You know, Jack's got a killer flow play field that you guys are going to love in his next year. Another editor's note. If it suddenly sounds quieter in the background, that's because we made George close his posh high-rise penthouse window. Is that better? Much better, yes. That's much better, yeah. Jack is great at streaming and marketing pinball, and now he's designing pinball, and you have got a solid group of talented people that are working his turn, and a lot of them are strong in multiple areas. Keith Elwin, a great example of someone who can work with rules and design. You're a perfect example of someone who can do everything, pretty much. As the chief creative officer, how do you take someone like Raymond Davidson or Tim Sexton, who are amazing on code, but also great players who know what makes a pinball machine fun and help them branch out into other areas where they can showcase those other talents. So my vision is that game designers don't have a lock on creative. So amazing creative stuff comes from guys like Harrison Drake and Elliot Eisman and Tom Copera and, you know, John Rothermel and Rob Blakeman, you know, the mechanical engineers, right? Amazing creative stuff comes from guys like Jeremy Packard, you know, in terms of impact, you know, Greg Ferraris is famous. He's an art director, but Greg is like slash game designer. I mean, he played an amazing, you know, I mean, Dennis gets the game designer title on those games, but good God. I mean, a lot of those ideas were as much Greg's. So my vision is that the best designers empower the teams to do what they do and to participate in the creative. So it's kind of like it's about letting people sort of, you know, water finds its own level kind of thing, right? You let these guys be what they want to be in the context of what they have to do. We all have, when you put a team together, everybody's got deliverables. The deliverables have to happen. So you want to geek out designing, you know, some cool element of that game. I don't think anybody's going to get in your way as long as your deliverables are there. So it's kind of like you want to cut plastic, but your job is to code. You know, somebody will let you cut plastic and try to get your ideas across. But the reality is that, man, that code's got to be there. So because it is somebody else's job to cut plastic. But the way they stay with the company is because they're learning, because they're growing, because they're engaging. Some of them are very happy doing what they do and staying in their lane and they're going to be in their lane forever because that's what they enjoy. Some of them are going to grow out of that. They're going to grow into other things. I can't tell you the number of guys I want to say, you know, they come to me and they say, hell, I was thinking I want to be this. Okay, here's a road and no guarantees. Nothing says you can get that seat because you're going to be put through the same filters I put everybody through. And so it's like if the deliverable in that area of your talent extension is not as good as your other talent, the conversation we're going to have is I really need you here because I really need you doing your core thing that you used to do for me before you tried to reach out to do this because you're really good at it. And you know, I mean, you got to realize it. And when you have those conversations, guys have a decision to make. I don't want to lose them. I want to keep them But at the same time I don want to handicap I don want to I don want to cripple the effort by getting somebody that you know maybe he a great coder He not such a great designer Maybe he a great designer He's not such a great rules guy. Maybe he's a great artist. He's not such a great concept guy. So it's kind of like, you know, you let people do as much as they want to do within the constraints. At the end of the day, you know, I've told you guys many times with our success comes a lot of discipline. And I know people don't want to hear it. And I know all the other shops out there are laughing at me as I say it because, you know, they think that's anathema to the process. But I believe in sandboxes. I believe in constraints. Constraints inspire creativity. I believe in discipline from the standpoint that we all have to be accountable. We all have to have responsibilities. You know, products got to cost the right amount of money. But it all begins, the very most important thing. I manage down, I manage up, right? I have to work with the other guys on the executive team. And we got nothing to make if the thing I'm making isn't fun and compelling. It's not fun and compelling. You're nothing. Your factory means nothing. Your we made it cost the right amount of money means nothing because nobody wants it because it's not fun and compelling. So the sacred mantra, the most important thing, fun and compelling. Now, lots of guys do fun and compelling and can't execute, right? They can't deliver. They can't make it cost what it needs to cost. It doesn't work, whatever. So the magic is you start with fun and compelling, but now you got to do your homework. You got to get it to the finish line. You got to do due diligence. So a lot of what I do is sort of let these guys do these things. But I'm the constant reminder, you know, hey, we got to, but we got to bring this in or we got to get this right. It's not always pretty, but it's, you know, it's what we have to do. Well, we had a few listeners reach out to get your advice on breaking into the industry. Ken Kemp asked about what you would say is the most helpful pathway in high school and college to break into design work. And Mervyn Heibert wants to know how you scout for new talent at Stern. Yeah, right. So you know, the history of a lot of the guys that broken into our business, a lot of the guys have made things that got people's attention, right? I first met Keith Elwin at a tournament in Arizona in 1996, when I did NBA fast break, and I was on a promotional tour with fast break, and he won the tournament. And I think fast break was like the game or whatever, in the tournament. And I sent him a bunch of swag. And I thought he was, you know, he's a great player. I didn't think anything more. And of course, I saw him, you know, throughout the years, I'd see him win tournaments and stuff. I knew who he was. I didn't really know him. A lot of guys in the studio started talking about, you know, he's building a homebrew. And, you know, like, you know, Gleiman said to me, I ought to take a look at this homebrew. Mark Guidarelli worked with him to try to help him with the homebrew. Mark had access to a lot of tooling and just different things and helped him a lot. And so one day I went on YouTube and I watched the Archer videos and I thought, this is pretty complete. You know, it's rough. but it's pretty complete. So, you know, we picked up the phone, flew him in, flew the prototype in, met with him, played it, and the rest is history, really. So I think lots of people approach me all the time with, I want to design, I want to do this, etc. And I get, like, some guys thinks he has to become a CAD expert to do this, or another guy thinks that he's got to do X to do this. And the single biggest thing is deeds, not words, right? It's kind of like, I don't care how you do it, just do something that's impressive that will get our attention. And that's a start. You know, Jack Danger showed me relentless. Like, I mean, he was like, relentless with, you know, here's this, and here's that, and here's this, and here's a drawing for this. And here's a, well, I'm doing this, I'm building this. And so at some point, I was like, high pinball IQ, working his ass off, trying to get my attention with different things. And, you know, some of them were, you know, I thought like you know conceptually you know pretty good so I thought let's give him a shot I told him and to this day you know I tell him all the time I said you know let's see you know designing a home edition the cool thing about home edition as a as a break-in is that it's hard to work with the limitations of that particular cost target it's very hard and I did it I pioneered that so I took the first shot and you know at the time when I was doing it there's a lot of guys that haven't arrived at where I am, where the true challenge is be elegant. That's the true challenge. It's not here's everything and the kitchen sink. Here's a billion dollars. Go do this thing. Well, that's not particularly challenging, you know. So I think that the home edition was a great challenge because, hey, you got one note board, whatever you can drive with one note board. That's what you're doing. That's like eight coil drives. I know. Yeah, that's the magic. It's like do something cool with eight coil drives and and you know some lamps and some switches and and that's that and beyond that you couldn't make one of those games full of steel because you couldn't afford it so it's like even then it's like you have to be clever with your ball guides you have to be clever with your ramps you have to be clever with your toys i told him i said you got to be checking yourself constantly and was it easy no it wasn't easy did they get in trouble yes i got him out of trouble a couple of times. So I say deeds, not words, build something, make me something. It's like, I want talent in all areas. I don't necessarily, you know, it doesn't always have to be designers. You know, I mean, a lot of our software engineers have come with a passion for the game, right? All the way back, all the way back to, you know, Willie days. Larry DeMar has a computer science and engineering degree from MIT. He could have gone to work anywhere. He could have done whatever he wanted. And he was interested in making games. And he came to Williams to make games. I have a lot of guys like that over the years, big credentials, big, big, big credentials, they could go to work anywhere, but they made a conscious choice. You know, in some cases, they took less money, because our industry is not, you know, we're not General Motors, you know, we're not Ford, we're not Boeing. So my salary scales are, they're competitive, but they may not be competitive to, you know, a guy with a degree from MIT maybe can get a lot more money somewhere. So I think a lot of people have said, I'm in it for the love of the game. And, you know, I have, it's interesting, I won't tell you who it was. I overheard a conversation amongst a couple of mechanical engineers, one guy wanting to design, and the other guy saying to him, good God, why would you want to do that? Right. And what that means is the guy that said that is perfectly happy being the mechanical engineer for a game and has no ask. You know, it's like that's why would you want to do that? You know, it sounds like if they end up at Stern, they clearly want to be there. And that passion is what drives good products. Absolutely. I don't have anybody that isn't there. I've said it in terms of my own career, I'm blessed, you know, that I've that I've had the opportunities I've had to make entertainment products. God knows how boring my life would be if it wasn't that, right? Well, that kind of leads us to the next question. And it's it's it's just that if you look at the work history on the resume of any of the pinball greats, you see that almost everyone has worked for multiple companies. The shuffling of staff from one to the next is pretty impressive. And most recently, Steve Ritchie left Stern. And I know that you guys had a long history together. He was there with you at Williams when you first got into pinball. So how do you deal with losing someone like that? And do you have a favorite Steve Ritchie story or memory that you can share with us? Well, I have a lot of Steve Ritchie stories. I think that when somebody, you know, happiness in our lives is really important. And so when somebody's not happy, for whatever reason, they need to go make themselves happy because I can't make you happy. There's nothing I could do. It doesn't matter even if you're fighting with me about what you want to do and I'm saying no, it doesn't matter. I can't make you happy. So I think that I think Steve clearly wasn't happy and he went to make himself happy and, you know, more power to him. Organizations have cultures and you either fit into that culture, embrace that culture, feel a part of it, or you don't. And I am somewhat responsible for the culture of my studio. I'm proud of it. And I don't think I have to make apologies to anybody. You know, the portfolio speaks for itself. And so I want guys that want to be there and that they, you know, they come to work every day, excited to be there in that environment, in that culture, doing the things they do. And so everybody's got opinions and the guys that are inside working on stuff. I think, you know, for the most part, they're happy to be there. Is every day a walk in the park? No, every day is not a walk in the park or every day is not a walk in the park, no matter what you choose to do. You know, there's hard days, there's easy days, there's days when you're biting with your co-workers and days when you're not and you know look i've got some amazing talent right brian eddie right and i think brian is is one you know we were talking earlier about how you know you just can't have your feet stuck in the williams mud right and um brian is a guy that has clearly moved on from the williams mud you know meaning that you know he's had several careers like i have always creating creative stuff you know always making stuff he's learned different things. One of the coolest things about the studio is that I really do have a depth of expertise in lots of different areas. So when I want to talk about interactive products, video interactive products, and when I wanted, you know, to bounce IC ideas, or I want to talk about some future digital effort or something like that, Brian will be one of the guys that I go to for counsel, because he's been in those places. You know, we were both executive producers running development teams in Xbox and PlayStation Land. And then he went on to make mobile games. And so I think that, you know, you tap the areas of expertise, right? When I have a mechanical engineering problem, I'm going to go see Tom Capera, right? And I'm going to say, hey, what do you think about this? And so I think the depth of talent, I'm happy that I have guys like that that have been in lots of different places because they are richer for it than someone that's been in the same thing every day for many years, right? Because those people have not learned as much. Maybe they know a lot about, you know, the rope process or whatever is related to making a pinball machine. But the, hey, I took five years off and I went and made mobile games. Guess what? When he comes back to make pinball machines, that experience is influencing his work. Just like I told you guys that my experience, like wrapping my hands around Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, when I was making NBA Ballers informed a lot of my thinking on Insider Connected, right? Just like, so whatever those experiences are, Jack Danger has a lot, you know, he knows a lot about, you know, essentially the notion of entertaining people, entertaining them in a different way. So those kind of experiences out of the day-to-day, you know, I make pinball machines thing, inform those designers. Dwight Sullivan is an award-winning board game creator, right? And so it's like, how do you not imagine that those forays into that area of creative aren't influencing his design of pinball machines? They absolutely are. Yeah, you're taking the strengths from every industry you've been in and applying them to pinball. That's great. And you know, you learned Years ago, I was at some IMAX movie, and there was a little movie at the beginning while you're waiting with the previews. And the entire movie was about Tour de France guys and how they're preparing, right? And they show this bike racer crashing on wet cobblestones. And the message was, you know, the next time that he encounters wet cobblestones, the act of crashing on those wet cobblestones made all kinds of new neural connections. This movie was from a drug company. The point they were making was that, you know, there was a period in time in which there was a belief that our brains worked in a certain way. And since then, they've determined that, you know what, it's not such a linear process. And there are new connections that you make when you experience new things. And whether those new things are positive or negative, every one of those new things builds new neural networks. And so the notion of experiencing new work environments, new challenges, I can tell you that in my own experience, every environment that's been new to me when I started working there is an environment that I had to prove myself in. you know, I'm ambitious, I'm motivated, I want to be successful. There was a moment in time when I came into the business and my charge was to work on coin-operated upright video games, and I wanted to prove myself in that arena. And I knew nothing when I went there, right? And then I wanted to invent toys, and I knew nothing when I went there, and so on and so on, right? So it's kind of like those experiences, the fact that, hey, one day you're the effing new guy, and, you know, you're absolutely, you know, in the military, you're a boot, you know, you're just absolutely lowest rung, and you have to work to get out of that. Those are the experiences that I think in all those different environments, you know, there was a point in time when Brian went into mobile games, he didn't know anything about mobile games. And, you know, Dwight had some idea for a board game, but he played board games, but he had never really been through that process, right? So those things inform us, and those things, they make us richer. And that richness is the thing you bring to the creative when you work in my studio to build your pinball machine. Yeah, I can't imagine the learning curve that Jack Danger is going through right now and any other people who are new to the industry. It's new and exciting. That's awesome. I have to ask, when Steve left Williams to go to Atari, you said you snagged his fancy, expensive drawing table and you got that in your apartment? It's like right here. Did you steal anything from Steve this time when he left? No. No, I walked in there and said, throw all this shit out. all right well you had mentioned in previous interviews that you had often designed a game when there was an unexpected opening question from our listeners jonathan houston of pinball magazine hi my name is jonathan houston asks if stern is still releasing steve richie's final game that he designed for them or will george or someone else redesign it uh yeah no it was So Steve's game got trashed.