Heyo, welcome everyone to Today in the Scene by Indie Arcade Wave. I'm Joe, your host, and here on In the Scene we dive into what's happening in the arcade space from arcade developers, arcade owners and operators, pinball even now, and just any news in general really. I have started selling pinballs for Compulsive Pinball, so if you're interested in bringing one into your arcade or your personal collection, let me know, indiearcadewave at gmail.com. We will figure out what to do and we will bring a new pinball to you. Now we've got a special guest. They just announced a massive game just the other day. I'm really excited to give it a go. We've got Jack from Jersey Jacks with the new Harry Potter game. How are you doing, Jack? I'm doing well. Thank you. How about you? I'm great. I'm great. I spent the morning in the sun, so I can't complain, right? I'm really excited to talk about this game. My wife is a huge Harry Potter fan, so I want to really dive into kind of how you got the game and everything like that. But first, let's talk about Jack. Who is Jack and how did you get into pinball? Oh, shucks. You know, I started doing this as a pinball mechanic. I was going to do it for six months before I went to college for electrical engineering or something like that. You know, people wanted me to be a lawyer or do this, do that. I just wanted to take some time off from school. I answered an ad in the newspaper for pinball mechanic. and I got hired. The interview was by a gentleman, this guy Heinz, who was in the business 30 years. He was a lot older than me, obviously. And he asked me two questions. He asked me, you're not a Riederskommitik? Yeah. And you know how to solo? Yes. You're hired. So, you know, they had game rooms and colleges all over the New York metropolitan area. And of course, I'm college age and I got a car and a beeper. and i'm getting i think 125 bucks a week and i'm living home and it's great and so i just you know i went to college i went to cw post and new york tech and brooklyn college and columbia university and you know my class state i went to all the colleges actually so then i um in later years i began buying games and putting them in location so i became an operator for many years. I opened arcades and amusement centers when I moved to New Jersey in 1989. And then I ran a distributorship, Mondial Distributing, for a while in state sales. And in around 2000, I realized that pinball machines would go to the home. So I formed a company called pinballsales.com. And the whole idea of the company was to sell commercial arcade pinball machines to home customers first year i had a customer fao schwarz the toy store on fifth avenue i had games in their catalog um we did about 1.4 million in sales the first year second year fao was kind of like out of the picture after 9-11 nobody was coming to new york for tourism we did almost 2 million that year in sales um we were bringing in games from Europe, containers of games, 50, 60 games at a time. Adam's families were 300 bucks. Creature from the Black Lagoon was like 200 bucks. Rocky and Bullwinkle was $150. We would shop them, repaint them, clean them up, maybe make 700 bucks, 800 bucks a game, put them on eBay and sell them. Then I became a Stern distributor around 2001. and I became the biggest distributor in the country for years. 2009, 2010, we were bad. There was a downturn in the economy. I wound up selling about 47 Stern pinball machines in 2010. And everybody thought it was the economy, and I knew it wasn't the economy. People were looking for better games with more things on them. And January 1st of 2011, I started Jersey Jack Pinball. and our first game was the wizard of oz right still my favorite game yeah it's a cool one for sure and you got it introduced all new cool things that hadn't been done in 12 or 13 years so yeah i mean it's it's still a great game i mean people still love it it's still very collectible and it used to be them around so you guys have had a whole bunch it's been oh what did you just say it's been like three years since we spoke last i think it was just before toy story yeah you had just like guns and roses was pretty recent yep guns and roses was uh around october 6 2020 when we launched the game something like that yeah so i mean you've had you've had some pretty big licenses i mean you did uh willy wonka and a whole bunch of other stuff like that tell me a little bit about how you got the harry potter license like what was that like working with i mean you were working with like warner brothers right or universal warner brothers and and all that so how was it getting that license you know i could say it was easy i could say it was hard it was you have to be determined when you have a business um you know you don't lose if you don't give up right so i tried getting a license i think it was about 10 years ago i was going back looking at notes and i was told that um they're not licensing our category our category is amusement games typically with all the licensors and then not licensing our category is a nice way to say we're not licensing the game you know for games and i asked a year later i asked again i asked again i asked again at one point they said and uh i kept asking and i asked at a time where um from what I understand there were people in California from representatives of the owner of the property there's an agency that administers the all the properties in in the UK and they said well if Jersey Jack can make a game like The Hobbit we're interested and my contact that Warner Brothers said that there's a Jersey Jack game. So it was love at first sight because they were more interested in how we would represent the IP and how we would integrate the story, how we were going to incorporate eight movies, all the actors, all the assets. Would we get the John Williams music? There was a million questions and I had a million and one answers and they were all the right thing because they came from the truth of what we were going to make the game be and um i think we did you know if i say so jersey jackson so i think we did a pretty good job yeah i mean the game looks fantastic i haven't played it yet i know it just came out what yesterday or the day before thursday so it's only been out for a couple days i'm in the middle of wisconsin right now so there's not anything near me for arcades i got drive into Minneapolis but I think there should be one coming pretty soon to a client of mine and I excited to play it So I want to know how you guys determined what you were going to put in the game I mean when you look at Harry Potter there's so many books, there's so many movies, there's so much lore, so many things that could work in a pinball. How did you determine, like, this is an asset that's large enough for us to put in, and this is something we're going to pass on? Well, we had Eric Meunier, our designer, our lead designer. and he is a Harry Potter maniac. He knows everything about Harry Potter. I think there were some calls where he knew more than Warner Brothers about different things. He's just an expert and he loves it. And he was the guy, the only guy to do the game as a lead. And he came up with most of everything on the play field. Joe Katz was really critical some other people on the team were critical Eric had you know what I said to Eric after we went to Warner Brothers meeting to firm everything up in May of 2023 and I took Eric with me because I wanted him to be part of it from the very beginning and we left the office and I said I want the game to be fun, fast and flow. Those are the three things I want on the game. And he delivered. Some of his other games are stop and go. They're more exploratory. They're different. I think as a designer, you can continue to grow and change styles and change different things about games to make them reflect what people want, honestly. I mean, people want a game that's packed with things, mechanical toys, technology, new technology, and a game that shoots really well. And I think we did all of that. You know, nothing's perfect. It's a pinball machine. It's a little tiny area that you have to work with, but it's a challenge. And I think the team did a great job. I agree. I think it looks really good. I saw the, I think it was like a 15 or 20 minute video that was going over gameplay and showing everything. I love how you guys incorporated all four houses as flippers. That was pretty cool. It took me a little while to find the fourth house, but then I found it up on the Quidditch field, which was pretty cool. And the way you used the grand staircase as a ball diverter to move into different shots and kind of drop the ball off was, I mean, it's brilliant. The way everything was integrated into, like you said, the flow of the game and also the pace of the game was great. I can't wait to get my hands on it and actually try it. When I played the game, I couldn't look up at the monitor. I mean, it's too much going on, especially you get into multiball, and you get the death of you to shooting that ball at 200 miles an hour, and then on one orbit, the ball's coming all the way down. Sometimes the post isn't there to lock the ball on the left orbit coming down and it just rolls right off the flipper and it's gone. It's a challenge. Yeah, I wanted to talk about the introduction of the arcade version. I think that's something really interesting. I do remember, I don't think it was on camera the last time we spoke, but you did talk about how your market is primarily the home market three years ago and you want to move more into the arcade. how did you make it feasible to actually make this third edition that was the arcade edition? And what are your plans in the future moving forward with the arcade edition? Well, it was something I wanted to do for a while. You know, we had a standard game years ago, and it was a least sold game. So the most rare games we've ever done are our standard games. Why they're not $50,000 because they're so rare, I have no clue. And that's a joke. but I along with other people in the company felt that we want to make a push into commercial locations and as an operator I know operators very well and it's not always about what's in the cash box what the game costs when I operated and I bought games I asked my distributor what does the game make before I asked them what it costs because it was more important to me to know what the game made than what it cost. But I want it to be under $10,000. So in theory, it's $99.99. We didn't take anything off the game that affects gameplay. So it's the same exact play field as the Wizard Edition. You just don't have some of the bling that you could add. You don't have a visiglass, okay? You don't have a shaker motor. You don't have powder-coated body armor. It's powder coated, but it's black. You don't have the arc blades. You don't have a topper. You don't have the lights around the monitor, which our other games didn't have years ago anyway. So it's those things. You don't have a volume control on the front. So we took a few dollars out of it, and we took a few dollars off of it. And the orders were very, very strong. Operators responded, and, you know, even some home customers. that my feeling was with a license like this especially, I didn't want to have anybody that wants a Harry Potter game to miss out on the game. So that's why it was important to have something at a few different price points. I mean, look, Joe, I wish the game was $6,000. I mean, I wish it was $5,000. I wish it was $4,000. But I wish gas was 30 cents a gallon. and you know it's not happening things today cost a lot of money uh it's expensive because it takes millions of dollars to create the product you have to build it you have to support it and you have to support it with people that know what they're doing um so the price as they say is what it is i mean we're doing the best we can and we held the price on the other two models too and um it's difficult to do that today so we're going down in price when other people are going up yeah i mean you made a good point there talking about production and everything and i'm curious to dive kind of into that side of it with having three models now you're talking about different components that you're putting in you have your own uh manufacturing facility as well how did you keep the quality up without cutting too many corners on the production side so that this is feasible to keep it under $10,000. The arcade version is going to go in arcades and it's going to get beat up. So how'd you guys keep quality without cutting it down? Yeah. The other thing that you don't have, you don't have radcals, you have decals. Well, so one example is if you took things off the playfield in the arcade game, I don't know what you take off. Let's say you took off the upper play field. You have to program the game differently. Right, because you don't have that play field. You have to probably put a different ramp on or something so the ball doesn fall all over the place Now you building two different playfields So you changing stations in the line some stations getting skipped or added. And now you built two different products. And you have to segregate them and you have to not get confused what's going where and why. actually leaving them the same you didn't take anything out harming your customer or the potential earnings of the game and you made it easier to build and you didn't have to do any extra programming or any extra um you know figuring out what goes where and what parts you have and what parts you have extra it's just you want to try to do things um systematically and the same all the time so the more you vary things and change things the more money it costs you to build it so that's a big part of it too um you know and we don't want to we didn't want to take things out of the game we thought the game was great as it was we don't want it to be any less of a game that was designed uh by the team so from a standpoint of this game it just launched right like this is or just a couple days after launch how had this rollout felt compared to previous rollouts having three models like did you guys go through a different process was there more of a marketing push like what what changed from this launch from the last launch you know this launch there wasn't uh negative comments um at the launch and you know i'm a very positive person and i have a thick skin i'm from brooklyn originally street operator so uh i didn't have a lot of people complaining about um silly things that they complain about because you're at a disadvantage you've never played the game you didn't stand next to it you didn't you didn't see it you know you look at a snippet of something and there's a comment and everything um the launch went really well. I think the videos really helped bring the excitement of what the game is and showed people what the game is without them being there as much as possible as we could. I look at the trailer that we made that Alex Manning did and I get a little chill in my back. The whole set that was in there wasn't CG. It was a set they built. The castle was unbelievable production for that. I know all the people that buy our games know that we look at every detail. We examine things with a microscope. We're critical of ourselves. We're our own biggest critics. And we don't want to make good games. We really don't. We want to make great games. and it takes more to make something be great. And people get criticized as the launch, you know, oh, you know, they need a hit game. They need this, they need that. Everybody needs a hit game. You know, what do you think? We're making a game to not be a hit? You know, we do the best we can do and we put it out there and we expect great things to happen. We don't expect failure. We expect success. Yeah, obviously. I mean, why would you get a huge IP like this and try to flop? Like that's that doesn't make any sense. Right. Right. Right. With this arcade specific launch, why should arcades be looking at you guys differently from your previous releases? Right. Like a lot of people were like, oh, Jersey Jacks are their home games. They they're just they're not the same as as as a route game. Right. So what did you do differently this time that like arcades should take you very serious? well toy story was on the replay magazine chart 11 months out of 12 last year is the number one earning game on location so there are a lot of smart operators that operate our games um what should be different is is really the price operators were complaining about like we need a game to be ten thousand dollars or less you know we can't pay we can't pay 12, 15, whatever. Okay, I get it. So I'm giving you a game that has all of the features and toys of a $12,000 game just to set up for an arcade. So buy it. Now you don't have an excuse. You know, it probably will have a good resale value too if you keep it nice and people will carve their initials into it. And we developed something else for arcades. It's called the Jersey Jack Pinball Game Changer. And I can tell you what that is. Yeah, definitely. Let me know a little bit more about what that is. Okay. It's three key fobs that are included with your game that have a QR code on each one. and on the screen of the game as well are three QR codes, easy, normal, and wizard. And you can walk up to the game with the key fob or you can take a picture of the QR code on your phone and push the start button of the game, hold it up to the camera on the game, and the game reverts to those rules at that difficulty level. So that's a good move. That way you can kind of change it up a little bit, make it more difficult depending on what your clientele is like. If you have very casual players, you make it really easy. If you're a pinball bar that close leads regularly. It's not the operator doing it. It's the player. Oh, it's the player. Okay. The player does that. Okay. The player does that. So you walk up to your game or you have your game at home. You have somebody that's just learning how to play pinball. I did it on my own game. I play easy. so I get further in the game. I get multiball sooner. I get wizard mode sooner. Actually, if you wanted to play wizard mode, I could play easy and you could play wizard and we play against each other. That's cool. I like that you can change the difficulty depending on how many players you have on the cabinet. Exactly. It's never been done. It's an idea I thought of 15 years ago. I asked programming people to do it years ago and they looked at me like I was crazy because we didn't have a camera in the game. Then I finally got a camera in the game with Dialed In. I asked about it. I forgot about it. I remembered it about a year ago. And a few months ago when I was in Chicago at the factory, Joe Katz and Duncan Brown surprised me. And they worked on their own time and they made it happen. So it's just the coolest thing when you see it. It's something nobody else can do and it differentiates our games more than other people's games. And I think it something that will help games make more money on location Newer players get frustrated with games They get so far in the game and maybe they give up or they don want to play or they play something different. This actually is going to encourage play and teach people how to play pinball a little bit better. I like that idea and I love that your team didn't tell you that they were doing it and they just surprised you and they were like, hey, here's your idea. It's done. We're not going to talk about it it's done and you can check it out yeah most of the time they're good surprises once in a while is not a good surprise but surprise that was a good good surprise i'm glad that happened so i got two questions for you great um as as someone new myself to the selling of pinballs and in in the space like what advice would you give me to to build out my client book and kind of bring more pinballs uh to arcades well years ago uh with pinball sales.com i realized that people work and do things and buy things at different times of the day operators pretty much concern with one one or two things you know like i said already what what the game makes and what the game costs because they're looking for roi right return on investment how quick can i get money back um if you can demonstrate the value in in that you have a good audience um there was there were times where i did did games and i actually put them in a location to prove to somebody that they made money or i gave them to an operator or a distributor and i said put this in and see what kind of money it makes and i knew it would make money because if the game is set up the right way uh and it's priced the right way you'll make money i mean years ago when we first did wizard of oz um i had an operator down in rohoboth beach call me and say you know this game's no good it doesn't make any money and blah blah blah well talked about how the game was set up i didn't go down to rohoboth beach but one of my questions was what's it priced at and he said well it's priced at $2 a play. I said, listen, I wouldn't play it for $2 a play. You got to put it at something reasonable, put it at 75 cents a play or put a bill acceptor on it, make it like six games for $5 or give some kind of bonus for extra, you know, money in there. You know, if it's a dollar a game, let's say you put a five and you get six games, right? I'd rather take what we say is a fast nickel than a slow quarter so i'd rather do a volume business so you got to know your room you got to read the crowd um he reluctantly lowered the price and the game started earning great money so a lot of it is how the game set up because he said well at two dollars a play i'm never going to pay the game back i says well if people don't play it you'll certainly never play never get paid back so uh how it's set up is important and i would say on this game the back legs need to be up the game needs to be on the second line the bubble level is instructions in the game so that's important too that the play field is at seven and a half degrees because that's how it was designed but the other thing if you want to sell stuff be available i have an 800 number that i still have i put it on my website i was getting calls all day and night every day of week when my competitors were sleeping or or you know playing golf i was selling games i outsold everybody everywhere because i was into it i'm still into it a lot of my customers became friends um it made it difficult for me to charge full price but everybody got a deal of some kind Everybody was happy. You know, try to give your customers something that nobody else can give them that doesn't cost you any money. Think about that one. I think that's great. Great advice. I mean, the relationship building is huge. And, you know, you got to go above and beyond. That's how you get people. That's how you keep people. And it helps you. It helps them. Everybody wins. Yeah. I mean, you know, relationship is pretty much everything. I mean, the product. What I did was I absorbed all the aggravation for the sales. you know we had brand new games that we were opening up years ago and the flippers weren't right or something wasn't right and we we prepped them before we delivered them and then you know mrs jones calls you uh three weeks later a month later and says my flippers stopped working on my game i sent people out doing service calls for free what am i gonna do charge her a hundred dollars she just paid four grand which was a lot of money for a pinball machine back in the mid 2000s. She just paid four grand. Do I want the $100 or do I want $100 worth of goodwill in the bank? So I put the goodwill in the bank. It all came back to me when I started Jersey Jack Pinball because everybody trusted me and they figured if I took care of them before, when I was repping the other company, I'd probably take care of them now. So what you put into it is what you get out of it. Yeah, that's great advice. I'm going to take that and I'm going to use that. and I appreciate it. And the last question I have for you is from an arcade owner, Brian Armitage at Starcade in Minneapolis or St. Paul now. And I know he's going to get one of these. We've been talking a lot about it. He asked if you were on Deserted Island and you had one pinball to pick from and it's not a Jersey Jack, what pinball would you have with you? I think I have, it's hard man. I think I have a Bally Strikes and Spins. Okay, going with a classic, going with one of those. I love that. I think that's a good game to have with you, and I'm sure it's got a lot of nostalgic value for you. So why wouldn't you have a game you love? Or a jumping jacks or a jack-in-the-box. Okay. One of those. Because that's a weird – that was one of the first games I ever worked on. So a lot of weird things, you know, the bumpers at the bottom. When you're at the bottom of the bumpers, you're in trouble. If you're at the top, you're okay. And you get all those drop targets and everything, and it's just a wide-open play field. it's a fun game every pinball machine is fun i love every pinball machine even poppy you could find something good about you know i love that i i really appreciate you coming on jack i'm super excited to to get my hands on harry potter and play that i know it'll be soon i'm sure i'll be shooting you a text letting you know that i played it what i think of it um for anybody that's still watching don't forget to like share and subscribe it helps us a ton the way we'll continue to grow and we can all ride it together i'm going to throw links for jack down in the description so you can go check out what they're working on and go play Harry Potter today. If you need any pinballs, you can reach out to me at IndieArcadeWave.com and we will chat about that. Until next time, peace. Thank you.