this is the blockade podcast with your hosts chris and jared you are listening to the BlahCade Pinball Podcast i am your host chris frevis aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world jerry morgan hello there this has been a busy week hasn't it uh yes it has Probably the busiest I've ever been on the forum for the last probably six or seven months, I would think. So for those of you living under a rock, that for some reason this is the first time you've ever turned into our podcast and have no idea what's going on. Yeah, last week was on Tuesday, was the release of the information that Zen had gotten the William Spinball license. and then they went ahead and dropped a demo that is a public demo for anybody to be able to play over on Steam. And we dropped our podcast and various other sites dropped their information and video podcasts were put up by other folk. And then we, well, you spent a lot of, way more time than you usually do on the forum. I was on the forum all day Tuesday responding to people. I stayed up the previous night until like 11 and 12 o'clock just to get all the assets lined up and released. Yeah. It was an interesting night, that one. It's like finally things are kind of settling back down. Yeah, after the initial blush of excitement. Yeah, the great part is Digital Pinball Fans Forum.com has never been busier in the past, Guy. I've got to say two years at least. I think so. I think we've actually got a lot of new signups too, eh? Oh yeah, yeah. It's been lively. It's been a lot of fun. It has actually. It's been great to actually see the forum light up again and actually have really, like the forum posts I've seen, all of it has been really nice Discord too. Like there's been some minor, there's been some debate, but it's not been the debate that we were having in the past on the forum. It's been very measured and very, very good actually. so our recommendation to you folks is if you've never signed up for digitalpinballfans.com go do it if you're interested at all in digital pinball it's the only it's the only place to be and you're gonna uh read a lot of opinion and insight and find out news way better than if you try and gather it off of facebook way better than if you try and get it off of steam threads it's and the reason why I say that, Jared, is because I went, I was out of curiosity, I was like, okay, what are other sites mentioning about about Zen getting this? Are they all going ape over this or are they just kind of It's like page 10 news or something like that. Right, so the first place I went was over to Facebook, which I know that's scary land if you're looking at Pinball Arcade's Facebook page. It's just like you seriously question why you ever clicked on it because it announced to basically people going, I want this table! Even though it's not even a Stern or Gottlieb table that Pinball Arcade can do. I want Houdini! Well, congratulations. So do I. Or it would be one of these, have you guys released on Xbox 360 yet? Oh, really? Move on. You know, it's just a lot of that. It's a lot of people who are guessing at stuff and have never visited any other forum. And it's just like the most simplistic of simplistic theorization. Yeah. You can be, I'll read it and I'll be like, yeah, we dismissed that like two years ago. So I go over to Zen's Facebook page, see their announcement. And almost right off the bat, the, one of the first comments was, no, I like your fantasy tables. Real pinball is boring. I don't want to play that. Really? And that was such an eye opener to me because I'm just like, oh my God, this is why Zen is kind of worried because this is their fan base. They want fantasy tables. They want the bells and whistles. They want the animation going around. They want all the crazy because to them, looking at a regular pinball machine digitally is a snooze fest. Yeah, right. How weird are they? Right? It really is kind of bizarre. And then it went into people because I think at some point Zen said, hey, we're not stopping our fantasy tables. And people were like, oh good, well why don't you just let Farsight have the license back instead? Sure, let's just give them that because nobody wants it. Nobody wants us to do the tables at all. So granted, there was a lot of people that were like, oh my god, this is fantastic news. You guys, you're my favorite pinball platform, blah, blah, blah. this is just great and stuff like that but it was interesting that there was a fair amount of those comments as opposed to if you go onto our forum nobody had that kind of comment there was nobody that was just like oh no I only like Zen for the fantasy tables if anything our digital pinball fans forum kind of goes into the oh but really Zen they're physics they're too leaden they don't have bounce the tables are too easy you can go on them forever so on our forum it was all about the physics it was all about the because you know our forum is like a couple of levels down the digital pinball rabbit hole really so we have a very different perspective on things in that forum and it's you know it is a specialty forum let's be honest like it is all about digital pinball and there's a lot of people who have a lot of various experience on that forum about digital pinball so So if you want the digital pinball-specific discussion, it's definitely digital pinball fans. Yeah. So then you go over to Steam, and you hop onto there. They have a form, too. They have a form, too, and there's a dedicated page called, I think, Pinball Players. Oh, okay. And so I went into that to kind of look, because I think they have 1,500 members or something like that. So, I mean, it's a decent size. and so I went on to theirs and a fair amount of excitement over it but it's only a couple of notches above the Facebook where the only area you're getting the real information is when somebody who you recognize from being on digital pinball fans would go in there and drop a nugget of info everyone else is going oh I don't know it's like the first they've ever heard of it essentially right right so that was kind of interesting so then the big one was I go over to Pimside oh man I had to go scroll down so far to find the first thing I found was it wasn't even a thread devoted to it it was devoted to Farsight losing the license so it was the old thread and so I hopped on that went on to the last page and people mentioned the license and all they were doing was and by this point the beta was completely able to download and play and they were just like oh but I hate Zem's physics that's not going to be any good at all I'll just stick with visual pinball and I'm like have you guys not even bothered did you not see this it's free you can download So then I finally found, scroll down, scroll down, scroll down. If you've ever been on Pinside, you realize that there's just 5 billion posts. Scroll way down, finally find one that's an actual announcement post. Yeah, right. And, again, it's somebody copying and pasting from, I think they copied and pasted it from This Week in Pinball, actually. Oh, right. Yeah. And those people, oh, Zen Pinball's not even a real pinball. and just crapping all over it until finally somebody took a look at it and played the beta and they went, hey, you know what? It's actually not half bad. Yeah. So that was rather amusing to just see what different people's perspectives are. Within our own forum, once people got their hands on the beta, you could see the attitude change just immediately. It was just like, oh, let me sing the praises. And then you had the people that were on the consoles who aren't privy to the beta or on iOS and they were still doing the, well, I don't know. Yeah, I can see that. Am I really going to? I've already got all the tables. I'm not going to pay more. If Zen wants me to pay more they're going to need to only make tables that I don't own yet. Don't own already. or it's I used to try I tried Zen years ago I just don't care for them I don't like their physics and again you're just like if you have never paid any attention they're different they're so much better now so I think it is totally going to be a case of people need to get it in their hands they need to try it out and see what's what that being said this past week Zen has been pretty dang busy too They've been taking feedback left and right, implementing it rather fast in some instances. And the problem is that I think we've got too many cooks in the kitchen now. Because the difference between the version of the game that we were playing for the three weeks prior to the announcement. The alpha, yeah. The alpha, if you will. Which was, if that's an alpha, damn. Damn. compared to what they put out for the public demo compared to what they then changed in the public demo and patched is getting easier and easier. I don't like that. Yeah, that tilt is way, way softer than it was before. The tilt got softer because... Because people whinged about it. And who whinged about it? It's the people that play on a keyboard. Yeah. People that play on a keyboard. Stop it! get a controller in your hand your your nudge is a single button of course it's going to be too hard 100 yeah um you know so they were they were asking for a two-stage nudge basically and i don't know if that meant you want a second key or or what the deal was and so one of the situations that like in the the forum post was uh oh so what i think would be great if we actually had like on the keyboard, you hold down one key, then you press another key, and that does your tilt. Hang on a second. So you're going to remember in-game, if you want to do a soft tilt, oh, but I have to hold down control and control and, like, you know, Z to do a tilt. No, you're just going to smash a button because the ball's going down the out lane, mate. Like, there's no way you would do this. I have seen Twitch videos of people playing, this was with Pinball Arcade, where they were non-stop nudging. They were doing the little soft nudge. but I'm talking, you know, it was like every three seconds they were nudging and that was just how they played and to me it was just like, that's a really odd way of manipulating a table rather than they were fine tuning the path of the ball in flight all the time which is really not what pinball's about no, no and so because of the keyboard people complaining that the nudge was an instant tilt, the nudge sensor, if you will, got lowered to the extent that now you can nudge to your heart's content for a little while before it fires off a tilt. The bigger issue with the nudge is if you have the ball sitting on your flipper, captured, and you do a nudge up, the ball jumps forward about six inches. It goes above the slingshots. I tried it on my 8-Ball Deluxe. I slammed that table hard, I got the ball about a half an inch off the flipper oh, and an immediate slam tilt. Exactly. There's no way. There's no way. Seriously, this path that they're going down with the tilt discussion, it actually shouldn't be a discussion. It should just be, this is how tilt works on our game, and these tables are different to our fantasy tables because they're a different breed of table. Yep. And that's actually what I worry about, is a lot of people, I think, are taking Pinball Arcade as gospel. They should not be taking Pinball Arcade as gospel. And they have not played real tables, so they don't understand what that is. And so, that being said, Zen has already said we're going to still address it. They're going to keep on going back to it. they did manage to implement post-passes and they worked really good. The problem is... The problem is that they deadened the rubber on the flippers. Oh, no. So now they feel like the Zen flippers of the standard game, which I hate because that's not how flipper rubber is. Well, it is if you put super bands on your pinball machine. They're horrible. No one likes them. The problem is that it makes the ball so much easier to control now. Yeah. I liked it before when the ball was crazy. It was wild. It was what we were begging for in Pinball Arcade, and now they've dialed it back. There was promise there, and now they've dialed it back. They need to get rid of that tuning aspect on that flipper. It's wrong. It's not real pinball, and it's going to destroy the great work that they've done on this Williams pinball license to date. It's going to destroy it. And my example of how it's being destroyed is there's a certain individual that plays digital pinball. I can't pronounce his last name, but Tarek. Tarek Goberding. Goberding, yeah. All of you are probably more than aware of it if you play digital pinball because he dominates the board. He's very good at the digital pinball. And he schooled TPA, just destroyed scores on that. He's a marathon player, one of these guys that would put in 18 hours on a single table. Within the first day, he had fishtails at over $3 billion, and by the end of this week, he basically broke the ROM at $10 billion. At $10 billion, yeah. In one week's time. Now, I don't think he'd be playing it in tournament mode, but I'm sure it wouldn't take him that much effort to do it in tournament mode either. After you adapt it to a different play style, you'll be able to get there. Now, the scary thing is he goes, I like the physics. Yeah, no kidding, mate, because they like bloody TPA at the moment. I'm like, come on, man. I want the wild ball. I want it crazy. I want it hard to trap. I want all these things. Yes, I want to be able to post-pass correctly. There's got to be something that can be done. The flipper techniques, like the flipper skills that you need, should be 100% OP on point. But, you know, like, let's just get those right and let's just lock those in as this is how Zen Pinball Williams Collection is. Yes. You know, that is it. There's no variation. Just like with their call on the earlier tables that they had. You know, no, those tables are staying the way they are with the leaden flippers, the leaden ball, the listless rubber, because if we have to change it, we have to re-tune the whole thing. No, that's how they're staying case closed, not doing it. Yeah. They just need to draw a line in the sand. Like, collecting feedback is great, but there needs to be decisions made really strongly about what flippers do. Yeah. And look, you know, I can see why they're doing it. They're collecting information to gauge people's feedback about what feels right. But they've got to have a very clear vision in their mind about the tolerances either way about what their vision is for this platform. Well, to me, it comes down to this. They own the tables. Go to the tables, roll the ball around, you know, see how the ball behaves on your table. Try and do a tilt and see how far that ball gets off the flipper because it won be up past the slingshots Find out how hard it is to trap the ball on your machine Just play the machine record your play, then go and try and implement that. Translate that. Because I'm telling you, folks, the beta that we played was exciting. It got us excited. It was exciting. Wow, here we go. This is it. It did it. it's still better than even in this state it's still better than how it plays in pinball arcade but we're drifting closer to pinball arcade than we are the other direction and i want the other direction we don't want we don't want a pinball arcade with better graphics right we want a brand new game experience for the williams and belly table properties exactly yeah so speaking of pinball arcade yes in a normal way it'd be like hi um how are you guys doing is your morale uh okay we hope so um pinball arcade uh has tables to release this week which is bad timing on their part um yeah well you can't buy any of the zen tables true but at the same time um so at the same time, they just... Yeah, they... Well, I'm not going to say they stole your thunder, but they're stealing the thunder for the next couple of weeks. This is what happens with movies, where you may have a perfectly fine movie, and you may have your release date all scratched out and everything, and then a movie opens the week before that nobody was really thinking about, and it's brilliant, and that's all anybody can talk about, and your movie releases the next week, and it's to crickets. So... Yeah, nobody cares. So anyway, Farsight released their Stern Table Pack 3, which is Big Buck Hunter and Whoa Nelly. Big Juicy Melons. Yeah. Which, if you look at that table, the innuendo on that is so above and beyond anything that is in Elvira Scared Stiff that I'm really really insulted that Scared Stiff can't be released in the non-family mode. It just is like, come on. If you can put this table out, you should have little... Yeah. Come on. Like, turn the bloody family mode off. At least give us that. Yeah. Which we'll get into. That's something we have to complain about to Zen too also, but we'll touch on that in a second. We will get to it. Yeah, so the problem with Big Juicy Melons is that it looks like crap. I'm sorry. It looks like crap. And I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just my eyes after having seen what Zen did. I went back and I compared to the last couple of releases that Farsight has done and looked at those tables. I looked at specifically I looked at World Champion Soccer. I looked at Doctor Who. And slipping my mind what the other one was that I looked at. But anyways, I looked at three different tables. And they all look pretty good. The colors are bright. They're crisp. The graphics were rather nice. The lighting was rather nice. Except for Now that I'm looking at Doctor Who Masters of Time, I'm like, wait, that's 50% ambient lighting and bulbs? Why does it look like I'm in a mausoleum? Yeah. But anyway, they looked all pretty well. You look at Big Juicy Melons, the playfield is washed out. The graphics look low res. They're not crisp. The colors are dull. There's a seam running across the middle of the playfield. If you see it, you can't unseam it. No, you look at the star rollovers, and when they're not lit, they're kind of okay. When they're lit, they look beyond low res. They're just a mess. They actually look like they're sticking up from the playfield. Well, they are. They should be. No, no, no. No, when they light, it looks like the circle, the actual insert, almost looks like a post saver that pops up out of the play field to me. It's just not good at all. Yeah. Look at the plunger handle. It is like a two-color plunger. It's blown out. It's got no detail on it. It's just two different shades of silver, and that's it. It doesn't look anything like a realistic spring or a polished handle. None of that. It's got zero detail on it. And that's just the way it is for the entire table. You just look at it. Everything is wrong about it. It looks flat. The thing that really struck me, even in table flyover mode, is I'm having a hard time working out the bits that are sticking out of the paper, like around the flippers, the slingshots and everything. Everything looks flat. And when you're playing this thing on a mobile and you're looking at that sort of top-down view in portrait mode, it just doesn't have any concept of height. I don't know what they've done. And then the kick in the nuts on the whole thing is here we have what is essentially a modern-day EM. It's got reels on it, scoring reels. It does. Except for when you push the start button and then a DMD pops up. yeah which is technically in a little tiny teeny tiny lcd screen in the apron yes it's like literally it's about a i would say a quarter of the size not even that an eighth of the size of the scorecard that's where it's actually positioned on the game and they've given it prominent private place right at the top now in the view that i've seen uh on mobile when i'm playing it in portrait mode, it does actually show the reels in shot, as well as the DMD. So that's a view that I have been playing with. And look, the animation, the reels animate nicely. They actually roll, unlike a lot of the other EM tables. Why would you go through all of that and then not show it? Well, they do show it. No, no, no. But what I'm saying is, I don't see it when I'm playing on the PC. On the PC, in portrait. Sorry, in landscape mode, it would be cut off. So it's like, you went through all this hassle of animating it, and then you didn't even give me animated reels. But if I play Central Park, I get animated reels. Yes, that's true. And the DMD, it's got nothing going on it. There's no graphics. There's no animation. It's just the score, the ball number, and the player number. That's it. It's designed to show the replay. That's literally what it's for. They say on the instruction card, look at the LCD for the replay. it's completely infuriating to me especially for the fact that we've known about Woe Nelly for ever for like a year they've been working on it for a long time they haven't put out a table since Banzai Run let's reframe that they've had the plan to release it for a year I don't know if they've been working on it for a year though with all the other stuff that's been going on in the studio I think that they, if I'm not mistaken, they were working on it back when they were working on, it was basically going to be the next release after Bontai Run. Oh, right. It got delayed because of the licensing deal and having to then deal with Arcuda and get that up and running. Yeah, true. But Arcuda got up and running, and granted, no, okay, Arcuda got up and running by the end of June, right? Yeah. Then they went ahead and they had to do tweaking to it. But the art guys weren't having to do tweaking to it necessarily. That's true. There was time. And you're not doing a monthly release. No. This is substandard to what you were doing when you were doing a monthly release. Yes. It's like all the effort has been put into Big Buck and zero effort has been put into, in comparison, Wonelli. And I was worried about Big Buck. Hunter in beta looked like what Wonelly looks like. It was washed out, low-res looking, just nothing was crisp. So when I loaded this up and checked out the trial version of the table, I was pleased to see the Big Buck Hunter looked like what it should. I'm still not 100% on how the lighting is on it. It's a little too dark. Dark, yeah, I agree. And this is where it's, I don't want a giant spotlight on the middle of the table. I want the table lighting to do what it's supposed to do, and it's not doing what it's supposed to do. And there's where you see a Zac Stark difference between what Zen is doing versus what Farsight was doing, because Zen's lighting is doing what it should do on the table, which is general illumination should be generally illuminating things. That's right. But the playfield art looks much more crisp. It looks like what we're used to. So I don't know what happened. maybe a submission fell through and didn't get put in. Hopefully, Farsight, you guys hopefully change it this coming week and fix that because right now it's kind of insulting looking at Wonelli. It really is. I would 100% not be buying the pack. I would not be paying the $21 for the two tables at the moment in the condition that Wonelli is in. It is a zero sale for me. And we'll state that that's 21 for Australia. That's Aussie dollars. Yes, Aussie pesos. It's about 15 in the US. The pricing here in the US, it's 15 for the two tables, $10 a pop if you go individually. Yeah. So it's like, I think, $15 for Big Buck. Yeah. And probably the same for Wonelly. Yeah. Honestly, just without even, like, you know, looking at the state of what FastRise released, I don't actually think I would put $15 of my own money into Wonelly. It's not really that exciting as a game. So that's my measure. Like, whenever people know me in the past, you know, if I... The great thing about Pinball Arcade is you spend a couple of bucks and you play the game forever. But I don't know if I would actually be bothered, to be perfectly honest. It's not very compelling. There's plenty of other games out there that would have been better to put in. One of the things that, with this news of Zen, a kind of thread that had popped up a little while ago, but then all of a sudden got a new life in it, was a, is this the end of Farsight thread? And everybody was kind of going, well, no, it doesn't have to be the end of them at all. Having competition is a good thing. You would hope that the two studios will kind of push each other to be better. And in Farsight's case, it's like you have these modern sterns. You need to figure out a way to pony up and pay the licensing on them. And then, for God's sake, go do those classic Gottlieb EMs. People want those. They don't want the Gottlieb premieres. that's just no one they're crap they're horrible like b-movie versions of actual williams tables you know what i compared it to they're the they're the direct-to-video version of the hollywood blockbuster they're trying to emulate yeah absolutely um stop doing them no one's interested no no but those witch heads like if they put a whole pile of witch heads into Pinball Arcade, Got Leaves, you know, it would actually become, like, from their, you know, preserving digital pinball for the ages, they'd be upholding their mission statement if they did that. Absolutely. Because that is, like, going back, all the way back in time to those witch heads, there's history there that is going to be lost. And, you know, if anything, they could go back and do those tables, no problems at all. Not only that, you're not having to model toys. You're doing simple pinball parts. And they're not licensed. They're not licensed. You can focus on any number of things, whether it's trying to improve physics or just making sure the artwork looks fantastic. And I'm not even saying going back. I mean, going back to wedge heads, that's a long time ago. But you can even do SSEMs, the Gottlieb, any of the SS tables. how come we never had joker poker you know i mean it's yeah these are wonderful drop target heavy tables that are like quite frankly a joy to play if you know what pinball's about exactly so there's no reason for this to be the end of farsight you've got the modern if you pony up for the the the stern stuff and then you can go and have the cheap easy license with you know the Gottlieb going with their EMs and early SS tables. So I really wish, I mean, I don't know, maybe the issue is because it's not ROM-based and they have to script the entire thing. Maybe that's what the issue is. They've done that with Fireball, they've done that with a whole pile of games today. I don't know. I don't know what the issue is. maybe they don't sell. But you look at Central Park. It's one of the top tables. Right. And you look at some... Big shot. obviously a big shop, another like top earning table. Like there's a, and it's a, a niche of the market that's not being served. Yes. Everyone else is doing DMDs and all the new games, but no one's looking at the old school. Right. And like, you know, we copied on steam that, that dedicated single table, um, game, that EM game. That's like a, like 13 bucks on steam. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. That one like that. I mean, sure. It hasn't got a lot of downloads, albeit, but at the same time, that's the only one of its type on Steam for EM. So, you know, there is, you could actually release, you could completely split off TPA and go for Gottlieb, like memory lane or whatever you want to call it and release that into, on different platforms with a completely different engine and just go, right, this is, this is the new thing that we're doing. I don't know. I understand that this news is probably demoralizing, but it's also an opportunity to go in a different direction that you've not been willing to. Or enabled to. Right. Instead of just embrace it, go for it. You know? So this kind of gets us into you probably all have been wondering, hey, when's the speculation coming up? Here it comes, folks. Here it comes. Here it comes. Um, and this is truly us spinning our wheels like we love to do, uh, applying our, uh, you know, crime scene investigation techniques. It's what happens when you've been on a pinball forum for six years, have read and soaked up every last bit of news you can about digital pinball, have gone and talked to people and, uh, you know, have paid rather close attention. the clues are there, you can kind of piece together information there's been a lot of discussion about what happened with Farsight what did they do to piss off Williams or Scientific Games that got Zen to be able to get the license so I kind of thought what we would do is kind of go back down memory lane and kind of look at the timeline of the events of where we got to where we are currently and that goes you got to go all the way back to when Farsight put out the Pinball Hall of Fame collection they put out their Gottlieb collection which was not that much of a risk seeing as how there was already a Gottlieb collection that Atari had put out called, funny enough, the Pinball Arcade that was for Windows and it was Gottlieb Tables so Farsight went and they did that and then they decided to do a follow up which was Pinball Hall of Fame Williams Collection so I don't know exactly who was the if that was still under Williams holding back then we're talking about going to that was I believe, 2009? If I'm not mistaken, 2008, 2009. But this is where Farsight got their foot in the door and went out on a limb struck a deal with Williams boom put out this game Farsight having no clue that this would be anything that they would continue with they sold all their pinball machines Then, I don't know, for whatever reason, they came back around to wanting to do it again. And so come around end of 2011, start of 2012, we get Pinball Arcade. and this time they went after I guess they had actually thought about doing a Bally collection, Pinball the Hall of Fame and Bally and probably in their investigation of that, that's when they talked to Stern realized that hey, the Williams tables are very popular, we have a new engine that we can put this stuff out on and so thus was born Pinball Arcade and that first initial deal was dealing with Williams and basically they had licensed themselves to be able to do 20 tables I believe a year because they were doing double dips because that first season was 20 tables I think the second season was also 20 tables because they had to bring in all the Williams collection tables that they did in the Pinball Hall of Fame brand yeah so they had to re-license those again Yeah, you're right, because we remember that time. It was like two packs of everything, and it was just nuts. So anyway, they had done an initial deal for X amount of tables. I believe it was Zach Sharp was the one that was the representative from Williams. Yes. Although Farsight had their wish list, they had to get that wish list approved, and Zach also went, hey, why don't you put this one in? Why don't you put this one in? So he was also guiding them towards picking of tables, which ones that would go in. And after two years or two seasons, it was time for a contract renewal. Yeah. Now, I honestly believe that Farsight never really fought beyond those first two seasons. That's why all the AAA titles came out those first two seasons. They didn't know what they had on their hands. All they knew was they had the license. and hey, while we got the license, we better put out the best stuff that we possibly can so that we hit the mark on what most people would want. Lo and behold, all of a sudden it's like, hey, you know what? We have a hit on our hands. Okay, time to renew. And none of us that were playing really had a clue that there was any kind of contract hula-baloo except for suddenly we got six Gottlieb tables in a row. And it was like, nobody was requesting these. Why are we getting these? Some of them we can understand, but others were like, what? Yeah, some of them were very odd. And yeah, very strange titles that were kind of like, where did this come from? They're not even good Gottliebs. This was right at the beginning of 2014. Well, it turns out that that's when license renewal time was for Foresight. It's in January of whatever year. Season end, basically. Yeah. The season itself may not have ended, but they've already got tables in the works. They've already approved the plan. So it's just, obviously, you work months in advance of what is released and stuff. Yes. So that was kind of the deal. but they weren't terribly worried about the contract. We all were, and all of a sudden they came back with Fishtails at the start of Season 3, and there was kind of this renewed energy of Bally and Williams tables coming through. What they didn't happen to mention was that in January of 2014, that's when Scientific Games bought the Williams license. Ah, right. That's when they acquired it. No, that's not when they acquired the Bally license. oh right Scientific Games acquired the Bally license in and I have this somewhere in November yeah they acquired it in November of 2014 so around this exact same time period I had heard rumor that Zen had thrown interest into getting either the Bally or the Williams license I'm not sure which but they kind of put their feelers out about that now obviously if you're a giant company acquiring another company the last thing in the world you're going to pay attention to is a couple of little little niche studios going hey can we have this piece this crumb here it's like no no we got bigger things to deal with and we'll get to you guys later so nothing really became of it at that same time that was when Zen they had just put out a whole bunch of Marvel tables They were just starting to put out, I think they just put out their first Star Wars three-pack. So it wasn't like Zen was hurting or anything. They had their own plan. They had their own roadmap. Yep. They had their own roadmap. They were going. So the two companies were popping along on their own thing. Zen was, at that point, doing Zen 2 on PlayStation, and it was Pinball FX 2 on Xbox. And I don't know. And kind of everything else. Yeah, I don't know if they drifted over to Steam yet or not at that point. I'm not quite sure. I think they were. Yeah, I think they were mobile at that time. Yeah. So, again, nothing really interesting happens until 2016. That would be when the next contract renewal is. So, at this point, Fireside's been kicking along and proven popular platform. they now are actually you know they're taking better res photos of their tables they've tried to work on flipper physics tried to do some improvements their the digital rotation I think at that point they actually got a 3D digital scanner as well so they were like scanning the playfield plastic blobs that you see on the playfield and actually getting proper 3D models of these things they just come onto Steam, they were, I mean, a lot of things were happening. And it was looking like, hey, you know what, this is, yes, we didn't realize where this was going to go, but now we see where this can go, and we need to. Let's double down. Yeah, let's double down on it. This is good for us, right? Yeah. So 2016 comes around, comes time for the contract renewal, and basically the rumor is that Farsight went to make a bid to buy the Williams license outright, which would basically have given them complete freedom. because they were telling us, they were like, kind of cryptically, we were asking, oh, well, how many tables are you going to do this time? And is there some point that you can, you know, not have to stick by production-only versions of the tables, but, you know, you can throw in the extra sticker that was in the prototype or whatever. And the information that was coming out was kind of like, just wait because we're about to do something. And when this goes through, we'll be able to do whatever we want. We won't have to worry about the contract renewals anymore. We won't have to worry about meeting these restrictions. It'll all be wonderful. Yeah. So I was like, okay, great. And then we didn't hear that anymore. So that was basically, that was their first negotiations with Scientific. I think Scientific said, you know, now they're willing to take a look and listen. And my guess is that Scientific probably went, oh, so you're offering to buy this outright. Hey, do you remember when there was that other company that was inquiring about maybe purchasing? We should talk to them, too. Yeah. Yeah, just be fair. Yeah, so I think that Scientific probably went to Zen and was like, hey, you remember when you were – you're still interested because we have an offer that we turned down, but maybe you have an offer. now you can kind of guess for whatever reasons that is you know did scientific realize that because farsight was unwilling to pay for uh the big licensed tables which was pretty much all that was left uh make the big money um for selling in digital pinball did they kind of go well farsight clearly is not spending the money on this zen clearly has the ability to license maybe it's better for us to go with them and oh by the way if we went with them we'd be making a whole new batch of money because all these tables would get released again it would be like an extra double dip it's a total double dip and you know you kind of have to look at it as you had this on VHS and then you went and purchased it on DVD and now you got your 4K TVs out and now they're really important gifts. Yeah. So, um, you know, it's, it's not unheard of or uncommon on a side note. Zen did a Facebook live chat, uh, this past week and I was reading the comments and there was this one moron who repeatedly kept on posting. What are you going to do about the customers that have bought nearly a hundred tables on tip pinball arcade? It's a different company. Let me help you with that question, sir. Absolutely effing nothing is the answer. Well, Zen was like, hopefully after you've played our demo and you've seen some of the other announcements that we're going to make, that you'll understand that this is worth the extra purchase. It was a very diplomatic way of responding to it. If I had been live when the recording was going, I'd watch the playback version. I would use it in commenting. Well, the thing is that he would post this probably every couple of minutes. And it's like, dude, shut up about it. You know, quit being an idiot. Okay, so back to speculation. So I suspect that scientific approach to Zen and Zen went, that's very interesting. Let's explore this more. Yeah, let's explore this more. So here's where things get particularly interesting. That was in January of 2016. In 2017, January of 2017, Zen Studios goes ahead and makes a Twitter post that says, oh, hey, we just got a new pinball machine for our in-house collection, and it was Roadshow. And, Jared, you happened to pose the question. what else do you got there? And they answered back, Champion Pub, Metallica, Fishtails, Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and more. Now, it would not be unusual in the least for a pinball game company. Yeah, Studio Co. has pinball machines in their house, right? Yeah. Knowing what we know now, rather curious. Interesting. Hmm. Yeah. Now, it's to be noted that during this exact same time period, Zen secretly starts working on Pinball FX3. Yes. Doesn't tell anybody. They start working on Pinball FX3. They make their announcement about Pinball FX3 in August of 2017. Also in August of 2017, Mel Kirk, who we're going to be talking to next week, and believe me, I'm asking a question related to this. He puts out a tweet writing up a license proposal for a brand I've been dreaming about working with for years. Pinball dreams do come true. We know exactly what that was. He was running up the agreement for Williams. Because then he retweeted that tweet, brought it back into light just after the announcement went out, said pinball dreams do come true. Then he quoted the tweet. So we know the two are absolutely related. Now, again, that was August of 2017. Farsight doesn't find out they lost the license until January 2018 I don't know if we know that I don't even know if we know that we know for sure that they know about it in April yeah that much we know I forget where it read I think it might have just been speculation I think it probably might have been my understanding was that they couldn't get scientific to even respond to them. Oh, yeah. It was just, it was totally, who dis? New phone. Yeah. It was like, uh-uh. So, if you think about it, it's possible that Zen had the license all the way back in August of 2017, right at the announcement of Pinball FX 3. Is it possible that Zen built Pinball FX 3 the way they built it with the physics engine that they built with the understanding that they were going to go after the Williams license. Wow. Because when you think about it, nobody was complaining about Pinball FX 2. It was fine. Could it use a UI update? Absolutely. Graphics-wise, nobody was complaining. It worked fine. It didn't have dynamic lighting, but again, whatever. When Pinball FX 3 gets announced, It's basically, hey, check out the new lighting we can do. Oh, and we've done some physics tweaking to make the physics better. So that's what I'm most curious about is, did the idea of getting the Williams license make them want to make Pinball FX 3, or was the ability to do Pinball FX 3 what made it attractive to get the Williams license? or did scientific go, hey, what is this you're doing? I'm curious to know and I know that we'll never find this out. Maybe they did a proof of concept of one of these tables that they got in-house. Here's our submission. What do you reckon? Here's what we can do and here's the money that we're going to pay you for it. Scientific just goes, we're not even going to negotiations. Thank you. We like it. We like it. Thank you very much. Let's look at the tables that they are releasing up front. It's Medieval Madness. There's a version of Medieval Madness in another platform we know of. You put those two side by side with the FX3 engine. And I think Blind Freddy could probably see that there's a bit of a difference in the representation of the Williams brand in those two versions. so like you just compare you unfortunately have to compare apples with oranges or apples with apples here you know so that what this all really means folks is whenever anybody was speculating about oh was it Pimble Arcade putting out you know being put out on the switch was that what did it no no one did it that was it if anything that was Farsight going let's put this out. Yeah, let's just get this out there now. Maybe that's within our contract thing and they found out a couple of hours later that it wasn't and got their cease and desist. Essentially at that point Farsight were going, we're running out of runway fast. Right. Real fast. So, yeah. That would not have been a good position. That would not have been a good feeling for those poor guys. You know what I will say? It's kind of like Farsight had their wife suddenly hand them divorce papers and they thought everything was groovy and the wife hands them divorce papers and just goes, I'm done. I'm leaving you. And then... Who are you leaving? No, no, no. Let me talk. No, no, no. It was too late. I'm already done. I've already moved in with this other guy. Who's the guy? And then you find out who the guy is and I always joke because it's my wife's favorite person, but it's Hugh Jackman. And I'm going to go, well, you know what? If you're going to lose out to anybody, that will be him. Shoot, I would leave you for him, too. You know, it's... You can't really be sad about who it went to. It's not like it went to some brand new studio that's never produced a pinball... digital pinball machine game in their life. And, you know, it's not some startup company. So, So it hard to be sad about that in that manner So it is it very it fascinating I know we never going to find out the information about this Um it one of those things There's a documentary on Netflix called, uh, the toys that made us. And if you've never seen it, look it up. It's fascinating because you find out, you know, why is it that Kenner, this little tiny toy company got the Star Wars license instead of Hasbro getting it, who was much bigger. Then you find out the reasonings and you're just like, oh my gosh, because Hasbro is being idiots. It's those kind of stories that you never knew ins and outs and whys, but when you find out, you're just like, wow! It's like political intrigue. It really is. the way these things go down is it's definitely one of those documentary style things that you could go into. There's a lot of twists and turns in the whole thing. And I'm sure that there's a lot of stuff that we're completely off base on as well. There's probably big gaps in our timeline here and there's probably some stuff that potentially happened in a different order than what we probably said. Different order? Who knows what those licensing conversations even were because I know some of the information that went into when Farsight got the license for Terminator. And that's stuff I'm not allowed to repeat. But it's fascinating. It's just like, really? That was a holdup? Or that was the hurdle that you had to jump over to get this? That's ridiculous. They're just really interesting kind of things that go on way behind the scenes that we the public are never supposed to hear about. No. Unfortunately, Zen is never going to tell us. No, they have well and truly, for us to know that information, we would have to enter into an NDA with the license holders. Yeah. And that's never going to happen. And we still wouldn't be able to tell you fine people. No. We'd only do it for our information only, and that's not really that much fun. No, it's not much fun. It's not fun to speculate. We love to speculate. That's the blast of blast. But feel free, folks, to spread all the rumors that we just put out there. Yeah, please do. And make that for gospel. Make it around the rumors of the rumors. Right. Because that's fun as well. It is. It is. But like I said, that's the – Did you say Hugh Jackman? Yes, I said Hugh Jackman. I think I just woke my wife up from a nap. She just did the meerkat of the door. Wait, wait, wait. Is the shirt off too? This is relevant to my interests. Look, shiny. So anyway, that's our dance of what we think to happen timeline how has Zen managed to get the license who knows it could be purely as simple as Scientivity just went no we're sick and tired of dealing with you we've dealt with you or you've had the license for 10 years this is what you've produced we'd like to see what somebody else can produce it might have been dry it might have been and this is something that we're not privy to whereas we think that Farsight never had a conversation. Maybe they did have a conversation. And maybe Scientific just plain went, you know what? If you want this license, you've got to up the price. And then went, we can't up it for the purchasing of outright. Not the... Yeah, not the two-year renewal price, but this is how much it would be to buy it outright. And Farsight might have said, no, we're not paying that. Never expecting another company to come in and actually... Well, we can. Here you go. yeah yeah here's the money honey um i encourage you folks to go and listen go on facebook go to uh the zen uh facebook page i don't know if it's either the zen page or the pinball effects 3 page um but look up the live facebook chat mel is answering questions that were posted there's some interesting stuff that comes out of it the most interesting to me is that they have 40 people dedicated to pinball and pinball only whether that's tearing the machines down, photographing them, designing that's their pinball team then they have an additional group of people that work on other Zen games but are willing to share assets right okay so what Disco Dodgeball and Castle Storm and all those ones so you think about it they made the Castle Storm game then they made a Castle Storm pinball version of pinball so a lot of those assets all that stuff was already designed so you know basically in house they can get some stuff brought over to them time for a Disco Dodgeball pin then eh right How about that? Then you have all of the the well, you know what? Zen in this thing said they have two new tables coming out at the start of the year that are going to be their own IPs. They're not licensed. I think you're onto something there. I think you're onto something. And the other one? What would be the other one? Because it's their other game? Infinite Minigolf. A Minigolf theme. Can you imagine playing, come on, pin golf? Nobody's done it yet. Yeah. Not a golf-themed table. I mean pin golf. Pin golf, yeah. Imagine the ball going off to a different play for like a golf course in a digital pinball table. Like each table is a different golf course, man. Come on. This is like obvious stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyhow. Anyhow. We'll see. We'll see if we're right in the back. But they also have their marketing people. They have their administrative people. They have people that work exclusively just with how to make things work online. So if you imagine that many people that can be dedicated to pumping out a product as opposed to Farsight, who has 25 people in the entire company. Yeah, it's just capacity. It comes down to capacity. Yeah. It's yeah. It's basically. That was an interesting thing. The other thing, and we hinted about this earlier, somebody asked about family mode. Because if you play Medieval Madness and you shoot the dragon ramp, the dragon goes to spit fire on a knight and a big censored bar goes up over it. The dragon goes to bite the knight's head off and a censored bar comes up over it. I'm probably sure when they do the Valley Girl Princess that she doesn't get to say bitchin'. Yeah, probably not. I'm not sure if the Emerus one does a lot of quotes either. I don't know. But the question was, oh, yeah, those quotes, Lord, how it hurts, I'm sure gets edited. Who the beep are you? Yeah, that's good. It's not just bleeping him out. They probably don't even use that audio clip at all. Yeah. Who the beep are you? It's probably not even used. So basically, they have it turned to family mode. This was asked, do you have to have it in family mode? Zen says, well, the rating of our game is an E10, and so yes. Here's the thing. Farsight with Pinball Arcade was rated an E10. Medieval Madness, not Family Mode. They did go ahead and chicken out and put Family Mode on Scared Stiff. Later on, I believe they bumped up to an E10 for Stern Pinball Arcade. those tables have now come into pinball arcade pinball arcade is still an E10 so clearly there's room the other thing is when these tables were put into family mode there was no such thing as the ESRB and I doubt that any of the stuff that is in these tables would require anything greater than an E10 even if that is the case there's still a way around it and that is can we just put in an age verification thing you put in your age verification code now you have access to the non family ROM of the table we fought tooth and nail with Fireside for so many years begging for this and the only way we got it was from the throat into pro mode now we have to deal with this again so please don't make us do this again please we want because what are we going to have to have the modesty sticker put onto Elvira if they get around to doing the Elvira table that's just stupid because we can't have Elvira bobs showing on the no cleavage for you that's terrible what are they going to do on Xenon put her in a skirt you know a future spa everybody's in a robe yeah exactly so again i'm gonna mel the interesting thing now if you're listening to this be prepared we're coming after you on this we're gonna expect we're gonna expect yeah i expect discord on this this is this is a this is a hot point you know what mess with the physics all you want i don't want family mode yeah yeah there's no family in pinball because when you think about it the double entendres and innuendo that are on tables like medieval madness and scared stiff it's the DNA of the game will go completely over the head of a 10 year old a 13, 14 year old sweet spot oh yeah that's like money in the bank for a 13 or 14 year old And that's your teen rating. These games never are rated. Not until Stern started putting out tables. So they never were that bad. And most of the adults that are playing this, this is what they grew up with. I never went to an arcade that had family mode on any of these tables, ever. I never heard about family mode until I started playing visual pinball and noticed that that was one of the ROM selections that you could do. Yeah, it's very bizarre. I wonder though, you know how TPA has merged all the Stern tables into their core TPA package? Yeah. What rating is TPA? Is TPA now team? No, it's E10. So Stern Pinball Arcade is team. It's team. so now they're putting titles that were team rated into a E10 rated package is what you're telling me yes that's interesting isn't it so Woe Nelly Big Juicy Moe with the double entendre city that puts Elvira to shame especially in the artwork no worries no problem at all under an E10 unless we just pointed out something that the ESRB is going to be going well hang on a second there TPA but here's my point even with Elvira Scared Stiff you could still purchase the pro mode that didn't carry a different rating and the pro mode was where you could get the non language so it makes zero sense to me so again Mel's going to have to figure that out he's going to have to enlighten us because I'm sorry I'm not letting go of this one he's going to need to tell us how ratings work so that we understand and there's no more debate over it so that's going to be one that we're going to pose next week and we'll still call BS so but here's the other thing folks like I said we're going to be talking to Mel Kirk we don't know exactly how long we're going to have him for I request that we get at least 15 minutes with him we won't be broadcasting it... Well, no, we actually will. I think we are going to be broadcasting it live. Are we going to do it live? I think we're going to do it live. I don't think we have any need to put the bleep button in. If you have questions that you would like us to ask Mel relating to Zen, now, we're not limiting it to either to just being about the Williams pinball collection. We got a ton of questions just about Zen pinball in general. Why don't you drop us... the best method in this case, drop us an email, blahblahblockade at gmail.com so that we can just copy and paste it over into a document that we can then do. As opposed to, if that's too much for you, if you don't want to email us, go ahead and message us on Twitter, at blockade, hashtag it, questions for Mel. Yeah, so we can filter on it. Yeah. and we'll try you don't really need to do that if you're DMing us because it goes straight to us we don't have to search for it right but if you don't DM us if you just put it in the regular Twitter thing we'll miss it but I'm saying if you do do that please put the hashtag on there questions for Mel and do that this week and we'll try and throw in some of those questions if they're not already questions that we have ourselves I'm trying to do my best to get this podcast out in the next couple of days so people have enough time. We'll tweet out before this episode even goes live to say, hey, look, invite questions. I should say also, hello to all of our new listeners. We picked up quite a few new Twitter followers. I haven't looked at our download numbers for the podcast itself, but our YouTube views is way higher than usual. Yeah. People like to see our ugly mugs. Like way, way higher than we're used to. So that's fantastic. So welcome to all you guys. And we'll tell you. So you just heard the email. You just heard our Twitter account. Follow myself. I am at ShutYourTraps. Jared is at JaredMorgz. Visit our website, which is BlockadePinball.com. dot com slash episodes. That's where you can go and go back and listen to any one of our 147 episodes. This is our 148th. So we're coming real fast on 150. Um, so those are all the methods that you can catch up on everything that we've done. And, uh, what we talk about that kind of things and they rest yourself because we talk about digital pinball almost exclusively. We do sneak in real pinball here and there, but it's, predominantly digital pinball. And sometimes we'll talk about things that are completely non-pinball related. So there you go. We do what other podcasts can't. Ha ha! That's right. That being said, wow. That was... Quite an episode. That was a lot of stuff. We've barely scratched the surface, folks. This is like... We were in a drought for months. It was a self-imposed drought. and now we've hit the well spring and we can't fill our buckets up fast enough so we'll be back again next week again talking to Mel Kirk live he apparently has some stuff that we don't know about that he's going to be talking about too so that'll be exciting it should be interesting and then we're going to have to figure out what the heck we're going to talk about for that episode 150 so my wife says Hugh Jackman there you go episode 150 is going to be all about Hugh Jackman, but only Hugh Jackman in Wolverine form, because that's apparently the only way she likes him. Right. So... And here's the funny part. She refuses, or she's refused to watch Logan, because he looks old in that. Oh. Alright, folks. Enough is enough. Thank you once more for listening. We will talk to you all again next week. Absolutely looking forward to it. Bye-bye. Bye. WizardAmusement.com, the site to visit for custom pinball shooter modes. Easy to install, totally unique. 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