You're listening to Topcast, this old pinballs online radio. For more information visit them anytime www.marvin3m.com. Flash Topcast. Today on Topcast we've got a Williams designer that's started working at Williams straight out of high school in 1970 and in 1978 designed his first game Phoenix for Williams. In between 1978 and 1996 he designed 35 games for Williams and his sales numbers are unbelievable selling over 135,000 pinball games for Williams in the period from 1978 to 1996. So I'd like to welcome Barry Oursler to Topcast today and Gary designed some great games for Williams including Gorgard, the first talking pinball machine, Jungle Lord, Barra Korra, Defender, Joust, the head-to-head game, of course Space Shuttle, Comet, Grand Lizard, Pinbott, Fire, Space Station, Cyclone, Police Force, Jokers, Bad Cats, Hardly Raymond Davidson, Doctor Who, Hurricane, Brahms Stroker's Dracula, Dirty Harry, WHO dunnit, Jack Bach, Junkyard and many others. Barry Oursler was definitely very prolific for Williams and again selling over 135,000 pinball games for Williams during this period. So we're going to give Barry a call right now on the phone and have a little chat with him. Hello. Hi, it's Barry there. This is Barry. This is Joshua Clay. Hey, how you doing? Good, how are you? Oh, pretty good. So tell me how you got into pinball and how you started working for Williams. I started working there the day after I graduated high school back in 1970 and I got a job working in the factory as a tester. What were you testing? I started out testing the back boxes, what do you call it, the neck panels that went inside the back boxes and the old lecture mechanical games. Oh, so what year was this? 1970. Oh, okay. So between 70, you know, it looks like your first game was the 1978 Phoenix. So between 70 and 78, you were basically working the factory line? I worked in the factory for about two and a half years and then I was offered a job up in engineering as a technician. So I went upstairs and I worked with Norm Clark and Steve Kortek. And designed the games and I would basically put all the whitewoods together and wire them up and get the game all ready for them. Now did you, you said you started working straight out of high school? Was this something that you wanted to do or just kind of fell into? Well, my father was working down in quality control over there and he told me that they were looking for some help there down in the, it was a place called the sample room where they would build like the 30 or 40 prototype games and that's where they got me in over there. And were you a pinball player or interested in pinball before this? Games, I always just play every chance I got when I, they were illegal in Chicago at the time. So anytime we won invocations or out of the city where they had games, I'd always look for them. So was this like, you know, just kind of a circumstantial thing that you just kind of fell into or you really wanted to work there? I guess at the beginning I think I kind of fell into it because I didn't really know what I was getting into when I started there. I won the full time job and things just happened to fall into place. So then after you were in the engineering department and putting together the white woods and working with Norm Clark and Steve Hordeck, you know, how did, how did things progress from there? Well, from there I guess I got a little better at putting these together. I was able to start drawing up the schematics for the electro mechanical games and I had come up with an idea for a game because I know it's a couple of the other guys that were working as technicians. They gave them a shot to try designing games and I told them I had an idea and they said, go ahead. Is that what ultimately became Phoenix? Right. And so that was, you know, the unique thing about Phoenix is that you've got the, in the center of the play field, you've got two singular drop targets and the lanes across the top and the lanes on the two inlanes, control those drop targets, raising them up. Right. And was that, that was, you know, what was the thinking behind that and how did you sell that to management to get the job? Hard to remember everything but I know we wanted different ways to make certain scores. We had to do one thing in order to earn something else. But once you knocked the target down, you couldn't get them back up again until you went and went over the roll of lanes. I guess they seemed to like the idea of that. They liked the idea of the little ramp I had on the left hand side. Or that one shot where it kind of goes up that, that almost like that tunnel, they hit that one target. Right. They could spell off Phoenix. Right. Right. Right. Yeah, actually, I actually own that game right now. Who you? Yeah. Alright. I kind of tripped into it but I, I really thought it was kind of a cool game myself. You know, and it was one of the early solid states. Now how was your transition from the lecture mechanical stuff to the solid state? It wasn't so hard as far as the game design. It was just trying to do any repairs on it. Because I mean, I know basic electronics but I can't really fix a circuit board, you know, trying to find out what the problem is. I can repair it. If somebody tells me this part's bad, you need to change it. But I wouldn't know how to troubleshoot it. The mechanical games I can do on blindfold. And was that because you were so used to putting them together in the engineering room? Right. So what I would do in the evenings and weekends is to work on the side repairing games for some of the operators. Because, you know, when you work on a factory, you know, they don't pay as much money or when you first start doing stuff up in engineering. You don't make as much as you do when you're designing. So I got into doing that. Now, it's probably making more money on the side. Now the Phoenix sold like slightly over 6,000 games, which actually seems like a pretty good sales number. Were they pretty happy with you? Yeah, they were. And that led, of course, to your next game, which was the time warp. Correct. And now that one sold even more. You sold 8800 units of that one. And you put something on this game that was this, your idea or was this management's idea or somebody else's idea to put banana flippers on that game? It wasn't really the first game to hit it on disco fever. And they said a lot of the women like the flippers because they can cradle the ball and make back shots and other stuff with the flippers. And they wanted management one of those flippers on the game. I didn't really. So that wasn't your idea then? I mean, there was a nice idea for doing some shots, but it's hard to make a good shot that you're aiming at, if you're aiming at a ramp on the game or something. And then you went to, you kind of hit the ball out of the park in 1979 with Gorgon. Gorgon, the first talking pinball machine is it maybe. Is there any stories behind that? Only story I remember from there, not so much how it came about, but when we had the game at the show, I don't remember the AMOI show or the ACTI show. The thing was so loud that Sam Stern came over to our booth and asked him to turn it on because they couldn't hear his games. Oh, because at the time, Sam Stern, of course, was now had part of his own company. He had the original Stern pinball, but he used to be over on the Versi Street. Right, because at one point, he was management at Williams. Right. He owned Williams at one time. Right, right. And then I forget the transition of how he came about with Stern. He bought Chicago coin. Right, right, right. So now when you sold on Gorgon, you sold like 14,000 units. I mean, they must have been loving you. Yeah, well, I think the main thing to the help that was that it was the first talking game in Gorgon happened to come out around the time that they developed the sound system for it. So you mean it was purely kind of coincidence that your game ended up with the talking? I kind of think it is. I mean, it was a good game to play. You know, I had a nice shot with the magnet on or something that we hadn't done on a pinball game before it magnets. It just happened to come about that. They had, you know, the talking system was limited, only a few words, but no other game had it at the time. Right. It was a seven word vocabulary, but it was still understandable and it worked. Right. Yeah, yeah, and it is a good game. It's kind of, now the artwork for Gorgon, was that your idea or just the artists? It was more of the artists. Did you have a theme in mind? Not 100%. We're trying to come up with something for it. We wanted to make it, I wouldn't say futuristic, but something unusual. Well, you know, I don't want to use the word demonic because that's not what I was looking at. But that's kind of what it looks like, but there was a lot of these dungeon and dragon type movies coming out around that time. And I think we tried the cash in on that, but heroes trying to save the girl from the beast. Now, on your prior games and games right around this, generally speaking, did you pick the theme or did somebody else pick the theme? I would come up with the theme or the name of the game. I mean, there had been like one incident maybe where somebody else comes up like a laser ball. Originally, we were calling it Williams Lanes. We were making a bowling game out of it. That's why I had the 10 roll over buttons in the middle. And we even had artwork and everything done on it. Then they decided that they didn't want to do it. They wanted a different theme. And I think somebody, I don't know, Steve Carter or somebody came up with the name laser ball. And on that game, that didn't do nearly as well as the Gorgar at 4,500 units sold. Was there, was that just because, you know, there was different change in the environment? Or, you know, it just, you know, you can't, you can't sell a million of every game every time. Are you referring to laser ball? Right, laser ball. That was a wide body game too. Right. Oh, so for a wide body, that was actually pretty good sales. Right. They never sold that many of them. Right. Right. And also a wide body too, which came out next. Yes it was. Now what was there any stories behind the Scorpion game? Not, not too much that I can remember. I was just trying to make this, another follow up to the last wide body that I made and just trying to do some other unusual stuff. I think that then they had, I think Atari was doing middle earth or, oh, they were, they might have been after that even. But we were just trying to come up with it like a similar type of theme. Now why were they going with the wide body pins opposed to the normal size ones? What was the thinking behind that? The only thinking I can come up with really is that somebody else was doing it too and they didn't want to be left in the dust, you know, if it did take off because then Atari was doing nothing about wide bodies at the time. And so the competition was basically driving that horse. Right. Nothing valid was doing wide bodies. So if you don't do one and the games do well, then you're going to be the last one. Right. How did you feel about the wide body theme? It was good if it was done right. Like when I did laser ball, I kind of laid it out like a narrow body game and had other stuff along the sides. So the game would play like a small game. But some of them were so wide that it just took too long for the ball to do anything. There's just a lot of open dead space. In 1981, Jungle Lord came out and there was, I think, where the cabinet was available, I guess, as a red cabinet and then it switched to a blue, what was the story behind that? I think that was mostly just because they just didn't like the color. I don't know if it just didn't test well or somebody in management didn't like it. It just didn't look right. So that was nothing that you were determining there? No, no. Sometimes they'll make a couple different sample color cabinets and if they don't like it, they'll go and switch it. They'll people involve the marketing people and the designers and somebody says they don't like it. It'll take like a vote on it then. Prior to Jungle Lord, who was doing most of the programming for your games? Different people. Well, I know Eugene Jarvis and Larry Demar were doing programming before they got into the video. So I ended up until 1980. I kind of think who else was there. There was a guy named Randy Fyfer. I know he did some programming for us. Did you have a particular programmer that you really like to work with? Well, later on we did when Bill Fudsenroider was programming and some of the later guys, you know, Dwight Sullivan, the people that are still around doing it. But in the past, the programming really wasn't as complicated as it is now. Right. So it didn't make that much difference really. Right. So your fire sold just, you know, you know, like a little almost 800 units. What, what was the deal with that game? Why did sales not do so well on that one? With that, it was probably because of the timing on it, when Defender had come out and somebody, all the other video games were getting really hot and everything in early 80s, which was completely dead from like 81 to 85. And you're lucky to sell 2,000 games of anything. And I think Solar Fire was one of my best layouts. Action it had, you know, a two level play field on it. Yeah, lots of shoot at on a lot of rules. Yeah, it's kind of a cool game. Was Solar Fire, do they ever consider having that, having speech for in Solar Fire at all? Not that I recall. I don't remember them ever putting it in there at the time. And where did that theme come from? I just kind of came up with it, you know, I just wanted to do something, you know, what do you want to call it, like sci-fi? You did a lot of like the space and kind of sci-fi, you know, theme. You really liked those, eh? Yeah, I kind of did, yeah. Okay, did you, when you were growing up, were you like a comic book person or anything? Oh yeah, I liked those. I just like, you know, whatever sci-fi I can find, which is a little harder back then, except for the old B movies. One that people really like as far as the artwork goes was the Barra Cora, or Barra Cuda. I guess was the original name? Yeah, I guess it was like a chorus between a woman and a fish if you kind of look at the creature. So they could be under calling it Barra Cora, like her name would be Cora and the Barra Cuda. Becky originally was laid out by Roger Sharp and Steve Epstein and the layout I guess was as good as they wanted, so they wanted me to help them with the side just took it and just relayed out the whole playfield made a whole new drawing for it. Kind of touched on that the game actually came from Roger Sharp and then you kind of like finished it up, is that what you were saying? Yeah, Roger Sharp and Steve Epstein had drawn up a playfield, you know, years ago back before Barra Cora and I basically took a little bit of what they had and just redesigned the whole game, came up with a whole new playfield for it. So did you incorporate their ideas or their design at all? Right, there might have been a little bit of it in there. I don't have a copy of the old drawing, I wish I did to make a comparison, but there are a lot of changes made out of it. Did that game ever, was it ever meant to have speech? No, I think so. Did it take a longer or shorter amount of time to develop that? I mean, you know, because of the Roger Sharp and the Epstein involvement, that made things easier or harder. It didn't really take that much longer because back then the playfields were a lot easier to do. They didn't have any toys on it like they have now, you know, anything that we made back in the 90s. Those games back there, I mean, that's the word about mecha, I can draw a playfield up in two or three days. One that you put together that didn't get ever gets sold was the spellbinder, which I guess was like maybe the mate hyperball, you know, really wasn't a pinball game, it was more of a gun game and a pinball cabinet. Hyperball. Yeah, so what was the story with that? Why didn't that ever get made? I mean, they only made, I think, like ten of them, the game played real well, but I guess hyperball kind of crashed or having a lot of trouble. We had the ball feeder on there and the things were breaking down a lot and just didn't do as well as they thought it would do. So then they kind of took it and put it on the shelf. So what was the difference between spellbinder and hyperball and gameplay? Basically the rules that we had on there. What I did is I had different shots. We had to do things that were different than a hyperball and on the back I did remember like the bear used to shoot on the old gun games. We did it with a dragon. You'd have to hit it before it got off to the edge of the site. If you hit it, it would keep going back and forth. Hyperball was just like shooting at flashing lights and that was it. One game that you did was in 1982, the end in 1982 was defender and I understand that you worked on that with Joe Chemical. Right. I think Joe and I came in with Larry was involved in that. He wanted to do a defender pinball so I came up and did the actual play field drawing for it and Joe helped out with the rules and some of the other things on the game to make it as close as we could to the actual, you know, to the way the video game played. And how was it working with Joe? It was pretty good. I mean, you had a lot of ideas and he was good at getting things done like we needed to get a license for a game or something. He was able to find the right people to do it. Of course he would. How long had he been at Williams at that time? I want to say it could have been more than a couple of years at the lowest. It's that long because I think he left there after space shuttle, like 85, 86 or something. I know he'd only been there for a few years. What was the deal with in another one that kind of got that didn't get made was rat race with Steve Cordack. Is there any stories with that? I think the game might have been ahead of its time. We were trying to cash in on the novelty craze because the pinball was still kind of quiet around that time and I was trying different things. I was doing that, you know, any kind of game that was maybe close to pinball but not quite a pinball that maybe we can use in place of some of the arcade games that were out there. And one of the mechanical engineers that worked there came up with a mechanism that he was used to tilt things back and forth like the old Abram toys that. And I decided to develop it into a game. So he put joysticks on it to control it. We had a couple of motors so you can go on an XY axis with this thing and try and guide the ball through a maze. I mean, everybody loved the game but for some reason it just didn't take off. Now what was Cordack's involvement with that? I mean, I had a lot that I could remember. I mean, he was supportive with it but just about the whole design on it was mine as far as the play field and the mechanical engineer did the actual mechanism that went underneath it. Remember his name was Doug but I can't remember his last name. Another one that was really pretty cool that might have been ahead of its time was the head to head game Joust which is really kind of a wild game. I mean, that was your, how did that come about? I wanted to do a game that was basically based on the Joust video game because in that game you're playing two people, you know, constantly head to head on that game and I wanted to see if I can do a pinball that was like that and it was great if you had two people playing but when one person played he had to operate both sets of flippers and it was a lot more difficult for anybody to do that. And you think that's what held the sales back? Probably plus I think a lot of people felt it wasn't really a true pinball game because it didn't have the backbox on there and some of the other features. Well then in 1984 of course you hit another one out of the park with Space Shuttle. Give me the background on that game. Well, that was a game that originally that was Joe Kamenkau and Larry DeMar had come up with a layout for a play field. I think that you would have a placement at an arrest round. I said finally we would draw it up just like we've got it, we'll build a game and see how it plays and it just didn't work out as well as they'd hope. So that was another one sort of like Barracore where I took it and re-drew the whole thing and made a whole different play field layout. Was it really a lot different than what they first came up with? Yeah, it was a lot different. I wish I'd kept the original drawing. Also that placement has a lot gone, huh? Yeah. Yeah. But you could have seen the difference. Now did you have to... The contact NASA and get us everything we needed in your pictures and permission to do the whole thing? So you had to actually license that with NASA? I don't know if we actually paid them or not. That I'm not sure but I know we had to have permission to do it. When that one sold, you know, that sold like 7,000 units. They must have, you know, in prior to that, you know, not since Jungle Lord in 81 had really any pinball machine sold any kind of substantial numbers. Right. They'd given us an ultimatum, what they did was before that game was produced. They went and looked at all the games that we were developing at the time and they came down with whatever game we pick as to make it big this time. Otherwise we're going to shut down pinball. That's where it ended up. And they decided to go with space shuttle because I already had Starlight done before space shuttle. And I think Mark Ritchie had something going, Steve Ritchie had something going but I guess they weren't far enough along and they liked this game enough to give it a shot. And the rest was history, I guess it worked. Do you think that the space shuttle theme really helped with it? Or do you think it was just the, you know, the basic game rules and game design that really sold it or just a combination of everything? I think it's a combination. I mean the theme melted a lot. Plus it was the first game we had with plastic ramps on there and we put a little model space shuttle on there to work. Too many toys on the previous games until then. And then the next one that you did that went, that you sold really well on another one that you hit out of the park was of course, comment. And that one you were working with with Python on. Right. Was there was this the, was that the first game you worked with Python? I believe so, yeah. How was it working with him? It was an experience. I mean Python's a great guy. You know, he's a little strange, but he's really good. He's really talented. You know, you know, he knows what he's doing. Now was he doing the helping with play field designer? Was he doing the art or a little of both? He was doing the artwork. And some of the later games he would come up with themes and sometimes I would actually build the game around the theme. This game originally, comment was originally called Riverview. I don't know if you're familiar with Chicago with the amusement park that you used to be here. Right, right. The Riverview. Right across the river from Waroyums is, and I had originally called a Riverview and designed all the different rides on. The comment was the right at Riverview. And they had, you know, the dump, the dummy and all the other different rides that I had on there. And then we decided that not enough people around the world know what Riverview is. You know, somebody in Europe wouldn't know what it was. So we decided just to give it a different name. So I needed to have to one of the rides. The artwork, you know, on comment, I mean, was there, did you give any direction there? Was that just Python to all of them? That we kind of let Python go wild with it. Now I gave them an amusement park theme with all the different rides and just, you know, come up with something good to go with it. That's where you put all the people on the play field looking up at everything and the back glass with the different characters and some celebrities in the back of the roller coaster. Yeah, that one that came that came to really well. I mean, it's, you know, a lot of people, I mean, look for that game till today. It's one of the first games they said to the two that a lot, it was like equally played by men and women. In the past, they might think most of the man's game or young guys we played it. But this game, young people, old people, women, everybody was playing the game. And I tried to make lighter based themes while some of the other guys that were designing, were doing some of the real macho games, but they kind of kept certain people away from them though. Oh, you mean that certain people got steered towards certain themes? Right. The Steve Richies of the World got like the macho stuff. Right, you know, he's got the black knight or some other, you know, big tough guy on their high speed, which I mean, those games are both great and they did really well. And I was trying to make something that was more universal that everybody could enjoy. You know, I have to try and aim it at one group. And speaking of which, on the space shuttle, I mean, do you, in your opinion, you know, a lot, you hear a lot of people say that was the game that saved Williams. I mean, is that kind of how you read it to? Well, that's what everybody was saying. I mean, I guess whatever game they put out, if it, if another game had been put out and that game did well, that would have been called the game that saved it. That just happened to be the game that they picked. You know, I can't say what the other games would have done. Right. Glad it worked. Yeah, and it sure did work. Yeah, at least we got another, you know, 10, 12 years. How do Williams? Right. Right. So were they serious about shutting it down? Yeah, they said they were. Well, that would have changed a whole bunch of stuff, huh? I know. Because I mean, nothing was selling more than maybe 2,000 games if you were lucky. Up until that point. Tell me about Grand Lizard. You know, how did that game come about? Grand Lizard was, I guess, that kind of did it as a filler game. I basically took solar fire since it didn't do as well as I wanted. I took the whole solar fire game and made it into a single level game. And if you look at the layout on it, it's real similar. Look at all the shots and everything on it except it's a single play field. And then we came up with some new idea of putting these wire cages on it to launch the ball. So you can get the ball up over different areas right off the shot to make up the difference on it. And we had Paul Faris do some artwork on it. And Python originally did the lizard head on there. He's one of like sculpted the original head. And then what did they, what did he sculpt the head and then they sent it out to get him molded? Right, well he came up basically like the drawing for it. Then there was a guy named Jerry Pinsler who used to do all of our, not really molds, but he would come up like our actual sculptures. And he would take it and he made the actual sculpture for us. And then they do what they make a mold off of that. The next one that you really was a big home run was of course pinbat. And you did that when I guess with Python? Yeah, that's when I, Python and I worked together. Python came up with a crazy drawing for a robot with flipper fingers and different other little crazy ideas on there. And I took his actual artwork drawing and made a game out of it. I took what he had under. He had, you know, like the robot with the visor and the eyeballs. And I had the idea of putting the target bank in front of something that I had designed. So we kind of use that as his teeth where you basically hit him in the teeth and that drops down. The visor opens up. Yeah, that little corkscrew. He had something on the side and I worked on that with Joe Joe's to try and get a skill shot out of it. But it was like Python's original artwork drawing that I had worked on in order to make this whole thing work. And then what is, and then that was programmed by I think Larry Demar? No, I think was what's. Okay, now you see that Bill and Python seem to be kind of a team. Was that by invention or was that just how it worked? Well, certain times you want certain people on your team to work on a game. It's something like that. What do you mean? You know, when you got a game where you think it's going to be really great, you want to try and get the program where you think it's the best that you can get the work on it. And plus Bill worked well with Python. I worked well with Python. You know, there's certain people sometimes that they can't work together. Certain people didn't want to work with Python or some people maybe didn't want to work with a different programmer. But the three of us seem to be pretty well. Python really is first name. Yes, his name is Python Vladimir Python Anghelo. Yeah, man, we got to have some words with his mother. He's a very unusual person, but I tell you he's very smart. Right, now what was any interesting stories working with Python? I heard he was a little wild. Yeah, he was pretty wild. I mean, he would be working on a project with us and he would disappear for a week to weeks at a time. And just come up with some big story when he came back. He was all fun, so far he went national geographic or whatever he'd come up with. And then we'd have three days from our deadline and then he'd work for three or four days straight to get the artwork done. So he never missed a deadline? Not that I remember. I mean, he got it done, but he was like, he worked better under pressure. If he gave him three months, he'd wait two months and 27 days before he'd start on it. Yeah, I bet that drove some people crazy. Oh, yeah, because especially with management, they want to see something. They want to see a sketch. They want to see something on it. To see how it's going to look and it's going to work. They want something thrown at him and say, well, we're forced to do it now. Now, whose idea was it to come up with the fire pinball? That seemed like kind of a cool theme. That was something I worked out at Mark Sprenger. I can't remember if he came up with the fire theme or if I came up with it. He came up with the idea of doing it as like an old period piece like a Skogel fire from 1800s. And whose idea was it to put the cow thing in there? That was one of the programmers. I don't know where they got it from. They started putting cows in every single game we made starting right around that time. Or even doctor who any game you make certain shots on there, you start getting these moves sounds. There's some kind of like a joke that they had done in there, but you only get it at certain times. So that was the programmers that were doing that? But the cows in this game kind of fit because we kind of loosely based it on this recall of a fire when they always get a cow kicked over the lamp. So it's kind of fit in with this. Now why the fire champagne edition? That was back when the, we used to call them fern buyers, were real popular. Like the Benningons type restaurants where the people would sit there with the brass rails and they'd be having their drinks. They wanted something that looked like a piece of furniture that they would put in some of these places that you wouldn't normally get a pinball machine. So was this a request by some of the distributors? I think it was more management. Unless somebody said something to them that I'm not aware of, but they wanted to make like a few hundred of these pieces and if they worked out they might even make more of them. And basically the cabinet we had like gold rails and an oak type look to it. And I guess you had some mechanical animation in the backbox that wasn't in the standard fire. Right. We had the legs were like brass plated. The armor was brass plated. You know we had the brass bell up on top. Then remember in the play field you had the little rotating lights. We had two of them in the backbox in addition to it. Like right around the squirtish plays or something right? There were two of them back there. Yeah were they like above the displays or something? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because the displays were down at the bottom between the speakers. They were like right behind the horses. There's like one on the left side, one on the right side. And if you have a picture in front of you or your computer in front of you or anything. I'm just kind of going by memory. You know I own that game for a long time and due to space constraints I got rid of it. The one thing that was funky on that game for me personally is it had no pop bumpers. You know I thought that was really unusual you know because pop bumpers and slingshots were like the pop bumpers slingshots and flippers were like the three mainstay things of pinball machines from the beginning of the end of World War II. So it seemed it was kind of odd that it didn't have any. I was trying to do something different with the game. I wanted to make it like you're actually fighting fires and if you put them off fast enough the fires would start spreading. You know you have to hit the target. If it's street targets flashing you have to hit those targets before a fourth one catches on or a fifth one. So the really wasn't room for the jet bumpers because I wanted some other different features in the back end over there. The space station game. Was that your theme or somebody else's? That was mine. Now why space station? I wanted to do it as a sequel to Space Shuttle. It's something else you know to make it a lot different. Plus they're always talking about building the international space station. So I was trying to you know catch up with the themes. I know like we do with space show. We got it that one. It was popular and this is when the space station was becoming popular. There were three number 1251 flash lamps that essentially kind of stay on in the in the backbox during the game during gameplay. Was that by design or what was the thinking behind that? Yeah we did it delivery. We just wanted the back glass to pop out more than what normal lights on there. You know a few more hot spots like in the tail of the space shuttle that was flying up there and you know around the space station. We just wanted to stand out more. Okay now in what about the the lack of any inlanes on this game which kind of seems unusual for games of that time. Was there what was the thinking behind that? So with that I just wanted to make some more shots at the bottom of the plate to which we normally couldn't have because if you put you know double lanes on both sides and put the slingshot kickers in there you can't shoot as far down on there. So what I did the conference say is I put two kickers on either side to return the ball back into play if you had a lift. And how did you think that worked out? I thought it worked out pretty good. I mean we tried to develop a mechanism in there so we at least we had like a little space station that would actually move and send the ball to different shots when you make it depending on what position it was in. I don't remember exactly what the numbers were on it. Yeah it sold about 3,800 or so but I mean which was probably pretty decent for the time. You know but it was nothing compared to what you came out with next which was cyclone and again that was with Bill and Python and that game sold you know over 9,000 units and that was another home run. You know anything now why cyclone? Well I like the way the comment team was received so I wanted to do another I guess a amusement park theme and I was kind of in the rollercoasters because I spent my childhood going to Riverview and all the different local amusement parks and the themes always seemed to work out pretty good so I tried to make a whole different layout now put some different features on there. I think that was when I had the Ferris wheel on and had some different ramp shots and all the crazy stuff on there. The wheel of fortune in the backbox we just got into stepper motors and I wanted to find some way of putting that into the game so that we have at least some kind of a random thing in the game where somebody has a chance to get something that maybe isn't that good of a player. Now Python did he help out much with that or did he just do the art? That one was more my idea but he came up with all the crazy ideas for the artwork but the actual mechanical play field layout was mine on that one. His main one was when he came up with in bot where I kind of designed it around his artwork. I had a theme ahead of time and back in the old days we started doing games like in the early 70s and 80s we would just develop a game and come up with a theme for later on and put artwork on it. But as time went on we started actually designing games around the theme so it fit together better. Now whose idea was it to put the celebrities on the back glass on that one? That was Python. Was there any repercussions to that? Not really because that one was I think was not the one with the Reagan's on it. Yeah exactly. Right and he was president and they make political cartoons with the president all the time so without any problems. I don't know what the word is that he used for it but like public domain or whatever it is. Right and now the management didn't have any problems with that either? No. Was there anybody in the cars in the taxi? Pardon me? I said if there was any problems they would have changed it like they had to do with taxi when they had Marilyn Monroe on there. Do you remember that? Yeah I remember they had to change it from Marilyn to somebody that didn't have blonde hair. We're going to rebrew that and call it a Lola or something else. Right. Because I guess her state the people were complaining about they didn't want her likeness on the game. We're going to take a short break talking with Barry Oursler the Williams pinball designer and we'll be back in just a moment. The Pin Game Journal is a proud sponsor of Topcast. It covers pinball like no other publication can. The Pin Game Journal is America's only pinball publication. Whether you're looking for new games or the classics reports on industry shows or collector expos. Insights on a game you want or features to help you fix the game you've got pin game journals for you. Your website is at pingamejournal.com. Alright we're back with Barry Oursler the Williams pinball designer. Now when you did these games did you keep any of these games for your own collection? I had a lot of games. I didn't start it with Space Shuttle. I had gotten one of every game that I had designed but then I ended up selling them a couple years after I was let go over it Williams. So you must have had a pretty good collection then? About 12 or 13 games at one time. There are a couple people that there's likenesses of them but not exactly on that thing. I think one guy and I were supposed to look like little like Harold Washington. That would used to be the mayor of Chicago. But the other people is not really anybody from here. I think on comedy had a few other people that looked like different celebrities. So now the next game that came out was Joker's and that game again was with Python and it used stereo sound. What was the story behind that? I think they just changed their sound boards so we're able to get a little better sound effects where they can actually work at a left channel and right channel where you can make the sounds come out differently on there. You can make the left speaker talk, make the right speaker talk separately. Did you think that worked out pretty well on Joker's? I think it worked out pretty good because it had some pretty good speech in there. It was kind of a funny thing too. Yeah it's a good game. I see a lot of them too. I'm kind of a poker for neck. I've been playing poker all my life. So I wanted to do a card game and Python came up with all this artwork to go with it. We used a wheel in there that we had from Cyclone. We used that in there to help deal cards off for like a special hand. Now on police force you worked with Mark Ritchie and Python on that. Was there any stories behind that game? That game originally wasn't police force. It was going to be Batman. But I think there were some delays with the movie or some problems getting the license. And we had to come up. We had a game already to go. We had all the artwork done. Ready to screen the playfields. And we were told we had to change it so we came up with a different theme. So instead of having a Batmobile we used it as a police car and the spell off sound like the police spell out. I think originally it was Batman. So we had to come up with all new artwork for it and new rules. Now when something like that happens does that really put a damper on the project? It can. I mean it sometimes it can really throw you off and screw you up on there. But this one I mean we seem to still get the game out in pretty much record time. I think they want to hurt the most. I think it was Python because he had to redo all of our work. When you were trying to get the Batman theme was just prior to any of the Batman movies? This was right around the time that the first Batman movie came up. I'm trying to think what year that was. Well the game came out in 1989. I don't remember. The movie was out around that time. 88, 89 some were on that time. Yeah because it seemed to me that Dede East got that theme but it was more like a 91 or something. Maybe it was tied in with the second movie. You know Michael Keaton, what do you do two or three movies? You know I don't know I'm not familiar enough with the Batman theme. With the very first one they did. But you couldn't you just couldn't get that license huh? Right. Or there was a delay with the movie. There's something that kept us from it. I'm thinking I had something to do with the license. Now what was Mark Ritchie's involvement with this game? We both kind of came up with the ideas. What we wanted to know he came up like part of the play field layout. I came up with part of the layout and I drew it up and Mark and I. I think the puts him right about working at one two of this and also Python and we all worked on the rules together for it. Now the next one he came out with was Bad Cats which was kind of an interesting game. Single ball not a multiball game and it had really kind of cool animation in the backbox. Any stories behind that game? That was some that Python came up with that one too. He always had something unusual that he wanted to do on the game and this one he had the idea with the woman swinging the broom, swatting the cat and the cat would spin around. We took, I think it's another one we used a stepper motor in there that was used on jokers and on cyclone. Kind of a cool game. You know, it's really interesting looking that's for sure. You know, I guess that's Python again, huh? Yeah, it was. I had one of those games and I ended up selling it years ago. Who was it? I think it was it lead singer of the drummer from Motley Crew. They were looking for a game and somebody I know, I guess knew them and I knew that I had a game and we ended up selling it to them. Now why would he want that game? I guess they liked the game. There's some reason, you know, maybe they thought they were bad cats. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I'm trying to think of the guys and I think it was the singer but I can't remember his name on top of my head. Was there ever, I mean, that was like a not a multiball game. Was there, why did that game go with just a single ball instead of multiball? I still wanted to do it like I did with cyclone and comments. Yeah, I just was more, you know, interested in the gameplay than having to have multiball on it, you know. So there wasn't any pressure from anybody to say, hey, most of our games are multiball. You know, you didn't get that any of that kind of pressure. No, because I did a lot of games like that. Even other games are multiball. I go into a single ball game and I do multiball. It's kind of like alternate back and forth. Did you find that the single ball games were harder or easier to design? It wasn't really any easier, I mean, because you had to compensate by having the rules, you know, be a little more complicated on the games. Now the next one that you did was the Harley Davidson game and that one seemed, all of us like the Gottlieb Street level games where there weren't any ramps. It seemed fairly simple. How did that game work come about? Yeah, that's pretty much what they wanted to do because Gottlieb had outsovers sluggier and that was the back one games where starting to slow down again and they wanted to make a game that was a little bit less expensive to make that they can, you know, sell for people with very low maintenance. Because all the other games had so many mechanisms on the games that break down people, be fixing them every other day. But this one had hardly any moving parts other than the bumpers and the kickers on it. How did you think that came come out? I thought it came up pretty good because we worked hard on the rules. I worked on that with Mark Sprenger and we both, Harley Davidson, planned up in Milwaukee. You know, took some pictures, talked to people there and this came up with some ideas what to do with it. We decided to make a cross country trip where you're hitting all these cities along the way. Were there hardly any sort of hard license to work with? Really, we didn't really have any problems with them. They just had to approve what we did though. Once we got all the artwork done, we had to submit it to them before we can do anything to make sure that they approve with the way the artwork, I guess, would portray them. And there really weren't that many revisions on there after they looked at it. The next one you came out with in 91 was Hurricane and that was your first game with a dot matrix display and also art by John Yalsey. Any stories behind that game? I think Python was already left Williams. I remember Cretty because he didn't do that much on that game. He even though he worked on the first two carnival games. Now, I just wanted to do a trilogy and do a third beat, you know, up when they were called like a carnival theme, like the other ones were amusing park theme. And we used John Yalsey who had done some artwork for Pat Lawler and a couple other guys there originally. So the hurricane was the trilogy of the kind of the roller coaster games. Was hurricane based on any particular amusement park? Not that one really. I just tried to come up with a clever roller coaster. The roller coaster is always the main thing and I tried to come up with a clever roller coaster name. And I'd gotten some different books. He had books on Riverview and books on other places that had roller coasters and there was one called a hurricane. The name kind of caught my eye so I decided to use that name on there. I took the Ferris wheel and decided to make it into a double Ferris wheel. So I remember seeing one. I don't, at some place at a carnival in Tandoor was a double decker Ferris wheel where these things would be one spinning on the bottom and one spinning up above with a shaft in between them and they would alternate places. Instead of being at the top of the Ferris wheel, you'd be at the top of the second Ferris wheel. So I tried to use something like that except that didn't really have the height to do it. So I kind of put them side by side where one would be the other one. And how did you think that game was received? It was fairly well but I'm thinking that was around the time that they were making Adam's family so it didn't do as well as it could because of the games that were coming out right around the same time. Did you like the dot matrix display? Yeah, I thought it was pretty clever because you can do a lot with it now instead of just having scores on it, they can actually put an animation on it. We could put a little miniature video games into the game. If you do certain things on it, you can get a little video mode. We'd start putting it into the games. What did you think? Did you like the video modes? There were a couple of them that were good, not all of them. I mean a lot of them were received very simple or waste of time. But it was a little break. If you did something really well in the game, you could get a little break to sit down and relax for a second. Next one they came out with was Doctor Who. Now how did that license come about? That one, I was a big fan of Doctor Who and Bill Futzenverter was a big fan. He wanted to try and design his own game. There were a game of chance. He was mostly this programming and he thought he could do the whole game himself and he made up like a rough play field layout. I guess he was running into a lot of problems with it. I joined up with him and re-did the whole layout and tried to keep some of what he had on there. Then I added on to what I had done on pinback before with the visor that went up and down, decided to put a three level into there. We have a little play field on top and you have the target you hit when it's up. Then when it's up all the way, there's like three little trap doors in there. We worked on this whole thing together. It was a joint design. That moving, I don't know if you want to call it the elevator or whatever, that was really well done. I thought that was pretty cool because you locked the two balls and it moves up and you hit the set of targets and it moves up again and you drop the balls inside. The one thing that was really always scares me about that game is whenever I take the top class off. You get that message, keep your hands and fingers away from the meat slicer. I know. We used to have different names for that thing. We were calling it a lot machine or the food processor because I mean if you did put something in it when it was going up and down, it would snap a pencil. Then when we put a safety switch on it, some guy was working at it and there was a kid and he had a kid and he stuck his fingers in there. We wanted to do the fingers chop off. Did you ever get any stories where that actually happened or is somebody got hurt by it? I haven't heard anything. The glass is off or the front door is open. The play field won't move. Right, which is probably a good thing. Right, because I mean you always hear about these different lawsuits for every little thing. There's always some dummy using a thing that I can do it is I'm not going to get hurt. Now how did management feel about that whole apparatus? That thing had to be expensive to make. It was quite expensive but I made that the main feature in the game. You notice there's not too many other moving parts on there except for a couple of ball poppers. You know you've got some bumpers and a couple of kickers and your flippers. Some other games might have three or four different gadgets. We decided to put it onto one big gadget but it did a lot of different things. It was like three different toys and one. Now whose idea was it to put the lightning flippers on which are about just a little bit of smidget shorter than the standard flippers? I think it was kind of a mutual thing because they were trying to keep the ball time down in some of the games because they get some of the operators and other people were complaining that the games weren't making as much money as they like. So we tried to shorten the ball time a little bit on there but put no slippers on there which did the job. And other things too with the slippers is they don't flex as much as you have the ones you can make some of the shots better. You just can't make certain shots if they're way off the side at easily. So you didn't see them as a bad thing at all then? No. The banana flippers like I said back on time or if not that was something different. I didn't really like that much but management wanted them on there. These I didn't really mind the shorter flippers on there. But when you designed the game, the game was designed with normal flippers right? Right originally. Right and then they just kind of added these on at the end. So before we ever really put them on a test plan, we'd just build one game and we would play it and kind of determine what we should do with the rest of them. We try with the shorter flippers and the shots are a lot stronger with these shorter flippers. Just that some of the shots that are way off to the far right or far left, they're a little harder to make. But you have a little better control with these flippers. And it does keep the ball time down. So was everybody pretty happy with the doctor who? Yeah, I think they were. Now what about the Dalek thing on the top? That was originally animated right? Right. The original, I think the first ten games or so we had that on there where when the Dalek talked ahead with swing back and forth as it was talking just like it did on the doctor who TV show, then they decided to cut some of the cost back on the game. Do you think that was a detriment to the game? I don't think it really hurt because I mean the game sold pretty well. Like it sold like 8000 or so then. Yeah, it sold almost 8000, that's right. Yeah, it did really well. That was my first doctor who was my first Williams dot matrix game that I ever bought. I thought it was a great game, but just I had never even heard of doctor who before at the time. So it was kind of a, I didn't know what doctor who was. Well, I mean that's been around since the early 60s. Very old, I mean it was on TV for like 30 years. I must have missed it. I was over here, I think it didn't come around here until like the 80s. Yeah, I must have missed that whole doctor who thing because I didn't have a clue what it was. It turns out my sister was a big doctor who fan and she kind of like, you know, informed me of what it was. Well, yeah, actually in every episode. Right, so you were a huge fan of doctor who was. That's why I didn't mind working on this with with with with with. Now Linda deal did the artwork was this like your first experience with her? Yeah, it was the first first game I worked out with Linda. She had been there for a little while, but it was the actual game. First game I worked out with her and this seemed to work out pretty good for her because her artwork was more lighthearted. This seemed to fit, you know, what she was doing. You know, more than I would have Python or somebody else do it. Okay, now the next game is one that's really dark, but it's really a cool game is the prom strokeers Dracula. How did it was that a theme that you wanted to do? That one. I remember who the movies do on up with Columbia or who the studio is. They approached this with the themes. I guess they knew we were starting to do other games like we'd done Indiana Jones and some other movie themes and they want to know if we were interested in licensing, you know, that particular product and I grabbed it up and designed a game around it. I kind of worked on that one in Mark's Springer. I'm getting the copies of the script and we got some still shots and they gave us some speech from the actual movie that we tried to tie it in with the actual movie release. But I did want to do it because what happened originally it wasn't Dracula. Originally it was going to be tied in with the Alien 3 movie that was coming out at the time and they decided to rewrite the whole movie. I mean I had the game all laid out as being aliens and when I had the movie ball on the play field it was tied in with the Alien theme originally. What they did was they completely rewrote the script and changed the movie for aliens and it wasn't time and I had a game ready. We needed to build something and they happened to come up with the Dracula theme so I just kind of changed it over and made a few adjustments on there and made it actually fit in with it. So who did that must have impacted obviously the art but it must have also impacted the programmers too. Not as much because a lot of the stuff was on there in programs you know we had a lot of the rules in there we just changed what we call them. But as far as what the game actually did it was still pretty close to the same. Now how was the Mist multiball thing incorporated into the Alien thing? Don't remember exactly what I was doing with the Alien because it never really got to that point. I think that was something I was just developing right around the time when we had changed it. I come up with some crazy idea because people always tell us there's magnets on the games that move the balls. I decided to put a magnet and I actually moved the ball except I wanted to make it do more than just that. So we ended up putting a little infrared beam on there where the ball would be sitting on the beam while it's moving across and if you knock it off you start a multiball on a double score or triple score or whatever it's doing. Yeah it was really a cool effect. I mean it's basically like a genie garage door opener underneath the play field with a magnet attached to it that drives the ball across and you're trying to knock the ball off the magnet during multiball. You know really really imaginative. It's one of the coolest toys I've ever seen implemented into a pinball machine. It really enjoyable thing that you know I mean it's like whenever I play that game it's like man I got to get Mist multiball. I got to see it do that. I know it and we had three like three different multiball features in that game and if you got all three of them going you'll get like a super multiball and the points would you know be like kind of like 10 or 20 times whatever it was. I've read about technical manuals and stuff where it said that the flasher's could actually mess up that infrared beam that has to go across the play field which tracks whether the ball is on that missed magnet. You know tell me about that and any problems that you might have encountered. It wasn't too much with it but if somebody took a real bright light or a flashlight after room was too well lit we tried to shield as best as we can but the light actually got in there and interfered with it. It wouldn't really know if the ball was ever there or not because the ball could be knocked off and there would still be light shining on there. I know we had that problem before with some of the ramps where they had instead of a switch they had apples on the ramps that would detect the ball going by and every once in a while either the general illumination lights or the flasher's would set it off and make the ramp start scoring or make it look like there's a stuck switch when there really wasn't. Was there anything else about the Dracula game that you were you know that you thought was a pretty neat feature? Everybody seemed like the coffin multiball we put the ball inside there and originally we wanted him to sit up in the coffin when the balls went in but we had too many mechanisms on the game already plus the height restriction wasn't a room to have the guy actually sit up because he'd be hitting the glass but I think on the very original prototype we had a little solenoid in there with actually make the body sit up in the coffin. Yeah that would have been really cool. Yeah I would have loved to see that. Yeah I guess you can have it all huh? No I know we had to limit it somewhere plus it was kind of restricted because we had the you know the multiball mechanism underneath there and the bumpers and everything else right in that same area this wasn't a room to put all the parts. Now the next one that came out was kind of an odd game the pup I saves the earth. How now who came up with that theme? That's another python. He completely drew up a whole thing that looked like a Antonio Cruz ship like a Noah's Ark Antonio Cruz ship with some crazy little animals on there and different things and that's another that I did sort of like pinbott where I took his artwork and developed a game around the artwork. I mean if you had like Blutel said I put things where you can actually hit Blutel in the face or his nose would light up or different things on there. Now why would pup I want to save the earth though? Puppie to me was always about eating the spinach, beating up the bad guy and getting the