You're listening to Topcast, this old pinballs online radio. For more information visit them anytime, www.Marvin3M.com. Flash Topcast. Today on Topcast we're going to be talking to another Gottlieb designer. Somebody that started designing him all machines when he was eight years old and made his own machine when he was 12 and actually did a college project with a pinball machine and right out of college got hired by Gottlieb. So this is kind of an amazing story of how somebody that was in into pinball right from a very very early age and was able to make his dream come true and start working and designing games at Gottlieb. Special guest. Special guest. Special guest. I'd like to welcome John Osborne to Topcast tonight. Again John worked at Gottlieb during the 1970s and 1980s and he designed such great games as haunted house, the three leveled game. So we're going to be giving John a call right now. Hello. John? Yeah. It's Joshua Clay. Hi, Joshua Clay. How you doing? How you doing? How you doing? How you doing? Let's talk about your first tidings into pinball. I mean, you know, before you were at Gottlieb or whatever when you were a kid, were you a player or anything? Oh yeah. Yeah. I can remember my father holding me up like it was the balls rolled out. And there was just always something that there was something a whole different world than that glass somehow. And I like pinball right right from the start. I used to try to make things out of old doors or shirt boxes and with holes and or something like that. You know, try to get that sensation of ball rolling down a plate field and going into a hole. So you mean you were like designing games in your kid? Well, the first game I ever actually, the first thing I put together that was something like a game was, I think I was in the seventh grade and I took an old door. And for an arch, I used a piece of garden hose curved at the top. And I just had in mind some holes and balls falling to a hole and like push two wires together. You know, it lasted about 10 minutes but it was something to do at the time. So it kept the sensation of pinball. Never went into a cabinet or anything like that. It was just playing around. And how old were you at the time? Oh, probably about 12. Well, that's actually pretty cool. When I was, I remember when I was six, we went to a place that had a lot of games. It was a big bear, a resort in California. I'm not sure if this was the first time I had had this happen, but it was a major event because there was like three arcades in this town and it was not much to do because it rained and so we spent a lot of time in the arcades. And I remember noticing the differences. There's the way that, you know, on this game the ball comes up on the right of the shooter. On this game that comes up on the left and this game has a drop shoot. This game has a push shoot. This game has a little push shoot. And they were so different and I think that might have been the time that I noticed that some games had something really cool. Have these buttons on the side of the cabinet? Well, what, now what error is this? Are we talking this is the early 60s? No, the 50s. The 50s, okay. Okay, for some reason I didn't think you were that old. Anyway, it was just really interesting to walk up to a game and you know, does this game have flippers or not? You got to kind of reach around and see. And I think, I think, that was also the first time I had ever seen a bingo. And well, here was something that, you know, I looked at this game and I thought, there's nothing on it but it holds and it has these wavy springs along the side. Well, at that time wavy springs that an old game, you know, like in the 30s or something. Right, right. And, you know, what's going on here? They had all these games lined up. They all looked the same except the back glasses were different. And I remember my mom said, don't don't play these games. And they tilt too easily. Which is funny because she was not a tilt there at all. But I guess she couldn't get anywhere with them. And I'd play one month in a while and I think, you know, what's going on here? And maybe the ball hits that double flag spring. Maybe that'll do something, but I knew it wouldn't. So I just, I didn't get it. Where were you growing up? Where, where, what state was this? In Southern California. In Southern California, okay. And they had pingos in Southern California, huh? Uh, yeah. I don't know whether they paid off. I mean, whether you did anything with them, I have no idea. This was not LA County at the time. Okay. This was San Bernardino County. So that, that probably made a difference. And then when I was like in the junior high year, there was a famous peer, uh, uh, attraction in Long Beach called New Pike. And that was one of those great old amusement park peers that just had, they must have had 30 arcades there. They must have had a thousand games on that, on that pier. And then I, I know they had pingos there too. And it was just, only now I was old enough to, I, I walk up to a game and I hear this, this, this motor running. So I'm not going to play that game. Something stuck. I'm going to lose my money. And I still didn't know what was going on. Because there was just way too much stuff to read on the back glass. Way too much stuff to read on the instructional cards. And so again, pingos were just, what is going on here? Were those, you think those pingos were paying out then? Well, of course they paid out. I mean, they paid out replays. But what the location was doing with the replays, I don't know. Right. Maybe nothing, you know, maybe nothing. You just play them off. Right, right. And, uh, and then when I got a bit older and I could drive, I'd go down to my coin row, which is, which used to be the place on Tika Boulevard and downtown LA where all the, all the old line distributors were. And, um, yeah, I'd hang around there and they'd give me old stuff. I got a lot of old stuff just by hanging around there. But there'd be some old games like this would be in the late 60s. And here they have these old games from the mid 50s or so. And you know, they don't, nobody wants them. So how much is this flipper game? Well, this game is $50. Well, there's a baseball game over there. That's $75. Well, here's this game with all the holes and it's $400. What? Now what's going on here? And I asked them, I'd say, well, we can't talk to you about that because it's gambling. You're under age. So it took me 15 years to find out what thing goes wrong about. And I've always had a soft spot for gambling in ball. Hey, Kacha. Oh, no. So now how did you get from Southern California to Chicago? Oh, well, uh, you know, I always wanted to. I was always interested in this. I did have a game when I was a little kid. We had a, a valley vogue. But when I was about seven to eight years old and then when I was just going in the junior high, I really wanted a game. I knew what was going on. I wanted a flipper game. And my dad found one for me. It was, I still have it. It's Chicago Coin Sally in 1948. And I acquired a few games here and there. But so I was interested in this. I, I built a couple of things and you know, fixed up and collected and whatnot. But then, uh, as the end of college started to approach, um, I wanted to work for one of the game company. I did stay out of school once semester and work for Port Tal Distributing in downtown LA. I'm going, whoa, which was the Gottlieb and Rocco Distributing. And yeah, what I wasn't going to do that for living, but I just, I wanted to work, work there for a semester, heading back into school because the draft wanted me in the worst way. This was during Vietnam. Right. And what, uh, what were you studying in school? Engineering. And what school was this over now? This was, uh, well, uh, I went to college and junior college down in Santa Monica. And then I went to, uh, got my degree at Fresno State College. Well, okay. Which is now Fresno University. But yeah, you know, mid in the, in the central valley, from my senior project to get my degree, I built a game from scratch, a full size game, which I still have. I built it from, uh, ironically, a bingo cabinet. We, uh, Fresno is an extremely rural at the time. It was still is when you get out of town. And I met somebody who actually said he had two old tin ball machines in his barn. And I'm living in the dorm at the time and my roommate said, let's get them. There was two of them. So we brought two games up to this shoebox size dorm room. And, uh, one of them I fixed up for him. They were both the same bingo of valley beauty. And the other one, I started taking a part. This was going to be my game. So I established all the realies and, you know, stuff like that. But it mostly the cabinet. And, uh, that was my senior project. I built it completely from scratch. I even made my own wire because I got wire out of the machine, of course. And, uh, you know, old wire is all, all turns yellow. So I would take, I needed, I needed a wire safe with a unique color. So I take this yellow wire, stretch it out to the length I want, and start putting bands on it with marks a lot. I made my own wire. But it was, it's a real game. It's a full size game. The only thing that's not legitimate about is it's a novelty game. And there's no replay. Because I didn't want to add that to the things of all the circuitry and things I had to do, you know. So on this game that you made for your project, what did it have any unique features or not so unique? What features did it have? Well, it was, uh, the shooter's on the left. I wanted to put the shooter on the left. And, uh, as it's called, fell paw. And, uh, mostly it's just standard game parts, you know, little, little Williamsville golly, a little new, little old kind of thing. And, uh, I've got just some arrangements of some post at the top, uh, and a, and a spring near the gate that's, it's from the bingo to kind of pay homage to the bingo. So there's a row of yellow posts at the top. Other than that, it's just the pop bumpers and kickers and flippers. The flippers are horizontal again, because I, rather than, then angled down, I wanted that, that wanted to, you know, again, the homage to the old game. And I built it to play to use the one and one eight-inch ball. Oh, a larger ball. Yeah, the old style ball. Yeah. Huh, now why did you use the larger ball? Because that's what was used in old games. I wanted to, I just wanted to do that. Huh. Even though it kind of slows down the play a little bit. Yeah, it's froze down the play, but the large balls, uh, in a way, have more bounce because they're more momentum. Right. More momentum. More momentum. Yeah, there's more weight. So when they hit something, you know, yeah, it can get a bit of bounce. Yeah, you know, there's, there's, there's pluses and minuses to both sizes. And they're, they're just completely different. Right. We had a game to behave. Anyway, so that was my senior project. And I started sending out resumes and they were, I had no way, Nia. He didn't, very helpful to me. Anytime I would write, took out me with some old questions and the Rod History, or I work and I get parts and everything, I usually got a letter from Wayne. And I must say he was, he was very kind to me. He really was. He brought me along. And then when I came time to write resumes, I, um, I sent a resume to Gottlieb and to Williams and the Valley. Now, in those days, when you wrote out of tight, tight, that resume, you had to leave a white space up in the upper left hand corner. So you could staple your picture. That is in a picture with a resume. Right. That's really another time and then. Yeah, sure it is. So I, I never heard from Valley. Williams said that I had to go down and I forgot what, what it was. It was from, remember I didn't quite understand they, they wanted me to go down to their distributor and talk to somebody down there first. Their distributor was truly, in fact, it was right across the street from Port Tal. I, I never, I never did it. But then Gottlieb and Gottlieb, they said, we'd like you to come and talk to it. When can you fly out? Really? Can you imagine that? This was at a time, you know, when they said that the employment picture for grad was not that good. And here Gottlieb wants to fly me out and interview me. Man, that was, that was an amazing weekend. Was Gottlieb paying for the airfare, too? Yep. Really? Yeah, they said, I've said, you know, when would be a good time for you? And we'll have tickets waiting at the airport in Fresno. And we'll set up set up the time and we'll meet you. Wow. Yeah, that's what I said. Well, in all those three companies, did you have a preference of which one you wanted to work for? Yes, I wanted to work for Gottlieb. I always had a, you know, a soft spot for Gottlieb. I never did even, I never rode to Chicago Coins because, uh, I didn't know about the company or anything. And I had the Sally game and everything. I was good products. But every time I got a letter from them, uh, it was written like, I don't know, like people that didn't couldn't write or something. They, they really wrote like they, no, they wrote my letters like my children. I wasn't sure what was going on there. They wrote these garbled letters full of misspellings. Uh, the, uh, I got the same letter, in different times, I got a letter from the same person who actually spelled his name differently both times. So, I don't know if I want to get involved with this. I think they were really bad with the typewriter. I think that's what that was. I can't. So, you went right, the company's letters. And what were you asking them? Oh, the, uh, the, I guess the standard deal then, you know, you would, you would say that, uh, you know, you're graduate in, uh, in engineering and you'd be interested in employment and, and, no, no, I mean, you said that you wrote letters in Wayne Nions would respond to them. What were you asking? Oh, oh, oh, oh. Well, uh, one time I was, um, I was building a game that I was copying. There was a bunch of games down at this new pipe place. And I, I say that because I think there were strictly local. They were, there was a big cabinet with a glass on top, and you would split pennies underneath the glass. And on, on the play field were, were, were, were rings, metal rings set into the surface. And if a penny contacted the ring and the center of the ring, it would pay off. They actually pay off in pennies. Okay. And then the, the, the play field would slide, would tilt up, and all the pennies would slide off and would come back and you start fresh. You could only get like three or four or five. So I, well, I need to build one of those. I, I, I could build one of those. I almost did, but one of the things I needed was, uh, half in the little, in the scoreboard to say what, how much you at one, you know, you know, inserts like play field insert. Right. And I had no idea where to get those. I didn't know, I didn't have a gotty catalog at that time. So I wrote to him and said, where can I get these? And he would, he wrote back and say, well, just, you know, if danger catalog, you could go down to Porto and over it through the distributor, things like that. And when I was building SouthPaw, I was not sure how I was going to grill all the holes for the pop bumpers. I know, I, I, I knew I catalogs by then. And I knew this was a complicated profile here. I might, I'm not going to do this, you know. So I asked Wayne and he sent me a drawing. He actually sent me a gotty drawing of that, of that profile in the wood. I felt like I had a piece of the company in my hand when he did that, you know. Huh. So he sent you a thing where you could make a template from it. Right. Exactly. Interesting. Wow. So, well, Wayne and I, I mean, it's hard to believe that this guy, you know, was designing games, running the, you know, running the engineering department and writing new letters. Yeah. Yeah, he's a busy guy. Yeah, I sure was. Well, what are the things I think he, he liked so is, is, what, let's see, from about, oh, I was about in junior college for a few years there. I was writing him letters, writing everything on our teletype. I was very interested in teletype and I got, if that time were surplus, was very common. And I had a teletype set up and I couldn't, but I couldn't transmit to him or anything, but I would actually use the teletype as a typewriter, you know. Well, it's all capital letters. You can't back up. You can't, you can't strike out, you know. And I would tell him that this is, I'm writing this on a teletype. Well, when I met him, it turned out he had been in the signal cord during the war as a teletype specialist. So that was, that was great, Fr. He knew exactly what was going on, you know. You were, you were ringing every bell, weren't you? That's so, yeah. Yeah. Wow. So now, okay, they fly you out. And, you know, how did that go? It went real well. I stopped over in Denver and then landed and they said they'd take me, and they said to take the shuttle bus to the hotel. It used to be a hotel, literally right next door to the plant, in North Lake. And I waited and waited and waited. Nobody, nobody came. This turned out to be, this was a real, Ricky Tiki hotel. I finally took a cab and he, he picked me up that evening. And we went out to dinner to a real nice steakhouse in Elmer's. And that night I also met Bob Smith. It was the operations manager who used to be the chief engineer before Wayne. And, you know, I brought pictures of my collection and pictures of the stuff I built, pictures of South Pond. And we just chatted and I think we really hit it off. One of the things they did ask me, which I really would not prepare for at all, was, are you color blind? I guess they'd had some experience before with bringing people into engineering that, whoops, couldn't tell the difference on the wires. Nobody, nobody found that. Yeah, I got a friend that saw, he's got that problem. And he has a really, really hard time with, well, he can't read the colors off any wire because he's color blind. Oh, yeah. You know, so I guess, well, you know, a game, a little bit of dies by colors. You know, we had something like, like 78, or I forgot, almost like 80 wire combinations. Right. A lot of wires. No two were alike. Right, right. So now, you spend the weekend at Gottlieb, you know, talking to these guys. And did they make an offer right then? Yeah, yeah, they did. They said they were real pleased with me. If I'm real pleased with them. And then they made me an offer, which was actually more than what I asked for. What, what do you mean, you mean, you, they asked you for salary requirements, and then they beat your salary requirements? Yes, they, they say, well, we usually start our engineers office, and then they mentioned that salary that was at the trifle higher. I couldn't believe it. So you up didn't move all the way to Chicago? Yeah, now they did not, they didn't pay for the move. They didn't pay for the move. And we agreed that I would start to feel like the day after Labor Day. This was, this was in May. I was there on May 5th and 6th. And I was going to graduate that June. Now, what year was this? This was in 72. So what was your first day at work like? Well, it was the Tuesday after Labor Day. And I came in and asked told the receptionist, you know, who I was, as I was waiting, that I'm here to see Wayne Niles, and Wayne came out, and he just said, but I was there for the plant tour. They wouldn't take me in. He wouldn't take me into the engineering department. The engineering department was always locked. And he, even then, you know, he let me look to the window, but we couldn't go in. That was on a Saturday. So then I got to go in, of course, and he introduced me around, and I don't remember every detail of that first day. So did you have an office and stuff? At the time, yes, in fact, I shared Wayne's office, because one of the things he said he wanted, he wanted someone who could write a new instruction manual. You know, that manual that had been around that instruction and service manual was a catastrophe. They said it helps a lot of people. But, you know, as a writer, I looked at that thing, and again, I just, it's hard to know what to say. They need some time. And he had seen my, the report I did for my senior project, which was like the history and development of pinball. He had to turn in something in writing, you know, to get the degree. And he had seen that, and they liked my writing. So that was one of the first things I did, was to rewrite the service manual. Do you still have a copy of that? No, no. Why not? I don't know how I wish. I don't even have a copy of the report, the report that I wrote. That it teaches in it and everything. It seems like you saved everything else along the way. Yeah, I said everything else, right. But then they kept, they kept rewriting it and, you know, saying we want this and we don't want that. It was a big book. They wanted something much bigger than just a little, pamphlet that they had. And I picked it down and put it up. I put it down and pick it up now and then, then I got to doing other things. One of the first things I started doing was running cable. And whenever we do an engineering sample, which is the first time the drawings and the documentation is tested to make a game that still builds an engineering, we have to run a cable to see if the cable, if you see if the run is or right. And I remember doing that running, because we had wirewax and stuff in engineering. So I did that. I ran cables and this just general stuff. Let's see. What else? I think I did some drawings. I did some of that stuff. Didn't have an office stuff. So how did you get to, you know, designing your first game, which apparently forgotly was pro football? You know, hit the deck. Oh, well hit the deck came by myself. We had a room, a small room off of engineering, where we had games that we would play, because we had to test the games. We had to play the crap out and we'll see if they were any good. And say, Ed Krivnsky would bring in a game and, you know, here's a new game that needs to be played. We set up playing sheets and start playing it and evaluating it. Well, it might turn out that, say, this roll over over here is too tight. Can't get at it. What we need to do is move these posts over a little bit. So Wayne would tell me, okay, go ahead and do it. Go ahead and, you know, make change. Some of them were pretty involved, like they'd say, you know, we need to add a roll over here. That's going to do this new function. Well, the roll of playfields, and put it all the wiring, add a relay, you know, make it, you still build it like a real game. So, and then we had a, like, red line of the schematic. So some of the changes were pretty substantial. I did that for a while. And then we had a guy that was working on his job was making light box test fixtures, which was just, we just used a bottom board and put on a roll of lights and a roll of, like, just contact blade that you got by hand, and you plug this into the light box and it would test all the wires, but it's particularly in a single player light box. It would test all the decogon units, test the tilt switch, test every wire, every light. It was pretty simple, but, you know, that was his job. Well, one day when I wasn't there, I guess in the evening, today he and Wayne got to do a bigger argument. The next day he told me, he had to let this guy go. So this is going to be, in addition to your other duties, he said, you're going to be building light box test fixtures. That was my first real, real responsible job. And then I did that for a few years and then another guy that did all the foreign games that he was going to leave. He broke me and on his job, that was a very responsible job. Because our foreign games, we did not have one of those one size fixed ball cables, like the other companies. We had specific modifications for a specific country. And we had like run-in chain sheets and addition deletion sheets. And so like the game for France is only for France. Game for Germany is only for Germany. So that was a pretty responsible job. And it was some time around there, I think Wayne said, because I had been helping with the modifications of games and making suggestions about, you know, this game might play a little better if. And what do you think about this, Eddie? You know, he said, yeah, go ahead and make a change. Wayne said, you want to try to design a game by yourself? I said, yeah, sure. Well, go ahead and do a single player. And that's how Hit the Deck was born. Now, on the internet pinball database, they talk about Pro Football as you and Ed Khrinsky designed that game. But you're saying that that was an Ed Khrinsky game and you had a smaller role to play in that? Well, look, you know, I get, I have to, I get them confused. There's Pro Football and there's Grinire, which is which, do you remember? Yeah, Grinire is the two player that came out in 1977. And Pro Football was the wedge head that came out in 73. Right. The single player was Eddie's and that was there when I came along. And then a few years later, Wayne said to me, we need a two player version of Grinire or Pro Football, whichever. And he said, you know, I want you to make it. Okay, fine. Well, that game did have one thing in it that I thought was really, really bad. If you shoot the ball at the, I'm probably going to get this wrong. I don't remember exactly, but I think if you shoot the ball at the very target, and when the very target pushes the ball out, it will push it out. No, no, I strike that. That's not right. It is possible for the ball to go out the out-roll over, which gives you a full touchdown while the motor is running from scoring something else, and you don't get the touchdown. No, it was it. Yeah, you got cheated big time because the roll over would be hit while the motor was running from something else. Right. And that really, that was one of the worst things I ever saw in a game. And I said, I'm sorry, I could have said, if I ever, in a position to design a feature like that, I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen. And here Wayne Hensley, this game, it says make a two-player version of this. And so I did, I put a feature in there that would delay that roll over if the motor was running. I never told Wayne about that either tool it was done. In case you said, no, I don't want you to add another relay, because there was a lot of relay in that game, you know, being a center shooter multiple player, and there's a lot of circuitry for that. Well, and they counted the relay for the, for costing, right? Well, we counted everything. Excuse me. That was something else I had to do in the early days, yeah. When a game was accepted and we made the engineering draw, and made the engineering sample, we had to count the connections. That was a play field would have so many hundred connections, the light box would have so many hundred connections and so on. We count, that was four. I think that was for staffing. You know, how many people they needed out there on the soldering line? Because I think each person just sold it on a few, a few wires and then we'll go. They started on the same wires. And we counted, you know, one wire was one, and then 18 gauge wire was one and a half, and two 18 gauge wires was two and like that, and we kept it running total. Interesting. No, of course we counted the relay. They counted all the hardware naturally, you know. Now, how did they draw schematics? I mean, that would seem like, I mean, which came first, the chicken or the egg? The schematics or the game? Well, sort of, let's see, well, when I laid out a game, I have to, I think, I'm trying to think, because you're right, they both sort of had to happen at the same time, because when I would lay out a game, I'd lay out a play field that I thought was going to work, and then either before F-Ride real, it didn't matter. But for me to wire that game, I had to have schematics. So I would just start, you know, when I would do a hand sample like that, I would omit most of the tilt circuitry, you don't need all that stuff. You don't need the coin circuitry and all that stuff. But you do need some anti-tilt. You need tilt. And I would just hand draw it. You just hand draw it, and when I would, as I would build up the schematic, I would put the wire colors on, and then I had a table of all the relay and the motor, and as I would add a color, I would write that color on say, have a yellow green wire on the N relay, well, I put, under the N, I put yellow green, so that I wouldn't use the same color twice, because you're not allowed to do that. That was one thing that makes games, or least got any games, more serviceable, you never have the same color wire on the same component, unless it is the same wire. Right. And, you know, I just gradually build it up by that time, see when you lay out a play field, you have to have some idea how it's going to play. I mean, where are you going to put the hats, where are you going to put the lights and things, you have to have some idea what you want this target to do. And having that in mind, then you start with the schematic. So, there's sort of both built up together. Now, how did Gottlieb, like, as far as the wires and the wire colors, did they die their own cloth-colored wires to get those colors? Well, no, we didn't. There was the wire company that we bought from that did, which is very typical. Most wire companies have the ability to do that. I'm not sure if it was made in the basic colors, and then the local wire company just added the tracing and the modeling. I don't know. I don't know whether wire industry was at that point. Because I heard that Gottlieb, when they went to the PVC covered, plastic covered wiring, that Gottlieb actually had wire strippers that they could put the wire colors on the wires. That's right. We went to South of the state. We couldn't use the cotton anymore because of all the connectors, where IDP. We went to plastic, and I guess it was decided high up, there's no way we're going to get plastic in 100 colors like this. We bought all white. This wasn't here. This was the Fargo facility. They bought a three-stripe machine. I guess they had to use all the stripes. I don't know what they did that on purpose or what, but it worked out pretty well. The body color was always white. The first color would be 0, 0, 0, which would be three black stripes. Then 001, which would be black, black, brown. You had all your colors except for white. Interesting. When you did hit the deck in Neptune, which was the, one, Neptune was the adipol, and hit the deck was the replay, you used black score reels. Was that like a first? The black score with the red numbers. Right. By that time, South of the state was known in the industry. Mirco had made their game and Bally was sniffing around. We knew it was coming. I think somebody got their idea to do these drum units to look like digital display. We weren't really trying to fool anybody. It was just to kind of jazz up the game. They hit the deck in the Neptune. Did you actually, when you designed this game, did you come up with those themes or were the themes handed to you or how did that work? No. In this case, no. The theme, there was no theme. In fact, I don't remember if I had any theme in mind for that. I usually don't because I'm not that good at it. I realize that any game couldn't have just about any theme. The only one I specifically set out with a theme was Blue Note, but that was a little later. No, I just made a game, made a single player game, and then I let the art department and management come up with a name. Did you pick the artist? It seems like all your EMs were used Gordon Morison as the artist. Who was doing it? He was the only one doing it. He wasn't at the company. He was over it at poster. They would just send over, you know, it would be a key play. Gordon would come up. We would let him know the theme, and he would come up with some artwork and he sent over a key plate, and then we would make a light box insert to match the key plate. Now, what is a key plate? A key plate is a backlash that is like a red wash on it, but it's transparent. It's like a transparent red paint on the back of it, and all the outlines of the artwork is there. In other words, like the circles, the five circles where the ball and play is going to be, the opening for the replay. In other words, it's like having a light box backlash that you can look right through and see all the light balls on the other side. This tells the person making the light box insert where the artwork is, where the illumination lights have to be, where the match lights have to be. It's like a single black line sketch of all the artwork on the back of the backlash. Okay, so then you can make the insert panel and then what you give the insert panel to the cabinet company and they take it from there, right? I'm sorry, what now? When you did that, then somebody in engineering would make that insert panel, right? Right, right. So yeah, our two-and-die person would make the light box insert that would match the key plate. And then is that handed off to the cabinet company and they would take it from there? No, most of our light boxes were standard. When I began working on a game, I would find an empty single-player light box, I'm sorry, empty single-player cabinet in engineering. So it'd be an empty cabinet, but a single-player light box in place because they were all wired safe. Thinking of a safe single-player, two-player, four-player, four-player, four-player, whatever. For engineering purposes, you could just plug into an existing light box. So you'd have to go to the light box every time. But once the key plate was done, then it would go back to Gordon and he could do the real artwork. And I think the, yeah, I guess the light box would have to go to the woodworking. I'm not sure where that came from. Now that you mentioned it. Now tell me about Strange World. That's what you did, right? Yeah, that was the second one I did. Well, there's really not much to I'm always, always striving for something different. I don't know what I'm after, but I'm trying to, you know, strenuously try to have something that doesn't look like the last game or the game before it. And so that's why it looks like it's such a huge positive arrangement. That's the only explanation. I wasn't, you know, you don't have any theme in mind or, you know, any, any setting up to accomplish anything in particular except novelty at all. All right, we're going to take a little break from talking with John Osborne of Gottlieb and we'll be back right after these messages. This portion of Topcast is brought to you by Pin Game Journal. Covering the World of Pinball is them online at www.pingamejournal.com. All right, we're back with John Osborne of Gottlieb. Yeah, now what about rock star and blue note rock star being the out of all version of blue notes? Well, blue notes, again, you know, time to make another game. And I've always been in mechanical musical instruments, automatic piano, music boxes, that sort of thing. And at that particular time, I was getting very interested in piano tuning because you can't work on a player piano or a nickelode, you know, having some knowledge of piano. piano, you've got to be able to do some degree of tuning. So music was on my mind at that time and I thought, you know, not be kind of any type of maybe like a scale, maybe eight target someplace, one for each note, something like that. And I laid it out, when I laid it out, I had the theme, the musical theme in mind. And that in that case, that followed through, you know, the Dolores Me thing for each target. And that's that they like, so they kept that theme. Didn't I write you about that? No, no, no, you didn't. Okay, all right. Well, this game did have a feature on it, but I really wish they had the captain. I realized now they probably could have used a flipper button, but at the top of that play field, there's three roll overs and they're not mandatory. You can miss them, but you usually don't. And you know, just ABC. And when I laid the game out, I had the free hats up there, along with three, I guess three red hats above that and a big yellow hat above that. And when the ball is at the shooter, I added a button to the front of the cabinet. So you could press that button and one of those yellow hats would light, you know, would just toggle as you press the button. The idea where these were five, they were five thousand points. The idea was you could call your shot. So you press the button until the hat that you want is lit. And when you shoot the ball, the button shuts off. There was a runway switch up near the gate. Again, they can start like bingo, you know, with the ball switch. And if you got in that hole, if you got in that roll over, you got your five thousand points. And then the hat went out, or even if you didn't get it, the hat would go out. The only time that feature worked was when the ball was at the shooter, so you could, in effect, call your shot. They didn't want to keep that there. I think they didn't want to custom-candet with that button in the front. And at that time, I don't think anybody had thought of the idea of using the flipper button for something like that. Well, that feature didn't survive. That's kind of a cool feature and it's one that, of course, was the mainstay of 80s and 90s and even present-day pinballs. I know, I know. It was so simple, just a relay, just an A.S. relay. But they didn't want to do it. So, was there any other features or ideas or even games that you presented to them that didn't get made? Oh, most of us made lots of games that didn't get built. Right from the start, I'd always been intrigued with what I call the subway unit, where the ball would go in a hole and come up someplace else. And I made a couple of games like that. They just, you know, had a lot of new hardware and new tooling and I just never came along. And then one day, I got the bright idea of using the ball return. The ball return, you know, about the way it sort of angled in a knee fashion. Well, how about if I straightened that out and then screwed that underneath the play field or something. And I tried it and they liked it. They really liked it. That's the game they became volcano. Oh, okay. The subway unit. And I didn't want to have a flap over it. They wanted to put a flap over. I really didn't like that because that did compromise the quality of the game. Sometimes the balls don't get out of there. And by not having the flap there, it was possible to shoot the ball into the into the hole. It was like like a pocket in the mouth kind of shot, which I thought was really nice. They didn't, they they want to put a flap over it. But that was the first subway unit. And then another one that I wanted to try was multiple balls. Not like balls of pop, nothing like that. But just maybe maybe two balls. And that was a force two. And where I did that, that was the old system one. I just put a kickhole right next to the shooter. So the out hole would kick the ball into this hole. And then the hole would kick the ball into the shooter. Well, that's what the extra ball was. And they liked that. That worked out. They didn't stick with that plan. I think they felt this might not work long term. They came up with something else. I forgot to hold the extra ball like that. But the force two was my game. And that was the first multiple ball game we made. Yeah. Now force two had a boatload of drop targets. That game's actually really fun to play. But none of your other games really had drop targets. But force two had a bun in several. I know no reason. Somebody asked me that recently. That's the funny thing you should say. I think if somebody asked me recently was the reason that my games don't have drop targets is because they told me to not spend so much money. Well, nobody ever said that. There was no real reason. I think I remember making some with drop targets that didn't get taken. They just just didn't. I think it was just coincidence. I think I was trying for it seems like every game that we made had dropped targets. So let's build a game without drop targets. Right. Well, Ed Khrinsky's signature trademark was drop targets, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, how come you know during the 70s you didn't design more games. I mean, more games of yours weren't made? I don't know. They just decided that they didn't want these particular designs. I didn't design that often because I had other things to do. You know, I was not solely designing. Right. And that was pretty much Ed Khrinsky's role, right? Right. Yeah. Right. Okay. Almost made a game. You remember what's that game? Singalong, swing along that had the multiple hole kicker. Yeah, that would be, yeah, that'd be Melody Sweiss. Yeah. That game. Right. Yeah. I saw that in a catalog and I thought, you know, really we could do something with that. So I built a game with an extra window. Now there was a set of three holes that had four holes. I was up at the top of the play field and was angled and there was better being straight across. It was angled, sort of angled down slightly. And so it would kick from one hole, one hole, one hole. And then the last hole was a regular kick hole which kicked it down to a flipper. This was at the top of the play field. That was a good game. In fact, we're going to make that game. They were actually going to build that game. I don't remember either the rest of the play field, but of course, I surrounded the row of holes with some posts. You know, I was getting that that mentioned a bingo in there. And that feature worked really well. I had it. So anytime you got into a hole, it would either light or not light it would toggle. And the idea was that if you lift them all up and gotten the first hole in every hole that was lit, that would be a special. So that didn't happen very often. You know, that worked out real well. In fact, that's it. They were going to build that game and they were going to call that game on a house. And why didn't they build it? I don't remember why they didn't build it. I don't recall. Well, speaking of haunted house, now how did you get to designing haunted house? Well, we had gotten the game from Valley. I think it was called Genon. They had a bird. They had a tube over the play field that would carry the ball from here to there. And sort of like a double decker. And we didn't think it was very much, but it seemed like, you know, this could be something we need to at least address. And Gil, Gil Pollock, who got us in the Christie's office one time and he said to John Burris, he said, I'd like you to design a two level play field, a two level game. And he turned to me and said, I want to design a three level game. And I think John's game was Mars. If that's the Mars god of war, I think that was the game, the two level game. Or Black Hole. Black Hole. That's it. That's it. That's his game. And then mine was the haunted house. They wanted a three level game. So what challenges did the three level game present to you? The loaded question, right? Yeah, in fact, I wrote an article about that game. Well, just everything. You know, they said they did not want to make a special cabinet. That was the first thing. I didn't want to go and do an extra deep cabinet if they could help it. And well, first thing, you know, what are you going to do? You're going to have two levels below the play field. One above, one below. You know, you have to start thinking as not only as a designer, but you know, how are you going to engineer this thing? Are you going to put it together? If you have a play field above the main play field, then you're not going to see the ball for a while. Well, you know, what about that? Why are you going to deal with that? And, well, you know, what I ended up with for the handsample was pretty much what the final game was. Not much what you see. I thought to accentuate the fact of the three levels, the first thing the ball should do is decide which level to go to. So that's why there's those three holes up in the upper right hand corner of the play field. Left hand corner of the play field. Right, where you can go down, you can go up where you can stay on the main level. Right, right. And some of the problems I had was determining the size of the window for the lower play field. If it's too big, you got nothing on your main play field. If it's too little, you're not going to have enough viewing distance. So of course, like all issues in all engineering, it's a compromise. And I couldn't, for the same reason, I couldn't have kicking rubbers on the main level because kicking rubber stands out from the rubber line and that's like where the window would be. I thought about designing a new kicking rubber for that. But I had so many new things in that thing. And this is going to be a hardware nightmare. I better not venture into that. Yeah, I mean, like you had the trap door, that was a feature I've never seen before. Yeah, that was something new. And the vertical up kicker. The vertical up kicker thing, the fuck is it maybe? No, no, the target is right in the middle. You know, that it takes you to a lower level. Oh, the one that kind of like disappears? Yeah, that looks like a spot target. Right, right, right. That was something else I had thought about for years about some kind of roll down target. What could we do if the target bit of drop or just bounced the ball? What if the ball just pushed it down? But the problem is, no then what? Well, you got the ball inside of the target. Now what are you going to do with it? Well, now this thing came along and I thought, this is it. Now I'm going to use this thing. And to make it a surprise, I put it in between two regular targets. And it worked better than I ever thought possible. I mean, people would come in for management and they would hit that thing, not knowing what it was, you know? And the ball just disappeared. It just vanishes in front of a player. That was an excellent feature. In fact, I got an international patent on that roll down target at the time. Now how come they never use that again? Because it would probably take a two level game. Oh, yeah, of course. You know, it wasn't a two way that too far after that that, you know, the company, the whole industry started to go downhill and they just wasn't the will to make ambitious games like that. I always suspected that in spite of it's success, I had a hard house lost money. I don't know. It would take almost like a forensic accountant to really determine whether it did or not. But I, I, I, I bet management was glad to see the end of that game. You mean because it was just too expensive to make? I think so. You know, we had to have a, we had to move the bottom board. The power supply panel couldn't be where it usually was. So that meant a new cabinet, all new jigging for the, for the cabinet. Everything about that game was, was special and it was just like I said, it was so much new tooling. It was a, it was a beautiful game, but it was a heavy, over featured freak in terms of production. Now, did you ever think about making that game a multiball game? No, no, no, no. No, no, no. It would have been, control would have been so difficult. It would have been just impossible. You might, might feeling where, is that if you're going to have a complicated play field, you better have a very simple play technique. On the other hand, you can have a very simple play field, and you can have a very complex play, like a bingo game. You know, but to have both, you're just going to play this, never going to understand the game. The play will never figure out what the heck you supposed to do. That's the way games are now. You can't understand what it is you're supposed to do on the first or second play. So, my, I want to interaction between the three playfields, but, you know, keep it simple, so you know what it is. What the heck is going on? Well, when they reprogrammed it, I think they took a lot of that out. They added a lot of stuff that made the game way too complicated. Now, what do you mean they reprogrammed it? Well, at that time, when we started doing Call of State games, whoever designed the game was responsible for programming. It's just like we were responsible for the wiring, you know, for making the rule. Well, at that time, when the haunted house era, thinktantor era, somebody got the bright idea that someone else, other than the designer, should do the programming, because they would have a fresh perspective. Well, I don't think it worked out like that at all. We had a guy doing programming that just loved complexity. He just more complicated the software the better. And they let him program these games. And there's some games, I mean, look, look at thinktantor. I remember when that game came out, they actually issued an instruction sheet. They ate in a half by 11 sheet. So the operator told me, tell them how the game works. I mean, it was just madness, you know, it was ridiculous. And haunted house wasn't that bad, but I'll tell you, there was some parts that came in there. So the day I don't understand how they work now. So I think a simple game with that kind of a complex mechanical aspect would have been back. I guess they gained it pretty well anyhow. Well, now, was it, I mean, how did you have it simplified? Like the basic premise to me of haunted house is on the main plate field. You've got those numbered five targets that you have to hit in order. You know, was that part of your design? I really don't remember how that game is supposed to play. You know, I assume you don't have your own haunted house, you didn't keep one. No, you know, I don't know, you can't keep one. I never knew anybody who had a new game, unless they got it through the distributor. Yeah, I remember these games are commercial items. They're commercial equipment. And, you know, how much of the game cost? Well, it depends on where you buy it. I say how much of the car would, but just to take a game off the line and take it home. No, that didn't happen. Because every game is going to be sold to a distributor. What about the engineering samples? What happened to those? Those would usually just get thrown in the dumpster. Well, we had a, we had a, like a compactor. And they would just chuck everything. Because, you know, the beat goes on. Here comes another game next week, another game after that. You just can't keep that stuff. So, it's just all that stuff gets trashed. Man, you didn't bring home an engineering sample? I did not. I can't believe you. But, you know, at the time, it just seemed like another game. It seemed like here's something that's good for the company. And now what? What are we going to do next? You know, and we just, we just move on. You got to remember, this was today. We weren't building games for collectors. Right. I know. It's so easy to say that, oh, I had one. Now, there is one game I really would like to find. Because there's only six other minigisters. The game called Grab it. Never hear that? No, who made that? I made it. G-R-A-B-B-I-T. We had all these video cabinets around. Even all video stuff was invented, though. We had these cabinets that thought, well, you know, do something. But they come sort of an upright game. And I made, I eventually made something like a kicker catcher. Or these balls, like, small little bit bigger than the chinklet balls, would drop from the top and go all through these tags and pins. And you had a catcher, like a pan, along the bottom of the play field that you moved back and forth with a crank. And you had to catch the balls. You didn't catch the ball with the score, you didn't catch the ball with the score. And there was the rollovers on this vertical play field. You could score and invent things like that and whatnot. And I did all the engineering on that. I did all the documentation. That was great. That was a lot of fun. But they liked it. They said, well, let's build some prototypes. And you know, you go ahead and give up for prototypes. We'll set up a prototype line in one corner of the factory, which has been done before in the old days. And that's how the one ball games, those daily racer games, were built in the early 1930s. Just over in the corner there. And we got artwork. The artwork was a picture, a lot of pictures of balls dropping from the sky. They're falling into a trash can. They're falling through a pizza with a guy's carry, like something like that. And the name of the game that they chose was grab it. And they set up a production line. And I think they used the system two. Yeah, must've used the system two. And we built six of them and we put them on location. I don't know who handled it. I don't know if it was in our distributing or who it was. But they put them on location. Of course they didn't set the ball on fire, but it was the last they ever heard of them. There's those six games probably still in the Chicago area. Now the vertical up kicker that moved the ball from the lower play field on haunted house back up to the you know the main play field. How was that a challenge to design? Yeah that was I knew that was gonna be a problem because you think about the lower play field flipping away from the player by the time it gets to the out hold down there it's very far away from the mid-level and so I did some experiments I I set up a bench a bench prototype of this thing and just see you know I keep it all straight up like that and I think I try to pop up a coil and he might it was pretty strong he might it was gonna work and it was pretty reliable. I might know now of course I should have had a special coil made it was like 120 volts something like that but that was the silly teal of the game certainly we found we found the operators were calling and saying that the ball would would pick up and then fall right back down and of course it would try again the process and would just keep triggering them. Well as the coil get hot the why the resistance of the coil goes up and it becomes weaker and weaker and pretty thin it says the vicious circle. The cure for that was to have direct wiring the all the solenoids in the game of course were driven by my transistors on the transistor PC board well there's always losses in that there's always voltage drop across the transistor so not all the power reaches the coil. So what we did we put a relay right next to the up kicker and on that relay we have huge tungsten points like we had on our DC pop-upers and kickers and we have the PC driver board operate that relay coil and then we had you know the so the wiring was local for that solenoid but there was no losses and that seemed to fix it that that seemed to do it because I recall I don't know if we set out kits or you know told our distributors what to do I don't know what was done in the field but from a certain point on we made all the gains with that auxiliary relay. So when you design this game it's got what like eight flippers do they like come to you and say eight flippers you know how much that's gonna cost? No they never did they never when they saw this they may but oh they they were very impressed by and they could tell you know they could tell by looking at it this is gonna be an expensive game and no they didn't they didn't say anything you know you told me it's all a three-level game with lots of features no they never said you shouldn't have done this you shouldn't have done that so they never did that. So they didn't try and say look you've got four flippers on the main plate they'll can't you just make it two? No no we never tried to edit me like that now did they you know in the in the backbox you had that kind of lightning effect behind the behind the you know the screen glass. Yeah. Now who's idea was that? That was probably Richard Tracy the artist. For me it was just another light box you know again like I said we have standard light boxes and engineering and I just plugged into a standard light box. Richard Tracy our artist probably was the one who dreamed that a few dreams at the name too or he decided they were we're gonna use that name that we work of using another game with a kickers we're gonna use that on this game then there was yeah that's really out of my hand. So did you think that that haunted house title and theme fit the game while? Yeah I did I thought it was pretty cute you know it was a basement and the attic and everything I thought Rich did a real good job of the way it looks. Now what about the music? Who did the music? We had another guy that was brought in a couple years before to do sound and voice. Our name was Craig and he did that we had it and that was pretty much all he did he did the speech and things like that that was his speciality. Yeah because the music is really really cool in that game. Yeah yeah he did the music for Rocky and close with counters and things like that so yeah that was considered to be a big selling point at that time. Now the game did not have speech or it didn't talk was that something that you could that you could have had in it? I suppose it was a standard standard system yeah but that it wasn't you just didn't think of needed it? Well it really wasn't my decision you know I think they probably wanted to get this thing into production because it was so much tooling to be done they thought you know we've got enough here we don't need to go need speech I don't