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Episode 49 - The 90s Pinball Renaissance Pt.1 w/ Roger Sharpe

Wedgehead Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 16m·analyzed·Sep 23, 2024
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TL;DR

Roger Sharpe discusses his role in driving the 1990s pinball renaissance through licensing strategy and mechanical innovation.

Summary

Roger Sharpe joins the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast to discuss the pinball renaissance of the 1990s, focusing on his hiring as Williams' marketing director in 1988 and his pivotal role in introducing licensed themes and emphasizing mechanical features (mechs) that defined the era. Sharpe explains the strategic shift from unlicensed to selectively licensed games, crediting Pat Lawlor as the master of interactive mechanical toys that transformed pinball design philosophy.

Key Claims

  • Roger Sharpe was hired as Williams' marketing director in March 1988 by Marty Glazeman and Ken Fedesna to replace retiring Nancy Goodwin

    high confidence · Direct statement from Sharpe about his hiring: 'in March of 1988 was an offer to become the director of marketing'

  • Sharpe discovered Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at a licensing show in summer 1987 and recommended it to Williams as a potential pinball license

    high confidence · Sharpe's detailed account: 'I encountered a small little booth. I met two very nice people. Mark and Renee were people that were representing Eastman and Laird and they had created a little black and white little comic book called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles'

  • Neil Nicastro initially opposed licensing at Williams post-Bally merger, citing Bally's licensing history as a cautionary example

    high confidence · Sharpe recounts: 'Neil's first comment was, look what it got for Bally. We just bought them. I said, no, you won't'

  • Sharpe proposed a balanced licensing strategy of four licensed games per year (spring, summer, fall, winter) rather than licensing all releases

    high confidence · Direct quote from Sharpe: 'What I'm thinking is you do like four a year, a spring, a summer, a fall, and a winter, not licensing all the time'

  • Sharpe attempted to license Batman in 1989 but was blocked by Warner Brothers restrictions on using actor likenesses in promotion

    high confidence · Sharpe: 'I wanted to do batman this is 1989 on the heels of elvira... couldn't use Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson on the back glass if I wanted to do any kind of promotions'

  • Pat Lawlor is credited as the master of mechanical toys and interactive features that transformed 1990s pinball design

    high confidence · Sharpe: 'Pat Lawler... will go down in the annals of history as being that one person that really brought into bear just the wonderful interactivity, physicality'

  • Banzai Run (with wrecking ball toy) was a pivotal game that opened designers' eyes to mechanical toy possibilities

    medium confidence · Sharpe describes it as opening 'a whole new dimension for pinball where wherever you thought you couldn't go before, you now can'

Notable Quotes

  • “The beauty of pinball, the fact that it is somehow irrepressible when it comes to dying, if you will, and being resuscitated.”

    Roger Sharpe @ Early in episode — Captures the core theme of pinball's cyclical boom-bust-boom pattern and industry resilience

  • “I think pinball needed to find its voice again”

    Roger Sharpe @ Mid-episode discussion of 1980s crisis — Explains the strategic need for innovation during the video game crisis rather than merely copying competitors

  • “What I'm thinking is you do like four a year, a spring, a summer, a fall, and a winter, not licensing all the time.”

    Roger Sharpe @ Licensing strategy discussion — Reveals Sharpe's strategic balance between licensed and original content to avoid over-reliance on licenses

  • “I don't need to be able to fly an airplane in order to advertise it”

    Roger Sharpe (quoting advertising industry figure) @ On licensing philosophy — Illustrates the principle that licensing doesn't require designer passion, but execution quality depends on team fit

  • “Pat Lawler started it all... suddenly it was like a whole new dimension for pinball where wherever you thought you couldn't go before, you now can.”

    Roger Sharpe @ Mechanical toys discussion — Attributes the mechanical toy revolution to Pat Lawlor's pioneering work, positioning him as the era's most influential innovator

  • “We wound up going from ignorance to a little bit of a feast, back to being oversatiated and saying, you know what? I cannot finish that entire meal. There's far too much stuff going on.”

    Roger Sharpe @ End of episode (partial) — Describes how the mechanical toy trend eventually over-saturated games, leading to diminishing returns and design redundancy

Entities

Roger SharpepersonWilliams ElectronicscompanyBally MidwaycompanyData EastcompanyPat LawlorpersonSteve RitchiepersonLarry DeMarperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Post-Bally acquisition (1988), Williams faced internal resistance to licensing strategy from executives citing Bally's historical over-reliance on licenses as cautionary example

    high · Sharpe recounts Neil Nicastro's response: 'Neil's first comment was, look what it got for Bally. We just bought them'

  • ?

    event_signal: IFPA tournament structure (co-created by Sharpe) institutionalized multi-era play, enabling community appreciation for games from different design periods and preventing era-centric prejudice

    high · Sharpe: 'I am just so pleased that, you know, through the IFPA and others... we're going to have tournaments where we're going to have people play games from different eras'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Sharpe articulated principle that successful licensed games require creative team passion/affinity for subject matter; design by assignment on unfamiliar IP produces mediocre results

    medium · Sharpe: 'it's very difficult to get your head wrapped around doing something creative if you don't have an affinity or an understanding or a passion for the subject'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Pat Lawlor pioneered mechanical toy integration in pinball, fundamentally shifting design paradigm from static playfields to interactive mechanical features; Banzai Run positioned as pivotal catalyst

    high · Sharpe: 'Pat Lawler started it all... suddenly it was like a whole new dimension for pinball where wherever you thought you couldn't go before, you now can'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Warner Brothers licensing restrictions on Batman pinball (1989) prevented use of actor likenesses (Keaton/Nicholson) for promotional purposes, forcing design compromises that made project unviable for Williams

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.230

0:00
Make up your mind Decide to walk with me Around the lake tonight By my side doing? I'm doing great. And today we're joined again by a very special guest, someone we've had on the show before. And this time we're actually going to talk about what he did in pinball and not just some history, the one and only Mr. Roger Sharp. Roger, how are you doing today? I'm good. How are you guys? We are wonderful. We are very excited to talk about today's topic this evening. It is the pinball renaissance of the 1990s. And just a little intro for the audience pinball was absolutely booming in the late 1970s with the switch over to solid state technology and the repealing of many outdated laws prohibiting their operation much of which roger had something to do with pretty famously pinball was at its cultural zenith with famous celebrities professional athletes and musicians being seen showing up to the arcade to play pinball what took 40 years to build all came crashing down in the early 1980s it was a massive and sudden jolt to the pinball market caused mainly by the newly developed video games that were flooding the streets stern electronics closed up shop in 1982 williams massively downscales their pinball division even steve richie leaves pinball at this time valley goes from top of the world down to a single pinball designer for a couple years as the video game division midway decimates the industry with pac-man and gottlieb loses their sole designer ed krensky to retirement during this time and chooses to instead just re-release some of his most popular layouts with new artwork instead of investing in all new designs. The outlook for Pinball is pretty bleak, but on the verge of death for the first time in its history, Pinball slowly picks itself back up in the mid-80s. Ramps become standard features, same with multiballs. Space Shuttle comes out at the very end of 1984 and includes the first sculpted playfield toy, and slowly but surely, the number of Pinball machines being made by each manufacturer starts to creep back up again. It's still a far cry from the peak about five years earlier, but it no longer looks like pinball is circling the drain. But what we're here to talk about today, in January of 1986, Williams released Steve Ritchie and Larry DeMar's High Speed, and for the first time in six years, they made a pinball machine that was a certified smash hit. Proved that pinball could still have a place in the coin-operated market moving forward, and in 1988, Williams buys their competitor, Bally Midway, and they also hired our special returning guest for this episode, Mr. Roger Sharp, as their new marketing director. This is the ushering in of the beginning of what I'm calling the pinball renaissance of the 1990s. Roger, you ready to talk about the pinball renaissance? Yeah, sure. Let's go for it. It's a great buildup. Thanks. I just want to, we try with our show to give people sort of historical context for some of these things and then not have to do major callbacks to, when was this? What was that? Kind of like what led up to it. And I think it's important for a lot of people to realize that pinball really went from like absolute booming in the late 70s to like dead, you know, not even a decade later or seemingly dead. And then it came back. So and that's what we're going to spend a lot of time on in this episode is how it comes back and then it comes back again. You know, nowadays it seems to. Yeah. Now it's happened enough that it's kind of a cycle that's maybe a little less scary to see. But it is just kind of crazy to look at how it went from dominating to almost dying and then coming back. The beauty of pinball, the fact that it is somehow irrepressible when it comes to dying, if you will, and being resuscitated. Yeah, something about the silver ball persists, you know, despite all odds. So getting to some questions for you, Roger. You were hired based upon your connections within the pinball and coin-op industries. and I think in large part to your relationships with a lot of licensors that you had built up over the years. When you were brought into Williams, what were the initial goals or objectives that they wanted to see you achieve for them as a marketing director, if that was your original position there? What, if anything, was laid out for you when you started? Did you come in? Did they have kind of objectives for you or was it more like you're there to do what you can to help grow the business? I guess, what did that position look like? There were different opportunities that kind of came and went for me where I wasn't able to really join any company full time, having done some freelance design work and such for a number of companies. So I'm on the East Coast, get a call. Nancy Goodwin, who had been the director of marketing, was retiring. And Marty Glazeman and Ken Fedesna thought that it would be a good idea to float an offer to me to become the director. No more, no less than that. If anything, I had approached the company prior to that with a game design. I only had gone to my first licensing show in the summer of 1987 and had seen a couple of properties that I thought might be of interest. And I also was putting together a business plan to launch a consumer coin operator amusement game magazine and was approaching Williams with the proposal of putting in sample premiere issues into all of their games that they were shipping out in the hope that people would find those, like what they saw, and would subscribe. So it was basically a three-pronged attack for me being in contact with everyone. And the net result instead in March of 1988 was an offer to become the director of marketing. Nothing having to do with licensing, nothing having to do with my magazine, nothing having to do with anything other than just coming in, replacing Nancy, working with the sales department for any of the collateral business information that was going to be going out, the marketing materials, setting up, overseeing trade shows, and then working corporately as well in terms of whatever information needed to be given during various financial quarters on the stock. So that effectively was a role as well as being somewhat of a, I don't know, I guess an intermediary between the executives and the sales department to evaluate potential projects from each of the designers. Gotcha. And that was including the beginning phase, or at least the middle, because it was a little bit longer in development for Williams to reenter video, as well as pinball kind of taking hold. And that was the initial offer.

  • Improved flipper power and system technology in System 11 era games enabled longer, more fluid shots not possible in earlier systems

    high confidence · Sharpe: 'I couldn't do really long shots on Sharpshooter, but I could do long shots on Baracora and Cyclops just because of the power'

    • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    game
    High Speedgame
    Pinbotgame
    Medieval Madnessgame
    Addams Familygame
    Cactus Canyongame
    Attack from Marsgame
    Police Forcegame
    Banzai Rungame
    Earthshakergame
    Whirlwindgame
    Neil Nicastroperson
    Stern Pinballcompany
    IFPAorganization
    Marty Glazemanperson
    Ken Fedesnaperson
    Gary Sternperson
    Stargategame
    Jurassic Parkgame

    high · Sharpe: 'couldn't use Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson on the back glass if I wanted to do any kind of promotions... You can feature them, the back of them... You can do a cartoon version of them, but you cannot use their likeness'

  • $

    market_signal: Mechanical toy trend reached saturation point by late 1990s, with designer/publisher concerns about feature redundancy and over-complexity diminishing player enjoyment

    high · Sharpe: 'We wound up going from ignorance to a little bit of a feast, back to being oversatiated and saying, you know what? I cannot finish that entire meal'

  • $

    market_signal: Sharpe's original marketing concept emphasized IP properties as promotional vehicles with advertising reach rather than as thematic content, fundamentally different from pure licensing-for-theming approach

    medium · Sharpe: 'What I'm thinking is... a license does a couple of things. It gives you potentially a storyline... But I also wanted a promotion. I wanted to be a part of something because I did not have an advertising budget'

  • ?

    product_concern: Era-specific design philosophy concern: mechanical toy prevalence in 1990s games eventually produced diminishing returns and feature redundancy as designers exhausted novelty applications

    medium · Sharpe: 'the redundancy wound up causing a lot of things to kind of fall by the wayside for a period of time later on'

  • ?

    business_signal: Williams adopted a balanced licensing strategy (4 games/year: spring, summer, fall, winter) rather than pursuing all-licensed or all-original content, reflecting Sharpe's deliberate market positioning approach

    high · Sharpe directly states strategy: 'What I'm thinking is you do like four a year, a spring, a summer, a fall, and a winter, not licensing all the time'

  • ?

    technology_signal: System 11 technology enabled improved flipper power and system performance, allowing designers to execute longer shots and more fluid ball motion than previous solid-state generations

    high · Sharpe: 'I couldn't do really long shots on Sharpshooter, but I could do long shots on Baracora and Cyclops just because of the power'

    • 7:45
    Nice. That's very cool. So it almost seems like a bigger part of that was just kind of your knowledge of what works good as a Coin.ot product, more than like the licensing connection or anything that we may have assumed here. Yeah, there was no licensing connection other than my thought process being, hey, guys, would you be interested in this? And it wasn't necessarily for my game design. It was just putting it out there and thinking that there was a unique opportunity and looking back historically at what the massive success was through Tom Naiman at Bally in the late 70s, mid-70s on through with Wizard kind of kicking it off and saying the company being propelled into a dominant position. I know that much of that was due to some of the licensed content that they brought to market, and I thought that there was something there. Didn't know what it was. Wasn't familiar at all with that part of the business, but thought that that was something that should be considered. I want to set the stage for sort of right when you enter Williams. Like you kind of enter right in the middle of the System 11 era of pinball, which I think most pinball players see as the sort of the predecessor to modern pinball. I liken it to how like Black Sabbath is like the father to all modern metal bands can you start off by telling us like what felt different about these games of the recent past and what they felt like to you because you worked in the pinball industry you you wrote the book you're the man that saved pinball they made a movie about you but you're a pinball player first and foremost I mean you're a pinball guy you love pinball you're a pinball player like how did these system 11 era games feel like a departure from the previous games and can you discuss to us how you felt as you were seeing them come off the assembly line i think that it was an easier transition the efficiency and effectiveness of what one was able to bring into the overall presentation of pinball sound wise light wise and such i think that for me at least it was a progression that I felt very comfortable with. You know, there was that opportunity, I think, to experience a whole new era. I guess that's the best way to describe it. Yeah. There was a feeling of anticipation and excitement back in that time frame for me in the mid-80s when I was still on the East Coast of traveling down to the world-famous Broadway arcade to play games on test and to see things firsthand or traveling into Chicago from time to time, you know, working on various projects and the like, and really seeing things up front and potentially having some influence on some of the games that were going to be coming into market without being overly repetitive. I kind of liked it. What did you guys feel in terms of looking in from your own personal experiences? I think that most pinball players, they look at high speed, and I think, I believe that's the first System 11 game that Williams released. It's, I mean, Larry DeMar, Steve Ritchie, I mean, two of the greats of all time. It's credited as being the first game that kind of tells a story. It has a multi-ball, it has kind of ramps and physical locks and then you have pin bot that comes out the same year and you get the visor and you get like a big mechanical mech again with physical ball locks and just sort of people look at those games in the in the whole system 11 era you know for the next couple years as like that's like when pinball became what modern pinball still looks like today it has every piece of what we see now we start getting ramps that return the balls to the flippers which i think is the biggest to me that's always the biggest distinction between like a classic solid state in a modern game is when you shoot ramps and it actually goes back to the flippers because that changes just the length of the game so much that's really that big transition era so it's it's funny when i got into pinball anything pre because i haven't been into pinball that long roger just for reference maybe five years or so and okay and when i got into it it was like anything pre-system 11 i kind of thought was a waste of time and then he's come around he's come around roger i promise you i hope so yes and it's it's kind of funny me and alan always joke it's like the longer we're in the hobby the further back we go and that's why we've become so just like infatuated with uh wood rails and two inch flipper games because it's like yeah we just love those now especially if you're playing with buddies it doesn't get better than that yeah we really love the old games and you get you get accustomed to it that's why i think it was it's interesting to hear kind of your perspective, like having seen this evolution over time and just hearing that it was just all exciting new stuff at the time. I'm always curious. I know we mentioned it in the last episode, but I'm always curious if there's something that you saw in pinball where you're like, I don't know if I like this. Like the one that I brought up, I think last time was ball saves. And I'm always just wondering if you think of anything throughout the episode that you're like, I remember seeing that and thinking it was corny or that that didn't feel like real pinball. Try to let us know. Not that you know, I'm not expecting an answer off the top of your head, Well, I'll give you an answer off the top of my head. Yeah. Let me segue for a moment, which is, for me, why I believe, and I am just so pleased that, you know, through the IFPA and others and whatever Steve Epstein and I envisioned when we co-created Papa, than when I was very much responsible for the original IFPA and then the resurrection of it with my sons, Josh and Zach, kind of taking over that mantle. But the ability to say, we're going to have tournaments where we're going to have people play games from different eras. Yeah. And you wind up seeing the appreciation for some games that were just failures, best way to describe it, that people gravitate to and say, are you kidding this is an incredible game we want to be able to play i'll pick a game without wanting to hurt anybody's feelings you want to play argosy yeah argosy was incredible it was like really it wasn't it was terrible oh my the imbalance of it all forget about ted zillow and doing asymmetrical play fields are you kidding me again not my team fingers no smell of that But there were other games that were, I won't call them colossal failures, because I've always believed that there is an audience for any game that's ever been built and ever been brought into the marketplace. But I think that to get back to your original question, you know, when pinball found itself in the throes of are we going to survive or not? and people were throwing darts at the dartboard. Where you have people fundamentally cocktail table pinballs, rotation eight. Well, we have to do something because nobody likes pinball anymore. So we're going to modify it and come up with these strange and bizarre approaches to it, such as Orbiter One, Baby Pack Now, Native Man, and others that were derivatives that didn't remain necessarily true to the essence of pinball. thought that somehow they had to dress it up for a new and different audience. And admittedly, on many levels, they were correct. That new and different audience had different types of entertainment options, and the majority of those entertainment options with the emergence of personal computers and home game systems as well as video games was all visual. I think that pinball needed to find its voice again, and I give a lot of credit to you mentioned high speed kind of taking that gauntlet and saying hi we can do more we can put a rotating light up here we can do some other good stuff I mean we can do some things to kind of dress it up but by and large underneath the hood it's pinball yeah whether that ramp leads back to the flipper or it doesn't guess what we can do some things that maybe were done before because there were ramps before, if you will. There were wire farms before. There was multiball before in other eras. Yes. So it wasn't a question of reinventing the wheel so much as it was reimagining how does that wheel work? How do we make this more compelling as a sense of discovery for new players, a challenge for existing players, and for older players, maybe they can step up and still have an appreciation of just the physical interactivity of a person playing a pinball. And whether you're just pulling back a plunger or watching a ball roll down in the 1930s, or playing a game post Humpty Dumpty that has flippers that are either aligned in the wrong angle or the right angle, that do something and do very much little, whether you have just bumpers that are really not bumpers versus jet bumpers and pot bumpers and all the rest of it. Suddenly there was, again, this inclusion of all these various elements into this stew, this melting pot, and you had a variety of chefs across all of the various companies putting their best foot forward to create, again, adventures that maybe we would find to be fun. Yeah. And for the listener, we did that whole episode on Harry Williams. And if you're wondering what Roger's kind of talking about, we had him on that episode and we talked about Harry Williams. All these advancements in pinball, they're almost all Harry Williams. They all kind of lead there. But we want to get into this era because you're hired in the in 88 you're in the middle of the system 11 era you're hired as the marketing director and i want to talk about what makes this kind of boom cycle of pinball and all these games we get into the 90s i want to start talking about like what makes them impressive and the first thing we got to talk about i think is that just like you said tom neiman at valley they in the late 70s started experimenting with licensing which is something you ended up doing at williams and Williams started making some licensed games after the merger. Because in 1987, a year before the Bally Williams merger, you get a new competitor to the pinball marketplace. Gary Stern partners with the Japanese video game developer Data East. He creates the first new pinball manufacturer since his dad started Stern Electronics. But Stern is out of business at this time. Data East starts off making some Williams-style unlicensed games. but then pretty quickly they only do licenses when you're at bally and williams post merger you guys still did some licenses some unlicensed games but i know that at the company it seems like i heard you speak before and you said that it seemed like you had to sell the company on doing licensed games that there wasn't like a big appetite at Williams at the time to do licensed games. So how did you bring the idea of licensing to Williams, and what effect do you think it had on this era of pinball? Well, I saw, and I've stated it before, that, well, let me go back. 1987, I go to my first licensing show in New York City. And I used to do a lot of different trade shows when I was at GQ, just out of personal curiosity and what have you. And it was like, wow, this is kind of interesting. Look at all this stuff. and you get to see previews, if you will, from the various studios and others who are going to be promoting the next big trend, the next big thing. And I noticed three different properties that I found intriguing. One was Willow, which was going to be a movie that was going to be coming out and looks kind of interesting. And admittedly, things from that type of time frame and time period had a lot of depth to it. But it didn't resonate with me necessarily, and I'm thinking of it in the context of pinball. Willow was one. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was the other? And I thought, wow, that's going to be incredible. But I don't know, Jessica Rabbit and the way her body is and her form, that kind of seems to be a little bit out there. Plus, I don't know how it would be to work with Disney or anybody. and then I encountered a small little booth. I met two very nice people. Mark and Renee were people that were representing Eastman and Laird and they had created a little black and white little comic book called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And I thought, that's crazy. That's nuts. And back at that point in time, if you remember, some of the, I won't call them underground necessarily, but there were a lot of different little magazines and picture books and things, you know, the Mr. Naturals of the world that were coming out. I won't call them necessarily counterculture, but it was like, you know, there's something here. The suggestion on my part to the folks at Williams was, guys, I think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would be great.
    21:38
    Now, we have to understand during this transition, when I first come in, The rumors are that we're going to be buying Bally Midway. So I started in March, but I don't effectively move from Connecticut to Chicago until the summer. It's somewhat, I don't know how many people have experienced the opportunity to effectively realize a dream.
    22:04
    Wanted to come back to Chicago, wanted to work in the industry, had opportunities prior to that. We won't get into those details that never really panned out. And lo and behold, here is this firm offer. So the lead up to this is that what I wound up doing specifically for the pinball group was to stage an offsite with the folks that we had brought in from Bally along with the existing folks at Williams to put up on a board what defines a Williams game and what defines a Bally game. The essence of it was that Bally had done licensed games and were kind of known for that over a period of time, along with other advancements and what have you. And my comment was to Ken and Neil Nicastro, who was heading up the company, along with his father, Luna Castor, as well as Kenny, was, I think we should do licenses. And Neil's first comment was, look what it got for Bally. We just bought them. I said, no, you won't. What I'm thinking is you do like four a year, a spring, a summer, a fall, and a winter, not licensing all the time. So to get back to the original question that was asked a couple of hours ago on this particular subject and the fact that we wound up integrating both licensed themes as well as unlicensed themes, I never felt that there wasn't a place for an original game based on whatever the original theme might be. I didn't think it was a necessity. Obviously, with Elvira, that set the stage for incredible success for Bally. It took us a while on the Williams side to do a licensed theme. But I think that a license does a couple of things. It gives you potentially a storyline where you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
    24:03
    That's not to say that a game like Earthshaker can't work on its own just because of what the premise is, or you mentioned Whirlwind before, or even High Speed, that I don't need to do Indianapolis 500 to have a driving game to make it work and be effective, that I can do Whitewater as an original game as opposed to needing to do, let's say, I don't know, Addams Family or Last Action Hero. I don't want to just pick on Williams or Bally games. But I think that, you know, when you wind up going down that road of doing a license just for the sake of doing a license, I think that's where things falter. And I think that there are far too many examples of games that missed the mark, either because it wasn't the right theme or it wasn't the right execution or more importantly and i'll use batman as an example i wanted and i've talked about this i wanted to do batman this is 1989 on the heels of elvira kind of show hey this is pretty good i'd already started working on getting a license for nba jam or what was eventually nba jam for the nba as a basketball game as a follow-up to arch rivals a very successful original theme that Brian Cullen and Jeff Nauman wound up bringing to life.
    25:23
    So I think that with Batman eventually reaching Warner Brothers and finding out that I couldn't use Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson on the back glass if I wanted to do any kind of promotions. My whole thing with licensing was that I just didn't want a license. I wanted a promotion. I wanted to be a part of something because I did not have an advertising budget. I could not reach the consumer.
    25:52
    I wasn't willing to take on a license for the sake of taking on a license and was told, well, if that's what your necessity is, you can feature them, the back of them. And it's like, no, that's not going to work. You can do a cartoon version of them, but you cannot use their likeness. And obviously Data East eventually did Batman and we didn't. And Police Force, as everybody knows, was going to be our Batman. But Police Force succeeded on its own merits as a very, very skilled and successful game with some of the inventiveness of Python Angelo and others that were on that team. Barry and Mark to help put it all together.
    26:36
    So I think that, you know, the point I'm trying to make, probably not doing an adequate enough job, is that it really depends on the design team. I originally come from the world of advertising. And as somebody once said, who was in the Advertising Hall of Fame, I don't need to be able to fly an airplane in order to advertise it.
    27:01
    Well, I think that one of the key ingredients to that is, and having been a copywriter as well as an account exec, it's very difficult to get your head wrapped around doing something creative if you don't have an affinity or an understanding or a passion for the subject, whether you're trying to do Coca-Cola advertising or Volkswagen, or if you're trying to create a pinball machine or a video game based on a particular subject where it's like, hi, guess what, Jim, this is going to be your next project. And it's like, Huh? Really? Okay, fine. Let me go do that. You and I all know that that's not going to be successful. Having said that, I thought that a game that was supposed to be Red Baron suddenly became Harlem Globetrotters. Right. Sometimes there were games that were given a new lease on life because a license became available. Yeah. And it just kind of all worked together because back at that time, maybe the rule sets weren't as established as they suddenly became. Or a game like now Godzilla comes to mind. You're really kind of integrating the signature elements of the particular property. M's family comes to mind, obviously. Twilight Zone and so many others from that era that really kind of encapsulated what the license was as opposed to games that were able to stand on their own. Yeah. That some people may think of as medieval madness is fantastic. We love it. There was no license. Exactly correct. Didn't need a license. Cactus Canyon, even as a remake with people jumping in to say, let me get that, did not need a license to be successful. I think you're transitioning nicely into the next part of what we're talking about with these games, with the games you just brought up. Cactus Canyon, Medieval Madness, Attack from Mars. The other big thing is licensing starts to become a thing, but it's not the end-all, be-all. Another big hallmark of this era is the big mechs. We call them mechs or mechanical features, big moving toys. So you have the castle in Medieval Madness, you have the saucer, the aliens that jump up and down. Cactus Canyon's got a whole bunch, like the moving train across the playfield and the guy, you smack him with the ball and his hat flies up, right? It kind of comes to a head, actually like a peak in these 90s games. And you see it with Thing, The Hand, and Adam's Family, and the moving bookcase, Rudy. I mean, the list goes on and on. It seems to be a hallmark of this 90s games, and even your competitors, Gottlieb Premier and Data East, they started putting big mechanical toys or features in their games. Can you tell us about your opinions on that and the way it changed the game of pinball?
    30:06
    Sure. You mentioned before Steve Ritchie with high speed really helping to define an era. You know, we can go back in time and talk about Wayne Nines and what his impact was on the side. Ted Zale and what he was able to accomplish with Ace Cemetery. You know, the emergence of Jim Patlin, Greg Kamek, Gary Gaten and others from a different era.
    30:27
    Obviously, Steve Kordak and Norm Clark and others from that era. I think the person that helped make that transition to toys was none other than, oh, I don't know, maybe bringing out something like Banzai Run. Yeah. Maybe doing something like Earthshaker. Yeah, Pat Lawler. Maybe doing something like Whirlwind. You imagine a little poor Rudy. I think the master of toys. And the master of toys, really, the master of interactivity on a pinball machine, that's Pat Lawler. He will go down in the annals of history as being that one person that really brought into bear just the wonderful interactivity, physicality of that world under glass. I thank Steve for the fluidity of what he's done in his career, his ability to adapt, to say, all right, fine, I'll put in a toy. Let me give you a spell here on no fear. Yeah. I mean, what else can I do here to kind of poddle things around? but staying true to what made him and still makes him one of the premier designers of the last 40 years. So I think that it was Pat Lawler that wound up opening up everybody's eyes saying, oh, yeah, well, then we can do that. Look, we see that in movies. We see the literature. We see it in music. You need somebody, some group, some individual, some team to kind of establish something that maybe is only a moderate and slight tweak to what the standard had been versus something that is just so outside the box that everybody gravitates and says, oh, well, now let's try to do that. The blinders are off. So to answer your question, Pat Lawler started it all. The first game I ever actually worked on, other than Ramp Warrior, a truck stop as we know it to be, was Bonsai Run that Larry brought in as wrecking ball. And suddenly it was like a whole new dimension for pinball where wherever you thought you couldn't go before, you now can. And I think that much of it was, again, technology. I couldn't do really long shots on Sharpshooter, but I could do long shots on Baracora and Cyclops just because of the power. Yeah, the flipper power. The flipper power and the system power and everything else where, thank you, Steve Ritchie, I can make those long shots all the way around and about. and have them be fluid and smooth, ride the rails and everything else. So I think that the technology blended in with the ability, again, to have some level of interactivity. Something that's going to surprise you, you mentioned before, things hand coming out. Or on Jurassic Park, the original one, having a dinosaur come down and chew up the ball. Right. Or having a pyramid on... Oh, Stargate. Thank you. Stargate. Shoot the pyramid. Which had so much stuff going on. It was kind of crazy. So we wound up going from ignorance to a little bit of a feast, back to being oversatiated and saying, you know what? I cannot finish that entire meal. There's far too much stuff going on. Yeah. And I think the redundancy wound up causing a lot of things to kind of fall by the wayside for a period of time later on in that era, if you will, where pinball found itself floundering a little bit more just because it was relying so much on, I won't call them gimmicks, so much as new different functionality that may not have been the best utilization. That's interesting. I mean, I do think that there is like a balance of like, you know, you see it now with stern machines where they have, on average, many less big mechanical features, but they also have different model levels where the Pro has less and then the Premium LE has more. And sometimes the Pro, it's faster, more kinetic, kind of more fun, sometimes more fun to play. I don't want to just paint the brush there that broadly. And then sometimes the mechanical features are actually really like Godzilla. They're amazing, and they really add to the experience. and I do think that they really did help Funhaus sells 10,000 units because Rudy the talking head is there like absolutely that's a big part of it. Adam's Family best-selling game of all time you know some of those mechanical features are they help that game and also Larry Tamar's a genius, Atlala's a genius right like you're there to secure the license. It is interesting though because I think like you're like you're getting out with going too heavy on the Maxin toys is that a lot of these things that are leading to big successes on these titles in the 90s could also be used as a crutch and you see a lot of the less loved games of this era might have a fantastic theme but that's all they have going for them or they might have a ton of toys like you're saying under the glass but they aren't integrated well and so it's kind of an interesting one where it's like you said we suddenly have this glut rescue 911 is a great example of a game that has a really cool helicopter that swings out and grabs the ball it's a really cool mech and it's not is it a great game was it use was it a good use of their budget on that title probably not i don't know i don't know it was it's fun the first time but you see it all the time in that game the game just feels like you're always you're watching you're watching the helicopter the whole time it's funny another another big advancement in this era that kind of defines it is the introduction of the dot Matrix display, the DMD, which for any listeners that are somehow not aware, it's like the classic orange kind of displays that you see in all the games from the 90s. The Data East kind of beat Bally Williams to the punch by a little bit. They have a very small screen. I think Checkpoint was the first production game with it. But either way, the new screen was immediately adopted by basically all the manufacturers as soon as they could moving forward. What are your recollections, roger of the of the dmd and how much do you think it affected the advancement of pinball in in the past episode with you we talked about going to uh indexing score reels and you mentioned how that was a complete game changer versus the static scoring of the wood rail era did you see kind of a similar change when dmds came into the games or was it a more subtle difference what are your just what are your thoughts on that well admittedly i mean they used to your point they'd come out first with Checkpoint by a little bit. We had already been in development with a larger display that Mark Ritchie had been working on with his team for Slugfest.
    37:35
    I think that it was really the better implementation of the effects of, in quotes, an exploding scoreboard that we have here in Chicago. So I think that, you know, if that was the precursor to it all, which it was, we suddenly found it to be less expensive, more reliable to go in that direction. And it allowed us to do more things visually because let's go back again. Based on the era we still dealing with a predominant audience that is very visually oriented And even if it is a black and white Game Boy that they playing that tends to resonate more than having the scoring the way that it was Now we have a dot matrix. We can do fun little animations.
    38:31
    We now have some speech and some sound. You can do video modes. What eventually then became a crutch of sorts. We can now do video modes that help authenticate the use of the detonation. Many people thought that that was a way to maybe encourage video game players to play pinball. Hopefully not to turn off many pinball players. I don't know what the outcome eventually became with that. I know they kind of took hold and even to the extent of I guess Sega eventually doubling up the size on games like Maverick and Baywatch with a larger display and doing more in different video modes and more in different animations so I think that you know you can have the same discussion I think the value of having an LCD screen in the top box i'm not looking up when i'm playing sorry either i'm looking at the ball and the flipper now you're giving me a rest period you give me a speech prompt or something else to say hi look up okay wow look at what's going on over here they're doing wizard of oz i've just captured dorothy god isn't that exciting yeah we just released the ball i just missed that when i was watching all right not going to do that again right you know that's all for the visual entertainment of people who are spectating yeah walking by it's to bring people in and i think that you know dot matrix has worked for their period of time before there was again the necessary evolution and we've seen it with some of the kits and some of the systems that have eventually come out saying hi how about color dot nation change over your black and white into this a different richer experience and i and i think that you know in all honesty we are still compelled to do things more visually and if you can do something like on medusa and give me some type of an inset in the middle of the play field counting up stuff or on what is it fireball 2 giving me something where I'm looking down on the play field or Embryon and other games from that era, or suddenly you're using some type of a display, literally front and center, well, then that's focused for the player. Right. So I think that the transition is smooth. I think the reliance on doing things now. Starts at that era. Maybe it takes away. I find too many games now where I don't get a flashing light. I don't get a speech. Agreed. I don't get an indicator that says, get ready, the ball is coming out from over here, over there, or whatever else. I'm going to surprise you. It's coming around from here. I'm popping it out over here. Oh, too bad. Or when multi-ball starts, guess what? We have 8,000 different colored lights. we're going to flash the ball in your face while the balls are released straight down to your flippers does this feel good to you roger you are speaking this is 100 sums up our feelings i we talk about this a lot this era okay so this is going to segue into the kind of like the last part of this first episode is the last part of this episode is the big change was in software you know the last thing about these 90s machines was the software just revolutionary particularly at bally williams we start to see modes wizard modes multi-balls multi-ball exclusive jackpots we would get a great increase in just rules and objectives not to mention all the custom music and the sound call outs and the impressive light shows that built the big moments into the play experience which was different than before and it's been a build upon since but i do think that there's a kind of level of perfection in the 90s in my opinion of the best 90s games were kind of the peak of like there was a lot more going on there were plenty of objectives things that you would have to climb towards where you get to wizard modes and things like that but the games did a really good job of you could still just shoot the flashing light you would get a good sound call out you know that would tell you what to shoot or how close you were to something and i do think that nowadays we are running into a lot of games are just everything's lit it's multi-colored you're building a lot of things at the same time and you can't display that on a play field adequately and so they rely on a display and they kind of rely on a lot of knowledge that you would have to bring to the game you would have to know it going in and we have the technology now that we go watch streams we can do research before we go play a game of pinball but i do think we like that shouldn't be necessarily expected for people to enjoy these games well then is for the pinball audience how do you increase an audience that is going to be the next generation of players right the problem all right i'm going to make a statement it's just mine mine alone i'm probably out in the lunatic fringe. Special effects movies were kind of cool 20, 25 years ago. The first, you know, Iron Man or whatever was kind of neat. And then everything became overlaid with special effects to the point of like, really? What's going on here? There's 85 different war scenes. There's these different heroes and all the rest of it. Much of the personality was drained. Forgetting about Wolverine and Deadpool. But I'm just looking at the Marvel Universe, what was attempted with DC and some of their movie adventures, if you will, and some of the other films that have come out where, again, the special effects dominate. And the storyline is kind of secondary versus something like Megan, which became a massive success and surprise because it was focused on one delightfully bizarre, created little robotic girl who had great dance moves and could kill people at will. so that now you have a franchise that wasn't expected. I think that the games that persevere today are the ones who have that delicate balance, that elegance of, in quotes, the special effects that we're talking about, where the game still resides on its own.
    45:24
    It is still something that is pleasurable. It is still something where, yes, there may be a number of different things happening at the same time, but at least you're able to navigate a little bit based on the overall geometry and flow of the game it still may not have what i think of as being most desirable indicators for me words of encouragement sound effects light display some indicate oh i've done this that or the other the ball has stopped somewhere i need to do this or that everything is now tempered when it comes to that because the priorities aren't necessarily giving positive reinforcement or direction to the player so much as it is lighting up the next opportunity to advance or increase some value somewhere somehow. I mean, I just played in the monthly tournament that we have here in Trarion and I played on a couple of games where I did not have a clue what I was supposed to do. And I walk up to it, I want to play the geometry of it. Ball's fading out here. There's a ramp. Let me see that ramp. Where's the ball coming from? When I find myself hunched over the play field, looking to see to the top of the game, is the ball going to come out from over there? Do I have to get ready for the flipper up over there? Where am I hitting? Over here on Toy Story? Where's the ball coming? On Willy what do i do next where is it going huh yeah versus other games like playing and again from a comparable era and it's like much more comfortable you know my sons have always joked my way of playing is that i'll make a ramp over and over again even if it's not worth anything because i like making the ramp right and also correct but i think that you know when you have to invest as much time and effort because the games are principally and primarily being designed and built for home consumption that's the problem that we have in the scalability of today's games versus from the previous era i have to justify that 10 12 15 000 8 000 investment for that person to bring this game into their home so that they're not going to master it. Look, I grew up in a time, I grew up, my son grew up in a time where I was like, hey, Dad, we need this game for the Nintendo system or the Sega or any of the other systems that we had. And you'd buy the game for $20 or $30. And two days later, thanks, we want this game now. Wait, wait, wait, I just bought, yeah, we finished it already. We're done. Right. And to think that that is the problem with pinball and maybe the challenge going forward is going to be how do we embrace the depth and dimensionality necessary for a home purchase versus just a standard use commercially at a bar, convenience store, bowling alley, barcade for somebody walking up and hoping that they are not totally lost, turned off and walk away saying forget it. Yeah. And that is going to be the challenge that. Yeah. It's just important to remember the breadth of customers for pinball. Right. It is funny, though, speaking to someone like you, that's, you know, one of the most famous pinball players in the world. And Alan and ourselves and myself play a ton of pinball. Alan owns a bar I play almost every day. And we still can be overwhelmed with what's going on with a lot of the modern games. and it does make you kind of consider who actually is asking for what's being delivered in some of these cases. The other problem, and again, a personal observation, you're playing a game, you're kind of getting comfortable with it, you come back, whoa, oh, it's a whole new program? Game doesn't play the same way that it did last week. Oh, I got to learn everything all over again? I know. Things going out today are incomplete.
    49:41
    Yeah, that drives me nuts. We're the guinea pigs out there. And I think that that's the part that's unfortunate, just because the public has embraced that and accepted it. If they didn't, then it would change, but everybody's ponying up because of FOMO. I want to ask you real quick because you bring up something that used to happen, and I don't think that many new players or people really understand the complete kind of sea change of these used to be commercial only on location make money games. They were point when you're service advertising, they had to get your quarters. They had to work. Operators had to do it. They had to make money. When they used to build these games, they used to test these on location. They used to do on location tests before they went into full production, and then they would take that information and adjust rules or scoring or maybe even adjust some shots and things to make that game, you know, do better. or the idea was that it would do better with that market testing for the final production game and it's something that they can't do anymore because now they or the companies seem to believe and this is their strategy and they're doing well so i'm not here to judge it one way or the other but nor am i they keep it in house and then they release a game and then as you said we become the guinea pigs that maybe they could have gotten some of this out when it was location tested i just want to talk since we're talking about 90s pinball today what were your recollections of how that process worked of putting a game on test and and how did it make a game better do you have any examples of anything that went out on test uh you found something about it and you were able to change it and make the game better yeah i mean one of the things i didn't mention in terms of my job responsibilities, I headed up the test program. Oh, well, see, you're the perfect person to ask that question to. That was for pinball as well as for video. It was for all of our games. We would put games out and try to get data and information, obviously on earnings, so that we could then use the sales message through our sales staff to distributors, and they could then pass that along to their customers who were looking to purchase a new game.
    52:06
    I think for the designers, when we would go out on test, and the designers would go out there as well, monitor, capture data in terms of plays. Was the game percentage appropriately and accordingly?
    52:21
    Was this feature being hit, activated to the extent that we wanted it to be? Was multiball too hard? Was it too easy? was this sequence of doing something appropriate? Could it be done in three balls?
    52:38
    How are we going to change things for a five-ball setting? Because parts of the world wanted five balls still versus three ball. I even put together a manual with Steve on Black Knight 2000, how to set it up on three-ball play versus five-ball play. Interesting. To maximize your revenue. So, yeah, I mean, look, 99% of what was being created was for a consumer market. The home market was all old used equipment. Yeah. You know, not many people back in the 1980s, 30, 40 years ago, were setting up their home game rooms with full-size football machines. It wasn't a thought necessarily because, my God, game costs $1,000. We can't afford that. You know, maybe we can find a used game for 500, 600. It was a capital investment. Not that it isn't today, but, you know, inflation. Yeah, we're all numb to it now. Well, the cost of toys is different for men than boys. That's what defines it. But I think that, you know, for us, it was important to get that information. I know that with a game like Defender being out on test in New York with Steve Epstein at the Broadway Arcade, Eugene and his design team ramped up difficulties. I think it got to setting 11 because Steve put it out at three and it was too easy. People were playing too long. So a lot of it was just time on device. Right. You know, we need this game, this pinball to be no longer than three and a half minutes. How do we do this? In the old days, when people still read magazines, and I was reviewing games for PlayMeter and Industry Trade Magazine doing Critics' Corner, I would put in what the reasonable settings were for replay and for extra balls. This is the game. This is how I'm rating it, number of sharps. And these are what the numbers should be for first extra ball, second and third, for replay levels, first, second, and third. and then you wind up getting a replay boost. Okay, the game is going to be able to monitor itself based on the skill level of the players in that location, and it will automatically boost the score so we're not giving away more than 5%, 7%, 10% replays. Right. So much of it was really associated with tweaks, both mechanically, open up the post, lower the post, add something, take something away. We're able to refine and modify game rules as well as settings.
    55:24
    So that was the purpose of going out on tests. And the tests used to be a good four to six weeks, sometimes longer. Yeah. And some of it was really based on mechanics. Right. Can this really work? Yeah. Is it reliable? Well, you know, is thing flips really going to flip? Yeah. can we really get that in Rudy's mouth? Right. Let alone dealing with Red and Ted. Because the complexity of the things that we were doing, I need to make contact with that particular switch. Is that going to work all the time? Yeah, especially in this era where everything is just evolving so fast. Right. So I think that some of the companies now, absolutely, I know, are putting games on untest. and what winds up happening is it becomes a work in progress for them, which is why we did a new announcement. It's software update number 8.7.63. Oh, wow. This is an update from last week. We did it where, you know, ideally there were moderate little bug fixes. Mechanically, things kind of were, you know, already given their life cycle. we already kind of knew what the degradation was going to be or not be. And I think today, unfortunately, as I said, the majority of folks, even when a game is in quotes on test, it is still being tweaked, looked at, modified, changed almost on a daily, weekly basis on location so that the eventuality of it going into production may be closer to what the final version is going to be, and yet there is never any final version, as we now see. Oh, wait, we're going to create games within a game.
    57:13
    We're taking the program, and we're dissecting it, and guess what? Put in this new code. You can download it through your folder or whatever else and here you have the new and latest game version for your use And the majority of locations and operators are not going to do that Yeah. The game is not worth earning revenue. It's going to play different than the game that that person has at home where they have tweaked it, massaged it, pinked it, if you will, to the point where it was their own special, unique, not one of a kind, one of many, many, many, many, but not necessarily the version that you will find latest and greatest at that barcade. This brings us to like kind of the end of the 90s. I know we kind of meandered here a little bit, but I want to kind of ask you. Yes, I left me meandering. It's okay. We edit these shows. It'll be fine. I'll make sure it's a clear narrative. But just for the listener, I want to say like the market, you know, it began its rise in 86, kind of its re-rise out of the doldrums. It kind of peaks in 92, 93, and then it quickly begins to shrink again. Before being shut down famously for good in 1999, the Williams-Pinwall department gets shut down. They go into slots only, gambling devices. I've heard all sorts of ideas about why this all occurred, but looking back on it now, what can you tell the listeners about this rapid boom and bus period this decade or so from the late 80s to the late 90s uh what do you think caused it and do you think it was inevitable let me ask the question in return what do you guys think was the cause my assumption looking at it from a much younger perspective is it's just the cycle of entertainment in general and being shifted to people spending more money at home specifically like home video games and people not going out to arcades and stuff as much. But that's just kind of the line I've been fed. I don't really know if that's actually true. Yeah, it's interesting that we see it again where it's like I'm a location owner. We've been open a little over six years. We're a pinball bar. My business partner has been operating pins for 20 years. So he started in the 2000s when it kind of quote unquote died and Stern takes over. They're the only pinball manufacturer, but they're not necessarily making, you know, what people consider to be their best games at this time. And they're not selling a lot of units. But my business partners, you know, basically starting out operating used Bally Williams games and was able to find a market. You know, the Pacific Northwest has a big location market and remains so, you know, through the kind of dead period. Yeah, I'm curious. I think the games became too complicated for mechanically. I think that when they first came out, I'm speaking as an operator, I think that when they came out and when I have to shop these 90s games, I'm upset because some of the servicing and to get to a certain switch sometimes, I have to pull ramps off just to even access it, things like that. So some of the serviceability, I think, was sacrificed for the cool wow factor. I will say that I love these 90s games. I'm very nostalgic for them. And I will gladly tear off every ramp in Bram Stoker's Dracula, pull the coffin out to change one rubber on the upper kind of lanes that I had to do. And it took two hours to deassemble and reassemble to replace one rubber there. but yep i will say that i imagine that that annoyed operators especially when they operate lots of pieces of amusement equipment and a pool table or jukebox just sits there and makes money yeah or like a hydro thunder or something yeah era of arcade games that would just clean up let me add in now from my personal experience through i guess what we saw is a demise you have a couple of different factors that come into play. Arcades and such kind of just fell into disrepair, just in general. Video games kind of took a backseat during that period of time, too, where the home systems were. Xbox coming out, Sony PlayStation and others were no longer with the embryonic generation of the 2600, But we were now willing to brand new, different, more lifelike.
    61:52
    And people's accepting of that, which meant at-home entertainment, which only grew with the accessibility of VCRs, cable TV. People now were spending more time at home. The cost of entertainment out in the outside world became a bit more challenging on a daily basis. The cost of going to a professional sports game, a music concert, out to restaurants became things that were more special as opposed to potentially where it had been before. as being something that was part and parcel to somebody's leisure time activity, either as an individual, a group, family, or whatever. So that's part of it. The other part of it, in all honesty, was the fact that we used to say, and we firmly believed it, and I think many people might have agreed, that the only competition to Williams and Bally was Williams and Bally prior games. Right. So if I have a game like Cyclone that I've had for five or six years and it's still earning 60 or 70 bucks a week, what is the motivation for me as a location owner or operator who has to go on a 50-50 split to purchase a brand new game for $3,000 or $4,000 where I have to earn out over a period of nine months to a year, a year and a half,
    63:30
    hopefully to generate the same $60 a week that I was getting from Cyclone. And just using Cyclone as an example. But we can talk about taxi. We can talk about any number of games. Yeah. From what you think of as being your era as to,
    63:47
    does it validate my investment in a new game? Forgetting about the fact, to your point, that you had stressed, the more difficult way of maintaining the games. So I have that situation for all the companies, regardless, of how can I justify that investment for that commercial location to actually buy this machine versus buying a brand new Hydro Thunder, An arcade video game where I can make money much quicker with another factor, less of a reliance on maintenance. Because, lo and behold, suddenly it became more difficult to find reliable repair people. So the game is down. The person who is the operator has 80 locations. He has three people that are going around as, in quotes, collectors. they really don't really do any significant repair work it's much more remedial yeah i can change a bulb or let me change your rubber but otherwise yeah that game is down yep so now that game that was going to be doing 60 or 78 a week where i'm getting my 40 is down for a week i get no money Yeah. So let me look at this and see, do I want to have the hassle of operating a pinball, all of the costs involved with it, the fact that I have less people coming into my co-location and staying less, all of these prevailing factors. and suddenly you wind up realizing that pinball has seen its day. It's why the mandate was put into place at Williams Valley. Come up with something to salvage pinball and take it out of its front. Look, Pat Lawler, I'm assuming, has mentioned this in the past. I don't think I'm going to say anything that is inappropriate. it, Pat Lawler went to a wide body with Twilight Zone because he wanted to have a product differentiator. Yeah, yeah. All of the games are the same size. Let me come out with something bigger. Yeah, right. So that at least we all know that, hi, this is new and different. I remember being at a nightclub and bar show, as there's any number of different conventions out there for various businesses and industries. And I got involved with Nightclub and Bar who approached the industry specifically me to see if we would be willing as an industry to take some space. And that space was going to be dedicated to jukeboxes, pool tables, video games, pinball, whatever else. And I wound up encouraging the industry to embrace this and look at it as a new sales opportunity to open up new venues, new opportunities. And I remember this one person, And we were there with Hurricane.
    66:51
    Forgetting about the era for Hurricane or the specific year, I don't have it in front of me. But I remember this one fellow coming by, playing Hurricane, liking it, and saying, you know what? This is great, but I have your new game. We just got into Cyclone, and it is fantastic.
    67:09
    But this is good, too. There was no way to differentiate for the locations. And when I explained that Hurricane was it, well, how do I get the new one? Well, it's going to be up to your operator to work with you and determine if they are willing to make the investment to put in, in quotes, a new game into your location versus just rolling out older games. And the other part to all of this, and I know I mentioned before about technical help, the games are more reliable. Yeah. I mean, ad games are kind of like auto-fixed. or guess what in the program look at that look what's coming up on the dot matrix it is saying that there's a switch that's out right wow i didn't know that let me see if i can fix that or let me see if i can get my tech here to fix that all of the reliability issues aside the problem became one of the fact that you could not differentiate a new game from an older game regardless of the license theme or whatever else. Yeah. Sometimes it won't, but sometimes it really didn't. So the mandate came, change the face of pinball. We have to do something to make it new, different, exciting for the player out in the marketplace. And that's when you realize that as a public health company, despite the fact that Revenge from Mars, as well as, and I know I'm going to say something many people are not going to agree with, despite the fact that also, unfortunately, Episode 1 wasn't that bad and was also successful, as a public health company, the games did not make as much money as they needed to to keep the doors open. Yeah, let's focus. Some years later, video games also fell victim to the doors being shuttered and the assets being sold to Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment. And since I was there for the transition, suddenly I was now the head of licensing for WMS Gaming. You know, things evolved accordingly. Daniel, thank God for Gary stepping up and saying, hey, I'm going to do what I can do. But he also floundered initially. until he was pushed to the edge by a newcomer. I want to ask you this, because that's going to bring up the end of this first episode with you about the 90s. Williams, you know, Pinball Division officially shuts down after Pinball 2000, which is a whole other series of episodes we need to do in the future, so I'm not going to touch too much into it. I heard you speak about how you made, at a time, a serious play to raise the necessary capital to purchase the Pinball Division from Williams and continue to run it yourself or not, you know, by yourself, but continue to run the pinball division. And seeing how hard, you know, and Gary ends up kind of buying the Sega assets, turning them into Stern. Right. And just as you said, struggled for many years, many years scraping by with the benefit of the knowledge of the future and how hard Gary had to work to get there. What do you think about your failed kind of bid to keep the Williams division going? Do you think like, oh, maybe I kind of dodged a lot of headache and heartache there? Or would you have still wanted to give it a go? And do you still think you could have made that work? Well, first and foremost, I'll go back. And I know I've spoken about this on a number of occasions. I did make a play. and had financial backing to pick up the assets of Premier Gottlieb. Oh, huh. I didn't know that. Some years earlier. And unfortunately, just based on what the business model was, it didn't happen. But I was all ready to jump in and take it over. I sat down with Alvin Gottlieb when Alvin was getting ready to start up effectively what became Alvin G because he couldn't use the Gottlieb name and hoped that Alvin would embrace the thought of bringing me on board to help create and run the company. That didn't happen. And years later, I know that Alvin expressed some regret in not taking me up on my offer. Mike Stroll, who was at Capcom, we had conversations, not necessarily to take over the company, but to go and work there and probably have a different vision. And so there were other times, but I think the ones that are most significant, obviously, is a very real going through financials, sitting down with investors, having a very significant amount of millions of dollars to purchase the assets and then to walk away from Gottlieb and Premier. I had the same backing for Williams Valley. And we won't go into the details of it, but never had the chance to be considered. It took a few years later for Gene Cunningham and Wayne Gillard to come in to pick up some pieces, where I was hopefully going to be taking it all over. And to answer your question, I know that I would have been successful. I know that the trajectory of pinball would have been far different than it was at the time. Maybe it would have gotten to the point where it is today quicker, but I brought what I thought was going to be a different vision to the industry in much the same way when I first entered into the industry full-time, I brought in a different vision as an outsider. Right. You know, I came in as somebody who effectively only wanted to buy a pinball machine and all the rest of it is history. Right. Well, you know, if I had grown up in any city other than Chicago, I would have known about pinball and it would not have been what it became in my life. Yeah. Again, I think that looking back, and I don't look back now. look, it's been far too long and I'm too old. But I do believe that I would have been successful, whether it was going to be Williams Valley or some other name didn't matter. I wanted the opportunity to run a pinball company and to imbue it with what I knew to be the necessary ingredients for marketing, for how to promote design, getting the word out. All the things that I had done in various capacities over the years, whether it was helping to run a March of Dimes tournament to benefit through video games for track and field, whether it was, again, creating Papa and what that could have meant and been aligned with a vision, whether it was a consumer magazine that I had proposed. Much of what I had done, all of the framework had already been laid out. It was just a question of having a place at the table to actually activate it all. Right. To see your vision. It takes nothing away from the struggles that Gary had. I think the fact that he persevered, that he had the passion, the dedication. You know, people have said, I'm the man who saved pinball. Well, Gary's the man who kept it alive. Yeah. And I think there's something to be said for the impact and influence that Gary has had. I give him a lot of credit for having done it, as I said, you know, without belaboring it. No regrets, but, God, it would have been nice to really kind of do it. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm glad to hear you say that. You're like, yeah, I know pinball basically kind of flatlined. And I did see my friend Gary struggle to keep it alive. But you know what? I still would have done it and I would have been successful at it. Like, I love hearing that. Yeah, I just want to thank you for coming on this episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. We're going to end this first episode with Roger here about the 1990s. If you listen to this episode and you're like, huh, you didn't talk about a lot of things in 90s pinball, like some of the designers and stuff. Don't worry, it's coming in episode two. We're going to have Roger back for another episode. So until next time, just wait for that. And in between, go and play some games from the 90s. Find any of these games from the 1990s and play them. We'll meet you back here for another episode next time. Until then, good luck. Don't suck.
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    Cause it's a bittersweet symphony that's like Tryna make ends meet You're a slave to money Let me die