You're listening to Topcast, this old pinballs online radio. For more information visit them anytime, www.marvin3m.com. Flash Topcast. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Tonight on Topcast I'd like to welcome an artist that worked for Valley starting in 1976. He worked with other classic artists like Dave Christensen and then soon became the art director at Valley. He also did such a classic pinball artwork as Evil Canoeble, 8 Ball, Lost World, Playboy, Future Spa, Paragon, Space Invaders, Zenon, and Centaur. After Valley he did some games for Game Plan and Williams and then settled in in 1990 at Denees doing games such as Fan of the Opera, Back to the Future, Chuck Point, Batman, Hook, Royal Rumble, Golden Eye, and Twister. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ I'd like to welcome Paul Faris to Topcast tonight. Again, Paul worked at Valley as an artist and a art director from 1976 up to about 1983 and then he did some work for Williams and Game Plan. And ultimately ended up doing work for Data East from 1990 up to 1996. Paul's done a lot of famous pinball artwork and we're going to talk to him tonight here on Topcast. So we're going to give him a call right now and see how he's doing. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hello? Hi, Paul, it's Joshua Clay. Hey, all right. You're an artist by trade obviously, but how did you get into art and how did you get into pinball? Okay, well, yeah, it's a little bit interesting. I went to college, was an art major in college, but then when I got out of college I was a teacher first. I was a high school art teacher and wrestling coach, football coach. I was a suburban high school here in Chicago area and in the wholesale high school. And I was doing that for about, I ended up teaching for about seven years. So that's how I started out as an educator. I always planned to go into commercial art, but then I enjoyed the teaching and coaching potential. I wanted to do that, so that was my way of kind of putting both those things together. And I actually enjoyed a great deal when the opportunity to get into pinball came up. I was a little reluctant to go do it because I enjoyed teaching so much. And actually, I'm back in education too, so I'm finishing my career as an educator and still doing work as an artist, but going back to teaching and coaching, which is for one of my first love. Now, where did you go to school? I went to North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, which is pretty close here now. And it was a small liberal arts college here in Naperville, Illinois, and I at night school. I actually have, in past years, I've actually coached wrestling over there at different times too. So it's been kind of an important part of my life after graduating from there. Now, how did you, were you always a pinball fan or how did you actually get into pinball? Yeah, that's kind of interesting. I, in the Chicago area, pinball wasn't even legal back in the time when I was growing up. So I hadn't even been around pinball as much. It was an interesting thing. When it went to Bali, it had just become legalized in the Chicago area. So it wasn't even something I'd seen them, but we just went around much. And they were, but the way it actually happened, I was, as I said, I was an art teacher. And then in the summer, I was, I was going to art fairs and I was selling my paintings and working as a working artist in the summer. That was my summer job. It was going very, very well. And my brother had run into Bill O'Donnell Jr., who is, at that time, his dad was the president of Bali. And he had, they were childhood friends and they were catching up on what, you know, what's your sister doing, what's your, you know, your folks. And that kind of stuff, and he said, asked about me. And my brother told me I was teaching and I was coaching and I was also having been, having a very successful summer job selling my artwork. And it just kind of, it's kind of a little light bulb and Bill's head. And he asked if, if I would want to come and talk to him. Because I guess at the time at Bali, they were doing all their artwork outside. They were sending all their artwork to be done outside with the exception of one artist that was working there. And it's a guy, his name you might know, his name is Dave Christianson. Sure. And he was, you've been doing some very, some nice work for them. And, but other than that, they were sending all their work out to advertising poster, which was a company that did everybody's artwork at the time. And they had this, Billy had this vision of bringing all the art department, or bringing art department into, and doing all their own artwork. So it would give it a little more of a unique style. And he was looking for someone that could do more realistic, a little bit less stylized stuff. At the time, it was kind of, more of a more cartoon approach, I guess you'd say. And he just remembered that I used to, he knew me as a kid and he remembered that I used to have this, you know, this ability as an artist. And we just learned if I was still doing any of that stuff. So that's how the seed was planted by Billy with, through my brother. And he contacted me and asked me to come in and see what I wanted to interview or talk about doing this. And I actually was very, very fond of teaching and coaching. I mean, I was, I just had no love of lifestyle. It really enjoyed working with kids. And so I was a little reluctant to even consider leaving it. But I did go in and interview, showed my artwork. And it wasn't even the pinball type so much. It just showed an ability to do, I was pretty much into drawing sports figures. And I could, I could draw people and portraits and that kind of work. And I actually could wish to be selling a lot of landscape paintings. And so not necessarily a pinball art, but it the ability to do realistic work was the main thing. I think you saw. And he also, Billy was trying to, as I say, set this art department up. And again, he thought somebody who was a coach, teacher might have the, I don't know, use a term stability if the right is the right word, but you know, artists can be kind of free spirits. And he was trying to come up with a pretty stable group of people. And any actually was thinking about bringing something in that could, that could set up in our department and be a coming art director. So I went in and interviewed and actually was not real excited about doing in the beginning. And then my wife and I sat down and talked about it. And ultimately, after a couple different discussions, I ended up going to Bali and kind of changing careers. And it was, as I said, a little bit nervous about it because I really loved what I was doing before. And I was pretty successful as a coach. That was one of my first loves was wrestling. So I went in and as we talked about what the possibilities were being, I guess the carrot that Billy held off for me was that not only would you be an artist doing Fimbal art that eventually within a fairly short time they wanted to set this art department up and I would be the art director. So that was the thing that kind of made it look kind of exciting to do. And I was not that familiar with Fimbal art at the time. So I had to kind of go out and kind of get caught up and see what the current look was. And when I saw Dave's work, that definitely encouraged me that they were serious about trying to kind of give it a little bit of a different look to Fimbal and actually make it more illustrative. And at that time, this was in the middle 1970s, about 1975, 1976 and we were around there when I was talking to them. Actually, record album covers, it's hard to even imagine. There used to be record album covers, but that was what were a lot of the best graphic art was being done. So for me, what to try to take artwork and for Fimbal and make it more like the record albums and some of the more labry illustrations that were being done at the time. So that was what seemed appealing to me. So that's how it all started. I went there and resigned from teaching and took the leap of faith and went to Bali and worked as a staff illustrator with Dave Christians and myself. And even at that time, there were still a few projects that were still going to advertising poster. But again, the plan was to start hiring our own artist and develop an in-house art department. And that's what we did. So you're was your, you know, I'm just looking at the internet, Fimbal Database and it says that your first product was the 1976 Knight Rider. Is that correct? That is correct. Because I did some work on, you get familiar with the process because the one thing I didn't have experience with was I was a fine art painter, as I said, an illustrator. But with Fimbal, you had to do work with ink and then with these, they have to cut the separations for stencils, the screen stencils for every color and there's a hand done process. You know, you didn't do it as a painting. You did it as an ink or what they used to call RubyLift, which is where you cut these with a knife. You actually cut these stencils for all the colors. So that was a little bit new for me. So I worked on a slot machine and I worked on a little bit of a Pimbal piece that went to Europe, but you know, just to kind of get familiar with the process. And then Knight Rider was my first Pimbal machine. And I think that right after I get to remember the chronology, but I think right after, and actually in Knight Rider, I actually, for models on the game, it was a truck driver and it was a, there's a waitress serving coffee to a truck driver, a big truck is all during the CB radio craze that was going on at the time. And I used my assistant wrestling coach who was the truck driver and a couple of my former students who were the waitress and some of the people on the glass. And so I just had a little bit of fun with it kind of like that and enjoyed the process of kind of bringing some people from my former life into the piece. And then we actually did a minor license for that for the CB radio because this was just when license games were starting. Tom Neiman from Valley was very instrumental in developing this whole idea of tying a license scene into the Pimbal. And I think the first one they did was Wizard, which was based on the movie Tommy. And that's one day of Christianson did with Ann Margaret and Roger D'Altry. So they were just developing this idea of license games. So in the Knight Rider game there was a CB radio company that kind of had there. We used their particular CB as part of the graphics in the back glass. It was like a minor license project. So that was the first one. And then after that I think it was Evil Can Evil if I remember right? Yeah that's correct. And now on Evil Can Evil that was obviously another license thing. And you must have been pretty happy that game sold 14,000 units. And here you go from working in high school to being like your artwork is being seen. God it's prolific you know? Yeah that was that's the thing that I think is one of the wonderful things about doing Pimbal Art and it came to me a little bit later when I got up to do and I think it was a playboy game. I started to get my first European travel, first European trip and I would walk into a bistro in Paris and there's my artwork right inside the bistro. It was very kind of overwhelming at first because here's your end. And one thing that's about Pimbal Art is a large piece of art. So a lot of illustrators who were very successful have their work in magazines and things but you just wouldn't be seen by that many people that size. So it was a large billboard artwork so that was a lot of fun to be able to have that experience. Now how did you do with the Evil Can Evil that you just worked from pictures or did you actually meet the man? Actually met the man. First of all we worked from pictures to do most of the concepts that in the early days what would happen you would send them whoever the licensed person was you'd send them sketches. But generally they would either come in or you would make a trip to make a final presentation to make sure they signed off and everything and we're happy with it. But I did all the artwork first as sketches that they approved, as managers approved. And then we actually did the final blast. This was really sort of funny. And before they were getting ready for production, Evil was in Chicago. Evil Can Evil came into Chicago and he was going to go and do a jump at the Chicago amphitheater and he would jump over a tank of sharks with his motorcycle. So that was a big kind of a big, one of his bigger publicity jumps. But he came into the factory and to Values, the corporate office there and came up to our department and looked at the glass and it was happy with everything. The only thing he was not happy about was I had done this graphic at the top of the glass showing that he was jumping over this series of buses. And I had the trajectory of the motorcycles incorrect as he told me. I had it in a complete arc but he actually said no, no, the last two cycles of this jump was kind of a sequential, you know, several motorcycles in a row that you would light up with individual lights and it would look like he was jumping over these buses. But he said that because the way I had the real wheel of the motorcycle, he would crash if I didn't have the front wheel up higher as he landed on the far side. So I made that adjustment kind of a good adjustment in terms of the graphic because it was more accurate. But the ironic thing is the next day he jumped at the amphitheater and he had, did you get he, and by sharks? Yeah, you remember the story when he actually, I don't know if you heard of that, but he was doing a practice run and he crashed and went to the hospital and never made the jump and they actually had a live broadcast of this jump. And I remember Teletel's Valleus and Jill St. John were the commentators. They were going to be talking, you know, as a host of the show about evil, because he was jumping. They had to fill this whole hour because he wasn't there because he had missed the tank or something and then it had a crash. I mean, he was alright, but he had still had to go to the hospital and recover, so he never made the jump. So after telling me he would crash, I thought it was a little bit strange that he had that happen to him. Yeah, a little bit ironic. A colorful guy. Now the one after that you did was eight ball and now this glass is a little bit controversial. Well maybe it wasn't at the time. I don't know. Tell me about that. Well, there's two things we're going on then. This is sort of what was interesting. Yes, I mean, you're talking about the fact that it kind of looked like Fonzi. I mean, that kind of thing is that. Kind of looks like Fonzi just kind of. Yeah, I mean, it was meant to be kind of, we, first of all, I don't want to minimize eight ball because eight ball turned out to be, I think, for the longest time the most popular pinball ever made. Yeah, 20,000 units. Talk about a hit. And it was a hit, but it was funny. I mean, in my mind, I was developing at this time. This was one of the more major contributions that we made as a company toward pinball graphics. In terms, it was at the time I was pushing very hard to get the company to try to do this four-color process printing. Now, nobody was doing that at the time. And it was, it ended up being a major contribution to pinball because it made it possible to do paintings on glass as opposed to just doing these ink drawings, which are kind of, I call it the kind of coloring book approach or comic book approach, which is where the old pinballs were done, where you did a very elaborate pen and ink drawing. And they needed these build in solid colors of separations. But if you had 14 colors on a glass, that would mean 14 different operations. You know, the screener screened that color on the glass and it was pre-labor intensive. The four-color process, which is how they do, you know, almost every magazine cover or you know, poster you've seen. It does it with four colors. And but it gives you the ability to reproduce photographically, basically, what you paint it. So I was really pushing hard to do that process. We were in the process developing the equipment. We were in the process of ordering, setting up the so-called department all during that time. And they said that, okay, you can do the next game you do after eight ball. You will be our first four-color game. So I was very excited by getting onto that. And then Norm Clark, who is our engineer and charge of pinball design, had come up with a pool theme. And again, pool themes were very common. Norm had done games in the past about pool and he knew they were going to be very successful. And it was one of our first fully electronic games. That was the other thing that made a huge difference in terms of it. It was a good game coming at the right time. And then the fact that it was fully electronic, coming emerging from the Electro Mechanical age to the electronic age, this was going to be our first full run electronically. So I was just trying to get through that game. And I try to remember, I think it was Tom Neiman and I were talking about what kind of theme we want. We came up with this idea of kind of doing a without a license, but a happy day type of theme. You know, the guy playing pool and the leather jacket. So that's all we did. And again, it wasn't meant to be exactly him, but it was meant to be a guy like you know. And he was a caricature himself. The fancy character was that black leather jacket guy in the 50s look in a pool. And then kind of keep it a little bit cleaned up so we make it as a sort of shop so it wouldn't look too dingy. And then there was actually a little bit of controversy even about you know, trying to promote the kind of a wholesome kind of graphic for pinball at the time because it just become, it becoming legalized in different places and Chicago was one of them. So they wanted to keep it sort of wholesome and appeal to families and that kind of thing. So yeah, that, so we just made it look close to it. And again, this is one of those friends thing. There's been games about like Tribolt and some other things that have guys that kind of look like the disco figures and not enough by our company. But so anyway, that's what we did. We just did kind of a caricature of a 50s, 50 type character, you know, was the idea. Did any, did you get any repercussions, you know, any legal repercussions from this? Oh no. And again, we would know this stuff if we did it. And again, you don't do this stuff in a vacuum either. You know, you do the artwork and then you know, you present it to marketing and they all have to kind of weigh in on it. If anybody thought something was too close or too, you know, this might not be good from a whatever point of view. If it was a negative image, like you certainly didn't do, there was a game called Old Chicago that there was some concern about because you didn't want to do gangster type themes, you know, I'm right. There was some sensitivity to that because of the industries, some things that might have been in the past in the industry and so on. So these were, these were, these were things that were always represented to marketing and, you know, all the exact addition and they all felt it was pretty, it was pretty benign. So, but I do, I don't know how true this is and I have never asked Tom to even about it but he, he used to go out to Hollywood at various times and supposedly somehow he was out there for a trip and talk to somebody who knew Henry Winkler and Henry Winkler said something, you know, you really arrive when you see yourself on a pinball machine or something like that. But this was in it pretty much in its infancy when the whole idea of having a celebrity on a pinball was not that, wasn't done, you know, nobody did it except for Tommy. Tommy was the first one or I should say wizard. And at the time that I was doing eight ball, I'm pretty sure, actually right before I did eight ball, Dave Christianson did, it was doing Captain Fantastic, which was a legitimate license from the movie built off of wizard. And so this was kind of when the whole idea of license characters was kind of being ushered into the industry, you know, so it was kind of a new territory, you know. So, no, there was no legal, except that I've heard that Winkler made the comedy thought the guy looked like him. So, at the time I just thought that was kind of kind of an interesting coincidence but not, there was no problem because different, different era now and also it developed into a different, where that were celebrities actually wanted to be on pinball machines because pinballs were just becoming kind of like the, you know, the, you know, we call it Nintendo or Xbox and all that crazy of today. Well, this is what pinball was at that time, you know, it was becoming this huge phenomenon. It was, as you can see the growth of the games, they went from, they sold 7,000 units that would be good and they all said to go to 20,000 or even, I think, wizard did 10,000. That was a huge jump in production so that, you know, there was a, starting to be an acceptance that tying these into license things was a good thing, you know, was a great thing to promote, help promote the game. I think before that time people just felt that we make a game, we'll sell, I don't care who's on there, you know, it will make any difference. And then Tom was able to promote people. You know, I might get, the game itself might get you the first 6,000 but the promotion part of it might get you the next, you know, the next 5,000. And in terms of the recognition of the license property on there. So that was a pretty interesting time to be around that. Well, even the girl on 8 ball, on the 8 ball glass, even kind of had a resemblance to the, well, she was certainly a more riskier, larger, breasted version of the girl on Happy Days, you know, I mean, did that have any sort of impact? No, well, I mean, just the fact that there was a kind of a sexy girl, you'd hang out at the, I think the only thing about her that I, if I remember right, was, some people are saying about the show, I didn't look like the girl on the show, but she was, I had a pink blouse or something, her name was Pinky or something, if I remember right. And so that was the only, you know, maybe stretch there, but it wasn't a, I mean, I, you know, if I wanted to make it look exactly like it, my would have made it look exactly like it, but it was more of a style and the same thing with her. It was more, because it was a, it was a popular show, if I remember right at the time, it was a pretty popular show. But the danger, and this has happened, even with evil cannibal, I can go back to that in a second, but the, you know, the danger of doing a television show is, you know, you're doing a pinball piece that's maybe a year, you started a year before it ever comes out as far as graphics and, you know, packaging and all, we, we, we didn't work on them for a year, but it took that long from maybe six to eight weeks to do your graphics and, but they had to have the whiteboard, which is the game itself without any graphics, and they had to be played and tweaked and refined and show us about a year from concept to final production. And if you're, you know, if a TV shows all of a sudden went into tank or got, you know, that canceled or in the, like in the case of the, of evil cannibal, we had a, we're doing a home game at the time, from Montgomery Awards, or, or, never going to have it, the first home pinball. And our first home pinball was going to be an evil cannibal thing, because we had the license, we'd already been popular with, you know, the public, so there was kind of a built-in awareness about it. Well, about, I think it was about two, three weeks, maybe before production of that game, when we'd done the graphics already and it was all finished, evil cannibal had a, a run-in, I guess was, we were going to say, with his manager and, or, I think, or someone else was medical with his manager. And actually, when after him with a baseball bat, and it was in big, you know, big, big, yeah, yeah, that doesn't help the product marketing, does it? No, it's not, it's not the most positive, everybody is very conscious of trying to keep a very positive image of, for pinball, you know. And, you know, as they got more and more comfortable, as it got more and more popular, it was able to graphically reflect maybe a little bit more, you know, male themes, I would say, is always pretty, pretty predominantly male audience, where it always has been. But in those days, they're pretty conscious of trying to keep it whole sum as much as possible, and that was something that they couldn't do. So I had just hired another artist to start building this department we had, and I had him do a replacement game, I think it was called Galaxy Ranger, if I remember right, which was, I really had no license tie in, but they felt that, again, Midway was actually going to be making this game. Midway was a company that we own, but was not in the same facility, but they were going to do the manufacturing of this home pinball game. And the exactly over there were very nervous about evil, Kanibos, so they wanted nothing controversial at all, no license to tie in, they have any problems with. So we quickly redid this graphic, redid the play field, and Kevin O'Connor was the artist that did that, by the way, and he did a great job, and it was just one of those things you have to be able to adapt to, and that's kind of the danger of a TV show. You can get the license to a TV show, and then your production schedule is set up, and you may not be able to work it into the production schedule, you know, until the following summer or something, and that TV show might be on the down slide. That kind of helped him a $6 million man when we did that team. That was kind of on the, you know, going the other direction, but on the air, I think for six or seven years, it was successful, but it was starting to get a little tired by the time you get the deal all done. It can affect, you know, how long it's going to stay on the air, or affect its popularity. So, how was it working with Dave Christianson? It was great. He's an interesting guy. I don't know if you ever talked to Dave, or he's a very interesting guy. And again, he didn't, first of all, they had determined that they really liked his artwork, and I'll say this about Dave. Dave might be one of the best line artists I've ever seen. I mean, ever, ever, into what a pen. He can do magical stuff. He used to illustrate manuals. What do you think? Yeah. Right. Yeah. He's an ex-exploited part, you know, of a carburetor and things like that. He just does a magnificent work. All drawn, you know, not on a computer. I think computers weren't even part of graphics at that point. Right. So, he was excellent. And again, his artwork is what motivated me to say, again, I wasn't raised playing pinball, and I'm thinking in my head of pinball, kind of stylized, Jerry Kelley type artwork, which I'm not saying was better, but it wasn't my style. I wanted to do something much more realistic, much more illustrative. And Dave's approach was much more in that direction. You know, he always had a whimsical sense of humor, maybe kind of a twisted sense of humor at times. But the work is what made me think, you know, this is a serious, this whole direction of pinball art could be changing, and it would be a great place to work. So that had a lot to do with me, but to come there. I don't think he wasn't. He was very good to me. He didn't know. He kind of looked at me a little bit as an adversary, I think, when I first came in, because he kind of had his own way of working. The one thing that was, the good thing about Dave was he did this beautiful work. The bad thing was it took him a long, long time to do it. And they were trying to get these games turned out. You know, as productions were going up, the electronic pinball was coming in, that's the whole idea about setting up this art department. So when I went there, I wasn't an art director, but I had to kind of get a lay of the land a little bit and get to know the other technical people because there were several artists doing different slot machine art work. And this whole thing was going to have to come together under one roof, basically. So I'm sure Dave saw me as maybe a potential adversary. And, you know, again, he was a very interesting guy that kind of, you know, the personality of the artist that was concerning the executives there, that's why he wasn't asked to be an art director because he was more of a, they saw him more as a kind of a lone wolf, you know, great with graphics. And this is not rock that boat. Let's just let him keep doing what he's doing and do well. And so that caused a problem between you two? And they did. And so it was fun to work with them. I'd say it was challenging at times because he wasn't, you know, a typical, you know, kind of five type of guy, you know, who just come into his work and go home. And, you know, so there were clashes, I would say, at times, but also I had a commencement respect for him. And especially his work, because if his work hadn't been what it was, I probably wouldn't have thought that this was a good move from me from a career standpoint because I wanted to do more realistic, illustrative work. And as I said, his work, you know, was leaning toward that direction, you know. Now when you did Lost World, now that game kind of had a different artistic feel to it. Tell me about that one. And that was my, I mean, again, if I was looking back at my career at Valley, that was sort of the, you know, a major turning point, not just for me, but for the whole pinball business because of this four color artwork process. It enabled us and me, because I was the only one there that was really a painter. As I said, Dave was a graphic artist that used the traditional method and did continue to do that style later too. I mean, he didn't change his style for the four color process, but it did allow other artists that we were building in this department to do airbrush and to do oil painting and to do all those things and capture that with the four color process. And that was a major time because it wasn't just doing artwork. We were setting up equipment to do this four color screen printing. I'm glass with ultraviolet ink, so these were inks that could be, when they printed the art, they would immediately get cheered by ultraviolet lamp. This was all new technology at the time. And then, and then immediately dried. So you didn't have all these drying time problem that was, that was slowed down the process and printing. And the press has themselves that they bought to, to make the artwork instead of doing 250 impressions in a day, which is what one person could do is doing a buy-in. They could do 500 impressions an hour. So it was a tremendous cost savings to Valley and that was one of their, what made it so attractive to them. And I was glad that happened, but to me it was all about being able to come up with painted artwork and transferring that to glass. And nobody was doing that at the time. So last year, I was actually a piece I had presented to the executives there to promote this idea of looking into this alternate screen printing process. And so all during the time I was doing 8 Ball and trying to get on to go to do Lost World, we were building up this art department, screening department to do this UV printing. So we went to the trade show, the AMOA show that year. And our two pieces on the floor were 8 Ball. And I think there's a third one. And we might have a third piece. I'm not sure if it was Mata Hari. I don't know my chronology right now, but I think Mata Hari, which is a beautiful game, and that was done in the conventional. Right, that's Dave. Yes, and he had done it. To me, that's one of my favorite pieces of his, and graphically. And that was done in the old way. We had 8 Ball, which was done in the old way graphically. And then we had Lost World on the floor of the show. They kind of introduced it there. And you know, you didn't use to do that. They didn't want to bring out a game too early and show it to distributors. And then had distributors wait till I'm in a path on this game so I can get 8. So I can get Lost World. So they were sometimes a little reluctant to put a game on the floor of a show and get to worry about the anticipation for the next game and hurt the chances of the game preceding it. But in this case, it was a great move because it did a couple things. It showed this direction of Valley's artwork. And I was just standing on the floor. I didn't have any badge on or anything at the booth. And I was just standing along there watching people play the game and listening to talk. And I remember two distributors coming by and saying, we had just gone into first places, the manufacturer, Pimballs. We were on the rise. And I remember hearing two people say, well, no wonder, Valley's in first place. Look at the artwork on that game. And so they didn't know what the difference was. I don't think. But they recognized it was different. And that was certainly gratifying to hear that because we were banking a lot that this would be not only a production benefit, but it would be a graphic and a move us away from the crowd of other Pimball machines in terms of look. So that was the whole motivation for it. I had a lot riding on it. And I actually, the piece you saw is lost. World was actually a, I had done a small version of that as a sketch and a little painting. And we did all of our sample classes with this new process for that game. And make sure it all worked okay. And then we moved in to doing that as our first four color Pimball machine. Now when you did Playboy, though, that's back to the old style, though, isn't it? It is. And buddy, buddy. That's what's unique about a four color. That's what I was also trying to, and I was also trying to make sure Dave understood this, too. You can do artwork that has a lot of that same quality in four color process. Because then as you think about magazine covers or album covers, some of them were very simple and graphic, some were much more subtle and blended colors and more realistic, bleeped done. Because the four color process just reproduces whatever image you photograph. It starts out as a photographic process. Nowadays, it's a desktop technology. You have a little scanner. You have a scanner photograph or you scan a painting and then you reproduce it. It's kind of like an inkjet print. That's kind of what all of this was like in the beginning with all of the computers. This is when scanners were laser scanners to scan your artwork. It was pretty new also. They had these huge scanners that were very expensive to get your art, get them scanned, but they could reproduce anything. So what I did with Playboy was the center figures. I don't know if you've seen it or not, but it's got the character Hefner with two girls and then a bunch of little vignettes around the edges. That was all done as a painting. Then the outer borders, there's a bunch of mirror on it and there's some graphic Playboy club keys and other kind of an art deco border to it. All that was done using the four color process but doing it as solid colors. I think you would have a simple graphic. I combined it to. I don't know if you know the story about that game, but when we presented the artwork and I was thrilled to be able to do it because it was going to be my first major license. The reputation of Pimball artists, some Pimball artists, especially Dave, of course, was you do these sort of elapsed with sexy women and that was sort of part of the theme of what Pimball was kind of emerging into in terms of graphics. Nothing inappropriate, but attractive women, it would be attractive to a male audience because it was so predominantly male. I was like excited about doing the project. We sent the graphics to Hefner and I had done all my research, of course, and what do you do for a PG rated Playboy without nudity and without anything inappropriate. I did it as a montage of the Playboy lifestyle and the clubs and they had resorts at the time. Just kind of like what Playboy I thought would advertise for their image. It was a positive image. It was not done any way. It's a sleaze here. When Hefner got it, we got this conference call and they called me in and there was four of them. I was the executive in there. I think Billio Donald was the Natalemann and Brush here and down Brit who was the operating officer at the time. They were all in the office and they were listening to Hefner. He was all excited about doing the Pimball. Matter of fact, he was criticized for being more excited about working on the Pimball machine. Then he was his hotel in Atlantic City that was going up. He was much more of a game player than he was really a casino person. He was his own executives. This was a distraction. He was going to be working on people on a Pimball. But his complaint was that the graphics were fine. It wasn't criticized in the style, but he said the way it was done was much more about the Playboy lifestyle, which is what we were trying to do. It was missing what he really wanted to see in the Pimball. What it came out to be was he wanted to be in the middle of it. He wanted to be a picture of him as the Playboy icon. And thinking about it, it was a good move by him because he was about promoting that that playboy is. He is a playboy. Not just his company, but he's the front man. He's the image of what people, the lifestyle of playboy, is to have this wonderful setting. He had just moved out to California at that time to the Playboy Mansion West. He asked if we could rework it. He asked for, at the time he was dating a girl named Sandra Ciodor. That was his current. He had broken up with Barbie Benton and was called dating, but he was seeing the girl named Sandra Ciodor. She was a playmate. She was a playmate of the month. Maybe he played me as a year. I can't remember if he was a year. He was one of the girls he wanted to see in this picture. I can't remember if it was me or if it was him that came up with Paddy McGlyre who was playmate of the year that year. She's now Jimmy Conner's wife, the tennis player. Those are the two girls he wanted up front to be surrounding. I need sight of him. So I read the graphic and we actually took it out to him, which was a tough trip. He was teaching high school a year and a half earlier and I was in the playboy mansion with Tom Neymann walking around. It was quite an adjustment to my sense of reality, but it was fun. He was very pleased with it. He actually, when we presented the artwork, at the time James Conn was staying out there, almost got permanent resident at the time. I think he'd gone through a divorce. I remember him coming into the room and was very excited about it. He actually helped on another trip. We went out there after we got the glass approved. We did the artwork for the glass. I'll go to the other trip in a second, but we had this large promotional pinball tournament based on the playboy game as they were playing another game. I think it might have been eight ball in the tournament. When they were going to unveil the playboy pinball at the playboy towers in Chicago to present to the general public, available to the world, the next great pinball by Valley. It was going to be a playboy. All the playfield had gotten done. We've screened it all because you have to do a playfield to actually put a game together because it has to be all screen printed and then top coated and all the plastics and all the rest of the game. But the back glass had only been approved. Again, you couldn't do a quick photograph, blow it up and put it on the back glass. You had to really do the artwork. The party was going on at the playboy towers. I was back at Valley on the northwest side in my little studio there. Getting trying to get this back glass done to put on the back on the game. It was a race against time to get the glass done, get it down to the ballroom on the game and then ready for the unveiling. It was maybe 15 minutes before they unveiled it where I rushed over there and they had a security guy come to the door to get it to bring me into the room. They kind of headed on the stage and from the back of the stage they had it all covered up. When they got the glass in, I think about 10 minutes later they unveiled it. It was a great applause and a great reception. That was a little tough. I don't know. Today it would be a lot tougher to pull it off physically. There have been terrible all nighters to get that thing done. It was a great success. Then we went on to do the final painting course. He was very pleased with it. I remember him sitting right next to him and he was really happy the way he was depicted and how he had captured him. He made a couple of comments on the girls. I looked at it. I was surprised too. They weren't to concern how I painted their face but they wanted to make sure that I had done a good job with their figures and their torsos. They actually found a theater or thank me for the cleavage that I gave her because she didn't think she had as much as she would like to have had. There are some things like that. There are a little side things that happen in the process of getting an acceptance of your artwork. You did great with it. They sold over 18,000 of them. You got to be just plain thrilled at that. Well, it was huge. Again, that again was the second, if I remember right now, again, this is good stuff. It's a little foggy after a few years. I think that was the second major all electronic pinball we had. All those things came together. None of us know, well, what if it wasn't playboy or what if it hadn't been electronic? What has done as well? All those things just happened to be hitting at the right time. The market was ready for that. It was a great theme. There's a little controversy again and there's some concern doing a playboy game. You're trying to come through this wholesome, as possible image, but be hip and be current and be have impact. Again, appeal to a majority of the audience was male and younger male. All those things they had to consider. In retrospect, it was a great theme. A little bit of controversy, some comments, I think, from some distributors would get things from some parents, I think, at different things. But it basically was very successful. Yeah, to fill that many games, it's a classic game. It's a very Jim Patla. Did the design on it? He was a very good designer. He was very important in the process. It just turned out to be a very, very good game at the right time. What about future spa? What was the story behind that? That's kind of an unusual theme. Well, it is. I have to think back to some of the stuff as almost like yesterday, if someone, you have to remember what influenced what and why things happened the way they did. I do remember that one pretty well because we had come out with these wide body games. I probably, I'm going to jump back for a second to Lost World for a second. We came to the show with Lost World. We had a copy right on it. Another manufacturer, which you probably are unsure of, maybe with Atari, had just gone into the pinball business. They had a game. We didn't know this. They had a game coming out that was kind of a fantasy theme or something, but unbeknownst to us, their game was going to be named Lost World. By us being on the floor, because ours was done, the two things had no connection at all, except that they both had come up with this name, Lost World, even though they were not even the theme anywhere, nearly the same. Because we had ours on the floor when it caught with copyright, that meant they had to go back and change the name of their game. There was a little bit of a sense that we did the right opportunity to do that for preview in the game. In terms of Atari, their game was larger. They had what we called the wide body game. This was a new attempt at a different product, slightly larger. There's some purist would say it doesn't play the same. The geometry is not the same as conventional size pinball and all that. We were coming out with our series of wide bodies. I believe we made three. The first one was Paragon, which is one of my favorite games that I got to do. I really enjoyed. I named my company Paragon after I left, I became a freelancer and formed my own company. That was a fun game. Then we had future spa and space invaders. You did Paragon before future spa? As I remember, yes. Now, let's talk about Paragon then before future spa. Again, from my point of view, a bigger camsist, because it was a wide body, so more places to do artwork, we decided I suggested, because Lost World was a game that I think because Playboy followed Lost World, if I remember. They wanted to get into Playboy and they could have sold many more Lost World than they actually did. They sold 10,000 Lost World, I believe, or 12,000, something like that. The feeling was, because the graphics made a difference. It was a new looking theme. They really realized once they got into it, that they had scheduled it to only be, we're going to cut it off at 12,000, because we want to get into Playboy and you have promotional deadlines, you have to hit and all these things to make this all work. They really didn't realize the full run of Lost World that they might have. So I suggest, let's come in with a kind of a graphic sequel. People are used to this look in the sort of sword and sorcery. There was an artist at the time, and I'll be honest. I used his book of Guinein Frank Frisetta, who was doing a lot of movie posters and more of them. He did more comic books and Conan the Barbarian type book covers and very dynamic sword and sorcery fantasy style artwork. Very rich, exciting stuff. I showed that to marketing before I even started on the sketch for Lost World to show them the direction I wanted to go. Nobody really done that stuff yet, especially in that painted look, because it wasn't capable of being done. So I moved to, I wanted to do a bigger and better version of that style with Paragon and you just kind of revisiting the same characters that run in glass. You might call this sequel. So that's how we got into Paragon. Then I came up with a name Paragon. It was sort of a bit my project. I used myself as the character, as a wrestling coach and a weightlifter. I sort of did a fantasy version of the Barbarian guy and created my own mythology for the game. So there's a story in my head. And to kind of show you how, when you do graphics, you have to have some reason to put something where you put it. It can't just be color. This was almost like a visual comic book, the whole Paragon thing. And we created the winged lion as a character for the game. And then my wife was, she was gracious enough. And this was when I was 29 or 30 at the time. So we're still pretty young. Modeled for the female character and the glass and the play field. So it became a kind of a very personal project. It was a lot of fun for me to do. But I have no, I have no like it a lot too. And I actually, one of the paintings I've got hanging up here in my studio that I really still like a lot. So the gal, the gal on Paragon is your wife? She's my wife, huh? Wow. It's a pretty good looking. Yeah, she's great. She's great. I mean, we were high school sweethearts and she still looks great. She says, I don't agree with her as much. She says it's her from the neck up. And then I, you know, it was my fantasy from, but she was actually very attractive and still is. So it was, I mean, you know, when you do a muscular character, you have a chance to make the muscles a little bit more ripped. And then you have a chance to do the figure a little more curvaceous on the females and stuff that's just doing a fantasy art. But at the same time, that's how she looked and she, you know, we took, she was, I have a stuff lying at home. I put on the photograph and then I took polar rides of her, you know, she had to get in this frightened pose as if a lion was about to attack her and in my living room. You know, so this was kind of a, looking back on it, it seems kind of silly now, but it was fun at the time. And she was, she's an accountant and a financial planner by occupation. So she's not necessarily a very flamboyant artsy type, you know. And so to kind of contribute this way was, was unique for her, but it was fun. And it's, now I get, you know, people call me and talk to me about Pimbal Art and different games. They all want to know if it's true that if it was my wife and you know, absolutely it's true. Now, how, now let's go back to the future spot. Now what was the thinking behind that one? Okay, well that was one. And again, I have to remember how the sequence of the thing, that project was given a day after I was working on Paragon, then they were going to come up with version number two of, in a wide body. And again, I was, we had Kevin O'Connor there at that time, I believe. And he was also doing games called Supersonic, I think was right around there. When the SST was flying between here, that was a big deal at the time. So he was working on that game. Dave was going to be working on Future Spa. I was finishing up Paragon, as I remember. And what was the Paragon, the inspiration for Paragon actually kind of came out of a, back in the, this would have been, let's see, early, early, yeah, I guess early 80s and late 70s. There was a television commercial that was promoting health clubs. It was actually Chicago health clubs then, ironically, Valley ended up buying out that whole health club chain. It was big tannies and all across the country. But having no relationship at that time, there was this great commercial they were running that was sort of a, what's the spa the future going to be like? And they had these kind of people in space suits and just kind of, you know, trying to envision this future of a spa, you know, our health club and trying to, you know, basically promote that they were that was who Chicago health clubs was. And so that kind of was the inspiration for what if we did some, it's a current theme. You're always trying to find something that's kind of hot in the public at the time. It's just another card game or another pool game or another cowboy theme, which has been popular in the 50s and 60s. So you're trying to come up with something that's current and kind of in the public awareness, you know, it's hot right at the time. But if it's too hot or too short lived, you've got a very dated pinball by the time it comes out, you know. So you know, this was one that Mark and you thought might be kind of a fun approach and you kind of, because it seemed like this whole direction going toward more refined health clubs and more, you know, where they actually would become, you know, places to meet people and single places and they were kind of envisioning these elaborate, which is what's, you know, all happened, lifetime fitness and all these other things of today. It's kind of a future spot was supposed to be about. But it was also at the time, again, there's a lot of Star Wars, where the movies that were popular and all this re-emergence of science fiction movies and fantasy movies and that was also very popular. So you kind of try to combine those elements. The reason it ended up being two people working is because Dave actually did the playfield and the cabinet and I did the back class just because of time frame. Right. He, as I said, he takes a lot and it was, again, it was a wide body pinball machine. So there's much more work to do to get more space to cover. And we were kind of running out of time and after I finished up Paragon, they decided they weren't going to hit their production date that they needed to hit for the prototypes they would send out on future spots. So that's why I jumped in and did the back class. And the back class is actually my brother is the male figure, my sister-in-law is the female figure. I've got my brother-in-law's down doing curls in the lower part of the glass. My secretary is in it. I mean, I just, you know, I can't grab anybody that was willing to be famous for a short time without really being famous and put them on the glass. And I did the glass. We tried to make the marriage happen and we don't have the same style. But it was still fun to do, but it was definitely done that was not the intended way to have it done. It wasn't because I wanted to jump in on that. It was because we were just going to run out of time. And it's kind of funny that the way you do a come-on machine, usually you do the back class first in terms of concept and you present that to a licensed figure or you get all your approvals based on the back class, you know, how these are picked like I said with Playboy the way it works. But that's the last thing you usually do in terms of production. You would do all the cabinet, the pinball, the play field, the plastics and decals and all other stuff first. So they could build the game and then the glass would be the last thing they just have to put that out at the end. So your sequence would kind of start with the concept of back class, but then that's the last thing you actually finished. So that's why that was, you know, I was able to pick that up and they finished the play field, I finished the back class and we got done on time. Now was that four color process or old school? That is four color process. And again, that's a fairly bright game too. I mean that's better. The argument about four color process and it's a fair argument that you, when you do a four color game and you're saying you're going to do a solid red and four color process, it won't be as bright as just screening a solid red. And sometimes we actually did, we would actually do like in Playboy, I would do my painting and then where I had solid pink, I wouldn't make that out of the painted artwork. I made that just with a solid print of pink screen printing ink. So it would be a more vibrant. So that was, you know, sometimes you had to combine those two. So it would be more than four color, probably be a fifth color, which was okay because you didn't really make the manufacturing process, it'd give them much more labor intensive but it was still a way you could pop up the colors a little bit. So when we did Futures by, we intentionally designed it, even though it's all four color process, I used some pretty strong contrasts with colors around the reds and yellows to make them pop. It would look like they're a little more vibrant to it. As you wanted it to be more muted, that's a nice thing about four color process, you could go all different directions. Whereas the conventional way was a little more comic book like it was a little more, you know, always going to be fairly bright colors or solid colors. So, yeah, that's how, you know, the four color process on the back class and it was conventional art as all the playfields were. But I worked at Valley, we never did a four color process play field. Because the question there was, and again, it goes back to what was being done in the industry. At the time, advertising posters still was screening everybody's play field. They were not doing the glasses anymore and they weren't doing the plastics and they weren't, but they still had everyone in the business, never four manufacturers in Chicago. And actually pretty much the world, you know. They were all being done advertising poster because they had this, what we were led to believe