And so it's like, we get to see the impact of code in the modern day in a way that we never got to see in the past outside of the jackpot or pinbot thing, because a game would come out, it would be finished, and then it was finished. That was it. It was done. no warts and all yep it was done there's a lot of examples of this nowadays that we can point to and you can see it executed well and poorly uh there's the pedretti remakes of some of the bally william games uh which i would personally say don't add anything to the experience some people might disagree if they played those original games to death maybe and then likewise i like i had a stern galaxy that was running um aftermarket code on an arduino that was done by i camel over on the east coast for anyone with like an old uh galaxy or kind of any of that era this guy i camel on the east coast he has a little way to piggyback an arduino in there for like 50 bucks you can get new code on them it's fun and it was like something like galaxy that felt very stale and like the right half of the play field is useless and everything having different code in there made it completely feel like a different game you played it completely different than you would normally play galaxy oh yeah sure because like if you make those if you make those star targets on the right, for instance, worth shooting at, then now you've got something to do from the left slipper, you know? Exactly. And it's like, or if you make it so that the spinner shot, when it's, when you've got Galaxy spelled, is worth a lot less, it disincentivizes you from banging on it all day, right? And so I think, I think those are the kinds of things that, you know, really make all the difference. And that's why when you compare a game like Galaxy to a game like Frontier, same era same you know general constant you know conceptual framework in playfield design it's one of the reasons why frontier is so incredible and galaxy is a fun game to shoot but it's got some problems yeah exactly and i think this is you know transcends into the george gomez gave us a nugget that i wanted to talk with you here about programming but he was describing how us as players will often tell him that oh a shot feels smooth or it's satisfying and how he likes to challenge the players that say that to him to think about the why that they think a ramp shot is smooth and then he would elaborate and he said obviously there's the physical aspect of it which he has control over but he's like there's also sound effects like choreography as well as points as a feel-good currency being added to your score that all make that same shot feel different during different moments of the game and that has a lot to do with how the programmer makes everything kind of dance together my example of this is like you know spinners are pretty cool but they only become something sublime when a programmer knows how to light them for big points or lets you rip them to cash them in where it has an awesome sound paired with it yeah you know what i mean like a spinner on its own not worth any points no lighting effect no ability to like juice it for 10 for 10 times its value like it's fine like but it's not special like the spinner on my godzilla the sega godzilla and you're like i don't know what i i'm looking at it right now i'm like i have no fucking idea what the i don't know if that spinner is even hooked up to anything it doesn't make noise i didn't realize until i had the glass off the first time i'm like oh shit there's a spinner in this game and what do you think about that greg what do you think about the the aspect of like choreography of like moments and teaching a player how to play a game i think that george is right to an extent i mean there are shots in pinball that feel extremely satisfying and would feel extremely satisfying on a white wood you know um and you know i think particularly in um metal ramps it's almost like you can hear the little swing as the ball goes around the thing you know or whatever yeah no i can't but it feels that way and i think there are things like that that are really cool i think of like the um the side ramp shot on king kong recently where it goes up and does that swirl and comes around yeah just like feels really awesome you know i think i think that stuff is very very important but it's also true that like shots that feel good can be feel awesome when you look at what what you're really talking about is choreography right yeah like the bringing together of the lamps and the sounds and the display i think of like the super jackpot shot on high speed getaway oh my god you you so good thing and it goes boom boom boom boom boom you know and it's like everything is flashing and it's just like feels incredible or like when you start multi-ball on attack from mars and the the the lamps like slowly build from the bottom of the playfield up to the the spaceship and then it explodes and screams multi-ball and all the balls start firing out like all of that stuff is like really it's it's true all of that stuff like fires together to make the most incredible feelings you know i get the billion hurry up on attack from Mars and it's great because I did something that I had to set up very carefully and executed on it and got a billion points. But if the game doesn't scream, oh, baby, that's not the special shot that it is today. And, you know, so I think I think that's totally right. And I think it's something that a lot of the programmers take a lot of care in, you know, like what else? Oh, in Safecracker, when it does the flashing lamp effect, then everything shuts down and then the token drops right you know stuff like that yeah yeah it's all all of that stuff is like is really important and i think there are definitely games that do it better than others you know and i think i think that special moment like if we talk about that super jackpot shot is a little bit lost in pinball today you just like built everything to that one thing and you nailed it and the game goes crazy and you're like this is so awesome and i do i i feel like i you don't get That which is not to say that there aren't really fun things and great things done technologically and choreography wise and modern pinball. But it's just like I think in part of it, I think has to do with deep rule sets, which I know we'll get to and all of this stuff. But part of it is also because those are the games that I learned how to play. So they're very special to me. But I don't know. I feel like there's a little something that's lost today. You know, I feel the same way. I think George is kind of underselling the importance of the physical layout. because there's only so much you can do with the choreography to make the shot specifically feel good. But I do think, like, the little twirly ramp on King Kong, I think that pigtail ramp feels better than the pigtail on Godzilla. Yeah. And I think that's entirely because it makes a little biplane sound effect when you hit it. Mm-hmm. It's like, meow, and you're like, oh, yeah, and it just, meow, and you're like, oh, yeah, that's the ball. I personally think that there's a lot of Steve Ritchie games in particular. Yeah. Like, I love Steve Ritchie, and I love the speed and the layouts of his games, and I feel like they are very smooth. But the difference between his best games and his lesser games usually all come down to, like, choreography. Like, what Greg is talking about, the super jackpot. Like, I feel like him and Lyman work together very well, and him and Dwight work together very well. But him and Dwight were, like, it sounded like they were kind of oil and water, but I felt like they both got the best out of each other because of it. Yeah, for sure. I think so. Yeah. And like I feel like Dwight still does. Like I think the super jackpot or the multiball start on Ghostbusters in particular is one of those great moments, like the storage facility where it's like, wow, wow, wow. And it just goes red. We do get it. But like you said, in the modern era, it does seem like players expect the games to be programmed with very deep rule sets. So I want to talk to you about the preponderance of deep rule sets in modern pinball, what you think about them, and why do you think we are where we are? I think we are where we are because of the trend towards home sales of games. And if you look at the video game industry, this same pattern presented itself. Like, you cannot take Robotron and sell it on a cartridge for $60 to people to play on their PS4, you know? they require a level of depth that you could never attach to a a coin-op arcade game because coin-op arcade games are made to be played in two minutes or less and that worked back when you know we had i had an atari 2600 was my first gaming console it was just supposed to replicate the arcade experience but over time that's changed a lot and i and you know also you know like we were playing space invaders for points back then and you're not playing breath of the wild for sport for points you know right and so like the whole concept of what video games are and what it means to play them has changed entirely and i think we're starting to see that happen in pinball as well, because the people who bring games home don't want to see the whole game in a week. They've paid, you know, 65, 75, 10 grand for this game. They don't want to see the whole game in, you know, five days, 10 days, whatever it is. And I think that a really big part of what is happening with the rules And I also say that I don I not necessarily against the deep rule sets I think it the complexity of the way that different elements come together that leaves me lost these days. Like I've read the rules for Jurassic Park a hundred times, and I still don't know how the dinosaurs work. You know, it's like, there's, there's just like stuff in there. And I think some of it is that there's so much information going on that you can't communicate it on the inserts anymore and that's a thing that really bothers me about modern pinball because i shouldn't have to look up at the display to find out what's going on i'm used to seeing it all right there in front of me laid out but i i think there's just a lot of like like that complexity is the thing that kind of bugs me about what's going on these days i agree with that i think we i keep coming back to dungeons and dragons i mean like this is a really good example of how to do a deep rule set and a big part of why I like it so much is because there's so much shit to do, but it's very straightforward on the surface. You're like, you just start a mode and then you play through the mode and then you kind of just keep working through modes. It kind of locks you out of, I mean, you can play Dragon Multiball with a basic level mode, but, you know, it regularly locks you out of doing other stuff when you're in something. Yeah. So it focuses your attention to... Yeah, it's not like making concurrent progress on like 30 different things at once and you don't know how any of those are affecting your scoring. It's very interesting because I'm kind of with you. I'm like, I don't necessarily mind deep games, and I actually really like a deep game with carryover progress like D&D now, but it's just when there's too much going on, it becomes difficult to keep track of. My take on it is I enjoy pinball at the length of a song, and I'm a location player, and so I want to be able to walk up to a game and kind of know what I'm supposed to do. And I don't want to just session one game for weeks at a time and really learn it and then start at the bottom of that mountain and climb up every single fucking time and then get locked into really long games where I still didn't see everything. And so I have to start like, I just don't like that. I do like that. So the modern video game analogy that Greg was alluding to is I do think that like if we're going to get these deep rule sets, I do like what Stern did with D&D because that was a game that I didn't understand until I got an insider account and then I played through it. And then I was like, OK, this game's fun. I mean, the scoring is fucked up. Like, it just doesn't doesn't make any sense. Scoring doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. disabled because you're playing it for progression like you would in a modern video game like you would playing zelda like greg was saying it's a little bit weird because it still kind of has its vestigial tale of like it has points and we expect the points to matter on a pinball machine but it can't really matter on that game in a real way because you'd be impossible to balance that game in a way where it's like every time you go up logged in or not the point the pounds you know the scoring's balanced i don't know it's interesting but you know i equate like how a game in the especially in the modern era i think we're getting increasingly more and more this way but it's i think that programming is so important in the modern era and a lot of pinheads are realizing it that's why you hear all the calls for like they need to fix the code where's the code update right which is all programming work that needs to be done but the original star wars movie was said to have been saved in the editing room right and that that film wouldn't have become the massive cultural icon that it ended up becoming if the editors hadn't sculpted that movie into something great and i feel like i see that parallel with the programmers on pinball machines especially in the modern era like the designers seem to get a lot of the glory like george lucas gets with star wars and of course it wouldn't exist at all without lucas but without richard shu paul hirsch and marcia lucas that original movie wouldn't have really been that good either like modern pinball in particular seems to follow this model very closely as the layout is done and then it's oftentimes shipped with beta code or that's what you know dorks on the internet like to be like derisively call games right if it's not 1.0 it is by definition like pre-release and then it is kind of sculpted over time into something much different and hopefully better than it was before like we talked about with galaxy or or many other games like Theater of Magic is one that sticks out to me is it just turns into shoot the left orbit shot over and over. It's like, but one small code update to rebalance the scoring exploit would make that game fantastic again. And that's what we get in the modern era. And I just wonder, are pinball programmers getting enough credit? And do you think that they do adequately sculpt a game in our final experience of them, Greg? I think that, you know, again, I think it takes a village and they do. All of those things are, you know, true. They definitely, you know, sculpt. And we've talked about ways in which they can sculpt a game into something different. But I'll also say that, you know, like in the case of Theater of Magic, I think that any game with looping shots is going to be more subject to being able to be exploited than a game that doesn't, as just a simple example, right? Right. And so, you know, you have to work harder on those games to make sure that those things don't exist. and when I look back at where pinball players were and how they approached the game at the time that theater of magic was was made I can't fault them for designing it the way that they did because this whole concept of do the one thing that's worth points and is safe and don't do anything else it wasn't really a thing you know right um like when I think of the first time when I found that meta really starting to appear in the pinball competition community it was at papa six when people were playing the dog video mode on junkyard and that was like the first time when this idea of like grinding on a game's exploitable feature really was something that like made it into my mental model of how we play pinball how much of that is your fault directly as the founder of tilt forums is that is that your fault it's not like when junkyard came out i tilt forums didn't exist when junkyard came out so i mean these these game exploits have been going on for a long time before i started to up for him so don't blame me okay i think there's a lot of things that go into it and the software people are definitely part of it but you know it's also hard to tell because i don't know on theater of magic you know jeff johnson was the programmer on that game and i don't know how much input he had into the rules and the scoring and stuff versus john or the other people who are involved so that's part of it too right it is always hard to parse i just feel like the programmers get a lot of heat right not that the designers don't they do but everyone today seems to accept the fact that oh yeah like stern made this game but don't worry it's gonna be better next year and stern does support their products very well and they will change that game year over year and support it well after its original launch date well after its by sale date i mean they also will rerun games which is something williams would never do or other pinball manufacturers never did in the past which i think is another innovation that we didn't talk about with gary stern that i think he deserves a lot of credit for which is like the ability to retool a manufacturing line to rebuild old games like allowing a game to find its audience or like in this modern era update the code and all of a sudden it's like well i want a james bond now yeah you know and they're people like starts like we got you pal you can buy james bond right fucking now like and that is that's that's amazing it's huge and they're really the only i mean i know jersey jack did it they kept running uh they've run multiple versions of stuff but nobody else really wizard boss like american has done multiple runs or so they say they're probably just the same ones sitting in the warehouse right yeah it's just a fascinating change but i want to kind of talk to you about we've talked about programming and i just feel like they get i wanted to do this episode because i just i it was a conversation that always seems to come up where it's like i feel like and i'm not a programmer but i just feel like programmers get all this heat but i don't feel like they get enough credit they get credit but it doesn't feel like enough so i wanted to talk about this and i wanted to talk to you because you've worked with a lot of these people but it's like what are some examples of a perfectly programmed game to you greg i think that metallica is a particularly well programmed game i think that one of the things that i love the most about metallica is that its features are mostly very accessible but you have to be so skillful to be to successfully implement them and there's also a thing in metallica that i really love and i know this goes against one of the things that alan hates about pinball but everybody in a game of metallica is like one crank one really good crank it up away from catching anybody else almost know how far how far ahead they are like if you're behind by a billion points in world cup soccer you've got a problem because your only your only way out of that is to grind your way all the way to the final match and succeed right yeah and if you're behind by 50 million points and crank it up you start for whom the bell tolls you start to x scoring and you cash that out and you are good and i love that about metallica because it just feels like nobody ever really runs away with Metallica. And, you know, the game is brutal. And, you know, from a play field wise, in Walking Dead is the same way. It really keeps you on your toes, which I think also helps a lot. It's not like you can jam Metallica for 20 hours or anything like that. So that's a game in the modern era that I think is really incredibly programmed. If you look back, I think that Larry's games are like, if you look at like Funhaus in particular is such an incredible game. just the way that everything is put together like the way the little things like the way that larry makes makes uh rudy's eyes follow where the ball is on the play field and all of the inner actions between like how rudy says different things at different times and players names for different players when you play multiplayer and also like the multi-ball sequence and when you get the jackpot and all of that like what we were just talking about from the perspective of you know of the way that and you know that chris granner soundtrack is immaculate and like just the experience of playing funhouse and the way that it all gets brought together is so just like satisfying and makes you feel really great and there's no real scoring exploits on funhouse which is awesome um and and i just feel like that game is just like it's really just like it's one of the few games i can look at and say i would not touch a single thing on that game well patretti did touch more than one they ruined john yossi's art package they ruined larry damar's code it's interesting yeah they changed all the music i think it's interesting oh did they change all the music i think oh for the yeah yeah oh all the new modes of songs this is disturbing all of it but that's why i brought it up earlier because i'm like just changing things for the sake of changing things does not a good game make you know what i mean like for sure there's a lot of ways to fuck up a good game with code yeah even if you're trying your best and putting a lot of work in and making it more complicated and more features and everything that doesn't necessarily make it good what what's an example to you alex what do you think perfect game it's easier what a perfectly programmed perfectly programmed game it's easier for me to point to classics because they're less and it's sad because i don't know any classic programmer names like once you get into solid states but i i agree that anything that doesn't have a real clear exploit is like the gold standard for me as far as rules which would be something like you know like a frontier funhouse is a really good example there's no i've never seen someone in a competition playing a funhouse i don play a ton of competitive pinball i never seen someone playing funhouse and like cheesing something any game any game where there like a shot that a safe bailout shot and it gives you enough points that it just worth doing that over and over again i like they fucked up they should have somehow made it so if you hit three sequential shots the game fucking turns itself off you know that's what i would like to see but as far as i'm trying to like think of like a perfectly coded game i think someone will probably correct me but i really bram stoker's Dracula, as far as a DMD game, is like a perfect, simple DMD game to me. I like that you can get carryover bonus built up. That's like a fairly substantial bonus if you're in like a hard game. It's really kind of the same thing as Metallica, where you're like, just get in that triple stack, execute well, anything is possible. You're like, you're always within, you know, shooting range of another guy's score, it feels like on Stokers. A modern game that feels perfect to me is harder, because that's like judging like a perfect single player experience and you're like it's such a subjective thing i don't just i just don't play modern games and competitions i think rick and morty is beautifully programmed with the the scoring the way it's such a bonus heavy game the variety that they worked into their the this basic rules are simple because there's not that many modes so you don't need to know that much shit but the variety they added with the dimensions the light shows are coordinated really well the sound effects are executed really well it has a lot of big moments so i would honestly say for me and that's i'm biased because it's a game i know really well right so i know i'm like there's not really any flaws in the programming of rick and morty eric prepke fucking killed that thing bowen karen's on rules scott denisi on lights and music really good team behind that i would add just to get to the modern and to be to discuss something in particular and i'll use an example of a game i do not like me and greg didn't know that was allowed no for a game that's perfectly programmed oh okay yeah i think simpsons pinball party is perfectly programmed oh yeah and i hate that game i hate the way that game shoots i think it's and uh i like how it shoots i hate the way it shoots i hate it but that game with anything less than what Keith put into that, that game is not very good. In my opinion, and that's my personal opinion, but I think it's like it's getting all the actors, getting all the call outs. I know Keith wrote the script for all those call outs. So he was a big Simpsons nerd. That's kind of crazy. And it's sort of like, it's just like one of those things where it's got kind of like whodunit being a Dwight game. You're like Simpsons, a Keith Johnson game. Yeah. And it's and he deserves the credit for that. alien invasion wizard mode is one of the most fun wizard modes i've ever played i love the like trying to lock all the different balls in all the different regions it's got multiple wizard modes again but it's still accessible like it's complex and it's deep but it's it's still accessible if you want it to be like uh i i played that a lot trying to get a high score on it and i learned that game and i'm like you know i i will never like the way this game shoots but it's no fault of the programmer at all like this is a great game because of keith johnson i on simpsons i actually don't mind the way it shoots at all i actually i like the layout quite a bit except for the garage door is one of like the worst clanky bash toys yeah it feels like you're hitting a piece of tinfoil i i hate the garage door which is funny because i'm like yeah i do yeah it's so touchy too like it doesn't register half the time and stuff yeah it's all that's probably why i'm biased against it so many simpsons i played early in the hobby were just like half working pieces of shit i mean that could be said about lord of the rings or sopranos or any game you know like especially the games that get a lot of plays like games that get played you know you you run into like really run down janky versions which i think speaks to the quality of the game itself but uh I will also say that for me, it's like, I really love Whitewater. That's my favorite game. I love that game. I love the way it's programmed. That's because you're a big playfield multiplayer guy. That game, everybody knows, you're playing Whitewater, the whole strat is waiting until you get a playfield multiplier ready, right? I just love when people tell me their bulletproof strategies on Whitewater, and I was like, I will teach you a fucking lesson about how to play this game, dude. Like, I will teach you a lesson. I think a really good sign of a well-ruled game is that there's a lot of different ways to play Whitewater, and they're all valid strategies. And the best part is that there's multiple ways to advance a dangerous raft class shot that you don't want to hit. You never want to hit the orbits. Oh, God. But you have to to progress the game, but there's ways around it, and I love that.