Journalist Tool

Kineticist

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

v0.1.0

← Back to items

Heighway Pinball

Pintastic New England·video·1h 23m·analyzed·Jun 3, 2018
View original
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Heighway Pinball details manufacturing, Full Throttle updates, and modular platform architecture.

Summary

Andrew Heighway and Romain Fontaine present Heighway Pinball's manufacturing operations, production challenges, and technical innovations at Pintastic New England. They detail their 42,000 sq ft facility, in-house equipment investments (UV flatbed printer, CNC machine, injection molding), Full Throttle game updates including optional back box display, modular game swap system, and custom driver boards. Key focus: quality control as primary constraint, infrastructure scaling for future production, and technical architecture enabling game swappability.

Key Claims

  • Heighway Pinball is the first and only UK manufacturer of pinball machines

    high confidence · Andrew Heighway, stating categorically during seminar presentation

  • Built and delivered 251 Bacardi baffle ball games in 4.5 months when Bacardi's own procurement quoted 9+ months

    high confidence · Andrew Heighway, discussing historical production achievement

  • New 42,000 sq ft facility is 3x larger than previous 14,000 sq ft factory; currently using only half capacity

    high confidence · Andrew Heighway, showing factory images and discussing expansion timing

  • Quality control delays in initial production (20 games over 6-7 weeks) driven by supplier education and defect management

    high confidence · Andrew Heighway, explaining production constraints and reasoning

  • Full Throttle playfield printing takes approximately 12-20 minutes depending on ink configuration; UV flatbed printer can produce 4 playfields simultaneously

    high confidence · Andrew Heighway and audience Q&A, providing technical specifications

  • Heighway's wiring reduced to approximately 50 meters from traditional ~800 meters in pinball machines

    high confidence · Andrew Heighway, discussing technical innovation and reliability benefits

  • Optional back box display screen pricing: $350 factory fit, $400 retrofit, due to plastic panel variation costs

    high confidence · Andrew Heighway, providing specific pricing for new optional feature

  • Full Throttle game can be swapped in less than five minutes using only three connectors on the playfield

    high confidence · Romain Fontaine, describing modular game swap architecture

  • Operators at EEAG trade show in London requested back box display feature to attract players in pub/arcade environments

    high confidence · Andrew Heighway, citing direct feedback from location operators

Notable Quotes

  • “We're the first and only ever UK manufacturer of pinball machines. There's nobody who does playfields, there's nobody who does metal ball guides.”

    Andrew Heighway@ 7:27 — Establishes competitive positioning and justifies in-house manufacturing strategy

  • “We made 251 games within four and a half months when Bacardi's own procurement departments were quoting over nine months... stupidly we love pinball a challenge and we took it on.”

    Andrew Heighway@ 5:25 — Demonstrates manufacturing capability and cultural commitment to pinball production challenges

  • “Quality control is so intricate to a pinball machine, because especially when you're Game of Thrones collectors who are spending larger amounts of money to get their sort of dream games, you know, you can't have blemishes.”

    Andrew Heighway@ 7:07 — Explains primary production bottleneck and rationale for quality-first approach

  • “By using UV and digital printing you can get much better depth of colours, much a vaster array of colours which really allows you to do some great things with playfield art.”

    Andrew Heighway@ 13:14 — Justifies significant equipment investment in flatbed UV printer technology

  • “Operators... they were very interested in that product but one thing a lot of them said to us is that you're missing something on your back box... you've got actually nothing there to draw people in.”

    Andrew Heighway@ 18:51 — Demonstrates responsive product development based on operator feedback; led to optional back box display feature

  • “We've got ours down to approximately 50 meters of wiring now so it's a fraction of the amount of wiring in a pinball machine which means that there should be a lot less to go wrong with them.”

Entities

Andrew HeighwaypersonRomain FontainepersonHeighway PinballcompanyFull ThrottlegamePintastic New EnglandeventPinball Expo ChicagoeventBacardi Full Throttlegame

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Quality control bottleneck limiting initial production to 20 games over 6-7 weeks; supplier education and defect management identified as primary constraints on scaling

    high · Andrew Heighway: 'quality control is so intricate... when you're dealing with people who aren't doing pinball machines... we have had issues with quality control with parts coming in'

  • ?

    community_signal: Heighway actively soliciting feedback at pinball shows; cited EEAG operator feedback as driver for back box display feature; positions shows as 'scrutiny and pressure' testing environments with continuous gameplay

    high · Andrew Heighway: 'we do follow what people say to us and we do react to it... at a pinball show if you want to test the reliability of a game... it's a great place'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Heighway adopting modular, game-swappable architecture enabling playfield replacement in under 5 minutes with only 3 connectors; contrasts with traditional single-board driver systems; enables future game releases on existing hardware

    high · Romain Fontaine: modular system with distributed boards under playfield rather than centralized back box; USB-C code delivery; new game = playfield + art + code

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Historical Bacardi baffle ball game production and current Full Throttle game suggest Heighway has capability for licensed IP production; no current licensing details disclosed for Full Throttle

    medium · Andrew Heighway referenced 251 Bacardi games produced in 4.5 months as proof of concept for licensed game manufacturing; Full Throttle appears to be original IP

  • ?

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.251

0:00
Hi, thanks very much for coming to our seminar. Just to introduce ourselves, I'm Andrew Highway, CEO for Highway Pinball, and this is Roman Fontaine, who is our Technical Director.
0:12
So first of all, I'd just like to thank you all very much for coming along to our seminar. Hopefully we'll have a lot of stuff we can share with you about where we've been going over the last couple of months and where we're going to be going from here. For a question, we decided to stay sort of on theme with full throttle drinks here. I actually, funny enough, when I was at Expo a couple of years ago, I bought one of these with the view of opening it when the first games came off the production line, but as we were running a little bit late, I think it's way out of date now, so I think that's not going to be moved from my fridge.
0:55
One other apology in advance. One thing that we like to do at our seminars is to give some giveaways across to people, like flyers, t-shirts, things like that. To be perfectly frank with you, we were so rushed getting the games out in time and getting ourselves over here in time that it was an oversight. And when we left, I remembered on the plane thinking, oh my God, we haven't bought any t-shirts or anything. So I apologise in advance, but if any of you guys are going to be coming, let's say, to Expo in Chicago in October, we'll make up for it there.
1:24

  • UV flatbed printer was $150,000 new; Heighway purchased refurbished model at lower cost

    high confidence · Andrew Heighway, responding to audience price guessing game with confirmation

    • Andrew Heighway@ 26:19 — Highlights major technical innovation reducing reliability failure points

  • “Being able to swap a game in five minutes is just not a marketing thing. Actually, we can swap a game in less than five minutes. It is so easy that the game itself, when pinball machines, they are comprised of electronics and software and of course the playfield, well, a pinball, you only need the playfield in the end.”

    Romain Fontaine@ 31:34 — Explains core architectural philosophy enabling game swappability and future product strategy

  • “So the complete system is not based on one unique board located in the back box. The complete system is based on small boards which are distributed under the machine.”

    Romain Fontaine@ 33:08 — Details modular electronics architecture differentiating Heighway's technical approach

  • “We can fit 24 games into a 20-foot container.”

    Andrew Heighway@ 22:01 — Logistical efficiency metric demonstrating packaging innovation and production scalability

  • “I would like to say this time I met Andrew Heighway was at the show in France when you came when yeah, there was about three years ago... very short notice, to Wales and then start working from very early prototypes.”

    Romain Fontaine@ 29:06 — Personal narrative establishing Fontaine's rapid onboarding and commitment to platform rebuild from scratch

    • EEAG trade show
    event
    Nickyperson
    John Greatwickperson
    ITV Newsorganization
    BBCorganization
    WMS Circus Voltairegame
    Canoncompany
    Pinball 2000game

    manufacturing_signal: Factory expansion from 14,000 to 42,000 sq ft; currently operating at 50% capacity; positioned for scaling production beyond initial 20-game rate; equipment investments (UV printer, CNC, injection molding) indicate scaling intent

    high · Andrew Heighway showed facility photos and stated: 'we're only using half of that at the moment... well prepped up to be able to do large runs of production games in the future'

  • $

    market_signal: UK-based Heighway Pinball positioning Full Throttle for both location operators and home collectors; attending North American shows (Pintastic New England, Pinball Expo) indicates expansion beyond UK market

    high · Andrew Heighway attended EEAG London for operator feedback but also at US shows collecting community feedback; shipping 24 games per 20ft container internationally

  • ?

    product_strategy: Back box display screen added as optional feature in response to operator feedback from EEAG trade show; dual pricing model ($350 factory fit, $400 retrofit) enables backward compatibility with existing units

    high · Andrew Heighway: 'operators... said you're missing something on your back box... we now offer this as an optional extra' with retrofittable design

  • ?

    product_strategy: Heighway Pinball planning multiple future games beyond Full Throttle; modular platform architecture explicitly designed to support 'next tables and next innovations'; second game mentioned but not detailed

    high · Romain Fontaine: 'we worked from the ground up to build a complete system that would not only allow us to make Full Throttle now but would also support next tables'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Heighway reducing pinball wiring from traditional ~800 meters to ~50 meters through electronic architecture innovation; aimed at reducing reliability failure points and service complexity

    high · Andrew Heighway: 'wiring is a huge problem... we've got ours down to approximately 50 meters of wiring now so it's a fraction of the amount'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Heighway Pinball implementing UV flatbed digital printing for playfields, reducing traditional screen printing color constraints; represents significant innovation in playfield art production capability and quality control

    high · Andrew Heighway detailed $150,000 flatbed UV printer investment, 12-20 min print times, and ability to print 4 playfields simultaneously; contrasted with traditional screen printing limitations

    • So I'd like to get started. there's a mixture of things that we're going to show you today, some still photographs, some videos, I'm going to be talking about some stuff, Roman is going to be talking about some technical stuff, and we'll have a few announcements to make along the way, and then at the end of it we'd be happy to take any questions that any of you may have.
    1:56
    Okay, there we go. So first of all, we'd like to say thanks very much to everybody at Pintastic New England for having us here. A special thanks to both Gabe and Derek for inviting us along to this. We were very excited to come along. And we've had some great conversations with a lot of people over the course of the last couple of days. So from all of us at Hyrule Pimble, we'd just like to say thank you very much for having us. So our first game, full throttle. Am I talking too close into the microphone here? Is this better from... is that better like this? That second microphone in front of it, press the button... No, no, he's not on that one. He's on the... I know he's not on that one. I'll turn it on anyway. Oh, I see. That's it. Thanks. Is that better now? Okay.
    2:50
    Here's an update video, which you guys have seen first before it goes on YouTube. Thank you. It's happening with the, everything was perfect of course in testing and now it's connected up here I can't move on. So just to show you a few things going on around our factory at the moment, what you see here lined up is our four original prototypes and you can see there's different sort of cabinet variations there. There's ones we tested for limited edition versions of cabinets which are generally red gloss trim with black powder coat or black gloss trim with red powder So there's two different versions of the LE trim. The trims that you see here on the games that we have here are sort of a matte black, more rugged trim, if you like, with a sort of a metal powder coated or metal finish for all of the metal work. What we have here is a picture of our old factory. This was 14,000 square feet. The only item we actually manufactured in here was the Bacardi games that we did. Who here remembers or has heard about the Bacardi baffle ball games that we did? I'll come on to a little bit about this later on. We made 251 games within four and a half months when Bacardi's own procurement departments were quoting over nine months to go and get this done, but stupidly we love a challenge and we took it on and we designed, built and delivered 251 games globally within only four and a half months. This was at this factory and that was 14,000 square foot.
    5:50
    Around the time of Expo in Chicago last year, we moved to a much bigger factory and what you see here, which admittedly could do with a coat of paint on the outside, but if you look beyond that, this is a 42,000 square foot facility. Now we're only using half of that at the moment, But we learned very quickly, and Rowan and I were in complete agreement, that during the Bacardi baffle ball production, we were going to run out of space very, very quickly. And the thing is, when you're dealing with pinball machines, which are a lot bigger, a lot more complicated, and you need so many more parts to store, there's no way that we would have been able to have proper pinball production in that old facility. So we're glad that we made the change over and the move when we did, and we're well prepped up to be able to do large runs of production games in the future. So one of the things I want to discuss with you now is sort of the direction that I decided the business should go in because we found out a lot over the last couple of months and we've only been building 20 games over the last sort of six, seven weeks because the first game to build is always by far the hardest game because you have to deal with supplies, you have to deal with quality control issues, you know, there's a whole host of problems that you get when you get involved with manufacturing. And the one thing that we decided was that quality control is so intricate to a pinball machine, because especially when you've got collectors who are spending larger amounts of money to get their sort of dream games, you know, you can't have blemishes, you can't have playfields that are the way that they should be. And quality control, when you're dealing with people who, let's face it, are not companies or suppliers that aren't doing pinball machines, and I can quite categorically state that, because we're the first and only ever UK manufacturer of pinball machines. There's nobody who does play fields, there's nobody who does metal ball guides. We've got to educate them what we want and then hope that they're going to go give us the right quality product. And we have had issues with quality control with parts coming in it's quite simply word right. So this is one of the reasons why we've had these long delays to get to where we are now. But the good thing is, is once you've nailed all that down and you've got the right quality and you've got the right suppliers lined up, then doing further runs of games becomes a much easier process. But nevertheless with something like playfields it's such a specialized thing that we decided we were going to do these in-house and I'll show you some bits of equipment in a minute but these first pieces of equipment you see which are actually the two of our most recent pieces these are injection molding machines this will allow us to make things like flipper bats the plastic insert lenses that you see on the playfields flipper bushings you know what the flippers the flipper bats go through or any sort of plastic parts that you see on the playfield which are injection molded we will be able to do those so we're going to be working with companies both in China and the States to make the moulds which will allow us to make these parts. Now it is quite a big investment at the very beginning because it costs like thousands of dollars just to make the tool to be able to make these things but once you've got to that point then you're talking literally cents or pennies in order to be able to produce these things in the future so it's a very worthwhile investment and we haven't used these yet they're not actually committed commissioned these machines yet but over the coming weeks and months we'll be bringing these online bringing people in to operate them and starting to make our own parts.
    8:54
    What you see here is one of our pride and joyce this was made in 1989, but this was top of the range back in 1989 it's a Japanese CNC machine and These things just go on forever and ever they're real high quality pieces of equipment What this allows us to do is will to cut out all of our play fields and also to be able to cut out all Our plastics so the individual plastics in the sets
    9:16
    The plastic panels like the back glass panels the side art panel we can do all of that in-house ourselves Now I'm going to show you a small video here, it's a couple of minutes, because I thought you might find it a bit interesting because you think, well, you look at something like that and how much would you say, anyone wants to guess maybe how much one of these things weighs? That's the Welsh son of Dar guess, anybody got a thought? Four tons. Yes, you're absolutely right, it's a four ton machine. And you know, when you're dealing with pump trucks that maybe lift up 500 kilos and you get this thing through the door, it's like, well, wow, you've got to have the right equipment to do it. But you might think to yourselves, how would they get something like that in the factory? So we did a short video showing how this thing arrived and how it was transported into the factory. So I'm just going to show this to you now.
    10:04
    No music on this one. We were quite thankful there was no rain that day. I hope I can hold it. I'll hold it right down, Rob.
    12:19
    So yeah, it's a large piece of equipment that gets high up down onto the ground and they have these tiny little rollers. You'd think how on earth are these things going to hold four tons, but they do. You put it on the end and then you fork lift the jacket up the other end and you just wheel it into position and there you go. So what we have here now, which I'm going to show you, is our third and most recent piece of equipment which really we consider to be the star of our show at the moment. I'm going to ask a question in a minute and John Greatwich at the back there is precluded from answering this question because he will know the answer to it. So what we have here is a flatbed UV printer. What this means is that it's the best way today which you can digitally print onto a playfield. So normally playfields in the past have been screen printed, but screen printing is very restrictive from the number of colours that you can use. By using UV and digital printing you can get much better depth of colours, much a vaster array of colours which really allows you to do some great things with playfield art and also with plastics too. So what you see here again is the installation, no videos for you on this occasion but just to show you this was it arriving at the factory, sort of being wheeled into position, there it is in its final position now. And so what you see here now is a blank full-throated playfield.
    13:44
    And these are the playfields that are being printed on a flatbed printer. This was actually done at Canon's head office, but this is pretty much exactly the same printer. Now, this is quite a substantial investment. So is there anybody who would like to guess how much a brand new printer like this would cost?
    14:02
    We can work in dollars, that's fine. What size bed? I'm sorry? What size bed? It's 8 by 4, so 8 foot by 4. gentlemen this actually is only less than a ton I believe from what I understand but yeah well less than a ton and it comes in sections as well so is this much easier although we did have to complete take the door frame off in order to get it in but that's another story but know how much just people think this would actually cost how much in dollars you think a brand new machine cost 30,000 30,000 Okay, higher than 30,000? Higher than 100,000?
    14:42
    Way lower than a million. It's like an auction, this, isn't it? 250, no, lower than 250. Keep going, lower.
    14:53
    You got it, yes. $150,000. So it's a substantial investment. The one that we've got is actually a used one. We haven't paid quite that much, but it's still, you know, full factory refurbished. And the thing is, you know, as long as you keep these things maintained, that was going on for years. But, you know, we kind of thought to ourselves as well, you know, by the time we're getting further on in the year, especially when we get to our second game, and we need to vastly increase capacity, this allows us to not only increase capacity to where we need it to be to keep up with demand, but also, most importantly, to keep a close eye on quality too. Because, you know, you get it back from other printers and you have just the slightest, you know, wipe of a head on the top and that's it, the playfield has to be scrapped or wiped out again. Just out of curiosity, how fast can you print playfield? That's also a good question. Normally about 20 minutes per playfield. That's what we worked out. That was with a double hitter ink. We just did it with a single hitter ink. If you did it with a single hitter ink, it would probably be about 12 minutes, 12-14 minutes. But at the moment we're using a double run of white ink. So it's CMYK and two runs of white. yeah exactly by being an 8x4 printer means that we can actually print four at a time so we come to full throttle um i'm sure maybe most of you have seen um the promo video uh the trailer for it it's a short one but we'll show it to you again anyway to be the best takes skill commitment determination to be the best you must be prepared to go four o'clock Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
    16:56
    Can you remember the time? You think you can beat me? Don't make me laugh.
    17:22
    Francisco's always getting in at the end, always has something to say. So here's some pictures of Full Thought. I'm sure many of you have seen it in the hall anyway. and one thing that um you know at highway pinball we do follow what people say to us and we do react to it because especially the pinball community i mean we're all pinball purists at heart i've been a pinball fan for as long as i could remember i've been playing pinball since i was very young roman as well and you know we're all very passionate about trying to create a product here that everybody wanted to play, a product that could make pinball mainstream again. And this is why we've spent such a long time, sort of almost four years, in fact, at this point now, building a new platform from the ground up, which can do all the things that we believe the market needs from a pinball machine in the modern era. And part of this process is getting feedback from people. And this is one of the reasons why I love coming to shows like this, because you will never find a place where a pinball will be put under so much scrutiny, so much pressure as at a pinball show because it's constant rotation rotation and even if you have busy sites you know you might have a you might have you know half a dozen people playing it one after the other and then it does nothing for half an hour until the next person comes up and play at a pinball show if you want to test the reliability of a game um then you know it's a great place to do that and and getting the feedback and opinions is also great and in some of the early shows that we did and one in particular which was the EEAG trade show in London at the start of the year we got to talk to a lot of operators and they were very interested in that product but one thing a lot of them said to us is that you're missing something on your back box. When it's in a pub environment or an arcade environment, yes, it's lit, the back box, but you've got actually nothing there to draw people in. And one of the things a back box display does with all these animations is that it creates some interest with the player. And also, people who are watching from around can actually see what scores you're doing without having to peer down on the playfield surface. And the reason behind us doing the playfield screen in the first place was because myself as a player, my guys as players as well, all of your attention is down in the flipper areas where it should be trying to keep the ball in play. And there's so many great animations on the pinball machine which are missed because you're not looking up, you're looking obviously down on the playfield. So that's the reason why we put the playfield where it is, sorry, the screen where it is on the playfield. But we've listened to what people have told us and operators and we now offer this as an optional extra to any of our customers on any of our versions of games. Now at the moment, it's a mirror image screen. So we're using exactly the same screen that we're using in the Playfield. It's the same size, it's the same chassis, but we've modified the back box. So even if someone buys a screen without the Playfield screen, without the back box screen, they can retrospectively fit it as well. So we've priced this, we tried to price this competitively, which is, as a factory fit option, it's $350. And as a retro fit, it's $400. And the only reason for the change is, is that we have two back box screen variants. one has the whole cut-out window, if you like, in it, so you can see the screen through it. If somebody buys one without that screen, then that plastic panel has to be changed retrospectively as well, hence why there's a difference in the price. But the feedback that we've got so far from the last couple of days and from forums as well is that people really love having that addition there. Because it's funny, when we were at Expo Chicago last year, one thing everybody was saying was they were always looking up. They played their ball, they were looking up, and there's no screen there, and they're looking back down again. Now I think that can be an educational process It just re ourselves that the screen is in a different place I mean after all you look at like WMS Circus Voltaire and you know you had to look halfway in between in order to see the screen before and nobody really was worried about that But it at least gives another option there, and I think particularly for operating games, it's a feature which a lot of operators, I believe, are going to want to get involved with. Just to show you this here, this shows you a bit more information about our packaging, we package our games. Because we don't have a traditional back box which swings down and you attach the playfield, with ours it's a very easy system where you literally just slot the back box in and you do up, I believe it's three screws and two wing nuts, and so it's a less than a minute job. But it means that we have different ways to have to try to package this. So the way that we do it is we traditionally have the game cabinet on its back, protected with foam inserts at the bottom, and then we have this sort of wedge shape, if you like, cardboard, which then the back box sits on next to it, and then we have a box with the legs and keys and everything else on top, and the whole thing has a box over the top in it that gets strapped onto a pallet and shipped out. And you can see in the bottom right-hand corner there, that's a mock-up of a container, and we can fit 24 games into a 20-foot container. Now this is what we see here now is one of the prototypes in the foreground but after that are games which are nearly ready to come off the line. In particular with these couple of photos here we had ITV, we have two major broadcasters in the UK, we have the BBC which I'm sure everybody has heard of and we have ITV who's always been the second one. And ITV News were down doing a piece for us literally days before we were boxing up the games that you've been playing here this weekend. Here we go, we see the camera crew setting up there.
    22:38
    So what you see now is our main sort of production area. As you can see cabinets are on the right hand side, new cabinets on skids I think as you guys call them or pallets as we call them on the left hand side and cabinets down the left there as well too. In the middle there is a stack of back boxes. So obviously when you're manufacturing pinball machines one of the biggest things is parts and you're constantly getting parts in all the time and That in itself is a logistical challenge. When you've got thousands of parts arriving on a weekly basis, someone has to check them coming in, check the quality, check the number of them, stock them accordingly.
    23:17
    It's a huge task. It's a mammoth task, the logistics of a pinball company. Nicky, by the way, here on the right, has become quite a celebrity in our YouTube videos, so we're told.
    23:31
    So here we see when our cabinets arrive to us. the cabinets are already pre-made this is just the shells of them and then we build everything onto them internally and on the outside as well uh stacks of back boxes uh these are the glass magazines this is something that we haven't got quite right yet we've had a lot of development going into this when we first had one to the eag show at the start of this year they had quite pointy corners on the front and it really wasn't comfortable for the player um when they're where when they're trying to use the flip buttons. So then this is two variants further on down the line. And they're nice and rounded on the front now, but it's a horrendously expensive piece of equipment to manufacture. But one of the great things about this system is, I mean, you guys over here in the USA have got loads of space, and so space isn't nearly so much of a problem as it is for us guys over in the UK, where people are living in matchboxes. So they have, like, you know, enough space. And I don't know what it is about the UK, but if you can ever find space to have machines, one wall and the other wall facing each other, there's never enough space in the middle to be able to take the glass off. It's a real pain. So with our system here, the whole magazine just lifts off the top there, so it negates the need to have the space to be able to take the glass out.
    24:51
    What you see here is a playfield rack, so all the playfields during the process get stored in racks like this. And again, one of the reasons why we want to do our own playfields is because when you're doing things like treating it with lacquer, for example, you tell people, suppliers, put them flat and keep them flat, but inevitably they have them up against the wall and then they bow and you have to straighten them out. It's no end of problems with playfields. By having flat lacs like this, it allows you to be able to keep a control of your product much better. So more images of production. Here is a pile of... I'm just showing you a few things apart. I mean, I could spend the next couple of hours here showing you piles of parts, but I don't think really you'd be that interested in it. But I'll show you a few piles of parts. This one in particular is a pile of magazines for the screens. So these, again, aren't quite very tricky to go and manufacture because you're using very light steel. It's going to be bent into awkward angles. So here's a pile of screen magazines, just bags of parts. No particular interest there.
    25:52
    Then we have many, many wires. One of the things about our games is that we really don't have wiring limits anymore. This is one of the things that we set out to achieve with our games because having serviced many games ourselves before, wiring is a huge problem. Whether you get snags in the wires, you get dry solder joints, all kinds of things can happen. You get wire shorting out against each other. Everybody knows that famously it's half a mile of wiring traditionally in pinball machines, about 800 metres. well we've got ours down to approximately 50 meters of wiring now so it's a fraction of the amount of wiring in a pinball machine which means that there should be a lot less to to go wrong with them and just lots of pictures what so what we have here now is when we were putting games together these are the two games that you've been playing the last couple of days so this is us just prepping up these games testing them and boxing them before they go off. So there's Roman working on some of the electronics there. And what you see inside the cabinet, that's our power board there in the middle with LEDs to show all of the voltages and making sure so you can see the glance if there's anything untoward. The top part of the playfield, so hopefully you can see from this picture just how little wiring actually is on again. So this is us packaging up so you can see the cardboard wedges on the right hand side which has the the back box area and you can see the foam the whole thing is sitting on and it sits on a pallet. And little things that maybe you wouldn't know is you have to have special pallets to ship overseas. They have to be heat treated and chemically treated so by the time they arrive here they're not filled with wood mites and other diseases. So you have to be very specialist even about the pallets and skids that you're using. So here are our finished games. So these are the games that came here. And it's just a small team photo. And finally going on to the TNT van. And they actually came back nothing how we sent them. Boxes were torn, straps were broken, the whole things were rocking, so we were quite impressed when they were pretty much intact by the time we unpacked them. So what I'd like to do now for the next five to ten minutes is we're gonna have a sort of a technical section in the middle now, where we're just going to discuss a few things about the technical aspects of our game, then after that I'm going to talk to you about some other things going on in our company, upcoming games, things like that. So I'll hand you over to Emma.
    28:53
    Hi everyone. So yeah, for those who don't know me, my name is Romain. I'm French originally. I moved to Waves about two and a half years ago to work for I would look this time I met Andrew highway was in the show in France When you came when yeah, there was about three years ago
    29:16
    So I was not particularly looking to work for pinball machines, but as I just previously quit my job I just bring a lot of ideas wrong in my mind and and we had a very interesting conversation you and me and And I was very interested by a newcomer in pinball machines, because the only thing I knew back then was just the Williams and the Oldies from the 80s and 90s, as I used to collect pinball machines before. And I was very interested in the new technology and the innovation that we just discussed together without even thinking about working for Harry Pinball at the beginning. And then, well, just a few weeks or a month later, we came back together, came back to you, and I asked Andrew Highway if it just would happen for him to be looking for anyone to do technical stuff. And, yeah, well, basically after a couple of Skype calls later, the answer was, when do you start? And I just answered, well, would next Monday do? So yeah, it has been very interesting to move, very short notice, to WAVES and then start working from very early prototypes, let's call it prototypes version minus one. That was the very first one. So we're starting from that very first prototype which has been already made for about a year before you arrived. decided to reset everything down and we worked from the ground up to build a complete system that would not only allow us to make full throttle now but would also support next tables and next pinball and next innovations in the future. So it was really long term thinking on how to develop these new platforms. The first thing that we always had in mind in was to have a modular system. So the game swap is something that we believe is very, very important in what we're doing. Being able to swap a game in five minutes is just not a marketing thing. Actually, we can swap a game in less than five minutes. It is so easy that the game in itself, when pinball machines, they are comprised of electronics and software. and of course the playfield, well, a pinball, you only need the playfield in the end. So just changing the playfield in itself, that's only three connectors. They will be always the same, they are scalable, not like Pinball 2000, and it is actually very easy. So a new game upgrade will be comprised of a complete playfield fully populated, the art panel, the two sides and the back glass, and USB-C with a game code. So the only thing you have to do is disconnect the playfield, drop the playfield from the cabinet, change the two side art on the cabinet, change the back glass, and put the new USB stick with the new code, and you just switch on the machine and your machine will be on and ready. Now about the electronics, so when I started at Howie Pinball I started as electronics engineer, and my first task was to develop the so-called driver board on how to control all the hardware stuff on the playfield in the machine from the computer platform. So after about a year of development, it really took a year, I come up with this board which is doing all the magic in the machine. So that board is communicating with USB communication to the main computer in the machine. It is a very small board for those who have seen the inside of the machine, it's quite small compared to what driver boards used to be. It is modular and scalable because the whole system is not based on one unique board located in the back box. The complete system is based on small boards which are distributed under the machine. So on first of all we have one board in the cabinet that handles all the cabinet hardware, the flipper buttons, the coin mechanism, the knocker, all of that. And then under the playfield we have three more boards which are handling all the solenoids, the switches, and all the RGB LEDs. The board is fully featured with a self-diagnostic system. If anything may happen to go wrong, the board will help the operator or user try to repair the machine, will tell what actually got wrong. And the embedded security on the board will make sure that if anything goes wrong, it doesn't get wronger that the board will automatically isolate itself isolate solenoids just in case there is short circuit somewhere or anything so all of that is completely protected and that board is uh compatible with all the new technologies now we are using our gp leds but well you don't know what what will just happen in a year time so that board has communication protocol that allow us to have a lot more support than what we actually do in full protocol. We can have support for intelligent motors, servo motors, all of that have already been used in the games but also things that have never been used in the games before.
    34:41
    As Andrew said, we don't have that big heavy wiring harness anymore. Everything is connected from the IO board to where it needs to be connected. So because it is a distributed architecture. Each IU board is actually handling its own area. There is no cross communication from one side of the playfield to another. Everything is centralized on the IU board. All the information is then communicated through the USB cable communication to the main CPU and the CPU sends the information back to the other area. The best example is the flipper buttons. When you press the flipper button that sends a signal to the IU board in the cabinet which communicates that through USB to the main CPU and the information come back by USB on the playfield, on the bottom of the playfield which then triggers the transistors to fire the flipper buttons. There is no direct wire from the flipper button to the flipper solenoid. We only have two voltages. For those who are very passionate about WMS and their 15 different voltages you'll be very disappointed with us we only have two voltages in the machine that's what we need we have 12 volts and 70 volt 12 volt is for all the control common electronics and then the 70 volt each I above handle is their own voltage converters to power the LEDs for the switches everything is embedded on the I above so actually the wires which carries the five volt or the three volt are actually very very short that's why the all the wiring has been brought down by having that so 800 meters down to maybe about 60 meters at the moment all the playfield pcbs so we have big pcbs under the playfield the big black pcbs are actually interconnecting all the leds the inductive switches that's another innovation from high-reaping ball that we don't have the wire switch going through the playfield with the slot they are inductive switches we don't have to hold the playfield anymore and they are self-calibrating switches so when the ball rolls above the switch modify the the magnetic field around the switch and the switch detects the ball moving like this
    37:02
    and of course the pcb is also interconnect the solenoids on the on the playfield so So all of that to say that those PCBs are custom to one machine. So FullSortAll has set of PCBs which are FullSortAll custom. Now about reliability, you will tell me, well, if anything goes wrong on those PCBs, well, what do I do? But actually those PCBs, it's very unlikely that anything could go wrong on those PCBs because there is nothing on those PCBs. They are interconnection PCBs. And the reason of doing that is that we don't have LEDs directly soldered on the PCBs themselves we don't have components soldered on the PCB themselves. Everything has small connectors, so if one LED may happen to go wrong, well you just drop the PCB, unplug the LED, you plug a new one, you put the PCB back. And as I said, at the back of the PlayFig, we only have three connectors, and we don't ever probably have only three connectors. We can't see how we may need more, but power supply, the USB for the communication, and the HDMI for the screen. So to show us some of the very small boards that we are using in the machine, so we have on the left the stand-up target board, that's the one, or those who have played Full Swaddle, on the targets on the side of the playfield, which are multicolored targets and you have to spell Octane to start the high octane mode. So those targets have a very small LED at the top, which is an RGB LED, exactly the same as we use everywhere in the game. just under it, just a small micro switch. So nothing to adjust above those targets, no leaf switches to adjust or anything. The target, when the ball presses the target, just clicks the micro switch and sends a signal to the computer. At the bottom, on the bottom left, you have an inductive switch with a small coil on it. So that generates a magnetic field above the switch. So when the ball rolls in this magnetic field, it changes the frequency of the magnetic field and then we detect a ball rolling like that so the ball can be close to the switch from about 2 to actually 8 millimeters we will be able to detect the ball and we can actually detect ball very very fast and on the right you have the jet bumper and the flasher LED balls so they are very small balls which are put in the in the pop bumper for example for the top one so in each pop bumper we have five independent LEDs so we can do RGB animations in the pop If you play Full Throttle, you will see that we have a rotation of light effects in the pop-dumpers themselves when you start the score multiplier mode. And for the flasher, we have four LEDs so we can also mix and do different kind of animation within a single flasher itself. And that's it for my side. Thank you.
    40:01
    So just to follow on a little bit from what Roman was saying there, we believe that there's so much more that can be done with pinball lighting and we made a decision to make sure that all aspects of our lighting were RGB so you can change all aspects of the playfield colouring. You know, before in the past with pinball games you had to distinguish between there being general illumination lighting, CPU controlled lighting, flasher lighting, but now everything really is together. It's just different types of lighting all doing the same thing. They're all individually addressable. And this is something we're even carrying through onto the back box as well. Whereas at the moment, if you see, it's just lit from behind. We could have made it brighter, but it's a fine line between having a back box too bright so it reflects off the playfield glass and not bright enough. It probably could do with been a little bit brighter in fairness at the moment but um we um we shipped the games out on the friday and we got a load of um addressable pixels for the back box on the monday so we were unfortunately a weekend too late from having them on these games but what they will be is individually 50 individually addressable pixels in the back box there where you can have effects and basically flash and light up different areas of the uh of the back glass which of course from a design perspective gives game designers many more ways, if you like, to communicate what's going on with the back rods. Other aspects too, just one other technical point I want to follow up on, is that one question we're asked a lot is, well, okay, you guys have got all this system here, but what goes and happens if things start to go wrong? Are we going to be left out there in the dark We very very serious about the USA market In fact we believe the USA market is our biggest market There so many passionate collectors in this country but there's also so many players out there too. You've really got a resurgence over here with the barcade and pinball is coming back as a coin-op activity here, whereas Europe, for example, is still very much what we would consider to be a dormant market, as in there's very little going on with operatable games. I mean, you know, you go into arcades near us in Wales, and we've spoken about this a number of times, and there's one arcade there, which is Seaside Arcade, really, really busy, and there's only two pinball machines there next to each other. It's like an Adam's family and a Dirty Harry. And I saw these things for the first two years ago, and Dirty Harry had a stuck-up flipper, and there was no GI working, and two years later, it's still in exactly the same condition. You're going to wonder, why are they playing pinball? Well, it's because they're not working. A few ones there on site are not working. So it's quite a desperate situation in the UK. and also in other areas of Europe too. But we're starting to catch up. There's a couple of barcades starting to open up around the country in the UK now. And I think it's the same in other European markets too. So one of the reasons we developed the product that we did was to make it attractive as a piece of coin-operated equipment. We're very passionate. Our mission statement as a company is to make pinball mainstream again. And the reason why we did it, and this is not to say anything bad about our competitors, we just didn't feel that there was the right product in the marketplace to be relevant for a new generation of player. and so we started as Roman said from the ground up because we wanted to have a system to be as expandable as our imagination was and yeah that might sound like a bold claim but it's exactly true which is why we're looking at many things like online payment systems systems whereby you create player profiles and you've got and hold your smartphone up to it and with near-field communications the game will recognize you and you play your game and your high scores get uploaded and you know you're shown on Facebook that Jimmy's been playing the full throttle at the dog and gun in wherever. And your friends get to see it and think, wow, I want to go and beat his score. And social media connectivity is a really important part, I believe, of the future of pinball and getting people to start talking about pinball, wanting to compete with other people, really getting the social element going. And our platform allows us to do whatever we want to do. And so, we're very excited about what the future holds. But you guys, just to go back to my original point, are really leading the way, I believe, in the resurgence of pinball. and we really recognise that and we've got plans for the US market I announced this back in October last year at Expo we're going to have a division over here in the short to medium future where we're almost certainly going to be building cabinets over here for North and South America and Canada and also having distribution points here too but we have, and this goes back to the point I wanted to make about the serviceability of our games we've designed these to be modular by nature It's not just the swappability of the games. It's the fact that you can change a flipper mechanism. You can drop it out with just a screwdriver and unplugging connector. You can drop out that flipper mechanism or that pop bumper or that slingshot. In a matter of seconds, you need to have no technical experience. You can pop it in the post to one of our distributors if it's outside of the USA. We're going to be working very closely with John Great, which is at the back there. He's going to be helping us very much and our customers off on the technical side of things as well. And almost certainly, John will have some spares in stock too. So if spares can't be shipped overnight from John, they can be shipped overnight or within two days from the UK. But we're also, in the near future, going to have a stockpile of spare parts in the USA too, because we're going to be having some warehousing of our games over here, because we're going to be shipping in containers over here and then distributing from here too. We have a number of distribution partners we're working with too. So the final point really I'll make is that some of our parts, even though we're making our own FIPA mechanisms, for example, they do use some standard linkages for example and we're using imperial screws and fixings as well so anybody who's technically minded if they want to take a part in a Rathliff mechanisms and rebuild it with other parts you can do that on the whole. So from a servicing point of view we'd like to emphasise we don't want anybody to be worried about that we're going to have one of the things avenues that we've been speaking about this in the last couple of days and we're going to be building on is tech videos, tech support videos whereby if you want to know how to change the game You want to know how to take out a fiver mechanism. You know, okay, it might be obvious to some people. To other people, it's not so obvious. But even though it's easy, we need to maybe show how to go and do it. So we're going to be building this up over time. So it will be the easiest thing in the world to go onto our website, go onto our tech support, and see how to do these things. And, you know, if you ever want us, we're at the end of the phone. We're on the other end of the internet, and we're there to help.
    46:22
    So I want to give you a few updates of other things that are going on in our company before we start taking questions. Of course, I'm sure most people here know who the attractive gentleman is in the photo here. It is Barry. He's an industry legend. The guy, you know, he was always one of my favourite designers. I've got, I believe, I think five or six Barry pins in my own collection. And, you know, when Barry was a guest of mine at my show, the UK Pinball Party, last year, we spoke about the possibility of making games together. And, you know, Barry's had his health problems and has had cancer scares and had treatments. And, you know, Barry's a fighter, but he's a pinball enthusiast, you know, right to the core. And, you know, you only have to look at his history of pinball. You know, the guy almost single-handedly, you know, saved the industry with Space Shuttle, for example. You know, in some of his innovative games, you know, he was really prepared to push the boundaries. And the other thing as well is the man is an animal when it comes to designing pinball machines. You know, he was known, he had a reputation as being, you know, the quickest straw at WMS, you know. He was a guy that if a pinball machine needed to be finished off quickly, people went to Barry. If you needed a game design quickly, you went to Barry, because Barry just got the job done. And he's done the same for us as well. Barry is not involved in Full Throttle or Alien Pinball, but Barry is the designer of both games 3 and 4. They're both very strong licensed games. And he's got it in such a short period of time, to such a point now, where game 3 is about to be built, and game 4 is only about three weeks away from being built as well as a whitewood prototype. but you know game three we already have a full rule set for it we have an artwork package in with the license or waiting approval at the moment uh well say waiting approval they've just come back and just asked us for a few tweaks here and there but it's um yeah game three's coming on very very quickly and this is the thing um where a lot of people sort of ask me oh great you know you're talking about games two three and four and you know where's game one and okay we've only just started manufacturing game one you know we were the first to admit that it's been a long hard road to get here. Manufacturing is a whole new beast altogether. But we've got there. We're manufacturing games now. We're shipping games. We're about to start our second run of games. We started off with 20 games, which will be in completion in about two weeks' time from now. They're almost all finished now already. We start 44 games straight after that, and we start scaling up from there. And the challenge, our biggest challenge right now, is to scale up from a company that's making 20 games in a month to 44 games in a month, which is our next step up to hundreds of games three four hundred games maybe even 500 games a month by the time we're in alien production later on in the year but you know we're up to the challenge but you know here we are you know we have these other games coming up behind and you have to do that because to have an interchangeable system like what we have now we have to be keep feeding games because the idea is especially from a coin off point of view is when that game starts taking less money you ideally want to rotate the games and in the past you had to take the games down, fold the back box down, take the legs off and move 120 kilo piece of furniture somewhere else. Whereas now you could just drive it in your car and go the upgrade, put it in there, five minutes you've got a brand new game and you're on to your next site. But for that system to work you've got to have a steady supply of games which is why you know we have one game that's finished, we have three other games in development currently and we're already in negotiations now for look for more licenses and different games for 2016 to 2016 onwards.
    49:41
    So I'm sure most of you know, we go back to the Bacardi game that we did and I was speaking about earlier on, one of the announcements that we have to make, well not have to make, that we are going to make, is that we've been asked many times, oh, where can I go buy one of these things? Oh, it's great, it's something different, you know, it's an old school, this is based on 1930s baffle ball game. And so we had all the inquiries about that and so we got back in contact with Bacardi afterwards and we said look you know there's a desire for it there what if we do a small run of games and we just do something specifically for the public and Bacardi were very interested in it so um we sort of explored the possibility here you can see the illuminated play field uh that was a massive task in itself it might look fairly simple and straightforward um does anyone want to hear very briefly about like this aspect here about lighting and the challenges there or should I move on okay I'll tell you in a nutshell then very quickly what it was These are vacuum-formed play fields, and you see the Bacardi artwork on there, and the worst thing is there's circles on there. And we talked about digital printing earlier on. You can't do that with vacuum-forming here. What you have to do is go back to old-school screen printing, because the higher temperatures involved in vacuum-forming mean that if you digitally printed, it would melt the ink off there. So you have to go back to screen printing, which means it's trial and error, trial and error to get it done, because what you have to do is you have to use a process called distorted art printing, which means that you have this flat piece of plastic and when you create a tool to begin with in the same way that we would do with pinball ramps you make it out of a solid block of aluminium this thing takes about a week or two to get cut out it really is a big heavy piece of aluminium you cut it out the whole thing is polished down then what you have is something which you then form the plastic onto so it starts as a flat sheet and then it's sucked down by a vacuum heated at the same time and then that's that's your vacuum form part which is what you see here But you have to start off with this like equal grid. You form it and it comes out all distorted. Then you use that to try and guess how the artwork is going to go and be. And it just, I mean, we must have gone through nine different prototyping processes to do it. You know, hundreds and hundreds of dollars at a time. It was a very expensive process to get to this point here as well. And the other problem is, is that when you heat the plastic, you have uneven thicknesses. And so you try to use Bacardi red and illuminate it and it becomes Bacardi pink, which they weren't particularly happy about. So a lot of trial and error involved in there. We use standard pinball plungers on this. It's a two-player game where you start off with eight balls, I believe it is each, and you have to get five balls into the other person's winner's circle on the other side. And when you do, you shout out, Cuba Libre, at the end. And you get given lots of Bacardi drinks as a reward, I believe. So these things have been all around the world. And I said we've been asked if we could make some again. so we decided we'll do a limited run of 100 units. We're going to do them slightly different to the other ones. We're going to do them in, everything's going to be powder-coated black, really nice sort of gloss powder-coated black. We try to keep the price down as low as possible. And so if the interest is there, we'll make them. We're only going to make 100 of these things. They'll all be numbered and have a plaque, and they'll all be, say, black powder-coated parts. They'll come with batteries, or you can plug it into the mains and use it. It's, I suppose, a bit of a novelty-type game. We're not planning on making any more than 100, so it's just 1 to 100. And we'll be selling it at $2,400 there, plus taxes and shipping within the USA. So that's one of the announcements that within the next week, we'll be selling these pre-orders on our website.
    53:15
    And as with our standard terms of practice, with this, we'll be having a fully refundable deposit of just $500. Then we don't ask for a single penny more or a single cent more until we're actually making the gains there. So exposure is at a minimum, but it's a fully refundable deposit, as with all of our games, up until the point of production.
    53:36
    So, I'm sure a few of you may have heard that we have... No! Sorry, power's gone. That's just... This is going to be slightly anti-climatic, and I hope everybody isn't here because they want... they're hoping we're going to give away loads of information because I honestly wish I could hear at this point and I'm going to explain why we can't because we're working I'm sure many of you heard there being problems and issues with other companies and games that they were looking to manufacture we had a license for 20th century fox from a very early point the reason why I went for alien to be quite frank and this is not a be trying to spin you a yarn is that alien is my favorite film of all time. I'm an alien purist to heart. I adore everything in the alien franchise and everything in the Prometheus franchise. And the fact that there's Alien 5 and Prometheus 2 coming out soon is a reason in itself to live, isn't it? I mean, it's going to be an amazing film.
    54:38
    But I had to go for this film because, you know, if you have something so rich with material in it, the atmosphere and everything, everything you can create with a modern pinball machine, It was just like, for me, a holy grail and we had to go for it.
    54:52
    But, you know, we're dealing here with somebody else's intellectual property. You know, 20th century Fox, this is arguably, you know, their biggest asset. We've come along and got it. Now, I'm sure most of you know there was nearly an Alien pin in the past. Well, there was an unofficial Alien pin with Space Invaders. Then Barry, bizarrely enough, almost had, it was Alien 3 at the time, which obviously became Gramsokas Dracula when they had all of the production problems with the films. so there's never been an official alien product alien pinball machine and we have that there we're determined to make this the best possible game but you know with any licensed store and you know there's been stories with some games stern have done recently you know it's a minefield when you're dealing with licensed products because you know everything has to be checked has to be confirmed approved by all manners of people and if they think it's slightly off base or something they don't, the way they don't want their license portrayed, then it's a no-go. So it is a minefield, but it's worth it. It's worth going through the processes. And, you know, we've had fights and battles to get stuff that we wanted.
    55:56
    But we're determined to make this the best game possible and to have it as atmospheric as possible. And so although I don't really have anything tangible to show you, the reason why is because, and I was even sort of begging Fox on Friday, please, please, let me show these guys something. Let me show some artwork. let me you know because everybody wants to go and see this and i want to show it but you know their opinion is is they want to wait till this is a nearly finished game and i guess what you have to understand as well is there's a few political things going on at fox because you know there was a game that was nearly a game which isn't a game that was the 20th century fox product and you know we're dealing even though we're in the uk and we're dealing with uk office everything from the uk office goes to la and la approves everything so the fact that they're asking us to wait until we've got a nearly finished product before we start showing everything to you guys, I guess it's not, you know, it's no surprise really. So even though we're frustrated and you're frustrated and we'd love to be able to show you some stuff, we simply can't. You know, why would I go and jeopardise our game by showing something early and getting into trouble with my license or we get on really great with them. We've got a great relationship with them and we've already spoken about doing other titles together in the future as well and they're very understanding. So, you know, we can have a great relationship. The only I am going to show you very briefly now, and it may or may not be related to Alien, I'll let you decide. It's something that came out of our R&D test department. But essentially, you know, we've got a great opportunity to do something really special with this game. So, I mean, how many people in this room are Alien fans, for example? Pretty much everybody, okay. I mean, you know, one of the best parts of Alien, for example, with me was the whole, you know, evac from the Nostromo. You know, you've got flashing beacons everywhere, smoke everywhere, you've got mother blaring in the background, you've got the countdown on the self-destruct system, and we're going to bring all of that into our game. We're going to have beacons on top, we're going to have an add-on mod where you're going to have smoke coming out from underneath your machine, connecting your TSW controller. We're going to have, and this again comes back to our LEDs, pulsing lights, imagine that, all amber pulsing lights, mother in the background there, the beacons going, the smoke everywhere. We just got this fantastic opportunity to do something really special with this, so is it taking more time than we would wish? Yes. Are we able, are we frustrated because we can't show you stuff? Yes, we are. But, you know, you can rest assured that it's not just me, it's other people within the company who are massive alien fans too, and we're going to do everything we can to make this as special as possible. So I apologise we can't share anything more at the moment, but I hope you all understand why. And really the last bit of news we've got is just, we're bringing in distributors all the time. I mean, literally, I get inquiries on a daily basis to the point where it's hard to actually keep up with inquiries about this. And we've got people coming in. We've got inquiries at the moment from South America, other countries in Europe, and really all around the world. We've even got a prestigious hotel somewhere in the outskirts of Thailand who wants games as well. So it's quite amazing. But Nitro Amusements, our official Canadian distributor, and I think I've probably shown you this just before my battery dies on my laptop, but he's recorded the message he wanted us to share with all of you.
    59:12
    Hi Andrew and everybody out at Fintastic in New England. It looks like a great weekend out there. I've been following some of the feeds and reading some of the threads, and the organizers should be very proud of themselves. Anyway, I'm here from Nitro Amusements in British Columbia and happy to announce that we're the official distributor for Highway Pinball in Canada. We're very excited to work with Andrew and team.
    59:47
    They've shown the forward thinking from the very beginning with their modular design concept. and I truly believe it's going to change the landscape of pinball for the better because there's not a company right now in the market that can compete with Highway when it comes to features versus cost. And that's a good thing for pinball and it's a good thing for all of us pinheads around the world. So congratulations Andrew, congratulations Highway and everybody that's been involved. Have a great weekend out there. I can't wait for our first shipment to arrive. So we're excited about that. And anyway, have a great weekend, you guys. Just wanted to get that in and be happy for Andrew and what the team has done out there. I'm going to go back to listening to my new favorite band, Redline. It's featured on the full throttle release. funny enough the video arrived it was expecting since yesterday and Tommy had a problem sending it through and it arrived about 15 minutes before the presentation was due to start and it was upside down completely upside down so Tommy was on his head up until about 2 minutes before I walked in here so that kind of concludes really what we wanted to say I mean, you know, we feel we're in a very exciting place at the moment. You know, we just started manufacturing games. We're looking now to upscale over the coming months. You know, we continue at a very fast rate with Alien Development and our other games. And really, you know, we're very pleased to be here. So, you know, open the floor to any questions that anybody may have. We're up here for questions. Jerry, do you have any coming in online? Yeah. Yeah, we do. Go ahead. Okay.
    61:35
    All right. Let's see what we got. So one question is, how far along is the code on Full Throttle? Full Throttle is in a place at the moment where we're very happy with the code in its current state. I mean, it gets to a point when you have to hand the games over to other people as in your paying customers. So we can develop it up to a certain point, but customers will always find things that maybe, oh, maybe this might be better or maybe there's a bug with this or that or the other. So we're happy shipping out games with the code where at the moment. We have a few little technical tweaks here and there to do, but on the whole, the worst problem that happens at the moment is you just switch the game on and off after maybe 40 or 50 games and the game's probably working again straight after. There's an odd little minor glitch that we're fixing up at the moment, but code-wise, we're happy where it is. But we're going to keep going and developing the code as needed and as feedback comes from our customers. That sounds like what we call 99 Is that fair I say so Next online question
    62:45
    Are there any things that you love from the United States that you can't get in the UK? Absolutely. I'm mad for Cheetos, I have to say.
    62:55
    Cheetos, Fritos Lays, and Hershey's Chocolate. You can get Hershey's Chocolate over in the UK, but they make it in the UK and it tastes nothing the same. It's actually quite a good gig actually because I've got this massive suitcase that I bought over. And these I had to bring over the big banners that you see next to our game there. So it was completely filled up with these and of course now they stay with the game and I have half an empty suitcase. And shipping containers in the future. Yeah, full bottle drinks, yes. Did he really say that there was going to be smoke coming out of the bottom of Alien Pinball as a modular attachment? Are you serious? Yeah, Roman's working on a program now to lock all the transistors on our boards at the given moment. No, no, yes, we're working on a smoke machine modification. We're talking with a few people within the industry as well. So the idea being that at certain points, you know, you trigger smoke and the smoke comes out of the smoke machine. So we won't be selling the smoke machines per se ourselves directly but we will sell the control boards so basically you'll just buy a smoke machine from any reputable smoke machine provider and so connected up and away you go
    64:06
    so epic Anyone in the room? Andrew, I've got a question for you. If you ship full throttle and you have a feedback from your owners of your games and they say, oh, there could be one or two things that might be tweaked in the code or anything like that, will you guys have a forum where you can listen to what the customers have to say and will you take that into account and update the games? Absolutely.
    64:39
    Yeah, well actually we already have our own forum on our website and we've already had a lot of feedback on our game and the way we're doing things on our own forum. So yeah, anybody can stay to come on our forum and talk with us. That's great.
    64:55
    And, you know, we look at other forums too. I mean, we're very active on Pinside, for example. And, you know, it's certain things that have been said on Pinside, like, you know, early artwork that we had, which needed to be changed. And it was down to hearing feedback from, well, people outside of Pinball, but also people on Pinside too. You know, we really respect people on the community there because nobody's more passionate about Pinball than people who are on internet forums. And Pinside, we think, is a very good representation of global opinion. If I was to order Full Throttle today, when would I expect to receive it? We've been asked this quite a few times over the last few days and we're looking around the end of September for delivery, start of October for our second run of games. We've already got, I mean with parts, again this comes down to upscaling from your business, is that yes we've just made 20 games but we have a lot of parts in our factory for 100 plus games at the moment because you know with economies of scale often you can't just go into a supplier and say I want 10 of this or 20 of this you know either they laugh at you or they say sure we'll make it it'd be like three times the price you're expecting so with certain things especially stuff from China you know like a lot of our electronics are made over in China and our wiring harnesses is that you know we have stuff for 100 plus games in stock so it'll make it a lot easier to do further runs of games because we already have the stock
    66:19
    the history of the original Atari pinballs in investigating these magnetic switches, replacing the mechanical type switches, because they started out that way and dropped it. Well, I know of, not specifically Atari, I'll be honest, but I know of magnetic induction switches, ones that WS used with the likes of Eddie Sensors and so on, and the kind of switches that Dave Therese and Stacey were using, like on Apollo 13 and so on. So, you know, we are okay with switch technology, not specifically with Atari. But, you know, we investigated, I mean, we started off actually with capacitive sensors before we went down the inductive route. But capacitive sensors just weren't up to the job, which is why we changed over to inductive.
    67:08
    Earlier you said about interactive back box lighting. Is there any chance of that tying in with the lit side panels? We've discussed the point of having addressable LEDs or at least different colours of LED strips in the sides of games as well, into the side panels. We haven't come to a conclusion about that yet, but it's something we're certainly looking into. About the back box, so from now on the full shuttle would be fitted with those R2D LEDs in the back box, the side panels would stay white for the time being. time being for Fursudo. Since you're also the producer and distributor of the games, is there going to be a web store for spare parts such as play fields, ramps and plastics? Yes, there will be. I mean, what you have to remember is now, you know, the Atlantic Ocean doesn't seem to be as big a distance as it did in the past. The way the global logistics is now, you know, we can get stuff next day over to the USA. you know we can send stuff over and they not be long delays anymore i mean you know the we shipped um our full bottles out on friday and this is you know 115 kilo bits of furniture and they were in the they were jfk on monday you know in a weekend they're already over there and other parts are even faster so yes we can ship stuff over quickly but we absolutely intend to be holding spare parts in the usa and canada as well back here i found it very interesting when you brought up the one about the machine actually being connected to the internet with Facebook and Instagram and all this other stuff. I personally believe that that's the way to go. Because everybody starts wrong, everybody interacts with their phone 50,000 times a day. How far-fetched is that to actually get something like that done? Not hard at all. We had one of our guys in our office at the moment, Janos, who's one of our software developers, he's already holding up his smartphone and he's clicking buttons and operating the flippers, just with a smartphone, you know, and he's already been developing some software too, which, from a competition element, which is connected with the web, so stuff is being done and it's going up to web already, so this is certainly absolutely not far-fetched at all, and this is something which we would expect on our platform to be in effect at a certain stage within sort of six months. But, you know, I mean, it goes even further than that too. It allows distributors to be able to tap into machines, or operators, sorry, to tap into machines and find out, Are they being switched on? How much money are they taking? Is there a problem? What is the problem? So, you know a pinball machine should be able to connect back and say what's wrong with it So you can go, you know armed with exactly the spare parts to to fix it And also, you know, you can tie commerce into it too. At that point, you know, you can take Pleasant. Because at NFC, you can use your wallet and Apple Pay and have it be your interface to your smartphone profile. Absolutely. Well, yeah, I mean, this is part of the system we want to develop, which is that, you know, you go online, you create the player profile, you've got your photo up there, and then you can play it paid by WorldPay, by PayPal, or other ways as well. And then, you know, you walk up to the game and you put your smartphone up with your near-field communications, and it says, hi, Andrew, would you like to play a game? Would you like to use some of your credits there? And you play your game. My question is, this has been talked about before, and like I said, I believe that this is the way to go. It's just a matter of fact, who's on the phone with you?
    70:37
    We're actively developing it, and we've tested certain aspects of that as well. So we're deadly serious about doing this. Have you considered providing the machine with handlebars on the side of it? Handlebars? You mean like motorcycle handlebars? Well, the funny thing is... Yeah, I'm from... I'm very good friends with Mark, Mark Ritchie, and we've spoken about, you know, stuff that went on in Capcom in the past. Capcom in the past and they were developing a motorcycle game at Capcom before the plug was pulled over there and I believe part of that was that it was big handlebars on the front of it there which would control the game. Orange County Choppers was the game. Oh right. It was a pinball video. Right. So, no, to answer the original question, we haven't considered it but, you know, with some of the crazy and the great mods that are out there, who knows, maybe somebody will develop that as an aftermarket thing. So you're set up for modular controls, right? So any mod person, once they know your interface, they publish the interface? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, our power driver board in the bottom of the cabinet there has been designed with the toppers in mind, so you can connect to different aspects of it. How many, what do we allow for on the toppers? How many LEDs and motors or coils? On the topper we have a load for as many RGB LEDs as you want for light effects and up to two three-dimensional I believe for the topper. Right okay but I believe we could add an extra one with extra wiring couldn't we because there is still more capacity on the board itself. So the answer is there's a lot of expandability there. Just curious how customizable are you looking for customers to be able to support customers when we either use the existing system or develop their own driver boards or add features, accessories, their own games? It's a good question. I can't really answer that in too much detail at the moment because we don't really have a definitive way forward on that. I mean, we're working with, we have a working group at the moment, which we're just sort of still putting together at the moment, or John is at the back there, where they're going to be actually developing games using our platform. It's not something that we specifically went out to become an open source platform. Does that mean that we wouldn't support people who wanted to do their own mods, maybe to change parts of their games? It could be slightly choppy waters, especially when you're dealing with licensed games, because everybody knows, for example, examples like with Terminator 2 and Star Trek Next Generation, when you had alternative sound packages out there, maybe ones that the studio wouldn't have wanted you to hear, but they got out, and people, you know, it's like a cult thing, isn't it, in the industry, but, you know, if we were actively seen to be promoting ways to go and do that, it could put us in troubles with licensors, so, I don't know, it's certainly possible, but we don't have any official line on that at this point. We would absolutely work with people about mods, though, because, you know, we know that people love to go dress their games up and have all these cool, wonderful things on there, and I think it's a great community as well, So we've had requests to have modifications or for people to do modifications on the games. And yeah, we will be working with people on that basis.
    74:02
    What is your goal for the production run of Full Throttle in terms of units assembled? That's an interesting question. As many as possible. That's dirty from our accountant.
    74:21
    Yeah, I mean, it's true, as many as possible. I mean, this is not a short-term item. This is going to be a long-term infantry item for us. You know, one of the things I feel very passionate about is breaking into new markets. I mean, I believe, for example, Japan is a market I really want to go after with full throttle because they're actually a bit bike-crazy over there. And if there was ever a title which, you know, should really get Japanese motivated to play pinball, I believe it should be full throttle. And so, you know, our ideas are for foreign export games is to have Chinese versions there. You know, if you're going to be selling a minimum of maybe 100 units in a country, then it becomes worth your while to have the play field in Chinese for a run of games, to have some Chinese actors come in and give some voiceovers there and to have specific programming for the screens. If the market is there, we will go and do it. So I'm very keen to go after new and emerging markets, as well as obviously taking care of our current markets and trying to kickstart what I call dormant markets like Europe. Let's go to the interim question. Audience member 2 Andrew, question for you. Are you going to be set up kind of like, is your goal kind of like, let's say, Stern Pinball where, you know, you're doing full throttle right now, you move on to Alien and say there was a demand again for full throttle, would you go and produce more units? Andrew Gawne Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, this is what I mean by it being a long-term infantry item. Yeah, we may not make something for two or three months, but then, you know, we may get, in order for a couple of containers of pins or 100 games, and then we'll start making it again. So absolutely, yeah, we can go back to games like that. I mean, the other aspect of it is when you're dealing with licenses, is licenses have a finite amount of time on them. So if you happen to have a three-year license, you'd be a fool not to go back and make the games if suddenly there's a surge there. You could have a license for a game, you make it, and then maybe it goes quiet for a year, and then all of a sudden, whatever it is, Alien 5, just use an example, it's just been announced, and everybody's, wow, I've got to get an Alien pin again. and so you get a rush of orders. So, yeah, absolutely. We'll keep games on the production line or keep coming back to them as the mantic takes. Is there one more in the room and one more in the room? Firstly, I'd like to thank my right honourable UK pinball friend for making the trip across the pond and coming and sharing your technology information with us. Thank you very much. Thank you.
    76:32
    Believe me, it's our pleasure. Secondly, I'd like to ask my honourable friend, is the appeal of the opinion that I am of that he, being from the UK, might be the one that approaches J.K. Rowling and gets that license to Harry Potter game that has never been made.
    76:50
    It's a very good question, isn't it? It's not going to happen. Not for a while, anyway. We have a fantastic piece coming up, which is a prequel of characters with Newton's Scalamander or whatever else is the magicologist. She has a new series that is being done now, I think it's for Netflix or whatever else, based on the, what is it, the vacant whatever character that she created under a pseudonym. She's holding very tight to licensing outside of the Jelly Beans that are out there and some of the other paraphernalia that you can find at the theme parks. The video games are all stunning, so. Absolutely. The problem is as well, one of the issues is that pinball to some people and currently I have to say unfortunately the gambling commission in the UK at the moment seem to think that pinball is a gambling device and some people and the rumour has it that there are elements there with regards to licensing of that title and other titles that don't want to go down the pinball route because it is seen as anti-social gambling however you want to go and see it. That's actually one battle we have at the moment with the gambling commission over in the UK which everybody knows Roger is more than aware of and versed in with all of his battles as well. It's really quite crazy. You have something which comes up and is making a resurgence and there's always somebody who wants to go and stick their oar in and the gambling commission wants to do that but it's a battle we believe we're going to win.
    78:22
    One last question. Okay, I'll have to pick the best one because there's five of them. We can all talk through it at the same time and I'll try and pick fire arms if you like. Is there a timeline on the Bacardi game? Are there any hints about a third title? Has the Aliens whitewood changed at all? Are you going to make any wrecks for the spare playfields maybe underneath the unit? I guess I asked for that, didn't I? Yeah, I mean, the plan is that the box for our upgrades fits underneath the existing sort of pinball machine, so you can keep your first game upgrade or whatever underneath the game. So, absolutely. Asteroid and Whitewood at the moment,
    79:08
    we learned what we did from the original Whitewood. We went back to the toys situation, and we decided we wanted to do even more with the toys. and just think you know I'm just going to give something away then we've got some really cool happening with the queen for example now which we've gone and developed it's sort of a rotating feature we have an lcd which is part of an airlock which shows you know get features as you collect them and then you get the big reveal with the queen so you know elements like that means we have to change a lot of things on the playfield and move some stuff around but we have one what would I suppose we would call our marquee toy which we just gone and developed which you know when you hear about it you'll see yeah it's so obvious you've got to have that on an alien game and that's what we've recognized and we've had to change the paper around accordingly so yeah we've moved some stuff around on playfield we've tried to keep some of the core stuff that really worked with the original whitewoods the next one is the next version which we're hoping is as close to the finished version as possible it's got insert layouts on it as well, we've got placeholders with arts in various places too, and it's virtually ready to be built. In actual fact when we get back next week we're expecting to have the playful cutout files and the files for the metal board guides. We're going to rapid prototype the ramps initially and get some white forms made and get this built. So it's happening very quickly now on that front. And we'd get our CNC up and running. Absolutely yes. We've got it trained at the moment to do circles and squares but it's It's going to be much better than that in the next four years. It's asking for a lot more. Was there anything I missed or... They wanted to hear if you could drop a super secret, exclusive hint about the third title and they want to know if they gave you $500 worth of party game, when might they expect to get it? We're looking to do production of that before the end of the year. So at the moment, we're just getting it out there to see if the interest is there. You know, it's limited to 100 games. If the interest is there and the order book fills up, then we'll make them before the end of the year. We already have the supplies for that. We know how to build it. So it's going to be a pretty easy process to go and do. So there's that aspect to it. So, I mean, if, let's say, the order book fills up in the next four weeks, then we'll have them out before Christmas and people can have them in time for Christmas. That's that aspect. And the other one was about as far as future games goes. What I can tell you is that every license we go for is a very strong license. What we believe is a very strong license. and one thing that I believe in the direction we have with our company is that we're not just going after the same demographics all the time because people have different tastes and maybe there should be a game orientated at families, one that's more orientated at adults. I'm a big believer, for example, that you can be a little bit risque, push the boundaries a little bit. One thing I firmly believe is that adults don't want to be treated as children. A lot of times adults want to get together, have some beers, play some pinball and if there's a bit of risque and a bit of some expletives or whatever, then great, let's have it as an unlockable function where you can go in there. And we did that on Full Throttle, for example. When we recorded all the voices for that, we had a 10-minute X-rated segment which has had every expletive under the sun there. I mean, you think Francisco Valentino insults the players at the moment, you wait for some of the words that he has coming out. You know, you want to be fighting this guy by the end of the game. Let's just have a little bit of fun into it. So we've got that as a feature, which will be, I mean, but specifically I have to be PC for one minute, you know, it's something which is unlockable with code, so your children can't get into it, but adults can get into it, so this is something that will be appearing. It's actually quite funny, in the recording session, I hope I'm not overrunning here, David, it was actually quite funny, because the guy doing the voices for Francisco Valentino is my oldest and my best friend, and he's a professional voiceover artist, and he started off as all Italian Francisco Valentino, but by the time we were into all of the X-rated stuff, he'd become Tony Montana from Scarface. And he's really good at that. And he was just able to use stitches for the whole thing. So I guess these are stories that you hear about over the years, Roger. There's some really fun stuff that happens in the development.
    83:11
    Well, your excitement is so clear and obvious. Now, we do have to call for a break right now because it is prize awarding time. There's a lot of surprises awarded. But on the other hand, your challenge is to make it from here to the door without all these people mobbing you. I welcome any questions, anybody wants to say anything to me.