And I don't know, call me a chicken, whatever. uh dave for you it's a little different i know you were into the racing for quite some time and uh but that's kind of come to a stop now isn't it yeah when you get to a certain age jeff where you figure out that your motor racing costs so much money you can just buy more pinball machines instead so also what's doing the uh the big target race around new zealand which is a famous uh race where you race race around all the country roads and you in your fast cars and we went off the road and my co said we had a car stop right on the side of a 100 fall and we just walked away from it no big deal But my co-driver looked at me and went, we could have been killed then. And I said, yeah, we could have been. What do you reckon? And he never got back in a car again after that. But I kept on going for a few more years. But then the novelty of working 24 hours a day, fixing up racing cars and lying on old concrete floors and taking your gearboxes out. The novelty ran out of that. So now I just stick with fixing pinball machines instead and doing up old houses. That's what I've been doing for the last year. I've seen some of your posts on Facebook. It's very impressive. And I have firsthand experience too. It was years ago. I was having trouble with my Flight 2000 and you reached out to me. I'm seeing this, oh, there's Roto Dave. And what's he got? And you helped me with the fix. And some were easy. Some were a little more complicated. but that's what I love about the pinball community is the willingness to help others and we're all in this fraternity, sorority together. We're all in one big family and there to help other people out so that the community grows. And with your collection, you must be fixing machines all the time. To be honest with you, when you've got 100 pinball machines, it is a full-time job and I'm lucky enough to be sort of – I call myself semi-retired, but I've worked 300. Last year I worked 360 out of 365 days restoring this old house that we were talking about. So I'm just lucky that I just don't have to work a 9-to-5 job. But all the time that I'm not working on the house, I'm fixing pinball machines for people to come around and play when we have our big events because all the big events in New Zealand are held in my house. So we need to keep them all going. And lucky enough, I've been doing pinball now for 30 years, so I've picked up most of the skills along the way. And I can fix 9 out of 10 things I can fix myself. every now and again I need to get someone to do a logic repair on a board or something which is a bit beyond my pay grade but everything else I can do no worries and yeah I love to help people out because everyone's got to start somewhere so most problems when you know what the problem is they're actually really easy to fix it's just knowing what the problem is so you can fix it so yeah when I see someone with a problem online I don't mind reaching out on Pinsight I'm always helping people giving them the tip on how to do little easy repairs because you know if you're going to pay someone $80 to come around and fix up your pinball machine every time it breaks you're going to be a very poor man you talked about having some of the events at your home i have to tell you the one that you did last year and it was in march i was so in awe i was like i've got to get to new zealand i just left australia i could have stayed another month headed over to the pecs for the fish tales symphony for those that don't know please explain what this wonderful tournament was right well that's the brainchild of another guy here in new zealand simon hexston who's played in the world champs in fact he came to canada last time uh so you might have run into simon uh that was his idea and it was all part of the big pin cave thing that we have every march this year it was just before the pandemic so what simon has always been simon's dream we got 10 fishtails from most of them were from the wellington area i loaned him some fishtails parts to make up the big display one that he had with the big fish coming through which you would have seen in the photos and then it was sort of like a speed challenge on all the machines so you'd get 10 people standing up to the machines at a time now you had some goals simon would call out what the goal was so some of the goals were start multi-ball uh start feeding frenzy what else do you have monster fish yeah some of those things so you had to have to do those in a certain time and whoever was the first guy to get it held hold up your hand and you got 10 points and the second person got nine points and eight points and so on so yeah that went really really well i think we had from memory 40 people in it i ended up winning that and then our guests from sweden johan came second i think from memory it's going back a long time jeff you know we're getting old but no it's a great event and the next one he wants to do he wants to do a getaway one because down in wellington just about everyone's got a getaway pinball so we're probably going to do a getaway one next time we're down in wellington next year so maybe you can come down for that one oh fingers crossed that would be so nice but danny what are the tournaments you've been able to sneak in between the odd school here and there over the last year oh pretty much just any of the monthly tournaments we do we haven't really had any big ones obviously since uh covid and then the pin cave covid really hit. I mean, that's really it. I can't hop over the ditch to go to any sort of Brisbane Masters type thing because we've still got travel restrictions here where basically if you leave the country and you come back, you have to stay in an isolation hotel for two weeks and I just can't afford that with my schoolwork. But the monthly is always fun. I get to play with my best friends, aka my parents and my other best friend Mitchell and it's all fun and games and it's always good. The last time I saw you both was at indisc in 2020 in january and danny a former indisc women's champion it was nice to see the banner there from 2018 and some great work and commentary and always a lot of fun playing and dave um we met in a classics tournament i think i didn't do very well and watching you in fact really beat the hell out of me you rolled something what was it i can't remember some uh Wizard, I think. Wizard or Captain Fantastic. Yeah, I like the older games. Now, to be honest, a lot of the new games, because I haven't got new pinballs now, just getting so expensive that I'm not buying them anymore. So some of those, the more modern games, I don't even know the rules of. I still haven't played an Avengers, haven't played a Guns N' Roses, haven't played a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We just don't have them here, so I never get to play them. So last time I went to Indus, I just concentrated on the classics. I know all those games, and I've made the classics finals every year. unfortunately um by the time i've got a sort of mental condition where i get a little bit tired at the end of the day so every time the finals roll around i usually bomb out in the first round so um i qualify strongly and then run out of puffs so that's the way it is but i've gotten the finals i've been every the last three or four years we've been there so that's been good times but um never progressed too high there but uh yeah but you smoked me and you could go back to new zealand with that and i know that was exciting for you and uh kudos to your excellent play i had a picture of that, Jeff, and I blew it up and stuck it on my wall. And it's something that inspires me every day. I get up in the morning and have to go and do another hard day's grind, but I look at that picture of defeated Teolis and I feel a lot better about myself. My self-esteem boosted greatly and I go out there to slay the day, you know? Yeah. It's been a great thing, Jeff. Thank you for doing that. I don't mean to burst your bubble, but there are a lot of those photo opportunities where people have smoked me in pinball competitions. So you're not alone there, Dave, but kudos to you for what you did. at InDisc and the Museum of Pinball looks like it's going to be moving. I mean, the current banning facility is an awesome facility. So old Mr. Weeks must really want to expand it. He wants to double the size of that. I mean, it's crazy big as it is now. So goodness me, if it's going to be twice the size, that's something to look forward to. The new Papa-like tournament, it was like that for January 2020 when we went to InDisc. So it certainly had that feel with all the different variety of games, machines available, the free play area boy that could be a week event and you still wouldn be able to do everything I think that the way that you organized tournaments before Geoff and the logistics of moving machines and that around like Pinberg used to do, it's just such a huge undertaking. You really need a big facility like I've got at my house here with my 100 machines and I can handle the most I've ever had here is 120 people, which for New Zealand is pretty big, but somewhere like Indus where they've got the machines there and if the local guys there can get all those machines up to competition standard. I know usually at Indus, Carl and Jim bring in a lot of their machines and Jay rather than using the museum's machines. But in time, that'll get up to be like a puppet type facility. And then, yeah, definitely run a 10-day tournament like they do at the Brisbane Masters and the big one that they run in Germany. I think that's the way of the future, have those big tournaments and have all the machines in permanent locations. I think that's the way we're going to be going. I think so too. You talk about your large collection. Everyone knows you have every System 11 game, and the collection grows. You mentioned you like the older games, and costs certainly have gone up in pinball, whether it's the bill of materials for the parts themselves. You add to your collection. I've never found out from you, have you ever sold any of your machines? I mean, you have all the System 11s. You can't break up that collection. But for people who have smaller collections, there's a lot of rotation of games just for the variety aspect. What's it like for you? Well, my place is a little bit of a pinball graveyard. They do tend to come here and die. But we know certainly machines come and go. I sold, during the pandemic, I sold 15 machines just to clear out some room. I really wanted to change the orientation of the main room I have here so I can make it a little bit more people-friendly so I can handle the big crowds. So I cleared out a little bit of dead wood, and 15 machines sold over a four- or five-week period really made a big difference. I had 135. I think I'm down to 119 now, which is still insane. But you've got to remember, most of those machines I bought 10, 20 years ago, I think the average price I was paying for a pinball back then was $1,000. $1,000 New Zealand dollars. So I've certainly done quite well financially out of the collection, should I ever turn around and sell it. Okay, so games do come in and out, and I've seen some pictures of some of the newer games, like certainly Rick and Morty, and I know you're big fans of Spooky. I know Danny and I are both kind of sad that the Spooky Podcast came to an end a few months ago. That was something that's very important to you, wasn't it? Yeah. I said, well, I'll explain. The Spooky Podcast was like, I just feel like the Spooky Podcast allowed me to sort of expand my horizons and allowed me to connect with so many lovers of pinball, which was like really cool. And I mean, the spooky people are just so lovely. And it was great to be able to like form a nice connection with those guys because they really are so lovely. It was just fun. It's fun to be able to sort of get to share knowledge of games or even have to research games. And I think it actually gave me a deeper knowledge of the games I was talking about. So, yeah, I suppose it's a whole lot of that. Yeah, we just talked to Charlie Emery on Final Round that I do with Martin Robbins on the Pinball Network. And I don't know anybody anywhere that doesn't root for Spooky Pinball and the Emery family and for their success because we certainly like their business model. We like what they've done to their community, and God bless them for everything they're doing. Yeah, no, definitely. I've met Charlie and all the family, and they're all just very, very reminiscent of us here in New Zealand. That part of the country up there, too, is very similar to New Zealand. They've got a great community up there, northern Illinois, Wisconsin area. I went up there when I drove around America in a hearse, what, 2014, that was, and met all those guys like Jay and Hilton, all that whole, yeah, Scott and EC and Terry at Pinball Life. they're all really really good genuine guys they have real great pinball competitions up there play a lot of dollar games just got such a great community and charlie's part of that they all get on so well and yeah good on charlie and ben you know sort of starting off making the game in their little uh in their little incubation room and yeah it's just gone that's the way to start a business you start no different from how i started my furniture business we started at small and then grew up where we had three or four shops you know so yeah start small baby steps and away you go he's done it exactly the right way so and we can see other examples of people who've done it the wrong way and we've all seen how they ended up but charlie's done it the right way and so good on him well don't sell yourself short because you're a bit of a pinball innovator yourself because you decided to re-theme a game and boy it just took off when you made a led zeppelin pinball machine stern went oh you know what that's a great idea we saw what david and the Peck family's done. We're going to make Led Zeppelin, too. So that's all because of you. I don't know about that. I'm pretty sure they had it in the pipeline before I hacked into it. But, yeah, I had that belly freedom lying around, and the whole thing started because I'd always wanted to retheme a machine. We were originally going to make a Death Note, an anime machine, a slightly more modern machine. But I had that freedom lying around, and it was a bit crappy. So I thought, well, let's do something with that. And it was a 1976 machine. That's my favorite era of EM machines. Those are 74, 75, 76 ballets like Captain Fantastic and Wizard and Old Chicago, Bow and Arrow, that sort of era. So what are we going to do? So what's a good theme that was big in 76? So you've got some movies around. Clockwork Orange was one I'd considered a lot of because that's one of my favorite movies. But Led Zeppelin was the obvious one to go for because they were the biggest band in the world in the mid-70s. They were a big influence on me when I picked up the guitar back when I was 12, 13 years old. So, yeah, let's hack into it. So we rethemed it. I mentioned it on the Head to Head podcast a couple of years ago. Brad Albright from Texas was nice enough to drop me a line straight after he heard it on the podcast, and what a great contact that was. I gave him direction as to which direction I wanted to go and then just let him go with it. He came back with a couple of ideas, and we tweaked them a little bit here and there to bring it into the era of the machine because the whole idea wasn't to make a Led Zeppelin pinball. It was to make a 1976 Bally Led Zeppelin pinball, so we wanted to match the Captain Fantastics and the Wizards that came out at that time. And so the highlight of the whole project was when the New Zealand Stern distributor said, when Stern did announce Led Zeppelin, he posted up on Facebook, oh, finally, we have a brand new Led Zeppelin pinball machine that rivals the old one that came out in the 70s and it had a picture of my pinball machine underneath. So even the New Zealand Stern distributor thought it was an old one. So that was pretty cool. That is hilarious. I didn't realize that's so good. Yeah, it sucked. But that was the whole idea was I don't like things that if you've got an EM machine, you don't want to put Back to the Future on it because Back to the Future came out 10 years after EMs, you know, or you don't want to put an anime theme on an EM. To me, that's not right. So you want to do something time specific or era specific. So that's why Led Zeppelin was there. Another one you could do would be Black Sabbath. Some of those bands that were around if you want to go music for that sort of thing like they did with the Beatles machine and try and theme it a little bit like an EM with the EM scoring that they have on the back glass I think that the way to go and make it sort of like era like that And yeah if I can suck people into thinking it really is a belly it actually says belly on the back glass I think that the way to go make it sort of era like that If I can suck people into thinking it really is a belly it actually says belly on the back glass When Brad first did the artwork he wrote Peck on the back in belly writing, but I made him take it off and put belly back on. That's so cool. Danny, since the last time I saw you, what are the games that you've been playing the most? I know you're excellent at every era of machine, but what are the ones you find yourself going back to? So I definitely think Rick and Morty's been one of the games that I've played the most lately, just because the code's awesome and the theme integration's just so, so good. And the games are really challenging and really fun. Aside from that, I still play Alice Cooper Heats, because I just love Alice Cooper in general. I'm still waiting for my Judas Priest pinball machine, thanks very much. You're a Priest fan? I had no idea. Oh yeah, Judas Priest is my favourite. Rob, help it. Okay, no, I've got to tell the story. Now see, he's got me going.