Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedget Pinball Podcast. I'm your host, Alan, owner of the Portland Pinball Bar Wedget. Joined as always by my good friend and co-host Alex, probably best known to most of the listeners by now as The Waterboy. How you doing? I'm doing okay. I'm not doing particularly good because we're recording this separately. So I had to go play pinball in my basement by myself while I waited for you, which was a very depressing experience. playing by myself yeah i mean that's modern pinball dude you gotta play it by yourself because you have no friends because you spend all your money on these pinball machines that you never play that are stuck in the basement of your house right isn't that the modern pinball experience yeah it's like not out on location competing against other people because one game would take an hour for you and your three friends to play yeah we're going off the rails already i'm supposed to be i'm supposed to be plugging our coffee account for anybody that's unaware we're doing uh we're raising funds over on a coffee, what is it? ko-fi.com slash wedgehead podcast. Yeah, if you want to go over there and give us a tip, it's very much appreciated. We finally determined that our next trip following Boston is going to be down to the great state of Colorado. For anyone listening, if you are unaware, we're completely unsponsored. We don't take any of the sponsorship deals we've been offered. We've shot down because we want to give you our true opinion and we always want to remain free and ad free but this is a way that if you'd like to support the show you can we very much appreciate it so again if you want to go there coffee.com slash whitehead podcast all donations on that page will now get an invite to our private discord so if you want all donations of five dollars or more we'll get a link to the private discord yeah but five dollars is the minimum right they can't donate less than that on the website i don't think i don't know five dollars or more you get a link automatically to the private discord and we talk about all things pinball including all the hot new game gossip that we don't talk about on this show yeah all the garbage that's not really worth airtime but everybody likes talking about anyway we talk about in the discord now yeah like what's the worst game i've played in the last year well i'm not going to get into it on the show but you can ask me directly in our discord and i will happily tell you there plus as is the new tradition waterboy has drawn a limited edition rocky mountain floopy trooper sticker and the first 25 people who donate ten dollars or more will receive two of these stickers mailed to them as a personal thank you that's a pretty good deal you know ten dollars for two pieces of hand-drawn floopy trooper art if anybody's not seen uh floopy you know he has nothing to do with flippy the mascot for the chicago pinball expo floopy's an original character nothing to do with flippy nothing to do at all he wears cargo pants so you can tell that it's floopy he's a lovable little scamp he's the mascot of the of the losing teams at wedgehead's uh howdy partner tournaments and for only ten dollars you know you can receive two of them yeah in sticker form in rocky mountain sticker form i guess this limited to the first 25 people that donate ten dollars or more to ko-fi.com slash wedgehead podcast but into the show this episode is a companion piece to our previous episode number 76 original themes this is the opposite or say the modern way of pinball, licensed themes. Since Gary Stern was the last man standing after William shuttered the pinball division in 1999, pretty much all pinball machines have been licensed ever since, with a couple exceptions. It was a strategy that Gary had begun to deploy starting in 1989, and it was something that worked well for them. Since they were without a direct competitor in the marketplace for almost 15 years, they really reset expectations for what a brand new pinball machine was going to be moving forward into the modern era. since in that previous episode we deep dived into what made the williams original theme so good we wanted to kind of do the same thing for why we ended up here why we end up all games are based on some intellectual property nowadays right yeah it's kind of the standard yeah we just want to see like how do we get here because like the more we dug into the original themes in the 90s and we'll do it again on this episode because i think it's good to highlight years and sales amongst manufacturers at this time because the more we dug into you're like like oh yeah well daddy he sort of pioneered it and like that's the way you do you get jurassic park and then you beat your competitors not necessarily i mean that's not necessarily that's not what happened then that's not how it always went yeah so we're going to start with sort of the beginning of the license wars or the real license wars i mean obviously we've talked about this in previous episode bally originally pioneered licenses in the late 1970s we talked about that in the band pins episode i think but they always made a lot more original themes than they did licenses and that continued even after they were acquired by Williams in the late 1980s. Gary Stern started Data East in 1987. He partnered with the Japanese video game company of the same name because they wanted to expand into the pinball coin-op business in the U.S. But even then, their first four games were unlicensed. Laser War, Torpedo Valley, Secret Service, and Time Warp. All original themes. Great art packages, too, on all four of those. Well, Time Warp, actually, but the other three, not so much. But it's like they sell moderate units. There are no real big hits in those first four games. You know, like Laser War sold 2,500. Torpedo Alley sold 1,000. Secret Service sold 2,700. Time Warp sold 2,900, right? So moderate, not great. Yeah, for the era, not great. But then we get Joe Kamikow, who's working at Data East with Gary as their main game designer at this time. He starts pushing for them to do licensed themes as a marketing strategy to sell more games. Like this becomes the strategy for not only Data East, but then later on their competitors and now into Stern. Right. And he ends up setting this sort of precedence. You know what their first licensed game was, Waterboy? Checkpoint's not licensed. I don't know. Checkpoint is licensed technically. I mean, but that's later. Yeah, that's I mean, they had to license the Porsches. Well, I thought they just kind of like knocked him off. Oh, it does have actual Porsche logos and stuff on it, doesn't it? Yeah. What was it? What was their first? Playboy, 35th anniversary in 1989. Ooh. Not a game that most people think about. Gary loves making Playboy machines. He's made two of them. Bally made the first one in 1978. Stern ends up making another one as Stern in 2002. This one was released in 89, and it marks their first kind of shift into the licenses. They only sold 2,300 units of them, so it's not like it was a smash hit. I guess it was Playboy's 35th anniversary in 1989. Hugh Hefner I guess was like a big pinball guy which is why he has so many pinball machines is because he sort of was into pinball and sort of like made the license available plus pinball has a history of scantily clad women yeah it overlaps with seedy activity not a great game not one that people really think about no that's their first because they didn't it seems like a big license the ballet game moved a lot of units they got it they didn't really do too much so I'm surprised that are like, oh shit, we got to like stick with that. Yeah. Do you remember what the first Williams license game was? We talked about it in another episode with our friend Greg Ferreres, didn't we? Yep. And with Roger Sharp, I believe, because he's the guy that ended up getting it. But it was Elvira and the Party Monsters released under the Bally name in 1989. This is after they had already combined after Williams had bought Bally and put them under one roof. And this is where the licensing wars kind of really began. you know like we said roger sharp was at williams and bally and joe cam and cows at data east and later sega elvira sells 4 000 units so essentially doubling what data east sells with playboy damn just kind of like right out the gate yeah well i'm actually you know i'm kind of surprised that the disparity is not more like when you compare the quality of like williams to the early data east games some of the early data east games are fun but williams was like an established name and stuff i'm surprised there wasn't a bigger gap between them honestly i know it's double but when you compare that to like some other numbers we've seen i'm just i'm a little surprised well we're gonna get to some interesting much larger discrepancies here coming up okay going back to data east their next four games were all licensed so it was monday night football robocop and phantom of the opera so none of these games actually though really did any better than their first couple of unlicensed games i mean they sold very similar numbers of units so monday night football sold 1500 robocop sold 1500 it's a shame there should be more robocops in this world that game's awesome and phantom of the opera sold 2750 units and joe cam and cow you have it in the show notes is the acronym podo podo dude people love actor the pinball people love their acronyms i was like what the fuck is podo really yeah they really weren't selling like a substantial amount of these licensed games at all again it's surprising that it used to be like this is what we gotta do this is it dude yeah with other companies doing it in the same year with their original themes okay so i put bally sells 2 500 pool sharks and 7 300 whirlwinds at the same time one of the worst licenses of all time roger sharpe sold his roller games sells 5 000 units because williams made it well and because the king designed it yeah but i just think it's interesting that they get something like monday night football they get robocop they get phantom of the opera they get these licensed things it's their new marketing strategy and yet bally's like here's 2500 pool sharks that's that's more than what you sold of robocop cool sharks it's not even like pool sharks is like a highly regarded game sharks playing pool that's why i included it yeah because it's like uh perhaps these licenses were being used at data east more as like a crutch than as like their winning formula you're like they weren't throwing down huge numbers because of the license they were just kind of scraping by with the licenses you know but joe was convinced that the licensed games were the future regardless and all of their games from this point were gonna be licensed games they didn't make any more unlicensed games so next they made back to the future in 1990 and they sold 3 000 units which is pretty good but it's also still not like a smash you know i mean when back to the future back to the future 2 came out in 1989 like this is still like a monster like relevant license that's kind of surprising to only move 3k the problem with some of these data east games and we'll touch on it a little bit is that some of these games don't get the assets that we want as pinball players or collectors want right in 1990 even were they aware like that people didn't have the internet man could they even be like they're like is this uh i'm blanking on the kid's name back to the future what's his name marty mcfly dude yeah you're like is that even the real marty mcfly you're like in 1990 kids know the difference it's not they know that that's not michael j fox and they know and they know that's not christopher lloyd so that's some of the things where it's like in this era like definitely joe was like it doesn't matter you know he's like in the marketplace it doesn't matter he's toy story four in it yeah he's toy story four back in the day for sure the first big hit that they would have would be in that same year in 1990 it'd be the simpsons they sold 5 500 units uh which is their best-selling game to date by a lot i think any company that sells 5 000 plus units that's like a big milestone to them and kind of the history of pinball so they have a smash hit it's a massive license obviously the simpsons is still on the air today but it was culturally super relevant at this time i mean this is a massive license and they sold 5500 units but i also put in the notes just for clarity here williams released funhouse of the same year and sold 10 750 units yeah well they secured the likeness of uh rudy there for that one i just think it's like it's fascinating right yeah it is genuinely you're like pat lawler can give me the most off-putting theme of all time in funhouse and sell 10 000 of them because it's a damn good game whereas like they're even closing in on 11 000 like it's crazy sometimes when it was by far like the biggest single like peak of its popularity rate in those early seasons yep and you're like they'd made 5 000 which is an impressive amount of sales especially considering that game's not super not super fun it's just nuts i did hear pat lawler say in an old interview that if funhouse would have been the same game but it was the simpsons like if they had got that license and i sort of swapped if that was a bart simpson head in the middle of the playfield instead of rudy kind of talking to you that they would have sold 20 000 units easy dude not a doubt in my mind i think if you had the stars aligned like that it's it's not like one of those things you can't just do that at any point in time but if the stars in that time when they were selling that like those number of units the early 90s and they had gotten that license and everything and had that good of a design behind it easy 20,000 game it would be like a t2 situation you know where all everything hit at once yeah and we'll get to that but they end up making data ease ends up making batman ninja turtles and star trek in 1991 the next year batman and teenage mutant ninja turtles were both licenses that Roger was also going after. So this was the time when like Roger and Joe and Roger talked to us a bit about it when we talked to him about those 90s episodes about Joe Cam and Cal and how they're friends, but they were like, you know, friendly rivals and that they would, you know, Roger always says it like, nah, I didn't, he didn't get anything that I wanted, you know, like I didn't pass. I don't think that's necessarily true. I do think that Roger has his own ideas about what he needed from a license which i kind of you know i tend to agree with him on is like i think that batman and previously like back to the future i think that those games are good examples of like these games didn't come out very good and they didn't get the assets that would have made them really good well like back future has like very famously not aged well in part due to like that lack of assets you're like yes back to the future game but it's like kind of a back to the future because they don't get the licenses they don't get the the voices they don't get the likenesses for the artists on the playfield roger you know said he couldn't secure the likeness rights to jack nicholson and michael keaton for the playfield for batman so he's like well then what am i doing you know like that is not really the batman game i'm not really what am i paying for yeah but joe was like yeah we'll put batman on it people will play because batman people don't really care 3,000 units. It's a different, very different mindset, I think. To me, it feels like Roger really didn't want his name associated with anything but the best, whereas Data East, much like Floopy Drooper, they're the scrappy little guys starting up, and they're just fucking making pinball machines, keeping the line moving, pumping stuff out. Yeah, and trying to find a way to compete. I think there's something to be said for both of those, because when you're the little upstart in an industry dominated by a couple big names, or really one big name at this point, It's like you do what you have to do. And I don't think there's anything like wrong with that. It's just you can see why this choices don't necessarily age as well. And I mean, they sold, you know, 3,750 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They sold 3,500 Batmans, right? He also passed on making Ninja Turtles to let Greg Freres and Dennis Nordman make Doctor Dude. I love that, dude. I'm like, that's the funniest, the funniest game you could be like, no, we've got a better idea cooking. We're making Doctor Dude. i'm like hell yeah you know what they sold 4 000 doctor dude so he was they were fucking right dude they they outsold they outsold the ninja turtles dude at the height of ninja turtles man you know what i mean that is kind of insane so i would have liked to see a dennis nordman greg ferris turtles game though oh yeah i would have it would have came out better because that game's also not very good right like i mean do you want to come on and do a die on this hill episode for some of these, you know, less loved Data East games, let us know, because we like a lot of Data East games, especially the later ones. But these ones are kind of rough around the edges. They they are rough and we're not going to go into all of them. You know, I'm not going to do this whole era because I do want us to do a proper Data East only episode. I want us to do a Sega episode at some point. So we'll save some of that. But I just thought it was interesting because, you know, Data East then makes Star Trek in the same year and they sell four thousand four hundred units so again this is you're like this is getting better like that's good that's respectable but williams at the same time is selling crazy units of unlicensed games in 91 because here it is matched exactly they sell hurricane which is like the worst of the three roller coaster roller coaster unlicensed python game things and they sold 4 400 units that's what star trek sells yeah insane man and then party zone sells 4 000 units on its own and williams when they were doing their licenses this same year 91 terminator 2 again worlds collide perfect 15 000 units they make a sequel to their own original ip bride of pinbot and they sell 8 100 units of bride of pinbot so they're just crazy cooking dude cooking it's kind of nuts because you it's like they're winning even on like the original themes where they're not paying for any licenses they're winning and then when they do get a license locked down they get one that's good and they get you know arnold in the studio to do call outs and shit and they sell 15 000 yep you're like they're getting their money's worth out of the licenses that's the difference but he swings and misses too i mean that's the thing like roger admits it like he he got a bunch of licenses that we're not going to talk about in this episode because it would just be too long and it would fit too well but it's like take you know shadow or congo or ginamonic like yeah there's there's a lot of them that danger of like trying to do things well they're hot right which we talked about with him is that it's it's a very different thing when you're trying to like predict things before they come out and you're like you can have a movie that looks like a success and you don't know till it comes out that it's a dog yeah water world for gottlieb right like same thing yeah so now we move into the peak of the license wars we're going to talk about 1992 and 1993 1992 did any good games come out in 1992 oh baby did they come out in 1992 okay so 1992 marks the release of the adams family by williams valley it's the highest selling pinball machine of all time at almost 21 000 units this is the height of this sort of short pinball resurgence of popularity in the 1990s they also sold 7700 doctor who's and 7800 creature from the black lagoons just under the bally name alone in 1992 and it's a lot of games a lot of games under the williams name they don't make a licensed game that year at all in 1992 but they sold twice as many units of their unlicensed games getaway high speed 2 with 13 300 units and then fish tales with 13 600 units it's insane it's a lot of units of fucking fish tales of a game about fishing game about lying about fishing like you're lying about how big the fish you caught was yeah game about lying it is just kind of nuts i know it's supposed to be the licensed theme uh episode but you're like these are original themes man like when you when you get the pieces together on those you're like yeah 14 000 units fishtails fucking insane so then data yeast at this same time this is their highest selling run this is like williams like this 1992 is a great year for them they start off with hook it sells 6 700 units so damn of a hook of hook this is great geez that game's yeah yes man hey i did die on this hill about hook hook rips okay go back and listen to it lethal weapon three also to die on the sale on lethal weapon three that sells 10 350 units okay okay they're doing yeah see now they're now they're doing good they got the dmds man everything's changing and star wars sells 10 400 units so this is by far their best but i i say that because okay even star wars biggest license in the history of licenses gets smoked by fishtails to be fair to them at this point like 1992 star wars is like kind of died off substantially i think but i mean yeah i guess i guess lying about fishing was just just super hot about fishing what kids were into if you were on the playground 1992 no one cared about star wars you were talking about tall tales about your fishing exploits that's what was happening on the playgrounds in 1992 but then gottlieb also enters the licensing wars in 1992 and they start off with super mario brothers and they sell 4200 units clarify from a previous episode because there was some confusion i think this is not based off of the movie it's based off of the video game for the nintendo i don't know what you're talking about people are gonna write in yeah save your comments i don't care but yeah it comes in swinging with super mario bros 4200 units 500 mushroom worlds all right in 1993 data east made rocky and bullwinkle and sold 5 500 units so a little bit of a pretty steep drop-off but right on its heels they sell 9 000 jurassic parks right damn well that's also because they got the fucking man johnny b over there designing jurassic park john borg john borg some haters would say that it's you know just whirlwind but flipped with a dinosaur that eats the ball but you know i mean whirlwind's a pretty fucking good game so you know i'd say it's jurassic park but good last action hero they make 5 500 units and tales from the crypts they make 4 500 units not bad numbers for trailing off here but also a steep decline from 92 and you remember what Gottlieb makes in 1992 or 1993 here? Oh, they follow up the success of Mario Bros., the video game, with Street Fighter 2, the video game, the pinball. And it says here in your notes that they sold 5,500 units of that thing? Yep. And that they sold 5,700 units of Q-Ball Wizard? Yep. Exact same year. Oh, maybe, because, like, with Pool Sharks, maybe there was just still a high demand for pool-themed pinball machines for some reason. Like, what the fuck, dude? Why are people buying up? They're like, oh, sign me up. Give me another dozen cue ball wizards. I got some thoughts at the end of this episode where I'm going to tie in some of my own personal thoughts to make more sense of this from an operator's perspective. But we'll keep chugging along and sort of end out this era. Because what was Williams doing at this time? They were selling 6,800 Bram Stoker Draculas, one of the greatest games of all time. They sell 12,700 Indiana Jones, and they sell 11,700 Star Trek Next Generations. They also sell 7,000 Whitewaters. Under the Bally brand, they sell 15,200 Twilight Zones and 7,000 Judge Dredds. Damn, that's a lot of games. Selling tons of units, right? So here's the interesting part. One, they're selling 7,000 of my favorite game, Whitewater. I love Whitewater. i think it's fantastic it's an epic game that's for a different episode but you're like dude they're smashing the licenses from data east right like so what's data east doing i mean i guess jurassic park outsells it but then when you look at just the licenses you're like well indiana jones the star trek are at almost 13 and almost 12 there and then they're fucking selling 15 000 units of twilight zone twilight so that's like the equivalent of when this game came out it's like the equivalent of like remember when the monsters came out and everyone's like what the fuck is this like in the 90s the twilight zone was old hat dude that shit was old it was a bizarre choice at this point so it's not like the theme the twilight zone sold those games pat lawler's name sold that game that's not the license there it's people being like you know what pat lawler games We just got Addams Family. We got Funhaus. These games are fucking earning money. Like, we're buying it. Like, that's how operators are buying it. Pat Lomer didn't sell that many units of Roadshow, though. Those licenses are still helping something. Well, yeah. I think it's more about the hot run and the time period. That's why I truncated this to 92, 93, because then we start comparing later runs. It's hard. You can't really compare numbers across years. Let's do it year to year because it changed so fast in the 90s. It was slow in the 80s, then it ramped up, and then it started dropping. Yeah, if you compared pinball sales from 2019 to 2021, it would be absolutely insane. It's like, yeah, things change. This is where we get to sort of the pinball Armageddon, where the end of pinball, I sort of call it. This is what people thought was happening at the time because people were like, oh, shit, right? Williams parent company WMS decides to shut down the pinball division in 1999 because their slot machine business was just too lucrative. Yeah, it's too damn easy to make slot machines. As a publicly held company, they wanted to appease their shareholders and help raise the WMS stock price. Right. So they end up shutting it down. Right. I keep teasing a pinball 2000 episode, which we will do one day in the future. I say this to listeners because it is a great story. but essentially George Gomez and Pat Lawler developed the modular platform pinball 2000 with augmented kind of reality projection onto the play field and it sold very well like the weird part is like this is the last things Williams did and the story is often told as create something special to save the industry and kind of they fucking did right like they made this amazing thing they sold 6,900 units of the first pinball 2000 game revenge from mars and that's with a big price increase they raised the price a lot and pinball machines were not selling in the late 90s so in 1999 they sell 6,900 units with an original theme an unlicensed sequel to their own attack from mars it actually sold like double what attack from our sold it It sold 6,900 units of Revenge for Mars, which is funny. Yeah, that's kind of insane. But then Star Wars Episode I was the second game, and it sold 3,500 units. Again, at this time, that would have been considered extremely good for 1999 standards, where the bottom had fallen out of the industry completely at this time. But Sega, which was previously Data East, would release South Park in 1999, And Joe Kamenkow loves to proudly state that this is one of their all-time biggest successes, that this was the game that put the final nail in Williams' coffin, leaving Sega now as the victorious company at the end of the century. But when you look at the sales, they only sold 2,200 units of South Park. So what does that tell you really? Yeah, you're like, this didn't really make an impact on anything. No, it's like Williams' shareholders decided to close the company. to close the pinball division about like the it's like yeah pinball was like pinball was shrinking but it doesn't mean like it's dead the only problem is when you have a publicly held company you need to grow forever or like people panic yep and it's like well pinball wasn't gonna grow forever in this time period so wms panicked and closed the doors and it fucking sucks but i don't think it was a result of any licensing decisions or anything like that definitely wasn't the result of like the guys working on the games or anything like that either. Yeah. I mean I think it just very interesting from what I heard conflicting reports from operators in the modern era But I think the historical record has basically said and i have no reason to really doubt it necessarily but it like that at the time maybe they didn't sell a ton of these south parks but the operators that did buy them said that they earned really well some modern operators today will tell me the same thing others will be like that game doesn't earn shit i think it has a lot to do with where it's at and where it's at because i think yeah i think what it is mostly with that game in particular is that obviously it's a it's a huge license like it's well known that's understandable the game itself not great right but it's it's easy and it has the theme and so i think if you're sticking it somewhere where people are but they're not necessarily pinball players i think the game does very well probably extremely well and that's where the reputation comes from now if you're in a place where you're a pinball bar in a pinball city full of like your clientele is pinball people are like nah i don't like this right like us pinheads are like nah this game sucks for the most part i'm sure there are fans out there majority right i know there's at least one person that likes it yeah because he might come on and do it on his hill but other than that I don't think I've run into anybody that actually enjoys South Park. So, I mean, it's not a great game. No, I would say it's kind of dog shit.