Make sure your device is attached in a
Yeah, we're like mid-con conversation when it drops in. Uh
true. I should probably unmute you. Uh hello everybody. It's an episode of the Dirty Pool podcast. We're here. It's real. Uh and hopefully the audio is working again. I've just reupdated a bunch of stuff. Uh this is as every episode is a very special one. I say that each time, but uh this one's like serious. I have been uh trying to get you on the podcast for a while and it just happened. It just happened. All the stars aligned. I couldn't be happier about it, everybody. Uh it's Bug from Spooky Pinball. Hello.
How's it going? I finally answered my Instagram DMs. That's why we're here. I finally checked them.
I kept sending you dick pics and finally you responded. Uh so
he kept saying, "Please respond." I showed you. Please respond. And I was like, "All right." I just kept begging.
So, we got a lot to talk about today. Uh, obviously, we're going to talk about uh a little game called Beetlejuice. I don't know, maybe you've heard of that on the internet. Congratulations on the success of that.
Um, but I really want to dive in. You know, all the podcasts are talking about Beetle Beetlejuice, but I want to talk about a little bit about the origins of Spooky, your involvement, all the good stuff, and then we'll get to Beetlejuice. Uh, so to start it off right off the bat, I think a lot of people may or may not know that Spooky was a podcast first, speaking of podcasts, right? Um, so can you can you talk a little bit about just what it was like being a podcast before we dive into some homebrew stuff and maybe your first game and then what Spooky actually came from?
Yeah, you know, it's funny. Every time I I talk about the the podcast side, I feel bad cuz the way I explain it almost sounds like a disc to podcasts now cuz every time I talk about this, I'm on a live stream or a podcast. But when Spooky Pinball was a pinball podcast, it was before like everybody had pinball podcasts. Like there was probably only three or four total back then. And of course now there's like there's so many. But uh yeah, it started off as that and it got some moderate success. It seemed, at least from what I remember, it seemed like most everybody in the pinball community and space knew about the Spooky Pinball podcast just because there wasn't that many of them. And so Pinball,
what year was that? Just to give a framework for people.
Probably like 2010 or so, cuz Spooky Pinball was founded in 2013 as a pinball company. And I think dad was doing the podcast for like a year, maybe two, before it became a company. So probably yeah 2010 2011 somewhere around then. I mean back like when I said like there wasn't a ton of pinball media. There wasn't a lot of people uploading to YouTube. I I think Papa tutorials were maybe just starting to become a thing.
Oh yeah. Bowen I mean they were streaming Papa back then, but like you know uh Owen and his brother had kind of started regularly doing the whole Papa Tour, but that was pretty much the only online pinball you could really digest.
Yeah, there wasn't a ton. And uh that was also around the time too that uh Jersey Jack pinball was getting kicked off. And uh my dad had some involvement with that company uh from a printing side of things uh early on. And uh yeah, a little bit later after, you know, a little bit of success with the podcast and working around JJP through the printing company he already worked at, he he decided to take the leap of faith against everybody's judgment to to start his own pinball company with absolutely no money, no experience in running businesses, uh, and just a hope and a prayer pretty much. And I mean, I think that's the best way to do a business. We're still doing it.
Just yolo it. And obviously things have worked out really well. I think the last two titles have been absolutely stellar. Evil Dead is a is a film franchise I just [ __ ] love. I think that it's just fantastic and seeing that game become what it is and all the stuff that previous games that you guys have done to the culmination of that and now Beetlejuice is just it's just cool. So uh so yeah. So then then you went into a little bit of homebrew and then Ben presented a pinball machine, America's Most Haunted, and you were like, "We should make this or maybe make a company." Can you talk about that?
Yeah, so it's uh it's the America's Most Haunted came about. I think I remember being around when Ben was originally talking about doing the idea for that game. And uh it was just it was just supposed to be a spoof off the reality uh ghost hunting TV shows cuz back then there was like 20 of them. There were so many ghost hunting TV shows, reality TV shows, and I'm still a diehard Ghost Adventures fan. Uh Zack B, I'm I'm a diehard I still watch it to this day. I absolutely love that stuff.
But uh it was like a parody of that. And um you know, Dad and Ben had been kind of tight for a handful of years there. And there was actually another game that we were working on that we wanted to do. Uh but around that time, so the game we were working on was called Pinball Zombies from Beyond the Grave.
Sounds like a drama film. I love it.
Right. And it was my dad's layout and uh design. And uh keep in mind this is like 2013 2014 era. And uh around that time there was this TV show that was kind of a big deal called The Walking Dead.
And heard of there was there was rumors floating around that just maybe uh Stern Pinball was going to be doing The Walking Dead. And my dad was working on this homebrew zombie game that he wanted to make a production thing. And so my dad actually called, I believe he called George Gomez and he said, "George, just please shoot it straight with me so I make the right decision here. If you guys are doing a zombie theme based off a popular TV show, I'm not going to make this game." Like, I don't think that's a good idea to start my company out of the gate headto head.
Did the Walking Dead and he said, "You may want to choose a different theme."
So he did.
That's cool. Well, that's nice of George to give, you know, a little bit of 411 on that.
Uh, I need
sure it was George. I
I need to, but this is driving me nuts. I have your frame too high and there's a little band of gray at the bottom and my OCD is absolutely riveting my mind right now. So, I'm going to fix it real quick.
Stand by team.
There we go. All good. Um,
awesome.
That's really cool. Well, so but so he didn't do that and then
Exactly. So, so America's Most Haunted. By the way, I don't know if you know this, but you'll hopefully you'll appreciate this, but Carl says that America's Most Haunted is his favorite spooky game, which I think is like
I think it's my it's like my second favorite, too.
Okay. [clears throat]
Until TCM came out. TCM it beats it for me. But, I mean, it's so cool playing MH because it it's all our friends and family in that game, you know? Like, those are just our buddies from Minnesota that were like frequent guests on the podcast from the time that we had on there. And like Dennis Nordman was one of our our ghosts in there and you know it's just it was like cool people. I think one of the the voice actors is like from the Benton State Bank you know like it's just our friends and
I think that's such a huge appeal to Spooky is that you know obviously people keep calling it a family company and a boutique company but like it really is like a communitydriven kind of thing. This is pretty cool. Someone in chat by the way we are live. We are uh taking questions so feel free to shoot them in here YouTube as well. What's up, Squiggle Tree? He's asking when the thing is coming. Uh, the GTP Prague says that he still has the translite for that prospective game. I believe he's talking about the the zombie game. Was there any test translates made for that? That's funny.
We We actually still print them occasionally. I might have a few um sitting in a box around. We uh because when we go to the shows, we'll like sell translates and whatnot. And I think we have some Pinball Zombies translates that we just run as like this fun cool thing. I feel really I feel really bad cuz I don't know who I I don't remember who did the artwork for it, but it's it's a cool like little backlash of a zombie chick and like two cheerleaders and uh it's very
it's good to cheer on zombies. They need the motivation, you know.
Yeah. Yeah. But it it was it was very much going to be a thing of its time. And uh yeah, like I said, so when uh dad decided to throw that out, well, we'd lost a whole bunch of time and development to that. And Ben had this ghost hunting game that was coming together pretty well at that time. So it made a lot more sense to transition over to focusing efforts on that and doing that. And I mean, Spooky Pinball, the company's logo, was a ghost starting with a ghost hunting game. Everybody knows ghost hunting TV shows and that whole thing. So it just worked out I I think a lot better as our first title.
It's a good landmark kind of like launch platform like you said thematically like really aligned.
Yeah. Yeah. It It really showcased like especially at the time like just how like homemade everything really was and felt like just like who we were, you know, like this is this is kind of our vibe. This is our thing that we're doing. And I I like to think that even now working on like the the really big Warner Brothers titles and whatnot that we still get that worked into all of our games, but that we've just really refined it and made it a lot more professional and and marketable to to bigger audiences.
Yeah. I mean, I think that I I've certainly enjoyed and I'm sure most if not all viewers have enjoyed seeing kind of like the development and change of the first spooky game versus, you know, Beetlejuice or Evil Dead, I should say. I don't think a lot of people have gotten to see or play Beetlejuice yet. So,
no, not that many. Yeah. All right. So, so the company launches at some point officially, right? So, did did Ben present this idea and and your dad and the rest of the team were just like, "Oh, this is a great this will be the game to launch and we should we should manufacture it at scale." Like, at what point was the like, "Okay, we're doing this." Like, this is a real the real thing. Uh, it's tough for me to say. So, around this time, keep in mind, I was 11, maybe 12 years old. So, like, you know, some of that stuff I wasn't as around or involved with. Um, sure.
I I think it was just a mutual thing that made a lot of sense after Pinball Zombies fell through was like, "Okay, well, this is the thing that we should do." And I think Ben, he really wanted to see that game get made uh to get it to a bigger audience and uh everything. So, I mean, he was just along for the ride and he's still with us here. He's actually here. He's across the street working with Spooky Luke on a game that comes out like 2, three years from now. Right now, we're working on mechs and stuff like that. So, he's still hanging around. We've still got old Ben, Crazy Ben, hanging around doing cool stuff with us. He hasn't changed. He's exactly the same person. And that is just how we That is just how we want him.
What would you say is Ben's defining quality? It sounds like Ben is a unique character.
Um, voices. Mostly voices. He He still is a a voice making movie quoting machine uh every step of the way. It's It's fun. I have a really really good time working with Ben on all aspects of what we do whether it's like mechanisms or code or modes or script. Some of the most fun I ever had working on a machine was writing script for Evil Dead cuz uh I would work on it solo, Ben would work on it solo, and we'd have Zoom meetings where we would work together just plowing through the parts of the script that we weren't quite as sure what to do. And I I still think that's some of the best work that we've ever done. A lot of a lot of us came out in that script for that character. So, it was really fun. I
I don't think people under like appreciate how important the script writing is for Pinball. And like it has to come from somewhere, right? Like the the dialogue call outs are you're going to be hearing them over and over and over and over again. So, it's I feel like an unsung kind of element in the production pipeline.
Yeah. Yeah. It was a it was a really fun time. So then let's let's jump forward.
Oh yeah, this this person says uh they picked up their AMH from uh Texas Pinball Festival, which yeah, the the crazy thing with that show is that leading up to that show over the course of like six to nine months,
uh we probably only sold seven or eight games total. So like things were looking pretty grim. Like we might have made a pretty big mistake. And then that Texas Pinball Festival is where we sold out every single one of the rest of the units that weekend. So we limited it to 150
and then it sold out the rest of that 150 units at that Texas Pinball Festival that uh GTP Prague was at. So
that's awesome.
We're here. We're here because you picked up that AMH at TPF.
Shout out GTP Prague for keeping Spooky running. the real the real financeier behind behind the curtain here buying transl lights and keep it spooky in business. Um, obviously that's not the case anymore. You guys have expanded multiple times now, right? I mean the uh production space is what two or three times, right?
Oh gosh. Yeah, we've been in so many different build we've we've built new buildings, added on to the buildings. I did a video of this on my Facebook where I did a quick tour of the the Benton Industrial Park of all the buildings that we've done and the add-ons we did for them. We're going to do another one at some point here. I want to do a building that is the spooky alley building where it'll be like a storefront with all of our merch and stuff and it'll have every single spooky pinball game completely refurbished that you can just like come in and play them all, pick up your game, like get a tour of the factory and everything. So,
I love your launch. Another one of those
your your launch party thing that you did for Beetlejuice. And we'll we'll get to that for sure. I definitely want to talk about that. Um,
so I I want to talk about this the family driven real quick. the family culture or just like how how do you think working as a family has kind of changed the perspective and mentality of how you approach pinball as opposed to like more of a corporate driven kind of way like some other companies.
Uh so it it really instilled the lifestyle aspect of it immediately. So, there's there's absolutely no separation from work and home for pretty much any of us here because
it has been a familyowned business. Like, when dad started it, it's not like he'd left Spooky Pinball at Spooky at 5:00 p.m. No, he'd come home, he was still answering emails, taking phone calls, texting people, and constantly. And uh that always carried through. And when Spooky Luke really picked up responsibilities and everything, when he would leave here, he would go, you know, he would work spooky pinball from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. making sure the production line was going and then at 5:00 p.m. he would leave to go weld the habit trails for Rob Zombie Pinball. And then eventually, you know, started doing the metal work for the company outside of the company. So it was 24/7.
That's impressive.
And uh so for for all of us,
the the work at home aspect has never been separated. It's always on 100% of the time. Just no breaks from it. We are always involved with it in some matter some manner. No matter what we're doing. I mean, even if I'm on the fishing boat, I will be checking email, taking a phone call, like whatever it is. And I think that's always been one of the main things that uh has worked for us. It's just that we're constantly working on this stuff forever. Like we we really don't take breaks or anything like that. So I I think that was really integral to the development of the company in general was everybody was two feet in the whole way no matter what was going on. Right.
So that was an employer definitely
lowered itself while I was talking about that. So I love
I don't know like started sinking. I was like
did you are you using one of your new mechs in your chair right now? It's like people levitating you up.
Yeah. It's like the opposite of an inlane lifter. It's a chair dlifter cuz nobody liked the inline lifter. So, we're going to do it different now.
There you go. We see there you go. We just saw a custom mech on stream live secret. Look at that. Um I mean it sounds like again like not having a company kind of puppet you and being just like part of it from the from the core just changes your perspective and it sounds like that that's just like kind of the spooky mo. Um so let's talk about some game design stuff. Uh you and Luke have collaborated on a ton of games in terms of design, right?
How do you when when you get an IP, like how do you begin to kind of like divert and kind of okay, well, I'll focus on this because I'm I'm good at it or I'm bored of that from the last game, so I want to change it up. Like how do you begin to kind of like divvy out design kind of philosophy for for a game?
Oh man, it's different every single time. the the one thing that is consistent with every single layout design that we do is that Luke is actually the person who's doing the CAD and the the drawing of all of the aspects of the game. So like I'll be there and a part of the process for like let's put this in, shoot it this way, tweak it this way. I want to see this here, that there. I'm always a part of that, but he's the person who's actually doing the CAD on every single one of these games. Uh so I always feel like that's kind of important. Is that is that Solid Works or do you guys use a different platform or
Fusion 360, baby?
Hell yeah, that's right. Not Not 180. The whole the whole way around, man. You can't you can't fusion halfway. [ __ ] no.
Exactly.
Um, many of the followers of the channel are engineers. That's why That's why I asked. We got a whole bunch of guys that like to like watch the stream while I play pinball during the day so they can sit at work and get paid to watch me play pinball. So, it's not the worst.
Um, okay. So he's doing more of the actual like 3D visualization and and physical stuff. So and then are you are you ideas? Are you what what is like what would you say is like the bug secret sauce when it comes to pinball machine design? Oh, theme integration for sure. As well as I I have a I like I I like to think I have a pretty decent understanding of of uh pinball game balancing and rule sets and layout theories and whatnot just because I've been around it my whole life and I'm I'm an okay enough uh player I think. But uh every game's different. I mean so like Evil Dead, Luke really took the reigns on that one. He had a lot of ideas that he wanted to see for it and uh I was really really occupied with a lot of things expanding the production line um and getting the new facility set up at that time. So like he really took over in that one. But then Beetlejuice I really took over on the layout design ideas of what I wanted to see for that one because it was a probably the biggest theme that like grabbed it was the theme that I latched on to the most out of everything I've worked on with him. Um, and I he was I was really lucky that he felt confident in me to make the right choices uh with that one. But then something like uh you know Looney Tunes and TCM that was a real collaborative effort from me, him, Luke Peters. I mean we're always bringing in other people too to get their like we always bring in the programmers to get their input on the design stuff and then we listen to about 20% of what they say and
that's the right percent of of feedback to to take, right? So, it's it's different every single time how much input one single person will have over a layout. Um, usually I'm I'm quite involved with the the aspects that are theme integrated of like this is a a thing in the movie that sticks out a lot in my head that needs to get translated well into pinball. I think I'm pretty good with uh figuring out like dynamically how to have things be as many things as possible in one area so shots don't get boring. Um, which is something that I'm really proud of with Beetlejuice. Uh, Electric Bat actually just had a video uh recently going over every single shot in Beetlejuice and all the different things that those shots do and how it's like some of them are, if you may be familiar with it from another game's layout, but here's the three things Beetlejuice added to it. That was a really cool video.
That's That's Pin Pal's that Serge and Kale's uh kind of like I don't know buddy buddy podcast. Shout out to Pin Pals and Kale and Serge.
Absolutely go check out that podcast if you haven't watched it. Uh, it's great. It's very different than they're kind of like going over finances and stuff at electric back with Kale and Rachel and it's and it's definitely different than the round table with the with Jamie and whatnot. All right. I've been negligent to chat. I've got a number of questions. We're going to do we're going to do rapid fire. You ready? Let's do them. Okay. Here we go.
Okay. Rapid fire quick.
Yeah. Well, it's going to be like medium fire because like some of these questions are kind of long. So, we'll just call it fire. Okay. Yeah. This [clears throat] is an amount of fire. Uh, [snorts] all right. We'll start at the top. All right. So, do you have a do you have an IP holder nightmare story that was just like you had a different vision of a license or and or they were just like it was just not fun?
Uh, none that I would share on a live stream right now.
Sure, that's totally fair. Uh, how do you balance what you want versus an IP holder then? Roller Coasters asks.
Uh, consistency. at a certain point they will get tired of how much I am willing to bother them to get our way on stuff and will let us have our way. And I think you I mean how how could an IP holder really you know have anything to say against you you've shown a way of consistently representing a game in a way that is respectful to the IP and people love the theme integration like you know they should trust you at this point right
one of the biggest pros and cons about pinball and licensers that I don't hear many other companies talk about it this is the biggest pro and the con is that 90% of licensers ers know nothing about pinball.
It's that's true.
They don't know much about it, which is awesome because you sometimes that means you'll have a lot more free reign over what you want to do cuz they're like you're definitely the expert on this. We don't in other cases they have a lot of ideas of what they think would be cool in the game and they're terrible and you don't want to do any of them so you spend the whole time fighting against that. So it's the biggest pro and con is that licensers don't know much about pinball.
It's funny. It's funny that that has positives and negatives where you can be frustrated and free at the same time. Uh, all right, Joe, I'll ask this. So, Joe Joe runs competitions in Chicago. He's a he's a person who's very passionate about tournament pinball. He's asking if if there's a future of settings like competition mode and extra ball settings to help better control the tournament landscape and tournament settings for for spooky pinballs.
Yeah. Uh we should do a pretty big overhaul at some point to to help cater to the the tournament crowd some more full like we have just neglected that crowd a little bit more with uh some of the settings and whatnot. What I will say is uh you know our games like Looney Tunes uh in Evil Dead and whatnot. They do have a lot of settings that you can go through and change. We should probably just make it more conducive to like here's the tournament section that will get you the things you want there. So like obviously you can turn off extra balls and things like that. That's very standard thing to do for tournaments, but there's probably a lot of other things
that we should do. Uh, I'll tell you what though, Joe, send me an email to bugs spooky pinball.com and just give me your your rundown of why we are not the best with those settings in our menu.
You do not know the can of worms that you just opened.
You're a mad man.
I I want to know. I love hearing I love hearing it. And uh
All right, Joe. There you go, man. your wildest dreams come true
of getting some good settings in there.
So DJR, also thank you for showing up. Uh will we're definitely going to talk about Spooky Speak because I have I have some definite concerns as a sound person which I don't if you may not know I've done some sound stuff. Uh I am very curious about some of the technology behind that later. Um uh we'll do one more and then someone asked is do you use custom software on the back end for your for your games or do you use a game engine like I don't know GDO or I don't know
oh sorry yeah I had to understand what that meant we use uh Unity when you turn the games on it actually has the Unity logo that pops up. Uh some other programmers from other companies when I've told them we use Unity looked at us like we had seven eyeballs. Why Unity is an awesome plat Unity Unreal.
It's It's worked for us for the last handful of years here and I'm just happy to have a more consistent system. I mean, that was like one huge quality sort of issue with Spooky Pinball for a long time was that we changed board sets and systems that run the game so often. It was like we never were able to like get our footing. like whenever we lock in on one and refine it until it was really great and set as like the solid spooky pinball system that we always use.
Standardization is a really important thing, right? Yeah.
Yeah. Extremely. And it took us an embarrassingly long time to get around to that. And uh like since Scooby-Doo, we've been on the same board set Unity system running it. Like we're we're very stable with that now. And everything coming after uh Beetlejuice as well has these things in it. So, it it was a huge huge necessary change that needed to happen and it has happened and we've seen the pros of it.
Sure. You know, before I click that, well, all right, I have one more question and then I'm going to ask you to say three things real quick and we're going to click on a new window. The next question is someone said, "Is Domino's pizza best?" And then someone else said Papa John's bug.
Oh, what's the best pizza?
Domino's kicks the piss out of Papa John's.
I would have to agree with that. That's like not even a competition.
It's not even close. No offense to a restaurant, but oh, come on. So,
pizza [ __ ] also wants to know if you're in a porta potty right now. If so, that is the nicest portaotty I've ever seen. That's that chair. I wish I could get my toilet to have that chair cuz that's the one I would do. Uh, okay.
Bug, can you say can you say a particular word three times so I could so I could switch a browser over?
Okay. Uh, particular word. Uh, Uh,
one that you might say for a new game that you have, maybe the name of the new game.
Uh, yeah. Beetleju. Beetleju. Beetlejuice.
Oh man, look at that. We've got the trailer pulled up. Let's talk about Beetlejuice. Um, okay. So, obviously this was not a big secret. Everybody knew for quite a while that Beetlejuice was coming and uh and boy oh boy, it seems like that you guys have really delivered. The game looks spectacular. It's got Franchie's artwork top to bottom. One thing that really surprised me and I and I I mean this in a positive way is you know Stern got a lot of like [ __ ] for Kong having this like kind of like wacky color palette and being like just different. And in my opinion, Evil Dead kind of did the same thing, but it like works. Like Evil Dead's color palette and everything about it is so like grindousy and the most like neon like not a traditional kind of like grungy feel that you would think. and Beetle just seems a lot in that same department, but it feels like it it fits a lot more at home. Um, yeah,
but you guys got praised for it and I love it. I love Christopher Franchi art. I love Christopher Franchi's artwork and and I don't know, just in general, it's it's great to see that there's been a positive amount of feedback in terms of the kind of explosive color palettes you use.
Yeah, for sure. I franchise is the master of knowing what is appropriate for the thing that you are working on because I think that's why some people get so upset about various color palettes in other games. It's just with certain themes or characters and whatnot. It's just not what they're expecting. It's not what they have in their mind when they're thinking about that. Fortunately, like in in a Tim Burton world, especially Beetlejuice, you know, greens, purples, reds, black, whites, like those all make sense. There's unfortunately a ton of colors. And the other great thing in his world too is like in the beers movie, there's a ton of different locations that are very distinct. They're very different from each other where you go. The addict is extremely different from the rest of the de's house visually. When they go to the sandworm planet, I always I I still get this wrong. I keep saying Jupiter or Saturn and for some reason I can never remember. It's Saturn. That's what I say Jupiter. Because our programmer's dog's name is Jupiter and so I keep saying that it's Saturn.
I don't think could live on Jupiter, right? Cuz it's like gas, right? They would have to be like fart worms or something. I don't I don't know, right? Like it
fart.
I mean like you can't like a sandworm can't swim through gas. It just wouldn't just wouldn't work,
right?
Ours can. But okay. So So Franchie nails the artwork. The reception of the game is obviously very positive. Uh, I couldn't help but laugh. So, I I have This is so funny. Please tell me this was pure coincidence, but you have a you have a magnet that ball saves directly under the flippers that throws the ball directly back up into the playfield. I don't know. There's a game that came out not too long ago as well that has the exact same mechanic. I'm assuming this is just like the pinball gods aligning, right? it every year. This is what hap like it's the same thing happens in the film street too where all the like two Spartan gladiator movies come out this year and two space movies come out this year or whatever like this stuff just always freaking happens. Two games two games came out this year with a sandworm that eats the ball and two games came out this year with a magnet between the flippers that throw it. What I would like to add though is that we did this in Alice Cooper in like 2018. So
there you go.
Which to be Yeah. which yeah. So I stole it from dad who stole it from me which I would add. But
it's a it's the it's the pinball like circle of life, right? Like you take an idea, you innovate on it. I mean like people [ __ ] all over Jack's X-Men for that for taking it from uh Pilot Wings. What the hell is the name of that game? Uh which is silly cuz I love the fact that Stern made a non-standard, you know, Italian flipper layout. So yeah,
I love that. Yeah.
Uh anyways, so yeah, obviously I thoroughly approve of Beetlejuice. It has sandworms in it. I'm a huge fan of sandworms. Um, when you go to make a game like this, what do you how do you build the chopping block of things that need to go in it and things that don't
to fan service to be authentic to the IP?
Oh, we we always put way too much in pretty rarely do we like end up chopping things out. We We get really antsy about having any empty space because I've just walked up to so many games where there was empty space and in that empty space there was artwork that was just okay
in those areas.
Jaws Pro comes to mind on that. Not to not to like isolate Stern, but it is a very barren playfield in the back.
That is I'm not even joking. That is exactly the game I was thinking of. I just was seeing it. I love Jos Premium by the way and I freaking
I'm playing it right now on stream. It's amazing. It's probably my favorite L1 game. But uh yeah, I think I agree. But uh yeah, exactly. So like I I really hate when we walk up and see stuff like that. But um fortunately lately we are so far worked ahead on these games that we had Beetlejuice pretty much done. Like I had it submitted for final approval and everything like this is it and then we started adding more. So like the left ramp there, that whole Dante's Infernal uh left ramp over there uh that wasn't there in the original final version of this game. Yeah, that right there. So, that wasn't there uh in the original game, but then we looked at the time that we had left in our hands and we were like just going over the game trying to think of anything we could do to make sure it was better cuz there was a lot of anticipation and hype building up to it and we were like we could turn this whole left ramp into a mechanism like feature deal and make it really special, make it have purpose cuz up to that point
the wheel of fortune interacts display, right?
Yeah, exactly. It's both physical and on the display. And we got a really badass 3D sculpt in front of it. So, and then of course changed the powder coat on that ramp. It used to be purple, now it's red to go with the rest of the Infernal Room theme. So, we just got to take something that was a boring ass left ramp that shotgun and turn it into this whole world and area and feature and mechanism and all these things. And it was because we were worked so far ahead. So, fortunately for us, we continue to maintain that pace schedule. So we are able to just look at our finished games and say like what more can we do until we've really are to the point where uh if we add any more stuff I can't build it.
I don't think anybody I don't think anybody could say
not fully loaded. I mean there's obviously like every every corner of this has stuff on it. Um I will say I have a question. Joe Joe asked are there any mechs that didn't work out. Before we get to that, I do want to ask, so you know, there was some online there was some people talking about how like the camera on the sofa are not things you generally like think of when you think of like Beetlejuice. I personally don't have a problem with that. I think it's an amazing mech to like hold balls and dump it. So, what what was the design philosophy when you're like, we need to have a mech that holds balls? Like what what was the like thought process behind the sofa? like one that's an Evil Dead, I think. Is there like was that part of the thought process behind that or
So, every single game Luke and I pretty much demand that we do something that physically holds the balls. Uh, in this case, you know, we knew the sandworm was going to eat the ball. I didn't really care to have it like regurgitate them back out or anything. I kind of wanted the main focus to be like shooting it and just having it eat the ball. Um, I always thought, you know, the couch was one of the earliest ideas we had cuz to me, the waiting room is probably in my mind some of the most iconic stuff from the movie just head. It's the first drunken head meet up. And yeah.
Yeah. As far as imagery goes, I always thought it was. Uh, but when you like look at that, it's like, okay, well, what do they do in the waiting room?
Technically, not a whole lot. They wait. They They sit around, there's interesting people, and they wait. And it's like, okay, well, what if like we make that a part of the game? Like you're you're waiting. You lock the balls onto there and they're sitting there waiting for you to load all three up and then start the multiball and then dumping it over. You [clears throat] know, originally they wanted it to be instead of it tipping over, the the right side was going to drop down and they would kind of fall out over there. But I remember I did this haunted house attraction. I think it was called Raven's Den. It was in some small ass town in Wisconsin, like 2 hours away from here. And I was like in high school and uh in the start of it, you sit on this couch that looks a lot like this couch. And uh there's this TV playing and there's these voices coming over in this room while you're waiting in there. And when it's time for you to go, the couch actually like got boosted off and like lifted forward and like dumped everybody like onto the floor.
And uh that always that always stuck out to me as like super impactful and cool. And I thought that would be it'd be way more interesting to dump the balls out that It just kind of reminded me of of that back then. It's more fun for pinball.
And it's unexpected, too. I like that it's unexpected. A big part of uh Beetlejuice and Tim Burton stuff to me is like subverting your expectations. Kind of like run pulling people of like, oh, you launched the ball. Oh, it's going out the out lane and it's getting grabbed by a magnet, thrown back in. Like, oh, you put these balls in the couch, you tip it forward instead of just like finding some other way like the Simpsons pinball party where you drop the side and they roll out.
Which is I like which Splood is asked about right now. Yeah, I was just about to say that. He was like, "You were concerned about it being too close to to that." No, it's Come on. How many other pinball machines had sofas in it? Like, come on. [clears throat]
I love that game.
Totally. One of the It's got how many mo? It's got more wizard modes than it has regular modes. Uh,
probably. Yeah.
Indie Arcade [clears throat] says that physical ball locks are awesome. Great. Thank you for doing that. The snake eating the ball. I mean, Chad is obviously overwhelmed with a lot of the positive decisions here. And anybody on the pin side who was complaining about the camera, you can look at the first comment right here. Polaroid camera is a nice touch. Eat it pinside. You don't know what you're talking about.
Well, so what's funny about the camera is uh originally, and this is something I do to Franchie all the time that I feel bad for him that we do it is uh so originally we had the targets there and it was like Lydia's targets like it was it was featured around strange and unusual multiball and we had the camera inserts and he had a plastic there with the camera drawn on it and we just we really liked his drawing of the camera so much that we just decided to make it physical and have it sit on top of there cuz why not we had the space, we we had the the ability to do it. So, we said, "Okay." But then we were like, "Well, we can't just have a stagnant sculpt sitting there." Like, we wanted to It'd be really cool if it could flash as if it was taking a picture, right?
And so, we, you know, got that worked out as well, too. So, it started off as just like, "Oh, that's a good plastic from Chris. Let's cover it with a sculpt." We do that so often where like he'll draw a really nice plastic. We're like, "Oh, that looks good. Let's just do it physically instead of doing your stupid plastic." And he's fortunately for me, he understands. He's like, "It's what suits the game best. Like, do that."
Unfortunately for me, he's cool about it. But yeah, we do that to him all the time. I feel bad.
I mean, I think he can't be unhappy with the end result. Uh Joe is asking though, I forgot that was the original question. Are there any mech ideas that didn't work out that got cut?
Uh I had a grave dig like mechanism originally that's pretty different from what the Beetlejuice mech is now. I think this one's a lot.
You're talking about the Greystone that kind of raises on the right ramp area or
Yeah. Yeah. Originally, I wanted it to be more like you were digging down to get to it, but it it just really kind of felt like crap. I I didn't like it a whole lot. And uh this shot gave us a lot more to do to where you could be shooting all the way through and it's a nice flowing ramp. Or you can shoot up and we stop the ball and put it behind the drop target. You can hit the drop target, release the ball, or we just pop up the drop target, you hit the drop target. or we catch it and Beetlejuice picks it up and he rises out of the grave just like in the movie and you know throws a pinball at you cuz what would be cooler than him rising up out of the grave like he does in the movie if he did that and threw something at you. So like this just ended up being a way better idea. It was actually Spooky Loop. He He directed that for quite a bit. So he rescued that area from what I was going to do to it. One One thing I saw about the game and and was just like bummed out about and then not was it it has kind of more of a fan layout. It's I would say it's a less adventurous layout than a lot of spooky pinballs cuz I mean you look at TCM, you look at you know uh uh Scooby-Doo, you know, you've got just like crazy weird ball paths and all sorts of stuff going on. This is like more of a tra the shots change as you shoot them. Like with the with the worm, you can choose to like, you know, dive down inside of it with the with the graveyard shot. I mean, you've got choices on choices, even though it is more more of a traditional family out. Was that cognitive that you were like, "Well, we're going to keep stacking stuff on to make each shot more interesting."
Definitely. I honestly up to the point I don't really know what is considered like a fan layout or not anymore. Like I I don't know anymore what the like official definition behind it is cuz like neither of our outer orbits function as just an orbit that goes all the way through and back to the flipper. You know, the left one goes up, it goes through pop bumpers, past the flipper, up and around the couch, back over to an upper flipper. You know, the right Orbit is it goes up to a ramp and all the way back to the flipper or it does a couple of other things as well. Regardless of which, the the biggest reason uh I wanted the shots to do as many things as possible, too, is it's a standard body. It's not a wide body. Uh Luke and I have gotten really accustomed to like in our widebody layouts, we have the space to just add more shots that can do certain things. In a standard body, you you're a lot tighter on the space. And I don't ever want anything to get boring. I mean, that's the tricky part with pinball is at the end of the day, it's only a set amount of shots and a set amount of modes. They can never get old. So, a really guaranteed way to make sure it never gets old is if each shot does multiple different things. So that was a huge huge important aspect of the design on this layout. As well as again as mentioned earlier like the whole Tim Burton weird bounciness of Beetlejuice of you know like I said like rug pull. I keep describing that misdirectiony quirkiness.
Exactly. Like I'm going to hit this this one time. It's going to go here, but the next time it's going to shoot it right back at me. And it's it's just weird. It's different and it's theme appropriate. to to your point on that though, like I feel like the entrances look like a traditional fan layout, but then what happens after that is like totally different and uh you have a mini playfield that's integrated into it. You know, it's not an upper or lower talking about the back area and that looks the challenge of that looks like right in the sweet spot for me where like there's enough to do up there and and learning how to master that is going to be uh fun, which is like the whole point, right?
Yeah. No, I uh and I love sectioned off areas like that, too. Like in uh Total Nuclear Annihilation, I love the reactor area. I wasn't uh like I right away I kind of talked about like how I wanted to do something like that in Beetlejuice. I wasn't going to commit to it to the scale that we did in TNA, but uh so I wanted to have like a smaller area, like I said, just designated waiting room where you can do loops around. You can hit that scoop, which will launch it through a spinner, which is fun. You can get those targets right there and a lot of times catch it with your flipper. Uh also, it goes behind the flipper. And also really neat is a lot of times when you let that ball roll off, it'll hit in the pop bumpers and it might throw it back up into the scoop or against the targets. Like the the exits from the pops are really really fun. They do a lot of weird things.
That's cool. I I feel like uh there seems to be two design philosophies in modern pinball right now. One is like raking drop targets that are like almost at the same angle as like the vertically to the pinball machine. You know, you see that on like Owen's Games and Dune has it.
He's He's good at that. Yeah. And then the other thing that seems to be hot right now is looping mini playfields. So, you know, like we're talking like uh Jack Danger, Foo Fighters, uh I guess whatever Jersey Jack's uh Harry Potter kind of has one with that similar kind of thing. And then of course, you know, yours as well. And I think that's a fun way of trying to keep a repeated shot cuz it's harder when it's compressed into a space, right?
Um
Yeah.
I don't know. Was that was that your the was the mini playfield a Luke or a bug concept? Th
this one was more me. Uh but Luke is uh quite a sucker for that, too. Cuz like in Halloween pinball, we had what we called the butt pretzel where you you shot that right spinner, and if you hold the flipper up, it goes around that right spinner, feeds back down, goes up your flipper again, and through the left loop. Uh, Harry Potter actually does something extremely similar on theirs, but Eric did it way better than we did, just transparently. So,
they probably don't call that the butt shot, though. I prefer buttsh shot.
They don't call it the butt pretzel because they don't have this level of swag.
There you go. You heard it right here. When it comes to swag,
Jersey Jack is not bringing it right now. The RZ is not I don't know enough of these terms, man. I'm too I'm too old for this.
I'm pretty sure swag is like way out of date. I'm pretty sure I aged myself.
I think it's I think it's current, man. Whatever that means. Uh, all right. We got some more questions. Let me dive into these. Uh, Boots is asking if you'd ever consider doing something special with the code for Halloween on on Halloween.
Oh, we we do a Halloween code update every single year.
There you go.
Every single o every single October we do this huge code bash frenzy where every single week we update another spooky pinball game. Some we some weeks we update two at a time. And uh every single year we make sure to update Halloween still. Uh we're still planning on doing at least one update, you know, a year for that for as long as I'm hoping that I can get away with doing it.
Think it's cool. Like
your wildest fantasies theme.
We got to do that.
Pennies is asking, we knew this question was coming inevitably. Are you planning on upping production number uh for future releases? Not, believe it or not, nobody's asked. Actually, maybe somebody did if you're going to make more uh Beetlejuices, but are you planning on increasing the number for future games based on the success of these last two titles?
Yeah. Well, we're going to continue to put them where we think is best, but I I would imagine it would probably be pretty safe to to do a few more units and whatnot on the here. We we're never going to overstep and say like, "Okay, here's 3,000 limited units of of this next one or anything like that."
15,000 Beetlejuice coming to you. So, we'll we'll definitely there'll probably be a slight increase in unit count on the next one, but nothing crazy. Again, it's hard to say. I mean, we're a year away from, you know, launching what the next game would be.
Sure. Plenty of time to think about that.
We'll usually we throughout the year, we'll we'll leak out a little bit of information of like what you can kind of expect to see as far as price and unit count goes on upcoming Spooky Pinball releases uh throughout the year. So, just keep an eye out. We're always communicating information like that cuz we know it's really important and sensitive for people. So,
Boots Boots has refined his question. He think I think he means more of like a like a midnight madness kind of thing. Like something that is unique to Halloween for Halloween.
Oh, I I'm sorry. I didn't see the midnight m you were
No, No, he he refined his question a second time. So, I think that's more what he meant.
Um, while he's while he's leaning in to look at that, sign out. It's good to see my pun daddy here.
That's cool. Not a bad idea. I love midnight modes. I think like Midnight Mattis is something that that needs to come back into pinball if we're talking about older concepts.
Uh S wants to know if you have flipper codes similar to like Stern. Are there Easter egg flipper codes on spooky games?
There there's some flipper Yeah, there's some Easter egg flipper codes in Scooby-Doo, but Dylan won't tell me what they are. I don't know what's behind it. I genuinely I don't know. I know they're there, but I don't know what they are, and he won't show me. So, yes, but I don't know.
There you go. There's your answer. Sign out. Good to see you. Uh, Stitch asks, "What's your favorite scary movie?"
Like from the scary movie franchise. The first one is I'm extremely excited for the new one.
I I think she means just in general, but that's hilarious. Scott didn't think scary movie, the scary movie franchise was going to be brought up, but here we are. The other what? Scary.
That first one is probably my favorite comedy of all time. Honestly, I
pill to make that game. Like when people are like, "You should do Scream." I'm always like, "Yes, we absolutely should do Scream, but I think we should do Scary Movie instead cuz that would be way more fun." But that's just me. Uh my favorite uh horror movie of all time. I don't know.
There can be no wrong answer here.
I know, right? Oh, yes, there can.
What? Uh, The Thing is pretty It's a pretty perfect movie. That's pretty
That's That's one of my That's my top three. Thing is one of my top three horror films.
My It's actually No, I want to say uh Sinister is my favorite horror movie.
Um which like as a sound guy, you would love Sinister if you if you're not familiar with it. Um
I haven't seen it and I have been told to watch it recently. So I can't
The amount of time working with sound people that I have sent them the soundtrack to that movie. So, like when we're working on TCM, like every time we do a horror title, I would always send over that movie soundtrack and be like, "Could we try something like this?" And they always shop it down, but it's one of my like favorite movie scores and soundtracks. It's sound design. You should You would I think you'd really get a kick out of it. You should check it out.
I I will absolutely check it out. It's been It's been a weird couple of weeks for me when it talks when talking about like uh horror and film composers. I saw John Carpenter live and then at a as a friend's book signing, I ran into Danny Danny Elfman and was talking with him. I almost asked him about about if how it was the process of licensing for you guys, but not appropriate, you know.
Oh, I I don't know that he ever like would have even been
Yeah, I doubt he was even involved. Right.
Maybe it makes I was going to say he's such a huge deal. Maybe it makes its way all the way up there, but like I doubt it.
Uh I do think it's really funny that you have slowly been you have slowly been like going down again over the course of this interview. I really hope that somebody like does a time lapse compilation and we can just watch you like kind of like like you're in the slowest elevator uh interview possible.
The elevator.
Yeah, it's it's like the American uh Most Wanted or Yeah. Right. Like your your first game. It's got a little elevator in it.
That's so funny.
Chad's saying Gremlins. They want to see Gremlins. Indie Arcade Wave says Jeepers Creepers. Joe, I don't know about that one.
Yeah, I'm I'm going to pass on that one on that one. But yeah, Sinister is my favorite scary movie. My favorite movie of all time, though, is a This is my favorite movie. This is Ben Heck's favorite movie and Christopher Franchie's favorite movie is Ed Wood by Tim Burton.
Oh, wow.
Now, there you go.
Freaking that is like all of our And none of us knew that about each other until like way late into the relationship. So,
yeah, you've got
the Tim Burton love goes deep at Spooky Pinball. Really deep.
Nice. Uh, and now even deeper because you've got Beetlejuice. Uh, Carrie's here. What's up, Carrie? It's good to see you. Thanks so much for hopping on. Uh, always a pleasure to have some pin pin influencer celebrities show up. Uh,
oh, like Carrie Hardy.
Yeah, that guy. You know that guy.
Oh, I think I know him.
He says that the stream's too sexy right now. Clearly, he's talking about you.
Uh,
Split says Edwood would make a weird pin. Okay. If you made an Edwood pin, what's the mech? Like the mech.
Oh, the mech for Edwood.
I'm trying to think if there's a way to have like an angora sweater that he could like put on cozy sweater.
Maybe Maybe it would be Lobo uh walking into like the walls when he's trying to get through the door and he keeps bumping it. The whole set moves. It'd be cool. Yeah, the wobble wall and the whole wobbling wobbles.
That would be pretty good. Uh
the tombstones falling over in the graveyard. That would be a fun mech. You can definitely do something like that.
Um so since since you were talking about sound design, too, I do want to reel it back. Let's talk about
Yeah,
let's talk about the voice to speech. The what is the feature called in Beetlejuice?
Spooky speak.
Spooky speech. So I'm just going to come right off the bat. How the hell is this going to work in a loud arcade environment? Anybody that's worked with any kind of FFT translation, like audio to speech translation knows that the accuracy in a loud environment is terrible.
Terrible.
Yeah.
So, we're going to have settings of course for our location people who don't want to have cuz like there's points in the code where we rely on it to get to the next phase, but we have tons of workarounds for that. So, like in the one multiball, you say Beetlejuice three times and then he does it's showtime. We'll go into that. You can also hit the action button. So, there will of course be settings uh in the locations to get around uh the spooky speed features because yeah, I mean when we're at Texas Fin will get through, but you know, probably not everything. It's definitely a lot tougher when you have that going on. uh heat forc something we knew was going to like people were going to point out like hey this may be kind of tougher in like locations and uh tournaments and and uh
but a huge portion of the games are home sales right so I mean
like 90% go to home sales and I'm just not willing to sacrifice what is the coolest thing that we've ever done for that 90% of people because the locations it may not work as great. It's like I I think the the people who own this at their home deserve to have what I think is one of the coolest experiences in pinball history.
It totally I just not willing to like compromise on it, you know?
And And good for you for innovating. I mean, like somebody referred to I called the the smaller companies indie companies. And I think one of the great things that smaller indie companies can do are take risks. I mean, look at like I mean, look at old Gotle games. Not that Gotle was a tiny company, but they were willing to take risks and do really innovative stuff to try to shake up what pinball is. And uh you know I think that this is kind of in that same ballpark. Um is someone Splud's asking is the goal now to implement spooky speech on future games. I mean
Oh definitely. Yeah. Yeah. We have a lot of really really great ideas for future games and how I wanted to tie in of I almost started doing impressions and saying what I wanted. That would have been bad. Um but yeah
hot takes here right
really really cool. Uh man I can't like even slightly begin to lean into that. Uh yeah, we we have a lot of really cool ideas for it in future. Uh the one of the main things I want to get going here as well. Uh it's not in yet. Spooky speak is still very new technology. We We just got this like fully running and functioning probably four months ago. Uh but something that I think would be really crucial that would be awesome uh for say the location guys uh or just text in general is uh using spooky speak in the menu settings because there's a lot of times that you are stuck working on a game and you have wrench here and you're holding something in the top and you're trying to set this or you're working on both sides and you don't want to have to let go of the play field cuz you have it balanced. You don't want to reach down for the coin door. be great to navigate the menu. Get to the coils, tell it to fire this coil, turn on this flasher, turn on these lights, go to the switch test so that you can basically just not have to let go of the things that you're doing. Cuz I mean, it's so frustrating when you have something set exactly how you need it. [ __ ] I'm not in the right menu. And then you're like trying to reach it and hold on to these things and
eject balls. I mean, I can think of a few fundamental commands that would just be like really handy. Take the glass off and put it down on the ground gently for me,
right? Like
that would be that would be replace coils.
Yeah. Solder that
fix the fix the node board.
Uninstall tilt.
Yeah. Um, Splicky is asking, "Does it require internet access to work?"
No, it does not. Nope.
Okay. So, that means it's not uh cloud processed. It's a a real-time analysis on the board.
Cool. Um, [snorts] Johnny Button wants Michael Keaton to mock him. Uh, well, play Beetlejuice, right?
Yeah. I mean, yeah, play. We got plenty.
Um, I'm trying. Jesus Christ, chat, slow down.
There's a lot There's a lot of chat going on, honestly. I'm just trying to catch up and everything.
Everyone's Everyone's all all
What game did they say is straight cheeks? I want to know what game they're talking.
I mean, if we had to talk about cheeks, we need uh pin butts in here. Joe from Pinball Degenerates is like the the Bible when it comes to games that have booties on it. Like that's his whole thing.
Yes.
By the way, if you haven't followed Pin Butts on Instagram, go do it. Pin Butts. Pin Butts is where it's at.
I think I've seen that get recommended to me. I don't know if I followed it or not.
Ah, it's so funny, man. He just takes photos of butts that are on pinball machines. And there's a You'd be surprised. There's a lot of them. We have another viewer. His name is Put Jake. His goal is to d uh to to record all of the pizzas that are on Playfields. We have we have three or four known games that have pizza on them. I found one for him. Can you guess Can you guess three games that have pizza on them?
Well, I'm going to start with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
That's correct.
Probably two of them. I bet both do. There's two Teenage Mut Ninja Turtle games, so two Teenage games. Uh
we'll count that. So, you only need one more.
Domino's.
That's true.
Obviously.
Okay. Um, uh, uh, Elvra has pizza somewhere in it.
Oh, does it? I didn't know that one.
I'm pretty sure Alviv and the Party Monsters has pizza somewhere.
Interesting.
This is so important. I'm looking it up.
This is really important. The fourth one or the the one that I contributed is George Gomez least favorite game, if that's a clue.
George Gomez least favorite game
that he made.
Did he do Hard Body?
No, but that Did he do Hard Body? That's my favorite game just in general. But
I mean least favorite game.
Uh anyway, the game is fast. It's NBA Fast Break, by the way. Has Has the has the pizza and that is apparently his least favorite game.
One of my guesses.
Uh I should Where's M where's M Retro Gamer when you need him? He's He has a hard body.
I don't mean in general. I mean like
he has Yeah. Does he? What's he look like?
Hey, baby. What's up, MN Retro Gamer? I hope you're watching this later. Call me. Uh, Ward Peton is the guy who designed Hard Body
Sound by Bob Leeb. Boy, that must have been a fun one to work on. Uh, anyways, to get back on topic here. So, yeah. So, the Beetleju way off. Yeah, we just went from tell me about Beetlejuice's audio technology to I hope MM Retro Gamers watching me later when we talk about how his hard body. Um, [snorts] all right. So, oh, we already asked that. I'm trying to catch up my questions now. Here's a good one. What's a design element you think is underused in modern pinball? Oh, I usually have a good answer for that. Design element that's underused. Air in my mouth. Let me resolve this while you think on that.
Um, man, [snorts] I wish I had a really awesome answer so I could look like a cool smart designer right now, but I'm just drawing blank.
Okay, I'll throw you a different one. What do you think about that? Roller Coasters asked this earlier and then asked it again, so I should probably ask it. He says, "Do you start on Whitewoods or or do you flip in VPX or uh I guess Turbo 360?" It's whitewoods. There you go. Classic.
We have a a great advantage with Spooky Luke because uh because he does all the m metal fabrication in house. When we're doing our whitewoods and everything, he can just be drawing the orbits and the ramps and then say, "Okay, I'm going to cut these out." He walks in the other room and he hits go on a laser and it cuts it out. We bend it, sand it, and go start installing it and just shooting it right away. So, we know immediately how that's going to be feeling and shooting versus having to mess around with a bunch of different
programs and things like that beforehand. Not that messing around in programs is a bad thing, but it's just a lot quicker for us.
No, but like fabrication tools in general have, would you not say, have like completely innovated pinball? I mean, to be able to workshop ideas in a heartbeat now. You can just think about something and were you dripping again? Are you riding that elevator again?
I got it. I got ahead of it. The elevator was taking me down.
Here we go. Ready.
Oh, damn it.
Lowering your There we go.
Oh man, now it thinks VGO is more attractive than me now. Come on.
You can see my Twilight Zone hiding back there.
So Joe's asking if there any plans to add stuff like Scorbit or online integration into it. I know a lot of people love Stern's insider connected. I'm not a huge fan of it just cuz I don't think its functionality really adds a whole lot right now other than achievement hunting. Um but I do think that there is a lot of room to explore that space. What are what are your thoughts?
We are exploring it. We are exploring it. We're going to get something done. We're going to
we are going there has been simply too much demand and ask for it for us to ignore it
at this point. So we we are looking into it and uh if we do it, we're going to do it right. We're going to do it cool for sure. Um because I'm kind of in the same cap as you to be completely transparent where I'm like not the craziest about that stuff, but I I'm also not completely blind and tonedeaf and I know that it means a lot to a lot of people and so it's a lot more important that we do that and get the thing that they want so bad because they've politely and not politely asked for it a lot and they deserve
what's the what's the least polite ask of something that you've received either at Expo or or other places? You know, it wasn't the least polite, like it wasn't like particularly like mean or anything, but um Morgan did get an email uh like the day after Beetlejuice came out and it was just a guy and he just emailed in sell me a game. That was
instructions clear.
Okay. Which Which would you like? We have Scooby-Doo. We have Looney Tips. What can we do for you? I'm guessing he wanted a Beetlejuice
probably.
Yeah. Wow. Neil Mcgra for the follow. What's up? Look at all these these big pinball people showing up. Uh cool deal. Um all right. So, if you had a dream license,
what would it be?
You know, the next game
always. No. Uh, I always have like a really cool answer for that and then I always completely forget it uh as soon as somebody asks me. Um, dream license and I always answer with something we probably won't do, but I would say
probably Jimmy Buffett's Margarita Philill.
It's probably my dream license.
You have to be trolling me. Please tell me this is not true. I am the last two years in a row on Spotify, I am in the top 0.01% of Jimmy Buffett listeners.
Are you are you wasting away in Margaritavville right now?
I am a huge I am a huge Margaritavville guy. I love Jimmy Buffett.
Oh my god. That's probably
that's probably
confirmed Spooky's next or first music pin is going to be Well, I guess it wouldn't be first. Alice Cooper, right? Would you count that? I no it rubs out me actually would be the total but uh there's enough every time I talk about it there's just enough people telling me like oh yeah you should do that that I get worried I have to like really pull myself away from it like no we're not we're not going to do it we're not going to do it
staying staying retro is asking me to check your blood alcohol content if you blew right now what percentage would you be at
if you were to give a BJ Beetlejuice what what percentage of alcohol would be running in your blood.
I have no I don't think I have any alcohol in my office right now. I do have cigars uh one of these. It's like a cigar with a tie on it. It's a bot cigar. I don't know.
There's no tequila in this office.
Do you think that ties improve the flavor of uh of a good of a good wrapped Cuban?
I've never had a kila.
Have you had one with a Have you not? Have you had an other cigar to compare with that one that also is wearing a tie, I guess, is
I think a bow tie would be better.
Okay.
I think that would have more of like a a British flavor to it, which I don't know what I mean by that, but I mean it
full flavor bow tie.
All right. Um I do love that this is the point of the podcast where things kind of devolve into uh hilarity.
Oh, this is why I'm here. Yeah, I'm here to talk about bow ties, cigars, and uh and I don't know.
Um, okay. Here's Here's a more introspective one. It's this is less to do with sales numbers, but to you, what defines like the success of a pinball machine? And I'm not talking about sales numbers, but I'm talking about from a design aspect when it comes together and you walk up to it and you play it, what really is the like, okay, this is this is what made this game special? That is a really good question. Huh. If uh I always compare pinball machines to amusement park rides, like dark rides. Uh, so I have like when I imagine Beetlejuice Pinball, I imagine it as like okay, you're you're getting strapped into like a three minute dark I I don't want to say roller coaster because that's like super fast, but like a dark ride, right? And when I play a short game, you know, for the first time on like a new game, I want to experience the best and most nostalgic things about that license while also getting new content from it, uh, with people who were involved in the original one kind of selling that to me. And I want it to feel like it will never get old. And so if I can go up and play a game in that five minutes, I get that exact feeling from it, like I just got off of a roller coaster, like I just took a ride in the dark through a Texas Chainsaw Massacre like house of of sorts, then I would say that you have done your job on that game. I would say that that means that you did what it should do cuz you need to it's always a tricky balance in pinball doing you to some degree you have to give people what they're expecting to see but you also need to provide a lot of things they're not expecting to see like you you have to you have to surprise them while still delivering them something it's like it's like eating a good chicken wing and you put a sauce on it that they they weren't expecting like oh I didn't know this needed that sauce but now I can't imagine it without that sauce
right now you got to that you got to make sure that sauce is on all of them. So, would which spooky game do you think hits all those marks? I think that's a great criteria for uh it goes along with what you were saying about how theme integration needs to be amazing. It goes along with what you're saying that the game needs to be fun and always and never boring. Like I think these are great design
mentalities to apply.
Yeah, I think Texas Chainsaw is the the handsome best example of that. I really do. It It has everything I just said where we're utilizing all of the old movie the most iconic parts of like Leatherface putting a chick on a meat hook. You're literally putting a pinball on a meat hook. Like that is the literal cool thing you're seeing when he drags the body through the door and slams it shut. We are dragging a pinball through the door with that magnet slamming the door shut. Like it's those literal exact things that you're looking for. But then we also have this gas station mode where you're selling items and there's an old country song playing and it's super like fun and happy sounding. So, it's completely like we provided this thing you didn't know you wanted in there, but then we also provided these things you did know for sure that you wanted doing the speech uh all the new call outs for the game and everything. It's It's the exact embodiment of what I want in my games. uh you have so you know I was just talking about Joe earlier from from pinball degenerates and uh okay he's got a term for this it's literally what you described but he has an anagram that he described for this
he calls it tea t i m a and it is the embodiment of using the pinball's mechanical mechs and motion to impart the theme of the game so like you're talking about where like the ball is being put onto thrown through the door like in the movie or where it's getting put on a Mi Cook.
That's a
So that's you you both have the same criteria for for what makes a great game.
And And the reason is so like pinball is incredibly niche, right? Like this is a really small industry. We are a small small fraction of all the different forms of entertainment in this world. Pinball has got to be one of the smallest ones.
Oh, for sure. And so when you take these absolutely massive IPs, you know, or even the smaller ones, but IPs that you love, like people grew up loving Beetlejuice, maybe you grew up loving Texas Chainsaw, maybe you grew up loving just, you know, Guns and Roses, whatever band it is. When the thing that you love is specifically interacting with pinball directly and all of a sudden they're talking about extra balls and jackpots and they're in the no. It feels like this IP, these characters, everything, all of a sudden they're in the know about pinball and why it's so cool,
right?
And that's a really really like special thing that makes people really fall in love with games is
I have more respect for for pinball characters that know about pinball or or I'm sorry, IP people that are suddenly now into pinball. I'm like, "Oh man, I didn't know Batman was so down with pinball. Batman's even cooler now."
You're like, "I didn't know he was cool like that." Yeah, exactly. It It makes it immediately a lot more special. So yeah, he's absolutely he's hitting the nail on the head for sure.
That's That's great. And Scott's asking, "Oh, Neil, wait, did Neil Neil, are you getting a BJ? When are you getting a BJ right now or in the future?" Did Are you sending Neil a BJ or No, I don't think he got one.
I don't know.
Have you been inundated with people that are in the pinball community uh that got the FOMO, missed out, and are just like, "Hey man, where's the, you know, where's the production one? you know, can we get can we get that?
The The amount of [snorts] uh if it falls off the truck emails we get is a lot. It's It's a lot.
Carrie's still here. He's talking about his BJ. I thought K's BJ video was hilarious. I thought the people that got mad about that are taking life too serious. Carrie, I appreciate you. [ __ ] the haters. Um All right. Well, so chat, we're kicking it for an hour and 20 minutes. Bug, I really appreciate you taking so much time to to chitchat about this. Uh, before I throw it to you to talk about I mean, obviously the game sold out, so there's not a lot of of marketing needed to do around that. I do want to throw it to chat if there's anybody that's got even more questions, you know, we got a party going on right now. Now's the time. Bug is here. He literally said he'd answer any question and not dodge anything. So, uh, let it rip. Um, and then while that's going on, Bug, I want to throw it to you again. Thank you. Do you have anything that you'd like to talk about? Is there anything cool going on? Oh, I'm sorry. There was one thing I wanted to talk about. The launch, the the idea of like a of a, you know, day one launch, like lining up down GameStop waiting for the game to to release. like thank you for bringing back the experience to the idea of purchasing pinball even though a lot of people are pissed off about the unavailability but like yeah that's a cool thing. Can you talk about what spawned that idea and everything? I all the credit in the world to Don's pinball podcast for that one. It was his idea. Uh he relentlessly hounded Luke and I about it once a week uh every week until we inevitably caved cuz at first we were like no way. like it just sounded like something we could never do. I mean, we've just never had a game launch day is such a private thing. It always has been. I mean, and also, you know, when we would launch our games, uh, people wouldn't play them in person, usually for a month or two after the fact. You know, the only thing that would be out there is the gameplay video or the live stream. So to have all of a sudden you're going to have a ton of people in your factory playing the game in person live like code development just got moved up a month to two months of like a whole different style of like robustness that it needs to be at
and uh we we were just really confident that the team
was was doing well enough that we could get it there and uh Don you just got to trust you just got to trust the Don yeah all all Spooky pinball did we just we just had some some food and drinks and a place to play the game. But that that was Don's brainchild. He He ran with it and I'm super happy did like the whole time we just couldn't believe how good the party went. Like how well
I'm assuming I guess it doesn't even matter, but I'm assuming it was a success. It was fun no matter what, right?
Oh my gosh. We're We're definitely doing it again next year. It was it was super fun. Everybody was really cool. They were cool about like no phones and taking videos and whatnot. And yeah, everybody was really nice. They were just excited. Uh it was just I know it sounds dumb. It was a party. I it was just it was a party. Like
Carrie has pointed out that some of us that are uh in our 40s like myself that the staying up past 10 is now a nightmare. So the midnight release thing is going to be for the uh for the young young pinball club only.
Yeah.
To be fair, we started the midnight release around like 6 p.m. because we all started doing the math and we were like, "This is a terrible idea to do this at midnight."
Well, it's spiritual midnight, right? Like just set your clock. You pretend and like whatever.
Yeah. Uh, Roller Coasters is asking, "Does Spooky have internships?"
Not, not really. No. Um, I to I don't know much about internships. I never did any and we've never had anybody do it.
I did the family internship. You were You were in You were grandfathered in on an internship, right?
Yeah, it was just free labor immediately. Is that what internships are? It's just free labor.
Yeah, pretty much. With school credit attached to it or something.
[snorts]
Um, baddest boy Lloyd is asking if speculation is good or bad for pinball and is asking your opinion on reselling pre-order spots.
Oh, yeah. Speculation good for pinball as in like uh like upcoming themes.
I'm not sure. I think that's what that means. Maybe he can rephrase that first part while you dive into.
I have a love I love a I have a lovehate relationship with uh the the themes being secret thing cuz it's really cool cuz then when you do finally drop what it is like I remember dropping the teaser trailer for Scooby-Doo in person to a room with 100 people in it.
Sure. and like the the pop that happened once it started and you heard the music and the logo hit and the room erupting into like cheer and everything like that was top 10 coolest things that's like ever happened to me. It's It's a totally different
also like I loved uh when I go to the arcade sometimes you'll see on like older data east games I think it was on Baywatch they were advertising that Tales from the Crypt is their next game
right
and I was like man that's also really nice too cuz then you don't have to play this whole hush hush game of like oh we can't say what it is like this and that there's a ton of pros and cons to to all sides of it you also don't want people like building up a certain expectation for what they're thinking they're going to see for 12 months and then you come out that's what I was You talked about the intimidation of like making sure that the game was fully packed on Beetlejuice.
You know, that is a direct correlation to announcing what the IP is beforehand. I mean, you've got expectations already building for the game and not like it really changes. You're going to try to make the best game you can anyways, but I just imagine there's got to be a different kind of mental philosophy of designing when you when people know what the IP is.
Yeah. Which we have never uh actually that's not true. We've definitely had some times where like, you know, like my dad announced the game and then it was a long time after that that you saw it. But like in the Bug and Spooky Luke era of of the company uh pretty much like when the teaser trailer came out, you saw the full game like pretty quickly after that. This is the longest break him and I have ever done for like you know teaser trailer comes out and then you wait to see the game and we were pretty against it for a long time. Uh, you know, especially, not to bring Stern into it, but like Fall the Empire. I think some people were not as crazy about what ended up coming out with how long that break was in between. But we had confidence. We just had full confidence that it was going to deliver like even with the hype train being as absolutely ridiculous as it was, we were pretty confident it was going to deliver uh on the reveal day. And I I think it did. I really I really do.
There's no doubt about that. I mean, you're not going to make everybody happy no matter what, but you know, hey, all your games are sold. So,
right.
We don't ever we don't usually put it out that way, but
I'll I'll be I'll be your avatar for that. Um, all right. We got a we got a questions. Let's get through these. So, uh, Scott Rundle's asking, "Do you sell as many toppers as games, or is it like Evil Dead where you've got more toppers in games currently?" Uh, I'm still waiting to get the total topper count. But for example, like certain distributors who yet for just throwing out random numbers so I don't give anybody away. If they sold 50 games, they sold 49 toppers out of 50 games, you know, and we've had some that sold way way more than that. That every single person but like one gets a topper. So, I think it's going to be close. Uh, I I think I think Beetlejuice might see an even higher percentage than Evil Dead did. Evil Dead, I believe we ended up doing about 820 toppers out of 888 games. So, I wouldn't be surprised if we see something like 900 out of 999 or maybe even 950.
I mean, if you have an Evil Dead,
I can't believe it.
If you don't have the topper for Evil Dead, like I'm not a topper guy, but like there's just certain toppers that are just like they feel like they belong on the game. We had a one funny story. I I won't say which distributor it was, but uh
um
we'll just say we'll say it was on tilt no matter what.
Yeah, we the the topper is obviously an option. Like you could pay to get that separate. And we had this distributor and uh Morgan calls him and she's like, "Hey, like how are the topper sales going?" He's like, "What do you mean?" And she's like like, "How many games did you sell with the toppers?" He was like, "All all of them. it's not an option. And she was like, "Yes, it is." And he's like, "Not in my camp." He He was refusing to sell it without the toppers on Evil Dead.
So, he sold every single game with toppers. I was like,
"Right on." Like,
that's funny.
You go, dude.
Uh GT Prague is asking, "Do you have any butter cans available for TCM?"
Yeah. Yeah. We're still selling and making TCMs all the time. Uh butter cabinet totally available. Uh, we have Butter Cabinet available for Scooby-Doo, Looney Tunes, TCM. Uh, we're still selling and making all three of those all the time. Worked in with these Evil Deads. They'll still be worked in with the Beetlejuices. Um, yep. Scooby-Doo, that's a Warner Brothers title. So is Looney Tunes. Beetleju is Warner Brothers. So that contract's open for a while. So you can keep ordering those games for sure.
Yeah, we still regularly.
Brass League solved the midnight launch issue. He says midnight- UTC. We'll have to have somebody translate what that is locally to central right for you guys. Your central time.
I'm just Yeah, we're central.
Uh Neil McCrae, the man himself who just wants to shout out Spooky for support is enabling us to put Evil Dead in the UK open bank. A spare part spent in two days. Top notch. Look at that. Shout out to Spooky support.
Yeah.
Yeah. We had fun this time. I'm glad we we got you on board with the Evil Dead Neil and everything. Spooky Luke likes you quite a bit. I guess I do too.
Spludg says, "Do you have internships for 45 year old men? It's getting a little weird in here." Uh, Blasters Pins asking, "Is this live live or a pre-recorded interview?" Well, I'll let you figure that one out right now. Uh, Pat the Weirdos, can you stop letting Sterling M blow up your games first? That 14-year-old boy needs an advantage.
Oh my gosh, that kid's a monster. Do you is there someone who's just like an absolute legend on spooky games? I would you say is it Sterling right now or is there like a player that you would like to give a shout out specifically that is like just the spooky goat when it comes to putting up big scores?
Oh man, I don't know. A lot of I mean a lot of tournament people kind of stray away from our stuff. They're usually the ones that you would see doing the big scores and whatnot. Um
well evil's a main stay at on tilt for tournament right now. like
videos I really appreciate. Uh Jake Danzik does a lot of good videos on uh just like long form gameplay. He'll have like a 40minute game on Scooby and upload that to Facebook and whatnot. So shout out to Jake for putting out cool videos of
his his homerew is really cool. Let's plug Let's plug mutant league hockey with uh with that artwork as well. That was a neat homebrew. It's like a face to face kind of like joust style uh pinball machine. Should check it out next time you're at an expo. Joe's asking, "Is your target for code on day one? Do you have a percentage for that?"
Uh, you know, the percentage always changes cuz like what I deem 50% on Beetlejuice would be a way higher percentage on some of our older games, you know, cuz like every game we get better at doing more in-depth code with a lot more layers. So the the percentage things I don't want to say like redundant, but we have more modes planned for Beetlejuice than we have in Evil Dead. And Beetlejuice is one movie versus two. Uh so we we have tons and tons and tons of content coming to it. I think the Beetlejuice code right now is by far the most professional uh roll out of code that we've ever had when it comes to stability as well as presentation of everything that we have going on. And we're still making changes and tweaks to it every single day obviously. be able to just a crap ton of modes that are coming to it.
Was there ever a discussion for Beetlejuice about including the second film
cuz I know there was a lot of speculation.
Yeah. Yeah. We uh it was actually kind of a cool story is um when we started working on this game as Beetlejuice, it wasn't that long after uh that they they let us know uh way in advance that there is going to be a confirmed sequel coming and then we got queued in onto like a meeting of uh you know what that was roughly going to be about and whatnot. And like for whatever reason like Beetlejuice it was it was always a fake Facebook post that you would see every single year of like oh they're officially doing it. was never true. And uh this time they gave us the heads up like a long time before it was officially announced that there was going to be a suitable bull. And uh what I quite transparently what's great about that is it's a win-win when you're working on like a a theme like this. It's a win-win cuz if everybody loves the sequel, oh great then the original movie is just it's made the whole franchise more popular. Like everybody's talking about it. It's
people love to rewatch the originals when they see a sequel come out. Yeah. And if the sequel is bad, which uh Beetle Juice Beetlejuice was, I thought, pretty good. Um if the if the sequel is bad, it just made the original movie that much better. It doesn't touch the original. The original is the greatest one ever. So, it's a total win-win.
Either way, you're going back to the first movie. This movie sucks. I'm going to watch the original. This movie's great. I'm going to watch the original. Like, win-win.
Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. But it it's tricky because I mean contracts obviously are just very different for the actors and the people involved with these projects in 1989 versus you know 2023 or 4 whenever it came out right.
Uh so like that that always makes it pretty tricky about like okay well if we do the sequel what can we really add to it? We We were pretty committed we were already started so we were pretty committed to just keeping it at the first movie and like I said there was kind of a win-win scenario for us in that case.
I mean I'm glad you did. I'm glad you did, but I mean, you're you obviously figured out a way to make it work with like Evil Dead, being able to select Evil Dead and Evil Evil Dead 2. Uh, this question has been shot multiple times in the chat. I have to ask [clears throat] cuz I'm curious. I love it as well. Is Army of Darkness on the table
either as like a as a wizard mode in Evil Dead or as a as a future pen?
I I really want to go get that license. I do. I really want to.
I mean, I I cannot promise or say anything. If I could, I would believe me. But like what I will tell you guys is like we are going to try to somehow do that theme someday. Like I that's really important to us. I think it makes all the sense in the world. Um and that game like being its own it deserves its own layout. It definitely deserves its own
this is kind of a confirmed hot take.
So I agree. It would make its own pin in its entirety not just a side mode in Evil Dead. So that makes me that that's awesome. I love hearing that. that. So,
yeah. yeah. No, that's that's on the list. Like, we really need to figure out how we're going to work Army of Darkness into our production at some point. We We need to do that.
You could use your spooky speech to do the Clatu Veratu,
you know.
Yes. That's so good. Yeah.
I'm just saying the spooky speech is a no-brainer on that one.
Marada.
Um, [snorts] all right. I'm going to wrap it up. I will say stick around just so we can shoot the [ __ ] a little bit afterwards. Uh, as we do on every podcast, we go raid somebody and you try to make their day and dump a bunch of pinball lovers on them. Uh, Neil wants to know if Mohead's coming.
Sneaking in some last minute questions.
Yeah, I know our British guys especially, they want us to do motorhead.
They love that motorhead.
They want it. Yeah. Motorhead.
Really? Really? I both are great, but uh, yeah. was truth. Uh, okay. We're going to wrap it up. Thank you again, everybody. I do want to say, Bug, will you will you praise The Great Pyramid with me?
Holy [ __ ] Madness Boy Lloyd, that is a huge blog.
Satanic thing I'm doing right now. I don't know.
Sure. It depends on how you feel about pinball. Um,
oh, right. Thank you, Johnny Button. I'm so stupid. Do you own personal machines at home? Uh, I have all of the spooky. So, I don't own any other games besides spooky pinball games. Not because I'm a prick, uh, but because pinball's really expensive.
Oh, for sure. It's It's horrendously so.
And I only I have all of our games. Uh, right now my house is like the safe space to have one of every spooky pinball game. It's for my live streams and everything. Um, I would love to own some games outside of that, but like I only have so much space for games and we keep making more. So,
would you own a classic
games into the collection?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. So, when we build Spooky Alley, I'm going to get these games out of my house and then I'm sure I'm going to put some stuff in there that's that's just for me. Like, have a haunted house.
For sure. I need that one.
Can I ask you a question? Then out of this these three pinball machines, they're classics. Which one of these would you add to your personal collection?
Ready? Raven.
That's Raven. The third one's Raven.
I'd pick hard body.
God damn it. Thanks everybody for coming to hang out with us. Uh, thank you Bug from Spooky. Uh, go I don't know. Go buy some spooky pinball machines. If you can't find Beetlejuice, there's a bunch of other great ones. Well, I guess you can't buy that either, but you can buy other ones. You can buy all the Looney Tunes. Uh, yeah.
Thanks, Bug.
Sweet. Yeah, I appreciate it. Does your life lack purpose? Have you wondered is there anything more? Join the cult of pinball. The great pyramid accepts all to the cult of the great order. I am Dr. Cornelius, imperturer and acolyte of the great pyramid. Join us for an ever ending