You're listening to Topcast, this old pinballs online radio. For more information visit them anytime, www.marvin3m.com. Flash Topcast. It's not yet the Topcast we have a designer that designed a number of games for Balli and Williams going from special forces to party animal to Elvira and the party monsters to white water to devil man to scared stiff and now to his current job with stern and pirates of the Caribbean. Special guest. Special guest. So I'd like to introduce Dennis Nordman to Topcast tonight. Again Dennis started working with Balli in the early 1980s and made the transition over to Williams when Williams bought out Balli in 1988. He did a number of very very popular games including the two Elvira games and white water, which definitely is a lot of people's favorites. And he's working for stern, he did Pirates of the Caribbean and he's currently working on a new game for stern. So I'd like to give Dennis Nordman a call right now and we'll give him a little talk here on Topcast. Hello. Hey Dennis, it's Joshua Clay. Can you hear me okay? That's not bad. You know what were your roots like to it? Did you play when you were a kid or how did you get involved in pinball? I think the first pinball machine I ever saw I was probably about. I guess seven or eight years old and one of my father's friends had one. I just I didn't play it very much. I just remember being fascinated by all the bright lights and things. That may even have been a flipperless game. That was in the early 50s, mid 50s probably. Then I didn't really rediscover pinball till I was about 21 or 22 and I think I played at Cedar Point in Sandust, Ohio. They said we'd use our case there and a lot of games. Is that where you're from? I'm from Columbus, Ohio. That's when I rediscovered it and then I played on and off and I see later in life I went back to Ohio State University to major. I was about 30. The major in industrial design and during my senior year I designed a really futuristic pinball cabinet. I used to go play pinball a lot as my research. How did you get hooked up with Balli? That was your first real pinball job, right? What I did was I built a model for my design project. I built a model of this game. Then I had to leave college during the second quarter of my senior year to have back surgery. They didn't offer the courses again for another year. So during that summer, while I was recovering I built a full size version of that cabinet. Went to Shaffer distributing in Columbus and showed it to them and they thought it was pretty cool. Chuck Farmer had worked for them and at the time he was president of the Balli pinball division. So they called Chuck and we set up an interview. I put the cabinet in my van and drove from Columbus to Chicago and made a presentation at Balli Pinball Division. They were in Bensonville at the time and they hired me as a cabinet designer. Now what was unique about your cabinet? I mean this was in a whole pinball machine. It was just a cabinet, right? It was just a cabinet and it was designed to have been made in fiberglass because it had an interesting shape. I built it out of wood. But what was unique of it was on a pedestal. It didn't have four legs. It was on a pedestal and I had designed it so that all the circuit boards and components would have been housed in the pedestal. The play field, let's see the glass level. The play field level was about three or four inches lower than a regular pinball game at a time. But I had raised areas where you could rest your hands for the flipper buttons and my reason for making it lower was so that younger kids could see the play field a lot easier than on a regular pinball game. They ever incorporate any of your design design? The thing that I, when I designed this game, this cabinet, at the time I designed it, games were digital, but they still had the digital displays stuck in four places in the back glass like the where the old drum reels used to be. My reasoning was I put all the displays down in an area just above the play field so that players could easily act, you know, view their scores while they're playing. And so the one thing that did come from that cabinet was all the scoring areas being put down at the bottom of the back glass for all four players. What came to they first do that in? I believe rapid fire was the first game that did that. What year was this that this whole thing took place? Well, man, you're going to have to year. I early 1980s. So what was your first, when your first official job was a cabinet designer, but I mean, did you stay as a cabinet designer for very long? Nope, not for very long because after a year, Valley merged with Midway and I got laid off. So the things that I had done during that year, I designed the rapid fire cabinet and the Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man cabinet. And then they had a lot of rapid fire cabinets left over so they turned them into eight ball deluxe limited edition games. Yeah, and sent hard too. That's right. And then I was working on some redemption games, some ideas from a toy company in Chicago. Marvin Glass used to submit ideas to us and I worked on a couple ideas for redemption games, but then I got laid off after a year. And then I went to Gottlieb, which became myelstar. So you were in the middle of all these transitions going on? A lot of transitions and ended up being laid off. How long were you at Gottlieb? I think I was there for a year, a year and a half and I didn't design 10-ball games there. I submitted ideas for video game ideas and my game. Us versus them was their second laser disc game that they did. The first one was Mach 3. And then I wrote the script and built some models and things for the us versus them. But then you got caught in the transition there with premier or was it with myelstar? I think Coca-Cola had purchased myelstar. And so I got lost in that transition. So how did you end up back at Valley? After myelstar, what did I do? I was unemployed for a while and I tried to sell some redemption games to, I think it was grand products. I forget. Yeah, it might have been grand products. That didn't work, but then I submitted a 10-ball game idea back to Valley again. And this was my first 10-ball game and I made a drawing and my theme was, at the time it was called Ranger based on the Army Rangers. And that's right after the movie, Rambo had come out. And that game, and so they liked it and they hired me. Of course, I still knew a lot of people. They were Jim Pat, what was their Greg Flair, Greg Kamek. That game became my very first 10-ball game, which was Special Force. Now, yeah, you see, you were a little head of the curve. If you had waited until that Tom Hanks movie had come out when the, you know, that World War II movie with Tom Hanks, and they were all part of the Rangers. See, you were head of the curve. You could have capitalized on that. So Special Force is when you designed that, you designed that outside of Valley and then submitted it. Did they make very many changes with the final? Actually, I went into Valley and then I designed the game at Valley. With a lot of Jim Pat was helped because I had never done a game before. And I actually wired that game by myself. I couldn't even possibly do that today. Was it pretty fun to do that? Wiring wasn't fun, but it was really fun to design and build my first game, absolutely. Now, I was looking on the internet pinball database and they have a thing called Special Force Girls. What's that all about? I believe that was a German game. That was the German artwork package for Special Force because they were very against war theme, so you couldn't sell a war theme in Germany. So they just put some more, put babes on the back glass and called a good? Back glass made it more tolerable. Now, the helicopter in Special Force is kind of cool. Did you have any resistance from the whole texture to the whole game? It has almost a very molded plastic texture to look like the Vietnam or something like that. Was there any resistance to get all that worked on and all the molding and figures in that? That was my goal, was to make it look very jungle-like and more like. And actually, it wasn't molding. It was all flat butirits that at the time when Bali was doing any butirits stacking, they used nuts and bolts and I used PC board standoff to attach all the butirit pieces together and they all came in white. But I didn't know this. Jim Patlet told me this that you could just use Rit Die and die those nylon standoff greens. So we had ladies in the factory boiling pots of Rit Die and I went out to the store and bought some green die and we died all those post-greens. Were they pretty happy with the sales numbers? They sold like 2750 of those games with it. Was that a pretty good run for them? I thought the run was closer to 4,000 for that game but yeah, they were happy with it. It did okay. So you did pretty good for your first game then? Yeah, oh yeah. And the funnel that I don't think there ever been a funnel on a game before, at least not a modern game that I knew of. These line drop targets, the innovative feature there was that they were memory drop targets so each target had a coil. So if you earned rockets, you could push a separate flipper button, fire a rocket and knock the drop target down without hitting it with the ball. Yeah, that is kind of a cool fixture. Did you, that used the Bally 6803 board system that kind of had like a, you know, they used this kind of weird thing for the computer control lighting where they had one SCR that could control two lights depending on the wave of the AC current. Was that all pretty confusing or you didn't have to deal with that? I didn't have to deal with any of that, thank God. Yeah, I've had to fix a few of those and they've always been tricky. I'm not, I'm not very, very good when it comes to electricity. I can put in a light bulb that's about it. So now your next one was party animal and that was, I had a myth that was one of my first pinball machine purchases and when I heard that game like the audio track Burp and Belch, I just said I got to have this game. Another one of my innovations, a belching game. Well, when you hear those games today, they sound terrible, don't they? No, actually they don't. I think that one is pretty cute, frankly. That game, that was the hardest pinball game for me to design because everybody probably has one good game in them because you accumulate ideas for years and years and years and I used up all my good stuff on special force and to design a second game was very difficult to come up with ideas and figure out how to do it. Now who came up with that theme? See how did that, I don't remember how that came about. You know, it's kind of a cool game. Now I heard that there was two different trans lights for the game like a bar version in all, you know, I don't know what the bar. There was a beer version and a dad's root beer version. Well, the root beer version was more for family locations. And so was that your idea or ballies? It wasn't my idea, it was probably marketing department decided they needed that. Did they actually sell a lot of those, you know, dad root beer ones? I have no idea. I've never even seen the dad's root beer one before. I remember seeing them. I don't have a trans lighter or anything like that. I didn't save enough stuff. My wife used to always say quit bringing that crap home. So it's all in the bottom of some dumpster somewhere. Yeah. She used to work for, I met her, she worked for Chuck Farmer. She was the Chuck was the president of the Ballet Pinball Division and she was his secretary and before that she was secretary to Bill O'Donnell Jr. And she told me stories of just throwing so much stuff out. Every time she needed room in the stock room, she just threw away tons of promotional stuff. Fliers and goodies and plastic toys and this mess, she would just toss it in the trash. Driving all the current pinheads crazy, you guys threw it all out. Oh, the stuff is valuable on each day now. All right, so after party animal, you did the black water, the black water 100, which was kind of like the last ballet game. It's a motorcycle theme. And once again, man, talk about a play field that's pretty sophisticated with lots of what you call a buterit. That one actually had a lot of vacuum forms on it. So that was in flat. It was just flat plastics. And we called them buterits because that's the kind of plastic they remain out of. Play field plastics is maybe what most people call them. But so special force just had stacked flat plastics but black water 100 had actual vacuum form molded plastics. No, that's a wild game. I mean, a friend of mine has that and I play it in. I mean, it's just, I mean, from a design point of view, I mean, that was like, I've never seen anything like that in a game. I really had fun designing that game. I like to try to do things really wild with different my ideas for I'm trying to make it as much like a motorcycle race as I could. Are you a motorcycle person? I used to be. I've actually raced in the actual black water 100 race a few times. And I used to, I used to race a lot when I was back in Ohio. Did you have to get a license to use that name black water? I had to use that and actually the race promoter and his wife came out to Bali. They have a name designed after their race. Was that a hard license to get? Oh no, that was easy. Do you have to pay him any money? Yeah, I'm sure we paid the money. I forget how much we paid them but it was a license like in the other license. And how did you think that game came off? Well, I was happy with the way the play field lay out and all my crazy shots and my up and down ramps and the area backed by the bottom aren't you used to be. I wasn't happy with the sound for the music on that game. Why? What was wrong with the sound of music? I just didn't think there was enough to put in to it at the time. Was that because Bali was kind of sliding downhill at that time? I think so and they were very enthusiastic about putting a lot of effort into the game. How was the transition from when Williams bought Bali midway? I mean, how did that whole thing go down? We just came to work one morning and they told us we were sold. And actually that day I wasn't there for some reason, I don't remember but I went to the prison there and all the other people and they said, yeah, we've been sold the Williams. Something you will be let go so that was kind of a nerve wracking time. But I think the ones that went or it was me and Jim Pat Law. I think Greg Kamehk was already gone by then. And Lord Pemberton, he went and I think that was about it as far as game designers. So when you went over to Williams was the was the company culture a lot different than Bali? The company what? The company culture. Well, we all felt like outsiders for a long time. Each of these I and her head is in an office. I remember at Bali we just had cubicle. Oh no, I had an office. I had an office when I was at Bali. But it was run essentially the same. So it was basically just the paycheck was different, not much more? Yeah, I don't think the paycheck was much more to start with. No, I meant just the name on the paycheck. Oh. That was different and we struggled for a while to get things done. All the Bali designers because we had trouble getting stuff done in a model shop and the prototype shop. But eventually they realized we could do some things. So you mean they didn't believe in you guys at first? You guys were just left over baggage or something it sounds like? That's what we felt like. We were the company that they had to buy. When you came over I mean you were what in Bensonville before and now you were like downtown Chicago right? Yeah. How was that transition? It's just had to learn to deal with Chicago three ways. Now the first game that they had you work on though was Elvira and the party monsters. That's kind of a big theme and a big, you know, it turned out to be a really successful game. I mean how did you land that project? Now the first game that they had you work on though was Elvira and the party monsters. That's kind of a big theme and a big, you know, it turned out to be a really successful game. I mean how did you land that project? Nobody at Williams thought that was going to be. This was their first license I think. Or what are their first licenses? Now the first game that they had you work on though was Elvira and the party monsters. That's kind of a big theme and a big, you know, it turned out to be a really successful game. I mean how did you land that project? Nobody at Williams thought that was going to be. This was their first license I think. Or what are their first licenses? And I don't think they expected much from it. Was it your idea to get that license? No that was Roger Sharpe's idea and Roger Sharpe presented it. I don't know if, if none of the Williams guys were interested or if they all had projects at the time, but I remember they didn't know who to assign it to so I worked on some ideas and Jim Patla worked on some ideas and they eventually selected the way that I wanted to go and I got the project. I mean was that an easy project or a hard project? I mean the game came out great. I mean it's a killer game. Fun project. It was, I think that was the first one Greg and I worked on together and we just had a great time working on that game. Did you ever get to meet Cassandra? Oh yeah we met Cassandra several times for that game and also for scared stuff. And now what is the deal with the broken bone thing on the on the play field? That's a story probably everybody knows about now during when I went to Williams that's when I met Steve and Mark Ritchie and I hadn't ridden any dirt bikes since I since I started back to college in Ohio and then moved out to Chicago and I found out that Steve and Mark used to ride a little when they were in California and so Steve had some old beat up bike and Mark had a bike and we went down to a riding area in southern Illinois. I'd never been there before I think I think they were so we were riding and we came out of the woods onto this nice little dirt road there was about four I was I forget who some of the other guys were Steve's son was there too and I was I was last and so I was showing off and I went blowing past Mark and I was concentrating on Mark and not on the road and as soon as I passed Mark the road made a sharp right turn there's no way I could make a turn and I hit some rough stuff off to the side of the road and flew over the bars and all I can remember allowed noise and I can remember just kind of laying there on my side and I looked down and my my left leg my femur was bent in a V shape and I was like oh man I really screwed up now and Mark came over and he was really scared and nervous and I couldn't catch my breath as I broke three ribs and knocked a wind out of me and he ripped my helmet off which he probably shouldn't have done he says oh Dennis don't do this to me Dennis hang in there so I spent three months in the hospital and I had just before we went riding I had just about finished the all-virus whitewood so during the three months I was in the hospital Steve did some work on the game and I believe Mark did some work on the game and Jim Patla did a lot of work on the game I think Jim Patla actually kind of like took over as director and they refined a few areas did everything it took to get it into production so they didn't make any big changes to the to the design no but that's why Greg put all the broken bones all over the back glass now in when they were doing this and you were in the hospital did they like bring by you know design pictures or ideas I was drawings and Chris Granar would bring tape to the music and Mark Finatra the program or would come and we'd have meetings so we got it that so when it did turn out to be a really successful game I mean you know was was was management surprised the only thing I can remember was when we won best new product of the show they seem surprised but they just never made a very big deal about it and my this is just my own personal feeling I think they were a little embarrassed that a ballet guy could do that and they just sell enough of them they cut it off too soon yeah because they probably could have really cranked up the I mean they sold somewhere around I don't know 4,000 or so but they could have really cranked the production on that one up oh they sold more police forces yeah go figure that because that game is not memorable compared to El Vira I know so that's what we as ballet desire so we had to deal with was there ever a point in time where you overcame that that I don't know that that that second class citizen feeling I thought I thought like I did with white water because finally I broke the 4,000 barrier and that game did like 7,000 I think well your next one after El Vira was was the doctor dude now whose idea was that for that theme that theme was Greg's idea Greg had a lot of influence on all the party themes doctor dude was originally I had started that I think that was my first game that I had started at Williams it was going to be teenage mutant Ninja Turtles and that spinning disc area was going to be like some kind of doctor doom machine or some kind of machine that the turtles had to destroy but management thought that theme was a little too juvenile so we didn't do it so it's that for a while then I did El Vira and after El Vira I went back to it and Greg came up with his doctor dude in his excellent Ray idea yeah because data east ended up with that you know data east ended up with Ninja Turtles and that their version of that game and it certainly doesn't do anything for me I don't know if that makes you feel better or not so I didn't mind not doing it you know so the whole party theme was really was was Greg's it was Greg's thing it was Greg's influence yeah so he was a party guy well there was a lot to do with there was a lot of things you could do with a theme like that and you didn't have to pay any royalties damn we didn't have to pay any royalties so were you happy with the doctor dude in the end oh sure I was always happy with every game in the end and then you always want to go on to the next one and do better that was basically like a on the hardware platform that was like a system 11 platform but they made a few with the newer WPC hardware I mean how do is there any reason that came about you don't have to ask somebody smarter than me I don't pay any attention to the hardware I just like to have fun so then you did another party theme you went to party zone was that it was the right after doctor dude yeah right after wow we had partying on the brain didn't we you sure did and that was that Greg again helping out oh yeah and that sort of incorporated all of the party games together because I think we had party animals in there and party dudes and in the party zone was like the ultimate party game now that game was our system for that one yeah there you go now that game you was one of the early games to use a dot matrix display did that did that influential design at all no I just thought the dot matrix guy do do what they wanted to do for that one so they had complete rain there but how did you feel about the dot matrix displays compared to the alpha numeric stuff well they look like a cool improvement because we could do so much more with them but at the same time if you're watching the game it's kind of hard to realize what's going on a dot matrix display too but part of it was well it kind of tracked other players because they can see it from across the room and something cool is happening and it made pinball look fresh and new now that at this time the the ballet games had a kind of a different cabinet style than the Williams games were you responsible for that at all no and I don't even remember it yeah they had like they wanted to keep a different look they probably wanted to keep on our remember at the time the the ballet games were going to be the license games the Williams games were going to be the original games and so they wanted to keep a different look to the cabinets to just differentiate between the two brands yeah then your next game was actually a Williams title and that was the one that you really hit the ball out of the park you know of course whitewater now are you a white water type sporting kind of guy no I never did whitewater rafting but I just thought that would be an exciting theme so did you pick that theme yes so did want the convinced management that it would be good I don't remember what I did to convince them but I remember going to the library and getting a lot of books on a whitewater rafting and learning all about it so I can get all the terminology right and and they could seem like a real rafting experience that's where I got the idea for for Bigfoot because in one of the books I read there was I think in a there's a river in Washington state and there's a legend that Bigfoot comes around at night and steals all the rafters supplies so that's how I got the idea for the Bigfoot character in the game I've never heard that before well amazing game I mean I own one of those games and it's just the the the whole thing with the I guess it's kind of your style with that kind of you know modified flat plastic and vacuum-formed plastic stuff but I mean you and you had the whirlpool ramp again and the ramp down the left side that goes up and now kind of like a like a wave that the whole game it just really is cool that game I had I had in my mind with all these different levels but there was I couldn't draw this game because I had no idea how all this stuff was going to fit together vertically so I made a a foam corn cardboard mock-up first so I could check hold it all my dimensions and measurements and see if I had enough space to do everything I wanted to do I think Jim Schalberg still has that foam core model when you went you know to get all these parts made did they like look at your cross-eyed you know with all these funky ramps and stuff no it was it was the nice thing about working at Williams then was that we could pretty much do whatever we wanted to do with our budget I guess we're at the time for the cost of the game we're way higher than what we can do now it's turned and pretty much what we wanted there's always stuff you had to take out but yeah I don't think a game like white water could be made now well was there anything in white water that that had to come out you know for for cost reason there was I don't remember but I always remember the standard joke we always used to put a lot of drop targets in so when something had to come out we pulled them out I've heard that before because they've heard that I was an expensive unit and drop targets are cool but they're expensive and at the time I guess we everybody was really into designing you know wild ramps and other mechanical things so the drop targets would be the first to go was there anything in that game that that you were that you were sorry that you did or that you sorry that you didn't do in white water well I can't think of anything either way right now I was I was really happy that it that it all came together which I wish the the molded plastics like the boulders had been made out of a stronger material now did you do the rules designed to when it comes to these games I do some of the rules Mike Boon did some of the rules it's not like one guy says we're gonna do it this way I'm sure I had a lot of pull because I was like the director and the designer in the game and a lot of the basic stuff was mine but then Mike could incorporate whatever he wanted and I think that Chris and Greg also participated in the rule design that's that's the way it worked for most games it was whoever had a great whoever had a decent idea if everybody liked it it went in the game yeah because Mike's rule was the vacation jackpot I mean that's one of his major contributions and I thought because I'm not a very good player and I thought Mike that's really stupid nobody's ever gonna get that but it turned out to be one of the things that a lot of people talk about yeah the depth of the rules in that game is was was really really quite quite deep at you know I think that was probably my first really deep game and I liked all of the I'm not sure I planned it from the beginning but I liked all the different strategies that you could use to play that game and try to stack things up so you could get the highest points try to stack things up so you could get it to work with 5x playfield thought it was big for what was kind of cool myself I had fun with the big guy like that and and his face was modeled after me John Yalsey came out to my house and did some caricature sketches of me then we gave those to the sculptor and so I'm bigfoot on that game I don't know was that a good thing or a bad thing I don't know if that's something I put on my resume I had a lot of big hair and a dark beard at the time so I kind of looked at time I bigfooty all right we're gonna take a break from our talk with Dennis Nordman and we'll be back right after this message this portion of topcast is brought to you by pin game journal covering the world of pinball is them online at www.pingamejournal.com all right we're back with Dennis Nordman now the top around that game with the with the waterfall lights who's idea was that that was another wet was one of the happy accidents I say also man called Greg and say he had this new material that he could create motion with in this foil material with chasing light and so Greg said okay come on in we'll look at it and we saw it and it was amazing and I actually forget what he demonstrated I don't know if it was a waterfall or not so we asked if he could do a waterfall and it took a while but we got it working right and it was a pretty cool fact it just happened now whose idea was it to have a blue cabinet I'll probably john jails you so he would controversial no just I mean most or no I mean other than funhouse everything's basically got a black cabinet yeah you know well you know blue water I guess yeah there you go so that was that was the the art the art guy came up with that one yeah that was john did you have an artist that you like to work with I don't you know I it well it turns out that I work with Greg the most so I I always really enjoyed working with Greg now why didn't Greg do the the art for that game for white water was busy on something else and I don't know what else was was around then but Greg did the the the the top or for white water but john did the the back left and I'm sure Greg would remember why but I don't remember so your next game was demolition man and tell me about some of the challenges that went through on that game that game was a little hard because I had the script to work with and some pictures but I really tried hard to make it follow the movie and to make it a lot like the movie I think I was successful at that but when I saw the movie I wasn't really very impressed with the movie but it had a lot of battle scenes in it and I like working with the wider body and that game had a lot of nice flow and ramp shots so I enjoyed building that game and I liked I put those handles on it because the the movie was nothing but weapons and guns and firing and shooting and I thought oh wouldn't it be cool if I could make the player feel like he's part of this and like he's firing guns and weapons and so that's how those those handles came about whose idea was it to make you know the scoring is almost different if you play with the handles instead of the flipper buttons who idea whose idea was that uh whose idea was what the scoring was almost different if you if you use the the the handles versus the flipper buttons whose idea was that I don't remember who's idea that was probably that might have been had f's fridge people to use the handles I don't know and what about the the art what there I heard there was some challenges with the art in Wesley Snipes and and Stallone had a lot of challenges with that art because everybody wanted their head the same size and everybody wanted their head big so that finally just gave up and did what hope but all the talent wanted and and that's how the backlash came out so when you did a backlash like that you mean you'd actually have to give a copy to each one of the actors and they'd have to sign off on it for every license game we have they have to sign off on it sure and was this always easy to work with El Viro was easy yeah she was easy to work with she's got all the attributes and she's the only actress too in the in the back class yeah right you know so here you got three people you know you got Stallone and you got Snipes and I guess to a smaller degree bullet right right now was bullet very hard to work with we really never had we never worked with those people it was just getting the approvals for the illustration for the artwork so who complained the most you know you have to talk to Doug about that I don't know I think I think it might have been Wesley complained a lot because he didn't like looking real sinister from what I remember but he was such a sinister guy in the movie right now the next one he did was Indianapolis 500 and now I've got that game it well it's I don't know neither cars ever crash talked to Andy marketing they go around and around and around and around but nobody ever crashes oh you can't well no we couldn't have crashes I actually had and Mark Weyna reminded me of this I had this little plastic box and I had a bunch of crashed car parts and you were going to hit it with the ball and parts would fly everywhere and they absolutely would not allow any crashing so you couldn't have anything I mean it seems kind of hypocritical well they just didn't want to promote crashing they wanted to promote the the quality racing maybe you guys should have went for the NASCAR theme instead I don't think those guys would have complained no they kind of like crashing don't they hey sure see do they I mean all the six o'clock highlights are always crashes I know yeah but Indy 500 was more upscale uptown huh yeah yeah that was yeah so I mean was that game were you were you satisfied with that game in the end yeah I was pretty satisfied with every game in the end but I mean was it I didn't didn't like a you know a theme limiter like that you know kind of taking a lot of the fun out didn't that kind of you know curtail your creativity yeah there's all especially with license games there's always something that you want to do that you can't do I had problems with pirates and I have some problems with my current game but licensing gives you a different set of problems and an original theme yeah but there's always some things that you feel like your hands are tied you have to work around it yeah the one thing in the Indy 500 never seems like the race ever really comes to a conclusive end yeah I then you don't have to play that game for a while I kind of forget how it all worked now the next one of course was the you know one of my favorite games and that's the the scared stiff which is like basically L pirate too so how was was Cassandra now was a little bit older was she easier harder to work with at this point she was just as easy to work with and just as fun to work with and there's a lot of people at Williams that didn't want to do that game at all because they thought oh we did a viral on so why do you want to do it again so was that your idea to get that theme again yeah I wanted to get it again and then Greg came on board and he wanted to do it again too and I I had gone to a car show in Chicago and I knew Al Vauer was making an appearance there and so I was able to talk to her at the car show and she said sure she'd love to do another game so that's how that got started now the some of the interesting stuff on that game like the glow in the dark parts tell me how did that come about and why didn't that end up in the final you know like in the final production versions well in the beginning the plastic smolder told us oh yeah that glow in the dark stuff that'll be free that won't cost you anything I'll just throw that in there and I just thought it would be nice because I thought at one point like to turn off all the lights in the game and I knew that stuff would be activated by the lights in the game so if you played in a dark room you'd see all these bones glowing but it turned out I guess after I got laid off they decided to raise the price on the glow in the dark bones so they had to leave the glow in the dark stuff out now the the bony beast I had in that why did that have so many different incarnations yeah you know I don't know why we why the sculptor would change it I don't know why it was changed so many times because each one looked pretty cool but maybe he just felt like he wanted to tweak a little bit here and there and maybe some of the early ones would have been too hard to mold because they had too much detail in them now the the skull pile with the LEDs and the candle flames was that just a cost savings thing why that didn't get implemented into the final game yeah that was a cost savings thing I found that when I was at the Disney World and I went through the pirates of the Caribbean ride and I came out and they have a little store there and I saw this pile of skulls and I thought oh wow that might be cool for my next Elvira game so I bought it and I drilled out all the eyes and stuck some LEDs in there and it looked really nice so then we sculpted our own and we had the LED boards made they were flexible they were boards that were designed to be bent and fit in place so they had all the engineering work done and some boards made and everything but for cost reasons they took it out now whose idea was it to include that that decal to hide the cleavage on Elvira I believe that was marketing again those guys screw up everything you know family locations wouldn't get irritated yeah those guys screw up everything don't they on the first Elvira Elvira in a party monsters I had red eyes in the skull and they made us change it to green because they said in the south that the red eyes represent the devil and they could never sell any games in the south okay so that's why the skull mountain Elvira the party monsters has green eyes now there was a change on the play field I mean this is kind of a bizarre one but the stiffle meter level three the face on their change is there any story behind that I don't know what the deal is with that that's something you'll have to ask Greg about was there anything else anything else that was any good stories or anything fun about that game oh it's probably a million other like this I can't remember them all with the one one story I remember is that we had a hell of a time trying to come up with a cool name for that game and we got really far along and Greg needed a name because he was doing the artwork Greg and I kept coming up with Elvira and the spooky spider or Elvira and the hunter house or Elvira and the something or other and it just wasn't working and finally Greg and I thought we had it and I forget what it was that we citer was so great and we went in and we told Mike Boon and and we were Greg and we were so excited and relieved to finally have this problem solved and Mike just went eh that's not so great and so we were really bummed and we went back to my office and we were sitting there kind of feeling glum and Greg looks up in his eyes get wide and he says scared stuff and we knew right then that was the name yeah that is that's a great name now what about the RRR thing on the side of the cabinet another another Greg thing and he like was just an enhancement of rated R this game was rated RRR I think it was rude raunchy and ribbed or something like maybe not rude raunchy and I forget what it all was but it got kind of kind of taken off the side more or less kind of yeah we had to get rid of it so they he put a plum mark through it what was the what it was just a little too too over the edge risk a I guess what happened in 1996 like almost done with that project was that did you get caught up in the black Thursday layoff or something I did and man I was so into work on my game I had no idea that was coming that was I was stunned in fact that morning we uh Mike and I and was a Chris Granner or Paul Hage I think was Paul Hage went downtown Chicago for a a sound recording uh Cassandra was going to call in and do some sound recording but they had screwed up their schedule and she wasn't available so we came back home and I mean came back came back to the office and that's when I got laid off it was me and John Trudeau and Barry Aisler and where did you go from there oh I designed some redemption games for ski ball uh tower power which is a pretty popular game you see that almost in every location yeah it's kind of a standard redemption game yeah and um then I tried a few games on my own and I fold one to Bromley did okay but not great and then Joe Kamenka gave me a call to come out and work at IGT and so to design like new mechanical devices for uh slot machine bonus uh top or things and um my wife didn't want to move so he let me work here for my home in Chicago and I fly out there every month with like a new idea they patented a lot of my ideas and used three or four of them on their slot machine games and then one day right hands are giving me a call and asking if I'd like to design 10 games for Stern and I said absolutely so do you still work for IGT like on a part-time basis oh not at all so you mean you blew off IGT and went to work full time for Stern oh so you're like on the payroll then for Stern employee at IGT and now you're on the payroll with Stern right and of course you got great theme pirates of the Caribbean I mean that got a you couldn't ask for a better theme oh I was a tremendous theme a very fortunate to have that for the theme for my first game after 10 years yeah how was it to have like a 10-year layoff and then was it hard to get back in the groove no because I always really wanted to design another pinball game and um it was a little harder it's turned because we had to do a lot more than I was used to doing at Williams at Williams we always had people that would digitize our playfield and make sure everything was correct and we just we had a lot more help at Williams I have to do the designers that Stern have to do a lot more with making sure you got the punch drawing on the bottom of the playfield on the top of the playfield so all your parts are correct you have to do the trap line for the artwork and just a lot more things you have to do so there was a lot of things I had to learn that I hadn't done before was the was the corporate environment um significantly different at Stern compared to Williams but the major difference I see is that Gary has a lot of control over everything but it's Gary's you mean the management kind of stayed out of the way at Williams yeah pretty much yeah they would you know put their fingers in one to a while but they let us we were able to do a lot of stuff that we wanted to do so is is Gary pretty easy to work with or is he kind of a control freak Gary likes to have a lot of control and there's there's certain things that he believes have to be in every game but I like his philosophy is that he really tries to get every game to have something for the novice or beginning player that they can at least begin to understand what's going on so he always fights for things like that what you said that there's certain things that he wants that he demands in every game like do you mean like from a hardware point of view you know like as far as you know this game has to have jet bumpers that's a pinball game every game needs a plunger shot things like that were Williams didn't have those criteria right now was there any good stories and working with pirates that was obviously another license theme from Disney were they easy to work with no they were the most difficult license we ever worked with everything was separate for that license the only thing we got was the title we didn't get actors we didn't get music we didn't get lines from the movie everything was separate so you know in that respect I was a little disappointed with the game because we couldn't make it exactly like the movie but I was still real happy with the way the the thinking ship came out was that your design that toy yeah I mean I I made it like a little model of how I of how I wanted it to work but I had no idea how he could actually do it but I just want I knew I wanted it to to think the way that it looks and the sales fall down but but John Rotherman the mechanical guy he's the guy that made it work I had no idea how to do all that now is you say that you couldn't get any of the you couldn't use any lines from the movie so that must have been now Disney everything is separate it was it was disappointing I mean even Gary I don't think realize that in the beginning and I just I remember thinking wow Walt Disney was still in charge of this this would never happen was it you mean you would you mean everything was kind of like out of a cart where you get the title you pay this much if you want this actor you pay more if you want lines from the movie you pay more yeah and it would just get spin out of control price wise oh yeah so we just couldn't do it basically you had to make your own Pirates of the Caribbean movie yeah that's what we did now the we licensed that the one song uh yoho yoho it's a pirate life for me we had to pay for that Johnny Dap wasn't interested in doing the line but we had to use a Disney supply town the like and um we would have had to have done that for every character in the movie so we just couldn't afford it so you mean you you actually did talk to the actor Dap and he just had no interest we didn't but through through his agent and our representative at Disney that's how that happened yeah so then they give kind of like a fake Johnny has it maybe to speak his to speak your the lines that you're writing yeah and how did you think that the fake Johnny turned out compared to the real Johnny it sounds good but you couldn't use he's the only one that you could basically copy in the whole movie he's the only character that we could use from the movie but we couldn't use line we couldn't even use his lines from the movie they really had you handcuffed oh I know it was it was difficult and then we had uh everything recorded and we had no time to change it and then Disney decided they didn't like half of the stuff because I think Disney we worked with I guess Disney marketing and then Disney Studios got involved and they wanted to change more stuff so at least the third of the script stuff we wanted to use we had to eliminate it because we had no time to re-record it and they made little changes a few words here and there and we couldn't use it did this score up your timeline big time well we missed I don't know if that was I don't think that was the reason we missed the movie opening but it it just meant that there was a lot of stuff we wanted in that we couldn't put in is it something you can go back later and add back in I don't think so now because we'd have to go through Disney again and that's not gonna happen well I'll tell you one thing that you know from best that I could tell that game sold like gangbusters that game I believe is over 5,000 in less than a year and now with the new movie coming out I you know maybe they'll tool up and do it again yeah well we keep running them every once in a while we get more and more orders I mean I guess some hardcore players it doesn't appeal to but we did something right because we've sold a ton of them I think it's a really good game I mean I've never really yeah I guess some of the hardcore people maybe you know it they don't think it's hard enough or something but you know that's that that comment does not come up a lot you know and I have to give Dwight credit Dwight had four months to do that game and I think he did a tremendous job in four months how long does they usually get a six to eight so you have that boy working overtime oh those programmers they all work over we all work over time so what is the secret to creating a pinball that's fun to play is it ball flow toys theme all the above oh my god that's that's a good question yeah it's like the question of the day right question of the year why ask me that question well I can well you got to understand that the the white water is like I mean you set the mark so high with that game you know I mean people just they ran or even about that game yeah that was a very successful game you know and somebody else asked what your next game in stern is there any way that it'll be reminiscent of white water and and I know you kind of spoke to that a little bit that white water was really expensive to make and that nothing could you that you probably don't have the budget to do that but I mean is there any you know anything that's reminiscent of white water in any of your you know the next game or future games boy I don't think you're going to see a white water again I mean we even have trouble trying to budget a mini play field in anymore you mean a plastic mini play field well plastic is more doable than than another wooden one that's for sure it's just too much money huh I believe that yeah in today's market it's just too much money it's you know all of our costs have gone up so much copper and just everything we do everything's gone up and Gary's trying to hold the line on price increases and our budgets become tighter and tighter for what's in the games is that make things really really tough or just medium tough um well I'll say that it makes some medium tough because whatever you design it's just a challenge to work within the envelope that you have and you know you have a certain envelope a certain budget and so that's the challenge is to try to make something fun within that envelope uh sometimes you know I don't have any formulas or anything that I work with I I start with a blank sheet of paper on every game and whatever comes to me or whatever direction the game kind of tells me that it wants to go that's that's the way I go um so I really I have to have a theme firmly in mind before I can even start drawing a play field because the theme dictates what the features are and the shots are to me that's the way I work anyway well I mean is there you're saying some themes or make maybe more flowing and others are more stop and go like that oh no now the reason pirates would stop and go here is here is my thinking on that uh we we we try to attract new players and there's just not as many people playing in public as they used to be now part of that is because there's no arcades I've talked to um experienced hardcore players that can't even find games on location anymore they travel around the different bars and they can't even find games so now trying to attract new players and keep the highly skilled players that's that's a delicate balance and what I tried to do with pirates was my thinking was that if the balls always flying back to the flippers that's going to intimidate a new player or a casual player because he'll be afraid he's got a flip and he's not scorned anything so with pirates I intentionally