concepts that make it and those that don't, number of people who are contributing to this, and the sheer volume of documentation that comes out of it. I mean, Pokemon I think is probably an extreme example of that given how much material there is out there for the theme. And the enthusiasm, but fandom, by many members of the team who are working on it, Some of whom will, like uber fans, who will pick up on anything that's not accurate. And of course there's also all the backwards and forwards for the licensors as well for Pokemon, the Pokemon company, who are very protective of their assets, their intellectual property, and want to make sure absolutely everything is bang on point when it comes to all the look and the behaviour of the game as well. So, yeah, it was really about the sheer amount of effort and work and ideas and thought that went into the game and that it's not something which is just sort of thrown together as a quick production. So, anyway, that was the gist of it and I'm sure you will be able to see it for yourself if you missed it. Right, so, and of course, I think it was the first pinball show where Pokemon was publicly displayed. Yeah, a few pros had been going out on location in the meantime, but this was the first place it was at a show, and I think the first place the premiums were available to play. Right, so quite a few games at the show floor. I think you got to play it as well, did I? No, it was pretty busy. It was kind of annoying in a way, because I was at the fun stand and had all the Pokemon games all set up, and I guess George had gone round and done his little adjustment to the orbit lane. Orbit Lane, which was not on all these games but is on all the production ones that are now out. And they were all sitting there updating their code. And I thought, I can't play them at the moment, so I'll wait a moment until they finish updating. I went off and played a game, a relatively quick game of Jaws, turned around, all the games were up and running and they all had people on them playing them. Oh, I'm a typical! Luckily enough, luckily enough, the Game Exchange of Colorado, in person of JJ, had his regular party at the top floor of the Texas Pinball Festival Hotel, the 14th floor, where he had a Harry Potter and a Pokemon game set up, so I was able to play the game over there. Indeed, yeah, we both were. Yeah, but I did get to play on the show floor as well, but that was, you know, pretty much like once the show was up and running, so you just play one game and then you pass it over to the next person in line. Yes. And there was always, even with a whole bunch of machines, there was always somebody, one or two people waiting to play it. Yes, so anyway, it should come as no surprise that Pokemon Limited Edition is currently on the line at Stern Pinball. That will be followed by the Premium model, first for location owners, and then premiums that go to home users, and then finally the Pro model. Interesting, they're prioritizing location owners for the premiums as well. We never do that for the pros. The Pro's Right But they did a limited batch of pro models early for location use. But they're also doing that and then they put the LEDs in now and then the premiums for location and the premiums for home and then back to the pros again. Right and speaking of the limited edition, this is one of those limited editions that I think that they regret making only 750 because they really undersold. Yeah, yeah, and people seem to be getting quite agitated about which number they get because each one comes with its own Pokemon type, because the numbers of the machines relate to the numbers of the Pokemon as well. So then people want certain Pokemons, that means they want certain machine numbers. And I don't know if there's an active market in trading your LE for somebody else's LE, but I suspect if you get one of the more popular Pokemon on your LE, then that would be worth more in future should you come to ever sell it. Right. Oh well. And then there is the first aftermarket mod already for Pokemon, although it's quite a standard one I have to say. It is announced as the Pokemon Card Blaster by Stumbler Pinball. And basically this is a device that sits in the bill acceptor slots in the coin door, And it automatically dispenses a Pokemon trading card whenever a certain achievement occurs in the game. Like winning an extra ball, but of course this is configurable. And well, basically it looks like a generic card dispenser that could be applied to any coin door or American coin door, I should say. A motor driven card dispenser with interchangeable card size options, professional grade nylon front face, not something home printed. Oh well, there's all sorts of things and should be easy to install, less than 10 minutes and of course with a Pokemon game, yeah, you can include Pokemon cards. So very smart of StumbleUp Pinball to list this immediately on their site as a Pokemon card block. Yeah, at the moment I understand there's, you register for interest, it's not actually available yet. Once they get an idea on the number of people who are interested in buying it, then they'll go into production with it. But the number of people that currently signed up for it are 325. Well, yes, register their interest, whether that all turns into orders, we don't know. Right. But it certainly seems like a good idea, but obviously, as you said, it's for an American coin door that has a dollar bill, etc. The European coin doors don't have that, so if you want to have it on a European or non-US coin door, you'd have to replace the coin door. Or mount it elsewhere. Right. Any other news from Stern? Well, I came across something, a new hire. Usually we don't deal with the personnel stuff, but this one I found somewhat interesting. Stern Pinball hired Kush Patel, I hope I pronounced that correctly, as a mechanical engineer. And he posted on LinkedIn that he's excited to share that he will be starting a new role as mechanical engineer at CERN Pinball this week, or that was a couple of weeks ago. Joining CERN will be a big challenge for my previous roles, which is kind of surprising to me. I mean, why would you hire a mechanical engineer if you did something else, completely different else, in a previous... I mean, you hire something for... Yeah, didn't need to use some extra... But I look forward to both the experiences and challenges I'll have during this new chapter in my career. I'm excited to have the opportunity to contribute my efforts to a team that creates such iconic projects. And then he thinks a couple of people that supported him throughout the recruitment process. Okay, well, congratulations to Phil and to Kush on his new role as mechanical engineer. And let's hope he's any good at it. Yeah, I look forward to seeing him appearing on some of these panels in the future, explaining how he built these incredibly intricate mechanical mechanisms that you're going to see on upcoming games. Yeah, it's also interesting to find out on which team he will be working. Yeah, assuming they are assigned to teams, maybe they're not. Don't know on the character in mind. Anyway, what we do have from Stern, of course, is lots of new code. And despite being busy with the launch of Pokemon, they have not been slacking in releasing updates. In fact, we have five updates to the code this month, although one of them is a dual update. I'll talk about that in a minute. So Walking Dead Remastered gets a new version, 0.9, which actually adds some new custom speech and speech from the TV series, which also brings in new sound effects and new displays and a couple of bug fixes, of course. John Wick, remember that game? And that's now finally reached version 1.0, which adds a new The Duel wizard mode, and also changed some display choreography, and added some new displays, and of course some bug fixes. So that's now got its wizard mode and should be feature complete, I guess, as they decided to go and enhance it even further. Star Wars Fall of the Empire version 0.93 and this small update adds some new expression speaker and cabinet lighting effects, some playfield lighting additions and a few rule changes and bug fixes. King Kong The Mists of Terror Island. This is interesting. It adds a new Golden Gary treasure hunt mode, but only if you've got the topper installed, the official Stern pinball King Kong topper. So it's a top of religion mode. Also there's a new T-Rex boss battle multiball when you complete King Kong spread out the second time. The victory mode that was previously part of the Vader when you completed the T-Rex battle now moves to this new boss battle instead. And Treasure Perks have been updated so you can get a lot more wider range of those and a whole ton of achievement awards added. So if you're into collecting those and you thought you had them all then you haven't because there's a whole load more to get. And they also added all the music from the game into the DJ mixer feature available from the gameplay menu at the start which allows you to just listen to the music. And then just today in fact as we're recording this on April 1st, I don't think it's an April Fool but it might be, came a new version, 0.96 of King Kong which made some changes to the additions made in the previous version including the way that the new Golden Gary topper feature carries over from game to game and some of the scoring and feature balances of the new T-Rex boss We were thinking about the ACTOS mode, and the old battle mode. That has been tweaked as well, so version 0.96 came out today, and that's all our software updates for Stern for the month of March. Ok, thank you for those. My pleasure. And then I should have announced this earlier, We visited Multimorphic, but we also recorded an interview with Jerry Stellenberg. We did. Which will be coming up shortly, but first let's talk about our visit to the Multimorphic factory. Yes, nice to see the team there. They were busy when we were there and loading up games and breaking down games and shuffling games around to take up the Texan Spinball Festival, because they had a big stand there. Well, pardon me. But in the meantime, they were still, the team was still building some portal games and modules. Although, again, the process didn't seem to be as fast as, they weren't sort of working flat out, put it that way, while we were there. Although, to be fair, we were also there at lunchtime. So people were away or having lunch. Thank you very much for lunch, by the way. That was a tasty burger, as they say. Yes, so, apart from that, where we had a chance to also have a word with Nick Baldrige, who we saw there, who was getting his drained game ready to take to the show, and cleaning it all up from previous well part of their showroom at normal times but of course they were taking all the games down and packing them up and loading them into a transporter But it was good to talk to Jerry and find out various aspects of how the business is doing how they've been going for so long, and also to find out their kind of expected timescale for future games, And for portable production as well. And the issues that they experience, some of which we've just been talking about when it comes to barrels of fun, and other manufacturers as well. Now there's quite a lot of commonality there, they all face the same challenges. But they also did a seminar at Texas Pinball Festival where they got various people involved with the P3 system And where they all explained how they got involved with it in the first place, what attracted them to the P3 specifically, and also their experiences of owning or developing for the platform. Some people were owners, some people developed games, there's quite a high mix of people on the platform and so it's good to hear a range of voices. And of course, it was also not the previous type of multimorphic seminar we've seen before where it was going on so much about this added value of P3 against buying multiple individual games. So it was the needs of the people who actually developed for it and own it and operate the game. So that was interesting. Hopefully again that will be available on YouTube at some point. Right. But they also mentioned at that seminar that the next Multimorphic title will be another licensed one. But obviously no details of exactly what that is. Obviously the current one, Portal, is licensed too. And no timeline either for when we can expect that. No, no, I guess so. Like many of these companies, it'll either be when it's ready or when they need to keep the line going and they've fulfilled all the existing portal orders and built up a stock of modules and complete games. Right, and it was very good to see that the Portal game, they brought two of those, was still very popular and had a short line all the time during the show. It was never like you could immediately walk up to the game, no, you get in line to play it, so the interest is definitely there. Yeah, I think between TPF and the Houston Arcade Show, they're their home shows. So that's where you're going to be with the best chance of getting to play Portal. I think a lot of shows don't have one, so it's only if a distributor has the game that they're able to bring it along. So yeah, that's the best opportunity to play it. Well, it seems like now would be an excellent time to actually hear from Jerry himself. Right. Well, then let's find out what's cooking with Jerry Snellenberg. What's cooking? So much is cooking. But in the kitchen this time, rather than in the factory. Oh, in the kitchen. Yeah, what's your go-to recipe? I am a five-year-old in a fifty-year-old body and I love to eat and cook and make tacos, pizza and burgers. This is my diet. But I love making homemade pizza. So homemade dough, homemade, homemade, well you actually do it in the bread machine. I'm a fan of the recipe where it's a specific set of ingredients with flour, sugar, water, yeast, and put it in the bread machine, wait a couple hours, spread out the dough. I've experimented with a bunch of toppings, but just straight up pizza. Okay, so what are your favorite toppings? So I love pepperoni. I like to put green peppers and black olives on it. And cheese of choice? Always mozzarella. Just mozzarella? I just want straight up mozzarella. Right, and as for the tomato base, do you put any seasoning into that? Any basil or oregano? So always garlic powder and oregano. But I experimented with regular pasta sauces for a while, but the stores have now gotten pretty good pre-made pizza, pizza-specific sauces, which already have the flavour and the spices. Right, and what's your cooking method then? So... Oven, what temperature? Oven at 500 degrees on the pizza stone. So pizza stone gets preheated at 500 degrees, it only takes about 10 or 12 minutes for the pizza to cook. Okay, and how do you like it? How do you like the appearance of the pizza to be? Is the crust lightly browned or very toasty? Lightly brown, a little bit crispy, but I still like a little bit of softness to the crust, The cheese needs to be melted in gooey stringy. Do you have a thick bottom or a thin bottom? It's medium. I don't like cracker pizza, but I also don't like it super duper thick. So medium pizza. I actually like to put the toppings under the cheese. So put the toppings on and cover with the cheese. And probably the giveaway then for your current lifestyle, when's the last time you actually made a pizza like this? Oh, do I have to admit that? So, I had a child three years ago, and it was before that. Right. It was before that. Okay, but the classics don't change. No, and I still long for it. It used to be a Super Bowl party tradition. I'd have friends and family over for the Super Bowl, and we'd make up a bunch of homemade pizzas and enjoy them. Okay, well excellent. Thank you very much. Now, while we're here, so, what's going on with Multimorphic? Multimorphic, you have Portal in production, we just got a tour of the factory, thank you for that. And photos will be up on the Pinball News website as well as on the pinball-magazine.com website. And so Portal's in production, but that game was already introduced last year. Correct. So it's a successful title for you. So our process usually is to announce, to launch a title, see how much interest there is, and that translates into pre-orders, and then we order parts based on those pre-orders. So we're always about six months delayed from launch date to production start. Right. So we started production in around September timeframe. We launched it prior to that in March, about a year ago. We've been hot and heavy in production since then. And of course, since we're a P3, since we're making a P3, which is a modular machine, some of the customers bought machines with Portal, and other people already have their P3 and are just buying Playfields modules, game kits. So, our Playfield production has been churning out Playfields constantly for the last, how many months has it been since September? Four, five, six, seven? Seven? We're in month seven from September. Constantly, and some of those playfields go directly to game kit orders and some of those playfields go into machine kit, or to machines. You stated in your update newsletters, which you send out regularly, they can pick you for those, that progress on creating the portal playfields hasn't been as fast as you originally intended it to be. What's the reason for that? Is that down to manufacturing issues of parts to build the games? Is it down to other delays or supply chain issues? Or is it more focused around the factory here? Yes, so normally we predict that every project is going to have some number of problems, supply chain problems, or parts come in defective, or whatever that is. We were pretty good about our estimates on the parts. Our normal issue is staffing, is keeping a floor full of assemblers, because I don't know how familiar you are with the production process at most of these factories, but it's kind of a revolving door. People come to work here for a while, and some of them stay forever. Some of our core people have been here for many years, but a lot of times you hire someone, you train them, you bring them up to speed, And then they never talk to you again. They don't show up for work and you never hear from them. They're all the fed burgers. It's a constant thing. We demand, of course, that they work under certain restrictions and according to certain policies and then make sure we're building a quality product that meets everyone's expectations. Some people like the environment, some it's not perfect for. Our challenge since day one, we started producing machines in 2017, so almost nine years, has been staffing. It doesn't matter how much we pay, people are probably listening to this now, you just gotta pay more and you'll get better people, that's not the case. We've tried all ends of reasonable pay rates for people and it all comes down to a person's sense of responsibility and commitment. That doesn't vary according to their age or employment history then? It seems not. You've got retired or ex-service people. We recently hired someone who had retired from a technology job. They were bored. They were very wealthy and they were bored and wanted something to fill their time. They weren't ready to fill that time with a real job apparently because we brought them to speed. They were one of our test engineers because they had a lot of familiarity with technology and they could debug and think through things logically. But yeah, it didn't last very long. So keeping people up and trained and making sure that we can roll product out in a consistent And we have a very important schedule. It's probably the hardest challenge. Strangely, when you think of pinball, you think it's super complicated and there's all these things you've got to make work and you've got to design cool mechs and you've got to figure out supply chain. All that to me is easier than managing... ...building the thing. Yeah. It's not the first time that we hear that. No, you're not unique in that sense. So where are you with Portal, Playfield, module development, production I should say, as far as all pre-orders? So we have shipped all pre-ordered playfields, I believe. I think we're right around the cusp of... I think we shipped the last few out last week. Right now we're building orders that came in since... Okay, when we say pre-orders, I mean day one pre-orders. We've shipped all day one pre-orders. Now we... Throughout the year, people saw the game, they got the experience of the show or in somebody's house or whatever, and they've since bought in, and we're still working through those orders. Currently our lead time is about two months. So somebody If you put in an order for a game kit or a machine, it's going to be about two months before we ship it. That's still pretty good. Yeah. I mean, with other companies, and I'm not mentioning any names, but you order a game and you're waiting for God knows how long. So we listen to a lot of different podcasts and things, and there seems to be a perception that we are always very slow and have a lot of delays, and that's not the case. I don't even think it's the case comparatively to other companies, but we always launch and then we build up a big queue of people who wanted it. It takes us generally about a year to get through that queue, but after we get to the end of that queue, we're still pushing out new product for new orders. I would say the reason for that perception is a very laudable one in that you actually own up to when you have production delays. You tell your customers, okay, we're having a problem with this, it means it's going to be another month or so. There's other companies just might tell the distributors but distributors don't tell the end buyers so it's just a rumor mill and if you've not heard it's been delayed now that game's not going to come out for another three months and once you're upfront about it and that openness can be perceived as being more prone to these issues than other companies even though you're probably less prone to them. Interesting point. It's the curse of being an engineer. We all want to tell you exactly what's going on. We can only fix it if we admit what's wrong. So, given that you have fulfilled the day one orders for Portal and you just mentioned that once you announce a new game you need like six months to get production going, obviously you need to get or to keep the line or the manufacturing line going as well. Obviously, I don't know how many Portal games you still have to build, but it sounds to me like you should not be that far from announcing a new title. So I just said we have two more months or so. If an order came in today, we'd ship it in about two months. That gives you kind of an idea of what the queue is right now. But what you said about wanting to keep the line running being an implication for when the new game is coming, it doesn't connect. So the P3 is unique, right? The P3 is a pinball platform. When we announce a new game, we get a lot of orders. And if we have zero orders after Portal production finishes, or when we get through the current set of orders, until some future date where we launch the next game, the production floor won't be idle. We'll be building up machines. We'll be building up base machines. Right, okay. So if we build up 40, 50, 100, 300 base machines, those will be ready for the launch of the next game, and then when the next game parts come in for the playfield module, we build the modules, slap them in the machines that are already built, get them tested and shipped. So our production floor won't sit idle waiting for a game to be launched. They'll be super busy. Okay, and that's why you're different from a lot of, or any traditional pinball company, basically. Right. Okay. We have a ton of machines in process. We have a table set up with a lot of playfields because some number of our customers already have machines. So it's a very different production environment than a traditional pinball company. Okay. So any word on when we might get a new title from Multimorphic or a third party or... So normally we launch a game right around or before TPF. Right. That's what we've done the last four titles, I believe. And we did that because the games were ready. Well, the new game's not ready yet, so when it's ready, we'll launch it. Okay. That's all. Fair enough, fair enough. Great. Okay, well, thank you for taking some time on this very busy build up to the Texas Pinball Festival. You know you've got to transport a whole lot of equipment and games and spares and glasses up there for your stand. So we look forward to seeing you up in Frisco in a day or two's time. And thank you again for taking time out to tell us what's cooking with Jerry Stellenberg. Thank you, Jerry. Thank you. So carrying on with Multimorphic in a sense, one of the people working at Multimorphic is of course Nick Baldridge direct癮 Goldbergiorios, Scott J Kielczak Watkins, Going back to his drained game, he has produced a drained music box ring holder. Yeah, it's a music box. It does, but also, yeah, so when you open this wooden music box, it plays 22 seconds of the original composition for the drained game from Charles Wolfe Music. Edm environment, Global