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Stern Electronics… No, Not That Stern

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·2h 3m·analyzed·Jun 26, 2020
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 (batch) · $0.021

TL;DR

Stern Electronics' origins: Chicago Coin bankruptcy, board copying, and early solid-state games.

Summary

Silverball Chronicles 2 covers the history of Stern Electronics, tracing its origins from Chicago Coin Machine Mfg. Co. bankruptcy in 1976 when Sam and Gary Stern acquired the company's assets. The episode details Chicago Coin Machine Mfg. Co. founding in 1933, its merger with Genco in 1953, and the transition from electromechanical to solid-state technology, including Stern's controversial reverse-engineering of Bally's circuit board design that led to patent litigation.

Key Claims

  • Chicago Coin was founded in 1933 by Sam H. Gensberg as a division of Chicago Dynamic Industries, operating a trade-in business model for coin-op conversion kits.

    high confidence · David Dennis directly states this as documented history in the episode

  • Stern Electronics acquired Chicago Coin Machine Mfg. Co. manufacturing assets at bankruptcy sale in December 1976 after Chicago Coin defaulted on a loan, specifically to avoid assuming Chicago Coin Machine Mfg. Co. debt from Magnavox patent litigation.

    high confidence · David Dennis explains the bankruptcy asset sale mechanics; Gary Stern's legal background enabled this strategy

  • Stern reverse-engineered Bally's solid-state circuit board design by acquiring Universal Research Laboratories (URL) and copying the board architecture, resulting in boards identical to Bally's that used the same CPU, solenoid driver, lamp driver, transformer, and rectifier components.

    high confidence · David Dennis provides detailed technical breakdown; notes that reproduction boards like Alltech work on both Bally and Stern machines of the era

  • Bally sued Stern over the copied board design, and Stern was required to pay Bally a royalty for each solid-state system sold, though specific royalty details were not found in research.

    medium confidence · David Dennis states this occurred but could not find detailed terms; describes Bally's strategy to control industry standards

  • Sam Stern purchased 49% of Williams Electronics from Harry Williams by walking into his office with a business proposal; Williams later flew his personal airplane around Chicago to consider the offer before agreeing.

    medium confidence · David Dennis recounts the 'famous airplane story' but doesn't provide a primary source; framed as anecdotal industry lore

  • Jerry Koci, head engineer of Chicago Coin, worked in the pinball industry from 1936-1977, designed over 30 games, and repositioned Chicago Coin into wartime manufacturing of sub-assemblies, with NASA contracting Chicago Coin for manufacturing in 1950.

    high confidence · David Dennis cites Pinball Compendium book as source; systematically documents Cokie's career and contributions

Notable Quotes

  • “I felt we could make a business, meaning pinball, but we couldn't do commodity pinball. One that looked like it was the same as everybody else. So we created wide bodies and these various other innovations which allowed us to price them anywhere we wanted.”

    Nolan Bushnell (Atari) @ Early in episode — Explains Atari's business strategy in pinball; cited by Dennis Creasel from Pinball News article explaining widebody choice

  • “I've bought some pinball companies, but I've never bought a pinball machine, and that's a true answer.”

    Gary Stern @ Mid-episode discussion of Stern family — Reveals Gary Stern's purely business-focused relationship to the industry, contrasting with typical collector mentality

  • “Whatever's on the line.”

    Gary Stern @ During Gary Stern profile — Illustrates Stern's pragmatic, operator-focused mindset—his favorite game is whatever generates revenue

  • “A bash toy and two ramps, really though. What else do you need? That's what John Borg says.”

    David Dennis @ Opening segment — Humorous reference to John Borg's design philosophy; establishes tone for discussing early Stern designs

  • “He would much prefer doing that as opposed to actually running the ins and outs of a company. Those are two totally different skill sets.”

    Ron Hallett @ Discussion of Harry Williams vs. Sam Stern roles — Articulates the division between innovators (Williams) and business operators (Stern) in early pinball

  • “Bally, when they came up with their solid state system, they tried to trademark it, not just their system, but any solid state. So if you made an electronic pinball game, you had to use their system.”

    David Dennis @ Solid-state technology section — Documents Bally's aggressive IP strategy to monopolize solid-state pinball industry standards

  • “You can use it on any Bally or Stern of the era. Well, what are the odds of that? What are the odds that Bally sued them?”

    David Dennis — Rhetorically highlights the near-identical board architecture; foreshadows legal consequence

Entities

David DennispersonRon HallettpersonSam SternpersonGary SternpersonHarry WilliamspersonJerry KocipersonDennis Creasel

Signals

  • ?

    historical_signal: Detailed chronicle of Stern Electronics' founding from Chicago Coin bankruptcy, tracing lineage back to 1933 and early pinball manufacturers; documents transition from trade-in conversion business to manufacturing

    high · Multi-segment narrative with specific dates (1933 Chicago Coin founding, 1976 bankruptcy, December 1976 acquisition), named designers, production numbers, and documented business decisions

  • ?

    technology_signal: Stern acquired URL and reverse-engineered Bally's solid-state circuit board architecture, producing near-identical boards with same CPU, solenoid driver, lamp driver, and power components; reproduction boards work interchangeably

    high · David Dennis provides technical architecture details; notes reproduction boards like Alltech work on both Bally and Stern machines; documents resulting patent lawsuit and royalty arrangement

  • ?

    regulatory_signal: Bally sued Stern over copied board design; Stern required to pay royalties per unit sold; Bally previously attempted (unsuccessfully) to trademark any solid-state pinball system

    high · David Dennis explicitly states lawsuit occurred; notes royalty structure though specific terms unavailable; documents Bally's aggressive IP strategy

  • ?

    business_signal: Sam and Gary Stern strategically purchased Chicago Coin's manufacturing assets at bankruptcy sale to avoid assuming the company's Magnavox patent litigation debt

    high · David Dennis explains bankruptcy mechanics; notes Gary Stern's legal background enabled debt avoidance strategy; Chicago Coin defaulted after video game patent lawsuit

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.083

0:00
The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silverball Chronicles. You can send it in to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. And we won't read it. We don't. We don't read that stuff. That's a waste of time.
0:30
Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Pinball Chronicles and with me is my co-host, Ron. How you doing, Hallett? I'm doing just peachy. Just peachy. That's great. Have you had any feedback so far, fella, about our first episode? Did you like us? Yeah, people thought we did an okay job, which is really great. We've made a couple of adjustments, But I think this episode is going to really play out. I think it's going to play out really well. I'm really excited to get this going. I've been looking forward to this for a couple of weeks. But as you know, we are on a monthly schedule. That gives us a little more time for research and editing. Plus, it gives us a little bit of time out to not sort of get burnt out. Isn't that right? That is correct. That is very correct. You've been super busy in the last couple of weeks. You've actually put out two Slam Tilt podcasts. Yes, we have. What's that guy? What's your other guy's name? Is it Brian?
1:32
It starts with a B, but it's not Brian. It's Bruce. Are you sure it's Bruce? I'm sure it's Bruce. Okay, well anyway, he's okay. He's doing pretty good on that podcast, which is nice. But you're, of course, tying it all together on your other podcast, the Slam Tilt Podcast. But I'm glad I could steal you away this evening to jump into this week's topic. One that I think you hold very dear to your heart. That I do. I was very excited when I learned what our next topic would be. Well, you requested specifically that we do this on the next episode. That was part of your contract to bring you aboard. That we continue to hyperinflate the Stern Electronics secondary market. And that was something that you specifically put forward. Sure. Yeah. So that's our topic this week. But before we get into that, Ron, this episode is brought to you by a bash toy and two ramps. A bash toy and two ramps, really though. What else do you need? That's what John Borg says. Big sponsor this week. Big, big, big sponsor this week. We've got a couple of housekeeping items from our previous episode, which was Steve Ritchie before the mullet. We always take corrections from our mailbag at silverballchronicles at gmail.com. Is that the name? Did we change something? Nope. Everything is exactly the same as it was before.

  • Gary Stern has never purchased a pinball machine for personal use, only pinball companies, and when asked about his favorite game stated 'Whatever's on the line,' though Jeff Patterson of This Week in Pinball obtained a quote where Gary mentioned enjoying Flight 2000 and Steve Kirk games like Meteor.

    high confidence · Direct quote from Gary Stern cited from This Week in Pinball article; David Dennis verifies this unusual detail

  • Stern's first releases were electromechanical holdovers from Chicago Coin (Stampede, Rawhide) designed by legacy Chicago Coin engineers, followed by their first solid-state game Pinball in 1978, with 594 EM units and 1,650 solid-state units produced.

    high confidence · David Dennis provides production numbers and designer credits; games are documented in Pinball Compendium

    • @ Board copying discussion

  • “He was probably like, ah, I've kind of had it.”

    Ron Hallett @ Discussion of Jerry Cokie's career end — Speculates on aging engineer's retirement during industry upheaval in mid-1970s

    • person
    Jeff Pattersonperson
    Stern Electronicscompany
    Chicago Coincompany
    Gencocompany
    Williams Electronicscompany
    Universal Research Laboratories (URL)company
    Ballycompany
    Seaberg Corpcompany
    Gottliebcompany
    Magnavoxcompany
    Silverball Chroniclesmedia
    Slam Tilt Podcastmedia
    This Week in Pinballmedia
    Pinball Compendiumproduct
    Stampedegame
    Pinball (Stern)game

    personnel_signal: Jerry Cokie, longtime Chicago Coin head engineer (1936-1977), designed 30+ pinball games but receives minimal recognition in industry history; represented transition from wartime manufacturing to pinball design

    high · David Dennis dedicates segment to Cokie's career, sourcing from Pinball Compendium; notes his work from Bermuda (1947) to Stampede (1977); cites NASA manufacturing contracts in 1950

  • ?

    industry_signal: Chicago Coin unable to compete with Gottlieb and Bally in 1970s; chose non-flipper game focus and video games rather than direct competition; patent litigation with Magnavox on video knockoffs precipitated financial crisis

    high · David Dennis documents Chicago Coin's pivot away from flippers to gun games, shuffle alleys, and video games; notes 1974 Magnavox lawsuit along with multiple companies; financial trouble led to bankruptcy

  • ?

    historical_signal: Sam Stern's acquisition of 49% Williams Electronics from Harry Williams; anecdotal account of Stern proposing deal, Williams flying personal plane to consider, then agreeing; represents early post-war pinball consolidation

    medium · David Dennis recounts 'famous airplane story' as industry lore; not primary sourced but presented as known anecdote; documents Sam Stern's role in building foundation for post-war pinball

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Division of labor in early pinball: Harry Williams as innovator/engineer (score reels, multiplayer, tilt bob mechanisms) preferred design to business management; Sam Stern as operator/businessman handled company operations

    high · Ron Hallett articulates distinction; David Dennis documents Williams' transition to semi-retirement in 1960s to focus on personal tinkering projects; Sam Stern documented as business-focused executive

  • ?

    collector_signal: Running joke in episode: Ron Hallett and co-host credited with inflating Stern Electronics secondary market prices through podcast coverage; Ron owns Dragon Fist, Quicksilver, and has access to Sea Witch; hosts humorously discuss strategy to pump next category (suggests Close Encounters, Gottlieb System 1)

    high · Opening segment establishes premise; hosts joke about being blamed for price inflation; Ron confirms owning machines before prices rose; humorous discussion of targeting next category for artificial inflation

  • ?

    content_signal: Silverball Chronicles operates on monthly release schedule with focus on research depth and avoiding burnout; first episode received positive community feedback; hosts made production adjustments; integrated corrections from audience (Dennis Creasel feedback on Atari article)

    high · David Dennis explains monthly schedule reasoning; discusses first episode feedback reception; documents correction process via silverballchronicles@gmail.com email with deeper sourcing in show notes

    • 3:00
    Silverballchronicles at gmail.com. If you want to get a hold of us, please send us a message. So we did get some feedback from the one, the only Dennis Creasel. He wrote in because he actually wrote an article in the Pinball News, and that article spoke specifically about Atari Pinball. I think it was you, Ron. You posed the question as to why did Atari choose widebodies? Yep, all their games were widebodies. All their games were widebodies. And Dennis wrote in, simply, it was money. And then he linked to an article. I put that in the show notes, so if you want to go back and read that. He also wrote down his sourcing. He quoted Nolan Bushnell from Atari and he said, I felt we could make a business, meaning pinball, but we couldn't do commodity pinball. One that looked like it was the same as everybody else. So we created wide bodies and these various other innovations which allowed us to price them anywhere we wanted. They definitely look different. The innovated mechs that no one used except them. I guess you could say they took risks and they could have paid off, but they certainly didn't. No, they had like, what was it called, rotary solenoids or some other stuff that, yeah, and their circuit boards at the bottom of the cabinet and other wonderful innovations that they did. Yeah, you can't hear my hand in my face, but that's what I'm doing at the moment. So one of the other bits of feedback that we actually got was on my sourcing of what I'm referencing as we go through the episode. Some people wanted to dive a little bit deeper into some of that sourcing. So you will see in your podcatcher much deeper, much more pointed sourcing inside of those show notes. So I wanted to make sure that I updated that. And we'll move on to the next bit, some feedback from the first episode. Ron, do you want to read through some of that feedback? Sure, I'll read some of the feedback. Glenn says, loved it. Can't wait until you get the other 42 episodes of material you said you'd get in another episode. Okay. Thank you so much, Glenn, you douche. Wow. Hey, he started it. He started it. Danny from Virginia said, I thoroughly enjoyed the new show. I run between 80 and 100 miles a week, and it's great to have new content to get through the miles. Runs 80 to 100 miles a week. So suffice it to say, Danny's cardio is probably vastly superior to either of ours. No, I think he means he's like in a vehicle or a truck doing like a little bit. No, it says run. I think you're taking him a little too little. I'll take it completely literally. Okay. Tim says, I am really enjoying the Super Bowl Chronicles podcast. Oh, thank you, Tim. Thanks so much. Also, no one wrote in last week about the book that I couldn't remember. Remember I said that everybody read this book in high school and I couldn't remember what it was? The one that had the greasers in it? Well, I Googled it after the podcast, and it's The Outsiders by S.E. Hilton.
    5:59
    And, Ron, what did they miss out on? What they missed out on is whoever guessed it could have won a brand-new Munsters pinball machine provided by last month's sponsor Dwight Sullivan's Code. Oh, that's tough. Man, if they would have got the secret question, they could have won a brand new Munsters pinball machine by Dwight Sullivan's code. Man, oh man. So if they guessed it, we would have said what? That you get the secret code, which is drink more Ovaltine? That's right. That's our version of that, which is much, much better and much more lucrative. Well, let's jump into today's topic. And before Stern Pinball Incorporated, which dominates today's pinball landscape, there was Stern Electronics. Ron, you know a lot about Stern Electronics, don't you? You can say that. I may have a few of them. So how many Sterns do you have in your collection? Oh, boy. These classic Sterns. Let's see. Well, I have Stars, Cheetah, Nineball, Big Game, Stargazer, Meteor, Dragon Fist. Oh, and Quicksilver. And you've had more in the past? No, I pretty much kept them all. My father has a Sea Witch. Okay, and are you looking forward to collecting a few more of these Classic Sterns into your collection?
    7:19
    Maybe one or two more. I have most of what I want at this point. Okay, okay. So I've only played a few Classic Sterns. They do have a bit of a charm to them, and we'll get into the deeper dives as we get along to today's pod, but you are a connoisseur If you will, of the classic Stern Electronics. Yes, you could say that. You have your Gottlieb connoisseurs, your Bally connoisseurs, your Williams connoisseurs, and then you have your Stern connoisseurs. Yeah, so one thing that you've always been criticized about on the Slam Tilt podcast is actually creating the Stern Electronics secondary market. Isn't that true? Yeah, they're really expensive now. We're being blamed for that. You've pumped that up. You were the one that was throwing the wood on the fire. But the cool thing is we got them all before they got expensive, so. Yeah, wasn't that funny how that happened? Isn't that great? So if I wanted to, if I were looking for the next thing that you and I should pump over over the lifetime of our podcast to boost the prices, what should that be? You mean what game should we pick to get expensive? Easy. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Make it so expensive that no one wants to buy it, so I never have to play it. Gottlieb System 1 games. That's what we're going for. We'll get into those in another podcast. Where did Stern Electronics come from, Ron? It didn't just get started one day at a factory, right? That is correct. They came from what was left of Chicago Coin when Sam Stern bought them out. One of the earlier pinball manufacturers from, well, you guessed it, Chicago, was Chicago Coin. And I want to get into a little bit of the background of Chicago Coin. So to know where Stern comes from, I think it's important for us to go back and look at what was the company that Sam and Gary Stern purchased to create Stern Electronics. Founded in 1933, the division of Chicago Dynamic Industries by Sam H. Gensberg. At the time, he operated a trade-in business, and trade-in business models was very big in the coin-op industry back in the late 1930s. Ron, do you know what the trade-in business was? So the trading business was early conversion kits where they would take your game, pull it apart, put some stuff on it, and boom, you got a new game. I mean, it's tough in the Great Depression and in the war times in the late 30s, early 40s, around the time of the Second World War to get materials so it was easier just to recycle those machines and convert them. And a lot of the games were very similar, too. They were very, very similar. And one of the people that really got their start in this was the man himself, Harry Williams. That was really his business model. Chicago Coin made a lot of bingos, a lot of gun games, a lot of shuffle alleys. Do you have a shuffle alley? I do not have a shuffle alley. Those are like all the rage. I notice that big collectors, people that have big collections, often... People who have big basements would have. Yeah, yeah, those bowlers. You need room for that, yeah. And if you have like a ball bowler, you need a ton of room for one of those. Chicago Coin never really made a huge impact in the industry. I mean, they were there, they were always kind of around. In the 1930s and 40s, they did a lot of bingo machines. Generally, they would sell 1,500, 2,000 units, and they really struggled when they got into the 60s and 70s because they spent most of their time on non-pinball, like bat games, and again, those shuffle alleys and gun games. Chicago Coin made boards for the early bingo games. And we're not talking like electronic boards, but there was like literally a board, right, Ron, where they would put all of these switches and knobs and hooks that would create actual math, right? Yeah, but bingo games are some of the most complicated electromechanical devices you will ever encounter. Yeah, I don't know why anybody would want to get into so much math, but I mean, I guess that's kind of the area that we're in, right? When at pinball, yes, there's probably a lot of people who are good at math. Now, Louis Gensberg, David Gensberg, and Meyer Gensberg, in 1931, they had founded Genco, which is an amusement manufacturer, basically a competitor to Chicago Coin, And they were actually relatives to the Gensberg family or Samuel Gensberg. I bet you that would be awkward. Thanksgiving dinners for sure. That's very awkward. After 1953, the competitors kind of merged. I guess they sort of decided that, you know, a company that's separate is probably less effective against the companies like the Gottliebs and the Ballys that were mostly the industry dominators. Funny little note about Genco or Genco. I've heard it both ways, and I'm always confused what's the proper pronunciation of that company. I've heard it called Genco. So if anybody knows, send us a line. Send us an email and tell us how to say it properly. I've heard Steve Kordak, who actually worked there, he said it was Genco. So I guess I should go by that. Yeah, he would probably be able to be the person we should lean on, And considering that it is Gensburg is the last name of the owners, it's probably that way. Now, some of their biggest sellers, Kilroy was 8,800 units. That was from January 1957. And 8,800 units back then, I mean, last episode we talked about 10,000 units selling something was a big deal. So when you're talking 30 years before that and they're selling 8,000 units, that's pretty staggering. Did these have flippers? Or was these older games? Kilroy had... Kilroy sounds like a 30s game. It sounds like a really old game. Yeah, it's a 47. Let me take a look at this picture. It doesn't say it did not have flippers. Flipperless! So, Ron, just a little bit of background. When we talk about a flipper, non-flipper game, what are we talking about? Humpty Dumpty was the first game with the flippers. And after that came out, everyone had to have flippers on their game immediately. All the flipperless games became completely obsolete almost immediately. So pretty much anything before Humpty Dumpty is going to be referred to as a flipperless game. When we look at their second largest seller, which was Beam Light, that was from 1935, and that one actually had zero flippers, and it was more of like a bag of tell game, which is kind of where you shoot the ball up, it bounces around, it lands in a hole, it's pretty awesome. Oh, it is. It requires you to do math, too. You have to add up all of the pockets, the holes that it goes in for your score. So this company, they're generating revenue. They've got some decent sellers. They just sort of are there. They're not an industry leader. They're not innovating. None of that stuff. Well, around the 1970s, you're really trying to compete with the Gottliebs of the world, the valleys of the world, and they've really stepped up their game at that point. Right in the early 70s? Yeah, they're cranking them out, especially when you go into the mid-70s and they start licensing things, especially Bally. Games like Wizard, Captain Fantastic. Yeah, so the best way to compete with that is to not compete with that, and that's really what Chicago Coin decided to do. And as I mentioned before, they did kind of more of those shooting gun games. They did a few more of the different style games as opposed to the flippers. And in 1973, they really moved into video because video was all the rage at the time. They had a knockoff Pong, which was called Video Ping Pong. Everyone had a knockoff Pong. In 1974, they were actually sued along with a bunch of other companies by Magnavox regarding patents of their Magnavox Odyssey from 1972, which was really the first commercial home video console. So we're talking before the Atari 2600, way before the Nintendo Entertainment System. And the thing about the Magnavox Odyssey actually had, when people think of say Nintendo, the NES, they think of the Zapper gun that it came with. Magnavox also came with a gun and it was a big ass rifle that looked real. Of course it did. Everything in the 70s was super like that, right? So this was kind of an interesting time because during that lawsuit, Chicago Coin really got into financial trouble along with a lot of these other companies. So because of that, they moved into somewhat of a bankruptcy period and they ended up selling their assets, the pinball assets, the manufacturing assets of Chicago Coin to Sam and Gary Stern. When your company gets into kind of a bankruptcy, you can actually sell off those assets to a new company without that company actually assuming the debt. But Chicago Coin's assets were purchased at bankruptcy sale, forming the core inventory for Stern Electronics Incorporated. And because it was a separate company, they didn't assume the debt that Chicago Coin had amassed fighting this lawsuit. If I remember, Gary Stern's a lawyer, so I'm sure he had all that under control. The Sterns are such an integral part, particularly Gary Stern now in today's pinball landscape, being the owner of the dominant brand in the industry. The guy has to at least know what's coming and going, right? And at this time, he's really sort of starting in the industry with somebody like Sam Stern, his father. I think he's really got a hold of this, and today he's probably got a better hold than he ever has. So enter Sam Stern. Ron, Sam Stern was obviously sort of the leader of this purchase, the person who really sort of came in with Gary. Who was Sam Stern? Well, Sam Stern started in the business in 1931 when he was talked into buying five coin-operated amusement machines. So I believe he did some operating. At the time, he was working in a men's clothing business. He took on a Rocola distributorship in Philadelphia. And probably one of his most important contributions before Stern Electronics was he was part owner of Williams Electronics with Harry Williams. And that's the famous airplane story where basically Sam Stern went into Harry Williams' office and said, why don't you sell me your company? So Harry Williams, who had a pilot's license, he went out in his private plane and flew around Chicago a little bit. Just think about it. Came back and said, sure, let's do it. And he sells them 49% of his company, right? Not controlling share, but he gets basically half of the company. Imagine if I just sort of, you know, I went out and I got on my Nissan Murano, jump in my car, drive over to Chicago, I walk into Jersey Jack at their new manufacturing facility and I just go, hey, hey Jack, sell me half your company. I got like a double-breasted suit, probably a cigar, feet up on the desk. Do you think that would pan out for me? No, I don't think it would pan out at all. Yeah, so he was really integral, Sam Stern, I guess, and Harry Williams at building the foundation for the coin-op industry really kind of in that post-war era when the flippers started becoming much more commonplace. Yeah, and the thing to remember about, Harry Williams was more, he was an innovator, he was a designer. He liked making games. He liked being an engineer more than running a company. Someone coming in saying, I'll run the company, and they were buddies. It's like, sure, that's perfect. I want to just make games. Yeah. I mean, in the 1950s, they'd introduced so many innovations, things like the score reels, multiplayer games, sophisticated mechanisms, like something as silly as we think of today is like the tilt bob created by Harry Williams. He would much prefer doing that as opposed to actually running the ins and outs of a company. Those are two totally different skill sets. Which will come into play later in our story. Yeah, one of the funny things that I read was that Sam Sturd would often walk by people's desks, and then he'd just grab papers and flip through the papers and go, that number's wrong, and then just walk away. In 1959, Sam saw the opportunity to purchase the rest of Williams Manufacturing, and he kept the company until 1964 when he actually sold the company for an exchange of stock in Seberg Corp. But he remained the president until 1969 at Williams. What's Seberg Corp? Seberg's probably most known for making jukeboxes. Yeah, some of the Sebergs I think are probably the prettiest jukeboxes out there in my opinion. And the thing about Harry Williams, at this point, I think in 1960, I think he made one of his last games for Williams and kind of went into a semi-level. He never retired, but he kind of left Williams. I believe he went back to California and started making other things, like that mini pro golf game he came up with, and I think he had his own company there. So that's where he was hanging out for the time being. Yeah, so Harry Williams is always the innovator, right? He just can't stop tinkering. He's a tinkerer. So when Sam Stern's contract was up, he went over to Bally as an executive vice president for a year. But it wasn't too long until he was right back at Seaberg as president, and that's where he remained until December of 1976. What happened then? Sam learned that Chicago Coint had defaulted on a loan, and he and his son Gary jumped on the opportunity. Sam was obviously itching to get back into pinball or into manufacturing in general. He wanted to own everything. He wanted to do that. So he jumped in with his son, Gary. Gary, as you had mentioned earlier, was a lawyer by education, and he shortly practiced law before entering the pinball industry. And often remembers visiting the manufacturing line when he was young. Yeah, so he's a second-generation pinball manufacturer. He's got a different perspective on the business. One of the interesting stories was at 16, Gary spent the working summer at Williams. He worked in the stockroom. He was a personnel manager. Yeah, and he learned he shouldn't use any tools because he would often destroy things on the manufacturing floor. So he was not very adept at actually building anything. Yeah, he was the opposite of Harry Williams. He was maybe Sam Stern, kind of in the middle. You got Gary on the other side, who's more of the sort of the academic thought business person, right? Like, don't give the man a hammer, basically. So when Sam heard about Chicago Coin, I mean Gary was pretty much in at that point. And when asked on an article by This Week in Pinball what his first pinball machine was, Gary said that he had never bought a pinball machine. I've bought some pinball companies, but I've never bought a pinball machine, and that's a true answer. I totally believe that. I totally believe that. I guarantee you he doesn't have a single game in his house. A quote from Gary Stern, I love Flight 2000, Harry Williams games like that. I love some of the Steve Kirk's games like Meteor, Stars, and Nineball. A lot of our old games back in the day. Yeah, but if you ask Gary Stern what his favorite game was, what would he tell you? Whatever's on the line. Exactly. And I think it's pretty interesting to be able to say, hey, I found a quote where he actually talked about a game that wasn't on the line. So there you go. Good job, Jeff Patterson, over at This Week in Pinball to get Gary to actually say that. So do you want to get into some of the games that Stern Electronics released? So they buy the company, they start manufacturing. Do you want to jump into that now? Sure. The first game they actually did was a holdover from Chicago Coin called Stampede. And remember, when they first took over Chicago Coin, it was still electromechanicals. We haven't gone into solid state yet. So Stampede was actually the first game. So there's Stampedes that are stamped with the Chicago Coin logo, and then there's one stamped with the Stern logo. Oh, interesting. Yep. And then there's also, I believe, Rawhide, which is, I think that's like a four-player version of Stampedes. Yeah, so let me yippee-yi-ki-yay the stats here for you for Stampedes. Oh.
    23:39
    Yeah, we're still doing this thing. Oh, man. Yeah, yeah, I hope you're enjoying it. So it's a cowboy, like cowgirl western theme. It's from February 77. It's electromechanical. So it still has the reels and the chimes and all of the shenanigans in the bottom. It doesn't have computer boards. They produced 1,100. It was designed by Alvin Peters, Jerry Cokie, and Wendell McAdam.
    24:07
    These were holdovers from the Chicago Coin Time. They actually didn't do any other Sterns. These were the last machines they did. The artwork was by Christian Marche, who did art everywhere with Bally and Wills. I think it's Christian Marsh. He says Marsh? Yeah, Marsh. I believe it's Marsh. He doesn't know how to say his real name? Maybe when he, well, he's French, maybe they non-French-ed it when he came over. Oh, my God. Anyway, he did the art for Grand Prix, Tri-Zone, Hot Tip. And Space Odyssey, some of those sort of iconic EMs of Bally back in the 70s. I'm looking at our notes and I'm glad you skipped over Stratoflight because that is a terrible game. Yeah, I only know that one because I see it for sale all the time. Yeah, there's a reason.
    24:56
    So, of course, you added Rawhide in there, which is the four-player game. It sold 1,200 units. So together combined, you know, it's selling around 2,500, 2,300 units. So, I mean, it's not a failure by any means. It still sold. And then their next game was Disco. Gee, I wonder why that came out during the Disco craze of the mid to late 70s. Another EM, two-player version. And the funny thing is, from my notes here, it has no designer credited, so no one wanted to take any credit for this particular game. Right, so that's just another machine that was sort of just there. They needed to kind of get something out, something on the line. And, you know, my assumption would be that it would be Jerry Cokie that did that. And, Ron, do you have a copy of the Pinball Compendium book? Somewhere in this house, yes, I do. Somewhere in the house. So I've got both copies. That's one of the resources that I've got in the show notes. One of the resources I'm using a lot. And I thought it would be a really good time to leverage that book to talk about Jerry Cokie because he's probably one of those people that has done a lot in pinball but I don't think gets a lot of recognition. So I thought this would be a really good point to bring him up considering this is his last game. So he was the head engineer of Chicago Coin. He was born on June the 12th, 1910 in Chicago. He really worked in TV and phone manufacturing until the Depression in the 1930s when he went back to school for engineering. He joined Bally and then in 1936 went to Chicago Coin. During the war, Jerry repositioned Chicago Coin into the war effort making sub-assemblies for planes, tanks, and naval vessels, and he had a very good reputation at Chicago Coin for making quality materials. In 1950, even NASA contracted Chicago Coin to manufacture some of their pieces. His first game that he created was Bermuda in 1947, and his last game design was Stampede 1977, although I kind of think he probably did disco as well. And he was kind of, what have you been, 67 around the time? So he's probably nearing retirement. Yeah, I think at that time when there's such an upheaval in the industry, there's a lot of upheaval within the company you're in in general. At that point, you're probably like, ah, I've kind of had it. So he's not a really well-known person. He's not a Harry Williams. He's not a Gary Stern. But I thought he needed to be recognized.
    27:31
    And now he is? So their next game, and I can say it's kind of the first real Stern game, has the least original title of any of my ever. I think you mean the best title.
    27:44
    The best title. It's called Pinball. Yeah, what else do you need? Pinball by Stern. It has just a big silver ball on it. And the thing about this game is it was originally made as electromechanical, and there's very few of them. There was only about 594 produced of the electromechanical version. And then they went to solid state. So there was way more solid state than all. Yeah, 1,650 solid states produced, so almost tripled the amount.
    28:11
    And how they got there is very interesting. Okay, because if you look at a stern, a solid-state stern, and you look at a valley of the same era, you're going to think, hmm, these are very stern. Yeah, so you open up the hedge, you take the back glass off, you open up the cabinet, you look inside, and they look exactly the same. Pretty much, yeah. And how did that happen? Well, I mean, it's just a coincidence, obviously. Oh, I'm sure it was a coincidence. Now, what happened is Stern invested in solid-state technology. And how they invested, they acquired Universal Research Laboratories, URL. And what they did is they produced circuit boards. And they were tasked with reverse engineering the valley board. So Gary and Sam, let's assume, kind of showed up to this company that they purchased, URL, And say, hey, I got these boards. Can you make these boards? And they just copied them?
    29:18
    Pretty much just copied them. I mean, I guess you call it reverse engineering. Well, yeah, they reversed engineering. They called them different things. They're the same boards. They use the same system, which consists of basically a CPU, a computer, a solenoid driver board. So the solenoid that drives the pop bumpers and the drop targets and stuff. And then you have your lamp driver board. Which is for the lights. Lights. Then you would have your transformer and your rectifier board. Right, which runs the power. Which they would add things later like sound boards. So you're telling me that they are almost identical. They're pretty much identical because if you get any repro board, like an Alltech or something like that, You can use it on any Bally or Stern of the era. Well, what are the odds of that? What are the odds that Bally sued them? Because they did. Ultimately, Stern had to pay Bally a royalty for each one of the systems that were sold. I couldn't find the details of that through my research. And, you know, honestly, I think Bally probably didn't mind because they saw it as their system as the system. So if they have another company using their system, I mean, Bally tried from the very beginning, So Bally, when they came up with their solid state system, they tried to trademark it, not just their system, but any solid state. Oh, I see. So if you made an electronic pinball game, you had to use their system. Luckily, they didn't win that.
    30:52
    That wouldn have been good for the industry Yes well I mean when you look at it Bally obviously wanted everybody to use their technology because then they could be able to sort of dictate what the industry went in which direction In this case, they could grab a royalty. But surely Gary Stern learned a lesson, right, to never copy a board set again.
    31:15
    Now, he did the same thing with Data East when they ripped off WIAM System 11, but that's for a future episode. That's getting way ahead here. Way ahead, way ahead. Now these first electronic games that Stern did, they used the M100 MPU board, which I'll mention that because when we get into what a lot of people consider their most classic games, is the point where they upgraded their CPU board, or MPU board, to a more powerful board with more capabilities. They really ramped up the horsepower. Yeah. At this point, they still had no sound board. Pinball actually has chimes, just like in EM. They did not go, we did not have sound yet. So we're still inside the machine, we still have a chime box, so it still sounds like an old EM machine, right? And Stern used actually a four chime, a four bar chime box, as opposed to a three bar chime box. Okay, so they got a different note. And yeah, they have a, I think it's the bigger one, which will be the lower note, but they're chime box. They're terrible. They're terrible. They're like a little piece of wood and they literally destroy themselves over time. Actually, of the classic Sterns that have seen the earlier M100 machines, they've all had Zachariah chime boxes in them. Really? Yeah. Interesting. The Stern chime boxes have a very distinct, very tinny sound, almost cheap, but it's kind of their charm. Would you say that the Stearns probably went for a cost-cutting version of their Chimebox? I would say, hmm, I think I've said this analogy before. Think of the companies. Think of Williams and Bally as a well-built, say, economy car, and Gottlieb is like a station wagon with a wood paneling on the side. The real fake wood paneling? But really built well, but not something you actually want to drive around. And think of Stern is that really awesome sports car that's made almost entirely of plastic that if it hits anything will just disintegrate.
    33:27
    And that's a Stern. The Fiero of the pinball industry. As someone who's had all the Williams Solid State games and Valley Solid State games, I can say they definitely have a cheaper feel. The cabinets, just most things about them are cheaper, but that's what makes them play the way they do. Their mechs are cheap, they're light, but because of that, they just, they really work well and the games play super fast. It is part of the charm. Pinball was designed by Mike Kubin, right? So he did Electronimo and Nugent and Magic and most notably Sea Witch. He was a very prolific designer at the Old Stern. Fun fact, did you hear that? I played a song there. You did? No. It uses the same ROMs as Stingray. Their next game. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Yeah. Stingray is a water sports, no, not that kind of water sports, and scuba diving theme from 1977. In December, Standard Body sold 3,000 units. And again, Mike Cubbon, Sam Stern, and this fella, Roger Sharp. Roger Sharp? What did he do to the game? Well, Roger Sharp showed up at the factory one day and just said, hey, you should put the stuff on the left side of the playfield a little bit different, and the one on the right side make these changes, and inevitably made the game worse. To your opinion. In my opinion, of course. Well, Dylan says, I love Stingray. I miss it and I regret selling it. The spinner was great and the double scoop setup always made for fun. The potential of getting $55,000 from the scoop made them tempting. The artwork and theme were fantastic, too. Only thing I had a problem with was how worthless and dangerous the drop targets felt compared to the rest of the game. When I find another one, I will certainly pick it up again. Yeah, those drop targets and that side of the game? Thanks, Roger Sharp. Actually, Dylan is from my hometown here in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and the person who really was able to bring me in to competitive pinball. I think the first real rocket that Stern Electronics had was S.T.A.R.S. And we received this email to silverballchronicles at gmail.com from Chris. And Chris said, Dearest Ron, he wrote that in capitals, and Dynamite Dave, Steve Kirk and S.T.A.R.S., that is all Chris. He's right. Everyone knows S.T.A.R.S. is one of the greatest games ever made. I have yet to play a S.T.A.R.S. although S.T.A.R.S. really intrigues me. So, S.T.A.R.S. is just one more game. Just one more game over and over and over. Cannot stop playing it. I would say this is probably one of the, definitely the best MPU 100 game that they did. And it still has the chimes. We still have no sound. We have no soundboard yet. So, it's like space exploration theme. It's from March 78. Sold 5,127 units. They sold a ton of them. For a beast hit. Yeah, and the funny thing about it is this was Steve Kirk's first game. I mean, he has credits on other games before this, but this was his first solo design credit. It has one pop-upper, just one pop-upper at the top, and it's a wide open game. And he actually had to fight with management to get the one pop-upper. Well, I mean, Gary Stearns' thing is like three pop-ups. Yeah, I could see Gary Stearns sitting there, where's the three pop-upers? And he was incredulous. He's like, I don't get it. I'm keeping the cost down by not putting other pop-upers in here. And you're yelling at me. I mean, it had to have a very low bill of materials. If you ever should look at it, it only has two, three banks, and all the rest are stand-up targets, one spinner and one pop-upper.
    37:09
    It is quite barren underneath the playfield, I can tell you, as far as mechs. This could not have cost that much to make. It's probably why they made so many of them. So the cool thing about stars is there's targets throughout the machine. You shoot that target, which is a star, and then that star adds more value to the spinner on the right side of the playfield, right? That is correct. So the thing is, like, how many stars can I get to juice that spinner? And they're all in sort of dangerous places, right?
    37:42
    Well, the two are. The rest are at the top and are a pretty safe place. Okay, so then you're like, okay, well I can go for the two safe ones and then smash that spinner. Or I can try to eke out another one or two and try to juice that spinner. Or you just try to get a drop bank down to get the double bonus and just try to build your bonus up. Okay, so you skip that juice. You can do it either way. There are multiple strategies, yes, even on a game this old. You do not have to go for the stars if you don't want to. So that's kind of one of the first games where you could be like, well, wait a second, I don't have to just do the thing. But the thing is the funnest thing to try to do. Well, yeah, of course, everybody loves orbit spinners. It has other interesting rules with the drop targets where if you get the two outer ones down but the center one's still up, it lights that one for I think like 7,000 points or something like that. It has a lot of nice rules like that. Complete things but don't complete things. It's like the drops actually control the value of the left spinner, but if you get them all down, then it resets the value. There's a lot of cool rules in a game like this that's this old that it keeps you coming back. I can't say enough good things about Sars. What do you think of the art of Sars? It's passable. Passable. I think it's pretty cool. It's passable. I kind of really like it. That's done by my buddy Jorge. Your buddy Jorge? Yeah.
    39:08
    What the hell is his name? Jorge Aberon. Abergon. Jorge Abergon. And he really did three games, which, surprisingly enough, are all Steve Kirk games. Wow, he must have been his personal artist. He's like his buddy. Yeah. His hombre.
    39:26
    The thing about S.T.A.R.S. 2, I never see a good S.T.A.R.S. backless. They're always wasted. They are always a mess. But CPR has a new reproduction mirrored backless, and it looks gorgeous. That's another thing about the Sterns. They used, well actually Stars has the thicker back glass, but their back glasses for whatever reason, they just don't seem to hold up as well as some of the other manufacturers. Are you saying that they were properly made on the cheap? I don't know. That doesn't sound like a Stern. I mean, I've seen some good Stern back glasses, but I mean, most of them just seem to get wasted.
    40:03
    Interesting stuff. So, I mean, I guess this is a good place to really dive into who is Steve Kirk, right? Steve Kirk is awesome. Yeah, so Steve Kirk, best known for Starz, Meteor, Nineball, Gammatron, Swords of Fury. We'll deep dive those in a moment. His first credited design was 1968, which was Gottlieb Fun Park with Ed Krinsky, the legend himself. What kind of brought him up into the fold and to bring him notoriety and I would assume what brought his attention to somebody like a Gary Stern was that he actually wrote a book about pinball and tournament pinball in 1978. In February of 1978, Playmeter magazine actually named Steve Kirk Coinman of the Month and it was about the time that Starz was going to come out. Steve Kirk, he's accredited for a couple of things, but one of them was that he actually was the president and one of the main founders of the Pinball Association of America. Have you heard of that before, Rob? I have heard of that. I've seen the phone number. Yeah, so in 1975, the association held its first national pinball open in Chicago. It drew 1,400 players. That's more than Pimberg. Wow. So that's, I mean, that's a big deal, which is probably one of the reasons why he decided to write a book. So his book was 128 pages, 5,000 words, and really talked about the history of pinball, where pinball was going, and tournament pinball and risk-reward. Very cool read if you can get your hands on one, which is basically impossible. So since 1971 when they started signing memberships, they've actually sold about 9,000 memberships at the time by 1978 over a seven year period. That's a lot of players. So like IFPA before IFPA? This is the IFPA before the IFPA. It's a big deal. Tournaments, in fact, would usually start on a Friday afternoon. They'd end on a Sunday. Okay, so he was sort of a big, I guess, mover and shaker in early competitive pinball, which is really, I think, probably one of the reasons he got moved into sort of a designer role. So one of the cool bits about S.T.A.R.S., one of the things that you'll see is that there is a rocket on there flying across the back glass. There's an SK-1, which stands for Steve Kirk 1 for his first design. Which gets confusing later, as you'll see. Yeah, it's going to get into a whole thing for people that are good at math. For some reason, it really got out of hand here with the numbering. One thing that's also really cool about stars is the Kirk post. What's a Kirk post? The Kirk post is the post that's in between the flippers because the game has a very wide flipper gap. The post is there. It's meant to be part of the game. You play the post. So what are some of the strategies you use with the Kirk post? If it's going right down the center, you can save it. You can also use it to transfer the ball from one flipper to another. Doesn't always work, but you can try it. You can get it to, so if you've got your ball trapped on the left side, you can lower that flipper and it can roll down, bounce off the post and land on the right flipper? Hopefully. Doesn't always work. Depends. It depends on that particular star as you're playing. So you've seen people do that? I've seen people do that. Now, do they usually keep those in a Pinberg-style event, like a big event? Do they usually keep the Kirkpost in place? I've seen it removed, but not for a long time. It's usually always there. The game doesn't need to be made any harder. It's plenty harder. It's very hard as it is. Yeah, so what we'll do here is we'll follow Steve Kirk's career, and then we'll dive back into Stern in a moment, because we're going to get our timelines messed up here a little bit. Actually, before you do that, we should mention his name's on the playfield. Oh, yeah, totally. Another thing that Steve Kirk brought to Stern, and I would say to pretty much all pinball, because I don't think this had occurred before Steve Kirk did it, but I'm sure someone can correct me. Steve Kirk insisted that his name be put on the playfield as a designer credit. So before they didn't have that? Yeah, before the designers usually didn't get credit, they might put their names or hide them in the art somewhere in a back glass. The people who did the back glass could usually put their names in there. There were other designers that might have, I can't remember his name, but one of the ballet designers, he would put a certain red post in every game. That was his trademark. He was the fellow that did Xenon. He did Harlem Globetrotters. So if you look at Harlem, you'll see a red post that's a little different than all the other posts. That was his trademark. Steve Kirk was like, no, I want credit. I want the design credit on the play field. So if you look at stars, it says right on it, designed by Steve Kirk. Craig Kimmick.
    45:13
    So there you go, Craig Kimmick. I only know that because I had a Xenon. And when I bought it and I went to rebuild it, buddy was like, if you throw this post out, I will kill you. So his name is, and Stern started doing that for their other designers. I mean, I would probably, too, going forward in a lot of their games. Harry Williams, they started putting his name on there. Even the other designers, they started getting credit. Even games like, if you go all the way to the end, like My Dragon Fist, it has JoJo, the designer. His name's right on the playfield. And as far as I know, they were the only ones doing that. So why do you think that they didn't have their names on the playfield before? It just wasn't a thing, I guess. I don't think anyone insisted on it. Like, I want my damn name on it. I mean, I would probably say that, I mean, maybe it's because the manufacturer doesn't want anybody to know who the designer is, because if the talent moves around in the industry, that individual is going to follow the talent as opposed to stay with the brand. That's a good point. A current scorn doesn't put their name on the playfield, unless it's a signature on an LE or something. So what was Steve Kirk's next game after the awesomeness that it stars? Yeah, so Steve Kirk really followed that up with, I think, one of the most fun games I've played when it comes to early solid state, and that's Meteor. And I'm going to just jump right in here. Let the stats fall to Earth like a meteor. Ugh, very good. That's Space Apocalypse Theme. It's from September 1979. It's an M200, the first M200 system. Yes, it is. This one is a smash hit. It sells 7,939 units and is Stern's highest seller since Starz. And it was once again the art and the programming by the same team with Steve Kirk leading them. I would say Meteor may be the best Stern game. The back glass and the flyer were derived from the 1979 movie Meteor. And the original printing of the poster is by the space artist Robert McCall. And the first game to actually have the SB300 soundboard sounds fancy. Well, it was the first game they'd had with decent sound. Because their MPU100 games, when they got ditched the chimes and they started to actually use sound, they were bad. Very bad. So would you say that they are Gottlieb System 1 bad? Yes. Oh. Kind of at that level. Would you say that this new SB300 is better or worse? Way better. In the first episode, we talked about Flash coming on the scene with Steve Ritchie and Williams, and they added dynamic background sound. And that's kind of really what the SB300 soundboard did, right? It added this tone. It had this droning sound, yes. Meteor was the beginning of what a lot of people consider the golden age or the best sterns that would come out. They start with Meteor. When they did the upgrade to the MPU-200, got the soundboard, the new soundboard in there with the actual decent sounds, this is where it really starts, where they really start kicking some butt. Yeah, so Steve, of course, we mentioned a few moments ago, was the founder and president of the body that really managed pinball tournaments. And his games from this point on actually had a sticker on the lower apron identifying that it was selected as a game for tournament play. And reportedly these stickers, which were Steve Kirk's idea, were installed in each apron starting from this point on during long production runs. So you mentioned before you saw the phone number before, and this is where you'd see that phone number, right? Yep, it would say right on the sticker. The stickers, I think they started putting them on about halfway through the production run. I actually have an earlier meteor. It doesn't have the sticker, but the later ones do. That's one way you can tell if no one's removed it. That's one way you can tell whereabouts you are in the run, whether you have the sticker or not. Yeah, my friend Dylan, who had the quote from earlier on, on Stingray, Now, he has a meteor, and I cannot recall if he has one of these stickers. Next time I see him, I'm going to check and see if it does. Yeah, and on the meteor back last, and this is where it gets weird, on the actual, one of the rockets. Oh, have you ever seen the movie Meteor? I haven't seen the movie Meteor. I assume it's amazing. Well, people don't realize how tied into the movie the game is. In the movie, it takes them three rockets to destroy the meteor, and those are your three rockets in the middle of the play field. Oh, I see. But it's not a licensed title, though, right? No, it is. It's totally a licensed title. Is it really? Yes. It's based off the movie. Oh, I didn't know that. I just assumed that it was like, oh, we'll just make this game that's kind of like the movie. No, if you look at the back glass, it's got the trademark right on it. It's from the movie. Very cool. And I just think it's funny that a tie-in to a movie where they actually, they must have had the script or something to know what the plot of the movie is, Because it mirrors the plot. That's why there's three rockets in the center of the play field. Would you say that Meteor is better or worse as a movie compared to Disney's Black Hole? Oh, I've actually seen Black Hole. It's on Disney Plus. Nothing to do with the Gottlieb Black Hole. They're completely separate. They have nothing to do with each other.
    50:34
    Last time I saw Black Hole, I was a kid. I remember Maximilian was pretty cool, the robot. That's all I remember. Maybe we'll do a Movies and Pinball Machines episode. Or Movies Disney Made When They Were Hurting episode. Yeah, so if you want to do an episode of Movies with Pinball Machines, just send us an email at silverballchronicles at gmail.com. Do you mean Movies with Pinball Machines in them, or are Pinball Machines about movies? No, Pinball Machines about movies. Well, there you go. We're talking like Tron Legacy, one of the greatest games ever created. Sure. I own one of those. I know. But on the Meteor Bat Glass, on the side of one of the rockets, it says SK-5. Well, that doesn't make sense. This is his second game. Exactly. It doesn't make sense. And that's why it's so upsetting that Mr. Kirk is no longer with us, because that would literally be the first thing I'd ask him. Please, especially in this era of podcasts and everyone gets interviewed, he would still be getting interviewed now. I think so. If he wanted to, though. He might not have wanted to be interviewed. Who knows? That's true. So his next game was Nineball. And let's Nineball Corner Pocket some stats here. It's a pool gambling space wizard magic-y theme. It's from December 1980. It's an M200, 2,279 machines produced. And again, same programming, same art team. And a mechanical and software nightmare. A mechanical nightmare. Please tell me why. It's mechanical nightwear for one reason. It has a drop target bank that must weigh 15, 20 pounds. Okay, so it's on the left side of the playfield, there's like how many drop targets? There's eight drop targets. Seven of them are individually addressable and can be dropped. There is literally, let me count here, seven. There's eight coils on the mech. Seven little coils and one large reset coil. If you want each drop target to come down, it needs to step up and down by itself. Well, it just goes down by itself. It doesn't go up by itself. So it still needs a coil for that. So what will happen is there's 1 through 8. It's numbered. 1 through 8. They're all pool balls. Get it? So you need to hit them in order. So if you hit like 1, it goes down. If you hit 3, it'll go down. But then when you hit 2, it'll reset all the targets and then drop everything except the 1, the 2, and the 3 that you hit down. Oh, I see. And it resets and drops, reset, reset, over and over and over, and it works the mech so much that it literally just destroys itself. Believe me, from one who knows, and the game has multiball. It has a lock area that uses a really bizarre, when you lock balls in there, they actually kind of stack on top of each other. Interesting. So it frequently, if the switches are even slightly out of adjustment and it doesn't know where the balls are, it will get horribly confused and it has very poor, they did 60 revisions of the software trying to get it to work right. Wow. That's right, 60 revisions, and most of it had to do with multiball not working right. Losing track of where the balls were, getting confused, it just, they could not account for if something went wrong in the game. I know, I have one, I use it in tournaments, but it's always an iffy proposition of whether it will get confused at some point, but it's still a great game. It was maybe a bit ambitious for the time. The mech is actually from another game, the Drop Target Mech from Hell. It's from Flight 2000. But on that game, it's not used the same way. It's not cycled over and over, so it doesn't really have the issues that it does on Nineball. I've never seen a Nineball. Nineball also has a cool hanging spinner. Like, it's only mounted on one side, and it hangs out. Oh, it's like those modern spinners. It's like a spinner. I think Metallica, they hang out. It's just connected on one side. Very cool. It has to be one of the first to have that. I don't think too many of them had that back then. Yeah, so it's Easter Egg. It has an SK-3 on the Wizards' hat. Okay, that's his third game. What's 5? Why is Meteor 5? It makes no sense. Maybe he designed it before they actually... Yeah, that's the rumor. That was actually his fifth design. Well, what happened to all his other designs then? Yeah. Every time he wrote one, like, nah, that one sucks. I'm not doing that one. That's okay. SK-3. Let's get rid of 2. 2 wasn't very good. It was based on ninjas. Nobody likes ninjas. They like wizards in space. It's still a weird game. It's cool, but there's a wizard. The art of this game was actually from a t-shirt, which can be seen in Roger Sharp's book from 1977 called Pinball on page 13. Really? So the back glass? Yeah. I'm all about interesting, strange, annoying facts here. So one of the things when I was doing my research on Steve Kirk was that I also found from Play Meter from 1985, he really spoke about the creative crisis in coin-op at the time. Again, we're jumping timelines around here a little bit, but in the 1980s when Pinball was on its downturn, there was a big crisis at the time about creativity in Pinball. We'll get into that maybe more in the Python Angelo episode that we've got coming up, but at the time, Steve Kirk worked for a company called Pinstar. Give us a quick breakdown as to who Pinstar was. Pinstar was the company that Gary Stern started after Stern Electronics went bye-bye. So Pinstar was a conversion type company. They made, yes, Pinstar made conversion kits that you could use in older, usually like an older ballet game. Like if you had a Lost World, which probably wasn't making much money anyway because it's Lost World, you could convert it to a different game using this kit. Yeah, so the most notable, I would say, game from Pinstar was from 1985 called Gamatron, which was Steve Kirk's standard-bodied version of Harry Williams' very successful Flight 2000 machine. It was a space theme from 1985. It had a Bally Stern board set, surprise, and it also had a bit of an extra board that plugged into the computer unit, so it converted it. It has an unknown production amount, and the art was done by Seamus McLaughlin, who we had heard about in our previous episode. Really, here we go, going back into this sort of conversion kit, or our trade-in business model, right? It modified most existing Stern games from the previous era, as well as the Bally games at the time. The manufacturing flyer basically states it fits most standard body four-player Bally Manufacturing Corporation pinballs. And one of the major differences, I would say, between Flight 2000 and Gammatron was that Gammatron does not talk. I think if you mod it, though, if you actually had a soundboard, I believe it runs the same code. You could get it to talk. I'm trying to remember that. Yeah, so your co-host on Slam Tilt, Ben, he has a Gammatron, right? Yes, he has a Gammatron. Another thing about Gammatron, they didn't just make them for U.S. market. They actually made kits for foreign markets. Okay. I got to play either Italian or Spanish Gammatron. The play field, the art was a little different. Okay. And it hit an SK9. Nine? Wow. He designed a lot of games that didn't make it. Yeah, absolutely. So we're just jumping all over the place. Maybe he's just making it up. One of the cool bits, I think, with Gammatron on the back glass. It's awesome. It's art. It is awesome in my opinion. It's got that really cool 1980s robot destroying the world thing going on. And it has a bunch of initials all over the place. So there are characters on there. There's an SK for Steve Kirk. There's an HW for Harry Williams. JJ for Joe Juice Jr. Gary Stern, GS, SS Sam Stern. There's a Seamus McLaughlin, SM. And that one's handwritten, almost like a signature on the back glass. There's also a couple of unknown initials on there as S-E-K-H-S-B-D-S-A-F. We don't know who they are, but I'm assuming they were so important that IPDB just decided not to put their names on there. In 1988, he wasn't necessarily working for Williams, but he sold a game design, which would eventually become Swords of Fury, which is best known for what? Lion Man. It also has a Kirk post in the center. Does, which would be one of the signatures. As a consultant for Bally in 1988, he worked with Jim Patla, who designed Ramp Warrior under Steve's influence. Now, that didn't quite make production, because at around that time, Williams actually purchased Bally, which created then Bally Williams, and Ramp Warrior was made into a game called Truck Stop, and they had about 1,500 units were made of that. I would say Truck Stop is probably best known for its backlash and the fact that everybody in there was in a cold room. Yeah. So Ramp Warrior had SK-13 on the prototype. It was a license plate on one of the trucks, and when it was changed over to Truck Stop, The license plate was still there, but it was laying on the ground all crumpled up rather than being attached to the truck. Symbolism? You could say that. Yeah. So through my research, and I think you can probably hear it here.
    60:15
    All that research. That's so much research. That's like four pages of research. I actually found a couple of pretty interesting little points about Steve Kirk. One of them was that he became very much involved in pinball for one significant reason, and that was that he had a heart problem as a child, which meant that he could not play sports. So because he had a heart problem, he ended up playing pinball and hanging out. Do you have anything else to add about Steve Kirk? I like to think Steve Kirk was three for three. That's what I call him. He's the three for three man. He did three designs, and they were all awesome. I mean, Gammatron, Gammatron is the repurposed design. I actually think Camadron plays better than Flight 2000. I've heard that. And as far as Swords of Fury, I think a lot of that, there are parts of him in there, but I think that also was reworked a lot. I don't consider that a true full all-out Steve Kirk design. Yeah, so I think Steve Kirk is probably one of those people that everybody's kind of heard of, but I don't think everybody really appreciates necessarily what he has done, particularly for early Solid State and tournament pinball and all of the things that come around with that. And we'll dive into Steve Kirk kind of after he left Stern Pinball and kind of what he saw after that. And I'll sprinkle that through a couple of other episodes instead of deep diving it at the moment because today's topic is Stern Pinball. But I did want to talk about Steve Kirk's passing. Matt Scianchetti, he wrote a great article in Pin Game Journal from March of 2007. Steve Kirk passed away in September of 2006 from heart failure at the age of 61 which is quite young at that age and that would come from his heart issue that he had And I quote from the article here I could tell the best years of Steve's life were when he was designing and making pinball machines. You could hear the excitement in his voice. He could go on and on and on about the glory days of the industry, and I enjoyed hearing most of all about what he had to say in those times. At the time of Steve's passing, he had been living in a motel in Rockford, Illinois, and working at the Bank of America MBNA's phone customer service department. I was a friend with Steve for about 10 years, and in the time, he had bounced back and forth between homelessness and just getting by. Steve lost most of his money he accumulated from pinball in a stock deal that went bad. There's actually a surreal moment that I had with Steve during Pinball Expo of 2000 or 2001. He had called me because he wanted to check out Pinball Expo that year and he needed a ride. During this time period he was homeless and living in a suburban shelter program while trying to find work in the area. People often have a stereotypical vision of the homeless. However, this certainly was not the way Steve conducted himself. He rarely, if ever, drank alcohol. He wore a regular button-up dress shirt and slacks and was well-spoken. If you didn't know his situation and ran into him at Expo, you would have thought he was just another industry big shot. The minute he walked in, tons of people recognized him instantly and started catching up on old times. At one point, he was asked to sign autographs at a table. So there he was, signing autographs of back glass artwork and talking to fans of his games, and no one realized at the end of the show, after he was done signing autographs, he would be going back to the shelter and trying to find a job the next day. Not many people who are homeless get to sign autographs or have fans tell them how much their work is enjoyed. Yet, for that night, Steve got to experience both, and I feel fortunate to have been there to witness it. How about that story? Yeah, that's about two or three years before I started going to Expo, so I missed that. That's pretty sobering to think that one of the greatest designers of all times fell on some serious hard times, And I'm glad that we could pay homage to somebody like Steve Kirk on this podcast. If you'd like to read that article, I've included it in the show notes. Well, on to something I would say maybe a little less depressing. Memory Lane. Or Memory Lane, if you've ever seen The Backglass. Yes. This was, I believe, their last game with the Chimebox, where they went with their wonderful early soundboard. And this is also by Mike Hoobin. And it's actually a good game. I enjoy Memory Lane. We have a local collector around here who has one. So around the time I had seen the Flash that was up for sale, the same seller also had a Memory Lane for sale, and I was intrigued. I was in some ways almost desperate to play some pinball, and I considered buying it. Wonderful little game, right? It's a bowling-themed or drive-in kind of car hop thing, right? Like your A&W. Yeah, it's going for a retro bowling vibe. It's got a really cool shot on the left side where it's a spinner that leads to a saucer, which is pretty cool. Yeah, also in the middle of the field, if you've played Bally's Strikes and Spares, it's kind of got a little bit of that going on, right? Yeah, the rollovers. In the middle, sort of the 10-pin bowling rollovers in the middle. Kind of a neat little game. I wouldn't say it was necessarily great. I wouldn't say it's bad. It would be maybe the B, B-plus of its time, right? Ah, I like it. I don't love it. I mean, I wouldn't own one. Let's play it that way. Now, Sam Stern actually got to sign that play field, right? Very cool. Oh, he did? One of the coolest Sterns, I think, around this time was certainly Electronimo. So horrible sound in general, but I thought it was one of the best lookers of its time. It's got some interesting art. It's got like a Pegasus lady thing going on. Very cool. We didn't really get into the art yet, but all their art was outsourced for Stern by Ad Posters, a company called Ad Posters. But a lot of the artists you would have heard of before, guys like Doug Watson, who did a bunch of stuff for Williams. There were a lot of pinball artists there that would come out later. But they pretty much let them do anything they wanted. So at the time, Stern really outsourced a lot of that. Gottlieb did it as well. And they spent a lot of their time maybe giving some guidance to these folk at advertising posters. You can read all about them in the Pinball Compendium. And Stern much preferred to outsource the art. And a lot of those artists preferred working with Stern over Gottlieb because of the freedom they could get from Stern because they used a four-color process as opposed to Stern, which traditionally used sort of those old sort of lines and straight edges. I believe that backlash is also ripped off of something that's not original. Yeah, I would say that those ad posters fellows usually went elsewhere for inspiration. Yes, yes, you could say that. Well, the next game is actually a big deal, whether you like it or not. It's wildfire, but it's a big deal because of the designer who was coaxed out of retirement by Sam Stern. That's right, and this, of course, is the legendary Harry Williams. Yeah, so this machine is a bit interesting because at the bottom of the playfield, it doesn't have those traditional slings where the ball comes down and hits the kicker. The kickers are actually in the mid-playfield. That's kind of interesting. Yes, and Harry Williams, during his time after he left his own company, he would do designs and send them into Bally and Williams, but whether they made them or not, I mean, he wasn't there officially, so sometimes his games would get made, sometimes they wouldn't. If you look at a list of the games he's actually had that were produced, you'll notice these gaps and it's bizarre. You'll see a couple games by Williams, a game by Valley. Like what was going on here, that's what was going on. He would just submit these designs, tons of them, and most of them did not get made. I mean, he's always an innovator, right? You can't just tell the guy. You can't just say, Harry Williams, retire, go play some golf, go learn to cook, watch a whole lot of home and garden television. He's not doing that, right? No. To me, that was one of the best things about Stern Electronics is they brought him back and he got right back into it. No issue. These were like his first solid state games because he had just done nothing but electromechanicals. But he had no issues transitioning to solid state. So that's wildfire. Spelled fire with a Y. Yep. Makes it fancier. Oh, and then we got the next game. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about maybe Stern's version of licensing. Mm-hmm. And Stern, I mean, I guess a lot of the others at the time, particularly your Gottlieb and your Bally's, they were really kind of diving into licensing. You know, you had things like Wizard, Bally did Kiss, you know, some really sort of big bands. On the Gottlieb side, you've got their association with Columbia Pictures. They're picking up things like Charlie's Angels, The Hulk, Spider-Man. And, you know, licensing kind of was a thing. Not to be outdone, Stern joins in the fray. Yeah, and they go for the biggest singer-songwriter of all time, Ted Nugent.
    70:12
    The funny thing about this game is, if you look at the back glass, and I have one in front of me here, and I can't remember the art. But it has a credit to a magazine on, is it the backlist or the playfield somewhere? The magazine to get credit to was an adult magazine. Really? Yep. I mean, who's Ted Nugent? He's a singer, songwriter, he's a guitarist, and a conservative political activist. He's initially gained his fame in the early 70s from being in the band Amboy Dukes, and in 1975 he started his own solo career. His first album, the self-titled Ted Nugent, was two times platinum, which is two million copies sold. At the time, The Pinball Machine was released. Ted Nugent had three solo albums, some of the most popular songs on the radio. Some of them still heard today. The only one that I know is Cat Scratch Fever, which you alluded to a moment ago, and it sucks. But it's a license. And he was involved. I've seen pictures of him actually playing the game at the factory with Gary Stern. Did it sell? Did it? Well, it sold 2,400 units, right? Eh, not exactly stars-like numbers. Now, the worst part about this machine is it actually used the SB100 soundboard. Oh, the sounds are terrible. So they went back, probably because they had a few laying around the factory, sort of like your Iron Man by Stern machines. They're just sort of laying around in parts, and you just slap them together and send them out the door, right? No. Eh. All right. Well, I mean, the next one, I would say probably one of, again, the bigger licenses they could have gone with, and that was Dracula. Really? Big license? Yeah. So actually, this was based on Count Dracula, and you'll remember Count Dracula. He moved from the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania, Romania, to England in 1897. Now, this individual, he had a phobia about garlic, sharp sticks, and daylight. Now, the details about his early life are very, very hard to find. Some would say they're undisclosed, but as mentioned, he was in life the most wonderful man. He was a soldier, a statesman, and an alchemist. He had a mighty brain and, learning beyond compare, a heart that knew no fear or remorse. Now, he allegedly studied the black arts in Scholomance in Transylvania, where he later took up arms against the Turks across the Danube River. According to his nemesis, Abraham von Helsing, upon his death, he was buried in a great tomb in the chapel of his castle. Some say Dracula returns from death and lives for several centuries in his castle with three terrifying, beautiful female companions beside him. And that must have been a tough license to get. And you know what? It's all in the game. All of it. That whole story. Yeah, sure it is. It's in the game. That's a tough license. This was made by Harry Williams, and it's a pretty good game. It is a really cool plunge, right? So usually when you pull the plunger back, it shoots the ball up at the playfield, it goes to the top, and in this era it would bounce back and forth and usually fall into lanes, right? Not this one. It comes all the way up and almost hooks around into a pop bumper. Actually, it hooks around into a dead bumper, where if you do it right, it'll actually go right to the upper flipper, where you can go at the foreback on the top. It is a really unique and very odd pinball machine. It has awesome playfield art. Backglass is terrible, and it's always completely wasted on every Dracula I've ever seen. The backglass Dracula looks like he is going to a hair club for a men meeting or something. He's like going bald. It's not a very good backglass, but the playfield art is excellent. The plastics are excellent. It's got everything, fire, skulls, all the kind of stuff you expect to see. He's got a, I would say, probably one of the nicest fences I have ever seen on that backglass. Gorgeous. Just gorgeous. Broad iron, very nice, very expensive. Count Dracula was a very classy person. And there's some lightning, or that might be the back glass, actually. He spared no expense on his landscaping. Very nice. He's got his, the ladies are on the left side, too, eh, on some sort of staircase. Mm-hmm. Very cool. Good for him. Good for Count Dracula. One of the legends in our industry, by the way. Who, Dracula?
    74:45
    Dracula. Next game we have Trident. Yes. Again, you'll notice, Stern, they would settle into a lot of these one-word title games. That's why it was like Trident, Stars, Dracula. Yeah, they didn't want to get very convoluted. Yeah, I like it. They kept it simple. Yes. And Trident is some green dude, and I don't know what, I don't even know how to describe the back glass, but that's typical with a lot of their stuff. It's out there. And this machine, I've seen a few of these for sale in Ontario, and it's kind of got a lot of the same kind of flavors as previous Sterns, right? They were really big on these Orbit spinners. So an Orbit is the kind of outside top arc of a pinball machine. And one of the sort of most fun places to put a spinner or the target that flips around is on the outside of the game Because you get a lot more kind of speed and a lot more angle to hit that. They really nailed that at Stern. I would say that the more spinners the better, and Stern understood that, and they said, you know what, we're going two spinners on this game. And the other interesting thing about Trident from the tech side, it was the first game, I believe it was the first game by any manufacturer to use the programmable drop targets. Basically you can drop them at will on its own, and they would use that a lot in upcoming games. Very cool. It has a bank of five targets, and it'll start with like two up, and you hit the two down, the reset, so like three of them are up, you hit them down, and then four of them are up, you get it. It's a fun-looking machine, a little bit different. Again, it's not overly complex, it's not overly exciting, but it is a bit different than everybody else. One of the, I mean, I guess one of the big differentiators of this machine is on the left side, there's no in-lane and out-lane, there's only an in-lane, which is kind of interesting. Interesting. Following Trident. Speaking of interesting, we have Hot Hand by Harry Williams, which has this crazy, huge, rotating flipper at the top of the game. Yeah, so this is unusual. Let's just put it that way. But again, it's Harry Williams doing what he does. There is a large, I'd say twice as long as a regular flipper. It rotates and there's several like saucers where a ball can go in and it spots you different things. It's actually not a bad game. I mean, I guess this is, you know, when you're not a Bally, when you're not a Gottlieb, you know, you can try different things, right? Like it's not like you're worried about upsetting the formula. So this is a great example of a way of trying something because, you know, you might come up with the greatest innovation of all time. You never know, right? Mm-hmm. So after Hot Hand, we have a game that probably most people have not seen called Cosmic Princess. I've never even heard of that. Only 336 were made, and it's an export. It was made in Australia. They were assembled in Australia. They were sold by Leisure and Allied Industries under license by Stern. And it definitely looks like a Stern, plays like a Stern. It was just made in Australia. So you do see these in Australia. You'll notice this on the Internet Pinball database where a lot of them will talk about the LAI's version of that game, which is really the export into Australia. Stern exported a lot to Australia. Now this is where we get into games like Magic, Meteor, and I think probably one of the more notable ones beyond Steve Kirk's Meteor is Galaxy, designed again by Harry Williams. This is the game that Keith Elwin regrets selling. It's an M200 MPU, sold 4,947 units. Very, very cool design, in my opinion. That's good. Have you ever played a Galaxy? Have I ever played it? Yes. I have played every single CERN, except Laser Lord. Why don't you have a Galaxy in your collection? It's okay. Are you saying that Keith Elwin, the greatest pinball player of all time, and some would say the best up-and-coming designer of all time is wrong? Uh, no. You heard it here, folks. Ron Hallett hates Keith Elwin. Oh.
    79:01
    When we get back onto the licensing train, Ali is the last major license that Stern would land. Now, this is based on Muhammad Ali, or Cassius Clay Jr., who was the American professional boxer. He was nicknamed the greatest and he's widely regarded as one of the most significant and celebrated sports figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest boxers of all time. He was best known as one of the greatest trash talkers. He was a Muslim convert and a philanthropist and a civil rights activist in the 1970s. He was also a huge pro wrestling fan. That's where he got a lot of his, basically he's cutting promos on other boxers. Yeah, he knows that he has to sell tickets, he has to sell the event, and people are going to want to pay to come, and he really learned that from professional wrestling. By 1980, around the time this machine was released, Ali was really starting to suffer from trembling hands, verbal stutters. He lost his match in October of 1980 to a stoppage. He was later diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1984. For even in this advanced age in his career, Ollie was still a massive brand. And to get somebody like him to partner with your company must have been a big deal at the time. Yeah, he's on the flyer, too. By on the flyer, I mean he actually came in and they did a photo shoot. It wasn't a stock photo. This picture of him with the game, like in his trunks. Yeah, and we're talking pretty close to 3,000 units here, so it sold okay for the most part. But we're getting into that sort of transition period into the 1970s and into the 1980s where sales weren't quite what they were on a consistent basis because we have so many players in the industry, right? We've got Bally, we've got Gottlieb, we've got Stern, and you're diluting the market at this point. And the production runs were fairly short for Stern, as we'll see on a lot of these upcoming games. Like an upcoming game such as Big Game, another Harry Williams game. So I actually posted in the Pintball Network thread on Pinside at Pinside.com for comments about games and topics about Stern Electronics. So I could include some of those comments and I listed a few games on there. One of the games I neglected, Ron, and I know you're disappointed in me, was Big Game. And I got a lot of messages regarding this game that I had left out of that list. So Chuck Wirt, one of the streamers here on the Pinball Network said, You forgot the best game of the bunch, Big Game. Well, Ken also yelled at me and he said, No conversation is complete without mentioning their first wide body game, Big Game. Big Game has become my favorite wide body pin due to its varied flowy for a wide body and rewarding shots. The effective use of 4 Flipper's unique jungle art package including the amazing and intimidating growling tiger head on the back glass and the fun digital sounds from the era. It also features multiple valid scoring strategies for competitive play that makes it a favorite in league play. I have let everybody down by not mentioning Big Game. Yeah, and also didn't mention it has the wonderful red on the back glass that always completely dissipates. So your tiger's tongue is just transparent. Built on the cheap. Yeah, the back glasses are almost trashed, almost always trashed on this one. But the other interesting thing is, and maybe someone can correct me on this, but at least the little blurb I have here says that this was the first game with seven-digit scores. Wow. Which they did advertise because they would count. I hope nobody just took their car right off the road here listening to this podcast. That's a big deal. That's pretty exciting stuff. Yes, I have a big game. It's a great game. So when they talk about the varied scoring, like I've never played a big game. I don't like wide bodies in general. You need to change your mind on that. You need to play a stern wide body. It's different. It's different. It's totally different. Number one, it's not as wide. It's not as wide as like a Bally wide body. It's not wide as a Paragon or something like that. It's only a few inches wider. It will not play like a wide body. It will play super fast. So get any preconceptions out of your mind. So when I look at the play field, I have an X and a Y and a Zed, that's right, Zed card, and it's got, you know, one through nine. It's got lines and squares and circles. Like, what is going on in the center of that game? You try to fill the cards up. It is most basic. You try to fill the cards up. You get line bonuses for any lines you make. So, like, three down, three across, three over. Like, that's where the lines are. So you get extra line bonuses. You also can spell big game, light spinner, hit spinner. You have the wonderful four flippers at the bottom, which are all to hit specific shots. So you can't scissor yourself on those, right? No, you cannot scissor yourself. So scissoring, for those who don't know, is if there's two flippers on the right or left side and the flippers open up, sometimes there's a gap in the bottom. And in this game, there are no gaps, right? It's solid. And it's pretty easy to get used to the flippers on this, to be honest. But it's a good game. It's a really good R package, surprisingly. I didn't think they, yeah, but it's like jungle. When you look at it, it's very detailed. Very detailed R package. You see this, how big is your big game? Oh, with the flyer? Brilliant. Yeah, I love some of the flyers. The cheetah flyer is ridiculous. It's like, what does this have to do with the game? Now we're into May of 1980, and this is when we release Sea Witch. Yeah, so we're talking fantasy sea theme. It's the M200 board set, 2,500 units. Mike... Kubin again. Mike Kubin. And now we're talking software by a fellow named Bill Futsenruder who's a big deal and he'll be popping up a lot more sort of in the Williams days later on. Yes, he will. So yes, this is Sea Witch. Sea Witch is the later rethemed Beatles. It fixes some of the limitations or some of the annoyances with Sea Witch. Sea Witch has the nice loop at the top that goes all the way around that you can hardly ever loop at all. Yeah, so there's a Sea Witch for sale not too far away from me, and it's for sale for 4,000 loonies. How much is that, two bucks? Hold on, you're so mean. So let me take a look here. So 4,000 beaver pelts, you've got to take that by dogsled to Toronto, and then in Toronto you've got to take it down to Detroit. It's got to cross the river. Give me one sec. Then the Mounties got to let you through. That's $29.80. No, that's too much. That's too much. I wouldn't do that. So why is it that Sea Witch is all of a sudden worth so much money nowadays? Ah. Besides you and Barry, the other guy on your podcast raising the prices. I don't know. I mean, for people who wanted Beatles, but that was too expensive, so they got Sea Witch instead. Kent wrote in to SilverballChronicles at gmail.com and said, Hey Davey and Ronnie. I don't, like, what is with these, ugh. Ronnie, Ronnie's fine, Ronnie's fine. Are you going to talk about the Beatles? Keep on sleeping with that chicken. What the hell does that mean? I have no idea what that means. Maybe we'll dive into this whole Beatles thing here. So, Stern's the Beatles, it was released in November of 2018. It's a Stern Spike 2 System standard body. They have 1,964 units designed by Mike Kubin but redesigned by George Gomez, art by Christopher Franchi, software by Dean Grover, and sound by Jerry Thompson. This is broken into three editions. The first one being the gold edition, 1,614 units, platinum at 250 units, and diamond at 100 units. Words I like to call them, too expensive, really too expensive, and obscenely expensive. I really, really, really like the Beatles, but if you lay the Beatles down to Elvira House of Horrors or Deadpool Premium or Batman 66, I'm sorry, I'm not choosing the Beatles. Yeah, that's one expensive license. Yeah, George says, Joe Cammon Cow and I did the overall concept for the rules of the game and collaborated on conceptualizing the game features. I felt strongly that it should be built on a simple, single-level board from that era. We settled on Sea Witch, even though it's from the 70s. Oh, okay, George doesn't know when the game was made based on its popularity. So George Gomez thought that Sea Witch was made in the 70s. So it took 10 years of relationship building between Joe Kamikow and the folks at Apple. And we're talking phone calls, gift baskets. Every year you're giving the folks at Apple a call. Now, rumor has it that this is the highest cost for a license ever at over a million dollars. Eh, I believe that. Joe Kamikau says there's never been a license in pinball as expensive as the Beatles. We took a big risk to make this game. It's a specialty boutique product which CERN does once a year or two. We had to do it right and make it different. Everything was sent to Apple in England, and when they were happy, it has to be taken to Proy. PROI stands for Paul, Ringo, Olivia, and Yoko. And it was the Beatles they envisioned and liked so it was approved. When you're talking about Paul, Ringo, Olivia, and everybody's favorite Yoko Ono, you know, you're going to have to get everybody on the side for something like that. And what they decided on, Joe, Gary, Stern, and the group, was that it had to be the coming to America's Beatles, right? It had to be not the controversial Beatles that they would later become. Joe Kamikow, the way he decided that they came to that was that he and Christopher Franchi started to get the proposal together with the back glass and cabinet art, and he wanted those coming to America Beatles. This is the biggest era of the Beatles, and really the Beatles that the Baby Boomers would remember, particularly the Ed Sullivan Show Beatles. So there were a bunch of playfield changes, right, to the Sea Witch design? Yes, there was. George Gomez started with Mike Koobin's Sea Witch layout. He made modifications to update and modernize it and fix the problems with the original. From conversations with stern guys like Keith Ellin and Zach Sharp who knew the game very well, they complained that Sea Witch top orbits were not accessible from the bottom flippers, sometimes even from the upper flipper. And it's supposed to be designed to have like a repeatable loop, sort of like Flash, right? Yeah. But it just doesn't work. It doesn't work most of the time. And the other thing about Sea Witch is primarily, it's a drop target game. You're trying to hit drop targets. The spinner, you hardly ever hit the spinner. You hardly ever hit the loop. It's about drop targets. With Beatles, they made it so you can actually hit the loop. So there's a reason to loop now. There's a reason to hit spinners now because they added a second one. I went to New York City, down to Manhattan for a portfolio manager meeting. Being in finance, you end up in New York from time to time. I went to Sunshine Laundromat in Brooklyn and Modern Pintball over in Koreatown in Manhattan, and I played a Beatles at both. Do you think that I would also really like Sea Witch, or do you think Sea Witch would just make me angry? You would not. You would say Beatles is better. Why can't this be as good as the Beatles? Yeah. If you really, really want a Sea Witch, buy the Beatles. If you can afford it. Yeah. The next game on the docket... Cheetah. Yes. I don't know if I'm really into games with cheetahs on it. I have a bit of a cheetah phobia. I was once attacked by a cougar and it was horrible. In Canada? Yeah. She was 40, 45-year-old. It was in a bar. I had too much to drink. Oh. Very good. Very good. So why do you, besides trying to hyperinflate the cost of the machines in your basement, why do you like Cheetah? It's another great Harry Williams wide body. Actually he did, I believe he did all the Stern wide bodies except two of them. So he was on his wide body kick at this point. So this is his second wide body in a row. And again, plays super fast, wide open play field, just tons of things to hit and you just got to play it. Just feels great to shoot the shots. That can be said for most of the Stearns that are really good. They just feel good to play. The shots just feel so good on these games. So at this time in Harry Williams' career, he's very much about geometry, right? Yeah, and in this game you have an upper left flipper where you can sweep a five bank, all five targets. I hope everybody was sitting down because that sounds amazing. Just did it two days ago. Every once in a while when it happens, like, holy crap, I don't believe that just happened. Now, it also has a three-bank target directly across from that top flipper, and that's for, like, multipliers? It has a grid with various grid awards if you can get the lights in order. It has three other targets. It has another three-bank way at the top, like as far back as you could possibly mount a Mac. But that's Cheetah, another great game. Now, released almost at exactly the same time is Quicksilver. Oh boy, yes. Designed by Joe Jost Jr., who would end up at Williams eventually. So this is like space theme? I don know what it is The artist specifically Doug Watson he took inspiration and by inspiration I mean directly ripping off a heavy metal magazine cover which is apropos now that Stern is going to be doing a heavy metal game So I'll include a link to that magazine cover in the show notes, and to be totally honest, the original magazine I think looks much better. Oh yeah, but I mean it is not even a question whether it's directly ripped off, because it is directly ripped off. Yeah, so I mean, I guess probably one of the best unsung, you know, pinball artists out there was certainly a Doug Watson. Oh, games like Terminator 2, I mean, everyone knows that back last, that's iconic. Yeah, Doug studied art at North Illinois University, and he half-completed a master's before dropping out because he was broke and couldn't afford any more time. He created artwork for pinball from 1979 to 1996 and he started with advertising posters which we mentioned a little bit earlier and through 1979 to 1982 he did most of the art for Stern and Gottlieb. This is where I would love to really touch on what made him a little bit different. As we had mentioned before Stern sort of let you do whatever you want. Gottlieb was much more kind of stay within our box. Which Doug Watson learned. When we get into some of our Gottlieb System 80 conversations in a future podcast, we'll talk a little more about Doug Watson and the limits that were placed on him by Gottlieb. But when you're able to sort of sit back and say, you know what, I want to make a game and I want to use this heavy metal magazine, that's pretty, pretty cool. Ron, can we talk about penises? Oh, I don't know. Is this the right show for that? This isn't a pinball show. This is Silverball Chronicles. But the reason we can talk about that is because they're all over this game.
    94:51
    Are you sure they're actually penises or are they supposed to be blobs? They're supposed to be blobs, but once you see them, you cannot not see them. It's sort of like Gandalf's beard in Lord of the Rings, right? The Lord of the Rings L.E., yes. It just, once you see that kind of hanging there, you just can't quite get it out of here. Yeah.
    95:14
    And the game is very green. Very green. When you look at the original heavy metal magazine, which Doug pulled the inspiration from, it was more sort of gray. It was a little more sort of devoid of color. And you can see that Doug Watson went for, okay, let's add some greens and some purples or some pinks. And the green, the green does not do it for me. Doesn't do it for you. It does not. It looks horrible. Well, don't worry. When this comes out as Led Zeppelin, I'm sure it'll have a different R package and maybe you'll like it. Maybe. We'll see. But that's a big bet. That's also a rumor. Who knows if that's true. You own one, right? I own half of one, yes. So you own half of a Quicksilver with Ben. Ben, yes, the guy from Slamt Hill, yeah. I'm looking at Pinside right now, which is sort of one of the major sources for buying and selling machines. A lot of the archived ads at the moment have this machine in the $5,000 to $6,000 to $7,000 US range for sales. Crazy talk. Why does this machine sell for more than a Stern premium? Branch of the Box. It's awesome and it's rare. So is there something about this game that is just so amazing that you just have to have one? Besides the penises. The sweeping, the center bank. You sweep the center bank and hit the spinner all in one shot. What does sweeping a set of drop targets mean? Basically, they all go down in one shot. You can kind of roll the pinball kind of along the bank, and they all fall down at the same time. And that's sort of a Stern staple, right? That was the thing that Stern sort of figured out. And they even had, certain games had sweep bonuses. If you sweep the target, you got extra 5,000 points or something. So, yes, even before Iron Maiden, I know Iron Maiden has a sweep bonus, the new Iron Maiden, but Stern was doing it back in the 80s. And actually the aforementioned Keith Elwin, the sweeping the targets to the left spinner shot, he called one of his favorite shots in early solid state pinball. So there you go. So the next machine that Stern sort of ventured into in August of 1980, so later on in the year, is Stargazer. And Ron, tell me about the amazingness that is Stargazer. You like spinners? I do. I do indeed love spinners. We got three of them, and they're all awesome. And it has the great feature upper left drop target bank. You hit one of the three targets, it locks in the value of the spinner. If you complete the bank, it'll start rotating again. So again, you want to hit it, but you don't want to complete it kind of thing that Stern did on a lot of games that I love. It has a very unique flipper area. It does not have conventional inlanes. It has like little pockets with rollovers that give you various awards. The pockets and the outlanes and just spinners. It's spinners, man. When it comes to the bottom third of that playfield, now, it does not have that traditional Italian bottom. In summary, an Italian bottom is that it has out lanes that go around the flippers and into the out hole. It has in lanes that then feed the flippers, and it has, you know, usually a pop bumper or a sling or two slings or something in the middle. This does not have slings in the bottom. It 100% has slings. But they're up higher though, aren't they? Yeah, they're up a little higher, but they're still in the same sling area that you would call the sling area. I've never played a Stargazer because they only made, what, like 1,000 of them? They made like 800 of them. Yeah, so why did they, if this game is so great. I knew this was coming, if this is so great. If it's so great, why did they only make 800 of them? Because of what the next game was. Well, what was the next game? It was going to be a wide body. It was going to be their first game with speech. It was going to be their first game with multi-ball, and it was going to be designed by Harry Williams. And that game is Flight 2000. Their second highest machine behind Meteor by selling 6,300 units. So they were all in on Flight 2000, so unfortunately Stargazer had to be taken off the line. So they were like, nope, we don't need any of that. We need some of this Harry Williams. We got Doug Watson on ours here. We got Bill Futsenruder on software. We're done. We're jumping in here. And this is the first one to use the VSU-100 speech board. It does the countdown. Yep. And their speech in all their games pretty much sounds the same. Like the same voice. And this has a spinner with a sweepable set of drop targets, right? Yeah, it does. Now, there was one of these not too long ago for sale, not too far from here. It had a brand new CPR playfield, all rebuilt, brand new boards, gorgeous looking machine, and it sold for... 10,000 loonies. 2,000 US. Sure. 2,100 US. Now, why is it that something like Quicksilver with a bunch of penises and horrible green vomit sells for almost the same as a Stern Pro? But a machine that sold tons because it was probably a great machine has speech. It's got probably lasers on it. It's made by a legend, Harry Williams. It's got gorgeous art. You answered your own question, though. It's got an amazing lock on the top. They made a ton of them. That's why. They're not hard to find. There's lots of Flight 2000s out there. They made a ton of these. All right. That's why. It's all supply and demand. The multiball on this can be a pain. If you want to talk about newer rule sets, trying to explain to somebody how to get multiball on this thing, it's like first you have to actually hit the left spinner shot and lock two balls. Yeah, and then you've got to count it down. You have to spell blast off by hitting the lanes. And there's no lane change. No lane change. You can't move those lit things around. You have to get the in-lane lights, which means you better be able to alley pass because that's the only way you're going to get a couple of them. But then the one you can't alley pass, so you're going to have to go through there eventually to get it. Then after you do all that, they'll say you're ready. Then you have to count down. So you have to count down 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 in order. And then when you do that, it's still not ready yet. You've got to hit one more ball up in the lock to finally start multiball. Yeah, that does not seem perfect. Very convoluted method as opposed to something like, say, firepower. We were talking about Steve Ritchie where he just lost three balls and it starts. Way easier to understand. That's horrible. Still fun. I haven't played one. I'll let you know. Okay. So that's when we get into Nineball into December. Next, we're moving into 1981. We've got Stern Freefall. Yeah. Never seen one of those ever. Yeah. Now's when we start. Yeah. It starts getting a little painful. Freefall is almost like a repurposed Flight 2000. They use the same mech, I think the same ball locker mech, or similar. It has a similar rule set where you try to lock balls and then spell something, start multiball. It has crazy artwork where basically it has women flying around commando. But really, if you look at the back glass, when I said they did anything with Stern, I meant that. So they wore military fatigues and some sort of beret? No, not that kind of commando. But it was another wide body from Harry Williams again. It's not a bad game. It's not as good as Flight 2000. So then we move into a game called Lightning. Ooh, that doesn't sound good. One of the few classic Stern games that I just hate. So this is when you can see the influence from the industry changing, right? The industry is very much, again, in flux. So when we move from electromechanical, we're moving into the solid state era. Things are in flux and they're changing. We get into that early 80s, we're getting into sort of, you know, Black Knight territory. Now we're talking about multiple playfields, right? And this is Stern's first stab at a multi-level playfield. Yeah, it sure is. So this is one of the classic Sterns that you haven't been able to find because it's so popular, right? I wouldn't say that. Actually, I've seen a lot of them. It has crazy backlasts where it almost looks like there's a nipple on it if you look at it. It's insane. It's just crazy. It has an upper playfield that you may stay on for three seconds before you lose it. It's extremely difficult to stay up on the upper playfield on this game, which is not a bad thing. I don't mind that, but the whole rule set of this game, at least in my opinion, is painful. They put everything in this game. They pack this sucker. It has bi-level, it has an extra display in the center of the playfield, like a little four or five digit display in the center. It has speech and multiball. But multiball, this is how you start multiball. The locks are on the upper playfield. Neither is really completely shootable. They literally just fall in half the time. And then you have to hit one of like nine stand-ups, get them all to start multiball. Yeah, it's like a fantasy god of lightning thing going on. Yeah, like Norse mythology, yes. It has the speech of like Thor, Thunder, God, or whatever it says, yeah. The wheels are kind of starting to come off here, right? Like it seems like it's all over the place. They put everything in this game. Everything's in this game. All out. I mean, when you're trying to compete with something like a Black Knight, Which, when we talked about this in our last episode, about how much research kind of went into that and how much time and effort that a Steve Ritchie, granted one of the greatest minds of pinball ever, spent on trying to perfect an upper play field. And then you kind of have Joe Juice Jr. just kind of throwing this together to try to compete with that. And the thing is, they're also competing with video games at this point, so they gotta pack more and more stuff in these games. So how do you combat maybe a lackluster two-level playfield? You do another one. You double down, right? And you go with split second. Which is a wide body, so now we're doing wide body bi-level game. Let's hurry into the sets. Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry. We're talking August of 1981. You said it, wide body, M200 board set. It's got the most annoying speech of all time. Hurry, hurry. It literally will say that. Hurry. It's just over and over and over. But it does say a lot of other things. It's a circus theme and it will say, you know, welcome to the whatever. It says a lot of different things. That's the one that gets stuck in everyone's heads. So this is a much better kind of kick at the can, right? Like the upper playfield is fun. It's not a bad game. It's kind of got like a high wire plank ball trapeze thing. That's kind of fun. Another Harry Williams design. You know, this guy, he just keeps, I mean, it's not his greatest game, but it is definitely better than the one that preceded it and the one that will follow it, right? Oh, no, Catacomb. I like Catacomb. Yeah, so Catacomb is a great game if you like toast. So with Catacomb, again, we have Speech, we have Multiball. It's the last turn game that actually has artwork on the cabinet for the game. They will cheapen out on future releases. One of my favorite pinball artists outside of Christopher Franchi or Zombie Yeti is Larry Day. And this was his first pinball game that he did the art for. And I think he did a lot of really kind of fun, cool art through his career, even though they're on, let's say, kind of some of the crabbiest games. Yeah, and Catacomb, no one understands the back box rules. Yeah, there's like a bag to tell in the back. Yep, and it gives you instructions. It talks, it tells you exactly what to do. It gives you spoken instructions on what to do. It has two ball locks, neither of which are really accessible to shoot. They bounce off the pop-upers and lock that way. And you're trying to complete, remember big games, trying to complete bingo cards? Here you're trying to complete, it's supposed to be the catacomb, it's supposed to be like a... It's like a hallway or something, but it looks like a big piece of toast. It is just the worst. I like it. The problem is, in tournament play, you plunge the correct lane, I think it's the rightmost lane you want to get it in, which lights the spinner, and then you just hit the spinner repeatedly and ignore everything else. So if you ever play in a tournament, that's what you need to do. Yeah, it's almost like there was a bit of a, we got something here and this is kind of what we want to do, but they just, maybe too many cooks in the kitchen or... Eh, it's a more cerebral game and people don't like to think. Yeah, I mean at the time, right, it might be a bit too much. I know Gottlieb had a game called Time Zone and it was very weird that way, right, when it came to really odd rules. I think at the time, people still really liked sort of spinners and interesting locks. They didn't like maybe complicated rules. And we have the next game. Iron Maiden. No, not that one. Not the good Iron Maiden. The one with the crazy back glass, which is the thing you remember about it. It has a weird, like, pulsating light in the back glass, the thing I remember most about it. It's a wide body, bi-level, multiball. First wide body, not by Harry Williams. Oh, it does have really cool art. It is really cool art, and it's just not good. I think most of these ended up being exported. Really? Yep. And this was done by, the art is done by a fellow named Keith Parkinson, and he did Iron Maiden, Krull, and Viper, everybody's favorite pinball machines of all time. Wow. Another interesting factoid about Stern is they're actually owned by Seabird. So when you see those S's on those classic Sterns, the S that you see on the drop targets, everyone thinks that's Stern. It's not. It means it's Seabird. Stern. Yeah. Oh. And the other thing I forgot to mention, I'll throw it out there. Starting with Stargazer, they started to use the block, like Stern logo, that they would use all the way up, like when they restarted Stern. Yes. All the way up until they changed it to what it is now, where it has the little flipper thing on it and all that. But if you look at the logo on Stargazer, on Stargazer, that Stern logo is the same one you'll see like on Spider-Man, Elvis, you know, all those games. I always thought that was interesting. Okay, after Iron Maiden, then we get to Viper. And another thing, Iron Maiden and Viper, they do not have any cabinet art. It literally just says stir. So again, cost cutting. Doing it on the cheap. Yeah, by this time, video's winning, pinball's dying, Viper is crazy. You want to talk about crazy artwork? You want to put nudity on the back glass and get away with it? Make it metal, because that's what they do. They have a topless woman, snake woman on the back glass, but she's metal. So somehow they get away with it. Yeah, it's got like this robotic theme going on. It's got, again, orbit spinner on the left side, triple flipper. It's kind of almost got an inner loop. But the whole gimmick of the game, though, is the turret. In the center, in the top center of the game, there's the turret. You load a ball in the turret, and it spins full 360 all the way around. You can fire it anything you want. There's extra buttons on the side of the cabinet. One is the fire button, one is the reverse. You can make it go either way. Wow. Yep, and the whole game is designed around that turret. There are shots you can only hit with the turret. Is it as much fun as it sounds like?
    111:23
    I've warmed up to it. It's not one of their greater efforts, but you're trying to get all the different arrows by hitting with the turret, and it increases the multiplier on the playfield. So you go from, like, no scoring to insane scoring if you can do it. So they're small and nimble enough that they can just kind of throw anything at the wall and see if it works, right? And that's a great subject. And there's Multiball also. I guess after that, the best one that we can, like the last two that I want to talk about, maybe there's a couple more that you want to talk about. Oh yeah, we got to go into Laser Lord. I guess we could talk about Dragon Fist. Yes, this is their last conventional size, regular I would call pinball machine. In typical fashion of using a license without using a license, it has Bruce Lee on it, but they put a headband on him. Is it actually Bruce Lee? It's Bruce Lee. Or is it just... It's Bruce Lee. They put a headband on him because Bruce Lee never wore a headband, so it's obviously not Bruce Lee. But on the playfield artwork, it's totally Bruce Lee. And it's another JoJo's game, and it's awesome. Now, you have one of these. I do. Now, what makes it so awesome besides the fact that you have one?
    112:31
    It's just the speed. So it's a really tight, fast playfield. I only have one game that plays faster than this. Remember, I have a lot of newer games, too. I only have one game that plays faster than this, and that's TNA. Would you say that because you've got that series of drop targets kind of a bit lower on the playfield?
    112:49
    It's just the way it's designed. It's all loops, the way you hit the shots. Everything is built around generating as much speed as possible. Very cool. It's just obscenely fast. It has the best spinner. I could get 60, 70 spins a rip on the spinner on the right. Why do you think it didn't sell? Because they were dying. So we'll get into that. They're making video games. Yeah, they're dying at this point. The software of this, just from someone I know who's decompiled and working on it, it has so many, it has abandoned features in it and it's a complete mess. They were obviously just trying to get this out the door and get it done with. Yeah, so at around 1980, so we're, you know, when we move into that time frame of sort of Cheetah, Quicksilver, Flight 2000, we really ramp up around that period in 1980. And then it's almost like the wheels come off in 81. Pretty much. Almost immediately in January of 1981. And a lot of that comes from, and you said it, Stern's kind of motion more into video. And I've included a link in the show notes to the Stern Wikipedia page where it talks a little bit about their pinball machines, but it also lists their video game machines. In 1980, Stern released Astro Invader, which is actually programmed by Konami, and that was very much sort of a Space Invaders kind of knockoff. That machine sort of started, I would say, an odd shift in the business model that they had at Stern. As they kind of got that first taste of manufacturing arcade games, they created Berserk in 1980, and Berserk became just an absolute smash hit for Stern. They sold 37,500 units, which, when you look at selling 2,000 pinball machines, that is an astronomical number, isn't it? That it is. So you can see the allure of this low overhead machine, right? It's got a cabinet, it has the monitor inside, and it's got one board and a couple of joysticks, right? It doesn't have solenoids, it doesn't have stolen technology from Bally, it doesn't have all these moving bits and pieces. It's very straightforward, right? So this is where that sort of love affair that Stern had with video, and it's almost like they took their eye off of the ball, right? I would too. It's way more profitable. They're a company. You've got to stick around. That's what it's going to take to survive. Yeah, so then this is where really the double whammy comes into the industry, right? All of a sudden, video takes a nosedive. People aren't playing video games as much as they are anymore. Pinball's now sort of declined as well with the arcades in this time. So now we're talking 1983. We're getting into some tough times in the industry, right? Yeah, there's a glut of video games at this point. There's just too many games. There's just too many manufacturers, too many games, too many arcade games, too many pinball companies. The pressure starts to build, right? They've moved into that. I would say the real beginning of the end was the fact that Stern and Video ended up in a bunch of lawsuits. And I've added one to our show notes, which is Stern Electronics Incorporated versus Kaufman, where they actually were sued for the underlying source code for a lot of the video games that they made. And this is really the spiral that sort of ended the company. Not Orbiter 1? Well, where do I put Orbiter 1 in, really? That train wreck of a pinball machine. Stern came out with Orbiter 1, another widebody, which if you've ever seen it. This is where they're trying to save the company. They're trying something crazy. And Gary Stern remembered this. There was an interview recently where he brought up Orbiter 1, like, yeah, we tried something crazy there. It has a playfield that looks like the moon. It is not flat, and the ball just goes all over the place. You would think there's magnets, but there are no magnets in this game. And the thing is, it uses some newer technology in that it has these spinner things in the center of the playfield, two of them, and they actually use like an opto. Interesting. So when you hit it, it slows down the spinner and the opto detects it and that's how it gets the hit. And it has multi-ball and speech and it's insane. It is. The ball will go behind the flippers and the plunger is so low in the cabinet. Like you've got to reach down to plunge the ball. The game actually has a light there flashing just so you know where it is. Shoot, pinball, it's crazy. It's something else. This whole video game thing that they're doing, kind of 81, 82, 83, the last thing that they really try is... I forgot about the Q-C-U-E. It was my Harry Williams, his last game. There was actually one on location by me. There was one of like six or seven made. They put it out on test, and the location called Stern and asked for them to take it back. Oh my. Yes. It is very bizarre. The flippers face the other way and you hit the ball up and it hits a bunch of bumpers and it's wild. It's a crazy game. It has a huge magnet in the center of the play field. What are they doing, Ron? Anything. They went from Meteor and Big Game and Stars and Ollie. Hey, anything you can. They are just flailing. Probably sometime after, it might have even been after Viper, more around the time they're doing Orbiter 1. Because Orbiter 1, I think, was outsourced. It was designed originally by someone else, and they brought it in and finished it. They were working on Laser Lord, which was to be a wide body, and it never really got too much past the white wood. Fast forward to 1984, what's left of CERN is still there, and they decided to take a game to one of the amusement shows. So they have these flyers printed up, and these flyers exist, and they said, like, Laser Lord, the future of pinball, or whatever, you know, the usual flyer, flyer nonsense. And what they did is they took a Quicksilver, and they rethemed the artwork, and made it into Laser Lord, and they brought it to the show. Hoping nobody would notice. And there was one made, it still exists, sold on eBay a few years ago. That would have been the end of the Laser Lord story. However, just a few years ago, somebody in Michigan, I believe, they were, I think it was a plumber, They were doing a service call at someone's house and they noticed they had this pinball machine. No. And it was the Laser Lord Whitewood, the original Laser Lord Whitewood that Joe Joe's had mocked up. So he bought it and it eventually went to a collector who got it working and they were supposed to bring it to a show or something, one of the Michigan shows. I don't know if it ever made it, but it would have had multiball. It had some crazy, like, a ton of stand-up targets if I remember. Maybe they were drop targets. It was a crazy-looking play field. It was a wide body. It was in a Viper cabinet. Wow. And that was just discovered a few years ago. I'm looking at the flyer that you mentioned here. It's on the Internet Involved database, and it says, Stern Pinball is back. Old-style excitement with challenging features and solid-state technology is laser lord. And it says, features, oh, this is exciting, pop bumpers, bonus multipliers, Advanced Features, Special Bonus, Spinners, Kick-Out Targets, Center Banks, and Extra Ball. In other words, any other game. A pinball machine, basically. Yeah, they had laid off their marketing department by the looks of it. You know, it's sad to sort of see that we had this stretch, I would say, between, you know, late 78 to mid 80, end of 1980 with maybe nine ball with Steve Kirk's nine ball. And then it was just like falling down a set of stairs with rakes at the bottom. But they left us a great legacy of awesome games. In 1985, Stern Electronics left the amusement industry. Gary Stern finally declared bankruptcy over the whole ordeal. As we know that this wouldn't be the end of Gary Stern. He's always been a fighter. He's always been a striver in the industry. And I'd like to assume that he either has a massive fear of failure or he doesn't like to fail because the personnel from Stern Electronics actually moved to a venture called Pinstart. We spoke about that during the Steve Kirk section. And they started producing conversion kits for old Bally and Sterns. And it wasn't too long after that that Gary Stern and Joe Kamenkao would convince a Japanese company called Data East to create a pinball division. And man, that's a totally different podcast. So there you go. There's episode two. Ron, any thoughts? If you see an old Stern play it, they're awesome. They have a different feel than any other manufacturer. I mean, every manufacturer has its own feel. I mean, most of the playfields, especially when they get into their really golden era, every playfield's totally different. They're totally different experiences, totally different looking playfields, but they still play like a Stern. Yeah, they didn't have a lot of the conventional sort of crutches that some of the other pinball manufacturers had. First time I ever played Sterns or saw any of them, one of my first pinball expos, they had a row of them, and I'm looking at them, it's like, yeah, that looks like a Bally, because they have the bigger flippers. Yeah. So I figured like, oh, it's a valley. And then I'd play these things like, wow, this is not valley. They had the orbit spinner down and they had maybe an extra layer of rules down that some of the other manufacturers just didn't. They had speed down. I'll say that. Go to a pinball show. Find some Sterns. Go play some classic Sterns. They're a lot of fun. Play a stars. You'll see what all the fuss is about. Sarah wrote to me on Pinside and said, hey, love the first episode. But it would be cool if you told us what the next episode was about so we could write in with some comments. Keep up the great work. Cool, you can tell me. Yeah, well, Sarah, our next episode will be titled Zombie Pinball, The Death of Gottlieb, and the System 3 Era. Wait a minute, wait a minute, I didn't sign up for this. I have to talk about Premier Games? Yeah, I'm so sorry. And remember, as always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to our mailbag at, oh, this changed, silverballchronicles at gmail.com. We look forward to all the messages and we read every one. Remember to leave us a five-star review wherever you can to help others find us.
    123:46
    I have it after Quicksilver for some reason. I think it's because I wanted to talk about penises.