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Ep 88: Pick your Jelly Belly with Scott Danesi
39 Plays3 years ago
Scott Danesi joins the LoserKid Crew to talk about TNA, Rick & Morty, Jelly Bellys, the real 80s look, and whatever random tangent they might find.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Acknowledgment
00:00:07
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the loser kid pinball podcast.
00:00:09
Speaker
Take three on episode 88.
00:00:11
Speaker
I am Josh Roop with me.
00:00:13
Speaker
My co-captain is always Scott Larson.
00:00:16
Speaker
Hey, and Scott, before we get to our awesome guest today, let's talk about our sponsor.
00:00:19
Speaker
Okay.
00:00:20
Speaker
Uh, flipping out pinball.
00:00:21
Speaker
If you have that pinball machine or accessory that you are looking at contact Zach and Nicole, many flipping out pinball.
00:00:28
Speaker
Um, they've always been great to work with, uh, been able to get the accessories I want.
00:00:33
Speaker
I have some art blades that I need to install.
00:00:35
Speaker
and I've bought some shooter rods from them in addition to the games I've bought from them.
00:00:40
Speaker
So go ahead and hit them up if you have any questions.
00:00:44
Speaker
They'd love to help you out, especially with a topper.
00:00:46
Speaker
Oh, you and your toppers.
00:00:48
Speaker
I know.
00:00:48
Speaker
Toppers are great.
00:00:49
Speaker
Hey, I also want to say thank you to them because they are helping us out with our flip in the script on autism.
00:00:56
Speaker
They are one of our sponsors that have stepped up to donate some product and whatnot to help out those kids at Learning Solutions with early intervention with autism.
00:01:06
Speaker
We want to thank also Stern and Multimorphic, Haggis.
00:01:10
Speaker
There's a whole slew of them.
00:01:11
Speaker
Brad with Lit Frames.
00:01:13
Speaker
They've all stepped up to help us out.
00:01:14
Speaker
We want to see you there at Pinball Expo here October 19th through the 23rd.
00:01:20
Speaker
We hope to see you there and give you some sweet swag.
00:01:23
Speaker
Why don't you go ahead and introduce our guest today,
Guest Introduction: Scott Denisi
00:01:26
Speaker
Scott?
00:01:26
Speaker
All right.
00:01:27
Speaker
Today we have a designer who burst onto the scene with his first game that was basically a homebrew, but because of fan interest was able to come into a production game.
00:01:40
Speaker
And this is Scott Denisi and burst onto the scene with total nuclear annihilation, but has since...
00:01:47
Speaker
help make Rick and Morty even designing it.
00:01:50
Speaker
And so now he is with us.
00:01:52
Speaker
And so we want to welcome to the show.
00:01:55
Speaker
Hi, everybody.
00:01:56
Speaker
Nice to be here, guys.
Transition from Pinball to Music
00:01:58
Speaker
Now, Scott, you wear a lot of hats.
00:02:01
Speaker
So you're a pinball designer.
00:02:04
Speaker
You're also a DJ.
00:02:05
Speaker
You also still work at Pinball Life.
00:02:10
Speaker
What other hats are you wearing right now?
00:02:12
Speaker
Oh, man.
00:02:14
Speaker
The problem is I just I do too much.
00:02:16
Speaker
And I mean,
00:02:17
Speaker
Sometimes I need to settle down.
00:02:19
Speaker
But yeah, so aside from my day job, which is pinball life, where I do the technical stuff over there, whether it's, you know, mechanical, electrical engineering, I'll even do stuff like help out with tech support.
00:02:31
Speaker
help out with sub-assembly or whatever needs to be done.
00:02:36
Speaker
I basically do that because it's a small business.
00:02:39
Speaker
But besides that, which is the nine to five, everything else I'm doing, I moonlight.
00:02:43
Speaker
So whether it's making audio for a new VR game that we're working on or working with Multimorphic doing audio, but it's mostly I'm just doing a ton of audio right now.
00:02:55
Speaker
It seems to be a really fun point for me at the moment.
00:02:59
Speaker
Well, it's funny, too, because there's a lot of people in the pinball industry that are like musicians getting out of music to get into pinball.
00:03:06
Speaker
But you're almost like doing the opposite.
00:03:07
Speaker
You started out in pinball and you're like gravitating more towards music now.
Creating Total Nuclear Annihilation
00:03:11
Speaker
Tell us more about that.
00:03:12
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's great.
00:03:14
Speaker
So really, I started writing music back in 1996 when I was in high school.
00:03:19
Speaker
And I started experimenting with electronic music and writing some really junky stuff.
00:03:24
Speaker
Sounds terrible.
00:03:25
Speaker
I actually found some of it the other day and I need to delete it.
00:03:29
Speaker
It's really bad.
00:03:31
Speaker
But, you know, I've been doing that as just a little side hobby for so long.
00:03:36
Speaker
And when I started getting into pinball, I said, well, hey, maybe I can take this other side hobby and smash them together and see what happens.
00:03:43
Speaker
Right.
00:03:44
Speaker
So when I built Total Nuclear Annihilation, I just started
00:03:47
Speaker
said, hey, let's see how crazy of a soundtrack I can make that's still acceptable to the normal pinball person, right?
00:03:55
Speaker
And we got the TNA soundtrack and I'm actually very, very proud of that, how that turned out still to this day.
00:04:03
Speaker
Now, tell me about what inspired you to build TNA.
00:04:09
Speaker
There's a lot of people who are like, yeah, I'd be interested in building.
00:04:11
Speaker
But with you working at Pinball Life, that gave you an advantage that a lot of people don't have and that I would have no idea what parts even make up a pinball machine.
00:04:22
Speaker
But you're well aware of this.
00:04:24
Speaker
So at what point did you say, you know what, I'm going to try making my own game?
00:04:28
Speaker
Yeah, so that's another really great point is I had all these industry connections prior to doing this.
00:04:37
Speaker
And what I did was I said to myself, I was like, hey, you know, I've been working with Jerry Stellenberg and building up this homebrew community for years at that point before I started working at Pinball Life.
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Speaker
And I was like, you know, I'd never actually built an entire pinball machine from scratch.
00:04:54
Speaker
I have just been dabbling in rewriting code for previous games.
00:04:58
Speaker
I'm just kind of playing around nothing that I would distribute to anybody.
00:05:02
Speaker
But I got to the point where I was like, you know, there's, there's new games starting to be created, right?
00:05:10
Speaker
So Wizard of Oz had just hit.
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Speaker
And, you know, that was doing really well.
00:05:14
Speaker
And I look at that game.
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Speaker
And I'm like, there's so much in that game.
00:05:16
Speaker
I'm like, it's, but it's not really the type of game that I personally want to see.
00:05:20
Speaker
So I'm like, you know, I'm going to build a homebrew.
00:05:23
Speaker
of what I personally want and what I think my closest friends would play dollar games with me on.
Design Philosophy & Simplicity
00:05:29
Speaker
And I said, I need, you know, just a simple single level play field.
00:05:34
Speaker
It's gotta be very brutal.
00:05:36
Speaker
Uh, so that ball times are very short, you know, just other little wacky things.
00:05:40
Speaker
I need to put the latest and greatest technology into it so I can run full RGB with including the GI.
00:05:47
Speaker
Um, and, um,
00:05:49
Speaker
So, and then I'm like, well, now I need to program it and I want to make sure that I use the RGB differently than what Jersey Jack was doing.
00:05:56
Speaker
Cause at the time Jersey Jack was just blasting rainbows on everything all the time.
00:06:02
Speaker
And I get it.
00:06:02
Speaker
Cause wizard of Oz, that makes complete sense.
00:06:05
Speaker
But I was like, Hey, that's like, you overuse something to the point where it doesn't actually become effective anymore.
00:06:12
Speaker
You're just like, great, you know, rainbows and cool.
00:06:14
Speaker
The lights can do all that stuff.
00:06:15
Speaker
But yeah,
00:06:16
Speaker
if I wanted to trick people into thinking it was a normal pinball machine when you started,
00:06:22
Speaker
and then use the full RGB sweeps and crazy explosions and stuff that are on the actual play field and in the light shows as something that would really have more of an impact.
The Rick and Morty Experience
00:06:34
Speaker
So that was like the main driver for like the light show generation on it.
00:06:39
Speaker
Then I also needed something that I thought sounded really good and something that I wanted to hear.
00:06:45
Speaker
So I threw in my own music that I created from scratch for that.
00:06:48
Speaker
But yeah, it was like a lot of that stuff.
00:06:50
Speaker
So really that high level, that's really why I decided to make that game.
00:06:57
Speaker
And really, I just wanted to bring it places and share it with people and play dollar games on it with everybody.
00:07:02
Speaker
You're going to steal all their dollars, huh?
00:07:04
Speaker
Well, you know, it's funny because I am not a good pinball player, but I am average enough that I can win sometimes.
00:07:13
Speaker
So losing a few dollars here and there is no big deal.
00:07:17
Speaker
But I got a lot of satisfaction out of losing dollars to people on TNA.
00:07:23
Speaker
That was worth the dollar to me.
00:07:25
Speaker
Now, remind me, wasn't, I don't know if I'm remembering correctly,
00:07:30
Speaker
At the pinball Olympics, wasn't this on the turntable?
00:07:34
Speaker
It was this year.
00:07:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:35
Speaker
This, uh, or this past pinball Olympics.
00:07:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:37
Speaker
So 2021.
00:07:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:38
Speaker
Um, yeah.
00:07:39
Speaker
Just in case the game's not hard enough, uh, add it spinning at the same time as you are.
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:46
Speaker
It's, that's pretty rough.
00:07:48
Speaker
So I would say that this soundtrack is probably revered as one of the best soundtracks in pinball, especially for original score.
00:07:55
Speaker
I doubt there's one I can think of that is higher.
00:07:58
Speaker
Um,
00:07:59
Speaker
Has it been hard because you've recently, you did music for Weird Al and then you did it for Rick and Morty, I guess, vice versa.
00:08:07
Speaker
Has it been harder to deal with licenses than doing your own jam or is it kind of easy because you get kind of a template to work off of?
00:08:16
Speaker
Oh, absolutely.
00:08:16
Speaker
So that's a really good question because there's I was actually very scared working with the Rick and Morty license because I always thought the worst.
00:08:25
Speaker
Right.
00:08:25
Speaker
I thought like, hey, I'm going to remix one of their songs for the main theme.
00:08:29
Speaker
And it's got to be energetic at times and, you know, halftime at other times.
00:08:35
Speaker
I'm really nervous about sending this over to them and having them having to like make a ton of revisions, like feel bad about it.
00:08:41
Speaker
But I sent it over to Adult Swim and they just thumbs up approved it right away and didn't have any feedback whatsoever for any of the music that was in the game.
00:08:50
Speaker
And that goes for the sound effects too, which is just incredible to me.
00:08:54
Speaker
I think I just got lucky though, because I've heard horror stories of other things.
00:08:57
Speaker
And yeah, I'm going to go with luck.
00:09:00
Speaker
Let's go with luck on that one.
00:09:02
Speaker
Well, luck and skill, I guess.
00:09:04
Speaker
Okay.
00:09:05
Speaker
So with Rick and Morty, though, you went a different level.
00:09:08
Speaker
You're like, you know what?
00:09:09
Speaker
I've done a street level game.
00:09:11
Speaker
I'm going to put some ramps in.
00:09:12
Speaker
So how was that different doing a more modern take?
00:09:17
Speaker
And you also put a pop bumper down in the danger zone.
00:09:21
Speaker
So that was interesting.
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:23
Speaker
Oh, yeah, the pop bumper thing is just crazy.
00:09:28
Speaker
When I started designing the game and Charlie told me that we could get the Rick and Morty license, that's when I said, okay, well, I need to actually create a chaotic game.
00:09:39
Speaker
And how am I going to actually do that?
00:09:40
Speaker
Right.
00:09:41
Speaker
So I wanted it to have, I wanted the low ball times again, and I wanted to create more chaos.
00:09:46
Speaker
So I actually put, I was like, well, I'm going to try and put a pop bumper somewhere weird again, because I love where I stuck it in TNA.
00:09:53
Speaker
It just, it's not very typical right there for modern games.
00:09:56
Speaker
So I went really extreme with it.
00:09:59
Speaker
And I was like, I'm going to replace one of the slingshots with it and just see what happens.
00:10:03
Speaker
And really it's, I didn't think it was going to make it to production because it was kind of a joke.
00:10:08
Speaker
I was like, ah, let's see, you know, let's see what I can get away with here, you know?
00:10:12
Speaker
So I cut the first white wood and we powered up all the stuff.
00:10:18
Speaker
I threw a P3 rock system in it so I could actually power up the slingshots and the pop bumper and the flippers and everything.
00:10:25
Speaker
And I'll tell you what, it was really fun and it actually worked.
00:10:30
Speaker
It was out of the way enough where it didn't intrude on the lower Italian bottom stuff.
00:10:36
Speaker
And it was neat because it was actually sending the ball upward on the play field and you could actually have it make shots for you.
00:10:44
Speaker
So we decided that it was a go.
00:10:48
Speaker
It was great.
00:10:49
Speaker
And then at that point when we said, hey, let's push this forward more, keep it in the whitewood, I still only gave it like a 50% chance of getting in the production game because I didn't know how the general public was going to react to it.
00:11:05
Speaker
So that was a big key because remember, like I have to make a game that will sell for Spooky, right?
00:11:13
Speaker
Like if I made something too crazy and people just didn't want to, you know, accept it, right?
00:11:21
Speaker
That could hurt Spooky's bottom line really on that game.
00:11:24
Speaker
So yeah.
00:11:26
Speaker
I was a little bit worried about that, but every single person that I've had play it who are very trustworthy friends of mine who will absolutely tell me something is not good.
00:11:35
Speaker
They all played it and every single one of them said they loved it.
00:11:37
Speaker
So I was okay, I guess, pushing it to production.
00:11:42
Speaker
You know, Charlie loved it too.
00:11:43
Speaker
So it's a whole thing there.
00:11:46
Speaker
It's pretty crazy, actually.
00:11:48
Speaker
Well, and when we talked to you at Texas Pinball Festival, you told us like everyone sees that TNA is a love letter to like early solid states.
00:11:56
Speaker
But what a lot of people don't see is that Rick and Morty is kind of a love letter to System 11 games.
00:12:01
Speaker
Was there any games that kind of stood out to you that kind of helped influence you making that game?
00:12:07
Speaker
No, you're 100% right, though.
00:12:09
Speaker
So no specific game, but Rick and Morty, if you were to look at that and just take a glance at it at a high level, that's a System 11 game with an LCD screen on it.
00:12:20
Speaker
Really, I wanted it to still be retro and simple and not really take the ball away from you too much.
00:12:26
Speaker
And I don't really like tons of cluttered playfields.
00:12:30
Speaker
So I tried to keep it as clutter free as possible.
00:12:33
Speaker
I know I got a lot of heat for that though.
00:12:36
Speaker
I mean, people wanted toys and stuff and more things all over it.
00:12:40
Speaker
And I understand that that's like something that people do like, but again, I was kind of, I was kind of building in half for me again and then in half for everybody else at the same time.
Balancing Work and Creative Projects
00:12:51
Speaker
So I kept it pretty stripped down.
00:12:54
Speaker
But Spooky did end up putting some, some toys and things in there for production.
00:12:59
Speaker
But yeah, it's a System 11 game.
00:13:01
Speaker
And I love System 11 games.
00:13:02
Speaker
I've had a majority of them in my collection over the years.
00:13:07
Speaker
So that's the last game that you have, or at least designed, that is in the public.
00:13:12
Speaker
Do you have other things in your development cycle, I guess?
00:13:17
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:13:18
Speaker
So I have tons of ideas, but I'll tell you what, designing a game in your spare time is very, very difficult to do just because of how much goes into it.
00:13:30
Speaker
Because if I design a game, I'm going to want to do the audio.
00:13:33
Speaker
I'm going to want to do all the sound effects.
00:13:35
Speaker
Right.
00:13:35
Speaker
And that's a full time job right there.
00:13:37
Speaker
Right.
00:13:37
Speaker
And then I'm going to want to go and make sure the rules are correct.
00:13:42
Speaker
And, you know, like the, the rules designers kind of staying within what, you know, what I would want.
00:13:47
Speaker
So it's a huge job.
00:13:49
Speaker
So like, I have to, I kind of want to take a break on it and like relax for a little while.
00:13:54
Speaker
Do you just do audio and then we'll see what happens, but I do have tons more ideas.
00:13:59
Speaker
I'm not giving up on anything.
00:14:01
Speaker
And yeah.
00:14:02
Speaker
It just dawned on me.
00:14:03
Speaker
I don't know why this clicked in my mind, but does that mean you made Rick and Morty?
00:14:08
Speaker
Obviously, TNA was a home project thing.
00:14:10
Speaker
We all understood that.
00:14:11
Speaker
But Rick and Morty, you were still working at Pinball Life, so I assume it was all not on the side, but kind of after work, right?
00:14:19
Speaker
Nights and weekends.
00:14:20
Speaker
It was nights and weekends.
00:14:21
Speaker
I was moonlighting that entire project.
00:14:23
Speaker
Holy crap.
00:14:25
Speaker
It kills you.
00:14:26
Speaker
You've got to be really careful not to do too much because you miss out on life, you know?
00:14:32
Speaker
So how was it doing sound for Weird Al?
00:14:34
Speaker
Because it's already a musician.
00:14:37
Speaker
How do you go in and say, I'm going to add to what you've already made?
00:14:42
Speaker
Oh, yeah, that's fun.
00:14:44
Speaker
So all of the music that is in Weird Al was taken from different generations of his albums, right?
00:14:51
Speaker
So there's a really
Music for Weird Al Pinball
00:14:52
Speaker
broad spectrum of music from his early career and his later career.
00:14:57
Speaker
All of it was mastered differently.
00:15:00
Speaker
Right.
00:15:00
Speaker
So different like loudness levels and like all sorts of crazy stuff, like different EQ settings.
00:15:06
Speaker
So the first thing I did was I went through and I remastered every song that we're going to use in a modern style of mastering technique where it's very loud.
00:15:17
Speaker
It's very compressed.
00:15:18
Speaker
It sounds really good on pinball machine hardware.
00:15:22
Speaker
And that was the first thing I did, which took a bunch of time.
00:15:25
Speaker
But then I said, hey, we have we have some like open areas that we need some music for.
00:15:30
Speaker
So I was able to create music from scratch in the tone of Weird Al, which is like which is really fun for me because his music is so quirky and and and it varies so much.
00:15:44
Speaker
So it's like.
00:15:45
Speaker
Yeah, it was really interesting.
00:15:48
Speaker
And I think if you listen to that high score music on there, you'll see it just, it fits right in with the rest of everything else going on.
00:15:54
Speaker
But I did write that from scratch.
00:15:57
Speaker
I was going to say, it all sounds like it was made from Weird Al.
00:16:01
Speaker
So you obviously did a really great job of matching his style.
00:16:05
Speaker
Because I played that game, we played it a handful of times at TPF, and there was never once where I played it and was like, this doesn't sound like Weird Al at all.
00:16:12
Speaker
This must have been Scott, you know.
00:16:14
Speaker
Well, most of it is Weird Al.
00:16:16
Speaker
So I wrote two songs for that.
00:16:18
Speaker
And it's, let's see, the two songs, the high score music was something I wrote from scratch.
00:16:25
Speaker
And there's also, I believe they used it in Drink from the Firehose, but I could be misrepresenting that.
00:16:31
Speaker
But they used another one of my tracks there.
00:16:34
Speaker
Did you get to talk with Weird Al at all?
00:16:37
Speaker
I didn't.
00:16:37
Speaker
I wish I did.
00:16:38
Speaker
That guy sounds like it would be really fun to just like chat with and talk about just music stuff or just life in general.
00:16:46
Speaker
You tell Jerry that needs to be in the contract next time.
00:16:49
Speaker
If we're making a license for you, at least get to come down and meet all the people on part of the project.
00:16:54
Speaker
I know they should have had Weird Al come in to the actual like fly into Austin and be like, just meet with everybody.
00:17:01
Speaker
I would have flown down there for that in a heartbeat.
00:17:03
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:17:04
Speaker
I'm sure he's on tour, though.
00:17:09
Speaker
Actually, the crazy thing is that you knew Weird Al was valedictorian, right?
00:17:14
Speaker
No, I did not.
00:17:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:16
Speaker
So the guy's crazy smart.
00:17:18
Speaker
And I just find it funny that he decided to do his to do his career in basically joke songs.
00:17:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:28
Speaker
Yeah.
VR Game Soundtrack for Arcade Legend
00:17:29
Speaker
Yeah, he's a smart guy.
00:17:30
Speaker
He's also does like anyone you ever talk to about Weird Al is always talking about how he's just such a nice guy and how he just, you know, does all this really charitable stuff, which is really great.
00:17:41
Speaker
So may we ask you, you said that you have other developments in the pipeline.
00:17:47
Speaker
Is some for Spooky, more for Multimorphic?
00:17:51
Speaker
As of right now, I am just helping Multimorphic with some things.
00:17:55
Speaker
But the main project that I'm working on now is actually not confidential, which is cool.
00:18:03
Speaker
It is an official soundtrack for a VR game.
00:18:08
Speaker
This VR game is coming out on Steam and Oculus and all the VR platforms at the end of the year.
00:18:15
Speaker
And I'll also be releasing an album with my record label.
00:18:18
Speaker
I'll release that entire album on there, which is interesting because that album is an official soundtrack for the game, but it also contains some of my prior work.
00:18:28
Speaker
that has not been yet released on an album.
00:18:30
Speaker
So it has some stuff from TNA in it.
00:18:33
Speaker
It has some things.
00:18:35
Speaker
There's a song called Silver Falls that's going to be on that official soundtrack, which I actually wrote for a homebrew project.
00:18:44
Speaker
So I got that going on there, which is really cool.
00:18:48
Speaker
But it's like 12 tracks.
00:18:51
Speaker
And yeah, that's going to come out later this year.
00:18:52
Speaker
So that's the main thing.
00:18:55
Speaker
What kind of game is this?
00:18:55
Speaker
Is this like Guitar Hero or something?
00:18:57
Speaker
It's called Arcade Legend.
00:18:59
Speaker
So it's like a, it's a game where you go in, stick your VR headset on, you go into an empty arcade, you find the keys to this arcade and you go in, you clean it up, you buy some games, you throw them in there, you maintain them, you like,
00:19:14
Speaker
You could set everything up and configure your arcade exactly how you want it, like put couches over here, like, you know, all the really cool stuff.
00:19:22
Speaker
It's mostly redemption things, but it has things like, you know, like, I don't know.
00:19:27
Speaker
It's just all sorts of really cool stuff in it.
00:19:31
Speaker
But you can also invite your friends in to play games in your arcade and win tickets, and then you win the tickets and you can go buy virtual things in the actual, you know, inside the game.
00:19:42
Speaker
Hmm.
00:19:44
Speaker
So are these going to be like licensed games inside your arcade?
00:19:46
Speaker
Licensed games.
00:19:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:48
Speaker
Yeah, they're absolutely licensed games.
00:19:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's a legit operation.
00:19:52
Speaker
Most of the games right now are licensed from LAI Games.
00:19:56
Speaker
It makes a ton of different redemption games that I'm sure you've played.
00:20:01
Speaker
There's like a less balanced game.
00:20:03
Speaker
There's like a...
00:20:05
Speaker
I forgot the name of the thing is, though, but it's a basketball game.
00:20:07
Speaker
There's a like speed of light, which is like a thing where people like you have to hit all the like the big wall of buttons in front of you and you have to hit them when they light up as fast as you can.
00:20:17
Speaker
Is it like Chuck E. Cheese where you go to a redemption center and you get like a Chinese finger trap or a frog jumper?
00:20:25
Speaker
Oh, absolutely.
00:20:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:26
Speaker
And but in this case, there's other things you can buy to inside the game.
00:20:29
Speaker
So there's a jukebox in the game and you can actually buy the tracks from the official soundtrack with your tickets and put it in your jukebox and have it play for people.
Influences and Favorite Projects
00:20:40
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:20:41
Speaker
How did that happen?
00:20:43
Speaker
Like, do you start putting out your information and say, hey, I'm an artist.
00:20:48
Speaker
I know how to write electronic dance music.
00:20:52
Speaker
How does this work?
00:20:53
Speaker
Because I would have no idea.
00:20:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's all about the relationships that you make.
00:20:58
Speaker
So in VR, I became friends with somebody who was on the team of that game, and they were going to actually just use like...
00:21:08
Speaker
You know what you can get like unlicensed songs or royalty free music.
00:21:12
Speaker
You just kind of pay for it and you can just use it however you want.
00:21:14
Speaker
But then again, so can anyone else.
00:21:17
Speaker
Right.
00:21:17
Speaker
So you'll you're not hearing any unique songs you can hear.
00:21:21
Speaker
You'll be able to hear those at other, you know, in other games or something.
00:21:24
Speaker
So it's like art, but stock music.
00:21:28
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:21:29
Speaker
And he was like, you know, I love what you did with TNA.
00:21:33
Speaker
And they're like, would you be interested in talking about doing an OST for this game?
00:21:38
Speaker
And then, you know, it just kind of happened that way.
00:21:41
Speaker
So it's it's cool.
00:21:42
Speaker
Like, you never really know what life's going to throw at you, you know.
00:21:45
Speaker
So what's been your favorite project so far?
00:21:49
Speaker
My favorite project.
00:21:50
Speaker
Oh, man.
00:21:53
Speaker
Let's see.
00:21:53
Speaker
There's so many crazy ones.
00:21:55
Speaker
Probably just the TNA thing, though.
00:21:57
Speaker
Not favorite because of how many years it took off my life, but because of stress and stuff.
Passion for Cars and Personal Interests
00:22:04
Speaker
But it's my favorite because it's the most I think it's the most well received of the projects that I've done.
00:22:11
Speaker
Now, you're still a child of the 80s.
00:22:13
Speaker
You're very much influenced.
00:22:15
Speaker
You still, I believe, drive an MR2, correct?
00:22:19
Speaker
Oh, no.
00:22:20
Speaker
So I don't have a Fiero.
00:22:21
Speaker
Oh, it's a Fiero.
00:22:23
Speaker
That was really an 80s.
00:22:26
Speaker
But I actually got rid of that in 2020.
00:22:30
Speaker
I sold that.
00:22:32
Speaker
And I picked myself up Mitsubishi Evolution.
00:22:36
Speaker
I don't even know what that is.
00:22:38
Speaker
It's the rally car version of the Lancer.
00:22:43
Speaker
Okay.
00:22:44
Speaker
So it's an Evolution 3 from 1995.
00:22:47
Speaker
So it's an old right-hand drive only made for the Japan market type of car.
00:22:54
Speaker
So it's super cool.
00:22:58
Speaker
It was a former race car in its days, and now it's a retired race car that I just care for.
00:23:06
Speaker
Okay, so it's super cool.
00:23:09
Speaker
What inspired you to buy that?
00:23:11
Speaker
I mean, I've never even heard of this, but it feels very early 90s.
00:23:15
Speaker
It's like, yeah, it's if you can pull a picture of it, my Instagram is a picture of me standing in front of the car, actually.
00:23:22
Speaker
Nice.
00:23:23
Speaker
So the the reason I really like those is because back in like around 2006 ish,
00:23:32
Speaker
I got my first real job out of college, like a real deal career job with a trajectory.
00:23:37
Speaker
Right.
00:23:39
Speaker
And I said, I'm going to treat myself and buy myself my dream car, which was a Mitsubishi Evolution.
00:23:44
Speaker
And that was a brand new 2006 Mitsubishi Evolution.
00:23:49
Speaker
It's a very fast rally car and I loved it.
00:23:53
Speaker
I drove that for many years and I ended up getting rid of it and got something more practical because of the... I'm like, I'm going to keep breaking this thing.
00:24:03
Speaker
I can't daily drive this thing.
00:24:05
Speaker
It's just, you know, it's like a race car.
00:24:06
Speaker
So I ended up selling that and getting
TNA Rerun and Licensing
00:24:09
Speaker
something more practical.
00:24:09
Speaker
But then, you know, it just kind of ate at me over the years.
00:24:13
Speaker
Like, man, I should have just chucked that car in a storage unit and just forgot it was even there, you know?
00:24:20
Speaker
So it came up locally.
00:24:22
Speaker
One of my friends actually had the Evo 3, which is the third generation of the Mitsubishi Evolution that was not supposed to be in this country.
00:24:33
Speaker
And it became legally titled and he's like wanting to sell it.
00:24:37
Speaker
So I ended up, you know, trading him some pinball machines and sold the Fiero and picked it up.
00:24:44
Speaker
So it's really cool.
00:24:45
Speaker
And it's just been a real fun thing to tinker on.
00:24:48
Speaker
I had a fast car for years.
00:24:51
Speaker
It was a Lexus 300, you know, IS 300 and it was fun.
00:24:56
Speaker
But one day I was driving it and I hit black ice on the freeway and I spun around like eight times.
00:25:03
Speaker
And thankfully I didn't crash into anything, even though the freeway was full of cars.
00:25:09
Speaker
And I just said, I can't drive a rear wheel drive car here.
00:25:12
Speaker
There's too much inclement weather.
00:25:14
Speaker
So recently it was announced that there's going to be like a TNA 2.0 coming out.
00:25:20
Speaker
Can you shed some light on that?
00:25:21
Speaker
Sure.
00:25:22
Speaker
The first thing is, is that I think we should stop calling it TNA 2.0 because that 2.0 designation means different.
00:25:32
Speaker
It is not really different.
00:25:34
Speaker
It's a rerun of TNA.
00:25:35
Speaker
Okay.
00:25:36
Speaker
Okay.
00:25:37
Speaker
I am planning on doing a code update, which has some just minor little things in it here and there.
00:25:43
Speaker
But because there's some things I have to fix, I want to try and fix the score bit integration, making that more seamless.
00:25:50
Speaker
I wanted to put a new multiball in it, but I don't know if it's totally fun.
00:25:54
Speaker
And it might take away from the actual, you know, original code.
00:25:58
Speaker
So I'm probably, I don't know, that's up in the air right now.
00:26:01
Speaker
But it's a TNA rerun.
00:26:04
Speaker
So Spooky is going to rerun TNA.
00:26:07
Speaker
And the differences are going to be that it's going to be in the normal TNA cabinet.
00:26:15
Speaker
But the LCD is going to have the flip down LCD screen that they used on Rick and Morty and newer games.
00:26:23
Speaker
Mostly because the flip down screen is really handy to get in the back box and it kind of angles the screen back a little better, makes it look nice.
00:26:30
Speaker
But they're going to load this thing up with all the really cool mods.
00:26:35
Speaker
I think they're going to put, I don't know the exact mods that are in there yet, but I do know it's confirmed.
00:26:40
Speaker
We're going to put green, those fluorescent green protectors on it just from the factory with the translucent drop targets.
00:26:48
Speaker
And we're going to have those lit up from the factory as well.
00:26:52
Speaker
So, yeah, that's I think it's also we're going to have the upgraded shoot again display, too, which has extra LEDs on it to give more give more light show stuff.
00:27:02
Speaker
So, but yeah, it's really just a rerun.
00:27:04
Speaker
There's been enough demand where people want to still purchase the game and haven't been able to find a used one.
00:27:11
Speaker
So.
00:27:12
Speaker
So can you retrofit any of the new stuff that you're talking about on the original run of TNA?
00:27:18
Speaker
Oh yeah, it's all bolt-on stuff.
00:27:20
Speaker
Yeah, so nothing that's going to be on the TNA rerun game is, it's nothing that you can't bolt onto the original.
00:27:28
Speaker
It's basically just a rerun of the original again with just the stuff installed prior for you, so you don't have to deal with it.
00:27:35
Speaker
Okay, cool.
00:27:36
Speaker
So how does that work?
00:27:38
Speaker
I mean, I know with licensors, if you want to run Stern ran Iron Man Vault editions for about 20 years after they made it.
00:27:48
Speaker
So how does that work with Spooky?
00:27:50
Speaker
Did they have to contact you and say, hey, we want to license some more games?
00:27:53
Speaker
Or do they just have free run to make as many as they want?
00:27:58
Speaker
How does that work?
00:27:59
Speaker
Yeah, so it's really quite simple.
00:28:02
Speaker
I own all of the IP for Total Nuclear Annihilation.
00:28:07
Speaker
So something like if Spooky wants to rerun again, they just, they contact me.
00:28:11
Speaker
We have a contract that says they can just run as long as we both agree, they can run more of them when they need to or want to.
00:28:19
Speaker
And they just contact me and we license it out and they run it.
00:28:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's pretty good.
00:28:28
Speaker
And I just keep helping support it.
00:28:30
Speaker
So with the rerun, does that mean they'll be making more games?
00:28:34
Speaker
So will TNA become again, the most ran game at spooky?
00:28:39
Speaker
Oh, I'm hoping so.
00:28:40
Speaker
I really hope so.
00:28:41
Speaker
I hope there's demand for it to tell you the truth.
Art Direction and 80s Aesthetics
00:28:44
Speaker
Um, but we'll see.
00:28:45
Speaker
I don't know.
00:28:46
Speaker
I think what, what was the run of Halloween?
00:28:48
Speaker
Cause that one, that one, the initial, like,
00:28:50
Speaker
most run games so that's uh it wasn't a 1250 i think because i think they did 500 ultramans and 1250 of halloween so i think it was 17. yeah so 1250 yeah i don't know um i hope there's demand to blow that number out of the water but i don't know and i don't know the plan for spooky whether they're going to limit it or not uh they haven't yet announced and made anything superficial so
00:29:15
Speaker
That was going to be my next question.
00:29:16
Speaker
If they were going to limit it or if they're just going to keep running until they stop.
00:29:20
Speaker
I would keep running that until you couldn't.
00:29:22
Speaker
Yeah, I would.
00:29:23
Speaker
That would be very smart to do that.
00:29:25
Speaker
I don't know if that's what they're going to do, though.
00:29:27
Speaker
So we'll see what happens, I guess.
00:29:30
Speaker
Okay, so the art on TNA, I know you've talked about this before, but remind me, I mean, it definitely has a retro 80s feel.
00:29:38
Speaker
So in addition to writing the game, you also had to basically write the story and you basically also had to serve as art director to say, how do I want this to look?
00:29:50
Speaker
So tell me more about all of that.
00:29:52
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:29:52
Speaker
So I had to do everything on that.
00:29:54
Speaker
So I came up with the story first.
00:29:58
Speaker
I then started building the white wood and art was the last thing I wanted to touch.
00:30:03
Speaker
Right.
00:30:03
Speaker
So I just, I wanted to get this game fully going white wood with music and everything, and then let the art flow afterward because in my brain, I truly think that's the proper way to do a pinball machine.
00:30:16
Speaker
And I kept seeing John Papaduke put the cart before the horse with, he's like blasting art on these play fields that aren't even done yet.
00:30:24
Speaker
And it's like, what a, I keep seeing this.
00:30:26
Speaker
I'm like, what a waste of time.
00:30:27
Speaker
You know, I got, I, I'm going to show people like just with, by doing this, that this is the way to actually build a pinball machine, which most people understand, I guess, you know, Stern definitely knows that.
00:30:42
Speaker
So I left it to the complete end on that art.
00:30:46
Speaker
And I got to work with Matt Andrews as I am not a good art director, as I've learned.
00:30:53
Speaker
And Matt Andrews has, he had saved myself many times during this project by saying, like just saying, hey, Scott, stop.
00:31:02
Speaker
We're going to, let's think about this for a second and do, how about this way?
00:31:06
Speaker
Right.
00:31:06
Speaker
Right.
00:31:07
Speaker
So it was really great actually working with him.
00:31:12
Speaker
And if I remember correctly, your wife is the inspiration for the girl in the game too, right?
00:31:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:18
Speaker
So my wife really put up with a lot while I was working on that project and I wanted to get a little nod to her.
00:31:26
Speaker
So I gave Matt just a picture of her and said, Hey, when you draw the main character,
00:31:31
Speaker
if you could make it sort of look like her and it would be just kind of sealed into this piece of pinball history.
00:31:39
Speaker
And it, you know, I thought it was I thought it was just a nice gesture for everything she had to put up with.
00:31:43
Speaker
So, you know, that's quite the love letter.
00:31:47
Speaker
It is.
00:31:48
Speaker
Do you have the translate hanging in your house somewhere?
00:31:51
Speaker
I don't actually, because I have the machine.
00:31:54
Speaker
So I don't feel like I'm very limited on art space.
00:31:57
Speaker
So I like to try and keep it as, you know, as diverse as possible.
00:32:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:03
Speaker
I hope you're happy because it's ruined my relationship now because the poster hangs on my wall.
00:32:09
Speaker
I told my wife the story.
00:32:10
Speaker
She's like, why don't you do that for me now?
00:32:12
Speaker
Yeah, see, that's the – so I probably shouldn't – you know what?
00:32:14
Speaker
Hey, let's just go back.
00:32:15
Speaker
You can just – you just change what I said.
00:32:18
Speaker
Just change it with one of those AI things.
00:32:20
Speaker
I'm just kidding.
00:32:23
Speaker
No, I think it's awesome.
00:32:24
Speaker
If I could, I'd do it.
00:32:26
Speaker
Well, it captures the feel of the 80s, which unless you grew up or at least experienced it, you can tell when someone from Hollywood tries to set something in the 80s, but you're just like, there's something not quite right about the feel of that.
00:32:46
Speaker
There's two things to that, actually.
00:32:48
Speaker
And I think I can probably shed some light on this.
00:32:51
Speaker
There's actual what things looked like in the 80s.
00:32:55
Speaker
And there's the retrofuturistic version of the 80s that we all think of.
00:33:01
Speaker
And TNA is the retrofuturistic version, which at the time, this retrofuturism thing for the 80s was just starting to gain mainstream popularity.
00:33:12
Speaker
It's everywhere now, as you can see.
00:33:15
Speaker
I've got a shirt with Stern's logo on it.
00:33:17
Speaker
It's in that retrofuturism thing, and it's one of my favorite shirts.
00:33:22
Speaker
It's great.
00:33:23
Speaker
That style is not really the 80s, though, if you think about it.
00:33:28
Speaker
It captures the feel of the 80s, but it's not.
00:33:32
Speaker
From the 80s, and I have pictures to prove it of myself opening presents on Christmas Day.
00:33:38
Speaker
The 80s looked real...
00:33:40
Speaker
Brown.
00:33:41
Speaker
Yeah, brown.
00:33:42
Speaker
Like the couch with the flowers on it.
00:33:43
Speaker
That's what I was about to say.
00:33:46
Speaker
What about the TV?
00:33:47
Speaker
The TV was stuck with siding, like wood siding on it.
00:33:50
Speaker
Wood paneling.
00:33:52
Speaker
Wood paneling on the walls.
00:33:53
Speaker
Exactly.
00:33:54
Speaker
It wasn't even quality wood paneling.
00:33:56
Speaker
It was like fake wood paneling.
00:33:57
Speaker
Yeah, it was like the really cheap, like particle board with a wood paneling finish line.
00:34:01
Speaker
With a veneer, and if you put a piece of tape on it, it would rip off.
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:06
Speaker
No, absolutely.
00:34:06
Speaker
Well, the funny thing is I've seen those memes.
00:34:08
Speaker
There's like what everybody thinks the 80s are, and it shows like all basically this color splash, everything.
00:34:15
Speaker
And it says what actually the 80s were, and it shows the TV on the ground with the Nintendo, the NES in front of it with a light gun.
00:34:22
Speaker
and the floral couch and the shag carpet.
00:34:25
Speaker
And we had, we had orange carpet.
00:34:27
Speaker
It was ugly.
00:34:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:29
Speaker
Ours was like beige-ish brown color and it was like long.
00:34:32
Speaker
It was like, it's just kind of, you wouldn't see that in a house today.
00:34:35
Speaker
No.
00:34:36
Speaker
So here's what you need to do with the rerun of TNA.
00:34:40
Speaker
Keep doing the futuristic one, but run an 80s edition where it's like the brown ashtray on top of the pot bumper.
00:34:46
Speaker
The brown ashtray from McDonald's.
00:34:48
Speaker
McDonald's ashtrays.
00:34:50
Speaker
McDonald's ashtrays.
00:34:52
Speaker
Oh, I remember those.
00:34:53
Speaker
Those are awful.
00:34:55
Speaker
I wonder how much those cost on eBay.
00:34:56
Speaker
Hold on a second.
00:34:58
Speaker
I think I might need one of these for my bar down here.
00:35:01
Speaker
The tagline says it's brown.
00:35:03
Speaker
McDonald's ashtray.
00:35:05
Speaker
Let's see if it's affordable.
00:35:09
Speaker
It is terrible.
00:35:11
Speaker
I want the glass one.
00:35:13
Speaker
It looks like they took a beer bottle and made it into an ashtray.
00:35:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's a beer bottle.
00:35:19
Speaker
It's a beer bottle color.
00:35:21
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:35:22
Speaker
Yeah, there's some.
00:35:22
Speaker
It's $18.
00:35:25
Speaker
That's a still of a deal.
00:35:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:27
Speaker
I'm not seeing my, man, they even have these disposables.
00:35:31
Speaker
I just find it amazing that if you tell kids, yeah, when we went to restaurants, because they have all these clear clean air laws, which are great now because I don't like smelling like smoke.
00:35:42
Speaker
But I mean, that's, that was unheard of.
00:35:43
Speaker
It's like, Hey, which section do you want to sit in the, the designated smoking section or the non-smoking that still smells like smoke?
00:35:50
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:35:51
Speaker
It was really gross.
00:35:52
Speaker
And I remember there was a specific time where they outlawed smoking in bars, right?
00:35:58
Speaker
And I could go to a bar with my friends and come home and not smell terrible.
00:36:03
Speaker
It was really like, it was a weird thing.
00:36:06
Speaker
Like the next day you'd be like, oh, you'd take your clothes and you're like just chucking them in the hamper and like closing it and getting it out of there because it smells like cigarettes.
00:36:13
Speaker
But yeah, that it's a, it's a thing that it doesn't exist anymore.
00:36:17
Speaker
Well, they don't, they don't allow smoking in bars here.
00:36:21
Speaker
I don't know where they do.
00:36:22
Speaker
I guess they probably do somewhere.
00:36:24
Speaker
Vegas.
00:36:25
Speaker
The only time I really smell a lot of cigarette smoke is in Vegas because everybody has to chain smoke while hitting the penny slots.
00:36:32
Speaker
Yeah, but you can do almost anything you want in Vegas and it's just...
00:36:36
Speaker
They claim what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but the STD still comes home with you.
00:36:41
Speaker
Oh.
00:36:42
Speaker
You know, don't they wear diapers in Vegas too?
00:36:44
Speaker
Like some of the people, like, and they sit at the slot machines because they don't want to get in.
00:36:48
Speaker
Yeah, that is a level of commitment I'm not interested in.
00:36:52
Speaker
Oh, man.
00:36:54
Speaker
Yeah, just sitting there.
00:36:54
Speaker
Like, imagine, like, not being able to leave your station, right?
00:36:57
Speaker
Because you're like, okay, this is going to be the one.
00:36:59
Speaker
This is going to be the hit.
00:37:00
Speaker
You're like, oh, man.
00:37:01
Speaker
I don't even want to.
00:37:02
Speaker
Yeah, forget it.
00:37:05
Speaker
But if you do go down there, so...
00:37:07
Speaker
people from utah really go to mesquite or windover which is like the mini vegas is it's like i i don't think a lot of people go to mesquite they basically drive through like mesquite is the very ghetto version of vegas and and windover is not even that it is like an outpost it feels like an abandoned saloon town it's old folks home of vegas is mesquite yeah
00:37:32
Speaker
But that's probably why I was going to say that's why they're all wearing diapers at the slots is because there's a lady smoking a cigarette while having her oxygen bottle right there.
00:37:39
Speaker
She's like 60, 70 years old.
00:37:42
Speaker
Isn't that an insane fire hazard too?
00:37:45
Speaker
Oh, yes.
00:37:45
Speaker
That's just crazy.
00:37:47
Speaker
Trust me.
00:37:48
Speaker
When I worked at the VA, you'd see people out there with their oxygen tank and their pole standing in the rain smoking.
Future Developments and Multimorphic
00:37:54
Speaker
I'm like, something's going to happen.
00:37:56
Speaker
Wow.
00:37:58
Speaker
Wow.
00:38:00
Speaker
Okay, so what are you looking forward to now?
00:38:01
Speaker
Like what is on your horizon other than the, like, what are you looking forward to in pinball?
00:38:08
Speaker
Not necessarily what you're personally doing, but is there something in pinball that gets you excited right now?
00:38:13
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:38:14
Speaker
So I, as crazy as it sounds, I am really excited to see what Multimorphic does with that platform.
00:38:23
Speaker
Right.
00:38:23
Speaker
Multimorphic got a big, they got a lot of publicity from the Weird Al game.
00:38:30
Speaker
And it's just going to push those guys who are a very smart team of people to do some crazy things with that platform.
00:38:38
Speaker
I know still there's a ton of people that are just, they don't accept it yet as a pinball machine.
00:38:42
Speaker
I'm wondering just, I want to see what happens, you know?
00:38:45
Speaker
So I'm excited to see what some of the most smart people that I know can do with that.
Challenges in Pinball Projects
00:38:51
Speaker
Because they're driven.
00:38:53
Speaker
It's something Jerry and the team over there are really, really driven to try and make that platform, just get it out there to people.
00:39:02
Speaker
Well, and I hope they get some recognition this year too.
00:39:04
Speaker
Because let's be honest, I guess there hasn't been a ton of games released this year, but of all of them, Weird Al's up there.
00:39:11
Speaker
It is.
00:39:12
Speaker
They did a really great job with Weird Al.
00:39:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's a, that was a really fun project too.
00:39:17
Speaker
It's, uh, it's neat to, to see the team kind of working on this stuff.
00:39:22
Speaker
And, uh,
00:39:23
Speaker
You know, it's a lot different from when I was doing stuff at Spooky because of how much I had to do.
00:39:28
Speaker
And it was to be able to just have access to watch the development team do their thing and then just be like, okay, well, I'm just going to do sound, right?
00:39:38
Speaker
And that's really all I need to function and like worry about, right?
00:39:42
Speaker
And it's really neat to see that, you know, instead of just running around all over the place trying to get everything done.
00:39:48
Speaker
Okay, so speaking of that, since you've actually seen behind the scenes on Multimorphic, did it give you an itch to try your own?
Pinball Olympics and Maintenance Tips
00:39:59
Speaker
You know, I've got ideas, but I don't yet have them completely fleshed out.
00:40:06
Speaker
Do you think a Multimorphic project would be easier or harder than doing our traditional pinball?
00:40:13
Speaker
I think that, and honestly, I don't know.
00:40:18
Speaker
I think from a complete dev perspective, right?
00:40:20
Speaker
Like if I were to try to build a pinball machine completely from scratch on the multimorphic platform, I think it's gonna be much harder because of all the video assets.
00:40:31
Speaker
And this is only for me personally, because I don't know how to properly create video assets, right?
00:40:37
Speaker
So it's just something I would have to work with someone else to do
00:40:41
Speaker
It's like black magic to me, man, how these people do this awesome video stuff.
00:40:46
Speaker
So don't know.
00:40:48
Speaker
A traditional pinball game, though, is extremely hard as well because there's so much that has to go into it mechanically as well.
00:40:56
Speaker
There's nothing really pre-made for you.
00:41:00
Speaker
the multimarfic system has like a pre-made, you know, flipper assembly that slides in, right?
00:41:05
Speaker
And it pre-made like side target assemblies and upper flipper assemblies.
00:41:09
Speaker
So you just build on top of that, right?
00:41:11
Speaker
But it has so much more dev on the software side.
00:41:15
Speaker
The other thought I had to, sorry, so I'm straying away from that, but we first met you at Pinball Olympics in Chicago at Pinball Expo last year, which I must say is one of my highlights to the whole trip.
00:41:27
Speaker
Weren't you part of one of the madmen that made some of those machines up there?
00:41:31
Speaker
So, so most of it was made by my buddy, Jay.
00:41:34
Speaker
I did help him with a few of the events, but mostly I help him with just running the thing and getting people excited.
00:41:42
Speaker
And, and, you know, I wrote some software for, for pinball Olympics that we use to keep track of the scores to make everything easier.
00:41:50
Speaker
But yeah, I did help build a few of the machines, but mostly it's Jay.
00:41:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:56
Speaker
He's the mad scientist.
00:41:58
Speaker
You got to get him on the show one time and pick his brain.
00:42:01
Speaker
Oh, definitely.
00:42:01
Speaker
Because those machines are crazy.
00:42:03
Speaker
They're insane.
00:42:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:05
Speaker
Well, just like looking at, I think it's Quicksilver is one of them.
00:42:09
Speaker
It's a narrow body game in a wide body machine because of the way that it spins and stuff inside the cabinet.
00:42:16
Speaker
Yeah, Shifty Quicksilver is what it's called.
00:42:19
Speaker
Oh, yes.
00:42:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's it kind of like pivots in the center and just kind of like shift side to side, like rotate side to side.
00:42:27
Speaker
Just to mess with you.
00:42:30
Speaker
If you want to try, if you want to experience physics on a pinball machine, you that you never dreamed of go to pinball Olympics this year at pinball expo, because you're going to see some crazy stuff.
00:42:39
Speaker
It's worth the drive.
00:42:40
Speaker
It's worth the drive.
00:42:42
Speaker
Yes.
00:42:44
Speaker
Okay.
00:42:44
Speaker
So when you're at pin pinball life, now you are on the,
00:42:50
Speaker
Hey, I'm an average guy.
00:42:52
Speaker
I'm calling you.
00:42:53
Speaker
I don't know how to fix my machine.
00:42:54
Speaker
Okay.
00:42:55
Speaker
So from your standpoint, what are like the top five things that you wish people understood about pinball?
00:43:03
Speaker
And what are some, what are the top five products that you're like, you know what, if you are working on your own machine, you need to have these.
00:43:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:11
Speaker
So the main thing that I feel bad, so I feel bad when this call comes in, you're ready for this.
00:43:16
Speaker
This is the top one for me.
00:43:19
Speaker
They say, Hey, I don't know much about pinball.
00:43:21
Speaker
I can do basic soldering.
00:43:22
Speaker
I'm like, great.
00:43:24
Speaker
Like my coils, my flipper assemblies were like, you know, kind of sluggish.
00:43:28
Speaker
So I replaced the coils on my flipper assembly and they put, you know, they wired it backward for the diodes.
00:43:35
Speaker
Okay.
00:43:36
Speaker
Or they put diodes on something that didn't need diodes and they had them on backwards and it just,
00:43:40
Speaker
And what happens is when that, that may be, you know, it's really not that big a deal because you can put it in there and then they're, they're not really doing anything too crazy.
00:43:50
Speaker
But the problem is when that diode is backwards and you don't know what you're doing with that, uh, it blows up the transistors on the actual board on the driver board and.
00:44:01
Speaker
telling somebody who can barely solder, who doesn't know how diodes work, that a piece of their circuit board now needs to be replaced.
00:44:11
Speaker
And the problem is it's their fault, right?
00:44:14
Speaker
It's like, there's nothing that we can do to say like, Hey, that's going to work in your game or not, unless they call for a suggestion.
00:44:21
Speaker
Right.
00:44:21
Speaker
So I feel terrible when that happens because they usually have to call a service tech and it ends up costing them so much money.
00:44:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:29
Speaker
You know, so that's, that's probably the number one thing.
00:44:33
Speaker
We get a lot of, we get a lot of calls just from random people, just asking how to, how to install some of the kits that we have because the most people will throw away instructions.
00:44:43
Speaker
Really?
00:44:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:45
Speaker
Like an M. Oh, I do it too.
00:44:46
Speaker
I'm not saying I don't.
00:44:48
Speaker
Okay.
00:44:48
Speaker
So I, I get a piece of Ikea furniture and I really don't feel like looking at the instructions.
00:44:54
Speaker
I want to try and figure it out.
00:44:55
Speaker
It always ends badly.
00:44:57
Speaker
OK, so is there a I'm looking at Pinball Life right now and I see I see a knocker assembly for Stern machines, which I thought was interesting.
00:45:05
Speaker
Is there one that works with Beatles?
00:45:09
Speaker
Let me see, like that one should actually it's a Spike 2 game.
00:45:13
Speaker
Because it says Sam.
00:45:15
Speaker
Oh, that's a Sam knocker.
00:45:17
Speaker
There's a spike knocker.
00:45:18
Speaker
Oh, is there?
00:45:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:45:20
Speaker
Because I got that the other day when I was playing Beatles.
00:45:24
Speaker
I'm like, ah, you cannot get a fake knocker in Beatles.
00:45:27
Speaker
It has to be like the old school...
00:45:30
Speaker
Yeah, if you type in like spike knocker, it comes right up.
00:45:35
Speaker
And it's just a little kit that installs in there and it puts a real knocker in there for you.
00:45:38
Speaker
Oh, yeah, there it is.
00:45:39
Speaker
It's actually really cool.
00:45:41
Speaker
I drew up and engineered the board and the hardware for that kit completely.
00:45:46
Speaker
Oh, there you go.
00:45:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:47
Speaker
I hope Stern's not too mad at me for that, but it's just something that really needed to happen.
00:45:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:54
Speaker
I hope they realize it.
00:45:55
Speaker
I just hope they realize I'm doing it on good faith.
00:45:57
Speaker
Like I'm not doing this to like try to screw them over or anything like that, but it's just, I just hope they, they know that that's a, it's just a needed thing.
00:46:06
Speaker
Hey, legitimately, I thought my first machine was Simpsons and I had it for a few years.
00:46:12
Speaker
And I finally was like, what is that sound?
00:46:15
Speaker
I had no idea because I was so new to pinball.
00:46:17
Speaker
And I finally emailed them.
00:46:18
Speaker
I'm like, what is this terrible sound that happens occasionally on the game?
00:46:22
Speaker
They're like, I think it's the knocker.
00:46:25
Speaker
So I was like, oh, OK.
00:46:27
Speaker
So once I turn that off, I'm like, oh, so much better.
00:46:29
Speaker
That's the first thing I do every time I set up a machine is turn off that that annoying fake knocker.
00:46:35
Speaker
yeah absolutely well if you've ever had someone that has never really played pinball before and they come over for the first time and they're playing it and i always have my replay set up as extra balls because i figure if you're playing good enough to get to the replay you should at least earn something since you're not on location and and that knocker goes off and people like i think i broke it what's wrong with the circuit i think i blew a speaker what's going on
00:47:00
Speaker
I've had that same thing, man.
00:47:01
Speaker
Like my doctor dude has the loudest knocker I've ever heard in my life in it.
00:47:06
Speaker
And it scares the crap out of everybody.
00:47:09
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:47:10
Speaker
Okay.
00:47:10
Speaker
So what are some of the things you're like, okay, if you are going to assemble your pinball workbench, what are some of the products that everybody should have?
00:47:20
Speaker
Oh, first of all, fuses, because every time you buy a machine, it's always a fuse.
00:47:25
Speaker
So just overfuse everything.
00:47:28
Speaker
No, I'm just kidding.
00:47:29
Speaker
Don't do any of that.
00:47:31
Speaker
So, yeah, the fuse joke is something pretty funny, though.
00:47:35
Speaker
I don't know.
00:47:35
Speaker
Some viewers will get it.
00:47:36
Speaker
Some viewers won't.
00:47:39
Speaker
Anytime they say, this pinball machine doesn't work, it's probably just a fuse.
00:47:43
Speaker
It's probably just a fuse.
00:47:44
Speaker
I'll take $10 off.
00:47:45
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:47:46
Speaker
You're like, but what caused that to actually break?
00:47:50
Speaker
This is what I would do.
00:47:51
Speaker
I would get your workbench needs to have some of each coil sleeve that goes in a pinball machine.
00:47:58
Speaker
You need to have, depending on the era of machines, you should probably have a couple of rebuild kits, but usually I would just buy the rebuild kits like as I needed them.
00:48:06
Speaker
Um, the reboot kits contain end of strokes, which is an older games, those end of strokes, which is blow out like crazy.
00:48:12
Speaker
Um, so, and they're super cheap and easy to replace, like just, you know, saturing into things and screwing it back in there.
00:48:20
Speaker
Um, so yeah, the coil sleeve is number one.
00:48:23
Speaker
Um, but you should also have, uh, you know, I, I have coils in my toolbox, but I don't need them.
00:48:32
Speaker
Um,
00:48:34
Speaker
And this is like low level.
00:48:35
Speaker
So I'm forgetting like the really common things like rubber, like having a complete set of rubber just there.
00:48:40
Speaker
So if you break a flipper rubber, you can replace it immediately.
00:48:44
Speaker
What else am I missing?
00:48:45
Speaker
Just standard cleaning supplies, extra pinballs, that kind of stuff.
00:48:49
Speaker
And ping gulps.
00:48:50
Speaker
You got to put ping gulps on all your stuff.
00:48:52
Speaker
Oh, yes.
00:48:53
Speaker
Shameless plug.
00:48:55
Speaker
I actually, I mean, shameful, shameful.
00:48:57
Speaker
I tell people all the time when they ask of them, like the first thing you need to do is get something for people to put their drinks in because otherwise they're going to put them on your game.
00:49:05
Speaker
Yeah, forget that.
00:49:06
Speaker
And it's angled, so they're just about ready to fall over.
00:49:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's great.
00:49:11
Speaker
Did you see the new pingulps that we came out with in the past year?
00:49:16
Speaker
Can't you take them off?
00:49:19
Speaker
It's the 3.0, right?
00:49:21
Speaker
Yes, the 3.0.
00:49:22
Speaker
Yeah, those are crazy because they're actually really cheap.
00:49:25
Speaker
So they're better and cheaper, which is crazy.
00:49:28
Speaker
The only reason we still sell the original pingulps in the pro version and the premium version, whatever we call them, I forgot.
00:49:38
Speaker
But we sell those because people don't like to have non-matching pingulps in their game room.
00:49:43
Speaker
Oh, yeah, I can see that.
00:49:45
Speaker
Yeah, but the 3.0s are the way to go.
00:49:47
Speaker
I actually swapped all of mine out.
Earthshaker Project and Innovations
00:49:50
Speaker
I just gave all my pingulps to Jay for the Pinball Olympics and just...
00:49:55
Speaker
Yeah, just put all 3.0s on there because if I'm climbing between games, I need to pull them off real easy.
00:50:00
Speaker
Yeah, actually, I probably need to do the same thing.
00:50:03
Speaker
But I am neurotic and I probably will replace them all together too.
00:50:09
Speaker
I'm looking at these and now I need to get some, they're only 10 bucks a pop.
00:50:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:14
Speaker
And they'll go on sale too.
00:50:15
Speaker
When we do, uh, when we do like the October, uh, like expo sale where like everything on the website goes like super cheap.
00:50:23
Speaker
Nice.
00:50:24
Speaker
They get down to like seven or eight bucks.
00:50:27
Speaker
If not more, I don't know.
00:50:28
Speaker
They're cheap.
00:50:29
Speaker
So I want to bring up one project that you don't, I don't know if you talk about much, but, and I don't know if many people know that you did this, but you found an earth shaker and like redid it from kind of like a software ground up.
00:50:41
Speaker
Didn't you?
00:50:42
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:50:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:43
Speaker
So earth shaker.
00:50:44
Speaker
So I stumbled across, I found earth shaker, the prototype number two.
00:50:49
Speaker
So it was the second game built.
00:50:52
Speaker
And a friend of mine had it and he restored it with like a clear coated play field and everything.
00:50:58
Speaker
And he, um, he was looking to get rid of it.
00:51:01
Speaker
So I traded him like a fun house for it or something.
00:51:04
Speaker
Right.
00:51:04
Speaker
And I went through it.
00:51:05
Speaker
I'm looking at this thing and I'm like, ah, it's so cool.
00:51:07
Speaker
It's a piece of history, right?
00:51:08
Speaker
It's like got all these prototype ramps on it and the prototype building and like all the right prototype, everything on it.
00:51:15
Speaker
And, uh, then I was like, I hate the music in this game.
00:51:19
Speaker
like legitimately hate the music, but I like the gameplay.
00:51:23
Speaker
And so I said, I am going to reprogram it.
00:51:26
Speaker
So I got a P-Rock and a P-Rock adapter board and wired the whole thing up in there and then started digging in and rebuilt the software completely from scratch for Earthshaker.
00:51:39
Speaker
It is very similar, but it has different music.
00:51:41
Speaker
It has expanded rules on it.
00:51:45
Speaker
And I posted that software online for people to use as reference.
00:51:52
Speaker
And that is still up there to this day.
00:51:55
Speaker
I don't have that airshaker anymore.
00:51:56
Speaker
I ended up selling that pre-pandemic.
00:52:02
Speaker
I think someone in Michigan has it or Florida.
00:52:04
Speaker
I don't know exactly where it is right now.
00:52:07
Speaker
But yeah, I took this prototype Earthshaker that was beautiful and I, in this prototype playfield and screwed an auto launcher into it.
00:52:14
Speaker
You know, people were not super happy with what I did to it.
00:52:20
Speaker
But again, I gave that whole machine something to be even more special now that it's the only one in existence.
00:52:27
Speaker
Definitely.
00:52:28
Speaker
And if I remember correctly, didn't you actually take the back glass off so that way you could, like you had like a plexiglass trans light.
00:52:35
Speaker
So that way you could just go into it.
00:52:36
Speaker
It was straight tempered glass.
00:52:38
Speaker
I put a piece instead of the back glass, I pulled the back glass out and wrapped it up real nice and set it aside.
00:52:43
Speaker
Right.
00:52:43
Speaker
So I didn't like break it or anything, but I put a clear piece of glass in there and then cut out some vinyl that said earth shaker aftershock on it.
00:52:51
Speaker
And then what I did was I put some LED strip in the back box so it lit up the circuit boards so people could see that it was not like it had a P rock in it and it had this crazy adapter board and an alphanumeric converter board and stuff like crazy stuff that did not exist in the game before.
00:53:10
Speaker
And I just I could I could make that LED strip change colors programmatically.
00:53:14
Speaker
And it was really cool.
00:53:16
Speaker
So that project was a lot of fun.
00:53:17
Speaker
That was my first time writing pinball code completely from scratch, from the ground up.
00:53:23
Speaker
Well, and if I remember correctly, didn't you have your wife also redo some of the lines and didn't you redo some of the lines as well in there?
00:53:30
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:53:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:31
Speaker
So I everything was redone, by the way.
00:53:33
Speaker
So it was like, again, this is a complete from scratch build.
00:53:37
Speaker
So I had to have someone record the vocals and my wife actually did that for me.
00:53:42
Speaker
And let's see what else I didn't write any of the music, but I did do all the sound effects for it.
00:53:47
Speaker
All the music in that game was actually just ripped from other artists that I really liked.
00:53:53
Speaker
But since I wasn't selling it or giving it away even, it was fine to use that as a fan project.
00:54:00
Speaker
So what inspired Earthshaker?
00:54:03
Speaker
Was it just availability?
00:54:05
Speaker
You had the option of doing it?
00:54:07
Speaker
It was.
00:54:07
Speaker
Really, it was just because I had this game and I also just hated the music so much that I needed to redo it.
00:54:17
Speaker
So it really just comes down to that.
00:54:20
Speaker
Cool.
00:54:20
Speaker
We're kind of running up into you're going to be going live here shortly to hang out with your pay phone.
00:54:26
Speaker
I am.
00:54:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:27
Speaker
So that's a that's a whole nother.
00:54:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:29
Speaker
Tell us about your pay phone, because we were talking about offline and I think it's awesome.
00:54:34
Speaker
Yeah, so I actually have a restored payphone that is installed in my basement right on my bar that is hooked up to my landline, which I still have.
00:54:46
Speaker
I had to call and reactivate my landline because I didn't have one.
00:54:50
Speaker
And the lady on the phone, you should have heard her, she goes, you want to do what?
00:54:54
Speaker
I'm like, I want to add a landline to my account.
00:54:58
Speaker
She's like, why would you want to do that?
00:55:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:02
Speaker
Like everyone's just getting rid of the landlines.
00:55:04
Speaker
I'm like, well, I got the Comcast modem here and it has a landline output on it.
00:55:07
Speaker
Just, just activate that for me.
00:55:10
Speaker
And I finally convinced her to do that.
00:55:11
Speaker
And it ended up saving me $20 a month, actually.
00:55:14
Speaker
Okay.
00:55:16
Speaker
We actually have a landline and it's the same thing.
00:55:19
Speaker
It's like with Comcast, you pay 10 bucks a month on top of whatever you're doing.
00:55:24
Speaker
Yeah, but it saves you like $20 a month by bundling it together.
00:55:28
Speaker
Yeah, we have it because we still have, you know, we have young kids who don't have their own cell phones.
00:55:33
Speaker
And we're like, you know, just in case they need to pick up and call 911.
Pinball Collection and Modifications
00:55:37
Speaker
But yeah, it does.
00:55:39
Speaker
It does come in handy about every year or so when a company from 1992 asks for a fax and you can send it.
00:55:48
Speaker
That's funny.
00:55:50
Speaker
That's awesome.
00:55:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:51
Speaker
So the pay phone, like, yeah, so it's actually hooked up.
00:55:53
Speaker
I have a, uh, I have a piece of radio, old radio equipment that taps into the phone line, which, uh, allows me to send my voice and the caller's voice, uh, through an XLR output into my audio gear.
00:56:08
Speaker
So I'm going to tonight spin up my Twitch stream and
00:56:12
Speaker
I'm going to post the number online, which is really risky to do.
00:56:18
Speaker
And I'm going to just talk to anyone who calls in.
00:56:22
Speaker
Obviously, I can hang up on people.
00:56:25
Speaker
There's no dump button.
00:56:27
Speaker
And I've already set it up to where if anyone calls that number with like star six, seven, remember that how it blocks it?
00:56:37
Speaker
It will automatically never even ring the phone.
00:56:39
Speaker
So it doesn't even tie the line up.
00:56:41
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:56:42
Speaker
And I do have a caller ID on it.
00:56:43
Speaker
So if somebody calls in and does something stupid, I can I'm going to have my laptop up in front of me.
00:56:48
Speaker
So I'll be able to block the number immediately and it will just never come back.
00:56:52
Speaker
So we'll we'll see what happens.
00:56:55
Speaker
It's really risky.
00:56:56
Speaker
I could get kicked off Twitch tonight.
00:56:58
Speaker
I don't know.
00:57:00
Speaker
But I do know it's going to probably be entertaining.
00:57:03
Speaker
I think it's worth the risk.
00:57:04
Speaker
I think it's worth the risk too.
00:57:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:06
Speaker
And I'm actually going to do that in an hour.
00:57:07
Speaker
I've got one hour.
00:57:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:09
Speaker
Okay.
00:57:09
Speaker
So I do have time for food and I do have time to kind of prepare for that.
00:57:14
Speaker
I've got a really crappy camera angle, which looks like a camcorder sitting on a countertop that is going to be pointed at me and the phone, which the, which the guys are actually looking at right now.
00:57:25
Speaker
Cause I kept my, it looks great.
00:57:27
Speaker
It really, if you grew up in the eighties and you had to call your mom from the arcade, this is your phone.
00:57:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's great.
00:57:35
Speaker
I'll have the pinball machines on in the background too.
00:57:37
Speaker
There's two of them over there that are in the camera view.
00:57:40
Speaker
So we've got Big Lebowski and Tron, which are two great games.
00:57:44
Speaker
Okay, yeah, actually, we didn't even talk about that.
00:57:46
Speaker
What is in your collection right now?
00:57:48
Speaker
Yeah, let's go down.
00:57:48
Speaker
Here, I'll go down.
00:57:49
Speaker
I'm going to look.
00:57:50
Speaker
I'm just going to read them off, right?
00:57:51
Speaker
So I'm going from left to right around the room here.
00:57:54
Speaker
Big Lebowski, that's the actual prototype number one, first game ever built by...
00:57:59
Speaker
by those guys.
00:58:00
Speaker
I've got a Tron, which I call Powerball Tron because it only has Powerballs in it and it will never have steel pinballs in it ever again.
00:58:07
Speaker
Because if you play Tron with steel pinballs, you're cheating.
00:58:12
Speaker
Seriously.
00:58:13
Speaker
And it's awful.
00:58:14
Speaker
It plays awful with steel pinballs in it.
00:58:16
Speaker
Go put four power balls in Tron and I'll tell you what, you will never ever want to play with steel pinballs in there again.
00:58:22
Speaker
That's hilarious.
00:58:23
Speaker
I'm going to have to tell my buddy who bought my Tron to try that.
00:58:27
Speaker
Yes, please do.
00:58:28
Speaker
And spread the word because it's absolutely important.
00:58:32
Speaker
So going over this way, we've got obviously a total nuclear annihilation, which shouldn't surprise anybody.
00:58:39
Speaker
That one is the, that's the first one that was built by the guys.
00:58:44
Speaker
It doesn't have a serial number on it.
00:58:45
Speaker
The serial number is just Scott, which is kind of cool.
00:58:47
Speaker
So when, you know, eventually one day when I pass away or something, someone's going to find that and find serial number Scott on it and it's going to, they're going to be excited.
00:58:57
Speaker
Next to that is a Rick and Morty with the serial number Scott as well.
00:59:00
Speaker
I have no idea when that was built.
00:59:02
Speaker
I think that was built like halfway through the run.
00:59:05
Speaker
I have a Bride of Pinbot 2.0.
00:59:07
Speaker
And then a multimorphic P3.
00:59:11
Speaker
And then the Dr. Dude that's over there and a Revenge from Mars, which is one I just picked up recently.
00:59:17
Speaker
You know, my Revenge from Mars played a Revenge from Mars at my friend's house and my wife thought it was awesome.
00:59:25
Speaker
She's like, they should have made more of these.
00:59:26
Speaker
This is really cool.
00:59:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:28
Speaker
And actually, the reason I got it was because it was my wife's favorite game.
00:59:32
Speaker
And I had one a while ago.
00:59:34
Speaker
It was like the third game I ever bought way back in the day.
00:59:37
Speaker
And my wife really loved it.
00:59:39
Speaker
And when I sold it, she was actually upset.
00:59:41
Speaker
And I didn't realize how significant that was until later on, because she doesn't really like pinball.
00:59:47
Speaker
She just tolerates it and goes, ah, whatever, you know.
00:59:50
Speaker
Um, but, uh, when I talked about getting another one again, she actually was like, Oh, I'll actually play that.
00:59:56
Speaker
I'll come down and play that.
00:59:56
Speaker
So I'm like, okay, well, it's a done deal.
00:59:58
Speaker
Does it have the LCD conversion too?
01:00:00
Speaker
It doesn't, this one's all original and it has a bright tube in it still, which is really crazy.
01:00:05
Speaker
That is crazy.
01:00:06
Speaker
Cause I, I do like the LCD conversion because the other ones I've played, uh, just the CRT is, is, is boxed.
01:00:14
Speaker
So yeah.
01:00:15
Speaker
And that's really common.
01:00:16
Speaker
I got really lucky with this one, which is why I hopped on it.
01:00:20
Speaker
The lines on that game are so classic.
01:00:21
Speaker
I love that game.
01:00:22
Speaker
Oh, they're so ridiculous.
01:00:23
Speaker
I thought of picking one up.
01:00:26
Speaker
I mean, I have Attack from Mars and I love it and it would just be fun to have both of them.
01:00:30
Speaker
Oh, absolutely.
01:00:30
Speaker
Yeah, like the funny lines too, like there's a little scene where like the alien's like massaging the girl in a massage parlor and he goes, I need you.
01:00:38
Speaker
Yes, to need, yeah.
01:00:41
Speaker
Yeah, to need the K, right?
01:00:43
Speaker
It's like, she like turns around, ah, yeah.
01:00:46
Speaker
One of my favorites is Clinton was still in office.
01:00:49
Speaker
It's while the aliens are ducting everything off the white house lawn.
01:00:52
Speaker
And he says like, take my wife.
01:00:54
Speaker
Just don't take the secretary.
01:00:57
Speaker
Save the interns.
01:01:00
Speaker
It's so terrible.
01:01:02
Speaker
No, it's, it's funny.
01:01:04
Speaker
It's all, but yeah, no, I get it.
01:01:08
Speaker
It's done in a way that's not like disrespectful either.
01:01:11
Speaker
It's just, it's just silly and funny and everyone laughs at it and everyone loves it.
01:01:14
Speaker
It's it.
Impact of Music Formats and Listener Experience
01:01:15
Speaker
It's really, really well done in that game.
01:01:17
Speaker
Don't take the car.
01:01:18
Speaker
That's the chick magnet.
01:01:20
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:20
Speaker
It's like funny.
01:01:24
Speaker
Oh, I need to get another one of those.
01:01:27
Speaker
It's been years since I've had one, and they're such a good game.
01:01:30
Speaker
And I'll tell you what, too.
01:01:31
Speaker
There's something, like, sorry to interrupt you, but, like, there's some really cool thing going on with Revenge from Mars right now.
01:01:36
Speaker
There's a guy out of the UK named Jim Askey who has expanded on the actual code in the games, and he'll send you, like, you buy, like, this little kit from him, and you plug your computer into Revenge from Mars, and you can update the code to, like, this new code that he's working on right now.
01:01:53
Speaker
He's like, he's actually unlocked unused voice call outs and stuff that are in the game ROMs that are not used in the game.
01:02:02
Speaker
I'll have to get that link from you because my friend has one.
01:02:05
Speaker
And Josh, you still have yours, right?
01:02:06
Speaker
Or did you sell it?
01:02:08
Speaker
I sold mine to buy attack for Mars, but I am actively looking for revenge for Mars right now.
01:02:14
Speaker
So it's such a cool game.
01:02:15
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:17
Speaker
I do know where there's another one for sale right now in Chicago, but that's a little far.
01:02:20
Speaker
So yeah.
01:02:21
Speaker
I know a gentleman that owns a couple of them, actually, because he owns a pinball company here in Utah.
01:02:29
Speaker
So I might have to call him and harass him because he's always like, yeah, if you ever want one of these, you call me.
01:02:34
Speaker
I don't think he's a fan of them.
01:02:37
Speaker
I don't know if it's because they're heavy or what it is.
01:02:40
Speaker
Yeah, probably because of that Prism card is scaring people.
01:02:44
Speaker
But, you know, what are you going to do?
01:02:47
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's such a good game.
01:02:49
Speaker
It really is.
01:02:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:51
Speaker
My vote is play it till it dies and then figure it out later.
01:02:54
Speaker
Well, I think that pretty much wraps it up for us.
01:02:56
Speaker
Is there anything else you want to tell us, Scott, before we hop off and wrap it up?
01:03:01
Speaker
No, I think that's pretty much it.
01:03:03
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:04
Speaker
We got to get you the 2.0 Loser Kid hat.
01:03:07
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:03:09
Speaker
I can't remember.
01:03:09
Speaker
Do you have the original?
01:03:11
Speaker
I don't think I do.
01:03:12
Speaker
I don't think I have any Loser Kid stuff.
01:03:13
Speaker
You don't have that one?
01:03:14
Speaker
Okay.
01:03:14
Speaker
I do not have that.
01:03:15
Speaker
Okay.
01:03:16
Speaker
So we've run into you twice and we never gave you a hat.
01:03:19
Speaker
I don't have a hat.
01:03:20
Speaker
At all.
01:03:21
Speaker
Yeah, no, we need to get that to you.
01:03:23
Speaker
Because you actually wear hats too.
01:03:24
Speaker
I do wear hats.
01:03:25
Speaker
Actually, I grew my hair out during that COVID thing.
01:03:29
Speaker
And I was going to cut it off and donate it.
01:03:31
Speaker
But now I'm just waiting.
01:03:34
Speaker
I still got long hair right now.
01:03:35
Speaker
It's crazy.
01:03:36
Speaker
Nice.
01:03:36
Speaker
But yeah, I wear hats like only, I don't know, 25% of the time now.
01:03:41
Speaker
I used to wear them every day.
01:03:42
Speaker
We'll make sure it can fit in your man bun.
01:03:44
Speaker
Perfect.
01:03:44
Speaker
It can stick out the back.
01:03:45
Speaker
It's fine.
01:03:46
Speaker
We'll definitely be up there for Expo.
01:03:48
Speaker
So worst case scenario, we'll bring you a hat at Expo.
01:03:51
Speaker
That sounds perfect.
01:03:53
Speaker
Well, if you want to get a hold of us, actually, before you get a hold of us, if you want to get a hold of Scott outside of his pay phone, because that's happening in an hour, and by the time we release this, it'll probably be done.
01:04:01
Speaker
So you could go watch the Twitch stream, the VOD.
01:04:05
Speaker
Well, we'll see if there's a VOD.
01:04:06
Speaker
I don't know.
01:04:09
Speaker
If someone wants to get a hold of you, Scott, how do they do it?
01:04:11
Speaker
You can go to my website.
01:04:12
Speaker
That's the best way to do it.
01:04:14
Speaker
Just scottdenisi.com.
01:04:15
Speaker
There's a contact form on there.
01:04:18
Speaker
You know, like my email is not hard to figure out if you know what my website is.
01:04:23
Speaker
I'm sure you can probably guess it, but that's another way.
01:04:27
Speaker
You know, so the yeah, so that's probably the best way to don't contact me through Facebook because it's I just don't look at that very often at all.
01:04:40
Speaker
But, you know,
01:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, websites, the website's the way to go.
01:04:44
Speaker
And that's scottdenisi.com.
01:04:47
Speaker
Scottdenisi.com, yeah.
01:04:49
Speaker
But it's awesome.
01:04:50
Speaker
I'm here now.
01:04:51
Speaker
I'm looking at this.
01:04:51
Speaker
This is pretty cool.
01:04:55
Speaker
Not many people can say they have their own website.
01:04:57
Speaker
Yeah, I just had to have a place for all the random crud that I do.
01:05:02
Speaker
You know, there's a lot of reference material and like blog posts that I wanted to just make sure that that information didn't die.
01:05:11
Speaker
Okay.
01:05:11
Speaker
So the website's the best way to do it.
01:05:13
Speaker
It is.
01:05:14
Speaker
And this is a cool looking website.
01:05:16
Speaker
Go check it out, everyone.
01:05:17
Speaker
Even if you're not going to contact them, at least go there and check out this website.
01:05:21
Speaker
There's a TNA code there too.
01:05:23
Speaker
You can download that.
01:05:25
Speaker
Nice.
01:05:26
Speaker
Well, if you want to get a hold of us, we are LoserKidPinballPodcast at gmail.com.
01:05:31
Speaker
We're on all the socials, Facebook, Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, all at LoserKidPinball.
01:05:38
Speaker
We've kind of simplified it to make it more simple for everyone else.
01:05:42
Speaker
Other than that, what do you got for us, Larson?
01:05:45
Speaker
You know, I'm just really looking forward to more stuff coming out and I'm really looking forward to getting my rush fixed.
01:05:52
Speaker
So that's what I'm looking forward to.
01:05:54
Speaker
But I'm also looking forward to really Expo.
01:05:59
Speaker
That's my next big thing.
01:06:00
Speaker
So about four months away.
01:06:03
Speaker
Yeah, same here.
01:06:03
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:05
Speaker
And, uh, and Simon, four months away, we're, we're in the middle of July.
01:06:08
Speaker
It's going to be here.
01:06:09
Speaker
We need to get close.
01:06:10
Speaker
August, September, October.
01:06:11
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:11
Speaker
We're, we're three and a half months, if that.
01:06:13
Speaker
So, Hey, Scott, do you still need one of these for your, uh, uh, for your,
01:06:19
Speaker
See that?
01:06:20
Speaker
Okay, so check this out.
01:06:21
Speaker
Actually, I installed an Alpine.
01:06:23
Speaker
By the way, for those who don't know what I just showed, I have an old cassette with the adapter line in.
01:06:31
Speaker
So all the people who bought a car from the 80s that still had the cassette, but they had to convert it to CDs, that's what you'd hook up your CD player to.
01:06:38
Speaker
All right, so I got a quick statement about those.
01:06:41
Speaker
So I had in the Fiero, I had a working tape deck, right?
01:06:46
Speaker
And that was all I had.
01:06:46
Speaker
I had FM radio, working tape deck, AM radio didn't work too well.
01:06:51
Speaker
So what I did was I just, I have a collection of cassette tapes
01:06:55
Speaker
and I would just pop those in and listen to them.
01:06:58
Speaker
And a ton of people were like, hey, let me give you this thing and you can plug your phone into it and then you can listen to anything you want.
01:07:04
Speaker
And I had to keep reminding people that that's actually not the point.
01:07:08
Speaker
Like that actually ruins the experience of being stuck with a tape and having to listen to every song on that album.
01:07:18
Speaker
When you have too many options, you aren't as satisfied with the outcome that you pick.
01:07:24
Speaker
What happens though is it basically has iTunes killed albums.
01:07:29
Speaker
Yeah.
01:07:30
Speaker
Like very few people actually put together a great album start to finish now because they only focus on one or two singles.
01:07:37
Speaker
And then a lot of other filler stuff because it's so easy to hit next song, next song, next song.
01:07:43
Speaker
But a lot of the songs that I've grown to appreciate on those older albums were songs that took me a while to really get into.
01:07:52
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
01:07:54
Speaker
And again, there's a whole study that happened with this thing with jelly beans, right?
01:07:58
Speaker
They would walk out with two options of jelly beans and ask people, like, do you want lemon or do you want coconut?
01:08:04
Speaker
And people would be like, oh, well, I'll take lemon, you know, and they eat it, right?
01:08:09
Speaker
They get to pick one, right?
01:08:11
Speaker
And after they'd eaten the jelly bean, they say, well, how satisfied are you with your choice?
01:08:16
Speaker
And they're like, well, very, because I like lemon and I don't like coconut as much.
01:08:20
Speaker
So there you go.
01:08:22
Speaker
And then they did the same experiment again with like a hundred different flavors of jelly bellies, right?
01:08:29
Speaker
And so then they're like, okay, pick one.
01:08:30
Speaker
And everyone's like looking around.
01:08:31
Speaker
They're like, well, I don't know.
01:08:32
Speaker
I mean, I like apple, but also...
01:08:34
Speaker
You know, the marshmallow one's pretty good or this and that, you know, it's like and they'll eventually settle and pick one.
01:08:41
Speaker
And then they say, well, how happy are you with your choice?
01:08:43
Speaker
And they're like, well, not not entirely.
01:08:46
Speaker
I should have picked the lime one because I, you know, I kind of got overwhelmed and I didn't lime would probably have been better.
01:08:53
Speaker
You know, it's like you get overwhelmed with options and cassette tapes are an amazing way and vinyl too.
01:09:01
Speaker
It's an amazing way of listening to music and being more satisfied with what you're listening to.
01:09:06
Speaker
You're a more captive audience.
01:09:09
Speaker
Yeah, you are.
01:09:10
Speaker
Well, this is actually this is what Costco actually zeroed in on is that you there's a paralysis of choice.
01:09:20
Speaker
So if you go into Costco, you have like two or three options for one thing.
01:09:24
Speaker
You don't have like 10 or 20 options.
01:09:27
Speaker
You basically is like you want ketchup.
01:09:29
Speaker
Here's the Costco ketchup.
01:09:30
Speaker
And they found that they sold a lot more that way because if people had like five choices, then they're just like, I don't know which one to buy.
01:09:38
Speaker
And so sometimes they wouldn't even buy one because they just didn't make a decision.
01:09:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's crazy.
01:09:44
Speaker
I feel like this should be a title for the episode.
01:09:47
Speaker
Pick your jelly bean.
01:09:48
Speaker
Pick your jelly belly.
01:09:52
Speaker
Well, thank you, Denise, for coming on.
01:09:54
Speaker
I really appreciate it, man.
01:09:55
Speaker
We've, we've wanted to have you on for a while now.
01:09:57
Speaker
This just worked out perfect.
01:09:58
Speaker
Uh,
Conclusion and Thanks to Scott Denisi
01:09:59
Speaker
we, we are so excited.
01:10:00
Speaker
Like you are some of the fresh blood in the industry and we have just loved your games between TNA, Rick and Morty, uh, and I guess the sound on weird Al, uh, hopefully you can get to a time that, uh,
01:10:13
Speaker
You can make another love letter to maybe an era of pinball machine.
01:10:16
Speaker
And then we'd be looking forward to that too.
01:10:18
Speaker
So absolutely.
01:10:19
Speaker
Thank you again for having me on.
01:10:20
Speaker
It was really fun.
01:10:21
Speaker
Thanks, Scott.
01:10:22
Speaker
Shut up and sit down.