And it's been working okay. And then Overwatch. I did get Overwatch for Xbox One, so I've been playing a lot of Overwatch up until this Friday, which is when Battlefield 1 hit, and I pre-ordered that. So the last three days have been Battlefield 1. A lot of conquest, a little bit of rush in their new operation mode. So I'm enjoying that. I got also as a birthday gift a bunch of Comet LEDs from Comet Pinball. And I'll include a link to Comet Pinball in the show notes. But I've converted firepower over. So other than a few flasher bulbs, everything has been shifted pretty much. Everything has been shifted now in the back box and in the play field to LEDs, which I like for two reasons. One, they draw a lot less power and put out next to no heat, which is good. The plastics I've been through enough as it is. And the other is I like to play in the dark. And so incandescent light bulbs just aren't all that bright on the older games. They weren't designed so you could actually see the ball all that well in the dark. So I've doubled the luminescence of the play field compared to what the incandescent bulbs were putting out. And so that's helpful. And in the show notes, I will have a link to a little 10-second video I threw together of a side-by-side of my firepower with the incandescence and my firepower with the LEDs so people can look and see the difference. Because it's noticeable in terms of the colors that show in the art and the brightness. So those have been my primary things that are in any way entertaining. And then last week, my AC gave out. It finally rapidly vented out all of its Freon. I noticed it was working, but it wasn't cold anymore. The AC was as old as the house, so it was over 30 years old. So that was a fun $4,500 expenditure. But it's in place. They did not upgrade the circuit breaker, so I will have them back out because we need to go to a lower amperage so that the city will sign off on the permit. But other than that, it seems to be working fine. Well, that's good. And I know some of those unexpected home things tend to pop up and take huge chunks out of pinball budgets. Well, yeah, in a way. I have been preparing, especially ever since the furnace, which had to be replaced almost six years ago now, I've been setting aside money to be prepared to deal with the air conditioning because I figured it passes life expectancy. So while it was an unfortunate expenditure, I had been putting stuff aside to take care of that. But, of course, when I look at the bottom line, I'm always like, oh, well, it doesn't look like I should be buying pinballs because I just spent this much. I could have. You know, the sad thing is, is that that price of the AC doesn't buy you any new in-box game. Not shipped to your door, at least it doesn't in this day and age. Almost. Almost can get you a Stern Pro, but not quite. Speaking of that, speaking of pins and the inability to buy them because of having to buy air conditioning units, I think we should go ahead and segue into pinball. and most of our discussion is going to be about the information that sort of came out at or around Expo. But before we do that, I wanted to, as we noted in the last show, I completed what I guess my research project on American Pinball. The very top link in our show notes will be to the folder full of all of the documents regarding American Pinball. So those people that are interested in reading and looking through all this stuff and doing whatever they want with it, feel free to go at it. But I went ahead and I've recorded an audio clip that we're going to drop in here in a moment. And I couldn't get it under 10 minutes, but I got it under 11. And that will just sort of walk through those files, those documents. And so if it's helpful to you, rather than read it to just sort of hear what is the information that I am putting out there, the number of documents I'm putting out aren't all that many. So it's, I mean, it's less than 10, but they were the ones that I thought were the most relevant and it goes through things from the ownership angle of the company to how they may be acquiring their parts to how some of their finances are in terms of what they've done to draw together funds so let's drop that in here and then Tony and I we're going to come back and we're going to go into a little discussion which will segue nicely into pinball expo because American pinball was there sure they were sure they were. All right, here we go. Audio running. Over the last several weeks, I have conducted an extensive research project into American Pinball in order to try and answer some questions regarding the organization's structure, ownership, and how it is proceeding to try and make pinball machines. I have reached the conclusion of what I think I'm able to find on the public record, and so I want to use this opportunity to summarize the information I have found. In our show notes, you will find a link to my American Pinball research, so you can go over these documents to your heart's content and read and review them and get greater detail than I will be providing here audibly. I'm going to attempt to summarize these things in a clear, concise fashion. I know it could be a little dry, though, so if you don't enjoy this portion, skip it and get to the commentary aspects of the podcast with Tony and I, but let us begin. In regards to ownership, which I think is the big question regarding American Pinball, The short answer is, I don't know who owns American Pinball. I did obtain the articles of incorporation for American Pinball from the Illinois Secretary of State's office, but there's not a lot of information that's really very useful that was included in the documentation. And let me apologize up front for any names, pronunciations I'll be making here and throughout the course of this podcast. I know that Daval Vasani did register the corporation. I can tell you that it was created with 1,000 shares of common stock. Not only were those shares authorized, they were all issued. There were no amendments submitted to me in my records request, so that means that 1,000 is still standing. But I don't know who owns the 1,000 shares. I don't know the distribution. I don't know the count of the people, much less the names of those who actually hold the shares. So in terms of who actually owns American Pinball Incorporated, I don't know. There are additional documents that the Secretary of State's office has, such as the Corporate Annual Report. However, on the website for the Secretary of State's office, they make very clear that they do not track ownership. They don't require it to be reported. So the likelihood of me being able to do yet another info request, which incidentally do cost me money because they're only giving these out certified, they likely don't have the information. So unfortunately, while I can tell you it's set up as a shareholder structure, anyone, well, I guess up to 1,000 people, if we're not getting into fractions here, could own this company. But I just don't know who holds it. So in terms of if you're wondering if a particular person does or does not own it, all I can say is it's possible that they do. But I don't know for sure which entities are involved. The other aspect that I had released on Pinsight a while ago, let's talk a little bit about the business license. That, I know, caused a lot of curiosity, and that is why I actually pulled the articles of incorporation, because the business license application had listed a John P. as an emergency contact. Now, emergency contact does not necessitate that it's an employee or an owner. It just means that for the city, or in this case the village of Streamwood, that a John P. is a potential contact besides Duval to be notified if something is going wrong, if there's some sort of emergency at the facility. So I did redact the telephone numbers in the folder on these because they did appear to be personal cellular numbers, and I wasn't really comfortable putting those out there, even though they are, again, part of the open record, and anyone who wanted them would be able to pull them from the village of Streamwood. But when I ran the John P. number through one of the reverse telephone lookups, it did indicate John Papaduke as the likely owner. So I'm quite confident that it is indeed him who is listed as an emergency contact. So he, at the very least, has been determined to be an individual who should be noted for the city of Streamwood to reach out to in the course of some sort of emergency at the facility itself. So that's really all I can talk about in terms of the ownership and employee arrangements. It's just it's very difficult on these private companies to get much detail. But this is what I have. And so if it is of use to any of you, I wish you all the best. But let's go ahead and move on to financing. Again, this is going to be a challenge as well. But it's a question that I know has come up. How is American Pinball paying for all of this? Obviously, there are startup. There's a discussion about the need, the money that you would need to raise to produce the Houdini's. But they're also doing this magic girl run and giving those out kind of simultaneously as near as we can tell. I mean, they're showing us images of both machines. So I tried to dig into this. And again, the short answer is I don't know how they're putting the money together. But to me, it doesn't look like they are just doing a wealthy benefactor approach where someone is coming with a lot of cash and is paying for all of this. And the reason I say that is I did find two mortgage documents, both of which are linked from the show notes in the American Pinball Research folder. So let's talk a little bit about those. Both mortgages are on the same property, and that's the Kingsdale Road property that is listed for the registered agent in the Articles of Incorporation. One mortgage is for $50,000, and the other mortgage is for $120,000. The research folder has copies of both of those mortgages for you to be able to review. But in summation, the differences have to do with the interest rates and when the maturation of the mortgages are in effect. Both mortgages list American Pinball Inc. as the borrower. The $120,000 mortgage is a fixed rate mortgage and it's note to mature on January 29th, 2021. whereas the $50,000 mortgage is a variable interest rate and it has a maturation date of January 29th, 2017. So one is obviously much more short-term than the other one. Now that's all I could find in terms of money being brought in for American Pinball. However, we did hear in the Pinball Magazine podcast interview that the overhead costs were very low and I believe the main assumption that I'd seen online which I think there's good backing for and I've tried to supply some, is that the actual facility in Streamwood, it does not appear to be owned by Duval as near as I could tell. Instead, it's owned by Mukesh. Now, Mukesh is the founder of Ametron. I did get a copy of Ametron's articles of incorporation, and you can see that Mukesh and Duval, when that was formed, were both on the board of directors. So in addition to the familiar relationship between the two, There is also a business relationship. That seemed to be pretty widely known anyway from anyone who had looked into Ametron, but I do have the documentation, those articles of incorporation. I also have a copy of the Streamwood Properties mortgage modification, which happened, which shows Mukesh listed as the name involved in that to help provide some additional evidence regarding the ownership there. I have no idea if there's some sort of special rent conditions or there are no rent conditions applied at all, and the facility is just being given to American Pinball for use. I can't comment on that, but I can say that it does appear to be the case that the property that's actually being used, listed as where the manufacturing would be, or I should just call it the Streamwood property, is in fact controlled not by American Pinball, maybe subleased to them, but ownership seems to fall back to McHesh. Which leads me to the final piece of research that I looked into, which was where is American Pinball acquiring its parts? There have been several discussions that people have been contacted about pinball parts, parts necessary for the manufacturing of machines, and that they'd heard from American Pinball about them, but I'd not seen any confirmations about anyone saying that they did indeed make such an arrangement. Again, this is something that would be very, very difficult to find much on. I did find something which may be of validity, but I just don't have any idea how critical it may be. And that is that appears the purchasing service Alibaba. There is an option with them called AliSource Pro where volume buyers can go and use a service to be linked up with thousands and thousands of manufacturers. So in this case, there was an entry for American Pinball Incorporated. And I'm amazed that the AliSource Pro service actually lets people who are not signed in as American Pinball go and look at things. look at things that they were looking into. So while I cannot load, could not load any buying requests, I do have a screen cap of this in the American Pinball Research folder linked in the show notes. I did see that someone created an American Pinball Inc. profile. It says that they're an amusement game contract manufacturer. It says that their preferred categories of products are seals, DC motors, and other wiring accessories. And it gives a small summary of buyer activities, which says they had contacted 21 different suppliers through the service, requested one sample, and put in six buying requests. So there's some circumstantial evidence that American Pinball may be using Oli's Source Pro to try and find parts for the manufacturer of their pinball machines. I have no idea regarding what might have been bought under this name. I can say looking into the volume buyer program that it is set up so that you're supposed to spend over a million dollars in a year through this in order to qualify as a volume buyer. So it does, I mean, Alibaba does sort of expect you to have a fairly sizable purchase record if you're going to be doing it through this mechanism. But anyway, it did crop up when I was looking into the company. So I am including it for those that do actually have some interest in trying to determine maybe where the pots are being acquired. But it's really, I could find no other details than this and so many vendors are available through Oli Source Pro that it still would be a needle in a haystack to try and research it further, in my opinion. That pretty much covers everything that I wanted to talk about before I'm on with Tony to have an actual discussion. The American Pinball Research Folder does include a copy of the Corporate File Detail Report. There's nothing really to go over on that that wasn't mentioned in any other documents I've already covered. I have a few other items that I did not put into the folder. It was mostly my supporting research when I was checking on the veracity of some of these documents I did include. So I've kept them out of here so it's hopefully not too confusing. But you can always write to me or Tony actually at eclecticgamerspodcast.gmail.com if you have any questions or you want to discuss anything or you need some of these other items and you don't want to go through the hoops that I went through to get them. But hopefully me just having them in this folder makes it easier for any of you that are doing any sort of research and wanting to know more about American Pinball Incorporated. Okay, so here we are. Tony and I are back, and now it is no longer info dump time. It is total commentary opinion time. I don't know what you found possibly the most interesting or if any of it was interesting in terms of what I ultimately put together. For my part, I don't think the interesting thing were the articles of incorporation and the ownership angle and any of that. I think especially given how they presented at Expo, well, John Papaduke clearly is a major influence on American Pinball and I think probably drove why they're put together. I don't know whether or not he actually owns any shares or not. In a lot of ways, I don't care. But what I thought was interesting is the two mortgage documents. And the reason why I think it's interesting is, to me, it indicates that they didn't just come in with a pocket full of cash. They actually did have to borrow or chose to borrow to do this startup. And so given the timelines, especially that $50,000 mortgage, which is not a very long mortgage, only for a couple of years, they clearly planned to pay that back pretty quickly. So if this stuff starts getting delayed, I don't want to say that they're going to have a problem because they have other – I mean there are other properties I think at the disposal, especially if you start considering Ametron and Vassini's dad who founded Ametron as a possible financial source. But setting all that aside, I think there was a plan here. And based off of what we saw at Expo, I don't think that plan is coming together. No, I'm going to agree with you there. I definitely don't think their plan is necessarily working out how they are wanting them to. And it does seem to me like it's a – I don't want to say a destined for failure type thing. But it definitely seems like it was something done light on overall knowledge of the hobby. Yes. And so let's go ahead and quickly give a very brief synopsis on what happened at Expo with American Pinball. For the few listeners that listened to us and didn't hear any other pinball podcast, which has already, I'm sure, gone into great detail about what's gone on at Expo. We're not going to dive into every element of Expo. Neither Tony or I were there. So we're just going to hit the highlights. So in regards to American Pinball, they showed up. Vasani and Scott Goldberg were there, as was Joe, who I'm afraid I'm blanking on his last name. He's helped complete projects in the past. And I believe there was a fourth person as well. J-Pop was not there. And that was not surprising. What was surprising to me was Houdini was not there. It was sort of there. The play field was there. The play field lit up. But it wasn't in a cabinet, which I thought was very odd, given that it was in a cabinet just a few weeks ago at the G2E Gambling Expo in Vegas. So they sort of brought what was described by someone on Pennside as a diorama which I guess is probably as accurate as a thing It didn flip And Tony and I I know we both said that we didn expect them to have a flipping game at Expo And they there and they explaining how they still plan to get the Magic Girls out by the end of the year But Houdini is a late second quarter 2017 planned release. And that's wrong. That's what they're saying. And Joe, who's brought in, I guess, to film. finish off Houdini indicates that, I believe he's indicated it was approximately 70% done, but also that he had to rework some of the shots. Now, I'm not a pinball designer. As long-time listeners know, I mostly work in finance and research, so I have absolutely nothing to do with laying out pinball shots. However, my understanding of standard pinball design was you came up with your concepts, you put together something called a whitewood, and you made sure that your shots worked before you moved forward with, oh, I don't know, the art and all that. People, attendees at Expo, were going up to this diorama, and they were looking, and they were posting a lot of photos, and then, of course, those photos ended up on Pinside, and people on Pinside started scrutinizing the photos, and then you start hearing all sorts of things like, there are still Zidware logos on some of this stuff. There are screws in the middle of ramps that are going to disrupt the ball because they aren't the right type of screws, and they're not in the right position. There were shots that didn't go anywhere. There were shots that couldn't work. There were devices that were conflicting with other devices. I mean, it's just sort of from a geometry standpoint, I guess the game just doesn't play. As in, even if it was in a cabinet and plugged it in and had software for it, it wouldn't work because the ball can't go everywhere. It looks like it could go on first blush. So it's basically just a complete false mock-up. That is the overall feel I get from it, is that it's made to look good, but it's nowhere near ready to be usable. I think you're right. What I don't understand is why were they even at Expo? I think they've hurt themselves very badly by even showing up. Showing up with something, considering who their designer is and all that background, I think that them being there, them making announcements like they have and everything, none of it's helped them in any way shape or form everything has hurt them more than even if they even if the news of them had slipped i think they would have been hurt less by not coming in than they are by actually showing up like they have i agree with you and i just because they failed american pitbull failed to achieve anything positive by being at expo all right so we talked about the houdini play field and the difference i mean basically it's like a step back from g2e from anyone's impression because all of a sudden it's not in a cabinet.