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Bon Jovi Pinball Reveal | Barrels of Fun
0 Playsin 4 hours
Phil Grimaldi joins us to talk about how they took one of the most iconic 80s bands of all time, Bon Jovi, and made the band into a rockin' pinball machine
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Transcript
Introduction and Announcement of Bon Jovi Pinball
00:00:07
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the Loser Kid Pinball Podcast. I am Josh Roop. With me, my co-captain. Scott Larson. And Scott, I can't believe it. It's another pinball reveal. If you're going to get Bon Jovi, who are you going to get it from? Reach out to Zach and Nicole Mini at Flippin' Out Pinball.
00:00:24
Speaker
Definitely get on this. This is going to sell out. I guarantee this is going to sell out. So Bon Jovi, Barrels of Fun. And we also found out that we did talk about the other two reveals with P3. And so you can also get them through Flippin' Out Pinball. So if if you want Dungeon Crawler Carl, if you want Ender's Game, If you want Bon Jovi, please reach out to Flippin' Out Pinball. They will take care of you.
00:00:48
Speaker
Awesome. We have a special guest on with us today to talk all things Bon Jovi from Barrels of Fun. This is Phil Grimaldi. He's done wonderful code and rule structure for several games. Now, you said you've been here before Labyrinth was even shown. It's great to have you on, Phil. Thank you so much for having me on I'm super stoked to be here and super stoked to talk about
Design Evolution and Game Mechanics
00:01:10
Speaker
Bon Jovi.
00:01:10
Speaker
I know that you said you came on a little later in this project, but I heard from David Van Ness, owner slash layout extraordinaire, apparently. ah This was a two-flipper game, but it's kind of evolved since then. and From the start, um this game was kind of like one of the main design the kind of principles was that it's going to be friendly to the beginner. And that's kind of built into the rule set, and we'll get to that soon. But even with early on in the design, wanted to stick to a two-flipper design because...
00:01:40
Speaker
You know, if you've ever seen a casual player step up to a game with three flippers, you'll see very often the ball will come around past the upper flipper and they don't do anything. And you just kind of watch in horror as it goes straight down the middle or something. And you go flip, flip. And you want to.
00:01:55
Speaker
tell them what to do, but it's not a natural thing for for new players who are just stepping up. They're kind of focused right down by the drain. They're just looking at those bottom flippers. And so by having only two flippers, it kind of makes it a little bit more accessible to new players.
00:02:11
Speaker
Just as it turned out, though, the geometry of the game early on really lended itself to an upper flipper. There's two shots up there that Hitting them from the upper flip, you can only hit them from the upper flipper. There wasn't a way to to massage the geometry to make it hittable from the lower flipper. So they said, you know what, we're going with a an upper flipper.
00:02:34
Speaker
I'm so glad they did because both of the shots and and we'll get into, i don't know if we're going to get into the layout at all. Both the shots I'm talking about, though, super satisfying to hit. And, ah you know, it's I personally like having at least three flippers on a game, but this game actually has four flippers because David, once he kind of broke that seal and he put in that third one, he said, well, what the hell, let's do another one. And that's when he decided to put in the outlane save. It's called the crowd surf flipper. It's it's located in the left outlane.
00:03:05
Speaker
So rather than a traditional kickback or something like that, You actually have a skillful attempt at saving your ball via a small little mini flipper, and you can hit it up a little launch ramp and launch it back into play, save your ball.
Bon Jovi's Influence and Music Integration
00:03:19
Speaker
So we started with two, ended with four, and it's it's a sweet it's a sweet end result. Josh, you're very elite. Okay. Bon Jovi. We've been talking about dream themes forever. And how long have I been saying Bon Jovi is low lying fruit? We need to have a Bon Jovi pin. So talk about why Bon Jovi and why, how did barrels of fun get this?
00:03:43
Speaker
A good question. And I'm probably not the best person to answer because I wasn't you know in the room where it happened when it all, but my my understanding is that, and I learned just through doing research with on Bon Jovi, on John Bon Jovi himself is a huge pinball fan. If you actually go back and watch There's a documentary, Bon Jovi, he talks about, you know, is in their writer for shows that they must have five pinball machines in their in their ah VIP room. And there's even ah a set in one of their early concerts during the 90s where they've got a giant pinball machine as part of their set.
00:04:18
Speaker
So they were huge pinball fans. um My understanding is they wanted a pinball machine made, approached David early on to have the machine made. And, you know, David, you know, did the math on it and was like, yeah, I think Bon Jovi is actually a good, good fit for pinball.
00:04:35
Speaker
Early on, you know, he approached me with it. He's like, what do you think of this? And i was like, huh, Bon Jovi. And then the more I kind of like researched it, it's like, yeah, I think this is going to sell. And,
00:04:47
Speaker
Wow, i actually didn't realize how many of these songs are Bon Jovi that I've been hearing on classic rock radio stations forever. it's like, I think this works. I think actually the selling point for me too was when I realized Raise Your Hands, like the intro, one of the first songs that introduces Barf and lo and Lone Star and Spaceballs was that Bon Jovi song. I probably heard that a million times growing up watching Spaceballs over and over and over again. I had no idea that was Bon Jovi and i was like,
00:05:17
Speaker
All right, Bon Jovi is cool. I think we could do we can do something with this for sure. That is amazing. I know. Now thinking it's baseballs. Yeah, I do know. like bon jovi Come on. That is one of the best. Okay. That is the, the lead in song for slippery, slippery when wet, which by the way, hasn't has a hilarious story that they had a, let's just say a more suggestive cover that would not be carried in stores. So that's why they ended up with the one they had, but yeah, no, it's, that is one of the best intros of any, CD album, tape, whatever. I'm from that era. And you put that in and you knew this, this album was going to rock. One thing I really want to talk about.
00:05:57
Speaker
i don't think this has ever done been done in pinball. If you look at the play field right underneath the Bon Jovi guitar, it says Bon Jovi, New Jersey. There is ah Newton ball that then hits a captive ball that goes through a loop de loop through a spinner What mad genius decided to put this on here? and The mad genius is sort of like a ah team mad genius effect.
00:06:22
Speaker
My understanding is that Luke Underwood, one of our new engineers,
Concert Experience and Gameplay
00:06:28
Speaker
new young engineer, and he's he's just awesome. he He's done a bunch of homebrew games. He did a homebrew Pokemon machine, if you've if you've seen that.
00:06:36
Speaker
he He's the one who came up with the idea for the Newton Ball loop-de-loop. And then David ah was, you know, shooting around at early prototypes and was like, we should totally put a spinner in this thing.
00:06:47
Speaker
And it was just sort of like stacking ah layer upon layer of kinetically satisfying things. It's like Newton ball, kinetically satisfying loop-de-loop, kinetically satisfying spinner. It's like, Oh my gosh. And so you put these things together. It's pretty great.
00:07:03
Speaker
We had a similar moment like that in labyrinth where we had, kind of this fork captive all mechanism. And when we put a spinner behind it it like turned it into, it turned a fun shot into like an immensely satisfying one.
00:07:17
Speaker
And so we kind of, uh, this this mech we we carried over the learnings from from that into there and that's how you get it so it's very much like an evolution of design and a melding of minds that that produced that uh work of art tell me in 20 seconds what do i do when i step up to this game and what is the goal of this game I will say there is a ah structure to this game that should be familiar to anybody.
00:07:45
Speaker
You are, first of all, at a Bon Jovi show. This is like your dream come true. You're at a Bon Jovi show. You're in the you're in this crowd and you kind of get to pick your dream set list.
00:07:57
Speaker
So pick your five songs for the set list and then there's an encore. So how you play the game? Your goal is to get to the encore, play five songs, you get and then you play your encore. so We put in a familiar structure that should be understandable to anybody who's just stepping up.
00:08:16
Speaker
If you've ever been to a show, you understand the concept of what happened. This band is going to play some music. They're going play some songs. They're going done. They're to play an encore at the end. That's the structure. But on top of that, too, we have one of the things I'm very excited about for the newbies.
00:08:32
Speaker
is when they do step up and they're about to pick their song or which mode they want to play, we have 3D rendered animations of the play field. These are beautiful three d rendered animations by Josh Clay, our our lead animator, and he's just a phenomenal animator.
00:08:49
Speaker
It's a shot-by-shot tutorial for each of those modes. so if you want to know what Runaway does, there's you can see a rendering of the inserts that are lit. You're supposed to shoot these shots. It makes it like very kind of boiled down to the most simple elements. So when you do step up, if you are confused, it's your fault because you didn't look at what was given to you.
00:09:12
Speaker
We're trying to make it as user-friendly as possible and not overwhelm the player with a bunch of blinking lights and kind of no cues as to what to do.
00:09:23
Speaker
We might as well ask this cause you were kind of alluding to it before, but you know, there's many ways to approach music pins. They're like Foo Fighters. It was more of a narrative drift driven pinball machine that just happened to have Foo Fighters music and then some is like a concert. So what did make you decide to go with the concert vibe over a narrative driven?
00:09:42
Speaker
ah Well, there wasn't a clear narrative to be had, first of all. So like we wouldn't we didn't want to go around and like invent a story like Foo Fighters. I love what they did with Foo Fighters, by the way. I think that that was excellent.
00:09:56
Speaker
um But it is very important to have some sort of structure. doesn't have to be a narrative per se, but having some sort of understandable structure to ground the player in, I do think is very important.
00:10:08
Speaker
If it's just a collage of random stuff, like there's nothing... to to organize it in your mind to understand what you're supposed to do. So if we have a concert experience, a set list that you're building, making your way to the encore, you at least know what's happening next. You at least know what your path is in this game.
00:10:29
Speaker
And you can remember everything else in that context. Along with that, too, wanted to you take a page out of a Creature from the Black Lagoon playbook where it's Creature is not necessarily like a Creature pin, like it's a drive-in movie theater pin, right? It's a kind of ah ah a love letter to drive-in movie theaters. And we tried to want we tried to do a similar thing here with the Bon Jovi pin.
00:10:56
Speaker
What happens that, a you know, you're going to a concert. And so we build in a lot of concert elements into it. When you're picking your song, Jeff Dotson, the audio engineer, has some amazing sound effects. And if you've played Dune and you've gotten to ah Fade Routhis Arena Battle, where the crowd is going wild when you're hitting shots and doing things like that, he's kind of captured part of that element in here and like amped it up to 11.
00:11:25
Speaker
So like you get this feeling. He creates this very rich experience for the player where it it gives you this feeling that you're in a 3D space, that you're in a concert hall.
00:11:36
Speaker
Like the sound that it makes when you are outside a concert venue and you can hear the muffled sound of songs being played inside. He's able to capture this this experience and in a way that is very...
00:11:50
Speaker
ah It's unexplored, i would say, in in pinball audio design. And this game is is very much as much a showcase of ah the audio engineering as anything else. it's ah And it it just it serves it serves the whole theme very well, and it serves the band very well. It ah a very much gives you this concert at the concert vibe.
00:12:13
Speaker
part of a music pin, the biggest determinator of people's interest in it tends to be the set list. How did you go about finding which songs to, to select? mean, this guy's been doing it since the eighties. And so we're talking at least 40 years.
00:12:29
Speaker
Uh, now exactly which ones are you going to select and then prioritize? The easiest, uh, way to approach this is what are the most popular songs? And to go on Spotify and see like, what are, what are people listening to? What is the,
00:12:42
Speaker
ah you know, what what what's popular. That works some of the time for Bon Jovi because a lot of the songs, you know, are popular, but maybe not are the thing you want to be playing 90% of the time, right? it's It's maybe not, it's a, you know, love ballad versus like a driving ah ah rock anthem. So we went through what are the popular songs?
00:13:06
Speaker
What are songs that we like? What are songs that we think it would be cool to play pinball to, uh, and then go from there. And then, then there's an iteration with the band too, because, um, the band very much wanted this to be uh,
00:13:22
Speaker
ah a telling of their legacy, right? So they didn't want to just focus on the early hits. They wanted to throw in some of the newer stuff. They wanted to to span the eras. So, They had suggestions of what they wanted to see in the game, what they didn't want to see in the game, or, you know, for whatever various reasons are complicated for putting it in. um So let's see, what did we end up with? So the, i would say the eight main mode songs, Runaway,
00:13:52
Speaker
is ah Runaways on there, You Give Love a Bad Name, It's My Life, Have a Nice Day. That's our first four songs. Then there's One A Dead or Alive, Bad Medicine, Born to Be My Baby, and Keep the Faith.
00:14:08
Speaker
So those are our eight uh main mode songs and then kind of a little mini wizard halfway in there's living on a prayer because you when you're halfway you yeah you get it uh you gotta to be living on a prayer and then our i guess uh mini wizard modes wizard modes what whatever you want to call our encore songs these are after you play your five songs in each set list you can play an encore song and that's raise your hands lay your hands on me let it rock those are kind of um nice like stadium rock anthem song so that that seemed appropriate to have like a rock out moment as a you've built the set list you've you've this is your you know climactic song for for this set list um that's kind of how we approached it and then uh legendary is our final wizard mode song which is more or less kind of putting a bookend on the career of bon jovi and you know reaching legendary status essentially
00:15:07
Speaker
So what made you decide to, cause that's a ton of songs and going through the the code, uh, you have to kind of whittle it down to five songs. How do you select those five and what made you decide to make it a five song set list?
00:15:19
Speaker
First of all, you can choose your songs in a couple of different ways. So like when you step up to your ball and the ball is just sitting in the shooter lane, you have a you know a menu of songs to choose from. We whittle it down to four because i don't want to overwhelm the player with too many things. Like there's nothing worse than you step up to the game and there's like 30 options of what to do. And you already don't know.
00:15:41
Speaker
I very much like to scaffold things for the player. So let's start off with like at least a manageable chunk of information. chunk of decisions to make. Four already is kind of pushing it.
00:15:52
Speaker
So we're limiting it down to just four. Of these four, which song do you want to play? While you're playing that song, ah you'll have the ability to kind of choose the next song before, before as soon as it's qualified to move on to another song, you'll be able to choose it just via spinner hits. So it'll it'll move the song to the next one. And on that case, it's only cycling it through the next four songs, next four available songs.
00:16:18
Speaker
And so you'll be able to land on one of those if you'd like. And then when you go into the scoop, you can choose to play that song or stay in your current song. In that case, you're only making a two option choice, right? Am I going to keep playing this song or do I want to move on and the next song that is currently selected, which you know sort of a pseudo random type approach?
00:16:39
Speaker
We did that, too, to be a little bit user-friendly for the novices who, again, don't want to be over one with too many choices. If they don't care, they can just flip through and it's going to start the next song for them.
00:16:51
Speaker
Yeah, and that's that's sort of a balancing act because we want you you know you want the objective in the game to be... to feel reachable, right? If it's, if you've got your wizard mode that you're trying to reach for this next thing so far away, it doesn't, you want to capture that feeling of like, just did a little bit better. I would have got to that thing. i was so close, like one more song. I would have got to that next thing. And so if it's seven songs or eight songs before you get to your encore or wizard mode, it's just too much.
00:17:23
Speaker
And so
Strategic Depth and Sound Design
00:17:24
Speaker
we wanted kind of like a, a nice in between where, It feels like it's close, but it's not too close. and And that's just sort of a, you know, find the right balance.
00:17:37
Speaker
And that's something that has, it's a inarticulatable skill or even thing that it just comes from as you're playing the game more and more, you're going to get sense for how hard the shots are, how hard each of these modes are, what,
00:17:55
Speaker
what feels like a reachable goal and what feels like a stretch and what feels like, um, a, uh, a bridge too far for, for some players.
00:18:05
Speaker
But we add in this, this layer of, leveling up these songs so if you want to kind of speed run to that final encore you could or you could go deeper in each of these songs and try and get them leveled up as much as possible and that it gives you additional perks there's reasons why you might want to do that strategically and point wise and then even when you do get to that final wizard mode you might wish you had gone deeper on some of those songs because it It's going to make ah make your life a little bit more difficult when you do get there and and maybe not make it as lucrative as it could have been otherwise. So there's plenty of um strategy to be made, ah strategic decisions to be made, but it's still accessible to the to the novice, right? We want it to be simple on the surface.
00:18:55
Speaker
And the complexity comes from taking a bunch of simple things, combining them together, and then you have a little bit more interesting of a game and there's reasons for why you might want to choose some of these things that the novice may not care about and hopefully they're not annoyed by the fact that it's happening right it's um and you're not overwhelming them with choices and flashing lights we try and scaffold that make it and walk them through it as they go and make sure they know what they're making a decision for and
00:19:29
Speaker
If they don't care, that's fine. But if you do care and you're you're in a pinball and you want to try and maximize things, you can if you want to. So it it seems like you're leaning very heavily on this risk-reward strategy.
00:19:42
Speaker
type thing, which which is really good, especially because for elite players, there is a deeper level that they can go into in each mode that they can actually gain more experience, more ah more points when a basic player just wants to do the bare minimum to get through. So talk about that philosophy of being able to reach that and why go in with the risk-reward And do you have it on every mode? do you have easier modes or are they all kind of like similar in that you start off with a, with an easier shot, but if you want to get more and you just keep pushing into it until you end the mode.
00:20:18
Speaker
As more of the rule set becomes developed, it'll become apparent that, uh, well, what even is the risk reward in it? And before i even get into the risk reward element of it, there's another.
00:20:31
Speaker
mechanic or set of mechanics that was really playing around with in this game. That's I'm really excited to see it unfold and see how players react to it, where i don't know if you guys are board gamers or anything like that, but I'm very interested in the idea or like card games where you're building a deck where you're kind of building an engine, right? Like you, you have each card in your, in your game, whatever you're playing, it does one thing and it might do something pretty simple.
00:20:58
Speaker
But then as you, build out your deck, you start to interact with one another, and it starts to culminate in something a little bit more than just the sum of its parts. And so as you're choosing these songs, they're giving you a perk or a buff that continues on to the next into the future songs. And so when you choose Runaway, and you're choosing a combo based mode, that combo mechanic is going to carry over into the next song.
00:21:24
Speaker
But what's like in the next song might be based on these drop targets over here or shooting the ramp and that that starts a hurry up over here. Does this does this pair well with that?
00:21:36
Speaker
And if I was to start these combos and then it triggers a hurry up, can I pair these things together in a way that's going to maximize my point potential and maximize my progress in that mode?
00:21:48
Speaker
um So. That's where. some of the risk reward comes into play because as you're deciding, do I want to move on or do I want to stay? That decision isn't just points. It's also, do I want this perk? How, how, how much, how long do I want this perk to last for? How valuable do I want this perk to be?
00:22:10
Speaker
And that that's where that risk reward comes in. It's not just points. And this is ah something that, I was heavily influenced by Bowen when we were you know working on Labyrinth and Dune that he emphasized a lot is just like giving players points is kind of boring, right? Like what's really interesting is when you give the player an ability or something new, like this unlocked some other thing.
00:22:35
Speaker
And that is when things start to get addictive, right? Like, ooh, now I can do this now. And i couldn't do that before. And it's not just, oh, you got...
00:22:48
Speaker
10 million points. It's like, you know, sometimes like when you do get that really big payoff, it's really rewarding, but you don't want to overuse that. You want to give them that ability or or that, that new thing that they didn't have before, or it unlocked some new mode or it unlocked some mini wizard mode or something they haven't seen before. That's where it's really interesting. So when we're talking about the risk reward, that's the reward i want to give. I don't want to give points. I want to give a reward of an ability or a new affordance that they didn't quite have before.
00:23:22
Speaker
It's a music pin. Obviously the sound's going to mean a lot. You guys have upgraded the sound system for this one. Can you walk me through what the changes you've made ah to improve sound and in this game?
00:23:35
Speaker
Jeff Dodson, who did audio work on Winchester and Dune, and who's just a phenomenal audio engineer and musician. um He worked with the Barrels team to help design this new system. He personally hand-tuned all of the settings for these for every game that that's going out of the factory. It's going to come sounding incredible.
00:23:58
Speaker
um Just from what I'm hearing people playing this game, they're like, it just sounds incredible. amazing Like they're hearing it from like rooms over at at headquarters as it's say being blasted. and And people are just saying, this is like one of the best sounding games I've ever heard. um They, i think they, they upgraded the cabinet design a little bit to help with how the audio even just sounds exiting the the game. It was really important to Jeff, for example, as he was tuning it, he's not, he he wants to actually have the game changed.
00:24:32
Speaker
in front of him he's not tweaking these things remotely or like hearing what it sounds like playing through his computer on a you know on a dev uh work environment he wants he's like i need a cabinet and i need exactly how the same specs as our uh as our shipped cabinet and i need a play field in it to like all of these things matter when it comes to how the game sounds and he's tuned everything uh to that physical reality so it's it's Heavily tuned to that.
00:25:04
Speaker
The hardware underneath ah underneath the hood has been tuned to accommodate these things. i'm I'm pretty sure there was like a yeah some new hardware that the is being and included in there.
00:25:19
Speaker
You'll have to, tell yeah it'll be announced in the spec sheets and everything what those actually are. Again, I'm not an engineer, so I can't tell you the um exactly what they are. But the end result, I can tell you, sounds phenomenal. It's ah it's really really special.
00:25:35
Speaker
One thing i want to point out before we move on from the sound, I was listening to Jeff talk about I don't know how they pulled this off, but you can turn this thing up as loud as you want. And there's no glass rattle and there's no cabinet shake. It is like pure music without compromising the quality of the cabinet. It just, it's amazing.
00:25:55
Speaker
You can feel it in your bones.
Art and Iconography
00:25:57
Speaker
And it really makes a difference. it Audio is one of those things that you cannot underinvest in in a game. And having good audio is is the difference between ah a banger and a snoozer. And it's like you can totally amp up a game just by investing in the audio. And and Jeff is like, ah in my opinion, best in the business right now.
00:26:21
Speaker
well, okay, an audio pen, it actually really thrives in a home location. And so that's why it's ah it's a big deal to be able to have that good sound. Now, one question that some some games kind of lack on on location is that sometimes it can be difficult to actually hear them. So what options are these? Is there a headphone option? Is there is there just a right? Are you are you just at the mercy of the operator for turning it up and down? How does how is the plan for this to be if it's on location? Now, I know that there's only 700 of them. And so that may not end up on location very often, but I'm just curious.
00:26:58
Speaker
Obviously there's certain things you can't control. Like if, if, if if you've got a room full of 20 pins and they're all cranked to 11 and you're in a noisy bar, it's just like, forget about it doesn't matter what you're doing.
00:27:12
Speaker
um But all of the barrels games ah in the past, like ah just the computer itself, there's eighth inch jack out. So you can install a headphone jack on the game if you'd like. They're not, you know,
00:27:27
Speaker
You can plug it into the back. um If you wanted to route one to the front, that is something you could do. It's not installed um by default, but you can upgrade it to to have a headphone jack if you'd like and you want to hear it.
00:27:39
Speaker
But honestly, if you had this in a home environment, the only reason I would say to put on a headphone is if like you're trying to not wake your whole family because you' ah the sound out of the speakers is better than than the experience of putting on headphones.
00:27:56
Speaker
You know, looking at this game, the mech that stands out to me the most is this massive heart mech with the sword through it. um What made you guys decide to go with almost a Lord of the Rings-esque magnet ring?
00:28:11
Speaker
And it has multi-positions. Like, just explain this thing to me. The mech itself is ah kind of a riff on the shot through the heart. lyric that that begins, you give love a bad name that, you know, probably everybody's familiar with. And so it's sort of like, oh, it would be cool if we had a shot that went through a heart, right? And so going from there, it's like, well, Bon Jovi is kind of iconic icon or image is this Bon Jovi heart and dagger, which is a heart with a dagger going through it and, you know, wings on it. That's kind of the Bon Jovi logo. And so we use that as
00:28:50
Speaker
the starting point for making this Mac. Um, so inside the heart is an, uh, aperture, um, that's, you know, has a, uh, a uh, a magnet around it, similar to Lord of the Rings. So when a ball is shot into it, you can shoot directly through it. Obviously you just don't energize the magnet.
00:29:11
Speaker
Uh, you can catch the ball with the magnet and it kind of hovers there in the center, just like Lord of the Rings, if you're familiar. But, um, It goes several steps beyond that because in addition to doing that magnet, we now have ah an elevator that can go up and down. So there's actually three levels that the heart can be on.
00:29:31
Speaker
uh, street level, we'll call it where it's, uh, at the play field level, you can shoot through it kind of like a lane. It can go up to the second level where it, uh, empties onto wire form ramp.
00:29:42
Speaker
And it can even go up to a third level where it empties onto another wire form ramp. So in many ways it kind of serves as a diverter. Um, you can do all sorts of, uh, tricks with this too. So you can grab it, you can whip it back kind of like shadow. Once you do have it, you can grab it on the bottom level, take it up to the second level, whip it back there.
00:29:59
Speaker
um You can hold it, wait for a ball to hit it kind of thing. It has multiple states. On top of that, there's a ah lift ramp in front of the heart. So when the heart's at the second level, you can raise the lift ramp and turn it into a ramp shot.
00:30:16
Speaker
You can lower the lift lower the ramp when the heart's in the up position and shoot underneath it into like a subway shot or like ah like a hole shot. Or you can put the ramp down, lower the heart, and shoot through it. So with the combination of the heart and the ramp, you've got a lot of different possibilities for how you can use this heart. And and we make full use of it in the roll set, too. It does a lot of different things.
00:30:46
Speaker
And... creates a lot of different special moments for the player. And since it's so prominent too, it's, you know, we, we try and make the player shoot as much as possible. It looks pretty amazing. Definitely. It is the feature of the game. That one thing you're like, that is really cool looking now.
00:31:04
Speaker
Talk about the the whole presentation of the game, because now Barrels has always had that approach where we want the best version for all the people out there. So there is an entire package here. So do you want to mention the presentation and how you're doing it?
00:31:18
Speaker
Yes, our artist, artist Johnny Crap, Jonathan Bergeron, also known as Johnny Crap, he did the art on Bon Jovi. ah He also did the art on both Dune and Labyrinth and also Jurassic Park in the past. So he's a pinball art veteran at this point. So we definitely trust Johnny to kind of like bring the the vision to fruition. And he's kind of made like a really great, you know, just a really colorful uh vibrant package for bon jovi it spans uh the decades for for for the band it does a nice job of kind of capturing several different eras of the bon jovi ah you know band history um and you know as part of it like i love like the apron art he's got us like a soundboard at the concert so we're kind of
00:32:09
Speaker
Again, trying to lean into this ah concert vibe in the game. didn't go overwhelmingly into like creating like a venue or anything like that because we wanted to you know explore a lot of the Bon Jovi imagery and kind of music pin in general. But it does a good job of of creating a nice collage of of the bo jovi ah you know Bon Jovi image and and setting up like a ah nice emotion for the for the game. like You look at this game and It kind of just, it has a fun vibe to it. Um, I'll bring up creature from the black Lagoon a lot. It kind of gives me this vibe of just like almost like a nineties nineties pin vibe of, it's just very inviting.
00:32:54
Speaker
you just want to play. It looks fun. Um, And of course, we've got all of the all of the touches that you'd expect. So there's artwork everywhere. There's details everywhere. The the more you zoom in on this on the artwork, the more little details and Easter eggs are kind of hidden in there.
00:33:10
Speaker
we've got like you said We've got Art Blades, a standard on every ah Barrels of Fun game. You know, you Mirrored Bat Glass, standard on every every Barrels of Fun game. it's ah it's ah It's a very beautiful...
00:33:26
Speaker
a beautiful game to see in person. The artwork is is very unique. We really leaned into Bon Jovi, right? We just, we did the band true to what it is. um We captured their vibe. I think it's, it's a it's a party. It's a it's a celebration of the different eras that they've they've been in.
00:33:46
Speaker
And it's, it's just a fun pin. When you see it, you know what you're getting into when you, when you look at the pin. So one thing I want to bring up is I don't think this has been done in a modern LCD game, maybe back old school, but you've put an out lane flipper in for a crowd surf shot.
00:34:05
Speaker
This is amazing. Like I love the skill to this. Yeah. i mean, this is, this is a David Venice's wacky vision come to life. So he, he, think as we mentioned early on, like, you know, started as a two flipper game, added that upper third flipper and, He wanted to explore this idea of a a flipper ball save.
00:34:22
Speaker
he put it in the outlane and of like leading into the theme of being at a concert, you know having this crowd surf opportunity to save your ball. um So rules wise, you're able to qualify this via shooting that loop-de-loop cheer mechanism. You build the build up enough Bon Jovi letters via that and you can qualify the outlane. And then when it goes in there,
00:34:47
Speaker
You have a limited time. I mean, you can imagine if a ball is going into the out lane, you only have a limited amount of time to like get your bearings and start flipping. Right. Like as soon as it hits that switch, your your flipper becomes active and you can start flipping away as much as you as much as you want. I mean, obviously you want to do this skillfully and try and time it right. Try and hit it up that ramp.
00:35:10
Speaker
and hit it back into play and save your ball. And if you don't, you drain and that's on you, but, um, it's more of a skillful opportunity to save your ball than like a traditional kickback or something like that, where, um you don't really have much control over it. It just happens. so or some kind of trick that, uh, hits the ball back into play, which can, it's always fun, but it's fun. i really like it when it's a, a skillful opportunity to save your ball.
00:35:34
Speaker
It's not a gimme by any stretch. Um, You know, you do get better at it over time. Once you kind of figure it out, um yeah you'll get better at it. Initially, it's kind of hard, especially if you get a screamer of an outlane. Outlane drain, you got really be on your toes and flip fast. Most of the time, if it's going out there, it goes right by you. But if it's in there and you're and you're ready for it and you know that it's active, you can save that ball. And it's it's a super satisfying thing when you do because, you know, who doesn't like saving their ball? It's a
00:36:07
Speaker
get to stay alive and play more pinball it seems like you should be able to do ah even a a planned one like maybe ah an extra level that this is just my idea go ahead and run with it but kind of like monster bash where it's like the phantom flip where you you get it timed and it comes down you're like boom you're right back in the action it's okay wow that's a free idea go ahead and take it go ahead i like about that i mean i don't know if we have enough uh If the time variability between when it that switch goes off and when it does get to the flipper, it's probably greater than it is on Monster Bash.
00:36:41
Speaker
But it would be cool to do that, especially as we were talking about early on, most novices, they may not even recognize that they've got that
Immersive Experience through Visuals and Audio
00:36:50
Speaker
that flipper there. So, you know, it might be useful to them to try and give them like a ah freebie flip if um they don't get to it in time.
00:36:58
Speaker
It's like the opening act mode. You know, you're not quite into the concert yet. You're just barely getting your drink. You're sitting down and you're just trying to get into the vibe of the concert. You know, you, you got to make sure you the the newbies get, get into it. So.
00:37:11
Speaker
I will say though, that phantom flip annoys me a lot when I'm, you know, yeah that it never works. I i have monster bash behind me and I swear it never works, but i mean, if it did, it would be great.
00:37:23
Speaker
woo we've got We've got so much AI now. Surely we could make a Phantom Flip be more accurate in the year 2026, right? That's true. yeah One thing that you guys were kind of known for with the other games is the backboard, how to to display within itself on the play field.
00:37:38
Speaker
This one, you guys didn't do that. what What was the decision there to not put that in? My understanding is, you know, early on it was planned. And as as the game started developing and the heart mech went in,
00:37:52
Speaker
It started just being, we actually it's too much back here. It's going to be obscured and we don't and we don't really need it. And when we started thinking about what you know what assets we were going to be putting in the game, what the display was going to look like, it was sort of like,
00:38:08
Speaker
we didn't want to pigeonhole ourselves into like always putting the display back there. If we don't, especially if we don't need it. So in this case, it just didn't add anything to the game. In fact, it would have distracted, detracted from the things that were in there.
00:38:22
Speaker
And so no, no LCD screen. That's not to say it doesn't come back for future games or that it's, you know, not a, ah ah not something that we want to use it just for this particular game. It just didn't make sense.
00:38:35
Speaker
Now let's transition up a little bit though, because you still have the LCD display that has been emblematic of most modern games. So let's talk about what things you're going to be showing out there. Are you showing concert footage? Are you showing animations? ah And getting into that, who's doing the call outs? Because that's usually a big part of the game.
00:38:55
Speaker
Yeah. So the on the main display, like the main kind of the vibe that we got is a concert footage vibe, but it's um painstakingly stitched together from decades of archival concert footage that the band had given us access to. So we got hundreds of gigabytes of concert footage dating back from the eighty s And Trent Armstrong, one of the animators on the team and, ah you know, ah digital asset designer, he, you know, stitched these together in a way in addition to and I'll say in addition to concert footage, too, we also have many of the music videos that go along with them. So he had stitched them together in a way that kind of.
00:39:43
Speaker
Seamlessly, you know, as you're playing these songs, you everything is lining up. So it's like, it's not just one concert footage constantly being played. It's kind of switching back and forth across the eras in a really neat and ah creative way that that Trent did it.
00:40:00
Speaker
It's stitching in footage from, from the music videos as well. And it really gives, you know, this kind of almost like nostalgic, like, It's like when you go to a music concert, it's not just seeing the band. like you're You're getting all these emotions that go along with it. What Bon Jovi means, like what happened over the eras, being told through this lens of this concert footage, the...
00:40:25
Speaker
um the videos that go along with them, it creates like a very nice vibe. So that's kind of like the main ah the main thing that's being shown on the screen. In addition to the wonderful user interface design by Josh Clay, that's conveying like what's what's actually going on in the game and and giving you like a heads up display of what songs do you have active, what perks you have active, what's next, what the value is of these shots, et cetera, et cetera.
00:40:53
Speaker
So we've got calls from a number of different perspectives and in this game. um We've got from this archival footage, we were able to get the most authentic call outs you could get from John Bon Jovi from these. So he's got so many moments where he's talking to the crowd and he's amping up the crowd and Jeff but again, I'm going to praise Jeff has gone through, pulled out these moments, you know, uh, digitally enhanced them to make them sound like really good and clear. So even though they were like soundboard recordings or from concert recordings, pulls them out, makes them sound excellent.
00:41:29
Speaker
Like they're recorded in a booth and you've got, uh, John Bon Jovi doing the call outs there. We also have two characters that are frequently referred to in, in Bon Jovi songs. If you're familiar with the lore,
00:41:42
Speaker
um Tommy and Gina, who who make an appearance and in Living on a Prayer and also It's My Life. Actually, they're featured in the video for It's My Life as well.
00:41:54
Speaker
So we decided to kind of, as a perspective of you're at this concert, it's like you're at the concert with Tommy and Gina and they are, you know, yelling you know yelling ah from the crowd. They're interacting with one another, um kind of reacting to, you know,
00:42:12
Speaker
them kind of maybe subtly realizing that maybe these songs are about them, that sort of thing, adding like a little bit of depth and character to the experience to kind of enhance this idea that you are at the Bon Jovi concert as being told by ah Tommy and Gina.
Availability and Fan Engagement
00:42:29
Speaker
Barrels does focus on a limited amount. So how many are there going to be?
00:42:35
Speaker
And when can we start seeing them out? 700 is the number. and um ah We also now have this Barrels Reserve program, of course. So if you're not familiar with the Barrels Reserve program, this is sort of like an insurance policy. It's ah it's a subscription-based club, essentially. It's like $75 a year, and like a low barrier of entry, but it serves as sort of an insurance policy against getting boxed out of purchasing a game that sells out immediately. So if this game were to sell out immediately upon release,
00:43:10
Speaker
I hope it does. um Then all of the members, of those 700 games are are accounted for. And then everybody who is a Barrels Reserve member who didn't already buy one of those games has up to a week to claim an additional game.
00:43:27
Speaker
So it could be 700 plus. I can't remember how many Reserve members are there. 700 plus, like it's going to probably get in the bar park of like 100 games. really a couple hundred people, um, somewhere around there that could purchase if they choose to.
00:43:43
Speaker
So that chooses that determines the cap. So it's a little bit tricky in that it's like non-deterministic what the final number is actually going to be. We can't just advertise. It's going to be one of 700. It's like one of 700 plus some.
00:43:59
Speaker
That makes sense because what happened with Winchester is it kind of sold out way faster than we anticipated. And yeah this is a great option for people. And actually, I'm totally joining this club because I want to be on the list because I don't want to be frozen out of future belt barrels releases. So this is great. If someone wants to join that club, do they just go to the website? How do they get on it?
00:44:22
Speaker
Yeah, ah you just go to the website, BarrelsOfFun.com. You should be able to navigate there. i will say, though, we closed. So we have to close entry to the reserve program before we announce the game. So we actually closed.
00:44:39
Speaker
um You can no longer become... a member right now. So if, unless you signed up before Friday, you can have become a barrels reserve member until this cycle passes for the sale. So like once the cycle passes, then you can become a barrels reserve member for the next game.
00:44:58
Speaker
So unfortunately, if if you're not on it now, you you cannot get on it for this release, but you can for all future ones. um Yeah. Go to the website and yeah. Oh yeah. Again, we're, we are,
00:45:11
Speaker
trying to, we want as many people to get the games ah that want them. And if we certainly, we love selling out games, of course, but like if there's people who still want the game, like we want to see it out there too, right? We, it sucks that we, ah there are people that want Winchester so bad that, you know, they now are having to pay a lot of extra money if they want to get it, pry it from somebody else's hands. So we we want to make it fair to everybody you still limited in a way and this is like the best compromise that we were able to come up with well phil i want to thank you for coming on to talk bon jovi with us if someone wants to get a hold of you what's the best way to get a hold of you
00:45:53
Speaker
Oh my gosh, I'm not on social media. I'm not one of these social media people. I am on Pinside under the name SprayNerd. used to be on Tilt Forums, but Tilt Forums doesn't exist anymore. So um yeah, Pinside, SprayNerd, that's me.
00:46:08
Speaker
And if you want to get ahold of us, we are LoserKidPinballPodcast at gmail.com. All the socials are at LoserKidPinball. Or if you want some sweet swa swag like I am wearing right now, our baseball jersey, it SilverBallSwag.com slash LoserKid.
00:46:22
Speaker
Scott, why don't you give us our final final words? All right. You want this pin, dead or alive.