of the game at various points. The things that I remember the most were with the display effects.

The bonus X thing was like a lot of a giant taking off her bra and kind of a silhouette and then the door open. So, you know, bonus 2X or whatever.

The match animation was the scene in the tent where I think where the guy was moving stuff and Austin was on the ground, you know, kind of doggie style in there taking stuff.

It looked like it was coming out of its rear end, I guess. And then eventually you fart and the match number comes up after that.

And there was a couple of other things too. I think the other one was many me actually helping the laser. We had them doing that and back up.

You know, I can't say I'm surprised that I'm mostly surprised at the bonus X thing. But the other stuff I'm not too surprised got the X.

Is that stuff still in the ROMs or has it actually been removed?

It was removed from production ROMs.

Do you have like quote home? Do you have quote home ROMs for this game?

They exist. I do not have them.

They do exist though.

Yes, they exist.

They haven't surfaced though. So, I mean, somebody's keeping these pretty under tight wraps.

That is correct.

Any hints to who may have these so I can go bother them?

Well, yeah, I mean, you're probably not going to get very far with them as my guests.

But, you know, maybe someday they'll show up.

I'm one of the few people that actually owns an Austin power, so that's why I was asking.

Yeah, no, it's, I mean, I've had people ask me about them before, but, you know, I don't have them and, you know, I don't have an Austin.

So, I don't have them.

How common were quote home ROMs for, you know, for stern games?

Not very often. I mean, there was a bunch of stuff that, you know, that I wanted to put into poker that I never really got around to doing an official home ROM for.

But pretty much for the most part, there's almost no...

I think Austin power is probably the only one that I remember having a specific home ROM for.

All right, yeah, you know, the whole, you know, you were talking about how you're kind of ramping things into this Williams style of whatever development.

I kind of look at stern games as like a bell curve.

And, you know, the top of the bell curve is, of course, Simpson's pinball party in Lord of the Rings.

And then on the left side of the bell curve, you know, that, you know, further down is Austin Powers and High Roller Casinos and Charkeys.

And then on the other side, you know, you got Elvis and World Poker Tour, but you kind of got this apex, which brings us to, of course, the game that you're most famously associated with.

And that's Simpson's pinball party.

And so this game was like, you know, I mean, talk about getting stern put on the map and selling a crap load of games.

And I guess, you know, you're largely the guy responsible for that, right?

For the most part, I mean, you know, I was working with Joe Balser on a play field layout.

And certainly, you know, I was responsible for getting, see me in the game and getting, you know, everything, you know, getting all the rules of the game, for your network characters to use that kind of thing.

I was the most familiar with since I've been, I was a pretty big fan of it at the time.

You know, it was certainly starting to wane for me personally, but, you know, there was a lot of, there's still a lot of fun characters that you can use.

You know, and you could still use them today, to do it for that matter.

You know, I wouldn't necessarily use some of the shows that, you know, that have been put out, but the characters are great.

Now, this game did it take a lot more time for you to develop this game, then say, you know, Austin Powers, for example.

I mean, was it, you know, because of the depth of the rules or whatever?

Well, I'll tell you that, you know, a lot of the rules have been, you know, where they were mostly finished, probably about the time that Rollercoast, there was about to come in the line.

In fact, for a long time, Christopher, I can.

Then Joe Balcer about the company, and there was a bunch of mechanical work that had to be redesigned.

So, you know, I'm not going to say that Simpson's didn't, you know, the rules and stuff, to really benefit it from that extra time.

I mean, you know, I kept working on stuff as long as I had time to do it, and then eventually started getting all the dots and, you know, sounds and stuff like that.

And, you know, we just kept going to town as long as we could.

And I don't think, you know, it definitely was the game that I had the longest to work on, but most of it was done, probably.

You know, it was mostly done in a little bit longer than the normal game time frame, I guess.

And then we just kept tweaking the choreography and, you know, cleaning things up and that kind of thing.

Now, there's no female voice characters in Simpson's.

Was that just because you guys had a certain amount of money, and you could only get one of the voice actors? Or what was the reasoning behind that?

The reason was, when we negotiated the contract, we had, we basically had a certain amount, like you said, of money to allocate towards voice talent.

And the number, the number of people that we had was, you know, the magic number was three. That was the amount of people we could afford.

We could have spent a lot more money to get four and possibly five.

But it just wasn't viable in terms of what we had to pay per game in order to get the extra talent.

And even as it was, you know, we've maxed out all the sound roms anyway, so I mean, anything else we put in the game would be at the expense of some other stuff that was already in there.

So, the thinking was, well, you have to have homework and you have to have bark, so that's two of your three right there.

You know, that's just not even a question. And all the other, you know, you also get all the other characters that those guys do.

And so, the other choice was just, you know, food you use for the third person, is it peri-shir, is it Hank is area?

Because both of those guys do a large number of characters that are fun.

Our first choice was Hank because he does comic book guy, he does a poo, you know, I'm pretty sure he does cleat us.

You know, he does a lot of the characters that, you know, were the most fun, you know, Lee felt.

And then, you know, Harry does, you know, smithers and burns and, you know, another set of characters does auto.

But, you couldn't, you know, we just, you know, we had to make a decision.

And if the longest time we didn't even think we'd get Hank, he was, you just had a show, cancel from TV, and he didn't really want to do it.

And then I think eventually, the other way, the other guy was convinced and he read the script for us and, you know, so we went ahead with the characters that we had.

Was there anything in Simpsons that got left out or in the cutting room for that you were starting, you know, that was originally designed in the game that didn't make it production?

There was only one thing that I remember, there was, that was, that we couldn't use and that was,

that was, the comic book guy target, it was originally a kicking target.

And, you know, kind of like, the godly views does quite a bit.

I think there was one in Strike or Extreme 2, which is probably where the idea came from.

But, basically, when you hit the comic book guy target, it would, you know, it kicked the ball back to the footburn.

In fact, you could get a little volley going, you know, between, between the target and the footburn, you know, get like a bunch of shots, you know, back and forth.

And, you know, it was a pretty cool dynamic, but eventually it was cost reduced out of the game.

So basically, it was a slingshot kicker for that target.

Basically, yeah.

So, how, you know, in development time, how much extra time do you think you got for Simpsons compared to, you know, one of, you know, another game?

I want to say it was probably an additional three or four months.

Now, when you did Lord of the Rings, which was the next game, which again is extremely deep, did you have a lot of time for Lord of the Rings?

No, in fact, I had probably half a time for Lord of the Rings that I had for Simpsons.

In Lord of the Rings, I knew I didn't have as much time, so what I wanted to do, that's kind of how I came about with the, with the, the multi balls the way they were.

I really liked the kind of style of multi ball where you could, and the two games were really big influence on me in this regard.

World Cup soccer and the jackpot.

Both had really great multi balls where you'd start them, you'd go for a while, and then you would, you know, you would drain out a multi ball and you could restart them.

And continue where you left off and get further down on it, get further down on them and that kind of thing.

So, those were pretty big influences in me in designing how those multi balls work in Lord of the Rings.

I knew that I wouldn't have as much time to put as much stuff as there was in Simpsons, so I figured I could kind of add depth by making things, you know, fast a little bit longer, but, you know, be able to resume where you left off and that kind of thing.

Now, was Stern using like a design team concept like Williams did, or was it just, you know, every man's working on the current game?

It was eventually, yeah, I would say it was kind of a design team. I mean, the games that I was lead on, you know, I was, I was definitely in charge of, you know, the basic content, the team integration, and, you know, everything that the players thought.

Basically, I, when I, my time at Stern, I worked with, I worked on five different games where I was lead, I worked with five different designers, and I don't think that, I'm not sure that anyone else has had quite that variety of people to work with, but, but it was interesting, you know, and it was definitely fun working with everybody.

I mean, but you said that on Simpsons, it was just you and Joe Ball, so that were basically designed the whole game. So you had a lot more responsibility on Simpsons than you did on say some other games, right?

Yeah, that's the right, true. I mean, George designed most of the playfield for Lord of the Rings on Zone. We played around with some stuff from the lab a couple of times in terms of what to do with the ring or what to do, you know, like, you know, we knew we wanted to be a magnet.

At one point, we had it like kind of hovering over the playfield, and then, you know, eventually it got moved into the backboard with the jumper amp and that kind of thing.

You know, so there were definitely a bunch of different things. You know, it wasn't, Lord was in the playfield that I would have liked to have seen, you know, I wanted, you know, I wanted you to be able to hit, you know, some black gates and have them open up and shooting the board or that kind of thing.

You know, and they wound up being, you know, what it is now. So you were thinking more of a success the game has had, but even still I personally have more fun shooting Simpsons than I do have shooting board.

So you were thinking of like almost like a medieval madness type thing.

I'm like that, you know, not quite. I mean, it was never going to be that serious or that joky or anything like that. I mean, that's funny or that, you know, joky or anything like that is medieval, but we wanted more interactive devices, I guess.

Yeah, now the that little mini playfield that's in the upper left side of Lord of the Rings, like that. Notice one thing like my game that's like real white and on other games, I see it. It's more greenish. Was there any, you know, what was up with that?

Well, that got, you know, it got changed early on. It was originally kind of colorful and, you know, looked, it looked like the original source artwork we got for the, you know, the, the dead people.

But, but, you know, when we found out later in the movie, they're going to be more kind of a, a ghoulish green time kind of thing. So that thing got, basically got, you know, saturated to green, you know, and color that way.

It's possible that, you know, that they're putting differences, you know, from different runs could make it look a little different. But I don't think that very many exist with actual colorful paths of the dead people. And that's you actually have one, I don't know.

Yeah, mine's a pretty early one. And yeah, it definitely looks different than the later ones. That's for sure. It's definitely the colors are more contrasted. I'll put it that way.

Yeah. Now, so your simpses in Lord of the Rings were really, really deep rule sets. How was the reaction by, you know, management to use spending this much time on, on, on programming these?

I mean, I don't think that they really cared one or the other, you know, as long as, as long as the person that just walks up the game gets entertained. And this is kind of my philosophy in general, as long as you can, you know, entertain, you know, the people who just play for a couple of minutes, who cares what else is on the rest of the game?

I mean, you know, the game could, the game could take you three hours to finish and who cares if it does or not. I mean, as long, you know, the game needs pacing and needs, you know, for you to have achievable goals. And as you start to achieve those goals more and more regularly, then if you have more goals to achieve after that, it gives you something else to shoot for.

And then if you have, you know, you start getting those more and more, then if you have something to shoot for after that, you know, I don't see the problem in having this stuff in there if people want to spend the time getting to it.

You know, if it makes you feel like, if it makes you feel upset that you can't get to the end, you know, I guess I never really understood that thinking myself.

I mean, it's more about are you entertained with what you're doing now, you know, and, and, you know, does the game entertain you at your skill level or, you know, does it not?

Well, I meant more like from did did the word ever come down? Look, we need to do these things. We need to compress the time schedule. These games need to get out sooner.

We don't need this depth of code, you know, lighten, you know, lighten it up a little bit. I mean, was that conversation that ever happened?

Not really, because until we were fortunate, no game that I worked on really, no game that I worked on was really incomplete by time I went into production.

I mean, since then has everything in it when it started production. There might have been some display effects and stuff like that added later, but, but the game, you know, was pretty much done.

Lord of the Rings, you know, I think when the very first 1.0 code went out, you had everything in it except, I think, Valenor.

And that was finished by a time 4.0 came out, which was the initial release to US production.

Poker, you know, that game pretty, that game might have taken a couple of revisions before everything was in it.

But, but we all is really the only game I think that was truly unfinished in terms of, you know, getting all the stuff into the game.

And there are a number of reasons why that was the case.

Well, well, do you mind talking about that?

Sure, sure. I mean, we all had, we all had a lot of, you know, even though it doesn't seem like it,

it had a lot of stuff in it that had to be dealt with.

I had to write, you know, a stepper motor driver for the new system because there hadn't been any stepper motors yet.

I had to write, you know, the thing to drive the little auxiliary display down at the bottom of the play field because that's driven differently than the one in poker.

And, you know, so that required new code.

The lights around the wheel had to be driven yet another way.

So, you know, there's always time spent, you know, and just basically work.

And then I had to do all the stuff at the puzzles.

I mean, you know, I had to solve the puzzles generically so that, you know, no matter what puzzle you have, it would fit on the screen.

And it would fill in properly and all that kind of thing.

Then I had to make sure it supported all five different languages that the game supported.

So, there was a lot of, of base work and wheel fortune that, you know, that needed to get done.

And that was just to get the basic, you know, the basic game up and running.

I mean, you know, it did set off kind of a storm, you know, especially after people perceive that Spiderman is not finished even though, you know, it's pretty finished.