Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

Pat Lawlor - Pinball Expo 2018 - Pinball News

Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2018)·video·1h 3m·analyzed·Oct 21, 2018
View original
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.026

TL;DR

Pat Lawlor details Dialed In's iterative design process from whitewood prototypes to production.

Summary

Pat Lawlor presents Dialed In's game design and development process at Pinball Expo 2018, walking through the iterative design methodology used at Jersey Jack Pinball. The presentation showcases 20-30 physical models and prototypes developed from initial whitewood through production, explaining how designers, engineers, and programmers collaborate to transform concepts into finished machines. Lawlor emphasizes the importance of physical iteration, supply chain management, and balancing creative vision with manufacturability.

Key Claims

  • Jersey Jack Pinball creates 20-30 physical models of each game before production

    high confidence · Pat Lawlor direct statement about JJP design methodology

  • Each whitewood model iteration can take an entire day to construct and evaluate

    high confidence · Pat Lawlor: 'I get up in the morning I put one of these things together I spend eight hours making it'

  • Original Dialed In design included a side ramp that wrapped around the entire game, later changed to final version

    high confidence · Pat Lawlor showing early design photos and comparing to final layout

  • Pat Lawlor initially told Jack Danger that doing an original-themed game in the modern era was 'suicide'

    high confidence · Pat Lawlor: 'basically I told him that was suicide you shouldn't do an original game in this day and age'

  • Almost all modern pinball games for the past 18 years have been licensed products

    high confidence · Pat Lawlor: 'Almost everything for the last 18 years has been a licensed product'

  • The drone circuit boards in Dialed In were custom-designed in-house, with base drone units sourced from China

    high confidence · Pat Lawlor explaining drone modification process

  • A lightning bolt insert was removed from the final game because space was needed for other mechanisms

    high confidence · Pat Lawlor explaining removal despite programmer objections

  • Pat Lawlor worked alone for two days on a weekend to solve the center wire form geometry transition problem

    high confidence · Pat Lawlor: 'I ended up coming in on a weekend when we had moved into our where we are right now at JJP Engineering. Nobody was there. all by myself'

Notable Quotes

  • “The difference between good pinball machines and great pinball machines is the ability to build them and fix all the problems.”

    Pat Lawlor@ 10:29 — Core design philosophy emphasizing iteration and problem-solving over initial concept

  • “Everything looks good on a piece of paper. If you only draw things on paper, they ultimately come back to bite you because you don't know what they're really going to do.”

    Pat Lawlor@ 17:53 — Justifies Jersey Jack's extensive physical prototyping methodology

  • “I only care that I can move him back and forth and see if what's sitting there is ultimately going to be fun.”

    Pat Lawlor@ 22:35 — Explains rapid prototyping approach for validating mechanics before engineering final versions

  • “It's like an adrenaline boost. You're all excited. This thing that you've been working on for months starts to come to life. And generally what happens, you have this happy feeling for five minutes until a programmer tells you he wants them moved.”

    Pat Lawlor@ 32:43 — Humorous description of designer experience when whitewood first lights up

  • “You're only as good as the models you can make.”

    Pat Lawlor@ 17:22 — Design philosophy emphasizing investment in prototyping infrastructure

  • “What's the most important part in a pinball machine? And the answer is the one you don't have because it stops production dead.”

    Pat Lawlor@ 38:00 — Highlights critical role of supply chain management in manufacturing

Entities

Pat LawlorpersonTed EstespersonJoe KatzpersonDavid ThielpersonKeith JohnsonpersonLarry DeMarpersonJersey Jack Pinball

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Supply chain management highlighted as critical manufacturing bottleneck; missing single component can halt entire production line

    high · Lawlor's 'most important part' anecdote about component delivery dependency

  • ?

    community_signal: Jersey Jack demonstrating detailed collector/operator consideration through design choices (removable game card holder, cabinet redesigns, aesthetic details)

    high · Lawlor's explanation of caring for both collector and operator worlds through product design

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Original design concepts (side ramp wrap-around, drop targets, lightning bolt insert) were removed during development due to kinetic feel, manufacturing constraints, or space competition

    high · Multiple examples of design iterations showing abandoned features from early whitewoods

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Jersey Jack Pinball methodology emphasizes extensive physical prototyping (20-30 models per game) before production, throwback to classic Williams approach with dedicated model shop

    high · Pat Lawlor detailed explanation of iterative whitewood creation and model shop operations

  • $

    market_signal: Original-themed pinball games represent high-risk strategy in market dominated by licensed IP, but Dialed In demonstrates viability of strong creative execution

    high · Lawlor stating original games considered 'suicide' previously but this one succeeded due to team quality

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.191

0:00
Hello everybody. This is going to be much more low-key than the Pat Lawler show used to be, for those of you that remember that.
0:30
We all got old and now it's on the old channel. Let me fill you in a little bit on what we're going to try and do today and what we're up to.
0:45
I brought as much of the game team as I could for Dialed In. We're going to talk about Dialed In today. and the order of events will be I'm going to let the game team introduce themselves. They're going to tell you what they do, and then I'll tell you a little bit about me because there's a lot of people who don't have the foggiest idea what the Pat Lawler show used to be, and so I'll introduce myself. and then what we're going to do is we're going to steal a page out of the Pat Lawler show and every three minutes the reason you have a raffle ticket in your hand is we're going to give away some of the promotional translates from Dialed In and the comic books.
1:38
And during that time, I'm going to start out by showing you some pictures of the development of the game. And you can, the neat thing about what we're going to do with the pictures is you're going to get to see from start to finish how a pinball machine is designed.

  • “We care about the collectors as much as we care about the operators, and we want you to be comfortable being in either world.”

    Pat Lawlor@ 40:46 — Indicates Jersey Jack's dual market focus on home collectors and commercial operators

  • “It's a really stressful endeavor for us at times.”

    Pat Lawlor@ 36:57 — Candid acknowledgment of design and manufacturing stress

    • company
    Dialed Ingame
    Pinball Expo 2018event
    Williamscompany
    Hobbitgame
    Steve Ritchieperson
    Jack Dangerperson
    Funhousegame
    Twilight Zonegame
    Addams Familygame
    Fernandoperson
    CSIgame
    ?

    community_signal: Pat Lawlor personally constructs most physical prototypes and works through design problems hands-on, including solo weekend work sessions for complex geometry solutions

    high · Lawlor describes constructing models taking full days, working alone on weekend for center wire form solution

  • ?

    product_concern: Mechanical engineer team struggling to keep pace with design demands; constant pressure to create custom components and solve manufacturability problems

    medium · Lawlor noting mechanical engineers 'just barely trying to keep up every day'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Jersey Jack using custom-designed circuit boards for commercial drone components, indicating move toward integrating hobby/commercial tech into pinball machines

    high · Lawlor explanation of sourcing base drones from China and designing custom circuitry in-house

    • 2:00
    And hopefully by the end of it, you won't be as confused as I usually am when I'm working on it. And so we can get going. I'm going to let these guys introduce themselves. You guys grab a mic. Grab the mic. Start at the end. Tell everybody who you are and what you do and, you know, some of the stuff you've done.
    2:28
    There we go. Hi, I'm Ted Estes. I've done a few games with Pat, most recently dialed in. Also worked on the other games at JJP. and before that worked on a few games at Williams, including Twilight Zone, Demolition Man, and Roadshow.
    2:52
    Very happy to be here. Joe Katz, game programmer, voice of Crazy Bob. Crazy. See? David Thiel friend of Pat since 1983 we used to make video games known Pat for a long time and in this business like so many others it's kind of who you know so I had stopped working in pinball right after a game that I did for another manufacturer who won't be named, and I was looking to do something else, and I noticed Pat said, I'm going to make a pinball game for Jersey Jack. So I innocently sent him an email saying, good job, Pat, glad to see you back, because I'd worked on his last game, which he won't admit to, but it was CSI. And then he sent me an email almost immediately saying, Dave, would you like to do sound for my game? Well, you don't say no to Pat.
    4:25
    Hi, I'm Keith Johnson. I've done lots of games from High Rollers, Simpsons, Lord of the Rings, some other work on Elvis, Family Guy. I also did World Poker Tour, Wheel of Fortune, Wizard of Oz, Hobbit. And I did a little bit of work on Dialed In, and I run the software department here.
    4:51
    It's pretty obvious to anybody who's been around Pinball more than two minutes that this is not all it takes to do this. And so there's obviously literally 20 or 30 people in engineering that work on these games on a daily basis. And then past them, there are the vast quantities of people in the factory that have to put them together. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that every one of those people is as important as I am. And so when you come to Pinball Expo and you see these beautiful creations, it's really important to remember that it takes a huge amount of investment and people to do this. And I just am lucky enough to get to be the figurehead that comes up and gets to do this. With that, we'll start moving on. How about if we give somebody, some lucky person before I tell them about me, a free prize already and we'll move on. The winning number is 277616. Raise your hand. Just raise it. We'll bring you the stuff. All right. There you go. Crazy. For those of you who might not know who I am, I'm Pat Lawler. I've been a game designer since 1980, and I've done pinball machines since 1988,
    6:36
    all in pinball due to my friend Larry who's sitting in the middle there. Raise your hand, Larry. There he is. That's Larry DeMar, everybody. and sort of in order some of the pinball machines you may have seen or heard about me doing are Bonsai Run, Earthshaker, Whirlwind, Funhouse, Adams Family, Twilight Zone, Roadshow,
    7:12
    No Good Gophers, Monopoly, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Family Guy. I'm sure I've missed something in there, but you get the idea. Yeah, Safecracker, all right. And some years ago, after Jack had done the first JJP games, he got a hold of me and said would you do an original game and basically I told him that was suicide you shouldn't do an original game in this day and age that people would never buy it and lucky for me it turned out I was wrong but you have to understand that in the history of what we do in the modern world it's really dangerous to have decided you wanted to do that.
    8:15
    Almost everything for the last 18 years has been a licensed product of one or another. And so to have enough trust that you could do an original theme and then sell it to boot against these monster licenses that just people want to buy because of what they are, was a tribute to the whole group, part of which you're looking at here, what it took to pull that off.
    8:54
    I brought along some pictures today of the development of Dialed In, and we're going to start with one of the very first whitewoods of the game and we're going to work our way from the first whitewood all the way through the first day of production of the game and you're going to get to see some of the steps it takes to do that. Now, before we go any farther, I can tell you that the way I do some of this is somewhat unique. I'm not speaking for the entire industry. I'm speaking for how I do things and now I'm speaking for, for those of you that don't know, I'm head of game design at JJP now. And so I've taught them how I do this. And at JJP we're big believers in we make models of everything we do. we have a beautiful model shop and we before you see a finished product on the show floor we literally have gone through and we've made 20 or 30 models of what we're going to build of that one game and through a process of iteration the game becomes more and more and more what it ultimately becomes but that's how this business is done it's done through a process of iteration My great friend Steve Ritchie will tell you all pinball machines look great on a piece of paper. And the difference between good pinball machines and great pinball machines is the ability to build them and fix all the problems. And so we go through and we go to great trouble to try and fix all those problems. So we'll start out with, this was one of the very, very first bare play fields that was cut on a router I have.
    10:56
    And you can see some of the bits and pieces that eventually became dialed in there. And there's also bits and pieces that ultimately vanished that are there. And you'll see that more clearly as we move along. So this is the original print, one of the original prints I've dialed in.
    11:26
    And this is a good example of how I go through and I build the wire forms that you see in finality in the game. We actually build models of those wire forms and put them together so that we can ultimately shoot a ball around on a play field and see if it works. If it doesn't work, how does it feel? You know, the kind of kinetic things that people appreciate in a pinball machine. And what you're looking at is brass wire that we bend and then solder together and turn these things into working models.
    12:05
    This is more of the same. One of the key things you can do if you look really, really hard, you'll notice that in the first versions of the game, the side ramp shot, which is down in the lower left corner, was designed to come around and go all the way around the game. And that ultimately was changed to the final version of what it became. But again, this is how we develop these things. We put them together, we shoot at them, and we find out that, man, that feels terrible. We shouldn't really do that. Time for a winning number, please.
    12:50
    277612. Dave doesn't win. Employees of JJP are not eligible to win. I wanted that, too. No.
    13:13
    351. I believe they're all 277. Yeah. 351. 277, 351. Okay, there you go. Great. So moving along, you can see now on the layout of the game, I'm starting to build the ramps. And so we actually build ramps out of plexiglass. They're hand-cut, and then we go through and physically build what they are by gluing them together and turn them into what I've drawn on a piece of paper.
    14:00
    Here's a good example of starting to lay it all out and mock it up. So there are some wire forms that have been built. They're laid on top of the drawing. There's the start of a ramp that's been laid on top of a drawing.
    14:16
    At this point, you can start to stand behind what you've drawn, and you can look at the physical pieces and you can say to yourself, that doesn't look so bad. Or you can look at it and you can say, that's a pile of junk. I don't think I better do that. But that's part of the process of what we go through to make these games.
    14:41
    Here's that bare bottom that you saw. It's starting to turn into a real ramp. We've glued some pieces on it. We now have an entry for a ramp. And again, if you look at this, this isn't how the game turned out. The game didn't turn out with the ramp that way. For those of you that have it dialed in, in the game, the ramp ultimately makes a hard right turn and goes around the game. In this version, I was going to bring it around to the left side, and it fell by the wayside.
    15:12
    There's that very same ramp, and now it's a real ramp. and you can see that there's more to it. There was going to be a diverter at the top of it in one of the original versions, and it was going to drop the ball a certain way and do other things.
    15:29
    And each one of these models that we make, while I'm sitting here clicking through them in real time, you have to understand that each one of these can take a day, right? So I get up in the morning I put one of these things together I spend eight hours making it and at the end of eight hours if what I looking at doesn make any sense it gets tossed into a corner and we start all over and do it again
    16:01
    Yeah, go ahead. If I could interject. Let me paint a little bit more of the story behind this because people are just looking at this. All of this stuff is built by Pat, right? Keith and I were basically working in a garage out in Streamwood working on Hobbit. and it really was a garage heavy rain and the water started seeping into the garage door and we had to start moving boxes around and stuff and Pat every couple of days would take a picture and send it to us and say hey look I'm working on ramps today Pat was about an hour away from us way out in the cornfields where his shop is and so I'd go good job keep going and then I'd get back on working on Hobbit so he's doing all this all by himself which probably made it more productive. But this was really, you know, this was really kind of seat of the pants kind of stuff when we were starting all this stuff out. Right, this was done at, I still had the, for anybody who knows me more than 10 minutes, you know that I've got a very nice shop. And I've got a whole metal shop. I've got a whole, I've got, I currently own two shop bots. And I'm a big believer in you're only as good as the models you can make. And so we're very much a throwback to the way WMS used to make, Williams used to make games. The game designers used to give them to guys in a model shop. The model shop would make the parts. We'd try them out, and then we'd move on.
    17:49
    I'm also a big believer in what I said a minute ago, which was everything looks good on a piece of paper. If you only draw things on paper, they ultimately come back to bite you because you don't know what they're really going to do. Draw a number, please.
    18:11
    3, 5, 6. Winner. All right, we'll move on to the next thing. And now what you can see is that we physically have taken the wood that's been routed, digitized and routed, and those wire forms that I was in the process of creating and we started to link them up with things. This is a later version than the first ones you were just looking at. This actually has the ramps curving in the correct direction, I believe, and the other wire forms coming around the back. One of the most unique things on dialed in that I'm most proud of is the shot from the right orbit around up the center backwards up a ramp and comes back around. And when I thought of how I was going to do that, I wasn't sure I could make it work. I went through many iterations of figuring out how I was going to build a transition between a wire form and a play field on the back of a pinball machine. Yes, it's been done before, but I had never really liked the way those other versions had been done, and I had to come up with a way of mating all this together to be nice and smooth and work. There's one other part of what we do that's inobvious to all of you sometimes when you're playing the game, which is not only does the game designer, when he's building this, have to make the game fun ultimately for you to shoot, but this game has to be buildable. I've got a factory of people that have to be able to screw this together, So I could come up with some of the most convoluted things in the world, but if they couldn't put it together, it wouldn't be worth a darn.
    20:14
    So go ahead. All right, this is just a bigger picture of the last thing, but you can see, again, where some of the big parts of Dialed In are starting to show up here and become a game.
    20:31
    All right, this is a later version, and you can see that now we start to go to the trouble of taking the game and we actually will lacquer the wood. We'll put sort of a faux hard coat on the wood so that we know we're getting ready to power up the flippers and make them work and do that kind of stuff. So we want the ball to roll as realistically as possible. For those of you who play pinball on location, you know that a pinball machine plays really differently when a game is filthy dirty than it does when it's clean and you've just waxed your pretty game at home. They're two completely different animals. And so when we design these, we try and design them to feel as much like they would as possible. A ball rolling around on a bare piece of wood is very different than a ball rolling around on a piece of plastic coated wood. And so we try and make that happen as best as possible.
    21:38
    This is starting to put handmade mechanisms on the bottom of dialed in just to see what it would feel like to make it go. We know, or I knew, that we would never ultimately use this mechanism to power QED in the center of the play field, right? Eventually I would end up having a mechanical engineer that I would, or two or three that I would work with, and I'd say I need a better version of this. But in order to bootstrap the game and find out if what's going on, And we hacked together some mechanical things just to see what's going to happen with that. And so right there, there's a really nice gear motor. There's an arm. And you can see the shell of QED in the center of the thing that's going to move back and forth. It's a reciprocating mechanism. I don't care at that point that it's the final version. I only care that I can move him back and forth and see if what's sitting there is ultimately going to be fun.
    22:43
    Here's more of that same white wood, and you can see we're adding all the pieces. There's now jet bumpers that are in at the top of the game. There's the flippers are in position.
    22:58
    There's the back-and-forth mechanism in the center of the game. There are stand-up targets. There are slingshots and a ball trough.
    23:06
    And, again, each step of this is time-consuming. We're moving ahead. And I think what you're looking at here is actually probably the sixth or seventh model that was made to build dialed in. I'm mixing and matching pictures out of my collection to take you through the steps here.
    23:28
    Here's the top part of what you just saw the underside of, and you can see how cleaned up it is now. There's actually pieces on the play field that look about what's going to happen. Can you rotate it clockwise? Is that possible? There you go. Now you can see it a little better as a pinball machine. If you look really hard up the center of the game there, you'll see that there's this big opening there for what ultimately was going to become the theater. But there was no idea at that time how I was going to make that shot do anything other than hit the theater. What was it going to do after it did that? I was in a quandary how to make that all happen. And you can see some of the metal in the back and how it was starting to come to what it ultimately was. Ticket, please.
    24:39
    373. Anyone? Anyone? Oh, over there. There we go. Winner. All right. That's cool. Can you rotate it clockwise again?
    25:06
    Okay, in this version, if we zoom in a little bit up at the top, you'll see that in order to play the game this way, there's just some blue rubber up there that stops the ball and it bounces.
    25:21
    And there's two targets over on the left that ultimately became a single target. And on the right, it's really hard to tell, but I knew this. I could tell that what was going on with the jet pumpers was a little too tight, and we'd have to do something with them in order to make them a lot more functional. There's one other thing I'd like to point out on Whitewoods. You'll notice that if you go ahead and zoom out all the way again. If you notice that the rest of the game, there's almost no inserts in the game. The little lights that the light comes through in the play field, there are almost none of them. And the reason for that is at this point it's counterproductive to put them in the game. The inserts are really the part of the game that are going to tell you how the rules work. And since there's no rules, we don't know where the inserts go. And we try and decide that as late as possible in the development of the game so that they help teach you how the game is going to work, ultimately. This is just a close-up of the last picture of the thing. Can you keep going?
    26:32
    Right. I didn't think there were that many. Oh, this has got a backboard on it. And on the left side, there's some stuff that's starting to magically appear on the left side there for what was going to be done. You can see the trap door on the left side. It's making its first appearance for Bob's. and we're starting to figure out how all of this geometry is going to ultimately work. But if you look at this, you can also see that that wire form that's coming down from the center ramp doesn't exactly match what the final version of the game turned out to be.
    27:15
    This is what we call a rat's nest. and when you get to this point of wanting to see if your pinball machine once again is worth a darn, you actually have to go through and hand wire the game with something. And so what we do is we lay a generic harness on the game and we start to wire the mechanism so that we can flip it the game and power the things up. And I'll go back to what Ted was saying. I would call up Ted, and he would drive out to my place, and we would go through the trouble of making sure that this could be dropped into a cabinet and the software could start to talk to it and that kind of stuff.
    28:04
    This, doing a rat's nest on whitewoods, is probably one of the most time-consuming things that gets done on them. and again we go through 10 or 20 iterations of this so by the time you're done doing one of these you're really sick of hand soldering wires in position here's another picture same thing you've got the wiring coming onto the game there's stuff starting to appear in the back that wasn't on the last one ticket please 5, 9, 8.
    28:53
    Winner. Next one. I'm going to try and move through these. This is actually a routed version of what was getting really, really close to becoming dialed in. Now you can see all the inserts that are starting to appear in the game. Along with some inserts that never made it into the final version, there's a little lightning bolt there in the center that never made it into the game. And I might point out that the software people that are here were very angry when I removed the lightning bolt. They're still mad in the game. And the reason is, is that ultimately when you're playing EMP attack in the game, you now are completely shocked that the magnets are sitting there attempting to wipe you out. But it had to go because ultimately there were a bunch of mechanisms that needed to end up where the lightning bolt had been. And so that's just part of the game we play to try and make this stuff work. Here is getting to be a final white wood, getting to be near a final white wood of what dialed in became. And you can see again that the lightning bolt was there, but the shots for the characters that are shooting at you are now in the game. Most of the big mechanisms are in the game. If you look back up the center, you can start to see that I figured out how I was going to make the geometry work in the back. But it's not a very good picture, but if you look right to the left of center, you can see where the center wire form comes up in the middle of the game. And I still didn't know exactly how to mate the play field to that shot. And actually, I ended up coming in on a weekend when we had moved into our where we are right now at JJP Engineering. Nobody was there. all by myself and I worked for two days and ultimately the version you now have on your games and you see out on the show floor is what ended up happening. But I needed a lot of quiet time and figuring out how that was going to work.
    31:15
    Here is a final white wood rat's nest and because of what we do at JJP with all those pretty lights that can each be tricolor, this is what it takes to wire all of that so that we can start to give the programmers something to use. It's not that clean version that you see in the final go around that the factory gets to build. We have to build this stuff by hand and make it go And so the electronics guys take this and they put it together in this fashion and if you were to see final whitewoods at JJP you regularly see wire bundled like that you see tie wraps everywhere and heaven help us if we get a wire in the wrong place because tracing it this way is a nightmare and this is usually what the programmers get to work with the programmers get this kind of white wood and this is where they're sitting there programming making the game come alive. First time a white wood's been powered up with pretty colors in the lights. That's a huge day for a game designer. You get really excited when you see the game light up for the first time. It's like an adrenaline boost. You're all excited. This thing that you've been working on for months starts to come to life. And generally what happens, you have this happy feeling for five minutes until a programmer tells you he wants them moved. But you get the idea. You're starting to see a pinball machine come to life now. Yeah, go ahead. No, no, no. Tell me. If you notice in the theater there, there used to be a drop target, but it was also taken out, as you can see right there.
    33:22
    So we made our own drop targets with the theater. During the development of the game, you put things in the game that you have every reason to believe are going to be fun, cool, and exciting. And for one reason or another, either kinetically or because you're having trouble deciding how to get switches around them or for cost, because we're a business and we have to figure out how to make money doing this, we take things out of the game. And so at some point, I get to be the bad guy and I have to decide what has to go. And, you know, a lot of times the game team will be there and they'll be saying, no, no, we really like that. And then I say, what else would we remove? And they grumble and we end up taking it out.
    34:24
    Here are the first drones that were modified to work in the game. Actually, for those of you, and I know there are people who know this, so I'm not telling any company secrets. These drones in their raw state are actually available on Amazon.
    34:40
    You can actually buy the drones. However, the circuit board that goes in the drones was designed by us in-house.
    34:50
    And so we actually buy the pieces of the drones from our friends in China. We reassemble them in this country with our circuitry, and then we hand wire them to go in the game and be mounted the way they need to go in the game. But this is one of the first ones that got wired and powered up and is sitting there waiting to do its thing. One thing that didn't quite translate exactly right, but if you look really, really, really close on your dialed in or out in the thing, there are four little lights underneath the drone that actually are blinking when it's sitting there spinning. They're really hard to see, but we went to a lot of trouble to put them there.
    35:36
    Ticket. 605. Ta-da. Crazy. All right. So you all get to see the final version of the quantum theater. But in order to build the quantum theater, that's the sheet metal it takes to make the quantum theater. And every one of those pieces has to be drawn by a mechanical engineer. It has to be ordered from a vendor. The vendor has to make them exactly the way we want them. and then they have to be assembled by somebody in the factory, and then we can finally put pretty stickers on the outside of them that say quantum theater, blah, blah, blah, blah.
    36:33
    What I'm doing is I'm trying to show you the huge amount of work that every single piece that goes in a pinball machine is. All of that stuff has to be developed at great cost to go in the final version, which is why along the way we make hard decisions about what can go in and what gets left out.
    36:57
    It's a really stressful endeavor for us at times. The mechanical engineers are just barely trying to keep up every day drawing all of this so that it can end up being sent out. One other thing that goes on that most people would never even consider, and I know a lot of you took the Stern tour, so I'm going to tell you something that should give you a bit of appreciation about what happens in a pinball factory. Ron, raise your hand.
    37:28
    Ron is one of our, Mike, raise your hand. Those are our purchasing guys. And so everything you're looking at here, they've got a source, and they've got to work with that vendor in order to get these delivered in a timely fashion, and they have to show up on the day in the factory that you want to build the games in a timely fashion.
    37:51
    And the funny joke that goes with this is when we finally get these on an assembly line, we say, what's the most important part in a pinball machine? And the answer is the one you don't have because it stops production dead. and if that's a special screw or one side of these didn't get delivered on time, the game project stops dead. And so those guys have probably the hardest job in the company of sourcing this stuff and getting it brought in. And, you know, I can draw anything in 10 minutes. That doesn't mean we can get it from a vendor or we can build it or we can, you know, make it happen in a timely fashion. Take it. . Three, five, five. Woohoo! Okay, here's another lit up version of the game. You can see some of the same pieces that were there. You can see some of the pieces that went away. There were a few targets that got changed in this mayhem. But pretty much it's becoming dialed in. This is a back version. This is one of the first versions that have the lit ramps on them. This was a big deal for us to try and figure out how we were going to put tricolored lights into a ramp, do our best to hide all the wiring, and by the way, we had to go to our plastics vendor and find out if they could route all those little holes into the ramp in order for this to work. And in the final version, the ramp not only is the center of the ramp, up the side wall, out where the lights are, but the final version has a flap that comes down that covers up all of those electronics. And the vendors had to come up with a slightly odd way of making that happen. I actually spent three days at their place working with them to do that.
    40:06
    This is some of the detail that we go to with our games at JJP, and I threw this in just because if you're a collector and you collect games,
    40:18
    these little guys on the bottom apron mean that an operator can operate his game, he can put the game cards on the game, and when he goes to sell the game, he takes the cards off, and they haven't torn up his arch at all. You don't have all those old licenses and things on there you used to do on the games that you did. And a lot of people would say, why are you wasting money on stuff like that? And I'd say, that's detail. We care about the collectors as much as we care about the operators, and we want you to be comfortable being in either world. Here is a lit whitewood of dialed in in the, I'm sorry? The lightning bolt's gone on this one, right. This is one of the final whitewoods. Good catch. And it's in a, this is, if you go, if you raise it sort of all the way up, no, the other way. You can see this is sitting in one of the cradles that we build play fields in. And so this is powered up on a test rig to find out if everything we're doing with the lights is going to work in the ultimate layout and if it's all going to be ready to go. This is before we pick this thing out of the cradle and drop it into a cabinet.
    41:50
    This is the very first dialed-in cabinet that we had in the back of our shop. This cabinet was, they delivered the cabinet. We went through and did all the work on the cabinet redesign from Hobbit to now what we call our standard cabinet, where the electronics are in the back box. And Fernando and company, who are here somewhere today, went through and put the decals on this cabinet. You can see if you look at where the front, where the Coindor would be that the insert of the decal is still in there, we haven't cut it out yet. And so this is another day where the game designer goes home going, tra-la, tra-la, tra-la, tra-la. I've got to see the artwork on the game for the first time, and it's very exciting. That's like another adrenaline boost if you're a game designer. Ticket, please. You skipped over a big part of the story, though. So tell them. How did we get to that artwork? OK, so go ahead. So when Pat first started the game, 186. Nobody? Oh, there you go. Whoa, OK.
    43:16
    We didn't have an artist slated for Pat's game. And John Yowsey wasn't available at the time. So Pat was trying to figure out who was going to do the artwork on the game. This is the time to pull up that one JPEG that I gave you on that thumb drive.
    43:37
    So back when Pat started the game, he wanted it to be sort of a B-movie type feel and stuff. So I had a friend of mine who was interested. He'd never done pinball art before. but he's a concept artist for video games. And he said, I'd really be interested in this project. And so he came up with this. So this was sort of our inspiration for a little bit. Not that we were going to have... Well, we did have... You did have a robot at one point, right, in the game, right? And we ended up with some space aliens at some point. But this was one of the things we were looking at. Right. And if you look at the game and you look at Betty in the back corner, there's some explanation about Betty that's interesting. Betty is actually a representation of those giant characters that you occasionally had seen on the side of the roads on Route 66. and there actually was a real version of Betty that used to sell uniroil tires. She was 20 feet tall, and she would have a tire hanging from her arm. And so we thought instead of just putting a stupid robot back there, we'd put Betty and confuse everybody about why there's a quantum mechanic back there doing that. But she was a version of the 50s B movies where she swats your ball off of the ramp and does great destruction. There's one other thing at this point that it's interesting to talk about the game.
    45:23
    The original working title of the game was called, all the way along I knew I wanted to put the phone in the game. I wanted to put a modern cell phone looking like thing in the game. And in the original concept, the phone had been lost by a secret group from the federal government. And it was incredibly powerful. If you knew how to work the phone, you could create earth shakes and you could create quantum attacks and all that kind of stuff. And the original working title of the game was called Killer App. So there was a killer app on the phone and it caused all that stuff to happen. And as we progressed in working on the game, we decided that wasn't a very good title for putting on a pinball machine. And Keith is the one that came up with Dialed In. We walked in one day and he said, How about Dialed In, that's what pinball collectors do to their games. And I said, That's really good. And it turned out that we could use it and it's how the game ended up with its title. Here is the first of the 15 prototypes we built that ultimately ended up coming to Expo two years ago for you all to play. And now you can see how a pinball machine went from a white wood to a beautifully decorated game. These are the first four prototypes that we built in Chicago that ultimately ended up coming to Pinball Expo. We were in a big quandary as to whether we were going to try and bring them to Expo and show them to people.
    47:17
    And, you know, we decided we had to prove as a company that we could come and show you something really different and fun and unique. week, and we went for it. And these are the first four games that were built. By the way, I want to point something out for that might be obvious to people This is the first pinball machine that has three video screens in it And those three video screens are all running different video and they being kept track of simultaneously by our operating system. And they can each independently do whatever we want them to do. No one else in the business can do what we do technically. No one. This is Pinball Expo two years ago. All weekend we had people lined up three deep and four deep waiting to play the games. And all I kept reading on the Internet was, this game is, the title is bad. And I'm thinking to myself, there are people lined up four deep waiting to play this game. What am I missing, right? And I took this picture just to remind myself that, you know, put your money where your mouth is. come play the game. Don't just look at a game, and I don't care whose game it is. I don't care whether it's Stern's game or whether it's made by Spooky or whoever it is. Don't pass judgment on a game until you play it. Okay? Okay. Okay, here are some of the people that have introduced themselves today, standing around the game. I think Ted wasn't there that day and I said we're taking pictures and we took pictures. I don't know. I'm sure you feel bad. I don't want you to feel bad.
    49:22
    But this, again, was the first game that we put together, and the programmers ultimately get the first game we put together so that they can go to work on a real thing and find out the differences between a white wood and that. Flip it over.
    49:41
    All right, this is in the factory, and this is the first real day of production. These are the last two pictures I'm going to show you. These are the people that made this happen.
    49:53
    And what I want you to do is just hang on a minute. This is Jack shaking hands over, dialed in, in the factory. You can see them all lined up in final test.
    50:04
    And this is a big day. You're actually going to start. Actually, it's a big day for the company because the company finally, with the huge amount of money they've invested up until this point, they actually start to get to make some of that money back. And I know when I used to do the Pat Lawler show, I used to try and tell you all, up till this point, there's a million dollars that's been spent. There's a million dollars that's been spent up to this point, and no one has made a dime. And now what we're going to do is we're going to start to sell them. We can make a little money back. Go.
    50:42
    Flip it to the right. Okay, these are the owners of Jersey Jack Pinball. This is the Abbas family. This is Leonard and Brett and Jane, and they're in the back right now. Could you guys just wave, please?
    51:05
    And this is, again, the first games that were being built. I think if you were to zoom in, you'd see that that game says number one on it up on the top. But this is a really neat picture of, wow, we finally made it. And so what I just did was I took you from the start of a game to the end of a game. And it's a big deal.
    51:33
    It's hard to do. There's a joke everybody has, pinball is hard. just ask all the people who've lost their fortunes trying to do it.
    51:43
    Pinball is hard. And so it's been really gratifying all the people who have it dialed in or who play dialed in. We get stuff all the time from people saying, you know, this game is really cool.
    51:59
    And you can just go to blank. All right. Let's give away another prize, please. 607. All right, there you go. By the way, this is my wife, Patricia, who's giving out prizes here. Those of you who have done this with us for years and years know it's Pat and Pat, so it's easy to remember. You had a question about the White Woods? You'd be horrified.
    52:40
    A lot of the whitewoods, the question is, what happens to all the whitewoods that you just looked at along the way ultimately? Ultimately, most of them are stripped and destroyed to grab parts that we've built along the way to go on the next one.
    52:59
    There are a couple that are ultimately kept around just to say whatever. It's rare that a whitewood survives more than two or three months past when we're ready to go to work with a game just because we strip them for parts and turn them into turn them into other things. What I'd like to do now is we've got it looks like about you know all right ten minutes to go since we started a little late. What I'd like you to do is ask the game team questions and they'd be glad to answer your questions and tell you what you want to know. So, uh...
    53:41
    You guys can answer that. . That was, I think it was Jack. . Yeah, go ahead. Can answer. . Oh, really? Well, it was Jack's idea. Jack said, hey, you gotta put a camera in this thing. And so we wanted to leverage it as much as possible. So that's how we ended up with the selfie time. But also we do it for some motion detection and stuff too. And then also for high score photos. Right. And again, it's something we can do that other people can't do. And on the white wood question, that final white wood that you saw still survives. It's at David's house. He used it during sound development. Most of the time, whitewoods aren't very useful because none of the wiring matches the final production. But that last one is really more of a prototype game that's missing artwork. It's just sort of blank. But typically a whitewood, you wouldn't be, the software becomes outdated very quickly because the lights move and the electronics guys say, oh, it's better to put this coil here on this drive and that sort of thing. And so they wouldn't be, you know, other than hanging on the wall or something and looking at it, historically it wouldn't be very useful. One nine nine. All the way around. Okay, ma'am. The question is how long did it take from the start of the design to the final whitewood? It's a really good question. In this case we were in the process of, JJP was in the process of trying to build Hobbit. They were also in the process of changing owners. It took longer than it usually takes by a lot. If you looked at one of those white woods there was my signature on it and I believe there was a 2014 date and we didn't build it until 2016. So the game development actually took a little over two years. Generally, we like to say it takes a year to design and build a pinball machine. That's usually a pretty good rule of thumb. Sir? . Originally QED was some sort of exterminator guy. That was Pat's idea. I don't know if you've seen the Mosquito Squad thing locally here, but something like that that would somehow come to life and maybe even start attacking you. And I liked the idea of the little leaping frogs on Scared Stiff. I wanted more action in the game. So I said, hey, as long as we've got an exterminator, can I have a jumping spider? And so Pat actually put a spider in there on a post, on a coil, just off the side of the left ramp, which eventually the mechanism didn't fit, so he took that off, but he still had all these plastic spiders, so it ended up getting screwed on the sign. And so the spider stayed, and it's just kind of there. But that's the story.
    57:35
    Part of the original thing of Quantum City was just weird things going on. Some of the stuff that we didn't put in the game were, like, mutant rats coming out of sewers and giant spiders and that sort of thing. But we should have had the cats. Yeah. We should have had the, it's Quantum City, right? There have to be zombie cats, cats that are neither dead or alive, right? And so we just never got there. We were going to have zombie cats marching through the streets of Quantum City, and it just, we never got there.
    58:15
    Question. Sir? I love the ticker that goes across the bottom of the thing. He's asking about the ticker that goes across the bottom of the thing. One of the, well, there was a lot of, I hate to use the word incremental again, but it was a lot of incremental iteration on how to present this game. Part of the difficulty with an original theme is what do you do for artwork? We had just come off of Hobbit where we had 17 hours worth of movie material or whatever it is on those three movies, and now we're going to do an original theme, and there's no way we could create all that stuff. So we started with the idea of viewing the city and then panning around, and then we focused on what if it's a live news camera. At one point, even when the disasters were going to happen, we were thinking of maybe zooming into the street, and there would be a reporter there, live reporting, and there'd be buildings falling down behind them. At some point, there's only so much we can do with the video horsepower and stuff that we have. But, you know, nowadays this 24-hour news thing is kind of so ubiquitous, we're trying to make fun of that. So, all right, so we're going to have these news ticker things. And I started throwing a few in there, including Cubs win World Series, which was about two years before they actually did win the World Series, but that was part of the, you know, that was one of the jokes. But in some cases, I pick things out of real headlines. And in the ensuing years, it's interesting because we keep finding more things. You know, a woman finds frog in her salad kind of thing actually happened. So, you know, and she keeps it as a pet.
    60:23
    Okay, what I want to do at this point is, because we're just about there, We're going to read five more numbers, and then we're going to answer one more question, and then it's time for the next guys to show up and entertain you. So go for it.
    60:43
    549. 549, anyone? Nope, go ahead. 365. Winner. 193. Just keep your hand up, I guess. 206. Yeah, keep your hands up if you've won.
    61:15
    559. One more. 189. Crazy. One more question. Sir. I'm curious, with today's technology, I see more and more electronic devices. Is pinball walking away from more physical applications, say, bad boys or, you know, small girls and new multi-type devices? Or is there a way we're going to see more of the physical devices? Okay, the question is in regards to the mix of physical versus electronics that go in a pinball machine.
    61:58
    I'll answer that. This is the 21st century. Every day you walk around with an incredible computer in your pocket.
    62:11
    And the kids today expect that a piece of entertainment has some level of sophistication in it, that it does something new and cool and different and that kind of stuff.
    62:30
    I do not see us ever walking away from there being a physical ball and physical flippers and some physical devices in the game, but I also don't see us backing down from taking advantage of modern technology and trying to turn this into a spectacular form of entertainment that people can enjoy for years to come. And that might not answer your question exactly, but we're in an era where we can do some pretty amazing... If I had told you when I was building games, when I was building Adam's Family in 1992 that I could build a game with three video screens in it, people would have thought I was hallucinating badly and cut me loose. that we can do that today as a testament to what we bring to bear on these games and make them fun and exciting for people to play. Thank you all very much for coming this afternoon. I hope you had a great time. Thank you.