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Ep 169: The Future is of Pinball Connectivity! | Pinquest

LoserKid Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·46m 47s·analyzed·Jun 2, 2025
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TL;DR

PinQuest pinball engagement app relaunches with operator tools, free player access, and nationwide competitions.

Summary

Neil Shelton discusses PinQuest, a mobile app platform for pinball engagement that launched in 2018-2019, went dormant, and is now relaunching with significant new features. The app serves players (quests, leaderboards, leagues, tournaments), operators (marketing suite, maintenance tracking, accounting), and venues, using geofenced photo verification of scores. PinQuest complements rather than competes with Stern's Insider Connected, and pricing ranges from $10-$29/month for operators.

Key Claims

  • PinQuest app is free for all end users; no subscription or cost required

    high confidence · Neil Shelton directly confirmed: 'A hundred percent. For the end user it is absolutely free. It's free on the app store. No subscription, no cost.'

  • Operator pricing: $10/month basic package (maintenance + accounting), $24-29/month full suite depending on state redemption laws

    high confidence · Neil detailed pricing structure: 'basic package is $10 a month... for locations that do want the full suite... it's $29 a month... states that do not allow redemption, it's $24 a month'

  • PinQuest uses geofencing and photo verification to prevent score fraud across all pinball machine brands

    high confidence · Neil explained: 'someone snaps a photo of the score screen, geofences them... if they're not within a specified range... it's going to say, "No, you're not at that location"'

  • Redemption and gambling laws across states significantly delayed PinQuest's launch and shape feature availability

    high confidence · Neil stated: 'this was actually something that kind of delayed our launch. We didn't really realize how gambling and redemption laws, how broad they were.'

  • PinQuest works with any pinball machine with a score display; not brand-specific like Insider Connected

    high confidence · Josh noted: 'Insider Connected—it seems to take over a lot of what you were doing anyway... it is Stern-specific... you are limited to a certain era of machines'

  • Neil Shelton took over Silverball Swag merchandise business approximately 1 year ago from original founder Will

    high confidence · Neil: 'We did take over the Silverball Swag shop just a little bit over a year ago... Will came to me and was like, "Hey, man, I think I'm gonna be done with this"'

  • PinQuest relaunched after being dormant to address operator feedback that staff didn't want to manually verify quests

    high confidence · Neil explained: 'What we learned early on in the app is that locations—the staffs did not want to have to deal with doing stuff like that. So we kind of put our hats on and... put the app dormant'

Notable Quotes

  • “I witnessed was a handful of wizards showing up, blowing up the high scoreboards, and then that was leaving the casual players really nothing to do.”

    Neil Shelton @ early in episode — Core origin story: identified the problem PinQuest was designed to solve—casual player engagement gap

  • “I love Insider Connected. I'm excited for any other manufacturers that bring stuff like this... there was no hostility or anything like that.”

    Neil Shelton @ mid-episode — Industry collaboration stance: positions PinQuest as non-competitive with Stern ecosystem

  • “I didn't want to put something out that was 50% complete, tell people that features were coming when in reality I had no idea how long it was actually going to take”

    Neil Shelton @ late-episode — Philosophy on product maturity: explains dormancy decision and commitment to quality launch

  • “I think I personally believe that what might have helped kill pinball originally back in the day was bad operators.”

    Josh Roop (host) @ mid-late-episode — Pinball history observation: ties operator quality to hobby health

  • “Nothing is better than an actual user submitting something like that. You know, a switch check notification is nice, but when someone's telling you exactly what's wrong—like, 'Hey, there is a ball stuck under that ramp'—that helps out immensely.”

    Neil Shelton @ mid-episode — Maintenance reporting feature value: crowdsourced operator alerts superior to automated checks

Entities

PinQuestproductNeil SheltonpersonJosh RooppersonScott LarsonpersonSilverball SwagproductFlippin' Out PinballcompanyStern PinballcompanyInsider Connectedproduct

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: PinQuest monetization strategy: free player access, tiered operator subscriptions ($10-29/month), merchandise drop-ship fulfillment via Silverball Swag

    high · Detailed pricing structure and Silverball Swag integration; sustainable business model leveraging merchandise vertical

  • ?

    community_signal: PinQuest maintenance reporting feature generates crowdsourced operator alerts superior to automated systems

    high · Operators receive user-submitted maintenance reports with exact problem descriptions; demonstrates bottom-up community accountability

  • ?

    community_signal: Poor operator maintenance historically damaged pinball hobby; modern enthusiast-operators improving standards through apps like PinQuest

    medium · Josh and Neil discussed how bad operators with misaligned flippers and missing rubbers discouraged casual play; PinQuest maintenance tracking addresses this

  • $

    market_signal: Casual player engagement gap identified as core problem: wizard players dominate scoreboards, casual players have no incentive to play

    high · Neil's 2016 observation at brewery: 'handful of wizards showing up, blowing up the high scoreboards, and then that was leaving the casual players really nothing to do'

  • ?

    community_signal: Neil Shelton acquired Silverball Swag business approximately 1 year ago from original founder Will

    high · Neil: 'We did take over the Silverball Swag shop just a little bit over a year ago... Will came to me and was like, "Hey, man, I think I'm gonna be done with this"'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.140

0:00
thanks for tuning into loose kick pinball podcast we are on episode 169 i am josh rupe with me my co-captain scott larson we've got an awesome episode today scott but before we jump into that there's been plenty of games revealed plenty of games showed off where are you buying your games if you're going to get a brand new game in box or even used yeah just call zach and nicole minute you're flipping out pinball they've always been really helpful to us and they have new games they've used games they have your accessories they have all that and so reach out to them they're always they'll give you a great deal and they'll always be able to find even if you have that grail machine that you're trying to get um i actually just ordered a godzilla premium for my friend so they and so they're going to be hooked up with zach mccall so again flipping out pinball awesome today we have a special guest on the man is named neil shelton he has done some amazing stuff specifically with pinquest if you've been listening to loser kid for a while now you remember competing in we did a tournament years ago for the app and you got to win a little trophy or whatnot and pinquest kind of went dormant for a little bit and uh we want to talk about what he has planned for it and the amazing stuff that's coming out with it and uh yeah i I don't want to get too much away. Neil, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, guys. First off, okay, you originally did this concept back in like 2019, 2018, right? Yep. And back then, you had this idea of like kind of doing online scores and stuff like that and competing nationwide.
1:39
Where did this all come from? What made you decide, hey, I'm making an app and this is what I want to do to help pinball? All right. So backtrack to 2016 approximately. I bought a bunch of machines. My wife was like, what the hell did you do to our house? Why are all these machines in here? Found a brewery, put them in there, started operating just by pure chance.
2:02
I had no idea what the pinball community was like. There were so many good players out there. What I witnessed was a handful of wizards showing up, blowing up the high scoreboards, and then that was leaving the casual players really nothing to do. There was no online connectivity or anything at that point in time. So I've always had a very entrepreneurial thought process in my head with stuff. I always look for solutions. And I was thinking, how can I make this more engaging for the average player who's not going to be likely posting high scores on machines? So I came up with the idea of a reward system, essentially. So the original concept was, the foundation's pretty much still there, but we've just expanded on it a ton. But the original concept was offer a series of quests. A quest was compiled of missions. Missions were target scores. Once somebody achieved all the target scores, they completed a quest. They would then take their phone up to a bar staff or arcade staff. They'd punch in a little code, see that they did everything, and then the bar could reward them a prize. So that was Foundation One of the app. what we learned early on in the app is that locations uh the staffs did not want to have to deal with doing stuff like that so we kind of put our hats on and honestly put the the app dormant and went back to the drawing board um we kept a couple beta locations in colorado running during that point in time while we built up everything that um you know people had asked for and we got through COVID. We got through all of the PinQuest team having kids and we're excited to do our re-relaunch with a ton of exciting new features that we've added onto the app. So for people who aren't familiar with PinQuest or have never used it, tell me about PinQuest and tell me what it does now. Okay. All right. So there's a couple of layers to this. So PinQuest is a mobile app available on Android and Apple App Store. So there's a couple different buckets here. So the player. The player is your average player. You go to a location, you're looking for something to do. That is the player role. You can complete quests where you can earn what we call quest bucks at specific locations. Some states we aren't able to offer that service, but you can earn those quest bucks. You can redeem them for swag. The swag gets drop shipped to your house. when you do earn that. You can compete in high score challenges on a monthly basis at a location. Locations don't have to reset the high scores each month. The app keeps track of it. And then at the end of the month, it awards first, second, third place trophies inside the app that users then, you know, have drop into their digital trophy case. They can participate in leagues. The software fully runs leagues. So a location can run a full-blown league. You can manage everything from sign up to check in to score entry, all within the app for a location. And then you can also participate in tournaments. We have a full blown tournament software in there as well. So the app is really an all in one app for players to essentially engage with a location. So that's kind of the location level. Now, there's an additional level. if there's no participating locations in a region, we have the pin quest national location where anybody in the, in the U S is able to participate in activities. Uh, we can do quests. We can do these monthly high score leader boards as well. And we can also host a virtual leagues, which we will talk about with you guys in a little bit for a little bit of a special announcement there. Uh, but that's the national level for the pin quest, uh, location for players, um, for operators. This is really an all-in-one marketing suite to help drive engagement at your location. Again, you're able to offer your users these quests. You're able to offer the high score challenges. You're able to offer the leagues. You're able to offer the tournaments. You're able to offer that redemption gaming aspect of it that gives people something to come and play for. It adds so much more when you're able to play for some sort of award. People really enjoy that. Um, and it's just, I, I obviously have built this, um, to, to help nurture, uh, traffic at my location and the joy it brings me, like seeing people using something, the people that don't know me when I go in there and I see everyone pulling out their phones and completing quests and doing tournaments and stuff like that. It's, it's just so, so cool. And, um, it feels really good that, you know, something like that is happening. Um, you guys have questions about, I spit out a ton of stuff right there. One thing I want to point out, and I don't know if you really touched on this. I didn't hear it, but you're also the owner of silver ball swag. And one of the perks is, is these quest bucks can earn you specific swag for the locations. And that's really cool. I'm a big fan of several swag. As you can tell, I'm wearing the eight bit shirt. You can get it on several ball swag.com slash lizard kid. I think it's awesome for operators that don't want to manage the product, but they want to have a product that is promoting their site or their location or their overall brand. But yet you're kind of taking that on on the back end with taking care of, hey, I'm doing shipping, I'm doing all this stuff. You just got to be part of the app and you get that perk essentially. Yeah, exactly. So you hit the nail on the head. Locations that are able to offer the Quest bucks, we handle everything. There's no inventory that they have to manage. When a user redeems their Quest Bucks for a prize, it all gets automated. It gets created on demand and drop shipped to the user's house. At that point in time, a location gets charged for that merchandise, but they're not having to keep 30 shirts on hand in all different various sizes. And of course, you never have the right size that somebody wants when they actually come to redeem it. So it really helps out a location not having to keep that physical inventory. and yes you are correct we we did take over the uh silver ball swag shop uh just a little bit over a year ago um we were integrated with silver ball swag and uh will came to me and was like hey man i think uh i i i'm gonna be done with this and i was you know you were we're closely tied here so i was wondering if you would like to uh consider taking it over and of course it's uh what will and those guys built over there is is awesome you know the first in um you know pinball apparel shop to my knowledge and uh we're happy to keep it running and keeping it alive so for those that don't know uh you know check out the website we work with a lot of different content creators such as yourselves you can get all kinds of cool uh apparel and swag um and support your your favorite uh content creators on there well the other part too like you talked about this earlier like you had these locations where they were redeeming stuff at the bar or whatever and the bar doesn't really want to do that like keto's is one of our favorite places in utah where it's It's the pinball machines are owned by someone else, but Keto's is its own thing, right? It's just kind of a help draw the people in sort of situation.

  • PinQuest development is not a full-time job for the team; all staff have day jobs and work on it as a passion project

    high confidence · Neil: 'this is none of our full-time thing. This is a passion. Um, we all have our day jobs, and you know, when you're dealing with code and building apps'

    • Scorebit
    product
    Match Playproduct
    Willperson
    Keto'scompany
    Loser Kid Pinball Podcastorganization
    IFPAorganization
  • ?

    announcement: PinQuest mobile app relaunching with complete feature set after dormancy period

    high · Neil Shelton: 'we're excited to do our re-launch with a ton of exciting new features that we've added onto the app'

  • ?

    regulatory_signal: Redemption and gambling laws vary significantly by state, delaying product launch and affecting feature availability

    high · Neil consulted redemption attorney; some states cannot offer quest bucks redemption; pricing reflects this ($24 vs $29/month)

  • ?

    technology_signal: PinQuest cannot directly tap into machine data like Stern can with Insider Connected; relies on manual photo verification and geofencing

    high · Neil: 'We don't have the ability to tap into all of these machines and extract data. That is where Stern has a grand slam'

    • 9:26
    And that way it's like you can still build your merchandise and they don't have to, like the bar doesn't have to deal with it. The brewery doesn't have to. And that's a really, really cool concept because then it's like win stuff and have it shipped right to your door. So I cut you off, Scott. What were you going to say? Oh, no. And I was actually just going to show one of the great things about it is you can get really cool things. Like I'm putting the loose airs up right now. So you can see they are in my size and I doubt they're going to have a whole bunch of different colors of these. So I just custom ordered them. They're 12 and a half or 12 or something. And so I was able to get these in the color I want. And just little things like that make it so much better than, you know, a bartender is not going to care. like they're not going to be engaged in helping you out so if you are interested in integrating pinball and merchandise and all that kind of stuff being able to use this app is great and the one thing that is nice about your app too is it's not brand specific correct you can use it on any of the machines anything that has a score display obviously is is what you can use it on so to touch a little bit on you know how we we go about collecting scores and verifying data and stuff like that. What happens is we geofence. So when somebody's at a location, they have to submit a photo proof of the score that they have achieved. Unfortunately, we don't have the ability to tap into all of these machines and extract data. That is where Stern has a grand slam with the ability to be the manufacturer and have access to all of their data and stuff like that, and that's awesome. We'd love to be able to do stuff like that. Any manufacturers listening, always open for conversations. If you ever would like to talk integration, that's my little pitch in there.
    11:15
    But the way we do it is someone snaps a photo of the score screen, geofences them to make sure that you're not earning Quest bucks at location A. Meanwhile, you're at location B feeding their machines quarters. So when someone goes to submit a score inside the app, it's pinging their phone. And if they not within a specified range of that pinball machine it going to say no you not at that location You cannot submit this score Sorry Scott What was the original ask there I derog myself. I was just saying it's nice that, okay, Insider Connected, it seems to take over a lot of what you were doing anyway, your idea. But it is Stern-specific, and it's specifically games that have been upgraded to the Insider Connected thing. So you are limited to a certain era of machines and a certain brand of machines. And so the nice thing about the way you're doing it is you could even go back and be able to do all these other games that are never going to be connected to the Internet. Correct. Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, anything with a score real, you can snap a photo of that and snag your score proof. What happens, just so folks know on the back end, is locations are getting copies every time somebody completes a quest. They get an email, hey, user XYZ completed a quest at your location. It has all the photos. It shows the geofencing, where the photos, what time the photos were taken. That way they can verify that, you know, the scores were actually accurate and submitted correctly and appropriately. And then, you know, one thing to touch on the competition side of things, you know, what I honestly came up with, it's not that novel. It's just the first time it's been brought. And there's a lot of smart people in this industry. And I'm sure, you know, other manufacturers have been already thinking about this for a long time. So I don't want to ever make it seem like there's any animosity or anything like that for other manufacturers doing stuff like this. I love Insider Connected. I'm excited for any other manufacturers that bring stuff like this. I'm good friends with the Scorebit guys. What they're working on is cool. We've all kind of had conversations. And even early on when PinQuest was starting, Stern was extremely supportive of me. When I did some trade shows and they gave me prizes, they thought it was a really cool idea. And then when they started doing their own thing, we had a nice separation. There was no hostility or anything like that. I appreciate the stuff that they do. And I just want to make it clear that there's like no hard feelings across the industry for anything along those lines. And I really appreciate the innovation that company's bringing. Sure. But as an operator, this is a nice way of rewarding patients. Not patients. Sorry. That's my other hat. Your doctor's showing. Yeah. Sorry. You're rewarding clients or fans to come and actually patronize your place because we know that a lot of locations, it's a synergistic relationship. They're typically not making a lot of money off coin drop. However, when people are in the facility, they're buying food, they're buying drinks, you're generating an environment in which they can spend money. And so by having this and being able to send out quests, achievements, things that they can do at your location, then it's a great way of generating a small interested group that will hopefully branch out. And they'll say, hey, by the way, this thing's going on at this location. Why don't we go ahead? We'll drop some coin in. We'll see what we can do. And the games are going to be fun to play. but people always do want those achievements. I'm always surprised because I'm a little older in the demographic. Like I don't understand achievements like other, other generations, but the younger generation, that is absolutely what's driving them to do things. They're like, Oh, it's there's, there's a, there's a challenge at noon today. We need to go down and do that. Yeah, you're absolutely right.
    15:27
    And that kind of just touches on another point. The marketing suite from the operator perspective, Like you're able to, well, users are able to subscribe to your location and anyone that's subscribed, you have the ability to directly message them promotions. So in the app, just like you said, you could send out one that says, hey, you know, if you come in with this message on a Tuesday, you know, we'll give you a free roll of quarters or something along the lines of that.
    15:53
    When a user checks into a location, also there's a bulletin board feature in there. So user launches the app to see which kind of quests are happening at that point in time. A little bulletin board is going to pop up where you can put notes like, hey, we've got a tournament on the XYZ of this month. Go over to the tournament section, sign up, and ding. Now you've notified them that there's a tournament that they can register in the app. And then on tournament day, they show up, they check in. You can mark them as paid, get everyone checked in, and then, like I said, fully run a tournament or a league right from the app. Well, and the other cool part too is, so I live in a smaller town. I live in a town of about 30,000 people. And there's a company that is actually starting to place pinball machines in locations throughout my city. My thing is, there's only like three or four in my town. So they cover all the way from Idaho through Utah, a little bit of Wyoming, a little bit of Colorado. so a product like this you know if if they were to tie all their stuff together and and do it as their amusement app um there's like a maintenance thing too so like i go to play the game and i know the people so i just called them said hey by the way did you know like the rubber ring on your congo on the top flipper broke off you really need to come fix this because it's absolutely useless if you can't play with that and it's shoved down into the trough so the ball can't get back in there and with them living up in idaho it's it's not the the closest drive but yep you know if if you have this app people are more likely to be like oh is there a problem you take a picture of it you send it into the maintenance thing and you're notified instantly as an operator of like hey your product's not working properly and sadly there if if you live far away from machines that you operate throughout a state or whatever that helps you a lot more because you're obviously not in that town and you can't be checking up on it every weekend or even once a month. Yep. Yeah, you're exactly right. So it's a report maintenance feature that we have in there. So when someone's using the app at your location, they can tap a little icon that says report maintenance, pull up. So it'll pull up a list of all their games. They select the game, they type out what's wrong with it. They hit submit. And just like you said, ding, email pops up for the operator. They now have a record of what's broken on a game. And in my opinion, nothing is better than an actual user submitting something like that. You know, a switch, you know, check switch notifications. Nice. But when someone's telling you exactly what's wrong, like, hey, there is a ball stuck under that ramp that helps out immensely.
    18:34
    So, yeah, thanks for thanks for touching on that. Yeah, I think I just think that it's a brilliant idea. Like really there's, it's funny to me that this hasn't been done yet because there's so much of like common sense use to this app. And in this day and age when it's hard to make coin drop, depending on machines and stuff like that, we were talking before the show, certain games make certain coin drop. And if that game ever goes down, and this is a passive income, if this machine, if you haven't checked up on it in a month and it broke in the first week that you went out and checked it, that's three more weeks that you didn't know it's working. And so it's just awesome stuff like this that can help give an advantage to the operator to squeeze a little bit more dollar out of their product. 100%. Before I had this in my own app, I would go in once a week and check on the games, and there would be out-of-order signs on sometimes five, six games. I'd be like, oh, boy, my Saturday is going to be a blast.
    19:33
    Now I get those emails, and hey, ball's stuck under that ramp. Hey, flipper rubber's broken there. I know exactly what I'm getting myself into when I go in. And if it's something easy, I can take a quick trip over to my location and fix it So I don't have to go into six repairs on my hour of scheduled time. But a couple other features that just, you know, made me think of is we actually have a maintenance log for the operator built in as well to where they can track maintenance that they do perform on their machines. So, you know, if you wax, you know, I got a jaws behind me. If I wax my jaws today, I can take a little note. So I, you know, don't wax it too soon. Or I look at my log. I'm like, holy crap. I haven't waxed jaws for six months. What the hell? That one needs some love and care. Or change the flippers, replace the flippers on this guy a month ago instead of me wasting a brand-new pair of flippers. Or maybe I let flippers go too long. So that log is really nice to be able to reference the maintenance that I perform on that machine. And then the other side of it is we also have a full counting feature where locations are able to track their counts and it graphs everything. So they can see how each game earns historically. They can say, hey, this game's become a dog that's been trending down. Now it's at the bottom of the earnings. Time for it to go.
    20:59
    So that's something that is really helpful in weeding out which games need to go when it comes to be that time. So again, all of that is included in the operator's side of the function. And just so people know, we have a couple of packages.
    21:16
    We have a basic package. So for operators that have no interest in providing the, you know, the quest aspect of it and league and stuff like that, we do have a basic package where they can just do maintenance tracking as well as the counting. So kind of a little handy, you know, pocket tool there. That is $10 a month. And then for locations that do want the full suite of PinQuest, if they're in a state that allows redemption, it's $29 a month. If they're in a state that does not allow redemption, it's $24 a month. So we do have options there.
    21:53
    And just to briefly touch on why some states can and can't, this was actually something that kind of delayed our launch. We didn't really realize how gambling and redemption laws, how broad they were. So got in touch with a redemption attorney, awesome guy, would actually be someone great for you guys to even interview. He's in his 80s. He's worked for Sega and all kinds of big manufacturers over the years and just really cool history. Uh, but talking to him, you know, made it really clear that we needed to make sure, you know, all of our, uh, T's were crossed and I's were dotted because, um, you don't want to put yourself in situations where, you know, gambling commissions or anything like that get involved.
    22:38
    That's awesome. Actually, I, I think the maintenance would be a huge plus for an operator. um do you have like on my car i hop on and it gives me a light and says hey you may need to check the oil or you may need to rotate the tires do you have features like that too uh as far as automated yeah just automated hey like uh you can say i get heavy play i get light play and these are just brainstorming ideas that sure hey maybe you should schedule like a waxing job every eight months if you have a light play or every every two months if you have a heavy play or something along those lines. Sure. In two years, replace the batteries. Right. Because they going to all over your sleeper board Your battery is going rancid and blowing out your board Yeah Yeah No nothing as far as scheduling goes You know we are always open to suggestions and stuff like that You know, something I'd like to add to is an inventory section. So operators know exactly what parts they do have on hand and if they need to place another order. So, you know, we're always willing to take considerations for app features. And honestly, that's how we got the app to where it is. We had so many people saying, add this, add that, do this, do that, that it really made us step back and say, okay, we need to kind of shelve this thing. And until we get this thing to where we feel like we've covered almost as broad of a net as we possibly can, we're not relaunching this thing. I didn't want to put something out that was 50% complete, tell people that features were coming when in reality I had no idea how long it was actually going to take to get these features out. um you know none of the the staff over here uh this is none of our a full-time thing this is a passion um we all have our day jobs and you know when you're dealing with code and building apps out and stuff like that it's it's it takes a lot of time so um you know just wanted to make sure that we were actually putting out a complete and finished product before we we did go live again that that would be interesting if you had like a even a home option because that would be something that I may be interested in, even like a low-maintenance thing where I put my games in and I don't have a log of the last time I've waxed my games or even things like that. And so that would be just kind of an interesting way of encouraging people to say, hey, these are the expected maintenance things for the use.
    24:59
    Because I know there are some pinball machines that are in a retro arcade up north. and I went there and the Tron that they have, it's a Tron LE and it is so black. You can't even see the play field because it's had so much use. And so even for something like that, because I would bet a lot of operators have no idea what the basic upkeep is for a pinball machine because it's totally different. I have an area 51 machine right next to me. There's no upkeep on that as long as the shooter's working. Exactly. Yeah, I'd say that's the biggest. Like, hey, anyone listening to this that's thinking about operating?
    25:43
    Yeah. Well, okay, but that's what I'm saying is you could give them – this is like a training wheels for, hey, if you're thinking of opening up a few on location, here's just some basic things that you can keep your games running and optimized. because everybody knows it can be so painful to play games on location, especially if you have games at home. Because your games at home, they're leveled, they're waxed, the flippers work, and half the time you go to a lot of these locations, and there's like one of the flippers has no rubber. One of the flippers is like misaligned or the kicker's broken or something like that, and it discourages people from going to play those games. Oh, 100%. And I think I personally believe that what might have helped kill pinball originally back in the day was bad operators. Oh, 100%. I remember going places when I was a kid, put a quarter in, you never knew if the right or left flipper was going to work or both. And that sure makes you want to plug another one in. So I think for the health of the hobby in general, I think it's awesome that all of us absolute obsessed enthusiasts have essentially taken over and become the operators of the modern day. If I were an operator, I guess that these questions that I'm asking, these are things that I would hope would be future releases into the app to say, hey, this could be like training wheels to say, hey, you're just getting into pinball. This is what you need to know.
    27:21
    You're right about going and playing pinball. When I first got into pinball, we took our kids to a Chuck E. Cheese, which I'm pretty sure has been condemned at this point. But my wife's like, hey, they have a pinball machine over there because that was when I had like three machines at home. And I walked over and it was a Pirates of the Caribbean. It was a Stern. And it looked like it had gone through the maelstrom. It was completely like the rubbers were gone. The flippers were misaligned. I don't even know if the upper flipper, you know, getting up into the whirlpool worked. And it was so hammered. And I don't think it ever had one bit of maintenance the entire life of this machine. I feel bad for this machine, wherever it's limping along somewhere. Yep.
    28:08
    So I actually, I've been thinking of two questions. The first one is, you talked about cost and whatnot. The app is still free to the end user, right? Like if you want to play the tournaments, if you want to do the leagues, it's still free for everyone on the app store, right? A hundred percent for the end user. It is absolutely free. It's free on the app store. No subscription, no cost. Perfect. Second question is you talked about tournament and you talked about like adding scores and stuff like that. One thing about match plays, you obviously have score keepers and then they can just play the app like the score. You know, someone raises their hand. Yep. They come over, they type it in. Is that how this app works too? or is this how does it work on that end and stuff yeah so there's going to be a tournament director or league director that has access to do all of it on an on the app on either the ipad or phone it even actually works on a pc um so the app is cross-functional but yes we do have to call somebody over um mostly for officiating purposes um you know with league i i toyed with the idea of doing all the score entry as players go along the problem is technology you know wi-fi signal gets lost after a bunch of league plays, loses all the scores, what's going to happen? So, you know, ultimately we ended up with just, hey, let's use traditional league sheets, turn them into the league manager at the end of the week, and the league manager is going to input all the scores. All of that is done in-app. But to answer your question, yes, everything is done inside of the app for tournaments and league, but there is the admin actually inputting the information. you i don't know if you've got this in there but you should have like an ifa uh or ifa ifpa rule book in there just just because like i don't know so one of my first tournaments yeah yeah like that's a great idea i can't remember if i've told the story on i probably have so one of the first tournaments i did uh we i was in the final four i had beat i was playing third i already beat one and two on ball three um and sorry no i was playing fourth i apologize i already beaten one and two and then ball three the gentleman got up there was so mad he stuck his knee through the front of the game rage tilted it screwed up the whole game the other two looked at me because they'd never done a tournament before like we don't know why we do this the guy was so embarrassed he just left like he just grabbed his badge and left and and we tried to start a new like like oh you're supposed to start a new game i guess if they had known they should have known like oh like one and two had already like lost i think they'd already completed their game and yeah at that point you weren't gonna lose yeah yeah and so but what happened was is we restarted the game we didn't we're able to get scores because we were told well that's probably what we should do we didn't ask the tournament director because we We were kind of sheepish about the whole thing. It was just a really weird situation. And in that situation, it's like it'd been nice to have a rollback. I ended up – he hit the game so hard, it screwed up the getaway we were playing on. It wasn't finishing games and he was doing funny things. So we had to move to T2, which I was having a hard time on that night. And I totally bombed and ended up taking fourth out of the whole tournament when I could have taken first if I had just known the ruling. on yeah but you you didn't just call josh sharp and i feel bad like i i every time yeah i i didn't know josh sharp at the time i know you didn't go josh back then i know i i've heard this day maybe i'll add a phone josh sharp feature you know what i've got josh josh would love that he would totally love this you definitely endorse this idea i'm sure no you know those annoying websites you go to that pops up and it's like we're live chat 24 7 you ask me a question right now and type it in you should just add one of those and it could be josh sharp and be like go away or something yes no well actually but there could be some way of like okay that's probably beyond what what you're looking for but actually that's an idea for future uh future operators to say or tournament directors to say hey here's a searchable database yeah for what the ifpa rules are because they can be oddly specific yeah um you know it's funny you bring this up. We actually do have a chat bot on the operator side that we uploaded all of our, uh, essentially, um, you know, how to tools. So if an operator has problems figuring something out, they can type it and we, we call it the support gnome. I don't know if you guys remember, um, a gnome is kind of my thing. You're going to see it on a lot of our marketing material. like on Travelocity. It kind of, that's kind of where it stems from. Um, it's going to go down a path, but, uh, essentially me and a buddy, When we would go out to bars or travel, we would take a little gnome with us and take pictures with people with the gnome. It was kind of just fun in college. But anyways, I've always had a little place in my heart for gnomes. Do you have garden gnomes? I do have garden gnomes, yes. Okay. Yep, yep. I have a few garden gnomes, and they're kind of hilarious. Yeah, I love garden gnomes. but anyways for for one of the expos i don't know if you guys remember this or not but we there's all kinds of different stuff you can do with our app too just since it's you know all you really need to do is have a camera in the app someone's phone has a camera like we did a scavenger hunt at expo in 2020 where i had a bunch of gnome decals and i hid them all over expo i put them on back glasses and so that was one of the tasks one of the quests was to find the 10 pin quest gnomes um but anyways that that's where this gnome kind of comes from and why our support chat gnome exists so where i was getting there with that long long route to get there i could easily upload the ifpa rulebook into this thing it would analyze it then somebody could go in there and type uh hey this is what happened how do we handle this and bam so thank you for that idea that's something i could implement very easily i i got i got donkey kicked and i can't walk that's why you have to stand back when someone's playing because some guys are crazy yeah oh yeah i didn't know i didn't realize how how competitive tournaments could get when i first did it like the first tournament i held we had we have a regular he's one of my really good friends now uh he said hey you should hold some tournaments and i was like oh that's that's gonna be interesting what the heck let's give it a shot uh i didn't know how to set tilt bobs this is how new I was. I had like five brand new Stearns, didn't have tilt Bob set the good players. Did you have them in? Did you even know just the stick, right? Just the stick.
    34:54
    And I I remember like watching people just just throw the games around And my my dad my business partner on the operating side And he we were looking at sure like what the hell is happening right now so i did i mean games got messed up um opto boards got jacked up uh stuff came unplugged and uh i learned very very soon that pinball tournaments are a real thing and people take them super serious and they're really good players they get there early and they figure out everything they can about a machine especially how how much they can push it exactly exactly and you know you talk about the people that dance and stuff like that like there is an art form to some people i'm going to call her out because we're good friends but jen ruper if you've never watched her play definitely go to a tournament with her there and watch her play it is like an art form to watch her jump up and dance and everything while she's playing the game it helps some people yeah i it's really funny because we're we're having this discussion with like tournaments can be really boring especially when you're watching on streaming because some of them are just like so zoned in and they don't move yeah but like we need some like wwe kind of stuff some like talking to the camera and talking the smack and i was like i guess that's one way to grow it like i don't know but like i'm one of those people i just stand there and like yeah i'll shake the machine if i need to to nudge or whatnot yeah i'm i'm pretty still like a board but that's the thing too i gotta show up an hour really you're not still like a board i've seen you throw my games around i'm like dude true well in a tournament i'm still like a board because i can't death save oh okay yeah uh yeah you know scott's got all le's i gotta death save them right yeah exactly look i had to move my machine eight inches after you played it one time yeah i do move the games a little bit but no i'm what i'm saying is is like i don't i don't dance like jen does yeah i'm just crouched down in like the roger sharp position so i just loaded the game yeah yeah it's it's any sport with me though i have to be there at least 30 minutes early to warm up because i will not do good like if i just show up and start playing i don't show up i'm not showing up for another 30 minutes it's like well my first three rounds are gonna suffer at least you know but it's the same with like when i golf and stuff like that too if i don't warm up like you guys are carrying me for the least first two two three holes and you never know the identical game is going to shoot different flippers are going to be in different conditions pitch is going to be different so yeah it helps out immensely if you're if you're going to compete to bounces are different that's that's one thing like like a game like funhouse you've got to know how that bounce comes out of out of the right scoop yeah and every i swear every right scoop's different unless if you've bought yours from you know flipping out pinball and it's brand new out of the box but even them like even those pitch readies are slightly variations from each other so it's like they all play different i don't know how many games i've played that are the exact same even to drops and stuff like that you know yeah exactly so we're getting way into the weeds yeah we'll talk about different bounce patterns meanwhile yeah tight rubbers for the three of you still listening to this well let's talk about there is you've brought this back like congratulations on the reveal uh hopefully if you haven't watched the video yet a little four spill of nil going through all the stuff you can do with this the new pin quest and everything like that but let's talk about you are doing special leagues for this app yeah and we might know something about that you want to you want to talk about that really quick now yeah so one of the things that we really wanted to do with the app is make it very pinball community centric so we have a little actually news section on the side that pops out with industry news and stuff like that. So we want to work with content creators and get RSS feeds in there to where we can help content creators get exposure from people that honestly probably aren't in inside of the pinball community quite yet. People that are going to bars and arcades, you know, and playing on location pinball. From what I found, believe it or not, from like my leagues and tournaments, most of them aren't really involved in the stuff that we are all with regards to podcasts and YouTube videos and stuff like this. So it gives a great chance for exposure. But with that being said, we're going to be running a creator series of guest hosts. These are going to be 30-day guest host spots within the app on the national location. So anybody can participate in these. We're going to kick it off with you guys. You're going to be the first guest host in there. People are going to be able to earn Loser Kid digital trophies for completing quests. You guys are going to pick the games based off of your game bank. People can go to arcades. They can play the games at home. For the score submissions, there's going to be a high score leaderboard. And the thing that I'm most excited about is a new feature we have created called a drop-in league. Some look at it as like a high score league. But basically, the way this league works is each week, four games are going to be randomly drawn from the game bank that you guys are going to select. Players are then going to do their best to submit their top score. All of the scores over a seven-day period are submitted blind. So you're not going to have any idea what other people's scores are. You just submit when you think you have your best possible score. At the end of the seven-day period, all the scores are revealed. and then we assign points to first through however many people are participating in this. Each league is going to be four weeks. At the end of the four weeks, we are going to add up all the points. Top 25 are going to get a special limited edition Loser Kid lapel-style pin with PinQuest, and then we're also going to do a random draw, so 25 other people can win one of those as well just in case they don't have the skill, just have some fun participating um and we're also going to give away a trophy for the actual winner of it and we're also going to do a giveaway for some loser kid uh swag package from silver ball swag so this is kind of an exciting way to get people familiar with the app um you know one of the challenges we originally had is people would download the app and say there's no locations by me awesome i just downloaded this app and i have nothing to do So that's why we've come up with this kind of concept of having this national level location that anybody can do something in. So you guys have any questions, need any clarification on that? We'll post rules, obviously, when we go live. The goal is to get this thing going on June 1st. Okay. That'll be the kickoff. Nice. I'm excited. This is really cool, and hopefully I can win my own lapel. Oh, there you go. Yeah. No, I'm excited too because I do have a mix of games, and I'm trying to find at least games that people have more access to. Sure. But I'm excited because I do have, you know, I'm a big CGC fan, so I have all the remakes, which is great. But, man, I've been playing a lot of Metallica and a lot of Beatles and, you know, all the elements behind me too. Yeah, I was saying he's going to pick the games himself, and so he's going to pick, like, Wizard of Oz. Rush. Iron Maiden. Beatles. and Jurassic Park for just one week, and then nothing but CGC Moscow. Well, you don't get to pick each week. You get to pick the game bank, so you guys can put all of those games in there. I'll pick the game. I'm going to try to limit it to the ones that are more likely because I know the Beatles, I don't even think they made the 1964.
    42:40
    Forget that. We're doing nothing but Doodle Bug. Oh, my gosh. Doodle Jump, yeah. I'm glad you just said that. There is something with regards to how this league works. It's going to take your top two games each week, so if for some reason there is not a game or you go someplace and the game's broken you don't have to worry about not submitting four scores it's only going to take the players top two games each week just in case circumstances like you said if someone can't find a game one other quick note people are going to be able to find the games inside of our app pinball map has an awesome API we really appreciate what those guys do over there and we do integrate with their API so you know when When we're running this league and they see a machine, people will just be able to say, hey, find this machine. As long as people have their pinball map updated, you'll be able to find whatever machines were thrown in here. So this is going to benefit other locations as well that aren't subscribing to the PinQuest suite. They're going to have players probably coming in there and trying to complete these league scores and quests to earn these potential prizes. Awesome. Neil, this is amazing. Like, seriously, I'm excited for this. I'm excited to see where this goes. Like, this is, you're doing such an amazing job to help build the community and offer something that is genuinely pushing pinball forward. And so just from all of us in the community, thanks for doing this. This is really, really cool. And I hope this takes off. I really appreciate the support, guys. Yeah, this is a great opportunity to cross boundaries with multiple games. also I everything you're doing with silver ball swag it's been so fun for us because we've been playing with it a lot Josh has done some great jobs of getting some really unique stuff for our you know for us and so we we've had a great time with it so we really appreciate everything you've done for us well thank you guys so much appreciate working with you guys you guys are awesome and keep up everything you're doing you know we were talking earlier uh it it takes a long time to build up what you guys have a lot of dedication and consistency and you guys have done a fantastic job thank you thank you neil if so if you want someone to get a hold of you what's the best way they can get a hold of you yeah they can i can be emailed uh neil at play pinquest.com you can follow us on all the socials um we're going to start being a lot more active here once we uh once we launch this thing so keep an eye out on us you know facebook uh x uh instagram uh that is the places to find us. Awesome. And how can they participate in our month of games? Yep. So you'll download the PinQuest app and then you will simply click find a location inside the app and then the national location is going to pop up right away. Again, anyone in the US can participate inside of this challenge here. They'll be able to sign up for the league and then we will post those league scores. We will drop the lowest week. So three weeks are going to count. So people will be able to join all the way up until the end of the first week. Nice. If you want to get a hold of us, we are Loser Kid Pinball Podcast at gmail.com. On all the socials, we're at Loser Kid Pinball. Subscribe to us on YouTube. Go to silverballswag.com slash loserkid to get some of our sweet swag on there. I highly recommend the baseball jerseys. They are nice. They are sweet. And the shoes. The shoes have been fantastic. The shoes are great. Yeah. We've got to change the name to whatever you said. Loser Air? Loser Air. Shout out to Glenn Wechter for coining that phrase. That is awesome.
    46:17
    Also, shout out to our Patreon members. Thanks for supporting us. You help make this content accessible and visible for everyone. And thanks also to Flippin' Out Pinball. Scott, give us our last words. Go play Pinquest and go buy some losers.
    46:41
    Thank you.