Hello, pinball history fans. This is an unprecedented seminar, and you know how much I like to give unprecedented seminars here at Pintastic New Robert Englunds. John Borg, I look back at your list, this massive list, page after page, and you're like the senior guy at Stern Pinball now. You're telling all these young designers how to do things the right way, right? Sometimes they tell me what to do. Okay. We've got some good guys. Yeah. Were you into pinball as a kid? When did you really get going? The first time I saw a pinball machine, I was eight, and it was called Hayburners. And it had this great big gigantic backbox with a bunch of horses that ran down a track. And I loved playing that game. And then later on, when I was in my teens, I started to play at a place called Galaxy World in Carroll Stream, Illinois. It was a huge arcade. They had 40 pinball machines and video games, and it was ridiculous. It was a gigantic arcade. So I went in there, and I was into video games, 80s video games. I loved Tempest and Space Invaders and just all kinds of 80s video games. I played Flight 2000 a lot with a friend of mine and we would sit and do battle on Flight 2000 and I would sweep that three bank and get that bonus X up and just blast that spinner and play like crazy so when a ball ended in Flight 2000 you got this really long bonus count if you were really crushing it and it would just go and it would just increasingly get more intense and I would sit there with my arms crossed and I would gloat and go, oh, it hurts, doesn't it? And me and my friend, we were both very competitive, and we were both about the same caliber player, and we just did battle on that game. That was a lot of fun. And then I started seeing some of the 80s games coming out, like some of the premier games. I remember Genesis and Heavy Metal Meltdown, and the games started to get better. And then the Williams games, big guns. I loved big guns. and then I just started playing pinball never knew that I would I had no idea that pinball was even in Chicago I just liked pinball and one day I was looking for a mechanical engineering job and I went to the Tribune and I found an ad in the paper that was about the size of two postage stamps it said mechanical engineer needed phone number underneath it so I called them up they offered me a job I was also offered a job to work as a hydraulics engineer at another company for $1,000 more a year. I took the pinball job because I thought, this is going to be a blast. I'm going to be working with wood products and sheet metal and vacuum forming and injection molding and the whole gamut. And that's why I studied plastics engineering and mechanical engineering in school. And so I went that route instead, and I'm really glad I did. Yeah, I think we all are. And so you were playing those games and not noticing the manufacturer name, like Stern Electronics? I didn't really. Flight 2000? When I started to play in the big arcade galaxy world, I noticed that there was Gottlieb and there was Bally and then there was Williams. And that's when I started to know that there were different companies making them. And luckily I got into one of them. Yeah. So what was your first assignment once you got in? When I started to work at Premier Gottlieb in 1987, and the first game I worked on was Victory. I never designed a game there, but I worked on a lot of games, did a lot of mechanical engineering for the guys. There were three mechanical engineers and three designers there at the time, so I was very busy. So I worked on Victory. I remember when I first started to work at Premier, they tried using a back-printed, real heavy mylar with an adhesive on it, and they laminated it to the playfield, and they called it Vitrograph. So it was the first four-color process playfield where everybody else was still screen printing. Like Diamond Lady is the famous one. So they tested it on Hollywood Heat, and it worked great. They had some playfields made. They sat around for a couple months and dried out real well. Then when they went into production with it, the board has wood. It has moisture in it. And all the heat from that big transformer in the cabinet would just rise, and the moisture would come up underneath the mylar, and we were getting bubbles all over. So we were getting games shipped back from Europe, and we had to rebuild them. And then we eventually stopped vitrograph, and we started screen printing them and sending out refurbished games with screen-printed playfields. Didn't look near as pretty as the four-color art, but I remember thinking to myself, how do they make money? How do they make money doing this? It's like making a car twice for somebody. And then we went back to screen printing, and Diamond Lady also started out with a vitrograph play field because they were locked into it at the time. And then when they started seeing this is failing, then they went to all screen printing. I worked on a couple other games there. I worked there in between 1987 and 1990. I worked on Victory, Diamond Lady, TX Sector, which I did lead on that one. That was a really fun game. I really enjoyed playing TX Sector. The back glass was photorealistic when we first made it, and then we made it look painterly. It looks really blurry and kind of funny looking. The original one was beautiful, and when I saw what they did to it to make it look painterly, I was like, oh. Any famous mechs that we would recognize from any of those premier games? Yeah, I did a mechanism on lights, camera, action. That was my first patent in the pinball industry. I was 23, I think, 23 years old when I got that patent. And I made a section of play field that turned upside down, and so there was like a little U-turn shot that fed a flipper on one side, and then when it flipped over to the other side there was a little plastic form ramp that you could take the ball up and get up onto the upper play field and play so that was my that was my first like wow I can't believe I got my first patent I worked on Big House and Robo War and if you look at a Robo War game there's these funny looking buildings in the artwork on the back glass and one of them looks like a corkscrew and it's purple in color Oh, yeah, the purple goyce. Now, if you look at the game Big House, there is a corkscrew-shaped purple mechanism that you shoot the ball into a shot, and this thing turns, and it lifts the ball into another wire ramp up above. So Big House was actually supposed to be Robo War, and I'm not exactly sure. I don't remember. It's 100 years ago. I don't remember why they decided to theme that game Big House. But I remember after we changed it to Big House, I made these little spotlight assemblies that, you know, like you'd see in a prison yard, and these three spotlights would just go back and forth when you started your multiball. We ended up taking that out and made them stationary. I worked on a game called Hot Shots, which I thought was really fun, but at the time Gottlieb had 20-volt, 24-volt flippers, and we had this big, long shot to the right of the game that went up back through this big vacuum form wrap and came back around, and the weaker-powered flipper couldn't make that shot. So we made this thing that had two skateboard wheels that spun. And when you shot the ball around the corner, it hit this mechanism and it just launched the ball through the ramp. But the skateboard wheels didn't last real long. As soon as that skin started to break, it left a little pile of urethane. You don't see very many of those around anymore, but that was a really fun game to play. Jon Norris designed that. He was a big rules guy and he kind of really sparked my interest in game rules. I remember when we were working on Victory, Victory was a game that you played, you started out with checkpoint one and you had one shot to make and checkpoint two and checkpoint three and you had to get all the way to the end and then Jon Norris implemented a countdown bonus in that which is the first time I'd ever seen that. So checkpoint one and all of a sudden you see these points counting down, counting down, counting down. It just made you a lot more tense about making the shot and a lot more pressure. I really enjoyed playing that game. It was a lot of fun. Was there anyone there influencing you based on what the other companies were doing? Because, like, the big house could have been reacting to a police force, you know, cartoony law enforcement kind of thing. Yeah, no, not really. So the ideas were just bubbling up internally? Yeah. When Dades came on the scene at the same time I got into the industry, I was really impressed with Laser War and Secret Service. I even liked Torpedo Alley, which at the time people didn't think that was such a great game. I think they do now. And I saw that they looked a lot like Williams. But Gottlieb, they had their own thing and their own art style, and they just stuck with that and ran with it. But it was interesting. I thought there were some games that we had produced there that the art could have been a lot better. I think there were a lot of different artists. Connie Mitchell was the art director, and he farmed a lot of the art out to different artists, so it was always different. I remember Jeff Busch, he did the Houdini game. He did the game called Bone Busters that Premier Technology made, and that was a really nice art package. It was kind of strange. The cabinet was pink. And it had skulls all over it. We even put a great big skull up on top of the backbox that moved back and forth. We called them old one-eye. Yeah. Now, I remember that being the feature game one year at Pinball Expo, the year it came out. And I think part of the motivation, and probably including the pink color was that they were trying to say, all right, we're not just doing single-level games. Look, we'll actually have a big bomb like the other companies. Yeah, most cabinets are black, and when people operated games, they wanted them to stay decent-looking and clean. So if you had a white cabinet, it was going to get beat up out in the wild. Yeah, so that game was kind of shocking. Like, Premier is doing all this? You know, Topper and all? you know that costs money yeah we thought premier was making cheap games yeah um glenn anderson was a bally engineer and i don't know the scope of his work i don't know how long he was in the business but he he was retired and he actually came and designed that mechanism for us so we bought this great big skull and we had like 15 fixtures you put the jaw on it you drill the holes and do this and do that and um it was quite a quite an assembly okay so it's not just the materials, but actually all the different labor steps that are used up. Yeah. Wow. All right. Are we ready to move on to your next gig? We are. We're going to start talking about Data East. When I started to work at Data East in 1990, I worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I just recently got to do again a second time. But I just had small tasks on that game. I worked on Checkpoint and Batman and Star Trek, and then I got my first mechanical lead on Steven Spielberg's Hook. And I worked with Tim Seckel on that game. And that game, we had just, Dot Matrix was in probably three or four models at that time, and Hook exploded. I mean, Hook sold more copies than Batman and Star Trek did, which was pretty amazing. And the game was really good. But I didn't think the title was all that strong. And then after that, Kamenko started me on, he said, John, he goes, I want you to start thinking about dinosaurs. Make a dinosaur eat a ball. And I'm like, hmm, okay. Now I'm working in Joe Kamenko's office. He made room for me in his office. I had a big six-foot drafting table, and his desk was behind me. And I remember this was always behind me. He'd be looking down, watching what I'm doing. I took a Godzilla model, and I sketched it, and then I made Godzilla throw pinballs, which you saw later in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I made it move back and forth, and then I made it bend over and eat the ball, but I didn't make the jaw move to close on the ball to hold it. I put a very small magnet way in the back of its mouth, so it drew the ball up to the magnet, and then he would lift back up, and he would move over to the side, and he spit it into a pit. Like a thing. So then one day, Joe came up to me and he said, my friend, he knew Steven Spielberg. Of course he did. And of course he did. He knew everybody. And he said, my friend Steven Spielberg is making a game about dinosaurs. And he goes, I would really like to do it. And I was pretty far along on this game. he goes I want you to take and change your game into Star Wars and I'm like wow what but then I thought Star Wars okay so I took the dinosaur out I put the Death Star in place of it and I revamped some of the shots and then I made the big R2D2 model that went over on the other side got a game up real quick we printed the play field and then Marcus Rothkrans was the artist on that game He painted, he airbrushed that back glass in three days. We told him what we wanted. I drew my stick figures, and it came in a few days later. I was just blown away. I loved the art. It was really nicely done Carrie Fisher was unhappy with her likeness in the back glass She was laying down kind of seductively and so we had to put her in a sitting, squatting position with her chain going to Jabba. I have a copy that I actually framed. It's in my office at work of the original, and it's the only one. And it's not even a translate. It's actually a big printed photograph. So I kept that. I pulled that out of a box a few months ago when we moved into our new building, and I'm like, I'm going to frame this and put it in my office. I'm getting a general impression here that this is a pretty fast cycle. Now, we were being told, you know, Williams people were coming up on stage at the Pinball Expo, and they were saying things like we have a one-year design cycle, So if you want to do four games a year, you have four complete design teams. And they were throwing around numbers like development cost of a million per game at that time. What are you allowed to say about the Data East practices in the 93, 94? Well, I think it cost more than a million dollars to make a game today. Yeah, more today now, yes. they had really good teams back then and they were a much bigger company we were a very small company it was joe kamenko and Joe Balcer were a team designing games and then i was by myself and i did all my own mechanical engineering too so when you design a game and then you have to go and pick all the part numbers and do all the detailed drawings and then this was this was mechanical drafting, this is on a drafting board. I had a great big drafting board and a big electric eraser, and if I wanted to move a ramp, say I laid out a game and I'm like, you know what, I want to move this ramp over like an eighth of an inch, I would take and lay a piece of vellum over the top of it, retrace the ramp, erase it off the original drawing, and then put it underneath and square it up and move it over and then redraw it. We used to have people that made the plates that go in that big pants presser that we have that puts all the little dink marks in the playfield where all the parts are going to be located. We used to have, Joe Balcer used to do it at Gottlieb when I started working there. And we had a guy named Glenn Reitzma that worked on it. He made the plates at Data East. And he would take a piece of blue steel that was the size of the playfield, and he would put this bluing dye on it. And he would actually scribe and trace and reduplicate the vellum drawing on a plate, and then he would go around and drill all the holes and pin it up. And then one day, Joe Balcer and I, I was working my first game on CAD at Data East was Tales from the Crypt. So when it came time to spot the play field, I just took my drawing, which we used to spot through the drawing, the vellum drawing, to make the first prototype. But I just, we took that plan, because I was working on CAD, so I could turn off all the layers of all the parts and just leave all those spotting marks that were on the bottom, and then I could do the same thing on the top. And we sent it out and had an NC machine just go, and pop all the holes in. And it cost us about $100. And I was like, you know, wow, this is the way to go. So then this guy, Glenn, that was making these plates, that was his job. He also made fixturing. So he got to do more work on the fixtures, and he got that area stronger in the company. But he didn't have to sit and make those plates because that was very time-consuming to relay out a plate field on steel. A lot of the public documentation of those games says it was done by design team number 28. What does that mean? I thought that was really interesting because when I was working at Gottlieb, I saw that on one of the first games, and I thought, they have 28 design teams? We have three. I'm like, wow, that was just something Cameco threw in there. Yeah. So I don't know if there's any other story behind that. So you were sometimes on design team? I was design. When I came in, I was design team 29. Yeah. Solo design team. Yeah, well, someday we've got to get Joe Kamikov here himself and really get into. Yeah, Joe is really great. He's an extremely smart and well-spoken man. He just, I would listen to him give seminars, and I would go to licensing meetings with him. We'd fly to California and go talk to somebody about, you know, whatever we were going to be working on. And he just never says the word um or anything. He just gets right to the point, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. he has a communications background. That's what he studied in school. So at one time I think he was planning on being a weatherman or something like that. But he just loved the game industry. Yeah, not just the articulation, but also in presenting Hook, he would say, you know, it's got this 360-degree ramp. and that was a great innovation that he would just radiate this enthusiasm. I would like to ask a little bit about how that worked behind the scenes because in those same presentations, and this is getting into the Sega pinball era, but just in that early to mid-'90s, he would often say something like, my game development team basically is they're working 80 hour weeks and they're trying so hard to get things done. I made the 100 hour club. When we were making Hook we had issues with the display crashing and we had 20 or 30 games out on the floor that were being played by, and we had the people playing them and we were sitting behind them watching them just like trying to figure out what was making it crash. I don't even remember if the programmer found some bug or something eventually. So we had to stop production. I mean, we were making games. We had games all over the factory. We were only in a 30,000-square-foot building at the time. And now sometimes if there are some parts missing, we line up playfields down an aisle. Waiting for the parts. And I think I've seen more playfields lined up than the size of that other factory could fit. so the 100 hour weeks is a real thing 100 hour yeah the 100 hour club we called it so but yeah we worked a lot I have a snapshot of Tim Seckel and Joe Balcer and I building a day to eat Star Wars at like 4 o'clock in the morning and we were really crispy the next day you know we all went home but this is like a couple hour nap couple hour nap back to work you know, and, but it was fun. It was fun. It wasn't, it wasn't, you know, there were some times where I was like, boy, I wish I could be out, you know, fishing or doing something else right now, but, you know, we were having fun, and we just did whatever we had to do to make it work. Yeah, it's like that book, The Soul of a New Machine, which describes the creation of the data, General Envy 8000, the first 32-bit super mini computer, which was about five miles away from here where that whole thing took place and they're you know they've got to show it at a certain deadline and they just have to keep putting in the hours and do you remember any time when you just had to blow off steam in some way or you conked out or any? Oh I conked out a lot. We did have weekends sometimes we didn't get to use them but that was when I when I got my rest. Alright, and anything in that data you mentioned? When we did the Star Wars game I missed my 10 year high school reunion because I had to fly out to California to Skywalker Ranch to present the game to George Lucas. That was an amazing trip. So we get to Skywalker Ranch and we're in this room and the game arrived, we set it up. We had lunch and they told us that the chicken that we had was walking around that morning because they grow and do everything there. So George Lucas walked in and Joe started up the game and started showing it to him and he was playing it. He was like, oh, the Death Star, he got the Death Star open. And he goes, he hit a backhand. George, of course, didn't know what a backhand was. he was just flipping and he eventually got the thing in there and saw the big display effect the intro to the multiball and he was like he wasn't very jumping up and down or excited or anything he walked out and his people came in and they told us that they hadn't seen him that excited in months and I was like wow so that was That was an interesting trip for me. And I'm sure all of your classmates from high school were so jealous. Oh, yeah. Yeah, when I went to my 20th, I got to tell everybody about my 10th. So, yeah. How about other things that you did, your mechs that you're particularly proud of in that era? Well, you know, one of the games, the early games that I made at Data East that I was really proud of was Tales from the Crypt. it just had ramps all over it it was very full John Kassir did the speech I'm friends with him on Facebook and I still talk to him once in a while that one was real special for me the Tales from the Crypt Backlash has a scene on the comic book that shows Joe Pesci and two blonde girls and they both have chainsaws and the episode was that these two girls were in love with Joe Pesci, and they fought over him. They cut him in half so they could each have half of him. Originally, we had another comic book scene that was on the back last that was of Demi Moore was in an episode on Tales from the Crypt, and she was told by a, I'm trying to think of, a fortune teller that she was going to be a millionaire, and she was going to meet somebody that was really disgusting and that this person would, you know, and she was going to be rich. That's what the woman told her. So she meets this guy, and she's a waitress, and she's getting hit on in the bar by this really strange-looking character, and she goes, this must be the one. And he kept talking about his rich uncle. so finally she marries him and she's living in poverty and so one day she goes to the market and she's the millionth customer and she wins a million dollars so she goes out shopping and she comes home all pre-ed up and she's got hats and all kinds of clothes and she tells him to take a walk and then he pulls out a big knife and chops her up so Demi Moore did not want to be on a pinball back glass. She didn't want to be in a game, operated game environment, I guess, or something. So we changed it to the Joe Pesci back glass. And so the original back glass was, of course, a painting. It was an airbrushed painting. And a gentleman that I had talked to had purchased the original painting, and he was up in Canada. And I told him the story about the Demi Moore. He took a little razor blade, and he sliced at the edge because he noticed that it was kind of puffy in the middle where the comic book was. And he looked underneath and he saw the artwork underneath. He goes, oh, I can't believe this. He goes, I feel like I just found treasure. And so I would imagine that that would probably be worth a few, just with what it is and that it's airbrushed and that it has that history to it. I think that would be worth a lot of money today. You have another anecdote? Oh, let's see here. Because if you don't, I've got it. Guns and Roses. Ah, yeah. I started working on Guns and Roses. I met with Slash. We sat and talked about the game, and I wanted to sit down with him and just draw on a piece of paper and just start drawing some sketches. He told me he wanted a ramp that was shaped like a G and one that was shaped like an R, and that wasn't where I was planning on going with it. And I'm like, okay. So now this Guns N' Roses was being made at the time as a narrow, normal, standard pinball machine. So he also said he wanted a snake pit. So I got the G and the R ramp in there, and then one day Cam and Co. came up to me, and he told me, he goes, we're going to start making water bodies. So Maverick was in the works at one time, and I'll tell you about that in a minute. But I took Guns N' Roses, and I extended the flat rail for the left orbit out to the left, and I got that extra room. I put all the extra room on the left and I took and I put a rose plunger on the left side of the game. So it was really easy for me to make, because when Tim Seckel had to go back and he made a Maverick as a wide body and that was when we changed back and went back to the standard size board. So he had this great big paddle boat on the game. He had to take, and that was injection molded paddle wheel and a vacuum form and a mechanism. He had to take and shrink that down to make that all fit into a standard size pinball play field. So he had a ton of work to do, and mine was like, I think I had it done in like two days. I'm like, I actually drilled a hole in a cabinet and I put a plunger in it and I made a little rose out of Joshua Clay It was terrible looking But I draw stick people and I make rough sculptures of stuff when I just trying to get the idea across But that was an interesting time. It was like, you know, we only made a few wide-body series. Batman Forever. I helped Paul Leslie work on that a little bit. That was the only game he ever designed. I worked on ramps with him on that. But that was a really nice wide-body game. every time I do a game I wish I could have that extra inch and a half it makes a difference some people say that wide bodies play differently but like Guns N' Roses well an Atari type wide body because your whole body is just like Guns N' Roses was designed as a standard game and I just added that big long shooter and that's where Slash got his snake pit plunge the ball with a rose and it'll spin around in the snake pit so he was very pleased about that when he found out that that went in there too. Yeah, and Joe has told a lot of stories about Slash being a very activist licensor, shall we say. Oh, yeah. I went to Slash house in 1993 after the earthquakes hit, and I walk into his house, and it's a beautiful house. There's cracks on the walls all over the place, and he's got these great big gigantic glass panels. It's like a zoo. He's got a 20-foot bow constrictor in his living room next to his television. and then he goes, this over here, this is the poisonous snake room. And I'm like, I don't want to go in there. He goes, I don't go in there either. He goes, I have people that come and take care of that for me. So all of a sudden, he's got games in his living room, he's got a game room. I'm walking around his house, you know, checking it out, and all of a sudden a cougar, he has a six-month-old cougar that walks around the house, and it's about the size of a German shepherd. so it took a shining to me right away because it didn't know me he walked up to me and brushed up against me like a house cat and I'm like wow this is so cool I'm a cougar so I'm petting him and he didn't chew my hand off so I'm like ok this is good so then he laid down on the side next to me with his legs up on his back like a dog and I squatted down and I started rubbing his belly and the next thing I know wham the paw comes up and smacked me in the side of the head I flew backwards and I landed on the floor and when I opened up my eyes his mouth was on my neck and I was like wow I didn't move I didn't try to push him I just laid there I was like it's going to be over in a second or I'm going to live to tell the story and I'm glad I'm here to tell the story So Slash walked He walked into the room and he goes Curtis, get off! And he just kind of let me go He was just playing with me So I told Slash that I was glad that he was well fed I think the person that was the most afraid in that room When that happened was Joe Because Joe was standing right there when it happened Coming up next Celebrity animal care tips Yes Oh, what else do I have here? There's still a whole lot of games left on this list. Sure. Oh, and then I thought I might add, I don't know if Dwight was just kidding me or not, but he told me that he was doing a search one day on the iInternet Pinball database. Yeah. And he said that I have designed more games than anyone other than Wayne Neyens. And I'm not sure if that's true or not, if he was just joking with me. But I do have a long list. It is a long list. I've got it printed out here in three pages, and it doesn't even include your partial credits. I guess this is... But you could sit down with Jay Stafford sometime and straighten it all out. You did a lot of six-player games. Apollo 13. Yeah, there you go. That was a lot of fun. I got to meet Jim Lovell when we did that game. We were driving up to his house. He lives north of Chicago, northwest suburbs. So we're driving up to his house, and I go, when we get there, is he going to be, like, in the basement? He's got moon dust all over, and he's jumping around because he never got to actually be on the moon. You know, I was making jokes about it and stuff. He was the nicest guy. He signed back glasses for us. A few years later, we had a receptionist that worked at Data East, and she was also a hairdresser, and she worked on people that were in film, and they were going to do a documentary on Jim Lovell, and she worked on him, did his makeup and stuff like that, And she said, you know, I used to work at the pinball company that made your game. And he goes, oh, I love that game. I play it all the time. She took a Polaroid of him, and he signed it and said, hi, John, I play your game all the time. And she put it in a frame and gave it to me. That was really nice. Meeting him was great. And then after that, I worked on Twister. And I flew to Ponca City, Oklahoma, where they were filming it. and I flew to Dallas on a jet and then I flew in a little prop job to Ponca City, Oklahoma and there was a cable running down the middle of the plane with chickens flying back and forth and stuff like that. It was a very small plane. I think there were six people, seven, eight people maybe. And flew to Ponca City, Oklahoma, met Bill Paxton. So they took over this whole town and there was a school that was there and we were going to record Bill recording speech for Apollo 13 and Twister at the same time. So then Bill took us out after we did the speech recording. We were walking around sets, and we go walking by all these trailers that are there, and Bill goes over and he knocks on the door of the trailer. And she goes, who is it? And he goes, it's me, Bill. He goes, the pinball guys are here. Because I guess Helen Hunt knew we were coming. And she opens up the door, and she's in curlers getting ready for a set. And so we talked to her briefly, and then we went back out, and we were walking around sets, and I got to see the great big fans, and they were, you know, throwing debris into the fans. And then there was a big group there working on another set, and all of a sudden this football comes flying out of this crowd of, like, you know, 10 or 20 people. And Bill caught it, and he threw it back. And they threw it back again, and it was coming to me, and it was way over my head. I jumped up in the air, and it hit my finger, and it bent my finger back. And I was like, ah, I thought I broke my finger. That was very painful. But it was just I was having so much fun, I forgot about it after a while. But, yeah, walking around with Bill, it was great. He's a really nice guy. He's just your average run-of-the-mill person. He had no ego whatsoever. He was just really friendly with us, and we had a good time working on that. well in this era I think we get to the the one offs and the like so you did Richie Rich whatever doing it means yeah I didn't have anything to do with too many of those the one that I really liked the most was the Michael Jordan game that we made but I didn't get into too many of those the one one off that I was involved in was we took a checkpoint when Desert Storm happened and we took and put a piece of paper on the play field that was arted and we just taped it down and we put the thing out in a location and it made money like crazy. So instead of shooting the ramp to see how fast your car was going, you were getting sorties per hour. And we got in the newspaper for it and then... And it was called Operation Desert Storm? Operation Desert Storm. We did a little quickie backlash for it and put the thing out on location. Yeah, well, that checkpoint was a historically significant game anyway. It showed at Pinball Expo the October before. Joe wheeled it in like Saturday afternoon. It had segment displays, so you weren't revealing to the Williams people there what you were up to. Yeah. One time we had an expo group come through the factory when we were in Norris Park, and we took a game and we put a mirror in place of the glass, and we called it Death Ball 2000. And then there was a big metal grate that stood in front of it. So you had to stand on this big metal grate. There was no play field in it. But everybody was looking at it going, wow, this is really cool. That was inspired by a story in the supermarket tabloid, the Weekly World News, just a little half-page story, Death Ball 2000, the pinball game kids are dying to play. Yeah, right. And Joe liked that, I guess, and said, let's make a fake game out of this. And it's on the dots as a coming attraction. You did coming attractions on the dots for a while. Yeah. Yeah. On another side of how you were getting through those times, there was something going on with Williams, the combined Williams-Bally pinball operation really clamping down. And, you know, an obvious visible example is that you had to say Tribal because they were trying to claim a trademark on multiball. But probably the biggest thing I know of was the distribution thing, that you were losing distributors because Williams was saying you can only carry our line. Oh, sure. That probably wouldn't affect you day to day except that you're being told, well, business is going to be bad. I also believe that they were able to push more pinball machines if you took some number of Mortal Kombat's. Yeah, right. They had that leverage. They had that leverage, too. And we did, but we didn't. Data East wasn't a big video game company. It wasn't really huge. Yeah. So what was that like from your side? We just had to work hard and just keep making fun things for people to shoot. That was about all we could do. We were a small group. Yeah. What was your lead time? Like you sign a license and you know you're going to do the game. From start to finish of game? Yeah. The best I've ever done is four months on Iron Man. Well, no wonder your list is almost as big as Wayne Nye's. When the company was, after 2008, 7, 7 and 8, everything was quite bleak, and I worked on Big Buck Hunter for probably a year. And I remember I would walk into the factory in the morning, and I'd hear, screw gun go off. And I didn't hear anything for a while. It was very quiet in the factory. We had an expo tour that year. I set up a computer with a big screen, and I showed people AutoCAD drawings, and I showed them how I extract everything off the drawing and make a routing drawing, because we weren't running production at the time. Those were scary days. But a couple years later, I had to work. Then the layoff happened, and then I was the only designer left. They actually let me go too, and Ray Tanzer was going to design a game. And then Ray left and went to Namco, and then Gary called me up a couple weeks ago and said, you know, come back to work. And I'm like, okay, that was quick. So, yes, I went back to work, and I was very glad to get back to work. But I had to finish 24 that Steve was working on at the time. I had to work that out and finish the details that weren't finished. And then I had a white wood with no drawings of CSI, and Keith P. Johnson and I worked on that game. We changed a little bit of it up. We took a pop bumper out, and we added the centrifuge in the middle, and we did a little bit of work, some changes on that, but Gary wanted to keep it somewhat intact and not just change the whole game and start over because there was some work done on it. There was a plan there. Yeah. How did you feel about the budget on that game? CSI? Yeah. I know I saw it when it came out and it seemed it had enough stuff on it, but there was a grumbling online at the time. Yeah. The skull mechanism was pretty interesting. that was pretty cool the ball went into each eye and lifted up and sent them out but there can always be more there can always be more there's a few games where I had really loaded them up John Trudeau made a game his first version of Ghostbusters was like $400 plus over budget and he had to back way off when I saw what he was planning I'm like oh boy that's a lot, that's a lot. So sometimes we've got to take things out or change things or downgrade things a little bit. But, yeah, I'd like to see the bill just keep growing and growing. The more the merrier. Is there any game, well, let's say from any time in your career, that you would encourage these people to take another look at? Like it may not have been properly respected at the time. Lost in Space. I saw Lost in Space. Unfortunately, that movie. Well, we got the Lost in Space 65 guy. Uh-huh, right. Remember him. Yep, there he is. I enjoyed working on Lost in Space, but that was another really, really short time frame. And I remember when we all went out to see the movie, we were like, oh, yeah, we're done with this one. On to the next. I was excited because Gary Oldman was playing Dr. Smith, and he is an amazing actor. You see him in movies, and you don't even know it's him until you see the credits. And when he was playing Dr. Smith, I was really excited. And then when I saw the movie, I was horrifically disappointed. But I love the 65 version. That's the way we should have made it. We should have just gotten rid of all the other characters. But you're reminding me of another movie thing, And Joe was so proud at the time that Last Action Hero you going to have a synchronized release with the movie That another good example of a game that everybody didn think was that great because T2 had come out and that was a great movie Last Action Hero came out and I still thought it was a good movie. I watched it about maybe six months ago. It was entertaining, but it wasn't a Terminator 2 caliber movie, but nobody really took credit for that game. I started working on it. Ed Sabula started working on it. Then I started working on it. And it just kind of bounced hands. And I think if you read the design credits for Last Action Hero, it says, designed by Lyman Sheets. But everybody's name was on that game. Everybody worked on it. I designed the crane and the tar pit. First crane. Yeah. I got a patent on that, too. Ball, oh, God, I can't remember what the name of the patent was something to carry a ball from one space to another and release it. And we were, Williams and Data East were really going after patents at that time to protect. Yeah, part of the same thing we were talking about. When I did lights, camera, action at Gottlieb, a year later or two years later, they came out with Bride of Pimbot, which had the face that flipped upside down. So they were, that was a patent infringement. So we ended up getting to use automatic percentaging for that. Instead of getting a cash settlement, they just gave us automatic percentages. Well, Gary's a lawyer, and he probably figured out it would be better to do that. Oh, and also we were talking about Star Wars a little while ago with the tri-ball. There was a video mode in that game, and we were not able to use video mode either. So when you shoot the ball into the C-3PO shot and you see that little video event happen with the speeder bikes flying through the woods, or whatever, that was controllable by that shifter mechanism that's barely used in the game other than to open up the Death Star for you prematurely. Yeah. So there was a video mode there. And then that never went back in because the suit was settled way after Star Wars production was made. Yeah. Now, you did have a couple non-licensed ones. like you're involved in some way in Striker Extreme and Sharky's and High Roller Casino? Yeah, Joe Balcer, he handled Striker Extreme. And what was the one that I did? Sharky's Shootout. I worked on that with Dwight. Jon Norris designed a game called Golden Q. And they ordered production parts for it to build like 250 to just get a start, and then somehow they decided that they didn't want to make that game. So Gary came into my office one day with the wire ramps, the drop target bank with all the trip coils on it, the metal ramp, and the eight-ball assembly, and put the stuff on my desk and said, make a game out of this. Use this, but make another game. So we won the Sharky shootout. Yeah, so the Kelly Packard's Golden Cue Tournament Edition, that was Jon Norris, the big rules guy, his idea of how we're going to solve the problem that tournaments take so long. So it's a game where if it's in tournament mode, you get more points the faster you finish. Yes, that was ingenious. That was fun to play. Yeah, and the play field was as close to eight ball deluxes they could come and yet throw a ramp in there because they couldn't do in-line drop targets anyway. They got that thing on the side, and they need a ramp, so it's a no-brainer. Yeah, that worked out great. Oh, let's see, what else about that game? Oh, the eight ball assembly. The eight ball assembly originally just had a little paddle that came down to divert the ball off. It went through always to the right flipper, and when the paddle was energized it would come to the left flipper. I took that mechanism and I had all those parts and I had to redesign it. And we didn't remake the part, we actually fixtured and added some more holes to it. And I put a motor in it and I put a blue vacuum form inside of it and I made it a magic eight ball. So when you shot the mystery it would spin around and it would stop on a value and light up like a magic eight ball would. So that was the first game I got to work on with Dwight. And I didn't get to work with Dwight again until Munsters. Munsters and Turtles we worked on together. So it had been a long time. Did you have a role in High Roller Casino? No, just maybe a little mechanical support, but not much, not much at all. Yeah, okay. Did they give me credit for that in the database? Well, I just printed out anything that has your name in any rule. Okay. Did you get really into rules on any of the games? Oh, yeah, I do. I like to write rules. My guys are really, really good at it. Yeah, so when you're working with Dwight, do you have arguments about? No, Dwight usually, he's pretty good at planning, and when I worked on Turtles, he pretty much knew. We worked on the play field together, and he pretty much knew what he was going to do and what he wanted to do with it. Like when I started to work on Rush, Tim was working on Led Zeppelin at the time, and I wrote about maybe, I don't know, I want to say half, but I'm going to say probably 30% now after Ray and Tim went after it. They added a whole lot more than what I, you know. I started the rules. I did the Bastille Day rule, and I wrote a bunch of the rules up for them, and I just handed them a book, and I go, you know, this is what I've got. And then Tim started working on it, and then Ray Day came in, and they crushed it. They just did a great job. This is Tim Sexton we're speaking of. Yes, this is Tim Sexton. Got to get all of this. I mean, I like that this industry is so small that most everybody gets to be, everybody not named John, gets to be just a first name, Lyman, Dwight, Lonnie, et cetera. But for the historical record, you might as well get their full names out there. Is there anything from your design history where you liked a particular flow or combo or something that you're especially proud of? Wow. Oh, that's interesting. I mean, you managed to make a ball traverse the letter R, which is probably not too easy. Yeah, yeah. Gosh. I really liked shooting Ironman, you know, and shooting and getting the bogey chase round started on the ramps, you know, because of the back and forth. Similar to T2, you know, left ramp, right ramp, left ramp, right. Don't miss. You know, just keep going and get all the way to that feature. I'll probably think about that a little bit later, and I'll probably think of something that I should have told you. Yeah, well, you can come back. Yeah. Right? Can I come back? Okay. Okay, yeah, we are getting close to the end here. I only have about 30 more games to talk about. Yeah. No, I'm only kidding. Any other, like bragging rights, you know, your favorite mech or your favorite implementation of rules versus mech? When I worked on Iron Man, the budget was very low. They didn't want me to do a lot of tooling. So when I started working on Iron Man, Gary asked me to find some old ramps that existed. Oh, yeah. Find some old ramps that exist so we don't have to spend, you know, oodles of dollars on tooling and make molds. So I was looking around. I'm like, oh, boy, this is going to be interesting. You know, it may change a lot of the game. so I looked at the ramps from X-Men because I really enjoyed shooting those a lot of swirls and nice geometry and I called up the vendor and I said do you have part number 545-889-62-00 tooling he says it's a boat anchor he told me it was a boat anchor for the president's boat and I'm like okay so I kept looking and I kept looking and then I found the ramps for Austin Powers and I thought this might work so I took the left ramp and I had them change the tool and I added about four or five inches to the entrance just to make the shot and the incline smoother a little less a little less abrupt and then the right ramp stayed the same except I changed the trimming on it and that that that worked out great the main work on that game there wasn't very much on Ironman but it was a really fun game to play I place I play 10 games on Ironman I get my butt kicked like six or seven times, and then that eighth game, you just get to Jericho and you just go or do or die. And, you know, it's a game. It's really well balanced and scoring-wise too as well. But that was just a really fun game to play, and mortals could get to the wizard mode. You know, mortals could get to the end of that game. My little brother came up after I brought the game home. My little brother's playing it in the basement, and he doesn't know anything about pinball. He shoots, and he doesn't flip both flippers at the same time, but he doesn't know rules. He doesn't know much about pinball. He comes upstairs, and he goes, is $100 million a good score? I'm like, yeah. I go, what did you do? He lit all the characters on one ball, and he just flipped and hit the do-or-die shot with like $35 million on it, and that put him up and over. And I'm like, wow. And I just brought it home. I think I had like a 90 million score on it or something like that, so I had to best him. Yeah, that's the big brother way. KISS was, you know what, I said that I had made Iron Man in four weeks, or four months, four weeks. God, don't ever ask me to make a game of KISS. Four months. KISS was another one. We were working on Game of Thrones, and I think they thought Game of Thrones was going to be Lord of the Rings, and it was a great game and big upper play field and a lot of stuff, and he needed a lot of support. So he was working on it, and then they asked me to jump in front of him and take his spot for Game of Thrones to do Kiss. So Kiss, I started on Kiss right after Christmas. So after New Year's Day, I started getting after it. And then I released everything for production in April. And then in May, the beginning of May, we were building it in the new building. That was the other thing I was worried about. We're moving into a new building, and we're going to be building Kiss in like three weeks? Yeah, sure. It was amazing the way they transformed. and got that place up and running. That reminds me of one of my final questions. Any shout-outs about art? Because I'm a big Kevin O'Connor guy. Oh, I love Kevin O'Connor. Who do you? Jeremy is amazing. Is that the Eddie? Michael, the guy, the new artist. It was my first time working with Michael. He did the art for Rush. When I saw the Ellie cabinet, I liked the premium cabinet a lot, But when I saw the LE cabinet, I'm like, it looks like a piece of furniture. I go, I'm definitely, this is the model. I'm definitely buying this one. I'm not going to buy a premium. I'm going to get an LE. And how about sound? Shout-outs for? Jerry's amazing. Jerry, yeah. Yeah. Brian Schmidt, Jerry Thompson. Brian Schmidt was just amazing in his day. you know back in the mid 90s I kind of went off into the weeds and made a couple of pinball games that weren't really pinball games per se it was a pinball cabinet but it went all the way down to the floor we made one called Derby Days and then we used the same game and renamed it Roach Racers and we took the dot matrix and put it underneath the window in the play field but we turned it sideways so you could see your horses running and it was kind of like an homage to hay burners and I had a lot of fun working on those. That was a redemption piece? Redemption, yeah. And when we made Roach Racers, we made one of the roaches that you picked your one of four roaches and then as you played the game, you would hit pop bumpers and targets to advance your roach or bug and one of the bugs was Harry Gary and we made it, we put Gary's hair on, little bum character. And then I made a bowling game that was like the old bowling games from like the 50s with mechanical bowling game. You hit the pins, and then the pins are drawn up. You knock them off magnets. I made one of those, and it was called Cosmic Bowling. And then the best redemption game that I ever made was the simplest one. I made it in like a month. It was called Cut the Cheese. You've probably seen that at arcades around New Robert Englunds. It's a coin roll game, a very small cabinet. There's a toilet in the middle with a mouse sitting up at the top of the reservoir bowl in the back. And the music is just, there's a YouTube video. If you Google Cut the Cheese Sega or something, I believe, it'll pop up. The music track is hilarious and the sound effects. So you're hearing this music and it's real quirky music. and then you hear this little mouse character talking, and you hear a, you know, cheese. You know, he's like, cut the cheese. And the whole idea of the game is to roll the coin down the middle and make it go up a ramp and get it into the toilet while the toilet bowl is open. In the toilet bowl, the seat is moving up and down. So if the seat's down, the coin just lands on top, and then it gets knocked off. You had to get the coin into the toilet and spell the word jackpot on toilet paper that came down to the bottom of the play floor. That was a lot of fun. All right. Well, thank you so much. And we've got a good momentum going here. So we'll just pick up next year, right? Yep. Sounds good. Start with all those stories you didn't have time to tell. Okay. All right. I still have another half a list for next year. Thank you.