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Bat Sh*t Crazy: The Python Anghelo Story

Silverball Chronicles·podcast_episode·2h 14m·analyzed·Jun 26, 2020
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 (batch) · $0.021

TL;DR

Silverball Chronicles: Python Anghelo origin story and Williams talent pipeline.

Summary

Silverball Chronicles episode featuring David Dennis and Ron Hallett discussing the life and career of Python Anghelo, a legendary pinball designer known for his passionate, combative personality and artistic vision. The episode includes corrections from Jon Norris on D. Gottlieb & Co. 3 design details and traces the lineage of talent at Williams pinball through Steve Kordek to modern designers.

Key Claims

  • Jon Norris confirmed SMS debt forced Gottlieb to close, not general business failure

    high confidence · Email from Jon Norris (primary source designer) to Silverball Chronicles

  • Gottlieb design cycle was 90-120 days (3-4 months), not 6-8 months as previously stated

    high confidence · Jon Norris email correction to podcast hosts

  • Gottlieb used just-in-time parallel design philosophy with art and software developed simultaneously

    high confidence · Jon Norris primary source account of Gottlieb design methodology

  • Management at Gottlieb prohibited ROM changes for rule tweaks post-production; only bug fixes allowed

    high confidence · Jon Norris email detailing Gottlieb post-production policy

  • Shaq Attaq underwent massive late-stage rule change from grid-based Surf 'n Safari-like mechanics to stacking modes at management direction

    high confidence · Jon Norris account of Shaq Attaq development constraints

  • Jon Norris gave permission for enthusiasts to replace D. Gottlieb & Co. 3 flippers with Williams equivalents

    high confidence · Direct statement in Jon Norris email to podcast

  • Waterworld had a three-drop bank target removed in front of the rotating ship during redesign

    medium confidence · Jon Norris recollection in email; admits Ray Tanzer would be better source

  • Gottlieb licensed Barb Wire primarily to feature Pamela Anderson on the backglass

    medium confidence · Jon Norris speculation in email to podcast

  • Python Anghelo attended 2012 Expo while undergoing cancer treatment, dressed as Hannibal Lecter in straitjacket

    medium confidence · David Dennis narrative account

  • Steve Kordek lived from December 26, 1911 to February 19, 2012 (age 100), worked in pinball from 1937-1999

Notable Quotes

  • “nice job, mostly accurate”

    Jon Norris @ N/A — Feedback from legendary Gottlieb designer on podcast episode quality; validates research approach

  • “I give permission to all pinball enthusiasts to replace their flipper assemblies with Williams if they fit.”

    Jon Norris @ N/A — Designer blessing for community modification of problematic Gottlieb System 3 flippers; rare designer endorsement of aftermarket fixes

  • “He's the type of person, if you were going to see a seminar with him... 40 minutes to an hour late, that'd be normal... and you would just be transfixed while he talked.”

    Ron Hallett @ N/A — Describes Python Anghelo's charismatic but unpredictable personality and impact on audiences

  • “Python Anghelo was an eclectic, passionate, charming, classically educated, combative, spiteful, and caring individual.”

    David Dennis @ N/A — Encapsulation of Python's complex personality and industry reputation

  • “At the end of his life, Steve Kordek, he only had like a few games in his house and they were all Barry's games.”

    Ron Hallett @ N/A — Demonstrates Steve Kordick's mentorship relationship with Barry Ousler and his pride in mentees' work

  • “When he started talking about his former employees, it would just be like... this person sucks, this person's great, this person sucks, this person's great.”

    David Dennis @ N/A — Characterizes Python Anghelo's pattern of blunt, unfiltered opinions about industry colleagues

  • “By the age of four, Python could draw much better than he could actually speak.”

    David Dennis @ N/A — Early biographical detail establishing Python's artistic talent as formative influence

  • “He hated Pat Lawlor... His hero, the guy he considered the king of pinball was Harry Williams.”

    David Dennis @ N/A — Documents Python Anghelo's consistent design philosophy preferences and design hero

Entities

David DennispersonRon HallettpersonJon NorrispersonPython AnghelopersonSteve KordekpersonSteve RitchiepersonRay Tanzerperson

Signals

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Williams under Mike Stroll built a talent sponge during late 1970s-early 1980s solid state transition, recruiting fresh designers and programmers that later spun off to Gottlieb, Midway, Sega Data East; established mentorship lineage from Steve Kordick through Barry Ousler to modern designers

    high · David Dennis describes Williams as primary driver pulling in talent that would 'spin off to other places like Gottlieb or Midway or Sega Data East'; Ron confirms mentorship model with Kordick as 'Yoda'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Pinball transitioned from engineer-dominated (1950s-60s, electrical engineers) to artist-dominated (solid state era, programmers as artists, light shows, mechanics as art form), exemplified by Python Anghelo's creative approach

    high · Ron Hallett: 'Pinball really in the 50s, 60s, was really engineers... now more like artists... programmers are artists... light shows... mechanics'...

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Gottlieb System 3 era used aggressive just-in-time parallel design (90-120 day cycles vs Stern's 12-18 months), with simultaneous art/software development and minimal post-production tweaking due to management prohibition on ROM updates

    high · Jon Norris: 'try 90 to 120 days typically... just-in-time design philosophy, where everything was parallel developed... only one to two weeks to tweak'

  • ?

    product_concern: Gottlieb System 3 flipper design flaw (excessive height) was undesired by designer Jon Norris; management decision to prioritize Shaq's face on playfield over grid mechanics created confusion in game ruleset that persists among players

    high · Jon Norris: 'Management didn't like a grid of inserts... The final rule set ended up being very confusing... nobody knows this' and on flippers: 'I hated the new flipper design'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.090

0:00
The Pinball Network is online. Launching Silverball Chronicles. I'm back. Yep. So am I. Don't worry, I'll stop eating when we start.
0:30
Hello everyone, I'm David Dennis and this is Silver Ball Chronicles. With me every month is my charming co-host, Ron Handy Hallett. How you doing, fella? Handy. This is a nickname I've never been given. I've never heard that one. Handy Hallett. You know how to adjust all the leaf switches. You know how to do all of that stuff. I'll tell you. I watch you sometimes on your streaming with your co-host Stu and you know how to do all the tweaks. He doesn't know how to do anything. He's useless. We're talking, of course, about your slam-tilt streaming over on Twitch because you've been stuck at home for some unapparent reason which nobody is aware of. When people are listening to this years from now, they'll have no idea. Yes, this is not an unprecedented time for using clichés as much as we can. We've had a lot of fun here on the first four months that we've done this. Oh, yeah. I, I'm very new to the hobby. I've only sort of done this really for about two years, but I'm having a lot of fun doing the research. I know it's not super ideal, nor I don't think a lot of people enjoy sort of surfing around and going down Internet rabbit holes, but for some reason I'm finding it kind of fun. The other thing is I'm so lucky to have a co-host like you. You're adding, I would say, a lot of awesome perspective, a lot of points, And a lot of the feedback that we get is between our interactions, which is kind of funny because I've never met you. And quite frankly, I think in real life, you probably wouldn't like me because I hate everybody from upstate New York. Oh, wow. Okay. That's true. That's true.
2:34
One thing that we started this week because I've noticed I'm getting more messages on Pinside. You know, we're getting more emails regularly. I thought we should sort of up our social media presence. The other thing is I want to be a bigger deal, sort of like Jeff Teolis and Martin Robbins over on their Final Round podcast, and they have a Facebook page. So to not be left out on the social medias, we've started a Facebook page, which can be found at facebook.com slash Silverball Chronicles, and that's where you can interact with us. You can see what we're working on, maybe find some hints about the next episode. We'll probably toss up a poll for our next episode so people can vote on what they want us to do. And I think that's a good sort of hub to focus people in to be able to interact with us. They can tell us how wrong we are, all kinds of great things. I'm so looking forward to that part. Love social media. Another thing that is very, very cool is This Week in Pinball has started their TWIP Pinball Promoters Database. Can you tell us what that is, Ron? Oh, yes. You get to review pinball content providers. Yeah, so they've got lists of all of the Twitch streams, all of the podcasts, various websites, that kind of stuff. You can leave your reviews on there from one to five stars. And we would always love you to add a five-star review, add your comments in there, because that's going to help other people find us. I think when people start in this, they're going to go to Google, they're going to type in pinball podcasts, and it'll bring up a list. My assumption is that this list would probably rise to the top of that. It's going to help people find us, and the more people that we have engaged in this, I think the more fun we can have, Because we can add some reviews, and some of those reviews I've added here. Four stars is good, too. Three, you know, and one and two, definitely not, definitely not. Don't do that. Yeah, yeah, one or two, you can just shut it off. I don't want you listening to this if you're going to give us one or two, because you're obviously not having fun. So Glenn W., he says that each episode is packed with tons of information about history of pinball, Broken down into categories so that you can choose which topic to learn about. Great personality and some good humor. A must listen. Did you ever think that you would have a review that said you were a must listen, Ron? When I started, no. Wow, I didn't think people wanted to listen to me at all, but I guess they do. Or at least Glenn W. does. Okay, this one's from Sean. He says, if you want a laid-back discussion on historical topics of pinball, this is the place. The hosts work well together and is an entertaining podcast to listen to. The funny thing is that as much as we have fun and we try to be entertaining, it's just the content itself that's fun and entertaining, I think. And it's just sort of us reading it with funny voices and a Canadian accent that just make it better. I mean, when you've got some topics like our topic today, that content just automatically breeds itself to being super interesting and entertaining. Yes, and the Canadian accent is funny. I agree. It is. It's all about being able to be funny. It's not just that. I'm looking at your show notes now and you have all those little Canadian spellings of certain things. That's right. I mean, they're wrong, but I mean, it's still funny to look at them. Because we're speaking the Queen's English here on this podcast because I do the editing.

high confidence · Silverball Chronicles biographical research

Pat Lawlorperson
Harry Williamsperson
Barry Ourslerperson
[name withheld pending review]person
[name withheld pending review]person
Joshua Clayperson
Eric Meunierperson
Keith Elwinperson
Silverball Chroniclesmedia
This Week In Pinballorganization
Pinball Networkmedia
Deep Rootcompany
Williamscompany
Gottliebcompany
Genco Companycompany
Humpty Dumptygame
Triple Actiongame
  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball podcasting community growing with multiple platforms (Silverball Chronicles launching Facebook presence, TWIP launching promoters database); content creators seeking legitimacy through review systems and audience engagement

    medium · David Dennis: 'we've started a Facebook page... to not be left out on the social medias'; TWIP launched 'Pinball Promoters Database' with 1-5 star review system for podcasts and streams

  • ?

    historical_signal: Steve Kordick's 62-year tenure (1937-1999) and continued industry presence until age 97-100 demonstrates rare career longevity in pinball; industry culture values designer presence at shows/expos as validation of their legacy

    high · Ron Hallett: 'At Expo, he would not stop talking... until he was like 97, 98 he was as energetic as anyone you will meet... come up and sign books'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Steve Kordick's 1948 innovation of DC-powered dual flippers at playfield bottom was paradigm shift; allowed skilled shots from bottom to top with accuracy; Kordick sourced this from arcade equipment background (Genco's DC standard)

    high · David Dennis: 'he provided direct current power, DC power, to those flippers... a ball skillfully flipped from the bottom could actually get to the top... at that time, that's like crazy thinking'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Python Anghelo had consistent design philosophy preferences: admired Steve Ritchie and Harry Williams, strongly disliked Pat Lawlor; maintained these opinions across multiple interviews with no apparent contradiction

    medium · David Dennis: 'He likes Steve Ritchie... He hated Pat Lawlor... his hero was Harry Williams... He mentioned that on multiple interviews. That was the king, the god of pinball'

  • ?

    content_signal: Silverball Chronicles positioned itself as pursuing primary sources (designer interviews) to correct published history; received direct email correction from Jon Norris (Gottlieb designer) with multiple factual corrections to previous episode

    high · David Dennis: 'We have our own sort of comments... but one thing we really pride ourselves on is being able to pull out those primary sources... from Jon Norris himself'

  • ?

    community_signal: Silverball Chronicles received positive listener reviews highlighting historical depth, laid-back tone, and entertainment value on TWIP Promoters Database; hosts actively soliciting audience feedback and corrections

    medium · Glenn W. review: 'packed with tons of information... broken down into categories... must listen'; Sean review: 'laid-back discussion on historical topics... hosts work well together'

  • ?

    product_concern: Shaq Attack experienced massive late-stage rule overhaul when management rejected grid-based mechanics; resulted in confusing final ruleset with stacking modes that tournament players remain unaware of decades later

    high · Jon Norris: 'Shaq Attack had a massive rule change very late... Management didn't like a grid of inserts... The final rule set ended up being very confusing. The game is all about stacking modes, but to this day nobody knows this'

  • ?

    regulatory_signal: Gottlieb's decision to license Barbed Wire attributed to desire to feature Pamela Anderson on backglass, suggesting licensing decisions driven by celebrity/IP branding rather than gameplay innovation

    low · Jon Norris: 'Gottlieb only licensed barbed wire so they could put Pamela Anderson on the back glass'

    • 6:05
    So, Ron, this episode is brought to you by Massive Backbox Screens. Massive screens distracting you from disappointing playfields since 2013. Okay. One thing that we do here on this podcast that I think is very unique is we take a lot of corrections and we try to integrate those into the following episode so that we can at least, you know, acknowledge the fact that we are not the be-all and end-all of all pinball knowledge in history. We make a lot of mistakes because, quite frankly, I'm a slacker when it comes to research, and I just sort of copy and paste them as much as I can. You know what the best things are about corrections? What's that? When they come from the most authoritative source possible. Ooh. Which our latest corrections could not come from a more authoritative source. That's right. We've seen our last episode about Gottlieb, System 3. The two names that came up most of the time were John Norris and Ray Tanzer. So we happened to get an email from John Norris. Yeah, John friggin' Norris emailed us at silverballchronicles at gmail.com. And to be completely honest, out of all the designers at Deep Root, he's the one I really want to see what he gets to do there. I really want to see a John Norris design game at Deep Root with better software. With somebody like him who's one of those out-of-the-box weird individual designers that we talked about in System 3, he is the one that I'm most excited about. We've seen some cool stuff from J-POP. We've seen some cool stuff from Barry Ousler. And those guys at Deep Root, yeah, of course I want to see what they're doing. But somebody like John Norris, who I think now has maybe the resources and the time to really do what he wants in his actual end vision. This is super exciting. That's for sure. Do you know, actually, the greatest feedback we got from John Norris? He said, nice job, mostly accurate. Yes. What do you think of that? It's just pumping right now. So what did we get wrong? What did we get wrong? So according to John, it was SMS debt that forced Gottlieb to close. All pinball games near the end made black ink, including barbed wire. They couldn't pay interest on the SMS debt. I said it takes six to eight months for a project, and John says no. He said try 90 to 120 days typically. Ouch. Three to four months. That's insane. Gottlieb had a small staff, so everybody worked on every game. We used just-in-time design philosophy, where everything was parallel developed. Art being worked on at the same time as software being written, for example. Then, everything comes together at the end. Typically, one to two weeks to tweak the game rules and find bugs. That's why the scoring was so out of balance on a lot of titles. Management never allowed software updates for games for rule tweaks. So once the game was boxed up, then no ROM changes unless it was a big bug fix like a game crash. That's like I was I went on this sort of tangent and rant like how can you make such an amazing play field have so much fun packed into this with some amazing mechs and only do it in like six to eight months. And he's just telling us, oh, yeah, no, we just did that like in two months. That's like when you think about Stern today and typically they're like a packed cycle is 12 months and you know 18 months is really where they fit and guys like Steve Ritchie are more on a you know almost on a 20 month cycle like that's crazy. I mean back in the EM era it would be like every month or two months but those are EMs and a lot of the designs were very similar should I say. Let's move the drop down bank to the left side. Yeah, a lot of them were recycled, like that one design that Gottlieb used. It was on Canada Dry, it was on Fast Dry, or Quick Dry, or whatever. It was on like four or five different games, the exact same design. Yeah. John also said, I love this part, we talked about Shaq Attack, how he wanted the coach speech off. So according to John, he says, the Shaq Attack added coach speech setting is reduced coach, but it's still too much. It would have been nice to add no coach call-out setting, too. Shack Attack had a massive rule change very late. The original rule set was surface safari-like. Oh, now I feel sad. Yeah. The grid that players needed to complete. See that? That interests me. Oh, damn it. Management didn't like a grid of inserts and had me, John, remove them so they could put Shack's face on the playfield instead. The final rule set ended up being very confusing. The game is all about stacking modes, but to this day nobody knows this. We let the cat out of the bag. All the tournament players are all ready now when they see that Shaq in a tournament, which I have seen Shaq in a tournament before.
    11:09
    Shaq Attack. Pinnball. It was in a Pinnball final, I think. Wow. I like how he also said, because we mentioned the terrible Gottlieb System 3 flippers. Oh. John says, I hated the new flipper design and tried to mod them to reduce the height of the stroke. I tried the method you mentioned by changing the coil stop to a System 1 coil stop, but this resulted in a weak flipper shot. I give permission. Okay, this is from John Norms. I give permission. The man who designed the game. The man who designed these games. I give permission to all pinball enthusiasts to replace their flipper assemblies with Williams if they fit. One of my ambitions before Gottlieb closed was to have the flipper assembly redesigned to copy Williams. There you go. I've been giving the blessing. He is telling you to do this. The patron saint of Gottlieb, John Norris, says that you are allowed to change the flippers, and lo, they rejoiced. Why don't you tell them about Waterworld? Oh, so this is great. So I just, I made this sort of comment like, oh, John Norris, if you're listening, just let us know what came out of Waterworld when they took the mechs out. Not thinking that the John Norris of Gottlieb would actually be listening and send us an email. What he writes is, from what I recall regarding the assemblies removed from Waterworld, it had a three-drop bank target placed in front of the rotating ship and a couple of other mechanical playfield assemblies. Now, of course, Ray Tanzer would be the person to ask that question, but I have too much of an ego to reach out to Ray Tanzer. He should reach out to me. Oh, okay. So he should be sending in emails. Exactly, exactly. And according to John, Gottlieb only licensed barbed wire so they could put Pamela Anderson on the back glass. There you go. Totally could see that. She's Canadian too, you know. She is. That sums up a nice tight bow on System 3 from really, I would say, the expert. We love to get primary sources, and primary sources, Ron, for those listening, are the words of the individuals that were there. We have our own sort of comments and suggestions, and oh, the reason they put that mech over there is because, you know, they were lazy, Or the reason they used that Mac is because it was the one that they used on the previous machine that didn't sell and they had a bunch of them in the office and they just needed to reuse it again. American Pinball. And we wanted to actually find out not the opinion as to why they use things, but from the sources themselves. And that's one thing that we really pride ourselves on this podcast is being able to pull out those primary sources, even though it takes forever. Anything else you want to add there, Ron? Thanks, John. Yeah, that's awesome. So today's topic, let's just dive right into that. The coin-op industry, and specifically pinball, has always been an eclectic mix of characters. Pinball events are the melting pot of individuality, social classes, education levels, and wit. One thing these gatherings have in spades is personality. Python Angelo was an eclectic, passionate, charming, classically educated, combative, spiteful, and caring individual. He gave his all for pinball. Python is a guy who added social commentary to his back glass art, added Easter eggs to his work, drank a lot, fought with leadership over creating unique worlds under glass, and, of course, burned bridges. One thing that we'll dive into is Python tossing insults to his former co-workers. One thing that Python did is he pulled no punches on his life's journey. He was a nut for sure. In fact, during the 2012 Expo, while undergoing cancer treatments, he arrived as Hannibal Lecter on a cart in a straitjacket with a mesh mask. That was there. Our topic today, Bat Crazy, the Python Angelo story. Ron, have you met Python? Yes, I met Python several times. Would you say that I summed him up fairly well? Oh yeah, I would say so. He tossed a few bombs? Let's just say Python was the type of person, if you were going to see a seminar with him, and he was, I don't know, 40 minutes to an hour late, that'd be normal.
    15:21
    He's just rolling in whenever he wanted. And he'd show up and he'd start talking and you would just be transfixed while he talked. He just, he definitely had a way. He just had like this weird charisma. Yes. And it's funny because I've never been to a big show. I've, of course, never met a Python Angelo. But when I'm watching these old videos and we've added them to the show notes, you can click on them on YouTube where people have uploaded them from these old shows. Even through the computer screen with sort of poor lighting and poor audio, it just sucks you in because you're just like, what is he going to say next? It's crazy. Some of the show notes that we have in here are links to articles, comments that he's done, but one that really transfixed me, there's an old podcast, really I would say the first podcast back in the day called Topcast. Their number 10 episode was an interview with Python. What did you think of that interview? Yeah, his podcast is Clay Harrell. And there's rumors around the interview itself that Python didn't realize it was actually an interview. And he kept mentioning some book during the interview that he wanted Clay to read. And, yeah, if you had never heard him before, he basically just went off. Like, I mean, they talked about his life, you know, his education, all that stuff. But when he started talking about, like, a lot of his former employees, it would just be like, you know, this person sucks, this person's great, this person sucks, this person's great. It was like insane, like, wow. Yeah, we joked last episode sort of secretly throughout the whole episode about Pat Lawler. He hated Pat Lawler for some reason. A lot of that came from listening to this interview and preparing for the next interview where he just roasts poor Pat Lawlor. He was very consistent. You can almost make a list of Steve Ritchie. He likes Steve Ritchie. He made great play fields. He hated Pat Lawlor. The one thing he always said, his hero, the guy he considered the king of pinball was Harry Williams. He mentioned that on multiple interviews. That was, to him, that was the king, the god of pinball. The thing to aspire to. Yeah, it's so funny to think about the way that he has this passion, but like I said, he pulls no punches. And we'll go into a lot of that. We have a lot of his quotes through here. We also have quotes about Python Angelo for other people. But I want to start at Williams around this time. We're talking sort of late 70s, moving into the early mid 80s. This is the watershed moment. We mentioned this in previous podcasts where this movement to solid state, the exit of a lot of the big sort of top playfield producers back in the 60s and the 50s, They're all starting to sort of take more senior management roles. They're moving out of the industry and retiring. You've got this fresh new talent coming in, and Williams was really the primary driver to that. They pulled in so much talent, just like a sponge, and then that talent would spin off to other places like a Gottlieb or a Midway or a Sega Data East. But it was such a flux of a time. Would you say that this is sort of like the golden age of pinball, this sort of mid-80s? I don't know if it was the golden age, but it was definitely, the beginning of Solid State saw a lot of influx of young talent, especially designers, especially programmers, like just out of college, taking advantage of this new technology. What can we do with this?
    19:14
    Pinball really, I would say, in the 50s, 60s, was really engineers, right? These were guys that were electrical engineers. They were highly educated. You know, they were unique. We're moving into now more like artists, right? The programmers are artists. The light shows that they create is like an art. The mechanics that they're doing are things that they didn't think of before. Python Angelo bringing in his designing philosophy and his art philosophy, I think, is an example of that. But let's dive into the Williams talent roster. So Mike Stroll, he was the president of Williams at the time. Stroll is a big piece in this pie. And really, he built a big talent roster. He wanted to mentor that talent roster. So I want to talk a little bit about Steve Kornick and who he was, just to add some context to those who he was hiring. Did you know Steve Ritchie didn't like him? Yeah, Steve, nobody likes their boss. Oh, no, he didn't, because when he did Flash, he showed that, he thought it was perfect, like his first game at WIIMS, he showed Steve Kordick, and Kordick was a deep one, you know, like it. So being Steve Ritchie, he was like, should I change anything? It's like, no, f*** him, it's perfect, I didn't change a damn thing.
    20:34
    This game is perfect. This game is perfect, and there you go. That's why Steve Ritchie is Steve Ritchie and sold Michael with 20,000 units, so I guess he was right. Yeah, and it was Steve Kordik, of course, from our first episode, Steve Ritchie before the mullet. All right, Steve Python on my stroll. He brought, you know, I could do the accent, but we'll be a little more classy today.
    20:56
    He brought so many talented people in. He gave Williams so much energy and vision, building a foundation of what we were to become. That's right. So he's this sort of visionary. Steve Kordik, he was the head of game design. He was Stephen Francis Kordik. He was born in Chicago December 26th, which is very close to my birthday, 1911, which is not very close to my birth year, and he's the oldest of 10 children. His father worked in the seal mills, and Steve Kordik worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps and for the United States Forestry Service during the Depression. On a visit to his hometown in 1937, he was walking down the street without an umbrella when a torrential rain forced him to step into a lobby of a building he was passing. That was Genco Company, and the receptionist asked if he was looking for a job, which happens all the time now, right? And he said, sure. And she asked, can you solder? And he had no idea how to solder. He said, yeah, I can solder. The first rule of being interviewed by a receptionist for a job after the Great Depression when nobody could get a job was always say yes and learn on the job. As a millennial, somebody in my early 30s, I'm going to have to say that doesn't happen very often nowadays.
    22:10
    For 45 cents an hour, he was soldering on the company's production line. He studied at the Cohen Electric School. It's probably Cohen. It looks like that. I hate these names. Why can't you people have regular names? You said Genco, right? I know, that's because you corrected me in the last episode. Well, I've heard it both ways, but there's an interview with Steve Kordick where he says it's Genco. And if Steve Kordick says it's Genco, that's what I'm going to say. As always, you begin working your way up in the engineering department.
    22:46
    In the 1930s, pin games were flipperless. We talked a little bit about that. And why was Steve Kordick so important? Well, him, along with Harry Mabbs and Wayne Nyan, who's another big deal in the coin-up industry at the time, worked together on a project in mid-1947, which was sort of the idea of player-controlled flipper bumpers. Humpty Dumpty added six electromechanical flippers, three on each side from the top and the bottom of the playfield. This was the first machine with flippers, and as you said in a previous episode, all of the machines were basically garbage at this point, right? Absolutely. They would even retrofit flippers on the older ones or try to. Steve Kordick, along with Wayne Ians, really revolutionized the industry, completely changed everything. He was a big, big, big deal. In 1948, Cordick created triple action, which featured just two flippers, both controlled by buttons, and those were at the bottom of the pinball playfield. Not only did he help invent the flippers, he also sort of invented kind of the modern idea of two flippers at the bottom shooting up the playfield. Recall they were facing the other direction. Like they weren't, the tips weren't going inward, they were actually outward. Oh yes, that's right. So, you know, close enough, we'll mark that one up good enough for Canada.
    24:14
    So Roger Sharp says, but not only did Steve choose to put two flippers down at the bottom of the playfield, even more importantly, he provided direct current power, DC power, to those flippers. Meaning that a ball skillfully flipped from the bottom of the playfield could actually get to the top, and anywhere in between with some semblance of accuracy. You know, as silly as that sounds today, like, at that time, that's like the crazy thinking out of the box, like, shenanigans, right? He's changing everything, maybe not nearly realizing it, but you can imagine all the previous people that came before him were all like, well, why would you do that? You can't bump it into the holes. The thing is that Genco, they made primarily arcade type equipment, meaning, like, they weren't pinballs. They'd be like little mannequin thing, like throwing a ball at a basket and stuff like that. And all their games were all primarily running on DC voltage. So I'm sure for him, that was just normal. Yeah, very cool. Steve Kornick was a designer for Genco, Bally, Gottlieb, Williams. He designed many of the most popular electromechanical playfields in the 60s and early 70s. He was at Gottlieb? Yeah, it said Gottlieb in the gimmick. Now, I mean, I'm sure he was probably just there for a cup of coffee. Valley, he was there, he was hired but never actually started. He got a few of his Genco people jobs there because he got an offer at Williams to be the primary designer, so he went there. Yeah, and at Williams he designed some pretty amazing games, but here's a couple of examples. Shangri-La, never seen one. Beat Time, which is most notable as a knockoff for the Beatles because you couldn't get a Beatles license back then, and there was a band called The Boodles. And I think this game is Dumpster Fire, Aces and Kings, Skylab, Grand Prix, and his highest seller was Space Mission, which I see come up for sale at least on a bi-monthly basis. Yeah, I'd say Grand Prix. Yeah, you gotta love Orbit spinners, man. And especially on those electromechanicals where they're just like... Oh, there's just something so awesome about that. George Gomez, throw in a couple of electromechanical spinners. Forget these optical spinner things. He also made some solid state games. Pokerino and Contact. Oh, big time sellers.
    26:36
    You can see we're moving into, he's moving out of sort of that older era into the solid state era, and you can tell he's kind of like later in his career and he's like, ah, it's a big change, right? Yeah, he was more of a mentor and just the guy at Williams where if they couldn't figure something out, he might look at it and like, oh, just do this. We did this on this game in like 1940 something and like, oh, hey, it works. That was what he did primarily at Williams. Think of him as like Yoda, the Yoda of Williams. That's probably the best description I can give. When you move into sort of the more management roles, you know, part of you I think probably still wants to be out on the line, you know, designing some play fields and doing all that stuff. But it gets to a point where, you know, that's probably not going to happen because, again, things are so rapidly changing during that time. And now we're moving into sort of the cultural zeitgeist of the late 60s and the 70s. Steve Kordick worked quite not from, well, 1937 to 1999. Yeah, which is nuts. He was there when Pinball 2000 shut down. Yeah, he passed away on February 19, 2012 at age 100. If we could all get to that age, I think we would all be pretty happy with that, considering we're, you know, all about to die here in the coming months. Yeah, he broke his hip near the end, so he kind of went downhill the last year or so. But before that, I'd say until he was like 97, 90, he was as energetic as anyone you will meet. Yeah, isn't that awesome? When you go to Expo, he would not stop talking. That's the best when you meet individuals who are older and they're still ingrained in what they're doing. They're not designing the playfields, but imagine you get to go to an expo and people come up to you and they're like, Ah, Grand Prix, I've got one. I stripped the playfield. I repainted it. It looks like it came out of the factory. You know, imagine how amazing that that would feel for you, the designer, and then how it would recharge your batteries all the time, right? As opposed to, you know, a lot of retirees who sit at home and watch home and garden television, right? He would do things like if someone came in with like a pinball book, like pictures in it, like, oh, he had the page open at Grand Prix. It's like, can you sign my book? He'd sign the book. Then he'd take the book. It's like, oh, I did this one, too. And he'd sign that. Oh, I did this one, too. And I'd sign that. Yeah, and the guy would be there for 10 minutes. Perfect. It's like a George Gomez signature on a Translite. It just takes 45 minutes. 45 minutes, yes. I mean, really, he spent a lot of time reinvesting, reinventing Williams for really the second half of the 20th century. And, you know, I've just collected a group of individuals here. What's this on his all-star team? Whose all-star team is this? It would be Steve Kornick's all-star team. I would call it Steve Kordick's all-star team. You don't think so? Whose all-star team was it? It would be more Mike Strolls, the guy who actually hired them. Specifically, he was a major mentor. He was Barry Ossler's main mentor. Barry Ossler was his main student, if you will. At the end of his life, Steve Kordick, he only had like a few games in his house and they were all Barry's games. I wouldn't say, like I said, he was more of a Yoda. He was not in any decision-making function. He was not hiring people, so I wouldn't say that. He's got some individuals here along with Mike Strahl, Ken Fresna, who was the VP of management at the time. Ken Fidesna.
    30:08
    We've got guys that came into Williams that Steve Kordick sort of mentored were the John Trudeaus, the Barry Ouslers, Pat Lawler, Dennis Nordman, Chris Granner, Larry DeMar, Steve Ritchie, Eugene Jarvis, Greg Ferreira. On and on and on. So the legend and the innovative mind that was Steve Kornick really worked with, I would say, the legends of the industry or the sort of the modern legends of the industry. And now those legends are sort of inspiring the next comers up when you look at individuals like Eric Meunier, who says his last name wrong. It's actually Eric Minier. And you've got individuals like Keith Elwin, who are now working with some of the next generation sort of mentors. Of course, one person that was brought in around this time, Python Angelo, our topic today. Python was born in Transylvania, Romania. I can literally hear him saying that in my head. That must be weird. Transylvania, Romania. And it's like, you can't be serious, really? And as crazy as he was, it's like, and you were actually born in Transylvania. This is, it's like too perfect. Yeah, being born in Detroit just wasn't good enough. No, no, it cannot be nearly as cool as being born in Transylvania, Romania. January 1st, 1954. By the age of four, Python could draw much better than he could actually speak. He would draw for six to eight hours in a single sitting. And it was often his grandmother and aunt that would help him and inspire him to keep drawing, Which, as a parent of two children under five during a massive pandemic, I will say, is just a way to keep him busy. Because it is very difficult dealing with young children.
    32:05
    He would say that he often grew up in poverty and that gave him the gift of a creative mind. He had to bend his mind and play games and have imagination as opposed to have things sort of fed to him in the ways of, I don't know, like television or books or movies or theaters or today's, you know, video games maybe. He would often say that he played pinball in a place in the Black Sea. Pinball is, in his mind, like a miniature amusement park. Yeah, Python would say kids changed into a ball and had power in their fingertips for 25 cents. I put that quote in our show notes because it's like the way that he thinks about it, right, is that you are you're one with the machine. You're transforming it. You're the one that's being able to manipulate it sort of out of your head and with your hands, but still be immersed in it. It is is a theme amongst I would say is a theme along this this podcast today where he thinks of things and describes them very oddly. After studying art and animation in Romania and in the United States, he won various art awards in universities. And in fact, if you go back and you look in October 27th, 1974, Chicago Tribune, they actually devoted four pages to Python Angelo. And this was well before his pinball career. 1974 to 1980, he actually had two art studios, one called Pen and Ink and the other called Art Force in Chicago. My assumption the reason he had two art studios is probably because as an artist you don make any money and it goes under and then you go somewhere else and start a new one He actually has done TV guides He did giant murals for the Chicago animation and commercials and film industry A lot of creative writing. He spent a lot of time doing creative writing and writing stories. And of course, one of the things that he mentions almost all the time and everything that he does for Ron. He worked as an animator for Disney until 1979. He often talks about his time at Disney being maybe not as fulfilling as he wanted it to be, but he always told people that he worked at Disney. Well, you have to be good, really good to be an animator at Disney. That's probably why he said it. And I would think even then Disney was probably too corporate for him, would be my guess, because I'm sure they told him what to draw, which probably wasn't something he was into. Yeah, Disney in that time, they're making some of those just absolute epic Disney movies sort of in that time period, right? So they know what they want, and your job is to sort of animate and enjoy it. What epic Disney movies were they making? Like Black Hole? That's one I can think of. I think that was late 70s. It has nothing to do with the Gottlieb game, Black Hole.
    34:55
    Because Disney was dead by that time. That's when they were doing some crappier movies. I would say Robin Hood. Come on. Robin Hood was an awesome anime. There's literally a break between 77 and then 81 and then between 81 and 85. They weren't doing shit. Yeah. Yeah, it was because they were hiring people like Python Angelo who weren't doing any work. Because they were not killing it then. Yeah. I loved Robin Hood. Robin Hood was great. And Winnie the Pooh? Come on. I never liked Winnie the Pooh. The rescuers, the little mice, and they're in the thing with the hats. Come on. I think the Jungle Book was probably the biggest one they did in that period after Disney was dead. Yeah, I mean, let me adjust the word epic to being pretty good.
    35:40
    Now, Python never really elaborated much to what he did at Disney, but he would often say that it wasn't really one of his happier jobs. So he left Disney for Williams, and he would always say this in all of his interviews, that he took a 50% pay cut because he thought video games had more potential than traditional animation. I mean, I don't know what he's making at Disney or if he's hyperinflating what he actually did, but he must have been making, you know, mad money at Disney because I'm sure that video wasn't necessarily paying, you know, introduction wages. What were some of the games that he first sort of worked on at Williams when he jumped over? Well, he got a hit immediately. Joust, 1982. He did the art and animation. Yes, classic game, animation of the actual The Bird. Flying, which if you ever played again, that's one of the highlights. It looks realistic. As much as they could do with the graphics then, the very effective flying animation with the bird, it was a huge hit to the point where they made a sequel, Chow's 2, which wasn't as big a hit, and they actually did a head-to-head pinball of it. Yeah, and that's sort of where he got first kind of introduced to that side of the business. He did Bubbles, which is another great game. And he was the designer and art on that. He actually got a big piece of that. You are a bubble. You're in a sink. And you can grow and get bigger, but certain things can kill you. It's very, very interesting games back then. It was a different world in video games then. Now video games will fall into one of four or five categories, you know, shooters, sports games, whatever. However, back in the early 80s, every game had to be completely different. Yeah, and they were creating an industry at that time, right? So you didn't know what to make until you made it. Yeah, but the games were unclassifiable. How do you classify? Well, in this game, you're a bubble in a sink. You know, in this game, you're a chef and you throw pepper at things. In this game, you're a carpenter. Well, it was originally a carpenter who's getting barrels thrown at you by a gorilla. Yeah, in this game you're drawing circles and squares. Oh, God. Kicks. I hated kicks.
    37:57
    So he did Sinistar. He did the sound recording in that. He was a sound recordist, in fact, in 1983. Sinistar is kind of cool. I played it once. Sinistar is awesome. Uses a 49-way joystick to get the smooth turning. And the sound is epic. It has speech samples that will steer the crap out of you. Yeah, it is. It has a huge, like, Sinistar head that comes at you. It's awesome. Yeah. He did Star Rider, where he did the design, concept, and artwork, also in 83, and Inferno 1984, he was the designer of that game. And, you know, you spend some time in video. It seems like a lot of the current generation of pinball designers, you know, around that, from 1980 all the way up to, you know, the 2000s, they spent some time one way or another in video. Yeah, well that's because the pinball industry took a dump around 81, 82. Video games took over. So it makes perfect sense that he would be doing video games. And then when pinball started to come back in the mid-80s, he finally gets to work in pinball. He would say that he wanted to make art that wasn't for the elites, that art for anyone to appreciate. And what better way to do that was thinking in pinball. And, you know, when you think of art for elites, of course, he's classically trained in Romania and the U.S. in art and art theory. And all of that stuff are like those, you know, Picasso kind of names, right? He wants to make art that everybody can enjoy today, all the day, and enjoy it for what it is. And he saw that, I guess, in one way or another as video, and now we're moving into his pinball time.
    39:41
    Python, as a creative, and we'll talk about sort of a creative mindset, if you're a creative, you have a really kind of weird way to think of things. And that's why people often call them, like, eccentric or strange, because they just think of things just differently, and it's hard to have conversations with those people. Python says, I don't 9 to 5 and pretend I'm working. I work when I'm creative. Work two days, work for 16 hours, work for three hours, which is funny because there's all kinds of William stories with Python where he has something due, a deadline, and didn't even start it yet and was panicking and then would do it all like in a day or two days and send it in. Yeah, and then it would be like some amazing, you know, piece. Yeah. Because they need that pressure sometimes, right? It's one of those deals where he's, you know, I'm a creative artist, but I think a lot of the fellow employees around him were like, no, he just put it off for the last second. Yeah, he's just pretty easy. He's just procrastinating. Right, but that's how that creative mindset works, right? When you're a creative, you're different. One of my favorite creatives that you can see today modern is a Christopher Franchi. You know, this guy, in his art and his design, he's got Easter eggs. He's a perfectionist through and through. He's doing his super awesome pinball show podcast with Ed and Christian Lyme. He's doing art for various companies. He's doing art for apps. He's selling trans lights. Like he just loves doing those things. But, you know, he can sometimes rub people the wrong way or when people critique him, he pushes back. But that's because they're creatives and they're putting their all and everything into it and they think differently than most people, right? Like you're an IT guy, right? I'm a sales guy. You know, when we talk differently, which I think is probably why the podcast. Well, yeah, you have a weird accent. I talk normally. That's right. You have that slur where you sound slower. I sound like I'm super fancy. That's how it works. It's balance. And creatives talk differently than us. And it's interesting because when you go through the quotes, and we'll go through these throughout the pod, Python is insane.
    41:54
    He's like a creative creative. So what was his first game? Comet. So let's take a, I once threw up a roller coaster stats here with Comet. That's a true story. Comet is a theme park under glass. It was June of 85, it was a standard body, did 8,100 units, designed by Barry Ousler, who did Gorgar, Space Shuttle, Doctor Who, Pinbot, Jackbot, and of course, the greatest game of all time, Popeye Saves the Universe. Best super pin, alright. Yeah, no. Software by Brian... Dalatowski? Dalatowski. And finished by Bill... Futsenruder. See, I can say that one. Futsenruder, yep. Can't say the other guy's name. Can say Futsenruder. Futsenruder, who actually worked at the old Stern Electronics. We may have mentioned him in our Stern episode. That's where he came from. He's a very, very important individual, especially in this kind of mid-80s, early 90s. And, of course, artwork by Python Angelo. Sound by Dave Zabriskie. Did I say that one right? Looks right to me. Tales of the Arabian Nights, Scare Stiff, Bad Girls, and the Epic Cactus Jacks. This game, this is a cool game because it's so different.
    43:21
    It's in that era. Python had good timing there. He was in the resurgence of pinball in the mid-80s when Williams started cranking out these huge hit games. Right place, right time? 8,000 was a ton for that era. That's when it started to come back. I gotta say as well during this time, it is maybe right place, right time, but it's also he's part of creating that right place, right time, right? His art coming together, new designers like Barry Ousler, software by a Bill Foots and Reuter who's able to now draw on the new world that is the Williams controllers, right? Games are definitely becoming more of the, I hate to keep using the term, the world under glass. Yeah, we're going to use a lot of that this time, so if you don't like that term, this is not your podcast. This is truly, it's not like you just slap a title on a game, no, the entire game is based around a theme, and everything has to be part of the theme. And that's new, right? That's not something that really was standard. Not really. I mean, High Speed kind of started the whole story thing. The whole game is the story. And they just ran with it. So every game now has to be a full experience.
    44:40
    Yeah, the art has to speak to the code, to speak to the design. The toys, they have to make sense. So if you're going to have them, we'll get into other games later on. But things like when you have fishtails and it has a reel in it, of course it does. It's fishing. It makes sense. You know, or Comet is really amusement park through and through. Again, we like to bring up the IPDB, Internet Pinball Machine Database, and really kind of dive into some of the photos. They've got some really cool, the old flyers from some of these things. And again, they get into that salesy stuff. Not just a fantastic new pin, not just all the fun of an amusement park, but a chance to make a million. Million! Zillion! Yeah, there you go. Perfect. I didn't do it justice. Zillion! I missed some of the flyers, actually. Just the descriptions of these things like, wow, these are the coolest games ever made. Yeah, this is like, it doesn't get any, who wants to go to a real theme park when you could just play a pinball machine of a theme park? So what Python says about Comet, we argued for two months on the art to make an amusement park, like walking in the gate. I went to an amusement park and paid them $2,000 to turn around the seat so I'm looking backward so I could watch the riders for the backlasts. Yeah, I don't know if that's hyperbole from Python. I can't see them actually doing that. I don't care how much you pay them. I can't see any world where like, oh yeah, we'll take the front seat and turn it around so you can, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's Fairy Python also. He might stretch it a bit, let's say. He said a lot of things about, you know, he had things about spies and other, he had a lot of crazy stuff. Believe me, if you hung out in a bar with him and he got going, there was a lot of crazy stuff he would say. He would say that he wanted to see the riders' faces of joy and excitement and fear. He wanted to have that correctly on the back glass for his inspiration. And, I mean, what a maybe it happened. You know, maybe he had, you know, been drinking a little bit. It's a great story, though, right? Yeah. It is a great story. Now, you alluded to this with your million-shot call out there just a second ago. What was something that was such a big deal in this machine? It's the first one with a one million shot, which probably isn't true because we have a note on here. Their first solid state with a million shot, but there was an EM, including Williams 1957 Arrowhead.
    47:09
    Score inflation, Ron. Can you describe score inflation to me? The scores kept getting bigger and bigger. And as the manufacturers kept making them bigger and bigger, the other, like if one manufacturer does it, the other one's got to do it. And they just kept getting bigger and bigger up to around probably Attack from Mars era, like 95, where you get like, skill shot, 10 million. And other ridiculous, ridiculous. And then they pared back quite a bit. So you got things like Medieval Madness where the scoring's way lower. They kind of said, yeah, we went a little too far. Yeah, Jersie Jack, you know, they're basically down into the hundreds of thousands now. Yeah, they do. Jersie Jacks are kind of, if you get a million, it's kind of like old school. If you get a million, that's the science. You've really achieved something, like a million. You know, Python, I guess, he said he was such a driver or a force to have this million shot. So the way that it works, right, is that there's like this weird kind of ramp off to the right, and it has consecutive smaller holes. So the idea is you're standing at the bottom, you know, you do your series of things, and you have a chance to make a million shot. And you got to shoot it up this ramp and it has to kind of jump over two holes and into a third hole. And that gives you a million points and you get this big million point call out. That's new, I guess. But, you know, it's the concept of a hurry up, right? Isn't that really kind of what it is? I've actually never gotten it. And I probably only played two or three games of Comet in my life. It was a big, big, big reward. So back in the day, you know, if you got multiball, that was like your reward. It wasn't easy to get. Where multiballs now are, you know, you can get it by accident most of the time. This was like your big reward was this million point shot. And is it that great? I'm sure it was for the time. They sold over 8,000 units, so I would say a lot of people thought it was a really great thing. I guess, I mean... Yeah, Python says, and the callout was done by Steve Kordick, the million point callout. Python says, I wanted the player to be fully immersed in a miniature amusement park. Using a one million shot on the game was my first daring idea in pinball design. I wanted the voice of Steve Kordick to call the shot, as this was the first game to score such a high score with a perfectly timed shot. It's funny because it's like he needed to get somebody epic to do the call out. The person he chooses is sort of the mentor figure at Williams at the time. Who's already been in the industry almost 50 years at that point. Right, so is he sucking up a little bit here? Or does he want him to do it because he wants to, you know, this is such an important shot. It's Python. Who knows? And in his TopCast interview, you know, he didn't have much nice to say about Steve Kornick, which is funny that he would choose him to be such an important piece of his machine. Yeah, he was consistent, though. I'm sure he wouldn't find any interviews where he said he liked Steve Kornick if he said he didn't like him. I don't get it. What do you think of the back glass, the Python's back glass? The faces are awesome. The back glass is insane. Barry Ousler is the last guy in the back there. He's got his mustache and his hair. He either looks happy or completely terrified. Yeah, it's so fun. The faces and the detail of the faces is so unique and different. And you'll see that with Python's designs. All of his art going forward is that they all kind of have a similar sort of color saturation and things. You know, he adds a lot of these like Easter eggs and strange little bits through it. Like there's a, you know, there's a person sitting in the third row whose face is completely covered by the terrified woman's in the second row. Her hair is flying back because they're going so fast. It's hilarious. There's like a child or something in there who shouldn't be on a comet. Tons of fun. What, what a weird, weird thing. Python would also say that when you look at that play field, right, so you're standing there as the player and you've got this weird top-down thing, right? It's like there's an amusement park under there and people are walking around and they're going to get concessions and they're going to, you know, various rides and they're sitting on the rides. Well, when he did the pencil designs, Python rearranged all the lights on the playfield to make sure that they integrated with the artwork. And he would say that I wanted the player to be totally immersed in a miniature park. Before, you just sort of put the lights where you needed them, right? You just sort of put them there and you drew around the art where it's almost like he's changing the way that you do it and you're integrating the lights into the art.
    51:48
    And we'll see later on, you know, the eyes of something are the flashing lights, right? Python would also be the type of person to say, like, I invented that. No one did that before. Yeah, which there might be some truth, but I wouldn't say that it is the truth. Yeah, it's what makes Python Python. Yeah, Ousler would also tell IPDB that Python wanted the top rollover inserts. So, again, you plunge the ball, it comes up to the top of the playfield, it has these switches that you roll over. There's like four lanes, and that would spell, or that would be the letters 1986 in recognition of Halley's Comet, and that would fly by Earth in 1986. And in Canada, numbers are letters, obviously. That's right. Because we're speaking the Queen's maths. Haley's Comet is every 70, how many years? I will not live to, well, I'd have to be like 90. I'd have to live as long as Steve Cordell. Yeah, I'm not Googling that. So if you want to send us an email to silverballchronicles at gmail.com. It's 70 something. Or you can send it over to our Facebook page at facebook.com slash silverballchronicles. But regarding Comet, Barry Ousler would say Comet wasn't the original name. It was going to be called Riverview, named after the amusement park that used to be across the river from Williams. After discussions with management and some of the big distributors, Barry changed the name and used one of the roller coaster names from that park. Yeah, that's kind of cool. Comet was a common name for roller coasters back then, along with Cyclone and Hurricane, which will probably come into play later on. I think so. So Steve Ritchie's next big project at Williams was high speed, and he brought in Python Angelo to do the high speed backlash. And this is one of my favorite backlash arts ever. It's a good backlash. This backlash became sort of a bit of a contentious point, I guess is a diplomatic way to say, the relationship between Steve Ritchie and his vision and Python Angelo's art and his vision. The guidance from Steve was that you were outrunning the police in a police chase. It was more about the story of a chase and getting away from the police. And Python would say that he didn't like that you were going to be running from the police. He preferred that you were the police chasing a speeding car. Now, that sounds very similar, right? Not really. One way, as the player, you are technically breaking the law and running from the cops. In Python's view, you would be the cops trying to arrest the player who broke the law or something. Or you are the cop trying to arrest someone. Right. It's a different perspective. But in the grand scheme of things, it's still about a car getting away from the police. Right. It's just it's just who are you, the antagonist, the protagonist, right? You're technically both. Yeah. You're breaking the law, but you are. That's you. You are the player and you want to get away. So you can imagine and we know Steve Ritchie is all passion when it comes to his design and its idea behind that. Like, it's not irregular that we hear stories about Steve Ritchie getting into fights with, like, a Dwight Sullivan or getting into arguments with somebody over mechanics or the pieces that go into their games. Like, you know, when you're dealing with passionate individuals, that passion bubbles to the top. And now you've got somebody like a Python Angelo who we've said is completely nuts. And you've got Ritchie who in his own way is kind of nuts. And they're both kind of clashing over, well, what is the vision of this, right? No, I'm not running away from the police. It's like, you are the police trying to catch them. They're like, no, no, no, you are the guy trying to get away. And we'll talk about high speed in the future in our next Steve Ritchie episode, but that nuance difference can cause a lot of contention, a lot of arguments. Yeah, he says, Steve didn't like the idea. You were being chased by the cops, and Steve didn't like that you were the cops. Steve was busted by the cops. You chased the player. The only reason he liked it was I put him in a Maserati kingpin, and he was getting away. Yeah, so he sort of used this psychology of, well, you're the guy in the car, Steve. You're the one that's being chased by the police. And then immediately it's like, oh, he changed it. But, I mean, I'm pretty sure Steve Ritchie's a little bit smarter than that. Like, give me a break. Why did Python care so much that he put you, the player, in the squad car chasing the criminal? Yeah, because Python said he didn't like that rap or violent music was encouraging youth to do bad things. Python's argument was that violence and drugs isn't what artists should do with their medium, which is such an interesting statement. Yeah, he said he wanted to be a moment and a spiritual force for entertainment. He didn't want to be a force of evil in the universe, right, which is kind of weird. Like, it's a game. Come on. So Python would leave the project sort of partially complete and he would give the rest to Mark Spinger. Yeah, and honestly that's one of the things that always bothered me about High Speed. I like when the games have the same artists for the back glass, the play field art, the cabinet art, because it all ties together. It all speaks with one voice. It's very obvious when you look at High Speed that a different person did the back glass than did the play field. The funny thing is, you know what the Williams, in Williams they would have, should I say, unflattering names for their games, they would do as like a joke.
    57:33
    High Speed was called High Cost. That's what they called them in the company. But they actually had a name for that backlast, the High Speed Backlast. Do you know what they called it? I don't. Zombie Cops from Hell. Oh no. That's what they called it. Is it because that backlast, because they have like weird facial features? The colors? I don't know, but that's what they called it. The coolest part is the mirror, because the mirror, Python put a mirror on the top, so when you look at it, you're looking at you. You are on the back glass. Yeah, so cool.
    58:09
    It was, and it's got that sort of Python facial, like high detailed cartoon style facials, if that makes any artistic sense whatsoever. Like, they're very detailed, but they've got sort of odd expressions and things like that. You know, the funny thing is, it's a Maserati, but the actual incident where Steve got pulled over, I believe he was driving a Porsche. Very cool. I really look forward to our next Steve Ritchie episode, because we get into some really cool... You should. I'm the best. One bit that I really like about this back glass is that you're sitting in the squad car, you've got player one, player two, player three, And four, those are say Speeder 1, 2, 3, 4, and those are like the radar detecting gimmicks. Very cool. You got one officer just yelling into his microphone. The other guy is just trying to chase down the car. There's a lady in the Lamborghini Maserati looking thing looking back like in fear, And you've just got somebody going flat out down a Southern California highway. It's so, so cool. Steve Ritchie got pulled over for doing 146 miles an hour, and that's actually on the back glass, too. That's on the speed gun, 146 miles an hour. And, I mean, that game sold 17,000 units, which is a lot. According to Python, the game sold because of Steve's genius kinetics in my back glass. Yeah, yeah. He's so humble. Yep, so humble. Now, he would move on to the project where they needed some extra help, and I guess we could talk about the Not-So-Grand Lizard sets, and it's a fantasy battle theme, April 86, standard body. This one only sold, sadly, 2,000 units. Really? That seems crazy, because I've seen so many of these. Yeah, well, it's $27.50, so, I mean, I'll give it a few more there. Designed by Barry Ousler. Python only did the Backlash, and Paul Ferris did the Playfield. So here's another one of those sort of projects where they need to get somebody in there to kind of finish it, kind of jumbling it together. The weird thing about this is Paul Ferris did the Backlash 2, and he did two versions of it, and neither of them were used. They did, he did two different versions in completely different, I mean, the style matched what was on the playfield. It was for numeric displays instead of alphanumeric. And he did two different versions with the score windows in different spots. And then Python came in and did the final back glass, which was, had the score displays in the position for the alphanumeric displays. Do you like Grand Lizard? Um, it's, I get, I have to play it in tournaments, and in tournaments you just hit it up to the top part and hit the drop targets forever. And never go for multiball. And it has the bongo drums and animals making sounds, and it's got the cool, like, lizard head. Like, I like that theme for the most part, but for some reason this machine just, it just doesn't, like this one, sorcerer. The opinions expressed by the members of this podcast are theirs alone. It doesn't really, you know, I don't know. Everyone always calls it the upper playfield when it's not an upper playfield. It's the upper part of the playfield. People think it's like a bi-level game. No, it's single level. The interesting thing is Barry Alser pretty much ripped off his solar fire design. It's literally almost the same thing. This lizard at the top, it looks like it was like, it looks like one you'd like, like a gecko, you'd peel off a highway, you know, in like Arizona or something like that. Like it's flattened out and squished and, you know, I don't know, man. It looks horrible. Just horrible.
    62:03
    The back glass is pretty cool. The pre-production back glass. They've got this on IPDB. It's got some pretty cool stuff going on there. You know, like it harkens back maybe to, you know, Paragon, Lost World, but just not done as cool. Well, it's just done by the same guy. Yeah. It's interesting that he did two pre-production backglasses and they didn't use either of them. And I think they're better, much better than Python. Oh my goodness. How dare you? This is probably Python's worst, I would say. It doesn't do it for me. So Python's backglasses, there's a lady chained to this lizard thing and there's a super muscular back of the night fellow, like a He-Man kind of thing. And he's attacking him. And, you know, it's got like lots of really kind of neat things on the back glass. But when you look at when you look at the pre-production back glass, which you can bring up here, it's so much more detailed. And Paul Ferris has a guy punching a baboon in the face. Like, come on. How much cooler do you get to punching a baboon in the face? Awesome. There's a story here that I couldn't find as to why they changed the back glass and why they didn't get sort of the original designer of the art package, Paul Ferris, why he didn't do it. There's something going on there, and I couldn't quite find what that is. So if you know what that is, shoot us an email at silverballchronicles at gmail.com if you kind of know why they just didn't get Paul to do a new back glass with different windows. It was the first machine to have digitized sound audio samples. That's sound designer Bill Parade, which I'm probably saying wrong, but yes. So a new sort of a new team, a different introduction, I would say, to the way they use sound and sound samples and digitization of those samples. So we're moving in. Now we've moved from kind of solid state being, you know, rules and scoring and sound and things like that into more sharpening that pencil on sound. It becomes less about, you know, just having sound. We're also getting into System 11. These games now, these are all System 11 games.
    64:10
    Advanced over the old System 3 to 7 or System 9. That is their board set. Their technology behind the game is now advancing, allowing them to do more stuff.
    64:24
    Yeah, and more complicated stuff. Just not refining, like we're totally changing the way things work. And I would say a machine that changed everything is Pinball. 12,000 units. Space fantasy themed. October 86th. Barry Ousler and Python, who did a million games together. Bill Foots and Reuter on software. Python and Bill, they would spend a lot of time working together. Even at Capcom. They both went to Capcom. And here we're going to bring in somebody really, really important who I would say is a major groundbreaker when it comes to sound, and that's Chris Granner. He's the sound guy along with Bill Pratt. Now, what are your memories of PinBot? Ah, well, it screams Python, I'll say that. This is definitely something Python would make. It's the first time, I think it's the first time they used a motorized, well it's a five bank in that game, which was cool. I don't know if that had been done yet. It had the grid in the front. When was the first time that you had seen Pinbot? Well, I didn't get into pinball until the mid-2000s, so then. When you saw it, what was the first thing you were like, what was the first thing that drew you in? Pounding the five bank and having it go down, then you put it in the visor, comes up, and then you lock the ball. Yeah, first time I saw Pinbot was on the Pinball Arcade video game. And immediately the first thing there was the sound. I was like, whoa, whoa, what's going on here? It was amazing. So it had all of these different pieces that drew people in from all these different angles, right? One person would see the sound. One person would see the robot that is inside the glass. Another person like you would see the mechanics, right? Like, it really had everything.
    66:18
    And I'll tell you what, I loves me some PinBot. I don't have a PinBot. I don't know if I would ever buy a PinBot, but man, every time I see one, I'm like, this game is awesome. And really around this time in 83, Pinball was starting to sort of recover from that kind of crash of video games and gaming. Most definitely. Yeah, PinBot was an example of how Williams really started to gain traction in the industry again. And finally they stopped spinning their wheels after a couple of years. You could see there was some exponential growth. And one thing that makes Pinbot truly unique in comparison to most, I would say, games of that era or pinball games of that era is it was, and Python would say, take that with a grain of salt, is it was originally storyboarded in early 83. And storyboard like a movie, right? You draw the overall vision and then you break down each piece in a flowing story, almost kind of like a comic book, I guess, if you want to think of it like that. And you can see that original art in the Pinball Compendium book, as well as you can Google it. You can look at it in IPDB. It's very, very cool.
    67:29
    Python would say a pinball machine is a robot. It like an exoskeleton Listen your finger controls the robot and it is an extension of you That is a weird way to say that you flip a ball around on a playfield eh That's a very normal way to say it if you're Python. According to Python, he said PinBot was a big risk. It was very outside the box. Steve Ritchie and Larry DeMar told Python not to do it and spent a lot of time, according to Python, Again, this is Corian Python telling him and Barry, don't put that there, don't create that mech. And Barry and Python did it anyway. Ken Fidesna, the VP at Williams, approved the project, and here's what Python said. What a courageous decision on Kenny's part. It was more controversial as a pinball, and I was the creative wacko behind it. So some feedback that I got, I asked everybody on Pinside and on our Facebook page, what are some thoughts about some of these various topics? And Mike P said that PinBot is an amazing starter pin for somebody looking for their first machine. Here's some top reasons. The price is more than fair for what you get, which is around $1500 to $1900 US. It has a multiball mode and it has a ramp. Of course, PinBot was my first pin. But when I was looking for my first pin, I wanted all three of the things listed above and PinBot nailed it. Plus, it's a fun game. It offers many other different things for an inexpensive game, including a whole awesome skill shot ramp, upper play field, interactive drop mech, and an awesome sound and voice package. I guess, you know, you mentioned the five-bank target kind of at the mouth, quote-unquote, the mouth of the pinbot, the robot. Stand-up targets with a mech that lowers down. The idea is there's a grid, and that grid has lights that are moving, and you fill up the grid, and the mech drops down. Now, you can also shoot to the right of the drop mech to complete the grid, or kind of like a skill shot or a pre-skill shot is that if you can shoot the one lit light right off the get-go, it'll drop the bank right away. And that was designed by somebody who's very near and dear to your heart. JoJo's. Yes, JoJo's, originally from Stern. Yep, Stern Electronics Designer. He did games like Quicksilver, Dragon Fist. When he went to Williams, if you look at his game list, he was primarily more of a mechanical engineer. He's a guy that got this stuff working. He gave somebody, gave him an idea and said, hey, just run with that. I wonder why they never let him design anything. That's a great question. That'll be on the JoJo's episode whenever we have that. Yeah, exactly. You know, pinball was never the same without a mechanically animated sculpture on the play field And some sort of interactivity with the player. The game and the theme were melded together. And he would say that he would humbly say that he was the one that did that with Pinball. That all of a sudden, not only do you have a quote unquote world under glass, not only do you have a story like Steve Ritchie and High Speed, But you would have the theme integrate some sort of sculpture or some sort of toy or mechanic underneath the playfield that would actually do something in furthering the story, in furthering the vision of what is under that glass. And he might not have been 100% the cause of that, but he certainly had a part in it. Let's put it that way. Oh my goodness, the sound of Pimbot. Python says, Chris Granner composed an orchestral masterpiece never heard of pinball as well as a stunningly realistic package that brought Pinbot alive. Granner made the most original music, not a copy of Hollywood. Under my direction, he made the most amazing music. I want better than 2001, A Space Odyssey. I want space. He was the guy. Yeah, it was all Python's direction. Without Python's direction, Granner wouldn't be able to do it. When I read these quotes, I can literally hear his voice in my head saying that. It's amazing. There is a mock reflection of you playing the game in the pinball that is used as a separator between the world's pin and bot on the Translight. Yeah, so there's a couple of really neat little Easter eggs in here. I was able to sort of pull them from online, and one of them is if you look at the back glass, and on the back glass there's between pin and bot, there's like a, it's almost like a planet or a little circle, And it's a reflection of you. It's shiny. It's not really a mirror, but it's a shiny bit of the back glass. And it's designed to be an abstract vision of you because you are the extension of the pinball robot, right? You are the pinbot and you're in the middle between the game and the individual. Really weird. Another thing is on the back glass there's a comet which has a face and that's very, very, very similar to the comet in the game Comet.
    72:34
    Oh, did you know Barry Ousler is the voice of Pinball? I did not know that. Yeah, so that's kind of neat. Now it's highly distorted, but I think that's one of the coolest parts about Pinball is that robotic voice. It's so strange and unusual. It's so cool. Another thing that Python talked about this were royalties paid to the individuals who designed the game. We talked in the Stern episode, episode two, about Steve Kirk putting names on the playfield. Yeah, his name. Yeah, yeah, specifically his name. Python wanted everybody's name on the playfield, the designer, the music and things. And not only that, he wanted royalties for machines being paid. And, I mean, royalties, like, whatever that means, I mean, a commission for the amount of things that are sold, but, you know, again, everything that Python says is like, is he completely full of s***? Is he sort of partially full of s***, right? Like, did they actually get, like, a dollar a machine? Python said he went to Kenny Fidesna. This is a quote from Python. I went to Kenny Fidesna. I wanted to put on the playfield the entire design team. Kenny didn't have an issue. The playfields were printed. Then you know what? All the money grabbers, all the control freaks yelling, he can't do that. Yeah. Yeah. He said that a lot about money grabbers. Yeah. He was very concerned about how much people were making and where they were making money. I guess the way I would describe it is Python was really giving that little extra to the design teams that he worked with. He was like the sizzle on the steak, you know, the flipper fingers on the robot arms, for example. So if you look at the flippers, it's almost like the arms of the pinball of the robot are coming down into the flippers, and the flippers are the fingers, which are really just strange, but it draws you in. You might not notice it, right? You might not look at it and be like, oh, those are the fingers. But, you know, you sort of subconsciously notice. Very cool. What was his next game, Ron? Big Guns. Your favorite, I'm sure, right? It's okay. Yeah, Big Guns, Big Stats. Big Batbox. Really big Batbox. Huge. It's like a space castle siege fantasy theme. October 87. We're getting really close to the 90s now. System 11B from Williams. It sold 5,250 units. Designed by Mark Ritchie. And Python Angelo. Software by The Foots, Bill Footsenruder. Artwork by Python Angelo. And sound by Chris Granner and Brian Schmidt.
    75:08
    So, Mark, who's Mark Ritchie? Steve Ritchie's brother. Yeah. And the master of the catapult. He did like Firepower 2, like 83, 84, somewhere around there. Also has a lot of really cool, innovative designs, just like his brother. Now he's not, he's not Steve Ritchie, but he's, you know. I wouldn't mind seeing some more Mark Ritchie games. But then again, I like Road Kings, so people think I'm crazy. Yeah, yeah, that's embarrassing. I wouldn't mention that to people. Okay. Now, what's unique about this game is it's actually designed in Mark Ritchie's basement over a bunch of pints. So, you know, we might have alluded to this, but Python was a bit of a drinker. A little bit, yeah. A lot of his creativity would come at the weirdest of times when he was, you know, hanging out, having some pints. And this is really a game and a theme that sort of came from that. And the art in here, because we're not focusing on really Mark Ritchie today, but we'll talk about some of the bits and pieces of this pin. One of them is a hidden champagne glass. So there's actually a hidden champagne glass on the Translight between the land separations of the planets. It's like this theme where you're laying siege to a castle and there's like tanks, but they're tanks from the past in the future with like, it's crazy. And there's like a bagatelle in the back. Yeah, and the castle itself has a face, which I just noticed right now. Oh, yeah. You can see the eyes and the nose. There's a whole thing going on there. Now, it's a little bit of a, it doesn't quite have the same facial animations and design. It's a little bit different with Python now. It's less sort of clay, less cartoony, but it's still very, very neat. This back box is huge. That it is, that it is. Isn't it the biggest back box? I doubt it. There's always going to be something bigger. A bingo. A bingo. So, yeah, you better make sure if you got a shorter ceiling in your basement or something that this game's going to fit. The reason now what I've what I have read through my research is the way they were able to sort of get it approved is that they told Steve Kordick that the back box was inspired by Apollo, which was an original design that he had done in 1967. And that's why they needed the four extra inches at the top of the back box. And then one would assume that Steve went to those kind of around the office and accidentally lobbied to allow them to make this game because, you know, he was part of the inspiration behind it, right? Kind of funny. So Lord of the Ring Breath from Pinside says, I assume that's what L-O-T-R means, At Pembroke last year, I happened to get big guns twice. I won the game both times. My strategy was simply keep sending the ball up top and pick off as many targets as possible. So I didn't totally ignore the locks for multiball, but just took them as they happened. I had very little experience or time on Big Guns and found it a little funny that I won both times I played it. And Big Guns is another one of those steel locks games, so in a head-to-head situation, you may not want to actually lock balls. Yeah, you know, kind of a neat game. We'll talk about that probably more in the Mark Ritchie thing. You know, it's cool. It's got catapults, and the ball flies through the air. Yeah, it's not so much ramps. And the voice of the evil king is Steve Ritchie, of course. Because when you had a bad guy, you get Steve Ritchie to do the voice. Oh, who else would it be? Their next sort of adventure, when it came to it, was to revisit a theme that they had done before but change it up. And that's with Cyclone. So let's circle around the stats. You know, like a circle. Like a cyclone.
    78:54
    Circle around the stats. Dead silence. Yeah. Okay, super. Super. Again, theme park themed, February 88, this is a System 11B. We're getting back up there again. 9,400 units, Barry Ousler, Bill Futsenruder, Chris Granner, sort of the four-piece band that really, I think, melds well together. Part of that might be because nobody else can work with Python, but we'll leave that. Cyclone's kind of neat. I haven't played one. Have you played one? Oh, yeah. Again, World Under Glass. It's got actual Ferris wheels. Yeah, this Cyclone is the one Ferris wheel. But again, you feel like you're in an amusement park. You've got a Ferris wheel on the side. It's got some wiggly ramps. Crazy ramps. Crazy, wonderful plastic ramps. An absolute terrifying clown at the bottom. Oh, man. Why does everyone hate clowns now? It's terrifying. I'm okay with clowns, but this guy looks like he's going to murder my dog in front of my children. So we have clowns, we have Ferris wheels, we have long flowing ramps that are supposed to be like the roller coaster, great skill shot. Probably one of the greatest backglasses. Yeah, interactive backglasses with a moving mystery wheel. Yes, it's got the jackpot builder upper light gimmick on the left side. It's a very nice machine, unique. I don't know if it's a great long-term player. And we have Ronald and Nancy Reagan for some reason on the backglasses. Yeah, I got a great quote about that. He said, the world loved or hated the Reagans, so why not put them on the back glass? Nancy at the time led a huge campaign against drugs, so I added say no to drugs on her shirt. I always loved adding some humor to games. The only reason I would ever own this game is for the Reagans on the backless. I mean, I don't remember the Reagans. I was too young for that. I mean, I lived through their years, but I don't remember their years. But having her kind of on the back with her hair and the Stay No to Drug shirt. And she's literally waving. She's waving to the public. Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan is like screaming. Terrified. It's again, it's a take on what he had previously done, but then sort of ramping up some social commentary. This is where we get into, I would say, a transition period for Python, where a lot of the art that he starts doing now has this extra social commentary layer, where before it didn't have that. It was sort of just unique, fun art. So he's got like a punk rocker dude on there on the roller coaster. Now he would talk, yeah, he would talk a lot about this game in the TopCast interview, and then all of a sudden he starts tossing bombs over Barry's way. He worked with Ousler a lot, and he did his best work with Barry, so I don't know why all of a sudden just randomly he starts tossing sort of negativity over his way. I don't get it. What an odd, odd guy. So Python comments on the back box animation. It was made possible by Joe Jost, originally from Stern Electronics, who did the mechanics, programmer Bill Foots, Foots and Reuter. I enjoyed working with these gifted men. So he says that, and then all of a sudden he starts tossing out some bombs to Barry. I don't know if their relationship soured later on, but, you know, I don't get it. Now, a couple of the neat little bits. Mark Ritchie, he's the voice of the carnival barker, because he's not a bad guy. So the good guy is always Mark Ritchie. The bad guy is always Steve Ritchie, right? Carnival Barkers, never met an un-honest Carnival Barker, right? So good guys. A duck can be seen on the back glass and two cows can be seen on the playfield near the advanced X light. Yeah, so let's get into the one that I enjoy. I enjoy a lot. So let's hail some stats like a taxi and talk about taxi, which is, I guess, car theme. It's August 1988. It sold 7,300 units. Its design was Mark Ritchie with Python on the concept software by Ed Boone, Pinnball, Artwork, Python Angelo, and Sound by the legend Chris Granner. So good. And when you say Python on concept, there is no doubt it's Python on concept. I don't know who else would think of, we're going to have a taxi driver picking up passengers, and the passengers are going to be Santa Claus, Dracula, Mikkel Gorbachev, Pinbot, and Marilyn Monroe. I mean, who thinks of that? I'll tell you who thinks of that. Bat-s***-crazy Python Angelo. So Joel Bob from Pinside, he wrote me and he said what I love about taxi. First off, it's an easy to understand game. You can have someone step up to the machine and all you have to say is try to pick up the lit passengers. That's it. The plunge is enjoyable. It's very important to have a good score, especially in ball three when it's worth three times the value. You can steal locks. Locking a ball is only one shot and starting multiball is only one shot, which makes it quite achievable for players of all skill sets. Once multiball starts, there are multiple stages to completing it to get more points. The music is great. You will start saying hey on the Gorby Collect. Can't ever complain about an included topper. It also has a bell if you like loud noises. Love the bell. I love a game with a bell. I had a tag team from Gottlieb, had a bell. Awesome. Overall, I just find this game fun. You don't have to overthink it or prepare any complex strategy. It's approachable for pretty much anyone, and it is great to play as a group because the ball times can be fast, you can steal from each other, and it's simple but still enjoyable for advanced players. Would you agree with that? Yep, 100%. I think this era of games is so good at the do the thing, and then the thing continues to escalate in its complexity, they really nailed it at this time. They couldn't have got it any better. One thing that is very cool, and again, I spoke about this in the previous pin we were talking about, Python adds a lot of social commentary. And Python is himself the taxi driver in the back glass, and it is his eye in the taxi driver's mirror. That is a self-portrait of what he felt he was like at that time. Python says, I sometimes would make social statements with my work. Since the majority of Vietnam veterans were working as taxi drivers, can you imagine how they would feel picking up Gorbachev? Python in the back glass is wearing like a military vet sort of jacket, right? A lot of these guys are coming back from Vietnam. You know, this is before we had support for PTSD. This is the first war where people came back severely injured. You know, there's a whole commentary there that he's picking up Gorbachev, the president of Russia. The Soviet Union. Get it right. This is the 80s. The Soviets. Yes. Right. So there's a whole commentary going on there, right? In that movie with, what was that movie? Rocky IV.
    86:19
    What? No, the one with De Niro. Oh, it's called Taxi. That's Taxi Driver. That's a lot different. That would be like if Python was going around killing all the passengers. Right, but Taxi Driver, right? He wore the military jacket, right? I only saw the movie once. I don't remember. Also, drawn on the playfield near the right flipper, there's a cow sitting on the side of a motorcycle.
    86:45
    So what, like, there's another cow. We're getting into a thing here. There's this whole controversy around Marilyn and Lola. It's not really controversy. They used Marilyn Monroe and they didn't have license to use their likeness. And they were strongly advised to change that. So they did. They changed it to Lola. So they made her a redhead and they just changed it in the software. So whenever it would say Marilyn, it would just say Lola instead. Yeah, they got into a whole thing because Marilyn Monroe was copyrighted. They couldn't use her likeness in name. So then they had to kind of fudge it a bit, right? They made her hair shorter, changed the hair color, changed the call out, and it's all done. Well, they literally, I don't think they made her hair shorter. They literally just made it red. That's it. She looks exactly the same. She's just red. According to Roger Sharp, he says, Suffice to say that we did have some limited run of machines featuring a blonde Marilyn. And I don't know if these were for international only. They weren't. However, we were informed that there were rights that needed to be secured in order to use Marilyn, and the decision was made to just alter the artworks that the female character was renamed Lola for the main production run. I can tell you, I have seen as many Maryland's as Lola's, almost half and half. There were a ton of Maryland's made. That's where the controversy comes from. This taxi was the game that was used for the Expo tournament in October of 1988. They said it had a whole row of taxis and they were all Maryland's. That's where that controversy comes from. People are like, they're so rare. They're not rare.
    88:11
    Roger Sharp also says, if memory serves, and I can't say with certainty, There might be games that were manufactured with a brunette Lola first before the Redhead. I've never seen a brunette Lola. So if there's one that exists, that's probably the rarest taxi of all. Yeah, so stop worrying about the blonde Marilyn and start looking for the brunette Lola. Yeah, you want the brunette Lola. You have like the ultimate. According to Mark Ritchie, it's explained in the Pinball Compendium. He says at least 200 sample games were in the process of being shipped with Marilyn before the change had to be made. It had to be more than 200. He also explained the name Lola was taken from a 1970s song by the Kinks about a transvestite, chosen to befit her muscular arms as she was depicted on the back glass. There you go. We're getting into all these weird Easter eggs and things. Like before, pinball was just sort of pinball, right? And that was it. It was a medium. Now there's all these, like, extra meanings and inside jokes and little bits shoved in here or there that only mean something to the people that are making the games. Next they did Jokers. So we'll do some stats with a Z because you spell Jokers with a Z for some reason. The thing is, this is the one Williams stereo game. Ooh. Although I think Pinball 2000 was in stereo. But as far as their regular, the rest of their games, this was the one game for whatever reason that was decided, yeah, we're going to do stereo with this one. This one is a card game, December of 1988. It's 5,400 units, Barry Ousler, Python Angelo with concept, Bill Foots and Reuter, and this is the first time we're going to see John Yossi and sound with Chris Granner. Python says on the theme, he says, the playfield had no theme until Kenny asked me to join in. I designed the upper play field, the social irony of kings and queens playing cards for fun with our little jokers' lives on the line. A metaphoric, symbolic game. Wow. I did not know that, but yes. So he's like, oh, here's the elite. The elite are sitting at the table and they're playing cards with all of us jokers around them. But if we're the jokers and they're the elite, can't we kill them? See, that would be more fun. Oh, what are you, France now? Or something like that. I guess that's true. Quiet. We are playing. Some of the call outs. Yeah, it's super cool. Now, the back glass was done by Yowsey. That was his first back glass. And there is a Joker on the back glass that is a self-portrait of him. Yes, and John Yowsey, who would end up doing artwork for a ton of Pat Lawler games. Yes. Next, they would move on to Police Force. Don't you mean Batman? Oh, of course. It was supposed to be the Michael Keaton Batman. Which is the only Batman. Which they lost out to Data East on the license, so they had to re-theme it. Which to me means that the animals in Police Force, because there's all the different animals, they had to have been the villains. So I kept thinking, like, which one was supposed to be, say, the Joker, maybe which one was supposed to be... Oh, good point. You know, the penguin, that kind of thing. It had to be what they were going for. And the car is a, um, was supposed to be the Batmobile. Yep. And the Batglass does look very reminiscent of High Speed. Yeah, it's like a bit of a riff. Instead of the zombie cops from hell, we have the animals in the cop car. Yeah, it's still in the center. It's almost like the dashboard of the car, right? Yep. The onboard mobile police computer. Now, some other little bits in here. The yellow taxi on the back list is the taxi from Taxi. And he's getting chased by the cops for some reason. Yes. And the cop car says, say no to drugs on the back. Yes, as it always does. Which just from knowing what I know about Python, I can see no world where he did not take drugs, at least at some time. If I were a gambling man, I'd put all my chips on white. Lister to the show, Dylan, he would say that I love this game. There are so many strange Easter eggs in the art. It's very fun when the rules are adjusted properly in the software. For example, calming down the center ramp. You want to talk about center ramp all day on this? I know that's the pinbird strategy. Yeah, just smash that center ramp. This era, you can tell, there's something about this whole era of pinball machines. Like, they just started ramps, right? Ramps were kind of, they were around for a while, but they were like trying to figure out what else they could do with ramps. Well, they were steel. Once they started getting the plastic molded ramps, then they could get absolutely crazy with what they could do with these ramps. You could make them curve around things. You can make them just exit the entire playfield, go out the back panel, come back in. You can do so much with plastic ramps. Yeah, they can zigzag. And at this time they were like, well, let's put a ramp in the middle of the playfield. And that became a thing. And I don't know. Part of me doesn't like the aesthetic of that. Part of me doesn't like the way that it gets in the way. Or that you're always using it nonstop like police force. You're just in the ramp, in the ramp, in the ramp, in the ramp. You don't have to play it like that. But I'm not a really great player. So when I'm shooting the ball and I just accidentally repeat a ramp, even though when I'm not trying to, I find it quite frustrating. And if you go to IPDB, you will actually see the original concept artwork for Police Force when it was Batman. Oh, you know, I should have looked at this. Okay, so it was supposed to be, now this is original concept. This is before Playfield was even done, so, but it does have the car there. Yeah, it has the car down the left side with the lock. Completely different playfield though. Yeah, it looks like a better playfield in my opinion.
    93:51
    It's before the center ramp was sort of thrown in. It's got a right side ramp that goes all the way up. It's got Batman in the middle and his utility belt are like the lights. It looks like the idea of redoing the high speed back glass was there even then. Yes, very, very cool. Go check that out, IPDB.org. Look it up.
    94:12
    It's like police force. I don't think it's amazing, but I like it. It's fun. The best part of it is the R's, really. It's so cool. So off the wall. I don't want to talk about these two, but I'll mention them. Bad Cats was a favorite of Python. It's probably one of the, I think it was the last Williams game they did that was single ball, that had no multi-ball. And it had the big plastic ramp in the center.
    94:41
    Actually, I have grown to like this more because it is goofy. Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. Just the call-outs are hilarious on the game. It has mechanical back glass, mechanical action going on there. Python's on the back glass. He is a snake. He is a pinball python. There's like a build-up jackpot. Jackpot. Down to that, there's a Python snake and there's Python Angelo. Yes, and it's got his head. It's the head of the snake and his tail is, instead of a rattle, it's a flipper. It's one of those games that's so, I like Goofy and this is totally Goofy. I spoke before about how the art and the light in Python's game are all integrated. Well, at the bottom of the playfield, the multipliers are the eyes of these cats and they're like these amber. Their eyes are really bright. There's one of those spinny wheel things underneath the playfield. What are those called? Like a roulette wheel? It's a roulette wheel. Meow, meow, meow, meow. I know. I got it in my head. Meow, meow, meow, meow. I haven't played a Bad Cats. Great sound package. One more time. It's like, yeah, you're a big fan of mousing around, right? Well, when you hit the ramp, it's just that clock. Meow, meow, meow, meow. Yeah, and again, it's got that friggin' repeatable ramp in the middle, right? It is two repeatable ramps, left and middle. Yeah, so it's just like, let's just keep smashing those ramps. Oh yeah, that's pretty much what you do. Yeah. I still find it fun. It's cool. It's just packed with, the artwork is insane. Yeah, you could tell that they were like, oh, let's get something done here. Now, the quote from Python was that they were looking for a way to fill a gap in the line, And Bad Cats was the way to fill that. The other way to fill the line at the time was Bugs Bunny Birthday Bash. You got it wrong, too. Everyone does that wrong. It's Bugs Bunny Birthday Ball, not Bash. And we'll never talk about Bugs Bunny's Birthday Ball. Oh, no, no, no. Yes, we will. Because this is significant. It's significant in one of the things Python was very adamant on, if you've noticed it so far, is there's no licenses.
    96:52
    There's no license game. Everything is original. Yeah. He did not want to do any licensed games. Period. Only original. He wanted creative control. But they knew there would be one exception. There would be one thing he would not be able to turn down. And that was a chance to draw Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes characters. Yeah. And he could not turn it down. So he went against his normal policy of no licensed games and he did Bugs Bunny. What she said was, I mean, the artwork is the highlight of the game.
    97:23
    And if you look at it, Python said, like, they would give you style sheets on how you're supposed to draw the character, but he said it was a pain because you had to submit it all for approval, and if you had just one little thing wrong with an eye or something, you'd have to redo it. But that was the one way they got him to do a licensed theme. They gave him one he could not turn down because as an artist, he just could not turn down the opportunity to draw Bugs Bunny. I've never played it, but I hear people just hate it. It has a weird John Trudeau trying something thing on the left with the flipper and the ball comes the other way. And yeah, just leave it at that. Yeah, just leave it at that. Another high point, I would say the birth of sort of a pinball series, right, of another machine with a similar theme that is part of the same sort of pinball universe. And that's the machine bride of pinball. Well, technically the birth of this series would be Pinball itself, but yes. He called this his dream sequel. Oh, yeah. He was so excited to do this one, and he put a lot, a lot of himself into this machine. I prefer Pinball. You bring her to life. Yeah. I can hear him in my head. I just heard him say this so many times. Yeah. So the idea is that you have Pinball. In the first game you built Pinball and now he lives and he sees and he goes around the universe getting into taxis and taxis and that's what he does. Well, you know, he's lonely and he needs a lady friend. And what you do is you get to build Pinball's lady friend who's known as the bride of Pinball, the machine. And things get weird. You make her see, make her, you know, I can speak, make her talk, and she becomes a living woman. It was probably one of the coolest sound light shows ever when you do the metamorphosis where she becomes human. And the whole game stops and her heart beats. It is, it is. It's a moment. It is, yeah. It's probably one of the best pinball moments I can think of that has ever been done. Python would say, I wanted the bride to morph into a living woman. And this was accomplished by using three faces that made a robot. See, speak, and think. Like, I could make the perfect woman. And that was done with what he called Lady Parchinko. So in the middle of the playfield, well, the top middle of the playfield, there's like a face. And it's of a woman and her mouth, right?
    99:56
    And you shoot up the left ramp and the ball will divert into there and it will plop into her mouth. And then the face will rotate, right? And then you can put balls into her eyes and you shoot the two balls up the left ramp. It goes up, diverts one into one eye, one into the other, and then it turns again and she's a human.
    100:19
    It's out there, man. It's out there. And it's got this weird sort of robotic sex appeal thing, right? The back glass, the bonus is her leg, and she's wearing these, like, high-heel shoes, and she's got that stereotype, 32, 28, 32, kind of hips, waist, chest thing. The visuals of the face are very soft and really symmetrical.
    101:01
    He's like, I'm going to make the sexiest robot anybody has ever seen and put it on the back glass. It's being built by little trucks. They're like building pieces of her leg. You know what an odd odd concept Now there another champagne on its Translite as well champagne glass So that again another weird signature of Python was adding these little bits and pieces It's on the bottom left side. Yeah, it's quite large. Right behind her hand. Yeah, she's supposed to be drinking it. It's her champagne glass. Yeah. I don't really like the game that much. I find that the shots are way too close up the playfield. I find them really tight. I find it specifically tight getting up that sort of rocket ramp into the locks. You know what I find? I find that the birthdays of people and family members associated with making of the game show up on display when the game is slam-tilted or power-cycled. These birthdays show up only on the actual birthday. The only way to make these appear is to slam-tilt the game or enter and then exit test mode. And if you are in New Year's or Christmas or on Bill Flipsenruder's birthday and you slam tilt on that day, up on the screen, Happy Birthday will appear or Merry Christmas or Happy New Year. How weird is that, eh? There's a flipper code you put in at the beginning and then you do certain things on the game and then you can play Old MacDonald. Old MacDonald had a farm. And the machine will reply back, E-I-I-O. So it's either they had too much time on their hands or they were working really, really late to kind of amuse themselves. One of my memories of Bride of Pinball is one of the expos after the banquet, it was probably one in the morning, and those have been at Expo. It doesn't close. Like the game room stays open into the next day. So it's like one in the morning and Python is playing Bride of Pinball with a bunch of other collectors. And he is somewhat inebriated and every time he hits the ramp and locks a ball he's doing a dance and it was very entertaining.
    103:19
    What a guy, eh? What a riot. The follow-up to that is Hurricane, which is another amusement park game. It's the trilogy, the third of the trilogy. This is the era where all of a sudden there is a series of games. You know, there's a sequel, there's a follow-up, you know, there's a trilogy. Pinball, and this is really the last one, and I would say probably the low point of the amusement series, would you say? Out of the three, it would be the one I like the least. Not a bad game, but, you know, it's all right. Again, with this thing, there's a picture of a cow accompanied by a moo, and a picture of a huge eye on the playfield. What is with cows as a running joke in pinball? The cows is because of the, what, Miss O'Leary's cow that tipped over the, whatever, the lantern that caused the Great Chicago Fire. That's where the cow comes from. That's why there's so many cows. But in this era of Williams, Brian Eddy of Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, I guess Stranger Things fame, he was really into cows. He had cow stuff, like, all over his house. So, and originally he started Williams as a programmer. So he started putting cows in every game he worked in. And all the other programmers followed suit and it became their thing. So every game had a cow in it somewhere. Data East, they had a thing where they thought they were making fun of Joe Kamikau. Oh, I see. You know, because, yeah, but it had nothing to do with that. And it's so funny, like, if you play No Fear and you get a high score and you put Moo in as a high score, or as the initials, the skull will Moo at you. I've always wondered what is with the cows, and now I know. Chicago, it's I think Miss Leary or O'Leary or whatever. That was the whole thing of how the Great Chicago Fire started. Her cow tipped over a lantern and knocked a lantern into hay and it started the fire. Because it's on, even before Brian Eddy started at Williams, they had a cow in fire, the game fire, obviously. Of course. When you start the game, I think it doesn't move because it's the cow. He started the fire. That's great. That makes me smile. I love cows. I actually like cows. Cows are all right. I think of Williams now. Every time I see cows, it's like, oh, it's Williams. Hurricane's okay, but what Python would say is that his primary goal was to create feelings and soul. He wanted to make humans feel and to tell a story with a beginning and an end. And he wanted to take them on a roller coaster ride just like an amusement park, which is, I guess, why amusement parks constantly pop up in Python's work. Very neat. Let's move on to, I would say, a very popular, very exciting game in which I hate. You're wrong, but that's okay. Hate. So while working on Bride, the machine Bride of Pinball, he went fishing with Mark Ritchie. And over, of course, a few beers and Fishtails was born. And that night, Python went home and he designed a storyboard for Fishtails. We have, in my hometown, I live in a very small hometown in New Brunswick, we only have two machines on location. One of those machines is Fishtails. It's in a laundromat. It's not level, which drives me insane.
    106:56
    And the theme is weird. It's like fishing. It's got this southern country music soundtrack. Oh, yeah. Which just gets stuck in your brain and you can't get it out. It drives me crazy, this game. I always liked it. One of my favorite video modes ever is knocking people off of jet skis. You hit them and they'll just scream, ah, ah. So the idea behind this game is that you're a fisherman, you are out on the lake, you're going after fishing these big monster fish, these tropical fish in your lake. You can shoot the ball into the tackle shop, which kind of is an upkicker that kicks it into like a reel, like a fishing reel, which then launches the ball during multiball kind of up a ramp and around into the flipper. King of the Catapult. Surprise. Mark Ritchie, trademark. King of the Catapults. It's got a taxi-esque sort of flowy center right-left ramp, so ball comes down, you shoot it up the left side of what looks like a boat, and it kind of goes up, and then it comes down to your left flipper, and then you shoot the left flipper up the right side of the boat, which flips around and goes to your right flipper. Did I get that right? Yeah, sounds right. It's crisscrossing. So it crisscrosses up and down and you build up a value into a monster fish and there's a captive ball in the middle. Like it's a cool game, but it's just, it's an earworm, it's weird, and it has a friggin' fish on the top. That's great. The fish topper. So what Python says about the fish topper, he wanted the topper to move and talk and be a character in the game. But Williams cut the idea. He said the money men didn't want to do that because of the talking fish that was popular at the time. I do remember that. They had those talking fish. Right. It was like a bass you'd put on your wall with batteries and it would sing songs and move its mouth. Well, that's what Python wanted. He wanted it to be a character to antagonize you and to bother you and to mock you. But I guess, you know, Williams was like, that's too expensive. And he didn't like that. So what are your favorite parts about fish nails? It's goofy. It automatically gets... That tongue in cheek kind of... It's just two different strategies. You can either do the monster fish to try to score points Or actually go for the multiball and try to get the super jackpots, which is where you get the scores in the billions. It's a cool game. Like I said, one of my favorite video modes.
    109:32
    It just comes across the screen. I just love hitting the jet skier and hearing him scream. Yeah, because you're on the lake, and there's these jet skiers and water skiers. There's other things you can shoot, but the jet skier is the only guy who makes any noise. He's hilarious. And it's got a fishing rod, like it's the shooter. The little integrations and things like that. I mean, the ramps are, it's a boat ramp. I mean, it's a boat. It makes perfect sense. Yeah, so 1991 rolls around, right, and that's when Steve Ritchie kind of makes the gun handle from T2, and now this is kind of an evolution of that. They started just using, yeah, guns and reels and pretty much anything. Anything other than a plunger. Anything other than a plunger is now game. What are lightning flippers? They're flippers that are an eighth of an inch shorter than standard. That's probably another reason I hate this game. Standard flippers are three inches, and they would typically use the lightning flippers, the eighth of an inch shorter, and they would use them on games due to their biggest distributor, and they sold a ton of games to Europe, especially Germany. I can't remember the name of the company, but they were like one of their bigger, the biggest buyers they had, and they wanted the games to play harder. DOS. So that's why you got those lightning flippers.
    110:47
    On games like that, you got them on Dracula had them, but almost all those games were designed originally with 3-inch flippers, and then they went to the lightning flippers when they went to production. Like I said, I'm not a good player, right? So, if I bought a Fishtails, and I switched it out to regular flippers, am I cheating? Yes. So I am. As a tournament player, I would say yes, but if it's your game, do what you want. You can go with the knowing that that's what Mark Ritchie intended. Oh, that makes me feel nice. Because it was designed with three-inch flippers. Yeah, you can see the original concept art on IPDB as well, and I've seen this in the Pinball Compendium book, and I've seen it in a few other places, of Python's original designs. And I think one of the coolest features of this game is that bottom third of the playfield, where the slings are, the flippers. The flippers are like the bottom jaw of the fish. And that is a theme that carried over even into the real... The production. The final production product. Because Python's original playfielder was quite a bit different. He had a reel, but it wasn't as far left. And he had a boat, but it was way in the back left, and it didn't have any of the crisscrossing ramps or anything.
    112:01
    Yeah, I would say that, again, the storyboard, the concept comes together, The collaborative sort of juices flow with a Mark Ritchie whose designs are always one where there's some sort of crisscross. There's sort of a quick back-to-the-flipper flow sort of like his brother as well. I thought it was, you know, it's a cool game. It's just, I don't know what it is. I want to like it. I want to play it. You're not good enough at it. I think that's probably it. It could be. I think that's probably it. That's probably it.
    112:31
    You know, I just need to play better. Yep. Play better and you'll like it. And the other thing is I think Python just did the concept, the original concept. I don't think he was involved with the actual production game at all. Like none of the artists has one of my favorites on the side of the boat. It says, I am a DV8, meaning I am a DV8. Nice. Like there's a lot of like weird little Easter eggs on there. And you have a ton of notes on this game that you hate. I know. I think you really like it. I think secretly.
    113:01
    Maybe I do. I don't know. I could just change the song. The song just gets in my head. We get to the end of his Williams era. So one would assume that Python had some sort of blow up and then he had to leave Williams. Well, the blow up was going to be this game called Pinball Circus. This was this was Python Angelo's vision. This was how he was going to revolutionize pinball. Pinball circus was going to be like Steve Kordick's flippers, right? This was going to change everything, and it changed everything so that we don't know pinball today like we did back then, right? Yeah.
    113:47
    I don't get pinball circus. I mean, I understand what's going on, but I don't get it. Have you ever played it? To fully understand this, people have to first Google it and bring it up on IPDB or bring it up on some sources and just take a look at it. And you can sort of see it and try to kind of get it. That's your first step. The next step is to somehow play one, which is almost impossible, and then sort of be able to draw the conclusion as to what was going on there. So the idea, right, is it's three-dimensional pinball. So it's not just a playfield that's forward and backward and some ramps. It's like forward, backward, and then an upper playfield, and then another upper playfield, and another one. It's pinball in a video game cabinet. Yeah, a very large video game cabinet. The thing is huge. You've seen this, right? You've played one? I've played one. There's only two, there's only private collector in Europe has one. The other one, and your notes here are wrong. It was actually Steve Kordick's private collection. Steve Kordick had the other one. It actually says that on IPDB. It said Steve Kordick. That's why it hurt, too. It was Steve Kordick's, and he granted it. I don't think they even bought it. I think he donated it to the Vegas Pinball Hall of Fame, where it currently resides, which is closed right now because of the pandemic. But when it's open, that's always one of their main attractions is the Pinball Circus game. And I played it, and it is very unique. I'll say that. What Ken Fidesna would say is this game was a brainstorm of Python Angelo. He had this idea for a pinball game that had play fields and ramps mounted in three dimensions. It was designed to fit a video style cabinet. The game tested okay, but it would have been extremely expensive to build. The earning that that game brought in would never have justified the price Williams would have to sell it for. So the game never went into production. Python says, Pinball Circus was my greatest dream. It was the hardest I worked and fought for a pinball game never to get to market. It had five playfields, four horizontal and one vertical, a mechanical elephant and a giraffe that took the ball from one playfield to another. The ringmaster was half sculpture and half for matrix display. Why did Python say that this didn't happen? Because of business. The money men. No, it didn't happen because if you played the game, I mean, it's very unique, and it's fun. It's fun to play to try to get it to the top. You try to get the ball from the bottom all the way to the top into the clown's mouth, and then you win. Yeah, more clowns. So you win, but once you do that, that's it.
    116:29
    There's no, you just do it again. That's the problem with it. It's like, it's cool until you accomplish it, and then there's really no reason to play it anymore. I've seen video of Pinnball. To me, it might even have been my video. So I had one of the first videos of it when they had it at Expo the one year. But, I mean, that's kind of the issue. Once you do the thing, you just do the thing again. And it was very, I mean, it's very complex. All the multiple play fields, all the mechs in that game, I could see that thing being just horribly expensive to produce that thing. And heavy. Can you imagine? Oh, it's very heavy because it's in an arcade cabinet, but think more like one of the cabins they would use for a multiplayer game. Maybe not that wide, but it's taller, and it's just huge. Yeah, I mean, like, video game cabinets have a monitor and a PCB board, and that's kind of it. This thing has the boards, sort of the mechanics, the metal ramps, the dot matrix displays. Like, it's got to be brutal and top-heavy. Yep. He really, like, this was the straw that broke the camel's back for him and Williams, I would say. Yeah, I haven't been able to find a whole lot. Like, all I can kind of find in this era was that is really from him where he says people didn't see his vision and, you know, they were worried about money and profits and not about revolution and not about recreating everything. And this was going to change it all. Very, very Python quotes there. Right. So that's what his thing was. But I mean, really, you know, you can't make any money. Around this time, what happened is Capcom decides they're going to get into pinball. And as part of that, a lot of Williams employees start defecting to Capcom. I always wondered if they were offering more money or what the whole pitch was for that. But a lot of the Williams employees left, including Mr. Futsunruder, Python. Granner, Chris Granner. So they all went to Capcom. And Mark Ritchie would come over. He came over and then Williams sued to prevent him from designing anything. They also put the brakes on Python being able to do something like Pinball Circus, Because they kind of owned the intellectual property to that sort of design style of game. So they put the brakes on that. And Python would obviously get upset about that because it caused a bunch of issues. So right out of the gate, Capcom is stumbling and having issues. I don't want to get into that today. We're already running a fairly long podcast today. We'll talk about Capcom some other time. Python would say that he didn't go to Capcom for a pay increase. He went over there for creative freedom. And then he started to make some major mistakes. Python was no longer just a creative force where somebody else took care of all of the day-to-day business. All of a sudden, Python Angelo, Mark Ritchie were running a team and more or less running a company or a division of a company, which was not what Python did before. Before, Python did art, he drank beer, he went hunting, he came up with ideas, he worked with other people to implement those ideas, he had amazing engineers to design the mechanics to go along with those major ideas. He wasn't running staff meetings. He was just in a staff meeting, right? He wasn't doing the TPS reports. Somebody else was doing the TPS reports. This is where the major issues started. So Chris Granner would say, Python Angelo had a lot more say about what was going on at Capcom than he ever did at Williams. Good and bad. It was pretty chaotic. There was a lot of drinking. There was a lot of throwing the party before the product was built. That was the problem. Management didn't want to hear about crazy or crazier ideas from Python. He felt the same old pin to make sure they make money approach was a disease that infested the whole industry. He felt the proof was seen when all the pinball companies closed. Yeah, it's, Python was nuts. We've talked about that. And he didn't want to manage around a budget. He didn't want to manage around anything. He wanted to just create. But you have to balance sales, manufacturing, you know, balance sheets with creativity. And that's the struggle this industry has always had. But people don't want to be told to take a mech out of a game because you can't make enough money. And it might only be $100 a game. But $100 a game over 40 games, this was a problem that Steve Kirk would have as well. They would talk about the creative crisis that was in the industry. Everything was managed around a budget. And that's, you know, that's the reality of the beast. Yep. Python says, everyone talked about profits. Smaller bills of material, small inventories and maximizing profits. No one wanted, cared, or dared to genuinely just talk, plan, and work to create a great pinball. Yes, we had a few tries at Capcom. After all, we had Foots, Mark Ritchie, Chris Granner, and others. But we didn't have Joe Jost, Ken Fidesma's courageous, crazy calls, or Roger Sharp's pinball wizardry and honesty. Yeah, Python didn't flourish in that space. He was given too much business, and he couldn't spend time being creative. We had meetings, business plans, schedules, and budgets. And while this was going on, great pinball games were being lost on unused bar napkins and fishing boats. So there's a callback that he has that the greatest creative ideas are the ones that come up on bar napkins, you know, are the ones that you come up with on fishing boats like fishtails. That is when things bubble to the top, that creativity comes. But if you're spending all your time doing business planning and schedules, you're not able to do that.
    122:13
    Capcom would close in December of 1996. Python might have had a direct influence on that closing, but it may involve a game called Zingy Bingy.
    122:25
    Yeah, and I got some great quotes on Zingy Bingy. If you want to Google it, go ahead, but make sure you're not on the bus. Your children are not around and stuff like that. I have never played Zingy Bingy. So, yes, there's something I have not played. There you go. After Capcom, he more or less sort of retired from, quote-unquote, retired from pinball and working with pinball companies. That's probably because it's very difficult to go anywhere when all of the bridges that you have are burned. Right? There's a huge gap in our coverage today, really from the closing of Capcom 2 today, because I couldn't really find much of what he was doing at the time.
    123:12
    You know, he's working at a couple of video game companies, he's doing some art here or there, he's going to Expo and selling stuff there, but he's not greatly and deeply involved in pinball. He would always give like a vague, I'm working on ways to change pinball. Because he still wanted it to be 1988, right? He still wanted it to be the mid-90s where his creativity exploded and that was gone. He spent all that time trying to get in his time machine and go back, I think. He didn't really talk about what he was doing, he was more vague. In 2012, Python began his fight with cancer and he still made out to all of the pinball expos that he could. For example, he attended the Pinball Expo in the fall where he shared a bunch of humorous stories of his cancer treatments and even entered the room as Hannibal Lecter. Oh yeah, I was there. Yeah, so I've included this expo video in our show notes if you want to go back and talk about it. And one thing that I find particularly interesting is that even through a difficult cancer treatment and consistent, I'm sorry, constant cancer treatments, Python still has this humorous, you know, storyteller, creative engagement with the crowd, right? Like he's going through a really difficult time, but you know what? He's still having, at least presenting the fact that he's having fun. There is a video in 2012, which I've included in our show notes, called Python's World. And this more or less focuses on Python as an artist. It talks about some of his pinball machine work, but it mostly focuses on his artist's background. And it was shot by, I believe, his nephew. Right out of the gate in this video, he's in what looks to be like his house, which is in rural Michigan. Oh, it's rural. He would have the outdoorsman outfit and he wore that to Expo one year where he just didn't bother changing. He just drove straight from his place there and showed up and had the whole get up on. It was awesome. He's got like a crazy hat with a huge feather. He's got a lamb. He literally has a lamb hanging in his kitchen without skin on it. And he's making lamb soup and there's a lamb's head in a friggin pot and they're just shooting it. And he's talking about, you know, creativity and growing up when he was younger. And this is how his family, you know, made food. And, you know, I'm, you know, I can break down a chicken. I do that fairly regularly. I'll buy a chicken. I'll cut out the chicken breast. I'll cut out the legs and the thighs and the whole thing. Skinning a lamb and having it just hanging in my kitchen. It's not really my thing. Throughout his cancer treatments, Python would continue to draw and do his work. And he would continue to go to Expo. Python's health would continue to decline through 2013, and he found it very difficult to sell his works and attend conferences. So a friend started a GoFundMe in 2014 to help with his medical expenses. The total raised by the pinball community, so as a community, all of us pinball folks, you know, really stood up and they raised $18,600 to help Python. So the other thing about that GoFundMe, in the last years of his life, he became friends with his name's Paul Kiefert. I'm probably saying it wrong. And James Laughlin, who used to – James Laughlin was for years the ramp guy. If you wanted a ramp, like I want some – I need this ramp for my Adams family or I need this. That's where you get new ramps from his company. I think they were called Pinball Inc. back in the day.
    126:52
    Both of them, they became good friends with Python. And when Python would come to the shows, that's who he would come with. He would be over in their booth, like signing autographs or selling his artwork.
    127:05
    And after Python died, they tried to, or are still trying to get the Pinball Circus made. I think they're calling it like Python's Circus or Python's Pinball Circus or something like that now. Okay. But they're also working on getting the Capcom Kingpin made. It was in March 9, 2014 that Python had passed away with brain cancer. I've included a link in our show notes to the GoFundMe page because there's some, you know, there's a video in there from Python and a few other things. It's a bit, you know, it's depressing, but it's part of, you know, pinball history. And, I mean, it's really difficult to sort of square this circle, right? You've got Python at the beginning. He comes into pinball. He changes things. He's adding sculptures. He's creating storyboards. You're engaged in pinball. He did change pinball, you know, but in that time, he also, you know, burned a lot of bridges and said a lot of mean things. And then at the end of his story, you know, he's going through this difficult time and people stepping up. And I think that's one of the cool things about our community is that we're a mix of social classes, of different jobs, of different personalities. You know, some of them rubbing against each other negatively one way or another, but for some reason we all still come together and rise and try to help those around us, even though, you know, Python was a difficult individual. From some who worked with him, yes, you could say that. Yeah, and others would say that he was the nicest caring person they've worked with. Yeah, well, as far as the pinball community, everyone loved him. You got to remember the thing is there's people within pinball who don't necessarily like the attention or being recognized or things like that. They may show up when they have a new game out and then disappear.
    128:56
    Then there are other people like, say, Steve Ritchie or Python who 100% you can tell they enjoy the attention. Yeah, it's awesome. It adds for entertaining podcasts on the Pinball Network. And you could tell Python was very comfortable in that environment, partying with the fellow pinheads to the wee hours of the night. There you go. Paul Kiefer, I hope I'm saying his name right. I'm sorry if I'm not Paul. Paul, formerly of Pins and Vids with Al Warner. They did a bunch of videos back in the day. Paul says he was the organizer of the GoFundMe. He says, over the past couple years, I've been fortunate enough to know the man behind the legend and become part of a team that was able to give him great joy in his last months. I can say with 100% certainty and with the help of this great pinball community, we were able to deliver great joy and happiness during its final time on this earth. And that the legend most people knew will continue to be honored for generations to come. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you for being a part of delivering this happiness to Python. I've only begun to learn about Python and sort of what he has done and what he's done for pinball in general. Well, and I can say that Paul is right, that there is a legacy that he's leaving behind. And hopefully a podcast like today, you know, bringing up some of the interesting tidbits and quotes and hidden things in backglasses and that kind of stuff continues to sort of build on that legend. But we also need to back that up with the form that he was a difficult individual. You know, he did burn bridges and toss bombs and fight above and beyond where most people did before. You know, you got to present a realistic background of that. Let's end on a quote that I pulled from Chris Granner that I think really sums up Python. Yeah, Chris Granner says, Python did for pinball what someone had to do. He said, we're making a pinball come to life. That's an amazing gift to pinball. It was big and we shouldn't forget that. Whatever wild stories people can tell about Python, that's the most important one. That brings us to the end of our podcast this month, Ron. What do you think? Is there anything else that we missed here that you wanted to bring up? Is there any other comments or things that you think that people will bring up in inevitably their angry correction emails to silverballchronicles at gmail.com? I'm not sure there will always be corrections, probably on certain name pronunciations. But what I would say is just go out there and we'll put the sources of a lot of this material. So listen to the TopCast episode. Listen to his expo seminars. They're the best thing you can listen to to figure out what he was all about and get the full experience of Python. When you see his games, you know, walk up and take a look at them, right? Like walk up to a taxi, stand over a taxi or a comet, take a look at some of the finer details, and then, you know, stand next to a game that was made by a different designer and a different art team and take a look at that one. And you can see the contrast in that. But then shortly after that, if you're looking into like the late 80s, early 90s, you can see that his influences started moving into other designers and other artists. So, you know, imitation is the highest form of flattery. And you can see that he did actually change the way things went and worked. And if Python was here, he'd be happy to tell you that he did that. And he was the main reason. So, Ron, next month we are going to leave it up to the listeners of Silver Ball Chronicles to pick a topic. So what we're going to do is we're going to put a poll up. Multiple choice, thank God. That was good because you don't want to just let them freeform a topic because who knows what you'll end up talking about. It could be something you don't want to talk about. So some of the topics that we can pull from, how about stepping on rakes, the Gottlieb System 1s. Wow. We can do our episode two of Steve Ritchie called Steve Ritchie, The Mullet Years. That's a follow-up on our first episode. Well, yeah, he had that thing where, you know that style where people have this clean cut, but then it had that little part in the back that would come out, like a little tail? He had that thing going on, whatever that's called. It wasn't like a full mullet. So if you want to vote on any of those, swing over to facebook.com slash Silverball Chronicles and vote on our poll. You love the poll, don't you, Ron? Sure, I love polls.
    133:33
    As always, you can send your comments, questions, corrections, and concerns to Silverball Chronicles at gmail.com. We look forward to all your messages and we read every one. Please subscribe to us on iTunes. No, no, no, no. Strong, strong. It's called Apple Podcasts now. Google Play or your favorite podcaster, turn on automatic download so you won't miss a single episode. Remember to leave us a five-star review on the brand new This Week in Pinball promoter database. This way more people can find us and then maybe we can make some of the fancy flippin' out money.
    134:17
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