Transcript
Speaker: Hey, thank you for tuning in to the Loser Kid Pinball Podcast.
Speaker: We are on episode 14.
Speaker: We're breaking our biweekly rule for someone special today.
Speaker: I've got Scott Larson.
Speaker: How's it going, my man?
Speaker: Howdy ho.
Speaker: And let me have you introduce our special guest today.
Speaker: Well, we decided to follow up our Keith Elwin interview with having someone who is equally talented and equally legendary, someone who is a tournament legend and also the director of every video you've ever watched on how to play pinball, Bo and Karens.
Speaker: Hey, thanks.
Speaker: I've definitely been called the Larry Bird to Keith Owens Michael Jordan, which means I'm almost as good.
Speaker: That's fine.
Speaker: Wait, but I remember the old, it was the, wasn't that magic versus bird back in the day?
Speaker: I think that was the original Apple II game.
Speaker: It was the Magic versus Bird, and then they changed it because they apparently needed a black and white character for the advanced graphics back then.
Speaker: It was Dr. J versus Larry Bird in the original version.
Speaker: And Dr. J could break the backboard.
Speaker: It was great.
Speaker: It was way more fun to play than Bird.
Speaker: But, yeah, Bird could rain threes.
Speaker: And then when they're like, hey, this guy's retired.
Speaker: Maybe we need somebody else who can dunk.
Speaker: Who we got?
Speaker: So Jordan became Jordan versus Bird in the game.
Speaker: The later versions.
Speaker: Interesting that Bird just stuck around that long.
Speaker: He was kind of an old guy at that point.
Speaker: Yeah, he was super.
Speaker: Well, when they had the dream team, he was basically laying on the side most of the time icing his back because he could barely run.
Speaker: So that's me because I'm Bird.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Hey, you know what?
Speaker: I'm the 12th man on the, I don't know, on Oklahoma right now, or I don't even know if I'm on the bench.
Speaker: I'm on the D League.
Speaker: So if you can actually be a star, then I think you're living the dream.
Speaker: It's been really amazing to get to do all these things based on a game that I just love to play and I'd be playing regardless of
Speaker: whether there were any kind of competitions.
Speaker: The fact that I get to make these videos and that now I work part-time for Spooky Pinball as the director of rules and programming, it's miraculous.
Speaker: It's nothing I expected.
Speaker: I bet that 20 years ago you probably wouldn't have imagined how involved you would have been in pinball.
Speaker: Well, 20 years ago, I was a world champion.
Speaker: But you're absolutely right.
Speaker: I did not expect it.
Speaker: And honestly, I didn't expect the way the industry was going 20 years ago.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: 1999 saw the end of Williams.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Dadee Stern was the only company really at that point.
Speaker: It's pretty miraculous that they kept the lights on for all of us.
Speaker: And we've seen this comeback now.
Speaker: And sometimes Stern gets maligned for releasing a game that looks the same as another game.
Speaker: We're doing things that are cost cutting.
Speaker: They're the ones responsible for the fact that there even is an industry right now.
Speaker: That actually gets into one question that I had was I consider this kind of the second renaissance.
Speaker: They basically passed ACDC up until now.
Speaker: It's been an amazing growth of pinball and a resurgence of pinball that I would say rivals something similar that happened in the 90s.
Speaker: From my take, it seems that pinball is continuing to ascend, though.
Speaker: And in the 90s, it seemed like it whimpered out with them just selling off, you know, Cactus Canyon, all those just as at a fire sale when they were trying to get out of the industry.
Speaker: How do you view the difference between the era now versus the glory years of the 90s?
Speaker: It's hard to really judge because we don't have sales numbers like we did in the 90s.
Speaker: But my sense overall of what Stern sells is that the sales numbers are much lower overall now than they ever were in the 90s.
Speaker: Consider that there were almost 4,000 Popeyes sold in
Speaker: And you say, okay, well, now a game is successful if it makes 2,000, 3,000.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: For other companies, it's lower than that.
Speaker: At Spooky, we're running a full run of 500 Alice Coopers, and that's wonderful because it means that the people who work at Spooky can still stay fully employed and can move on and keep making games.
Speaker: But it's still nowhere near the production it was in the 90s.
Speaker: And even then, that production is nowhere near the production it was in the 1970s when –
Speaker: Games were just getting cranked out over and over again with 10,000 plus runs back to back to back.
Speaker: It's kind of incredible if you look at the numbers of there's what, 10,000 Lost Worlds?
Speaker: That game sucks.
Speaker: And they still made a ton of them and put them on location and it worked somehow.
Speaker: So what's crazy to me is just like you're saying, even in the 70s, a lot of those games were kind of crap.
Speaker: Or it's the same theme.
Speaker: just a different name as a two player or a four player or, you know what I'm saying?
Speaker: And so it is crazy to see the numbers.
Speaker: Being at spooky, does it give you a different side or perspective being, working for a pinball company than it was before you started working for them?
Speaker: I think I definitely see how challenging it all is.
Speaker: Like Charlie always says,
Speaker: Pinball is hard and you truly get to see the detail and how difficult it is to get something right and get something fun.
Speaker: have to make a lot of guesses and to say, well, I think this is fun.
Speaker: Let me build this and then we'll see if it actually is.
Speaker: And if it turns out you're wrong, you have to go back and try again, having wasted potentially a month of time trying to build something you think is fun and then backfires.
Speaker: So having people on the spooky team who have
Speaker: all these different expertise, expertises in mechanical design and animation and rules.
Speaker: I think it's, it's a tremendous team and we all kind of rely on our own instincts.
Speaker: And that's, that's something I didn't really think of or expect.
Speaker: I felt like there would be more play testing and putting something on location, getting it back, find out how it is before you,
Speaker: roll something out, but it's not like that.
Speaker: It's a, it's pretty much all internal thoughts and my own play testing and a few other people.
Speaker: And then we kind of go like, we agree.
Speaker: This is fun.
Speaker: Let's roll it out.
Speaker: And then it turns out, thankfully with Alice Cooper, we've been right.
Speaker: And hopefully with the next game, we'll be right again.
Speaker: I think it's, it is different now versus in the, in the nineties or basically pre-internet days that you could actually put something on location.
Speaker: I, I think if you put something on location now would be on pin side in about three hours.
Speaker: So I, that would kind of steal the thunder.
Speaker: But I,
Speaker: You've seen Keith and you've known Keith for years and you've seen Keith, uh, take his job at Stern and actually design a game himself.
Speaker: Um, including, uh, the rules you you're heavily involved in the rules at spooky.
Speaker: Have you ever considered taking that leap and trying to design a game?
Speaker: It's not really on my radar, and there's a couple of reasons.
Speaker: One is that there's already a couple of really good designers at Spooky, and having seen the work that Scott Denisi puts in to build the playfield, and we have a playfield ready to go for the next game, it is intimidating.
Speaker: I can't figure out.
Speaker: He's like, well, I moved this thing up an eighth of an inch this way so that this thing that's under the playfield can fit in there, and this light wasn't very visible from the front.
Speaker: He's doing this all in CAD design without actually having something physical in front of him.
Speaker: Then making the playfield with a CNC machine, then populating it, all of that stuff is just so far against my own expertise.
Speaker: I have very little taste for it.
Speaker: On the flip side, I have taste for rules, and I have taste for like, hey, I like the thing that this game did when it did this.
Speaker: I guess if I were to design a play field, it would probably be super derivative of all these other games.
Speaker: And on the one hand, you can look at what Keith has been doing, and you can say that as well.
Speaker: You can look at some of the shots and go like, oh, there's the cool through the bumper shot from Roadshow and Congo and the shadow loops.
Speaker: And if you look at what the design is on Jurassic, and you can see some things that are borrowed from other games, including the original Jurassic.
Speaker: But they're not borrowed in a way that makes you think, okay, this is bad, this is derivative.
Speaker: It's like taking the more interesting things that happened and iterating on it.
Speaker: Truly, I think that's what pinball design is like because it's not like you're going to design something and go like, oh, my God, I've never seen this before.
Speaker: But you can put some things together that create cohesion.
Speaker: And Scott is an expert at that.
Speaker: I don't think I ever will be.
Speaker: I actually mentioned Scott and I told him this.
Speaker: It was just an interesting story that when TNA came out, I downloaded the soundtrack and I work at a hospital.
Speaker: So one day we were in surgery and I actually had the TNA soundtrack on and the, there was a neurosurgeon who was operating and he looks up and he says, what are we listening to?
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: And I said, well, it's a pinball soundtrack.
Speaker: And he said, oh, yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Then he went back to surgery.
Speaker: I don't think in a million years he would have anticipated that would have been my answer.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And Scott has a real pace for...
Speaker: so many different aspects of pinball it's amazing he just kind of knows everything and he knows fun i think that the fact that he worked on the earth checker aftershock as well as the bride bride pinball 2.0 a little and he just had his had his toes dipped in all these different projects and gives you a feel of what it takes to make
Speaker: cohesive whole.
Speaker: That's one of the things that if you look at TNA, that's to me why it's very successful.
Speaker: That everything that happens in that game, the music, the lights, the action of the play, everything, all serves one purpose.
Speaker: It's super cohesive.
Speaker: And maybe that's because it's his vision.
Speaker: But I also think that's one thing that Spooky does as a design team really well.
Speaker: And you can see it in Alice Cooper and basically every Spooky game.
Speaker: that a small team working together can make a cohesive story, make a cohesive, uh, art and, uh, sound and rules package.
Speaker: It, uh, it works.
Speaker: And I think that the, the size of spooky can work to its advantage in that sense where a larger team at Stern, they're going to, they have to crank out games so much faster than anyone else does that, uh,
Speaker: it makes it difficult to make the game as cohesive.
Speaker: Going back to what you're kind of talking about, knowing that layouts and stuff have been around for such a long time, and kind of me building something that's more derivative, just because you've been around that for so long.
Speaker: Do you think that the industry's in a, at a point where, I mean, pinball's been around since the 1930s, we're coming up on 90 years of pinball.
Speaker: Do you think that
Speaker: it's all been done and so it's hard to do anything new or do you think there's still room to reinvent the wheel so to speak?
Speaker: Well, even since if you look at the new things that have come along in pinball, those two things are the dot matrix display in 1990 and the LCD display in either 1999 or 2013 or so, whatever, depending on if you count pinball 2000s.
Speaker: None of those are really innovations that have to do with gameplay.
Speaker: And I don't know that there's a lot that you could improve on the change in the gameplay of having a ball hit around with flippers.
Speaker: Just about everything I could think of has been done in some game.
Speaker: And so it's a matter of then hooking all those things together
Speaker: Like, it's kind of cool.
Speaker: I see on the Jurassic artwork, what's been provided, what's been visible so far, is there are shots that divert to other shots and kind of a lot of different ways the ball can go.
Speaker: I think that's something that on Alice Cooper does well, too, is it has this...
Speaker: these five different entrances to the subway.
Speaker: So you'll hit a ball into something.
Speaker: You're not quite sure where it's going to come out.
Speaker: And then it comes out and you're like, Oh damn, it's over there now.
Speaker: Those, those things are fun and they can bring in a new player or a casual player and make them want to,
Speaker: dig into a game more deeply.
Speaker: But I do see like some games seem to have more innovation than others and that's okay.
Speaker: And the innovative games might not be the best playing games.
Speaker: Like the, the games from American pinball have had a ton of play field innovations, all sorts of a wackadoodle, like ball fires into a
Speaker: box thing or whatever it was on Houdini and the ramps and the feeds on Oktoberfest.
Speaker: But it's hard because it doesn't necessarily translate into the most fun machine to play.
Speaker: And that balance is impossible to strike.
Speaker: You basically have to just go with what you think is right and hope it works.
Speaker: So you mentioned finding that, I guess, I don't know a better way to describe it, that thing, that whatever it is that fires off the dopamine in your brain to say, ooh, this is a lot of fun.
Speaker: So you've been doing this for years.
Speaker: What keeps pinball interesting for you?
Speaker: It's that thing.
Speaker: Wait, no.
Speaker: It really varies a lot.
Speaker: I think that one of the things that has kept me...
Speaker: It kept me going for so long as there's still many skill moves to learn, and I don't have mastery of some of those skills like the tap pass and the stage flip.
Speaker: For example, this last IFPA championship, there was a match with Johannes from Germany, and he's able to just hold down the upper flipper on Iron Maiden.
Speaker: and fire through loops like it's not even there.
Speaker: Even when there's a ball cradled on the other flipper, he's got the flipper button held in halfway and just leaves it there and then is able to flip the upper flipper when he wants to while still holding a ball.
Speaker: And the, I don't know how he does that.
Speaker: I mean, I know how he does that.
Speaker: I just don't know how he does that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And the fact that players can do that and consistently tap pass and consistently do these crazy skill moves that I just, I mean, I know what they are, but I don't feel confident doing them.
Speaker: And I don't know how he got there.
Speaker: Is he practicing a lot?
Speaker: Is he just naturally amazing?
Speaker: Is it this particular machine?
Speaker: But all those things make me want to play more because they make me want to
Speaker: advance my own skills and try and attempt to compete with these folks.
Speaker: Um, then so it was for me, for example, 10, 15 years ago with the older machines with the Flash Gordon era, Paragon era machines.
Speaker: I used to just hate those games and, um, felt there was a lot of luck involved and it, it basically forced me to learn how to, how to nudge better.
Speaker: And in doing so,
Speaker: I became a better player on modern machines.
Speaker: And the fact that there are so many machines and such variety to them, that is fantastic.
Speaker: It keeps me going.
Speaker: And you always see, year over year, you see machines you've never seen before that are super old.
Speaker: I got to play a game recently called Four Seasons.
Speaker: It's an old Gottlieb.
Speaker: And in the middle of the playfield, it had these two arrows.
Speaker: and you could whack the ball with the arrows and change how much things were worth.
Speaker: So the one arrow, the arrow on the left was like one, two, three, four, five.
Speaker: And the arrow on the right was times one, times 10, times 100.
Speaker: And so if you could line up your shots and make them, and these were weird shots, you could make everything worth 500 points a shot.
Speaker: Or you could make them worth one point a shot.
Speaker: And I had never seen that before, never seen that kind of device on a game.
Speaker: And it makes me wonder, like, okay, this has to show up in some other pinball machine someday.
Speaker: It's too cool.
Speaker: The fact that those things exist and that you can still discover them is kind of one of the things that will keep drawing me back.
Speaker: I got another 30 or 40 years in this, I think, or at least until I get bad enough with my reflexes that I'm sick of playing because I'm too terrible at it.
Speaker: Could you imagine Pinside blowing up over a 500 times multiplier?
Speaker: I mean, they lost their mind over the 40 times multiplier.
Speaker: Why is this a problem?
Speaker: 500x multiplier?
Speaker: I think games should have a 1,000x multiplier.
Speaker: That would not be an exploit in terms of settings.
Speaker: So what do we want then?
Speaker: A 0.1% multiplier?
Speaker: We'll make it divide by 1,000?
Speaker: Actually, do you know what I would like?
Speaker: I would like the ability to attack my opponent's score.
Speaker: So if I do something, then it multiplies the score by 0.75.
Speaker: And so it actually shaves points off them.
Speaker: That's what I want.
Speaker: Point shaving incidents.
Speaker: Uh-oh.
Speaker: Has there ever been a pinball machine where it shaved off points?
Speaker: I mean, it doesn't sound like, I don't know.
Speaker: It sounds like a terrible idea to me because you start losing points.
Speaker: It has happened.
Speaker: It happened on Bugs Bunny's birthday ball.
Speaker: Um, and, uh, there may be another game besides that, but it's generally a really bad idea.
Speaker: Uh, pirates of the Caribbean on Jersey Jack actually does allow you to, uh, steal score from other players.
Speaker: Um, so, you know, unfortunately like for tournament play, this is a really bad idea because it allows someone to play Kingmaker and say, well, I'm going to, I'm going to rob from player three, even though strategically I should rob from player one player, player one's my friend.
Speaker: And,
Speaker: I'd rather rob from player three and help player one out.
Speaker: We don't really want that type of thing to happen because it can create collusion conditions and situations that don't bring out the best player as the winning competitor.
Speaker: That's a good point.
Speaker: But it doesn't mean you can't do it.
Speaker: You can totally do it in programming and you can build games that have that.
Speaker: You just have to have the ability to shut that off when it comes time for a competition.
Speaker: And that's one of the things that the Jersey Jack Pirates does well.
Speaker: It allows you to decide how much of that plundering
Speaker: can or can't be done like plundering a ball from another player is possible that that's crazy town to me um but if you it's a game about pirates it really pirates feel snuffed they steal booty pirate booty
Speaker: So in my in my personal experience, Bowen, you were one of the first pinball celebrities that I found because when I got into the hobby, I found these pop of videos and they were fantastic.
Speaker: I would because I don't have very many pinball machines around me.
Speaker: And so when I went to a tournament.
Speaker: It would be fantastic to learn the machine.
Speaker: And I just go on and I would just type in, say it was the shadow, which is one of my favorites, because that point that part where you're doing the the oh, what's it called?
Speaker: The the inner loop, the inner sanctum loop or whatever it is.
Speaker: And the points are just the points are going nuts.
Speaker: And you're like, this is absurd.
Speaker: I just I love it.
Speaker: It's fantastic.
Speaker: What's neat is that's the basis for Iron Readings loops being as valuable as they are, that if you can pull off that many loops in a row, you should get rewarded big time.
Speaker: And it's very satisfying.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: But yeah, a couple of the videos, especially with games that play a little faster and they're more challenging, we try to film maybe two or three games and do different strategies on each game to try and show what is possible and what might be most point efficient.
Speaker: But for longer games like Spider-Man or X-Men or something like that, it's all like, okay, let's see if we can get to wizard mode here.
Speaker: I remember spending eight hours playing X-Men.
Speaker: trying desperately to get to danger room.
Speaker: And I finally got there and it was over within 20 seconds.
Speaker: It was just, I was like, screw it.
Speaker: I don't care.
Speaker: That is the, that's the game.
Speaker: That's the one we're going with.
Speaker: There is, and I'm not spending another eight hours trying to get back there.
Speaker: Well, that makes me feel good.
Speaker: That makes me feel good about deciding to sell my X-Men now.
Speaker: What convinced you, though, to start doing the pop-it tutorials?
Speaker: Was it just people kept asking you how to play this game, and you're like, that's it?
Speaker: I'm making videos?
Speaker: I had work in Pittsburgh every two months.
Speaker: I worked for Pittsburgh Public Schools.
Speaker: I live near Boston.
Speaker: And so I would go to Pittsburgh every two months.
Speaker: work a day for the schools.
Speaker: And then in the evening, I would just go over to Papa and play some games with friends.
Speaker: And they had just gotten these cameras in.
Speaker: They'd used them for the Papa World Championship the year before.
Speaker: Papa 13 was the first one with top-down cameras.
Speaker: And I was like, well, what are we doing with these cameras?
Speaker: What could we do with these cameras?
Speaker: like, oh, I can talk over a game and just play it out and see how it goes.
Speaker: And so we made a few, not really expecting very many people to watch them.
Speaker: We weren't sure how to even show them.
Speaker: We used Vimeo, which was a service that allowed you to decide whether you were vertically or horizontally oriented so we could use vertical orientation on the videos.
Speaker: And lo and behold, they were all right.
Speaker: And every two months we'd come back and
Speaker: I come back and film another one, film two more, maybe depending on how quickly we can get them done.
Speaker: And the library grew.
Speaker: And now it turned out that in 2017, I was no longer going to Pittsburgh for work.
Speaker: And I was like, well, I guess that's it.
Speaker: That's the end of the videos.
Speaker: And someone asked me to set up a Patreon.
Speaker: Say, well, you could make a little money on the Patreon and then eventually build up to have enough money to make trips.
Speaker: And it's been running strong now for two plus years.
Speaker: And we continue to make trips.
Speaker: We have a couple trips planned that I don't want to spoil, but they are very special trips to places that we are very happy about filming, but we wouldn't have been able to do it without the support of the Patreon backers.
Speaker: Well, the, uh, the tutorials, they're a big hit, obviously, uh, get a lot of streaming on them.
Speaker: I, every time I'm thinking of getting a game, I always type in and say, I wonder how this looks when a really good player plays as opposed to me.
Speaker: Um, and.
Speaker: When you are involved in in Papa, how involved are you in game acquisition?
Speaker: Do they ask you, do you choose the games?
Speaker: And if there are games out there that you would like to incorporate into the Papa library that just currently you don't have, I guess that's a wandering question, but you can take any part you want.
Speaker: I'm not as involved in the day-to-day operation of Papa, which is now called the Replay Foundation, than people think because they see the videos or they see me at Pinberg and they think that I must be really super involved.
Speaker: It's much more on Mark Steinman and Doug Polka and Elizabeth Cromwell.
Speaker: And the technicians and other people who actually live in Pittsburgh who make those decisions.
Speaker: Every so often, they'll send me a list and an email.
Speaker: They'll be like, here are some games we could acquire.
Speaker: Do you have any feel for whether these are competitively viable?
Speaker: And so if Lost World shows up on that list, I'll say, no, do not get another Lost World.
Speaker: But otherwise, I usually have some input about like, oh, that game looks good or that game is like this game.
Speaker: That game is terrible.
Speaker: And then they'll use that to make their choices.
Speaker: So in particular, they've greatly increased the number of classic Stern machines they've had in the last few years.
Speaker: So games like Quicksilver and Stargazer and Stars, I mean, they've had a Stars, but that era of game is rare to find, and they're all really terrific competitive games.
Speaker: How do you keep them going?
Speaker: When I was in Denver, there was a Barakora, I was playing the classics and then Barakora basically caught on fire.
Speaker: They had to unplug it.
Speaker: And so it basically, we stopped it before, but it started smoking and you could definitely smell it.
Speaker: And the reliability of these games, that has to be a huge challenge to keep these games going, especially when it's nonstop play.
Speaker: for four or five days.
Speaker: How do you maintain them and keep them linear, I guess?
Speaker: So this is where the team, the preparation, and the format of the event shine.
Speaker: So first it's the team.
Speaker: It's Steve Eckert, it's Dan Hall, it's Nick Chiquet, it's all these technicians who prep the games and are really attentive to
Speaker: the small issues that a game might have so that by the time it gets to Pindberg, it's in as good a condition as they can put it in.
Speaker: The preparation for the tournament locally in Pittsburgh is to run little mini weeklies at PAPA on a small set of games.
Speaker: And everyone who goes, they're called fight clubs.
Speaker: But I'm not allowed to talk about it.
Speaker: Nobody talks about fight clubs.
Speaker: The players are responsible there for also making note of anything they see on those games that is out of whack.
Speaker: And then the technicians will go through it and then that's it.
Speaker: They'll leave that game off to the side, ready to go to the convention center.
Speaker: And they will do that for all 388 machines that are being used in the tournaments.
Speaker: And that doesn't mean there won't be problems on site because games still go down, games still catch on fire.
Speaker: My favorite of all was two years ago, we had some rain and the rain leaked through the roof at the convention center.
Speaker: And it took down one of the pinball machines.
Speaker: And the reason this is hilarious is because it was Torpedo Alley.
Speaker: So Torpedo Alley was underwater and got taken out.
Speaker: So the format allows us to pull a game or replace a game or make a game more difficult or easier at any time during the event because everything is match play.
Speaker: I don't have to compare someone's score on day one to someone else's score on day three.
Speaker: That means if we look at a game, we realize, oh, yeah, we forgot to take the in-lane rubbers off this game.
Speaker: I'm thinking of you, World Poker Tour.
Speaker: Then we can take those rubbers off once we realize it's too easy.
Speaker: Or we can pull a game entirely because it's just not reliable and bring in a different game to replace it.
Speaker: We have 10 backup games of each type, and those backup games can be brought into a bank.
Speaker: Or when something goes down in mid-game, we say, all right, go over there.
Speaker: Go over there, see Lewis.
Speaker: Lewis will set you up with a backup game.
Speaker: And that format is, I'm happy to have helped develop that format.
Speaker: And I think it's one of the reasons Pinberg has been so successful because it runs, it runs smoothly, it runs on time.
Speaker: And that matters way more in a tournament of this size than people tend to think.
Speaker: Sorry, I got to reel it back just for two seconds because you guys have been talking about Fight Club, and Scott and I have been talking about that this week with all the –
Speaker: leaks of Jurassic Park and he's like, first rule of Fight Club, you don't talk about Fight Club.
Speaker: I've thought about pinball, Fight Club is the perfect analogy, whatever, for the hobby because in that movie, if everyone remembers, at one point in the movie, there was like a ton of people showing up to Fight Club and Brad Pitt gets up there and he's like, you remember what the number one rule is?
Speaker: No one talks about Fight Club.
Speaker: Why is there so many people here?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's exactly how it is with the pinball hobby.
Speaker: They're like, here's the new Jurassic Park.
Speaker: Don't tell anyone.
Speaker: And then the one guy's like, all right, I won't tell anyone except for two close friends of mine that I know that I know they won't say anything.
Speaker: And then those two friends say something.
Speaker: And before you know it, we've all seen the pitchers.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, now being in the industry, I see a whole different side of that because we're working on a game.
Speaker: And frankly, we're not supposed to tell anybody what's in it.
Speaker: And it's been interesting because people constantly ask, like, so this new Scott Denise game, how many bumpers is it going to have?
Speaker: How many ramps is it going to have?
Speaker: How many?
Speaker: I say ramps?
Speaker: But...
Speaker: Those are legitimate questions for people to be asking, but I can't tell anybody.
Speaker: If I tell anybody, pretty much it's gone.
Speaker: And it's interesting, too, because there are people who I would love to talk about for brainstorming purposes.
Speaker: who are interesting people and might have a lot to say about it.
Speaker: And what do you do?
Speaker: Do you bring them in with an NDA?
Speaker: Do you trust that they're not going to tell anybody?
Speaker: Do you just eat it and do what you're going to do anyway?
Speaker: I don't really know.
Speaker: And as we start to continue to work on this game and other games, it would be nice to be able to talk about it with my friends and say,
Speaker: what do you think this should do in this multi-ball?
Speaker: It would be a better game for it.
Speaker: I can't do that.
Speaker: So there are possible leak sources.
Speaker: We've actually been talking behind the scenes.
Speaker: Who do you think is leaking it?
Speaker: Here's my thought is there are certainly ways that people, either distributors or people, friends of designers, or also industries could be doing like kind of guerrilla marketing and actually do kind of a leak to develop some buzz.
Speaker: Do you have any thoughts on any of that?
Speaker: So by guerrilla marketing, you're saying there's a King Kong game coming?
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: King Kong versus Godzilla.
Speaker: It has to be both.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: You heard it first.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So one of the issues here with any kind, well, this is also the issue between being licensed and unlicensed.
Speaker: That if you are a licensed title, you have to work with the licensor in a way that is mainly up to them.
Speaker: So suddenly they could just drop.
Speaker: I've noticed that's happened with at least one or two of the Stern machines where the licensor just kind of mentions, oh, by the way, this is coming.
Speaker: Or the example of Elvira announcing that the game is coming this fall.
Speaker: I doubt that was approved by Stern or they would have done something different.
Speaker: So at Spooky, we haven't had to deal with a licensor, even when we had a license.
Speaker: Alice Cooper was like the easiest licensor ever.
Speaker: He just basically was like, yeah, do what you want, man.
Speaker: The...
Speaker: Strangely, not only that, he now has built his tour around the way the pinball machine was designed.
Speaker: If you get a chance to see those pictures, it's ridiculous.
Speaker: Yeah, I saw them.
Speaker: They were fantastic.
Speaker: That's a guy who knows what to do.
Speaker: Well, coming back to it, it's a difficult thing to go.
Speaker: If you're asking, like, who's responsible for the current leaks, at least for Jurassic Park, it looked like it was coming from a webinar with distributors.
Speaker: sometimes these things are done on purpose to try and drive hype on a game.
Speaker: I don't, I don't know.
Speaker: I don't like any of it.
Speaker: I just like, look, let's just make a game and put it out there.
Speaker: And maybe spooky flies under the radar on that stuff.
Speaker: And it's nice that we don't have to, to deal with people chasing down the, the names of the game or whatever, or in Scott's case, he just goes to expo and tells everybody.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I do.
Speaker: I miss the days when I would open it up and when I wasn't as involved as I am now, when I would look at it and say, you know, I wasn't even following the rumor mill and I'd say, oh, well, they released that.
Speaker: Let's check it out.
Speaker: And so that seemed to be a lot more fun.
Speaker: Now you have like these current lists of, hey, this is a rumored title or this is a rumored title or these things are going up.
Speaker: Part of me says, well, okay, I don't know what's coming out, but it's probably one of these five.
Speaker: So it seems to kind of take a little bit of the air out of the sail for me.
Speaker: I like being surprised.
Speaker: I remember when I was first getting into pinball or when I was playing a really large amount of pinball, all of a sudden I'd just show up to the arcade and they'd be taking out the roller games and wheeling into Terminator 2.
Speaker: And I'm like, oh my God, it's Terminator 2.
Speaker: And you'd see them setting up the game with the lights off, trying to figure out what the rules would have to be.
Speaker: I remember looking at the right loop on that game because it was labeled as million plus.
Speaker: and thinking, oh, that has to be the jackpot because of what Whirlwind did and what Funhouse did and all these other games have been doing a million plus.
Speaker: And then you get to play it, you're like, oh my God, this is amazing.
Speaker: There's a gun and there's a super jackpot and there's all this, oh my God.
Speaker: That is a really visceral experience of seeing a game for the first time.
Speaker: It's an experience that people who are brand new to pinball still get because they don't follow any of that stuff.
Speaker: They'll just show up in arcade and I'm like, oh my God, they made a game out of the Munsters.
Speaker: Or they made a game out of Twilight Zone because they haven't seen pinball in 25 years.
Speaker: And that's a great experience.
Speaker: And I think that I agree with you there that if I'm following the forums too closely or I'm just following what everyone's doing, that there's something lost there.
Speaker: And unfortunately, I don't think there's a way to change that because it's just the nature of scoops and the internet.
Speaker: Well, what's funny to me is like, I didn't even follow the stuff on Tuesday.
Speaker: It's like, as soon as the floodgates open, all of a sudden it's flying everywhere.
Speaker: Like, it's Mountain Standard Time, nine o'clock Mountain Standard Time.
Speaker: I've got emails.
Speaker: I've got text messages.
Speaker: I've got Facebook messages.
Speaker: I'm like, well, Jurassic Park must have been leaked because why else would my phone be blowing up from all these people?
Speaker: You know what I'm saying?
Speaker: So it's crazy that even if you're just, I guess we are in the podcasting business and so people want us to know.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Or maybe it's because we're all friends with each other and we're all like, dude, check this out.
Speaker: We all need to talk about it right now.
Speaker: So it's just so weird going from what it was 20 years ago to what it is today.
Speaker: Yeah, I agree.
Speaker: Like you said.
Speaker: Realistically, all you had to do was follow Keith Elwin's Facebook where he was constantly playing Jurassic Park with his dad.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Did you notice, by the way, that the picture that he had with his dad, and I think that's his girlfriend, he was wearing a Padres T-shirt and she was wearing a Jurassic Park one.
Speaker: So yeah, that, that was, that was a brilliant move.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think that the challenge with, with controlling the message is I think everybody's so excited about it that they really just, just like you said that when you're working on a game, you want to talk to someone because you want to bounce ideas or you want to talk with someone who has that, that same fire about pinball.
Speaker: And yeah,
Speaker: Because we are such a, it's a big community, but it's also an interconnected community.
Speaker: Just like Josh said, when the pictures came out, he was getting it from multiple different sources.
Speaker: Just like you said, I think the leaks are coming from multiple.
Speaker: It's not just one area.
Speaker: It's so many different areas because people are excited about their product.
Speaker: And I guess that's a really good thing.
Speaker: So it certainly gives us stuff to talk about between releases.
Speaker: Very true.
Speaker: But I don't care as much for the speculation side of that when there's not something going on where you're like, oh, maybe they're working on this or maybe they're working on this.
Speaker: And people will ask me, so what do you know about who's working on this?
Speaker: I don't pay any attention to that.
Speaker: I've got my own junk to think of.
Speaker: And my own, I guess our own games to think of now, which is, it's still very weird to work for a pinball company.
Speaker: I gotta say.
Speaker: But even before that, I wasn't paying attention to any of those rumors until like, okay, pictures.
Speaker: And even when pictures come out, I want to play the game.
Speaker: I don't want to make a judgment about a machine until I can actually flip it and get a feel for the shots and get an understanding of how the game plays.
Speaker: And I've been...
Speaker: Burned on that a couple times where I go like, oh yeah, this game looks amazing or this game looks like crap.
Speaker: And then you find out from actually playing it that, oh, this is what it is.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Getting in there and playing the game matters so much.
Speaker: Hopefully that will happen soon.
Speaker: A tendency for Stern, I think, is to get this information out there only weeks before the game ships.
Speaker: So I suspect we'll be seeing these games before the end of the month, before the end of August.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it looks, it looks great.
Speaker: It's a, it's a theme that I would be interested in.
Speaker: Uh, I remember seeing Jurassic park the first time, and that was really the first time in my life that I looked at it and said, yeah, I could believe dinosaurs were real in that.
Speaker: Well, because it's the first time the computers took it.
Speaker: I mean, it was sad.
Speaker: So dinosaurs were real.
Speaker: Well, okay.
Speaker: You know what I mean.
Speaker: Imagine how they would be in life.
Speaker: It was sad that they had to poison the Triceratops so they could film that scene.
Speaker: But, you know, it's...
Speaker: No, but it was so exciting to see that because that was really that touchstone when computers took everything to the next level and you said, wow, computers can take us into a different world.
Speaker: I'm really excited to see how the theme is integrated and how the game is played, though.
Speaker: With his first game with Iron Maiden, such a huge hit.
Speaker: I'm excited to see what the follow-up is.
Speaker: Yeah, I think he's just going to stick to the 25-year-old licenses at this point.
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: Well, it is the wheelhouse.
Speaker: It's the 40- to 50-year-old people who grew up in the 80s.
Speaker: That is exactly right.
Speaker: It's the old white guy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, what it is, is the game room effect because we don't have arcades anymore.
Speaker: So we have to take the arcades and put them in our house.
Speaker: I'm going back to what you said about the heyday of the industry and how even though things are going great right now, they're not going like they were in the 90s.
Speaker: That's the reason.
Speaker: There just aren't as many places to receive machines on location.
Speaker: And it used to be in the 90s that...
Speaker: People in the industry wouldn't really necessarily care about home users.
Speaker: Home users were secondary market to the distributors and to the arcades.
Speaker: And now that's completely flipped.
Speaker: Now, following up on that, is pinball relevant to anybody who's not in the hobby?
Speaker: I can't tell you how many times people talk about, oh, what's your hobby?
Speaker: And I just say, well, I play pinball.
Speaker: And they say, really?
Speaker: Do they still – they say that every time.
Speaker: Do you still make pinball?
Speaker: And it's like, yeah, actually, they –
Speaker: They're still making them and it's still going strong.
Speaker: But certainly to the average person, they don't even know that pinball is still, they think all of the companies vanished.
Speaker: So what do you think and is it possible to build that mass appeal that we once had or are we so fragmented with smartphones and with the internet and everything that we all get into our own little silos and don't really pay attention to other things?
Speaker: My opinion is that we haven't had that level of mass appeal since the 1970s.
Speaker: I don't think that even the positive industry movement in the 90s was enough to register on the general population for pop culture.
Speaker: You would see kids go to arcades, but they wouldn't go to arcades thinking, I'm going to play pinball.
Speaker: They'd think I'm going to arcades to play Mortal Kombat or NBA Jam or that.
Speaker: Those games...
Speaker: don't even match the same category as Adam's family.
Speaker: They sold thousands and thousands and thousands of arcade units and then the consoles started coming and the consoles destroyed all the arcades.
Speaker: So I think once they still make those, their vision is that Pinball is what it was in the 1970s of late model EMs and early model solid states.
Speaker: without voice, without dot matrix or LCD, without any of what we see today.
Speaker: So what would it take?
Speaker: I honestly have no idea.
Speaker: it would be a huge change in the industry.
Speaker: I don't see how it would even be possible.
Speaker: I like the industry that we have.
Speaker: And I like that we get to expose new people to pinball often.
Speaker: But I don't think it can ever come back to where it was in the 70s.
Speaker: So my question is with the rise of the, I would say the new arcade where it would be the barcade.
Speaker: So people aren't really exposed to pinball before they actually start going to bars.
Speaker: Most arcades have really turned into kind of a ticket redemption centers.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You go in there and it's kiddie gambling everywhere.
Speaker: And every single machine is a Rothrill's machine with a ticket dispenser.
Speaker: And I'm not sure.
Speaker: Hey, kudos to Josh Sharp for getting it done.
Speaker: But it's not really the same because those machines don't require the maintenance that a pinball machine does.
Speaker: And you have such a niche group who want to actually put in the effort to maintain pinball machines, to actually play them, to have them on site.
Speaker: So where is the next generation coming from?
Speaker: Because a lot of these kids, yes, it's kind of a hipster cool thing to do now with rising barcades and certainly locations, Pacific Northwest, where you are in the Northwest or Northeast, excuse me.
Speaker: I'm just wondering where that next generation is coming from.
Speaker: I really wish I had a good answer for you.
Speaker: There isn't a good answer other than the children of the other people who already play pinball.
Speaker: Because as you said, many of the locations are 21 plus.
Speaker: And the ones that are full family tend to have only say one machine.
Speaker: We just don't see pinball machines in restaurants and 7-Elevens and just on the corner.
Speaker: You get mostly places that are catering to the bar crowd who are going to try to get more people there on a Tuesday night than anyone else.
Speaker: And you also get the crowd of
Speaker: just people who super care about pinball and want to create an amazing location.
Speaker: And then they do that because they love it.
Speaker: And that's, that's amazing that those people exist and we need to salute them because they're the reason we're able to play pinball like we are.
Speaker: Any of these places that you said that have had this increasing scene, it's been individuals.
Speaker: It's been small groups of people,
Speaker: who have just dedicated themselves to acquiring games and putting them on location and making that work somehow.
Speaker: I think that one of the ways we can potentially appeal to more locations than the ones that have the driving games is the resale value of these machines.
Speaker: If I acquire a brand new Munsters and then it turns out a month later that I'm sick of it, I can still flip it for almost full value, where if I tried to do that with one of those Royal Thrillist machines...
Speaker: I'm going to have a really hard time finding a buyer at the original sale price.
Speaker: Whether that's enough to want people to put more games on location, I have no idea.
Speaker: I doubt it.
Speaker: I also wonder if the manufacturers and anybody can take this and run, I'm not copywriting it.
Speaker: If they had a pop, basically what you're doing with gameplay, but they had a similar format to say, hey, these are like the top 10 or top 15 things that you need to do to maintain kind of like, I guess, a mechanics course on pinball machines.
Speaker: I know that there are things out there if you Google, you know, if you YouTube it, you can find all different sorts of different things about, well, this is how you do a flipper rebuild or this is how you do whatever.
Speaker: But if they had something that was more of an online resource from the company, I wonder if that would actually get people more involved when they don't have
Speaker: you know, they're willing to get their feet wet into, Hey, I'm going to get under, I'm going to buy a machine.
Speaker: I'm going to be able to maintain it myself.
Speaker: Uh, I know that's one of the challenges with new people where they're like, I don't even know how to maintain this thing.
Speaker: And if, if you're telling me it takes maintenance and breaks down, I don't even know if I want to go there.
Speaker: Um, even, even then you still have to get those people's interest in the first place where if they're like, yeah, let's go get that rough rolls.
Speaker: Let's go get the drop zone.
Speaker: Let's go get, uh, these, uh, kitty ice games where we do carnival stuff.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: have kids pay a dollar or throw for tickets.
Speaker: It's hard to argue for pinball in that environment where the amount of money being made by those machines is probably greater than the amount of money that would be made by a good pinball machine in those same conditions.
Speaker: But it does happen.
Speaker: Like there's an arcade in Boston where they've had, they started out with three pinball machines.
Speaker: They found, oh, these are the best earning games in the place.
Speaker: Let's make more.
Speaker: Let's have six pinball machines.
Speaker: Now they have 11 pinball machines.
Speaker: And they're starting to crowd out all the video games in that place.
Speaker: For all I know, it'll be a pinball only place eventually, but still has the same problem.
Speaker: It's 21 plus.
Speaker: I think another potential venue for drawing new players, and this is a difficult one, is the potential for the visibility of competitions.
Speaker: And like the IFPA world champion is a teenager.
Speaker: Now the last winner of Papa was a teenager.
Speaker: There are ways in which people can look at these, and sure, you can find them on YouTube, but we'd have to be talking about a partnership with a real TV network, ESPN or Fox or somebody like that, to air these tournaments the same way they air poker tournaments and try to get some visibility for the game that way.
Speaker: The point where someone would say...
Speaker: I want a pinball machine.
Speaker: Where is one?
Speaker: And if you get enough drive from players to say, where's my pinball machine?
Speaker: Please make one.
Speaker: Bring one here.
Speaker: That works.
Speaker: It really works.
Speaker: And then once people get to actually play pinball on location, they usually like it.
Speaker: They like it a lot.
Speaker: These people will say, oh, they even make pinball these days?
Speaker: Once you get them in front of a game, they love it and they want to play more.
Speaker: the followup question I always get when someone comes over and sees my games is they immediately say, huh?
Speaker: And they play it for about five minutes and then they turn to me and say, okay, so theoretically, how much does one of these things?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Theoretically, how much does one of these things cost?
Speaker: Cause they're immediately thinking, wow, this is pretty fun.
Speaker: I wonder how I can get one in my basement.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: It's a price point of 400, $400 per game and everything will be fine.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, and that's actually where I was defending Stern's attempt at doing the pin or, you know, the Star Wars pin.
Speaker: Because I thought, you know what, people were saying it's not a big deal to go from that to a pro.
Speaker: And I counter in saying, well, when you look at it and a pro is $5,500 and this is $4,000, you're still looking at a pretty significant reduction in price if someone's trying to outfit a game room.
Speaker: And so if they're willing to say, well, I just want one that works in a home environment, maybe it's a gateway pin.
Speaker: Maybe they'll be able to do something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, I have my opinion on this is that the price is still way too high.
Speaker: That $4,000 is not something that people generally would look at for something that they're going to.
Speaker: use as a consumer device.
Speaker: And unless they already like pinball, in which case then they are, they would then look around and go like, well, for $4,000 I could get blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: And get a fully featured game with a theme I really enjoy.
Speaker: So it's either going to, if it, if it succeeds, I think it succeeds on its theme and its music and its feel and,
Speaker: I think the rules on that game are solid.
Speaker: They're done by Duncan Brown, who's done Beatles and a number of other games.
Speaker: He's been in the industry for two decades.
Speaker: So dismissing it as a bad game is not true.
Speaker: It's a good game.
Speaker: But it doesn't look like a good game on the surface to people with pinball experience.
Speaker: And then for people who don't have pinball experience, they look at it, they go, oh, this looks interesting.
Speaker: Wait, how much is it?
Speaker: $4,000.
Speaker: And that's it.
Speaker: They're done.
Speaker: Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I really don't think that that's a price point people are going to go in for.
Speaker: They're going to go in for an air hockey table at $800 or a foosball table at $1,000 or a bubble hockey table.
Speaker: It's around the same.
Speaker: If a pinball machine were available at that price range,
Speaker: It could win, but it's not going to win at $4,000 in those spaces, I think.
Speaker: But they have a different opinion on this.
Speaker: And I hope they succeed because it means more people playing pinball and it means more people wanting to play the full-size versions of these games.
Speaker: Well, I think that's another reason that some of the early Stearns and the 80s Bally's and whatnot have been doing so well.
Speaker: Not only a lot of people hype them as of recently, but people see, at least here in Utah, it seems that if you hit that $800 to $2,000 range, pinball machines sell within 30 minutes.
Speaker: And so I think people are out there wanting to buy pinball machines for the home.
Speaker: They really want...
Speaker: They love the nostalgia.
Speaker: They love everything about it.
Speaker: They want one in their corner next to their air hockey table or their pool table, wherever it is.
Speaker: And so they're looking for that lower end stuff.
Speaker: I think that's why it's so hard to find one.
Speaker: And that's the other thing is a further strike against the pin from Star Wars.
Speaker: Very few people just lay out $4,000 whenever they feel like it.
Speaker: And some of those people are going to lay out $5,500 whenever they feel like it instead.
Speaker: And the ones who are, aren't willing to pay that extra amount for the larger machine, they're probably going to look around and go like, well, instead of paying this for $4,000, what, what else could I get?
Speaker: And they might pick up a full-sized 80 star Wars for 3000 or a, uh, or a Paragon.
Speaker: I hopefully, um,
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Data in Star Wars is a pretty good gateway drug into other pinball, though.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, here's my argument for anyone that's trying to get into the hobby.
Speaker: This is what I tell a lot of people.
Speaker: When the inevitable question comes up, how much does this cost?
Speaker: I usually tell them, honestly, my whole collection's paid for itself.
Speaker: I've bought one, then I've sold it.
Speaker: And I slowly grew my collection.
Speaker: I didn't go to what I have now just because I spent it all over one night.
Speaker: And so the wonderful part about pinball is if I buy a game that I don't like, nine times out of ten, I can usually sell it to someone else for either the money I bought it for,
Speaker: or maybe take a hundred dollar, $200 hit.
Speaker: And so if you buy one and you don't like it, don't worry.
Speaker: Cause you can usually sell it, especially depending on what range a lot of people when they're first getting in, I tell them get in that 1500 to $2,500 range, because if you don't like it, I guarantee someone's going to buy it off of you at that price and you won't have a problem selling it.
Speaker: And so when people start hearing that, when they start hearing, Oh, well, if I'm not stuck with it and I don't like it, you know, if I don't like it, then I'm stuck with it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Then, uh,
Speaker: So it helps.
Speaker: It's shockingly low risk compared to other similar investments into electronics.
Speaker: Well, but I also look at it compared to other things like people buy four wheelers, people buy boats, people buy like all these things, especially out in Utah.
Speaker: Outdoor stuff is a big business and you buy a boat and you drive it off a lot, so to speak, and it loses $20,000 in price.
Speaker: Don't people recognize that the Salt Lake is really not a good place to drive a boat?
Speaker: I mean, what are they doing?
Speaker: Well, actually, Salt Lake is more for sailing.
Speaker: There is actually sailing out there, but there are tons of reservoirs out here.
Speaker: So it is kind of a mecca if you like water skiing or wakeboarding or surfing or whatever the kids are doing nowadays.
Speaker: Yeah, I learned just a few weeks ago that you don't need a license to drive a boat, even a motorboat in Utah.
Speaker: It's pretty awesome.
Speaker: Yeah, awesome and slightly shocking when you see a 12-year-old driving their dad's $100,000 boat.
Speaker: Yep, yep, yep.
Speaker: Kids need supervision from kind of like one-hour course.
Speaker: Well, watch a YouTube thing.
Speaker: It's all on YouTube nowadays.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So my son's eight and he drives the tractor.
Speaker: So, uh, well, there you go.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, okay.
Speaker: But there's nothing to hit Invernal except for dinosaur bones.
Speaker: So, um, Hey, we got two reservoirs around here.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, there you go.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: We've kept you super late.
Speaker: I appreciate you for going away.
Speaker: I want to wrap up on one final question or at least a final topic.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: You're an elite player, one of the best around, and the Super Bowl is coming up in two weeks with Pinnberg, and you can't play in it.
Speaker: So do you feel that right now Papa's not running, at least doing the other major tournament?
Speaker: And so do you feel a loss?
Speaker: Do you feel a possibility of missing out that you can't actually compete with these elite players?
Speaker: I would imagine it being a, you know, you know, it'd be like Tom Brady on the sidelines saying I can still do this, but I'm running the Superbowl as opposed to playing in it.
Speaker: Well, one of the things with Pinberg is that this is in some ways my baby that, uh, um, back when Papa first opened in 20, 2006, 2007, 2009, whatever.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: I kept talking to them about running a match play tournament, that they have enough games and enough games of quality to run the best match play tournament ever.
Speaker: And finally, in 2011, they agreed and they're like, all right, let's do it.
Speaker: And this is now year nine of Pinberg.
Speaker: In all nine years, I've been part of the team building the event, setting up the format, running the event as one of the assistant tournament directors.
Speaker: And there are so many other people involved now,
Speaker: like Doug Polka, who is the full tournament director, that I could step away and it would still be all right.
Speaker: It would still run itself.
Speaker: But I feel like it's very important to me to see this event continue to grow and succeed and that it has the flavor it already has, which is to be fun for all the players, not just for the elite players.
Speaker: There are definitely a lot of events out there where elite players have
Speaker: the run of the house, and they enjoy it, they can do whatever they want, and they're going to have a great time.
Speaker: And Pinnberg is not just for elite players.
Speaker: It's for all 1,000 players to have the same experience.
Speaker: And I'm really proud of that, and I think that it needs people like me to help run it.
Speaker: And I'm very proud to be part of the team, and I don't even think twice about not being able to compete because I still get a huge amount of enjoyment
Speaker: from talking with friends and seeing people fly across the country and across the world to be part of this.
Speaker: And it's something rare to be able to build the thing of this caliber and size.
Speaker: A thousand people in a pinball tournament?
Speaker: What is this?
Speaker: It's not supposed to be possible.
Speaker: And the fact that we have a team that can do it is amazing to me.
Speaker: Well, awesome, Bolin.
Speaker: We thank you so much for coming on and coming and joining us, little peons.
Speaker: I know that we've always appreciated having you out here in Utah when you come out to hang out with us.
Speaker: Too bad we didn't have you for this last Salt Lake Gaming Con, but we've always had fun whenever you come out.
Speaker: Yeah, congratulations on the growth of that.
Speaker: The growth of the con there has been really cool to see.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: If someone wants to get a hold of you, what's the best way to contact you?
Speaker: No, you can just find me on Facebook or on Twitter.
Speaker: It's pretty easy to find me just about everywhere.
Speaker: If you're coming to Pinnberg, say hello.
Speaker: A lot of people are like, I didn't want to stop you.
Speaker: You seem important.
Speaker: I'm just this guy.
Speaker: So I hope nobody's intimidated by me being whoever I am.
Speaker: I don't even understand that personally.
Speaker: It's just a thing that happens.
Speaker: Well, we're going to send you out a hat.
Speaker: We're going to send you out a hat as a thank you.
Speaker: And I hope you at least proudly wear it one of the days when you're walking around Pinbrook.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: Free hat.
Speaker: Yay.
Speaker: And on that note too, we're not doing the hat giveaway on this episode.
Speaker: It will be the next episode that we do.
Speaker: So all those that still want to participate, the way that you do it is like our Facebook page and leave us a review either on Facebook or if you do it on another website, please take a screenshot of it and send it to us because there's so many places to review us.
Speaker: It's hard to keep track of all of them.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Anyway, thanks again, Bowen.
Speaker: We really appreciate it.
Speaker: And staying up super late on the East Coast for us.
Speaker: Sure thing.
Speaker: It's a real good time talking with you.
Speaker: And I'll catch up with you again soon.
