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Ep 54: The Real VonTökkentäkker with Jack Haeger and David Fix
44 Plays5 years ago
From 1980s Williams to modern day pinball, Jack has quite the impressive resume. So come join us as we talk: Pirates, Star Wars, and red eyes.
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Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Guests
00:00:07
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to the Loser Kid Pinball Podcast.
00:00:09
Speaker
We are on episode 54.
00:00:11
Speaker
I am Josh Roop.
00:00:13
Speaker
With me, my co-captain as always.
00:00:15
Speaker
Scott Larson.
00:00:16
Speaker
And today we have two awesome gentlemen with us.
00:00:19
Speaker
One that has been in the industry for years and seen some pretty awesome stuff.
00:00:23
Speaker
The other one is a man that has been recently thrown into the pinball media spotlight.
00:00:29
Speaker
But before we get to them, Scott, will you please let's recognize those friends of the podcast before we get going.
00:00:35
Speaker
Okay.
00:00:36
Speaker
So, uh, first and foremost, uh, let's talk about, uh, flipping out pinball.
00:00:40
Speaker
If you're looking at picking up a new pinball machine or any other accessories with your pinball machine, check out Zach and Nicole flipping up pinball.
00:00:49
Speaker
They're always a good resource.
00:00:50
Speaker
Uh,
00:00:50
Speaker
We've been able to get a lot of good machines and accessories from them.
00:00:55
Speaker
Also want to talk about This Week in Pinball.
00:00:58
Speaker
If you're looking at running down the news for the day, go check out This Week in Pinball.
00:01:05
Speaker
Jeff Patterson always has a lot of fun information and summarizes that into the top fives.
00:01:11
Speaker
Lit frames.
00:01:11
Speaker
If you have that Translite that's collecting dust in your corner, please check out Lit Frames and you'll be able to actually put it on the wall and illuminate it to
00:01:20
Speaker
We love having our alternative Translite.
00:01:22
Speaker
I have my alternative Monster Bash Translite in there.
00:01:25
Speaker
And speaking of alternative Translites, if you're looking for an alternative art package for your classic Williams Valley game, check out Flyland Design.
00:01:36
Speaker
I have the alternative back glass and medieval madness.
00:01:39
Speaker
It's a way to spruce up an older machine.
00:01:42
Speaker
Also check out the Pinball Loft.
00:01:44
Speaker
If you're looking for a blog out there, the Pinball Loft.
00:01:46
Speaker
Tim did a great review of his Guns N' Roses and he also just upgraded his sound package on his Guns N' Roses collector's edition in case you wanted to blow the speakers off your house and your wall.
00:02:01
Speaker
If you're looking at more information and a deeper dive, go and check out Pinball Supernova.
00:02:07
Speaker
Pinball Supernova is always a good resource if you want to go and dabble in other things.
Guest Backgrounds and Early Career
00:02:12
Speaker
So, Josh, who do we have on the podcast today?
00:02:16
Speaker
We have David Fix, who is over American Pinball right now, who has been killing it with the hires.
00:02:23
Speaker
And with him, we have a man that has not only been on the pinball side, but he's also been on the arcade and the home computer console.
00:02:32
Speaker
We welcome Jack Hager.
00:02:34
Speaker
How are you two doing today?
00:02:35
Speaker
Good.
00:02:36
Speaker
Very good.
00:02:37
Speaker
Great to be here.
00:02:38
Speaker
Yes.
00:02:38
Speaker
Good to be with you, Scott and Josh.
00:02:41
Speaker
It is great to have you two on.
00:02:43
Speaker
I'm not going to lie, Jack.
00:02:44
Speaker
I didn't really know much about you until...
00:02:47
Speaker
American Pinball hired you.
00:02:48
Speaker
And then Pinball News did that wonderful article on you.
00:02:52
Speaker
If you want to check it out, go to pinballnews.com.
00:02:55
Speaker
We're going to be referencing a lot through this interview.
00:02:57
Speaker
But you've got some wonderful stuff here.
00:03:00
Speaker
I want to know, how did you get into all this?
00:03:03
Speaker
Well, it's a pretty eclectic and checkered past.
00:03:07
Speaker
I'll say that much.
00:03:09
Speaker
I studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago back in the...
00:03:16
Speaker
late 70s, early 80s, studying fine art, pretty much classical painting techniques and illustration, and I was preparing myself to be an illustrator in Chicago, which I became a regular contributor while I was still a student.
00:03:35
Speaker
I was appearing regularly in the Chicago Tribune, the Sun Times, Chicago Magazine, and eventually Playboy Magazine.
00:03:45
Speaker
And Playboy being the major publisher that it was based in Chicago, I had a great art director named Carrick Pope who, you know, knew that I was doing freelance jobs here and there.
00:03:59
Speaker
And he said, he pulled me aside and said, Jack, there is a pinball company in Chicago on the northwest side looking to get into this new thing called video games.
00:04:10
Speaker
That's how long this was, long ago this was.
00:04:14
Speaker
And he said, they're looking for an artist to help out.
00:04:16
Speaker
And he said, I think this might be a good regular gig for you.
00:04:20
Speaker
And that's when I had my first interview with Williams Electronics on the northwest side of the city.
00:04:26
Speaker
That would have been around 1988.
00:04:28
Speaker
And I brought in my portfolio of editorial illustration and fantasy paintings and surrealist work.
00:04:37
Speaker
But I was always very much focused in classical training and recognizable, not abstract painting.
00:04:46
Speaker
The folks at Williams Electronics really appreciated my subject matter, my approach, and I met with Ken Fadesna and another great guy named John Newcomer who were working on some new things at that time.
00:05:01
Speaker
Williams had just had huge successes with Defender and Stargate from Eugene Jarvis.
00:05:09
Speaker
And we're in the process of working on joust.
00:05:13
Speaker
So that's when I was brought in.
00:05:14
Speaker
And I was asked to help out on joust a little bit.
00:05:18
Speaker
And I was put in the, essentially, the pinball art department at that time.
00:05:24
Speaker
So there was a guy named Connie Mitchell who did a lot of Williams back glasses from back in the day and games.
00:05:32
Speaker
Seamus McLaughlin was another artist from that period.
00:05:36
Speaker
And I got to work with the early artists at Williams and get a sense of what pinball design and illustration was all about.
00:05:47
Speaker
At that time, I also ran into a larger-than-life personality.
00:05:52
Speaker
You may have heard of him, Python Angelo, was at Williams at that time.
00:05:58
Speaker
And Python and I hit it off right away because we both had traditional fine art backgrounds.
00:06:06
Speaker
And I came from, you know, a basic Midwestern background and Python had this exotic Romanian life story behind him.
00:06:17
Speaker
And I
00:06:18
Speaker
So we kind of contrasted, but we're very competitive with each other.
00:06:24
Speaker
So that's basically how I set my foot in Williams Electronics in the early in the early 80s.
00:06:32
Speaker
So getting back to that, that was actually an interesting overlap era where they they had an Atari tried to do these things, too, where they tried to.
00:06:42
Speaker
kind of re-theme some of the games.
00:06:44
Speaker
You mentioned Joust.
00:06:45
Speaker
They came out with a Joust pinball machine.
00:06:48
Speaker
Correct.
00:06:48
Speaker
There's not too many of them, but...
00:06:51
Speaker
It was one of the rare ones that actually didn't have a back glass, but it was it was almost the you know, you're competing with someone across and it was it was incredible.
00:07:01
Speaker
It's a fascinating game.
00:07:03
Speaker
There's actually one locally in Utah that in someone's private collection, I want to go and check out and I was planning on going out there until Corona hit.
00:07:12
Speaker
So I'm waiting for things to die down so I can go out there.
00:07:16
Speaker
But were you involved in any of these overlaps?
00:07:19
Speaker
I believe there was a defender pinball machine too.
00:07:23
Speaker
Yes, it was an ambiguous time for me a little bit because clearly I was brought in to help
00:07:31
Speaker
stimulate building an internal dedicated video design team.
00:07:38
Speaker
But I had such a formal illustration background that it really did lend itself to pinball, but I had to kind of be pulled away from getting too involved with them
00:07:52
Speaker
at that time because we really needed to focus on making new
Pinball Machine Maintenance Challenges
00:07:57
Speaker
video games.
00:07:58
Speaker
So I didn't get a chance to work on either of those, but yeah, the head-to-head joust was an amazing table.
00:08:06
Speaker
I wish I could tell you if that was Barry Ousler or not.
00:08:09
Speaker
I forget who may have been the designer on that.
00:08:12
Speaker
I believe you're right, it is Barry Ousler.
00:08:14
Speaker
That did that piece.
00:08:16
Speaker
That's usually, I don't know if you guys know Phoebe who comes to, Phoebe Smith who comes to Expo, but that is one of the pins she usually brings.
00:08:26
Speaker
And there's also one that's very rare called Varkon, which I don't know if you remember that at all, Jack.
00:08:33
Speaker
Varkon was a pretty cool game around that same time.
00:08:39
Speaker
There's a Varkon actually on location out here.
00:08:44
Speaker
It's isn't it the one that's slightly more vertical?
00:08:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's there.
00:08:49
Speaker
There's a an arcade out here.
00:08:51
Speaker
It's it's Flynn's retrocade.
00:08:53
Speaker
And so, you know, it's obviously themed with the trauma in the back.
00:08:56
Speaker
They have about six machines.
00:09:00
Speaker
The challenge with that location as all location is.
00:09:03
Speaker
maintenance on these machines because electronics, you, you flip the switch and it turns on and you basically have to wipe it down occasionally, but it pretty much functions exactly how it's intended as it comes out of the factory.
00:09:17
Speaker
That is the main challenge with pinball is that it's kind of a labor intensive hobby.
00:09:22
Speaker
And that if you have a machine on site, you have to have someone who knows what they're doing to maintain this because
00:09:30
Speaker
you basically have this violent ball that's smashing around.
00:09:35
Speaker
It's a steel ball and it's hitting all sorts of plastic things.
00:09:37
Speaker
And if you don't keep that maintained, it can be very difficult on location.
00:09:41
Speaker
Oh, I know, Scott.
00:09:44
Speaker
I don't know if you guys know this, but there's a place in Buffalo, New York called Pocketeer Billiards.
00:09:49
Speaker
It's a dream of mine and my partner and we have 80 pinball machines on the floor.
00:09:53
Speaker
We've hosted some Papa events and so forth.
00:09:56
Speaker
But it's just me and him, you know, wrenching on these machines and we have a few guys who kind of help wipe them down every once in a while.
00:10:04
Speaker
Go ahead, Jack.
00:10:05
Speaker
I had a question for you for a second.
00:10:06
Speaker
I was going to ask you, you said a name there that I haven't heard in a long time, and there's not a lot talked about Seamus McLaughlin.
00:10:16
Speaker
Tell us a little, if you can, a little bit about Seamus, because he did Pharaoh's Backglass, if I'm not mistaken, and a bunch of Pharaoh art, Pharaoh pinball.
00:10:24
Speaker
That sounds familiar.
00:10:26
Speaker
I know Seamus...
00:10:30
Speaker
enjoyed socializing with Python a lot when I showed up, and they were good friends.
00:10:36
Speaker
And Seamus was a longtime talented artist in the pinball department.
00:10:44
Speaker
I eventually left Williams and followed some fellow employees there to do a startup in California.
00:10:52
Speaker
So I can't tell you why.
00:10:56
Speaker
When Seamus departed, but when I did come back, he wasn't part of the pinball team anymore.
00:11:03
Speaker
So I don't have a lot to share, but he was one of the great, you know, hand-drawn ruby lift.
00:11:14
Speaker
cutting pinball artists of that era.
00:11:17
Speaker
And it's interesting is that the Ferrobat glass, you can do a lot of research on it, but there's a lot of secret stuff hidden in that glass that was quite interesting.
00:11:27
Speaker
But what was your first game at Williams, Jack?
00:11:30
Speaker
Well, again, my first
00:11:32
Speaker
First game that I was involved in was Joust, working with John Newcomer and helping out on that.
00:11:40
Speaker
Connie Mitchell, I think, was doing the cabinet exterior art.
00:11:43
Speaker
But there was an existing concept floating around called Juggernaut.
00:11:48
Speaker
And it was the concept, I believe, started with John Newcomer.
00:11:54
Speaker
And it was about some object in space being built floating around and you had to prevent it from being built or it would come and attack you.
00:12:03
Speaker
And I was given the task of designing the graphics around this, which kind of expanded the game concept.
00:12:11
Speaker
The game eventually developed into what I titled as a Sinistar.
00:12:17
Speaker
So some people are familiar with the game Sinistar.
00:12:21
Speaker
And prior to that, we had 16 color, a whole, you know, a whole amount of 16 colors to work with.
00:12:29
Speaker
And even then I was doing things that really hadn't been done up to that point where a lot of, you know,
00:12:38
Speaker
very primitive games up to that point were solid color characters.
00:12:43
Speaker
And I chose to make a gradient palette.
00:12:45
Speaker
That was a big deal at the time.
00:12:47
Speaker
So I could make 3D-appearing boulders.
00:12:51
Speaker
I could make a 3D-appearing metallic object, which was the Sinistar.
00:12:55
Speaker
And I also animated the face.
00:12:57
Speaker
So I animated the jaw, the eyebrow, the eyes, so on and so forth.
00:13:02
Speaker
And the team realized, well, we could animate speech with this character.
00:13:07
Speaker
So that's how Sinistar became one of the biggest first... Run, coward, run!
00:13:14
Speaker
Right.
00:13:15
Speaker
Video games with speech calls.
00:13:17
Speaker
And, you know, it was pretty much a one trick pony.
00:13:20
Speaker
You know, the game is you're, you know, you're defending yourself against this thing being built and you're trying to build it up.
00:13:26
Speaker
But a lot of people, you know, still, you know, tell me to this day that it really gave them chills as young kids playing.
00:13:33
Speaker
You know, they thought it was a pretty ominous character.
00:13:38
Speaker
And so I feel like I did my job with Sinistar.
00:13:42
Speaker
So after Sinistar, you kind of left Williams to go on to do computers, if I remember correctly.
00:13:49
Speaker
Like I said, once again, we're referencing everything in the pinballnews.com article.
00:13:55
Speaker
And you got to work with Andy Warhol there.
00:14:00
Speaker
How was that and how was it working with him?
00:14:03
Speaker
Correct.
00:14:04
Speaker
So I had worked at Williams Electronics Corporation.
00:14:10
Speaker
I believe from 1981 to 1982, I was happy working there, but I had, there were two people that left for Silicon Valley, namely Sam Dicker and RJ Michael, who became hugely successful in Silicon Valley these days.
00:14:33
Speaker
But they, uh,
00:14:34
Speaker
created a startup company focused on building the Amiga computer.
00:14:40
Speaker
And for those that are familiar with the Amiga computer, it was eventually purchased and sold by Commodore Computers.
00:14:48
Speaker
And I was invited by RJ and Sam to come out as the art director of Amiga.
00:14:55
Speaker
And again, we were just a startup.
00:14:58
Speaker
And I think that the code name at that time was Hi Toro.
00:15:04
Speaker
And we were quietly making this amazing computer that outdid a lot of what Apple was creating at that time.
00:15:12
Speaker
Steve Jobs even came in to take a look at the Amiga in early development, and he was blown away and was very interested in it.
00:15:26
Speaker
project reach its fruition and we had an actual computer and Commodore bought us.
00:15:31
Speaker
They were interested in doing a major launch for the computer.
00:15:36
Speaker
And that's where marketing came to me and said, you know, are there any people that you feel would be good visual artists to be representatives for the Amiga?
00:15:48
Speaker
And we had been doing work with digitizing that was pretty interesting at the time.
00:15:54
Speaker
And everything that we created reminded me very much of the silkscreen work that Andy Warhol was doing.
00:16:00
Speaker
And I just commented.
00:16:01
Speaker
I said, well, boy, Andy Warhol would be something.
00:16:04
Speaker
But I didn't expect it to happen.
00:16:07
Speaker
And next thing I know, I was flown out to New York to meet with Andy and some of his people at the Seagram's building in New York, and I gave him a demo of the Amiga.
00:16:16
Speaker
And that and a substantial amount of cash encouraged him to become involved as a representative for Amiga, which, of course, every artist, you know, is looking for support.
00:16:29
Speaker
And
00:16:31
Speaker
But it became more than that.
00:16:32
Speaker
So I was flown out later to spend time with him to teach him how the Amiga works.
00:16:38
Speaker
And I set up shop in his what was called the factory, his studio.
00:16:43
Speaker
And I would spend a couple hours every day with Andy, just he and I working on the Amiga.
00:16:49
Speaker
And I
00:16:51
Speaker
You know, just showing him ins and outs and just letting him play with it.
00:16:55
Speaker
An interesting side story to all this about 10 years ago or whatever it was.
Amiga Project and Andy Warhol Collaboration
00:17:01
Speaker
I think I know Time magazine had a big story.
00:17:04
Speaker
Someone from Carnegie Mellon University made a big production that they had found Andy Warhol's old Amiga computer.
00:17:16
Speaker
And it had a disk with all of these previously unseen images on the disk.
00:17:25
Speaker
And they published it, and it became a worldwide article.
00:17:29
Speaker
Every image on that disc, technically I sat next to Andy as he created them.
00:17:37
Speaker
There was a Campbell soup can, there was a banana, there was a self-portrait, and he even signed each one with the mouse.
00:17:44
Speaker
And so it was kind of just nice seeing that uncovered, and that became a bit of history after the fact.
00:17:54
Speaker
The video that appears here and there on the internet shows the actual launch at Lincoln Center and Debbie Harry from Blondie was the model that he chose to use who was just wonderful.
00:18:07
Speaker
She was terrific to work with too.
00:18:10
Speaker
And the interview that I conducted with him was largely unscripted.
00:18:18
Speaker
And one thing that
00:18:20
Speaker
that I realized in getting to work with Andy and be comfortable with him is that we would have extensive, long running conversations and it was, you know, no problem.
00:18:32
Speaker
When he was in public, Andy would speak in pretty much monosyllabic responses.
00:18:39
Speaker
So you'd say, Andy, this is the most amazing thing.
00:18:42
Speaker
What do you think?
00:18:43
Speaker
And he'd go, oh, it's great.
00:18:44
Speaker
Then that's it.
00:18:46
Speaker
So so as part of his launch, I had to kind of pull things out of him.
00:18:49
Speaker
And that's why I was kind of hamming it up a little bit or trying to get responses from him, which we did.
00:18:56
Speaker
And the crowd responded a little bit and we made it a fun experience.
00:19:01
Speaker
And that's that's the story behind the Andy Warhol video that appears on YouTube.
00:19:10
Speaker
So how did you get, you started in Chicago, you get your toes wet, and then you disappear.
00:19:18
Speaker
How did you get roped back into coming back?
00:19:22
Speaker
Amiga got bought out, and Commodore paid all the employees off, with the exception of a few of the lead chip designers and so on.
00:19:36
Speaker
And I was doing freelance work for Apple.
00:19:40
Speaker
Even LucasArts was getting into gaming and I would and I would drive up to Skywalker Ranch and do a little work there.
00:19:49
Speaker
And in that period, I got a call from Ken Fidesna, who was the manager of Williams Electronics at the time.
00:19:59
Speaker
And he mentioned that Eugene Jarvis was at Stanford University and he was considering moving back to Chicago from Stanford.
00:20:07
Speaker
And I have...
00:20:09
Speaker
you know, kept in touch with Ken and he said, you know, if you'd be interested, we'd love to have you back with Eugene to get the video department kickstarted again.
00:20:19
Speaker
There had been a slump in arcade and video arcade coin op sales at that time.
00:20:26
Speaker
And there was interest in, you know,
00:20:29
Speaker
rejuvenating the production line and let's see what we could get going.
00:20:35
Speaker
So, you know, I took the opportunity and I love California, but, you know, I'm a Midwestern boy and it seemed like an interesting opportunity.
00:20:47
Speaker
So I went with it and that's what brought me back to William.
00:20:52
Speaker
It was still just Williams again at that point.
00:20:55
Speaker
And that would have been around 1985 or so.
00:20:59
Speaker
So, and this is, you referenced the arcade collapse in 1983, which was pretty infamous.
00:21:06
Speaker
A lot of businesses went under during that.
00:21:08
Speaker
Yes.
00:21:09
Speaker
And so when you brought back in, were you designed to just do the arcade stuff?
Pinball Concept Creations at Williams
00:21:15
Speaker
Because you have a few concept arts projects in your portfolio, at least in the pinball news thing, or like Pirate Island.
00:21:23
Speaker
Correct.
00:21:24
Speaker
And hey, bartender.
00:21:26
Speaker
So you have all these things and they look like they're are they're pinball machines.
00:21:31
Speaker
They are.
00:21:31
Speaker
Yes.
00:21:32
Speaker
And so, again, I was brought back to work with Eugene on reinventing the video production and video concepts.
00:21:41
Speaker
And Eugene had a concept at that time, which would eventually become NARC, the first fully digitized.
00:21:50
Speaker
action game that we did, but the hardware and the software wasn't written fully at that time.
00:21:57
Speaker
So that was all in the works.
00:22:00
Speaker
And rather than just sit on my hands all that time, I contributed to Eugene's concept and I came up with some other video game concepts.
00:22:12
Speaker
But I would find my way up to the pinball department again and again because in my heart I'm an illustrator and a visual communicator.
00:22:21
Speaker
And I found that there were some opportunities to create concepts for the pinball department.
00:22:31
Speaker
Steve Kordik was still at Williams at that time, and he had a wide-body whitewood
00:22:40
Speaker
And the unique thing about this white wood is that it had 13 lights on the play field.
00:22:48
Speaker
And so whatever title you had to come up with had to incorporate 13 letters.
00:22:53
Speaker
That was my limit.
00:22:55
Speaker
So that's what I was starting with.
00:22:57
Speaker
Nothing more than that.
00:22:58
Speaker
And I just thought about it and I thought, well, and I just thought, well, what can I say in 13 letters?
00:23:04
Speaker
And one of the ones I was thinking, you know, different themes, and I thought, oh, pirate island.
00:23:10
Speaker
If you use a space in between, that would be 13 letters.
00:23:15
Speaker
So that's where I started sketching, and I came up with pirate island, and I thought this would be a nice universal theme, and it has a lot of potential, and could really be graphically interesting.
00:23:27
Speaker
So that's where that sketch came from.
00:23:32
Speaker
and people seemed to like it, and they were kind of surprised that I was that into it.
00:23:36
Speaker
Again, I was supposed to come back and just focus on video, but it really got me enthused about doing something and helping them out.
00:23:47
Speaker
The sales department commented at the same time, they said, well, gee, Jack, this pirate island thing is great, but we also have input from street locations and bars and everything.
00:24:00
Speaker
Do you think you could come up with a theme that's more adult or that would be well suited for a bar street location?
00:24:07
Speaker
And again, 13 letters.
00:24:09
Speaker
It was like an episode of Wheel of Fortune, you know, so I came up with, hey, bartender, 13 letters.
00:24:19
Speaker
and came up with that concept.
00:24:23
Speaker
And then there was an additional feature that I just thought about, you know, having a classic bubble machine, transparent mug of beer on the top with a bubble machine, and I could see it illuminated from the bottom even better.
00:24:38
Speaker
And so you'd have this bubbling stein of beer on the back box.
00:24:42
Speaker
I thought that would be a great idea.
00:24:44
Speaker
So that was that concept.
00:24:47
Speaker
So, Jack, where were you when we did Oktoberfest?
00:24:49
Speaker
That would have been perfect, you know?
00:24:52
Speaker
That's what I'm wondering.
00:24:54
Speaker
I actually saw that and I thought, well, this must obviously be where Oktoberfest came from.
00:25:00
Speaker
I do have to say something, and I don't know if you want this on the record or off the record.
00:25:04
Speaker
Go for it.
00:25:05
Speaker
A friend invited me, not from American Pinball, invited me to an American Pinball open house after the fact.
00:25:14
Speaker
So this is when Oktoberfest was in production.
00:25:18
Speaker
And I may have met with one of the creative members of the staff.
00:25:24
Speaker
And I did bring drawings with because I didn't know if there was an opportunity with American Pinball or I just wanted to let them know.
00:25:32
Speaker
And I did bring my sketches with.
00:25:34
Speaker
And specifically, I brought out the Stein of Beer and I said, you know,
00:25:40
Speaker
This never got used, but it's not a bad idea for Oktoberfest.
00:25:44
Speaker
So after the fact, I did my best.
00:25:46
Speaker
I tried, but you guys were already, American Pinball was already in production at that point.
00:25:52
Speaker
And to go with that story a bit longer, not to drag it out, but that was Josh Krugler you met with because... How do you know that?
00:26:00
Speaker
Because Josh told me, so I'm talking to Josh.
00:26:03
Speaker
When, you know, I'm like, Josh, we're looking at bringing Jack on.
00:26:07
Speaker
He goes, Jack did this great game called Hey Bartender.
00:26:09
Speaker
And he put a beer mug on the top.
00:26:11
Speaker
He showed me pictures and so forth.
00:26:14
Speaker
And, you know, the next thing you know, we were just like, you know, trust me, I trust, I talked to all the guys in the department on a daily basis.
00:26:22
Speaker
And, you know, Jack came across as being the guy that we needed.
00:26:25
Speaker
So, you know, that's kind of why we pulled you.
00:26:28
Speaker
That's great.
00:26:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:30
Speaker
So, Jack, as I was going through this pinball newsletter, Cole, I noticed that there was a Williams World Tour, which confused me a little bit because there's... I've never seen this pinball machine before, but there's an Alvin G. World Tour.
00:26:43
Speaker
Where did this come from, and how did this come to be?
00:26:49
Speaker
Sure.
00:26:49
Speaker
So, that was still in the same...
00:26:55
Speaker
gestation period for the new video hardware and software at Williams.
00:27:00
Speaker
And I was asked to help out a designer, a young designer at Williams at the time who had a concept for a traveling game.
00:27:11
Speaker
And that was about it.
00:27:12
Speaker
It was like, Jack, I've got an idea for going from one town to another.
00:27:16
Speaker
Do you have any concepts or graphic ideas how that might be made interesting and entertaining?
00:27:24
Speaker
So I worked on sketches and concepts, and that's where I came up with the idea that what is better than to travel but to be paid to travel and have throngs of fans waiting for you at every location, you know, like a rock star.
00:27:42
Speaker
So I came up with the world tour idea of a traveling musician and
00:27:47
Speaker
And it wasn't meant to be licensed or anything, just a generic traveling musician.
00:27:51
Speaker
And to clearly show on the back glass that here he had started in Los Angeles and then landed in Japan and then in Russia.
00:28:01
Speaker
And that sort of depicted on the back glass sketch that I created with him.
00:28:05
Speaker
three different women in three different costumes.
00:28:08
Speaker
And then you clearly see the stylized earth below him with, you know, the Coliseum in Rome and Big Ben in London, et cetera, et cetera.
00:28:19
Speaker
So that that I was pretty excited about the drawing.
00:28:23
Speaker
And then I took the drawing to the next step and actually made 150 percent scale, a very large painting that I started on, never completed.
00:28:35
Speaker
But I did a painting, an acrylic painting of the World Tour Bat Glass.
00:28:40
Speaker
And people loved it.
00:28:42
Speaker
I also suggest that as part of the game that, you know, CDs weren't brand new at the time, but they were really at their heyday.
00:28:51
Speaker
So I thought, why don't we have a compact disc on the play field that spins?
00:28:56
Speaker
And that could be like a spinning ramp or something.
00:28:58
Speaker
So that's where the spinning ramp for a world tour came from.
00:29:02
Speaker
So to tie this in, Jack and I have had a conversation just recently.
00:29:08
Speaker
Actually, it's kind of funny how this all lends itself together.
00:29:13
Speaker
That designer was under contract with Williams.
00:29:17
Speaker
And Williams kind of passed on the design because he was only on a contract.
00:29:22
Speaker
He then took the artwork and the design and went to Elvin G. And basically that's how the game went from Williams to Elvin G. And the artist concept later got picked up.
00:29:35
Speaker
You know, they love the idea.
00:29:36
Speaker
So they did their own version.
00:29:39
Speaker
an artist by the name of Dan Hughes, who Jack and I had a nice conversation with a couple days ago.
00:29:45
Speaker
So, you know, it's just kind of funny to be able to be in that circle still with these guys and talking to people.
00:29:52
Speaker
And Dan was like, oh, yeah, I remember seeing, you know, your artwork at this.
00:29:57
Speaker
And we brought in a couple other names.
00:30:00
Speaker
And it was kind of amazing how this little community was all together and how the design that Jack had worked on this
00:30:08
Speaker
you know, from the CD turned into a record onto Al's, what is it?
00:30:14
Speaker
Al's and G's Garage Band tour.
00:30:18
Speaker
So, you know, amazing.
00:30:21
Speaker
Al's Garage Band goes on a world tour.
00:30:23
Speaker
There you go.
00:30:25
Speaker
Thanks.
00:30:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:26
Speaker
So if you see my original sketch, that was the intention of the original back glass and the vibe and so on and so forth.
World Tour Concept and Pinball Community
00:30:36
Speaker
It's really, that's a pretty amazing, that would be a fun art thing to have in the game room, actually.
00:30:45
Speaker
That's a really fantastic backlash there.
00:30:48
Speaker
The other one's, it's different.
00:30:49
Speaker
The other one's a cartoony one.
00:30:51
Speaker
And this one's just kind of a fine art interpretation, but that really is fantastic.
00:30:58
Speaker
I'm really impressed by that.
00:30:59
Speaker
Thank you.
00:31:00
Speaker
Thank you.
00:31:01
Speaker
And you got to remember during that timeframe, you know, a lot of, I mean, I love Jack's back glass too.
00:31:07
Speaker
And I'm going to tell you, Dan is a really good artist and he probably could have done something very close, but you got to remember that time, a lot of the companies were, yes, it was very close to
00:31:17
Speaker
market but they probably got a lot of heat from Williams if they were using the same backlash that Jack had already done so there had to be a little bit of a change a little bit more done into the cartoon and listen Elvin G he was kind of Elvin was a great guy but he always loved the Archie look so you know the Archie comic look so
00:31:37
Speaker
Right.
00:31:37
Speaker
And you can definitely see that.
00:31:39
Speaker
You can definitely see that style.
00:31:40
Speaker
And it, well, it's the, I would argue it's the same thing as a star Wars pinball.
00:31:46
Speaker
So that there's two different versions of the star Wars pinball.
00:31:49
Speaker
There's the comic version and there's the, the photo realistic, uh, painting version.
00:31:56
Speaker
And, uh,
00:31:57
Speaker
I actually like I understand why people like the comic version, but I like the more realistic interpretation of it.
00:32:04
Speaker
But that's the beautiful part of it is there is that space for everybody.
00:32:08
Speaker
Sure.
00:32:09
Speaker
And, you know, to to talk about the conclusion on that on our end of it.
00:32:15
Speaker
because I became the art director at Williams-Balley Midway, there was some sort of legal encounter between Williams and Alvin G. when they found out they were producing a game based on World Tour.
00:32:31
Speaker
And I can't go into that any further, but I had no idea that the concept had left the building.
00:32:41
Speaker
Now, I know it seems as though
00:32:46
Speaker
I kept throwing stuff at the wall and nothing happened, but it was fine.
00:32:51
Speaker
And I'm not even listing every concept that I was working on at the time.
00:32:55
Speaker
There were redemption type games I was designing.
00:32:59
Speaker
There were alternative video game concepts.
00:33:01
Speaker
But again, the hardware and the software was being developed and Eugene Jarvis and I were starting to experiment with the video digitizing process.
00:33:12
Speaker
Lighting, the fact that if you wanted to have a repeatable cycle of somebody walking or running, that would require a treadmill solution in front of the camera.
00:33:25
Speaker
So we figured out all of the requirements that eventually would lead to other game development, to significant game development at Williams Valley Midway, as in Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam, et cetera.
00:33:43
Speaker
So we were really building the processes and the procedures for the other teams to develop it.
00:33:52
Speaker
Yeah, that's actually a pretty – everybody who is in my age demographic, they all pumped in tons of quarters into Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, NFL Blitz, all of those games because it was different.
00:34:06
Speaker
And really Mortal Kombat was –
00:34:08
Speaker
it seemed that that was chasing Street Fighter 2.
00:34:12
Speaker
So Street Fighter 2 came out.
00:34:14
Speaker
It was very cartoony.
00:34:15
Speaker
It felt very much like a Sega Genesis game, I would say, with better graphics.
00:34:20
Speaker
And then when Mortal Kombat came out, I looked at that and I thought, huh, that's really interesting.
00:34:24
Speaker
They...
00:34:25
Speaker
found a way of animating really well.
00:34:28
Speaker
I actually didn't even know until recently, those were pictures and you found a way of animating those together.
00:34:33
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:34:34
Speaker
And actually to help support a good friends project, there's an excellent documentary that's out now.
00:34:43
Speaker
It's available on Netflix, if I can plug it, called Insert Coin.
00:34:48
Speaker
And it's by a former Midway director.
00:34:52
Speaker
designer and incredible artist named Josh Sway and it hit all the film festivals at South by Southwest and so on and so forth.
00:35:04
Speaker
So now it's available on Netflix, Prime, I think in the paid documentary section called Insert Coin and it deals in great detail on the rise and fall of Midway Games
00:35:19
Speaker
And the process and then it focuses a lot on the development of Mortal Kombat.
00:35:23
Speaker
So for anybody interested in the inside workings of Mortal Kombat, that's it's a very good documentary that covers that history.
00:35:32
Speaker
Does that cover Steve Ritchie being the voice?
00:35:34
Speaker
It may mention him.
00:35:37
Speaker
I don't, you know, quite honestly, I was interviewed for it.
00:35:41
Speaker
I still haven't seen the whole thing myself.
00:35:43
Speaker
So, but I hear it, but I hear it turned out great.
00:35:47
Speaker
So, but yeah, Steve, that was, that was again, one of the side issues of Williams Valley Midway is we all pitched in on everything.
00:35:56
Speaker
And I think that kind of,
00:35:59
Speaker
reinforces what we're talking about here.
00:36:01
Speaker
There was a lot of cross-pollinization.
00:36:04
Speaker
So you'd have people from pinball going, hey, can you do speech for my game?
00:36:08
Speaker
And people from video asking for cabinet art support, this and that, from the pinball side.
Voice Acting in Video Games
00:36:16
Speaker
So there was a lot of cross-fertilization that took place.
00:36:20
Speaker
Now, Jack, you brought up something to me the other day.
00:36:22
Speaker
You did some voices.
00:36:24
Speaker
So can you tell us some of the voices you did?
00:36:30
Speaker
Oh, boy.
00:36:30
Speaker
Well, now a lot of them were computer-aided and synthesized.
00:36:38
Speaker
Probably the greatest number of voices in one game I worked on was a game I designed called Carnivale.
00:36:47
Speaker
and it was a video game, and it was an evil carnival, basically, and it had a great backstory, and there's a nice intro to it with sort of a Vincent Price sort of reading of a local legend that tells you about the history of Carnival and when it returns in this small Iowa town, and that was my voice.
00:37:12
Speaker
And then there was a...
00:37:16
Speaker
a disembodied skull that you would meet throughout the game named Umlaut.
00:37:21
Speaker
And Umlaut is a character in Germanic alphabet, but I also like the sound of it.
00:37:29
Speaker
And the leader of Carnival, I sort of pictured being from Luxembourg.
00:37:34
Speaker
He was Ludwig, Dr. Dr. Ludwig von Togentaker.
00:37:39
Speaker
And his name is literally what it sounds like.
00:37:43
Speaker
We had the game on test.
00:37:45
Speaker
And one of the guys said, boy, the game's really doing well.
00:37:48
Speaker
And I said, yeah, it's really taking tokens.
00:37:51
Speaker
And he said, yeah, it's a real token taker.
00:37:53
Speaker
And I go, that's it.
00:37:54
Speaker
That's his name.
00:37:55
Speaker
And that's where we came up with.
00:37:57
Speaker
It's a shooter.
00:37:59
Speaker
It's like an Area 51 type game.
00:38:01
Speaker
Yeah, but I guess the best way to describe it is kind of Tim Burton-esque, very fantasy.
00:38:08
Speaker
And so...
00:38:11
Speaker
Ludwig von Togentaker might be, welcome aboard from this room.
00:38:17
Speaker
I have observed your every move, but you do not obey.
00:38:22
Speaker
Prepare to die.
00:38:23
Speaker
And that was Ludwig von Togentaker.
00:38:25
Speaker
And then umlaut, the skull, would be, welcome to the haunted house.
00:38:31
Speaker
Meet a ghoul who lost her head.
00:38:33
Speaker
If you'd like to stay and join us, you're always welcome, alive or dead.
00:38:42
Speaker
But it would be pitched way up.
00:38:44
Speaker
So I would read these silly poems.
00:38:46
Speaker
We had poems for the start of every wave, the freak show, the big top tent, and so on.
00:38:54
Speaker
It's where umlaut would read these things.
00:38:56
Speaker
So guilty as charged, I am umlaut.
00:39:00
Speaker
Well, that just tells me I'm going to have to use you for some voices for our games.
00:39:08
Speaker
I just want to rewind for a second because I noticed here on your resume that you've got Elvira and the Pottery Monsters on here.
00:39:14
Speaker
So how did you get involved with that?
00:39:16
Speaker
After Williams bought Midway, we brought on several incredible people.
00:39:25
Speaker
Two of them were Greg Freres and Dennis Nordman.
00:39:31
Speaker
and they were working on, um, uh, Dr. Dude and, uh, Elvira and the Party Monsters was a game they were developing.
00:39:40
Speaker
And, uh, they realized I also had a background in sculpture and I designed, uh, uh, puppets for puppet theaters and things like that.
00:39:49
Speaker
So they said, uh,
00:39:51
Speaker
They said, Jack, we have this tunnel ramp thing we would like to do.
00:39:55
Speaker
Do you think you could do a sketch and a sculpt for it?
00:39:58
Speaker
And the concept was a skull cave, sort of a skull cave entrance.
00:40:04
Speaker
So I worked with Greg and Dennis on that and sculpted it out of plastilina.
00:40:10
Speaker
clay and we casted it and put eyes in it and that's the Skull Cave ramp on Elvira and the Party Monsters on the upper left side.
00:40:20
Speaker
An interesting detail to that is it has green lights for the eyes.
00:40:28
Speaker
And originally, almost by default, I said, well, it should have red bulbs for the eyes.
00:40:34
Speaker
And that was not allowed due to concerns of people in more conservative areas of the country who might feel that it was a seitan.
00:40:48
Speaker
Oh, devil worship.
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah, satanic object.
00:40:51
Speaker
So we had to change it to green.
00:40:53
Speaker
So that's just a fun fact.
00:40:55
Speaker
I remember we couldn't play Dungeons and Dragons in the 80s because apparently that all led to devil worship.
00:41:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:04
Speaker
So let me get this right.
00:41:04
Speaker
It was wrong for kids to see the red eyes, but it was all right for Elvira's bosom to say hello to the kids.
00:41:10
Speaker
Now, wait a minute.
00:41:10
Speaker
Wait, wait.
00:41:10
Speaker
Let me touch something on that.
00:41:12
Speaker
Hold on one thing.
00:41:13
Speaker
You know, not so fast.
00:41:16
Speaker
We're okay with the knockers, but not okay.
00:41:18
Speaker
No, no, no.
00:41:18
Speaker
Actually, do you know that Elvira and the Potty Monsters was the first game to come with a panel, a majesty panel that could fit on the inside of the translator back glass?
00:41:29
Speaker
So you didn't see the knockers, as it were.
00:41:33
Speaker
It was the first one to do that.
00:41:37
Speaker
Here's a fun fact for you youngsters out there.
00:41:40
Speaker
If you develop a game like Elvira and it requires a modesty panel, the quickest and most efficient solution is you go to a Hobby Lobby or a store like that and purchase a pack of paper doilies.
00:41:55
Speaker
And they're sort of lace doilies.
00:41:57
Speaker
And you cut it into a little triangle.
00:41:59
Speaker
And that literally is how you make an Elvira Modesty handle.
00:42:05
Speaker
And it works like a char.
00:42:06
Speaker
Lace is okay.
00:42:07
Speaker
Lace is okay, apparently, yeah.
00:42:10
Speaker
Okay, so I do want to get back to, this has been a fascinating travel through all the entertainment game industry
Art Direction at American Pinball
00:42:20
Speaker
thing.
00:42:20
Speaker
But I want to bring back, so you have a cut, you brought back to pinball.
00:42:26
Speaker
You had involvement in Full Throttle and Ultimate Spider-Man and Stern Star Wars.
00:42:30
Speaker
So I want to talk about that.
00:42:32
Speaker
But I also want to transition to,
00:42:34
Speaker
The reason why we have you on is because you are at American pinball.
00:42:38
Speaker
And so we want to talk about American pinball and what you're doing at American pinball and the next five games you're going to release.
00:42:44
Speaker
So go ahead.
00:42:45
Speaker
Next five.
00:42:46
Speaker
Wow.
00:42:47
Speaker
Well, three would do three would do.
00:42:49
Speaker
We're not even going to tell you the next three, but anyway, we're already working on those, but anyway, go ahead, Jack.
00:42:56
Speaker
Uh, well, I, uh, was, uh, contacted recently by, uh, David, uh,
00:43:04
Speaker
Sort of out of the blue, I had been talking to Greg Freres and I was doing contract work and consulting work for Stern whenever they needed it.
00:43:14
Speaker
There were concepts that I worked on for several games and Greg and George Gomez would contact me and say, hey, Jack, could you give us, you know, 10 flavors of this cabinet and how you different approaches?
00:43:30
Speaker
And I would do that.
00:43:32
Speaker
And in some cases, I would be asked to continue and do final artwork on the side or some or some other times it would be the concepts would be handed off for other artists, which was fine.
00:43:45
Speaker
So I think there may have been some communication there.
00:43:50
Speaker
David can tell you how that happened.
00:43:53
Speaker
But I got a call from David and it was it was just a real surprise and a real honor to to talk to David and just to discuss American pinball and.
00:44:03
Speaker
their needs and how I might be able to help out with my background.
00:44:07
Speaker
Well, it was kind of funny.
00:44:08
Speaker
I'll give you a quick brief thing.
00:44:10
Speaker
When we joined American Pinball, before I brought Dennis in, one of the biggest concerns from a bunch of the guys was that we needed an art director.
00:44:19
Speaker
We never had one.
00:44:20
Speaker
We've had artists where they gave us our concept, but we never had an art director.
00:44:24
Speaker
And when I brought Dennis on, we started talking about people.
00:44:28
Speaker
And believe it or not, Dennis said to me one day, he says, I need a mechanical engineer.
00:44:32
Speaker
And I says, OK, we'll get you one.
00:44:34
Speaker
He says her name was Zofia Bill.
00:44:37
Speaker
Can you find her now?
00:44:38
Speaker
Zofia Bill.
00:44:40
Speaker
I'm like, OK, how am I going to find this woman?
00:44:43
Speaker
And it literally was.
00:44:46
Speaker
Thank goodness I had a little background with the US government at one point where I was able to find people.
00:44:50
Speaker
It took me about an hour.
00:44:52
Speaker
I had her on the phone.
00:44:53
Speaker
She was excited to come.
00:44:54
Speaker
uh, join American pinball.
00:44:56
Speaker
You can hear her podcast on the super awesome pinball show with Chris and Christian, but that it was like, you know, you know, Dennis was sitting there and saying, okay, now we need an artist.
00:45:07
Speaker
And he goes, uh, there was this guy by the name of, uh, Jack.
00:45:10
Speaker
Uh, and he gives me this information.
00:45:13
Speaker
And the next thing I know, uh,
00:45:15
Speaker
I'm like, I told Dennis, you give me somebody and I'm going to pick up the phone and I'm going to call these people.
00:45:20
Speaker
And listen, I've been turning over rocks and saying, hey,
00:45:25
Speaker
You want to come work for American Pinball?
00:45:27
Speaker
And Jack was like floored, honored.
00:45:29
Speaker
And I mean, it just took a little time.
00:45:31
Speaker
And before you know it, he was coming in as our new art director.
00:45:35
Speaker
So Jack, if you want to talk a little bit about what your role is as the art director, go ahead.
00:45:40
Speaker
But remember, don't tell them game three.
00:45:44
Speaker
I mean, game four, game five and game six.
00:45:46
Speaker
We got to keep those kind of secret.
00:45:47
Speaker
OK, OK.
00:45:48
Speaker
We won't tell the public, but you're more than welcome to tell us afterwards.
00:45:51
Speaker
Wink, wink.
00:45:54
Speaker
You'll have to wait like everyone else.
00:45:57
Speaker
Okay.
00:45:57
Speaker
Okay.
00:45:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:00
Speaker
Well, initially it's been, uh, uh, surveying, uh, recent projects and, uh, like any, uh, game in production, there are some revisions that need to take place.
00:46:13
Speaker
And, uh, I've been looking at that and, uh, helping out with that immediately.
00:46:18
Speaker
We have some promotional concepts that I've been involved in that are really terrific promotional concepts.
00:46:26
Speaker
So I'll be supporting the marketing efforts as well.
00:46:31
Speaker
And my role also extends to the parent company, which is Aintron Corporation.
00:46:38
Speaker
So from time to time, I will be providing them with art direction and graphic design support, working with promotional materials that promote and inform people on their
00:46:56
Speaker
capabilities as a PCB company and manufacturer.
00:47:02
Speaker
So it's a great opportunity to help out pinball, the entertainment industry, as well as development that supports the medical industry, military, government, and consumer computer products.
00:47:20
Speaker
So I'm just very happy to be here and
00:47:25
Speaker
They're going to keep me busy, I have a feeling.
00:47:27
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:47:27
Speaker
We have plenty of projects.
00:47:29
Speaker
Okay, so lead me through this as an art director.
00:47:33
Speaker
You're basically overseeing, and I would assume it's very similar to a project director or anything like that, where you obviously have multiple games at various stages of development.
00:47:46
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:47:46
Speaker
And so you now are the one who is saying, okay, we're going to be guiding for this look.
00:47:54
Speaker
We need to look for these artists.
00:47:56
Speaker
We need to figure out how we want to steer the theme and how we want to...
00:48:01
Speaker
find the right audience and find the right description.
00:48:04
Speaker
So tell me how involved you will be in actually producing the art yourself for it, or are you going to be more of a supervisory role where you're guiding the vision, so to speak?
00:48:18
Speaker
Well, the way you stated it, Scott, is very true.
00:48:23
Speaker
Where a, let's say an engineer has a concept for a game
00:48:29
Speaker
I will be heavily involved in working on brainstorming, on refining that concept, and trying to find the most entertaining aspects of the idea and ways that we can exploit those in a game.
00:48:49
Speaker
If I'm not personally involved creating the artwork, then yes, we are going to seek the best artist, the most appropriate artist for the concept that can really support the theme and make for a nice cohesive experience.
00:49:06
Speaker
And then along the way, it's my job to shepherd that person in that I'm looking to encourage and champion their work.
00:49:17
Speaker
So...
00:49:18
Speaker
People may do things very differently than I do.
00:49:21
Speaker
They may have a different style or manner of creating art.
00:49:28
Speaker
But my job is to really champion them and celebrate their work in the game.
00:49:37
Speaker
So I try and keep my style different.
00:49:41
Speaker
out of it, but my attitude is how do we efficiently make this happen?
00:49:48
Speaker
Are we communicating the theme of the game and is it working to
00:49:58
Speaker
make the best product and the most desirable product most importantly for the customer so everything we do um i i hope that it inspires uh desire and uh entertainment and and people appreciate the product in the end
00:50:17
Speaker
And I'm just going to touch on this too, because Jack brings a very unique perspective.
00:50:22
Speaker
Not only has he done pinball art and has a great artist flair of stuff and done stuff, but he's also been in the background with Williams with the video games.
00:50:31
Speaker
And you know now that the pinball machines are heavily video styled with the back display.
00:50:39
Speaker
I mean, we're not talking about dot matrix.
00:50:41
Speaker
We're talking about high def.
00:50:42
Speaker
So, you know, Jack and I have had discussions already about characters and,
00:50:46
Speaker
how to bring them into animation, how to bring these creations and give it more dimension, even with a little of the flair of the Williams style or even some green screen stuff that we can bring into the pinball realm to give it that all around effect, you know, because I'm looking at, you know, back classes and, you know, you look at, you know, the different games that have been made and it's like, wow, this is like,
00:51:11
Speaker
you know, the days of just as a score display is gone.
00:51:14
Speaker
And we're now talking about almost a video game inside of a pinball machine, which is already heavily, you know, illustrated as in the first place.
00:51:25
Speaker
So bringing Jack to have that vision to be able to work with not just video animators, but also with the artists who's coming together with this to make sure that everybody's
00:51:36
Speaker
on board to communicate that it was a very important step for me.
00:51:40
Speaker
And I think it was a very important step for America Pinball at the same time.
00:51:43
Speaker
Now in the, in the design process, I mean, your, your last machine that you released was a Hot Wheels.
00:51:51
Speaker
And I actually know two people who have Hot Wheels.
00:51:54
Speaker
And I'm the first to admit I was a little puzzled by the theme because it's a little different than what you typically see.
00:52:04
Speaker
You typically see the dad rock bands or you see the theater assets or something like that.
00:52:10
Speaker
And when Hot Wheels came out, I actually had two friends who was like, yeah, I bought it.
00:52:14
Speaker
And they gave surprise, like when I say surprisingly good reviews, I didn't know what to expect.
00:52:19
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:52:20
Speaker
And so when they reviewed it, they said, yeah, it's a blast.
00:52:23
Speaker
It's actually a lot of fun to play.
00:52:25
Speaker
So that was about a year ago, so to speak.
00:52:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:30
Speaker
Right.
00:52:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:30
Speaker
It's actually a year in March.
00:52:32
Speaker
So next month.
00:52:33
Speaker
And let me talk to you on that real quick, because, you know, Houdini came out and, you know, I've made some other podcasts and I talk about Houdini.
00:52:40
Speaker
Houdini is a really advanced players game.
00:52:44
Speaker
Okay.
00:52:45
Speaker
It's challenging.
00:52:46
Speaker
I have played it.
00:52:48
Speaker
It is very challenging.
00:52:49
Speaker
And it's very tight shots.
00:52:51
Speaker
And you know what, if, if Houdini was made three or four years from now, and it was a tournament game or a Papa game or something like that, it would be a challenge for some of the key players in the industry, but it was our first game out of the gate.
00:53:06
Speaker
And unfortunately got a kind of a bad rap because it was so tight and so hard.
00:53:12
Speaker
And then Oktoberfest, a lot of people said, oh, it had some, you know, they released it.
00:53:17
Speaker
There was a couple shots that weren't working.
00:53:19
Speaker
They fixed the shots, but they really didn't tell the world that the shots were fixed.
00:53:24
Speaker
So now all the new games that are coming out from Oktoberfest have the fixed thing.
00:53:27
Speaker
Thank goodness we have Twitch and other things who are showing these games because you can see that.
00:53:33
Speaker
Hot Wheels, we kind of leverage, you know, and some people say, and some of the people who love the original Hot Wheels go, I don't get the Dynastore.
00:53:42
Speaker
I don't get the, you know, the characters and so forth.
00:53:45
Speaker
Well,
00:53:46
Speaker
We really brought in the whole Hot Wheels City TV show that's on YouTube for kids.
00:53:53
Speaker
And you know what?
00:53:54
Speaker
We've already seen this now transcending to operators.
00:53:57
Speaker
And operators are seeing this.
00:53:58
Speaker
I had an operator in Wisconsin contact me and just said, you know, I get it with Hot Wheels.
00:54:04
Speaker
He said, put it out on a location.
00:54:06
Speaker
It was in like a little family diner.
00:54:09
Speaker
And the kids that were sitting at the table go, Dad, that's my favorite TV show.
00:54:14
Speaker
And sure enough, he saw the father and the kids go over and we were playing the game.
00:54:18
Speaker
And he's like, I get it.
00:54:19
Speaker
I see where you're going for with this.
00:54:21
Speaker
And it was a great playing game, too.
00:54:23
Speaker
It's a little bit easier than Houdini.
00:54:26
Speaker
It's got some good flow.
00:54:29
Speaker
It's challenging.
00:54:31
Speaker
And the artwork on that package was brought together pretty well.
00:54:35
Speaker
You know, and to talk about licensing, I mean, Jack can tell you a little bit about licensing and, you know, licensing holds your hand an awful lot, you know, a lot more than you want because, you know, Hot Wheels was probably going to have more of that classic Hot Wheels look.
00:54:50
Speaker
But that wasn't the brand that Mattel wanted.
00:54:53
Speaker
They really wanted to support the new logo, the new Hot Wheels.
00:54:58
Speaker
They didn't want the old style cars.
00:55:01
Speaker
We want to bring this in.
00:55:02
Speaker
So with licensing, you kind of get roped into stuff.
00:55:06
Speaker
But...
00:55:07
Speaker
the package came out really good.
00:55:09
Speaker
Now the marketing on it wasn't so great.
00:55:11
Speaker
All right.
00:55:12
Speaker
We kind of should have pushed it out to everybody, you know, and done that.
00:55:15
Speaker
And we, we kind of took it to a trade show and then everybody took pictures of it and wasn't really well received.
00:55:22
Speaker
And, you know, there, there's reasons for that, but,
00:55:25
Speaker
COVID hit, and that also hurt the sales.
00:55:27
Speaker
But we're still selling them.
00:55:28
Speaker
We're still selling all three games.
00:55:30
Speaker
People are buying Houdini.
00:55:32
Speaker
The players who want a challenging game are buying Houdini still.
00:55:37
Speaker
People who have found out that Oktoberfest is fixed, they're buying that.
00:55:42
Speaker
And Hot Wheels is rolling out the door.
00:55:43
Speaker
So we're really doing well with that.
00:55:46
Speaker
But, you know, there were challenges along the way.
00:55:48
Speaker
And I have to say, I love Hot
Strategic Shift at American Pinball
00:55:50
Speaker
Wheels.
00:55:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:51
Speaker
I have it in location and it's a great playing game.
00:55:53
Speaker
So David, I've got a question for you specifically.
00:55:56
Speaker
American Pinball has made quite the splash here in the last couple of months between hiring you and then Dennis Nordman and Zofia and now Jack.
00:56:05
Speaker
It seems like American Pinball is saying, hey,
00:56:07
Speaker
We're here to play ball.
00:56:09
Speaker
So can you kind of give us some of the vision of going forward?
00:56:12
Speaker
What's going to happen with American Pinball if we're going to see a different schedule?
00:56:16
Speaker
Because it's been kind of hit or miss with like every 12 months or 18 or 24 months.
00:56:22
Speaker
Are we going to see a more tight schedule?
00:56:23
Speaker
Are we going to see more machines?
00:56:25
Speaker
What's going to go on now?
00:56:27
Speaker
So let's touch on that.
00:56:28
Speaker
So, you know, I'll just tell you that the owner of American Pinball now is Mukesh Vasani.
00:56:37
Speaker
And that's part of the Amtron Corporation.
00:56:40
Speaker
And at the time, there was Deval Dasani, who was his nephew, who was running American Pinball.
00:56:48
Speaker
Well, back in December, McCash and his advisors got together and they contacted me.
00:56:56
Speaker
And I told the story already a little bit that I had been working for ICE.
00:57:00
Speaker
And unfortunately, it's one of the major manufacturers of arcade gaming worldwide.
00:57:04
Speaker
And during, because of COVID, it kind of got shut down.
00:57:08
Speaker
You know, I mean, I feel sorry for the guys at ICE.
00:57:10
Speaker
I still plug the, you know, the Super Chex game, all the other games that they have.
00:57:15
Speaker
They even have a whole new arcade version.
00:57:18
Speaker
of the games coming out a really nice looking um arcade a skeeball you can actually see it at flipping out um zach many is now a distributor for ice uh home arcade and they have a lot of other games that are going to be absolutely cool and zach will be rolling those out on a on one of his streams but um
00:57:38
Speaker
They basically came to me and said, Dave, we really want to change the direction that American Pinball has been heading.
00:57:45
Speaker
And everybody's been watching American Pinball, including myself, for the last four or five years going, okay, guys, let's get this going.
00:57:53
Speaker
Because originally I helped them out with Houdini when they first came out with Houdini from Papaduke.
00:57:59
Speaker
I help Expo.
00:58:01
Speaker
I run it with Rob Burke.
00:58:03
Speaker
At that time, I reached out to American Pinball and said, listen, we're going to get you the back room.
00:58:08
Speaker
We want you to bring the first Houdini there.
00:58:11
Speaker
Let's show it off.
00:58:11
Speaker
They said, we just hired Joe Balcer.
00:58:13
Speaker
I said, fine, let's get everybody together.
00:58:16
Speaker
And we gave them a room, that kind of thing.
00:58:18
Speaker
And they got great publicity off that.
00:58:20
Speaker
And then when Oktoberfest came out, Nermal reached out to me and I said, let's do it.
00:58:25
Speaker
Let's launch it at Expo.
00:58:27
Speaker
We got Jack...
00:58:29
Speaker
We got danger to stream it.
00:58:31
Speaker
We got a bunch of things.
00:58:33
Speaker
We got this whole thing.
00:58:34
Speaker
We had a whole launch party right there at Expo, and we kind of pushed it out.
00:58:38
Speaker
And then, of course, Hot Wheels kind of floundered.
00:58:43
Speaker
So when I reached out to them and I said, listen, hey, how are things over there?
00:58:47
Speaker
And they said, they're okay.
00:58:48
Speaker
And I said, well, I'm not doing anything right at the moment.
00:58:50
Speaker
They said, no.
00:58:51
Speaker
Would you like to come work for us?
00:58:53
Speaker
We would really love you to be the director of operations.
00:58:57
Speaker
Duvall is leaving the company.
00:59:00
Speaker
You're gonna answer right to McCash.
00:59:02
Speaker
It's gonna be McCash is the owner and you're gonna be the principal guy over it.
00:59:06
Speaker
And we looked at it and we said, listen, let's bring together this team.
00:59:10
Speaker
And I had a vision.
00:59:11
Speaker
I said, listen,
00:59:13
Speaker
The golden years of Williams and Bally were made by some great people.
00:59:19
Speaker
And one of them was Dennis Nordman.
00:59:22
Speaker
And then, you know, you look at Sophia, where she came out with some great mechanical stuff.
00:59:27
Speaker
There were some great artists that came out of that time.
00:59:29
Speaker
And Jack was one of them.
00:59:30
Speaker
And I'm like, this is just fitting the vision that I have to make a company look at
00:59:37
Speaker
and be respected in the industry as a pinball company okay and the other idea was it's like we are bringing in other people to help design games so that we just go from one game every 18 months to two years to two games every year you know and we're gonna turn the with basically i said to mikesh i said listen
01:00:00
Speaker
We can build a game.
01:00:01
Speaker
You guys can build some really good games.
01:00:04
Speaker
What we got to do is put the burners on and start, you know, cooking the games really well.
01:00:11
Speaker
So, you know, Dennis came on board.
01:00:13
Speaker
We started looking at that.
01:00:14
Speaker
And now I'm happy to say that with Dennis and Zofia and Jack and the rest of the team, Josh and Joe and all the guys, we're starting to sit down and we're like, OK, this is going to be great.
01:00:26
Speaker
You know, we're going to start.
01:00:27
Speaker
And trust me, Dennis has already brought some great ideas.
01:00:30
Speaker
We're already cooking on that.
01:00:32
Speaker
Jack and I and Dennis have already had conversations.
01:00:35
Speaker
And, you know, the, the, the, you know, I love, there was a, there was a guy who did a podcast one time who worked for Williams.
01:00:43
Speaker
And he says, when, when you get engineering, you know,
01:00:46
Speaker
going there's like it's all excited and great ideas are flying off the walls and you know what you just start grabbing and it's like lightning in a bottle and what you want to do is try to hold it and bring all this creativity together and basically say go at it guys let's do this you know let's jack what do you got for a vision can you share that with dennis dennis and jack got together and they're sharing their vision together
01:01:10
Speaker
We're going to bring in the right sound guy that's going to share that same vision.
01:01:13
Speaker
We're going to go out and going to get the right artists that can bring this all together.
01:01:17
Speaker
And you know what?
01:01:17
Speaker
You let the guys create, let them create, let them build some cool, cool mechanisms.
01:01:23
Speaker
Sophia, build me another Miss multi ball or build me some kind of a cool mechanism.
01:01:27
Speaker
That's just going to, you know, people are going to love.
01:01:31
Speaker
And, uh,
01:01:32
Speaker
Hey, that's my idea is just sit back, let them create, and let them go at it.
01:01:37
Speaker
And we already have a game coming down the pipeline, and we have another one that's already in development.
01:01:43
Speaker
Jack and Dennis are working on that, and we're bringing the rest of the team on board.
01:01:48
Speaker
So I think it's just going to be a win-win.
01:01:50
Speaker
You guys are going to be excited over American Pinball over the next year or so.
01:01:54
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds like you're getting the band back together and we're doing a Williams 2.0.
01:01:58
Speaker
That seems like the culture you're trying to do.
01:02:01
Speaker
Is that fair to say?
01:02:02
Speaker
Yeah, I would say it's fair to say.
01:02:04
Speaker
And in fact, some of the, it's funny, I was talking to another designer, mechanical engineer, and I told him, I said, listen, I'm trying to get the Williams band back together.
01:02:14
Speaker
And they go, are you crazy?
01:02:15
Speaker
There's some sitting over here.
01:02:17
Speaker
There's some sitting over there.
01:02:18
Speaker
There's some guys sitting over there.
01:02:21
Speaker
They're all over the place.
01:02:22
Speaker
It just won't happen.
01:02:24
Speaker
Well, then all of a sudden, Zofia comes walking in.
01:02:28
Speaker
Jack comes walking in.
01:02:29
Speaker
Guess what?
01:02:30
Speaker
You know, we're going to make it fun.
01:02:32
Speaker
You know, we're going to put fun back into pinball, guys.
01:02:35
Speaker
We're going to have some fun making these games.
01:02:37
Speaker
And you know what?
01:02:39
Speaker
If you come to me and you say, hey, listen, I worked for Williams.
01:02:42
Speaker
And I'm just, you know, hey, listen, Williams was great because a good friend, we were talking about this with Jack.
01:02:48
Speaker
And we can go back over this because I want to know more stories about Python.
01:02:51
Speaker
But Python was this other guy who was just energetic.
01:02:54
Speaker
He just brought so much to the Williams.
01:02:57
Speaker
And he just was like he bounced off all these teams and he gave people ideas.
01:03:02
Speaker
And, you know, the creativity level just expounded.
01:03:06
Speaker
And with that, you know, more people build on that.
01:03:10
Speaker
So, I mean, Python was a good friend.
01:03:13
Speaker
I do miss him.
01:03:14
Speaker
I, you know, I miss the phone calls at midnight because he worked with us at ICE on some projects over the years.
01:03:21
Speaker
And, you know, Python was a driving force, I would say, in the Williams department during the 80s and
01:03:29
Speaker
Good part of the 90s and then took that to Capcom for a while there.
01:03:33
Speaker
And I think that, you know, bringing these guys together, letting them create, let them have the passion.
01:03:39
Speaker
They have the passion.
01:03:40
Speaker
They want to do it.
01:03:41
Speaker
I mean, I'm not saying Jack's old and I'm not saying Dennis is old and I'm not saying Zofia is old.
01:03:46
Speaker
But.
01:03:46
Speaker
You know, hey, guys, would you like to work for a pinball company or would you want to just kind of take an easy job and retire?
01:03:53
Speaker
No, no, we want to work for a pinball company.
01:03:55
Speaker
We have the most fun.
01:03:56
Speaker
We want to do this.
01:03:57
Speaker
We want to have some fun with these people.
01:03:59
Speaker
And I'm just excited to have them.
01:04:01
Speaker
And you guys are looking for, I see your press releases.
01:04:05
Speaker
You're like, Hey, if you want to be in pinball, send us your resume, check us out.
01:04:09
Speaker
We're, we're growing.
01:04:11
Speaker
That's the message I'm getting from you guys.
01:04:13
Speaker
Yes, we are growing.
01:04:14
Speaker
And unlike other companies, you've actually made pinball machines.
01:04:17
Speaker
So you've got that going for you.
01:04:19
Speaker
Oh yeah.
01:04:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:20
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:21
Speaker
Okay.
01:04:21
Speaker
I'll, I'll, I'll put my cuffs on.
01:04:22
Speaker
I've been a little, I've been aggressive about a different manufacturer who has all promises.
01:04:28
Speaker
Um,
01:04:30
Speaker
Well, you know what?
01:04:31
Speaker
In all fairness, you know, pinball is not an easy business.
01:04:36
Speaker
Okay.
01:04:38
Speaker
And God bless you.
01:04:39
Speaker
You're trying to put it together.
01:04:40
Speaker
I mean, I remember support.
01:04:42
Speaker
I mean, listen, in Expo, I supported...
01:04:45
Speaker
Wait, I was hit the first foremost.
01:04:47
Speaker
I remember walking in when I was still working with PaySack over Expo and Burke.
01:04:52
Speaker
And I said to him, I said, there's this guy by the name of Jerry Stellenberg who makes this thing called P-Rock.
01:04:58
Speaker
We want to I want to give him four booths free of charge because he's going to bring in homebrew guys.
01:05:03
Speaker
And then Aaron from Skillshot out in Seattle calls me and I said, hey.
01:05:10
Speaker
He says, can I get a booth?
01:05:11
Speaker
Yeah, we'll get you two booths.
01:05:13
Speaker
And just to create these homebrew guys and the passion to work at this was one of my driving forces back in 2010, 2011 at Expo.
01:05:24
Speaker
Um, you know, it's not an easy job.
01:05:27
Speaker
And from that point, we, I helped, you know, I helped the kid that made this thing called predator pinball, you know, Kevin, I kind of gave him this.
01:05:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:36
Speaker
Skip B. Uh, I remember helping him where I could with bringing him at the expo and so forth.
01:05:42
Speaker
I helped, uh, uh, of course, uh, friend highway pinball, Andrew highway, which I actually own, um, one of the, uh, prototypes, number four of Jack's game there full throttle.
01:05:54
Speaker
We didn't even get to talk about that.
01:05:56
Speaker
I'd love to hear a little bit more stories about, you know, his thought on full throttle.
01:06:00
Speaker
And, you know, it just, you know, there was, there's a lot of passion, you know, people try to make the machines.
01:06:07
Speaker
I give them full credit to doing it and I'd love it when they can pull it off, but it's not an easy toy.
01:06:12
Speaker
It's not an easy thing to do.
01:06:13
Speaker
You know, you know, give them the credit for trying.
01:06:16
Speaker
That's all I have to say.
01:06:17
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:21
Speaker
But Jack, tell us a little about Highway Pinball.
01:06:23
Speaker
How did you get over there and into UK and working with Andrew?
01:06:26
Speaker
That's, that's gotta be an interesting question.
01:06:30
Speaker
It was another case of being contacted out of the blue.
01:06:35
Speaker
Andrew was working with another artist, another Williams artist, Tim Watson at that point.
01:06:43
Speaker
And Tim went on hiatus because he wanted to, uh,
01:06:49
Speaker
I believe, get into teaching and wasn't able to get back and do revisions on what he had started with Full Throttle.
01:06:59
Speaker
So I came in when the project was already underway.
Collaborative Design Work for Full Throttle
01:07:02
Speaker
Tim had created a back glass that featured two motorcycles driving away from you, away from the place.
01:07:13
Speaker
You're seeing the back end of the motorcycles and the riders.
01:07:17
Speaker
And Andrew just gave me the wonderful premise of this upstart young rider who is a total unknown and nobody expects anything from him in the red number 28 motorcycle against this world-renowned leader that wins every race.
01:07:42
Speaker
And...
01:07:44
Speaker
And again, Andrew asked me to develop the theme a little more, and I worked with him on creating this South American character who...
01:07:54
Speaker
ultimately you really had to hate.
01:07:56
Speaker
So, so we made him the character that would produce speech calls at you and taunt you and tell you, you're never going to win.
01:08:09
Speaker
And that's where the three dimensional model came from on the playing field.
01:08:13
Speaker
I did,
01:08:14
Speaker
sketches of the actual character and the 3D artist did a fantastic job.
01:08:20
Speaker
I think his name was, I think the character's name was Valentino in the end.
01:08:25
Speaker
So I created a back glass concept where the bikes are coming at you and you can see in the one character's shield, the finish line is reflected in his visor.
01:08:36
Speaker
So they're just
01:08:37
Speaker
yards from the finish line and the Valentino character is reaching out with his boot to kick him off his bike.
01:08:44
Speaker
So all this is happening at once.
01:08:47
Speaker
There's more that I wanted to develop in the glass, but there was only so much time available to do this.
01:08:54
Speaker
So there were some comments, which I take wholeheartedly, where
01:08:59
Speaker
The characters appear to be kind of sketchy, which they were at that stage.
01:09:05
Speaker
But Andrew said, you know, this is fine where it's at right now.
01:09:09
Speaker
I'd like you to work on some, to adjust some graphics on the play field, which I did.
01:09:15
Speaker
I did the two motorcycle characters on the play field and there was a female character.
01:09:20
Speaker
I did the cabinet side.
01:09:22
Speaker
So there was a lot of work that I kind of fit into a limited amount of time.
01:09:28
Speaker
But I was excited.
01:09:29
Speaker
It was a great opportunity to kind of come out of the video and redemption world that I had been working in and a chance to, you know, really work on a pinball project.
01:09:41
Speaker
And I was excited and I thought it was pretty neat to work with a designer and a company based in Wales.
01:09:50
Speaker
Having relatives over there, it was kind of a nice homecoming experience for me.
01:09:57
Speaker
Now, did you get to work on any of the other game from Highway, the Alien?
01:10:01
Speaker
No, no.
01:10:02
Speaker
There was talk about it.
01:10:04
Speaker
I was asked to come up with some concepts, but, you know, at some point as a freelance artist, you know, you have to decide on a contract and so on and so forth.
01:10:18
Speaker
And Andrew hadn't gotten to that point with it.
01:10:22
Speaker
So out of respect for him and the business, you know, that's,
01:10:27
Speaker
Things were on hold at that point.
01:10:31
Speaker
But another company I came in and out of quite a bit is Team Play Incorporated, and they're based here in Elk Grove Village in Illinois.
01:10:40
Speaker
That's Ken Fidesna's place, right?
01:10:42
Speaker
Ken Fidesna, who was my former boss at Midway for many, many years and a great guy.
01:10:48
Speaker
And their focus was primarily redemption games.
01:10:52
Speaker
So types of games that you would see at Dave & Buster's, Chuck E. Cheese, that sort of thing.
01:10:57
Speaker
And so I got to work on some concepts with them that were actually pretty interesting and some that actually touched on the pinball world as well.
01:11:05
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:11:05
Speaker
And it's funny, which is kind of fun, which I laugh.
01:11:09
Speaker
There was a game that Teamplay brought together and I had seen it.
01:11:13
Speaker
It was called Fishbowl Frenzy.
01:11:15
Speaker
And it's interesting because I talked to Ken at IEPA and I saw Fishbowl Frenzy and we were talking and I said, so how did you lure John Yowse out of retirement to do the artwork for Fishbowl Frenzy?
01:11:31
Speaker
And he looked at me and he goes, how did you know that's John Yowse's artwork?
01:11:35
Speaker
And I says, listen, John has a style.
01:11:37
Speaker
Everybody's got a style.
01:11:38
Speaker
I mean, you know, Jack's got a style too.
01:11:41
Speaker
And I said, not only that,
01:11:43
Speaker
the the the you you basically got uh williams coils up there dropping the ball i mean the whole thing has got like you know well i think it was stern coils but anyway they had pinball coils and you know and and ken's like you know you're you know your business mr fix i will tell you that much and then they came out with another game which was more pinball like and you worked on that one jack a little bit more that was uh what was that one with the little little pinball tables
01:12:10
Speaker
Yes, spins a whole.
01:12:11
Speaker
There you go.
01:12:12
Speaker
Spins a whole.
01:12:13
Speaker
And originally it was a licensed a license that we were working on.
01:12:17
Speaker
And sometimes, as you know, when you're working on a license in there, you have financial investors.
01:12:25
Speaker
It can go south in the middle of the project.
01:12:27
Speaker
And that's what happened with the original concept.
01:12:30
Speaker
But we still had this great game that had four individual kiosks.
01:12:36
Speaker
And basically, it was a board game, basically.
01:12:39
Speaker
And little characters would move around the board game.
01:12:41
Speaker
And that was your one credit.
01:12:43
Speaker
You put in your credit, and you'd see where your character would end up on the board.
01:12:47
Speaker
And that would tell you how many credits you won.
01:12:52
Speaker
And it had some nice novel features as well.
01:12:55
Speaker
And we decided that the license wasn't going to happen, but we still wanted to go ahead because the mechanic worked.
01:13:02
Speaker
It was great.
01:13:04
Speaker
And then again, because of Ken Fidesna and his great leadership and experience as a leader at Williams Valley Midway,
01:13:14
Speaker
Ken was the one who came up with the idea of, okay, we've got the spinner, but how about we make a little mini pinball play field?
01:13:22
Speaker
Technically, it's a bag of tell because there's no flipper.
01:13:26
Speaker
So you just pull the plunger and the mini pinball drops down between slots and it tells you,
01:13:33
Speaker
again the same thing tells you where your how many spaces your character moves on the board and i just love this idea of the mini pinball play field and we applied that spins ahoy was a sort of a cartoony pirate theme and the characters were really uh well defined and wonderful unique characters and we named one of them captain captain ken in honor of ken fedezna
01:14:03
Speaker
And it turned out to be the highest earning game ever at a Chuck E. Cheese location.
01:14:12
Speaker
And it was a four because it was a four player, four players independent.
01:14:17
Speaker
And this was a Chuck E. Cheese headquarters, which was no small feat.
01:14:21
Speaker
So they saw firsthand how well it did.
01:14:26
Speaker
I can't say anything about distribution or decisions after the fact, but it did reach that milestone.
01:14:34
Speaker
And I'm proud to at least illustrate it when I was asked to post some images.
01:14:42
Speaker
Spins Ahoy, I'm really fond of it.
01:14:47
Speaker
had a lot of a lot of pinball people involved in that as well.
01:14:51
Speaker
Yeah, it basically looks a little bit like a well, kind of like a bingo machine.
01:14:56
Speaker
Actually, I'm kind of like, Yes, sure.
01:14:59
Speaker
And imagine four of those side by side, each, you know, at a slight angle to the screen.
01:15:05
Speaker
And it was really fun.
01:15:06
Speaker
And it really drew people in, you know, you don't see that very often.
01:15:10
Speaker
Um, you know, everybody's used to joysticks, gun, you know, gun games, et cetera.
01:15:15
Speaker
But this, it was really special.
01:15:17
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:18
Speaker
It looks like a lot of fun.
01:15:20
Speaker
So after that, you kind of went to, uh, you did some work on the star Wars for Steve Ritchie and, and Stern.
01:15:28
Speaker
And again, you did your photo realism kind of, are you want to talk about a little about that?
01:15:34
Speaker
Uh, I know the guys.
01:15:36
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:37
Speaker
Yeah, correct.
01:15:37
Speaker
That was again, another case where, uh,
01:15:41
Speaker
Greg Freres reached out to me to ask if I could contract some art.
Star Wars Pinball Art Challenges
01:15:45
Speaker
And the Star Wars license, without getting into too much detail, required a lot of scrutiny by the licensor.
01:15:54
Speaker
And I think there were a lot of changes and revisions that affected the schedule.
01:16:01
Speaker
So Greg had to call in several people to help out to meet the milestones that they had set.
01:16:09
Speaker
And it was a case where I had to match an existing artist's style and method, which I did.
01:16:17
Speaker
So it looks very painterly, and that was the intention.
01:16:22
Speaker
And it was all done on computer, but it was intended to appear to be more hand-drawn.
01:16:28
Speaker
A painting illustration of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader on the...
01:16:33
Speaker
the back box sides and the coin box front and some other work that I did.
01:16:39
Speaker
But those are the, I think they appeared on the pro version of the Star Wars cabinet.
01:16:46
Speaker
And I was one of several artists, but we all had to pitch in and, you know, try and have a unified style.
01:16:55
Speaker
So the final package looked seamless for the consumer, which it did.
01:17:00
Speaker
Yeah, that's certainly true.
01:17:01
Speaker
We've talked about that before is how in many ways we as casual fans don't understand the licensing constraints and how how really the owner of the license really guides the visual presentation of their product because that's their product.
01:17:17
Speaker
They want to know.
01:17:18
Speaker
how it's going out.
01:17:19
Speaker
And it doesn't matter if you make the coolest thing in the world, if it doesn't follow whatever their style guide is or what their agreed upon presentation for the theme is, it's not going to fly.
01:17:33
Speaker
Yes, very true, very true.
01:17:34
Speaker
And the metaphor I've used a couple times, and I'm not going to name specific games, but you go into it hoping they give you the box of 128 crayons, and they give you the box of 12, and make something with this.
01:17:50
Speaker
And as a creative person, then that's what you do.
01:17:55
Speaker
And we can't always come out and point to that, but you do the best you can.
01:18:01
Speaker
in in every situation i i told jack when he started working here i says uh you hit the big box of crayons my friend uh you can you don't have to worry about we're playing with the kitty pack from uh any any restaurant we only get four colors or six or eight colors you can have all 64 uh use them sparingly and uh go for it you know that kind of thing yeah but i do have to i i would like to just call out specifically i can't uh
01:18:29
Speaker
thank and show my appreciation enough for the leadership at Stern with Greg Ferreres and George Gomez.
01:18:40
Speaker
Those guys are amazing.
01:18:43
Speaker
They are pros.
01:18:44
Speaker
They're at the top of their game.
01:18:47
Speaker
And, you know, in the times I have, I've had to work with them.
01:18:51
Speaker
I've been truly grateful and appreciative for their guidance and, you know, how they've done things, you know, over the years.
01:19:01
Speaker
So good guys.
01:19:03
Speaker
Yes, very good guys.
01:19:05
Speaker
All right, before we wrap this up, David Fix was nice enough to hook us up with a Houdini Translight, and we're going to give this away to you, our audience.
Houdini Translight Giveaway
01:19:13
Speaker
What we're gonna do is kind of what we've done in the past.
01:19:15
Speaker
We're gonna make a post.
01:19:17
Speaker
It's gonna be of this episode.
01:19:20
Speaker
Make sure you comment, you like, and if you share.
01:19:24
Speaker
The share will get you extra entries.
01:19:26
Speaker
And then here in two weeks, we will toss all the entries into a hat, stir it all up, and announce a winner.
01:19:33
Speaker
And we'll work with you in getting that Houdini Translight.
01:19:36
Speaker
Yeah, the Houdini art style is certainly very fun to see.
01:19:41
Speaker
Yeah, it was done very well, the Houdini artwork.
01:19:46
Speaker
Same artist did Houdini did Hot Wheels 2.
01:19:50
Speaker
So I'm happy to give one away to any of your listeners out there.
01:19:54
Speaker
It would be really great.
01:19:55
Speaker
We want to thank David Fix and Jack Hager from American Pinball.
01:19:58
Speaker
We really appreciate them coming on.
01:20:01
Speaker
And it's always fun hearing about a pinball company that's on the rise.
01:20:07
Speaker
David, if someone wants to send their resume to you and contact you, how do they do that?
01:20:12
Speaker
Very easy.
01:20:13
Speaker
David period fix at American pinball.com.
01:20:19
Speaker
And you can even call the office.
01:20:22
Speaker
Um,
01:20:23
Speaker
and talk or send to info at AmericanPinball.com.
01:20:28
Speaker
You can do that too.
01:20:30
Speaker
Thanks, David.
01:20:31
Speaker
If you want to get a hold of Loser Kid Pinball Podcast, you can get a hold of us the traditional way at LoserKidPinballPodcast at gmail.com.
01:20:38
Speaker
Or we prefer Facebook, so if you hit us up, I am Josh Roop.
01:20:42
Speaker
That is Scott Larson.
01:20:44
Speaker
You can hit us up at LoserKidPinballPodcast page.
01:20:46
Speaker
Everything, all of our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook is at LoserKidPinball.
01:20:52
Speaker
We still got some hats and some beanies, so if you want to hit us up for that, there's a gentleman that did reach out, but I'll make sure I get you taken care of, my good sir.
01:21:00
Speaker
And I think that wraps it up pretty much for us now.
01:21:02
Speaker
Scott, is there anything, any other last thoughts you have for us?
01:21:05
Speaker
Well, when it's time for you guys to announce, we'd love to invite you guys back and we can do a reveal and talk about it.
01:21:11
Speaker
And certainly more pinball is good pinball.
01:21:15
Speaker
And it's always good to have more seats at the table, as we always say.
01:21:19
Speaker
Thank you for having us.
01:21:21
Speaker
Thank you both.
01:21:21
Speaker
We really do appreciate it.
01:21:30
Speaker
Shut up and sit down.