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Ep 14: The Larry Bird of Pinball, Bowen Kerins
45 Plays6 years ago
Sitting down with a pinball legend, Bowen talks about Pinburgh, Jurassic Park leaks, and Star Wars home edition among other things!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:06
Speaker
Hey, thank you for tuning in to the Loser Kid Pinball Podcast.
00:00:09
Speaker
We are on episode 14.
00:00:10
Speaker
We're breaking our biweekly rule for someone special today.
00:00:15
Speaker
I've got Scott Larson.
00:00:17
Speaker
How's it going, my man?
00:00:18
Speaker
Howdy ho.
00:00:19
Speaker
And let me have you introduce our special guest today.
00:00:23
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.
Comparisons and Classic Games
00:00:41
Speaker
Hey, thanks.
00:00:41
Speaker
I've definitely been called the Larry Bird to Keith Owens Michael Jordan, which means I'm almost as good.
00:00:48
Speaker
That's fine.
00:00:50
Speaker
Wait, but I remember the old, it was the, wasn't that magic versus bird back in the day?
00:00:57
Speaker
I think that was the original Apple II game.
00:00:59
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.
00:01:08
Speaker
It was Dr. J versus Larry Bird in the original version.
00:01:13
Speaker
And Dr. J could break the backboard.
00:01:16
Speaker
It was great.
00:01:17
Speaker
It was way more fun to play than Bird.
00:01:19
Speaker
But, yeah, Bird could rain threes.
00:01:21
Speaker
And then when they're like, hey, this guy's retired.
00:01:26
Speaker
Maybe we need somebody else who can dunk.
00:01:28
Speaker
Who we got?
00:01:30
Speaker
So Jordan became Jordan versus Bird in the game.
00:01:33
Speaker
The later versions.
00:01:34
Speaker
Interesting that Bird just stuck around that long.
00:01:37
Speaker
He was kind of an old guy at that point.
00:01:40
Speaker
Yeah, he was super.
00:01:41
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.
00:01:47
Speaker
So that's me because I'm Bird.
00:01:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:53
Speaker
Hey, you know what?
00:01:54
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.
00:02:00
Speaker
I'm on the D League.
00:02:01
Speaker
So if you can actually be a star, then I think you're living the dream.
Spooky Pinball Roles and Industry Insights
00:02:08
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
00:02:16
Speaker
whether there were any kind of competitions.
00:02:18
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.
00:02:27
Speaker
It's nothing I expected.
00:02:30
Speaker
I bet that 20 years ago you probably wouldn't have imagined how involved you would have been in pinball.
00:02:37
Speaker
Well, 20 years ago, I was a world champion.
00:02:42
Speaker
But you're absolutely right.
00:02:44
Speaker
I did not expect it.
00:02:45
Speaker
And honestly, I didn't expect the way the industry was going 20 years ago.
00:02:48
Speaker
Right.
00:02:49
Speaker
1999 saw the end of Williams.
00:02:50
Speaker
Right.
00:02:53
Speaker
Dadee Stern was the only company really at that point.
00:02:58
Speaker
It's pretty miraculous that they kept the lights on for all of us.
00:03:03
Speaker
And we've seen this comeback now.
00:03:04
Speaker
And sometimes Stern gets maligned for releasing a game that looks the same as another game.
00:03:10
Speaker
We're doing things that are cost cutting.
00:03:12
Speaker
They're the ones responsible for the fact that there even is an industry right now.
00:03:17
Speaker
That actually gets into one question that I had was I consider this kind of the second renaissance.
00:03:24
Speaker
They basically passed ACDC up until now.
00:03:28
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.
00:03:36
Speaker
From my take, it seems that pinball is continuing to ascend, though.
00:03:41
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.
00:03:53
Speaker
How do you view the difference between the era now versus the glory years of the 90s?
00:04:00
Speaker
It's hard to really judge because we don't have sales numbers like we did in the 90s.
00:04:04
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.
00:04:16
Speaker
Consider that there were almost 4,000 Popeyes sold in
00:04:23
Speaker
And you say, okay, well, now a game is successful if it makes 2,000, 3,000.
00:04:27
Speaker
For sure.
00:04:28
Speaker
For other companies, it's lower than that.
00:04:34
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.
00:04:48
Speaker
But it's still nowhere near the production it was in the 90s.
00:04:53
Speaker
And even then, that production is nowhere near the production it was in the 1970s when –
00:04:59
Speaker
Games were just getting cranked out over and over again with 10,000 plus runs back to back to back.
00:05:04
Speaker
It's kind of incredible if you look at the numbers of there's what, 10,000 Lost Worlds?
00:05:09
Speaker
That game sucks.
00:05:11
Speaker
And they still made a ton of them and put them on location and it worked somehow.
00:05:17
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.
00:05:22
Speaker
Or it's the same theme.
00:05:25
Speaker
just a different name as a two player or a four player or, you know what I'm saying?
00:05:30
Speaker
And so it is crazy to see the numbers.
00:05:34
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?
00:05:43
Speaker
I think I definitely see how challenging it all is.
00:05:46
Speaker
Like Charlie always says,
00:05:49
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.
00:05:58
Speaker
have to make a lot of guesses and to say, well, I think this is fun.
00:06:02
Speaker
Let me build this and then we'll see if it actually is.
00:06:05
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.
00:06:17
Speaker
So having people on the spooky team who have
00:06:21
Speaker
all these different expertise, expertises in mechanical design and animation and rules.
00:06:28
Speaker
I think it's, it's a tremendous team and we all kind of rely on our own instincts.
00:06:35
Speaker
And that's, that's something I didn't really think of or expect.
00:06:38
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,
00:06:46
Speaker
roll something out, but it's not like that.
Game Development and Design Challenges
00:06:48
Speaker
It's a, it's pretty much all internal thoughts and my own play testing and a few other people.
00:06:53
Speaker
And then we kind of go like, we agree.
00:06:55
Speaker
This is fun.
00:06:55
Speaker
Let's roll it out.
00:06:56
Speaker
And then it turns out, thankfully with Alice Cooper, we've been right.
00:07:00
Speaker
And hopefully with the next game, we'll be right again.
00:07:03
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.
00:07:11
Speaker
I, I think if you put something on location now would be on pin side in about three hours.
00:07:17
Speaker
So I, that would kind of steal the thunder.
00:07:21
Speaker
But I,
00:07:23
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.
00:07:31
Speaker
Um, including, uh, the rules you you're heavily involved in the rules at spooky.
00:07:38
Speaker
Have you ever considered taking that leap and trying to design a game?
00:07:44
Speaker
It's not really on my radar, and there's a couple of reasons.
00:07:46
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.
00:08:00
Speaker
I can't figure out.
00:08:03
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.
00:08:12
Speaker
He's doing this all in CAD design without actually having something physical in front of him.
00:08:18
Speaker
Then making the playfield with a CNC machine, then populating it, all of that stuff is just so far against my own expertise.
00:08:29
Speaker
I have very little taste for it.
00:08:34
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.
00:08:40
Speaker
I guess if I were to design a play field, it would probably be super derivative of all these other games.
00:08:48
Speaker
And on the one hand, you can look at what Keith has been doing, and you can say that as well.
00:08:53
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.
00:09:00
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.
00:09:11
Speaker
But they're not borrowed in a way that makes you think, okay, this is bad, this is derivative.
00:09:15
Speaker
It's like taking the more interesting things that happened and iterating on it.
00:09:20
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.
00:09:30
Speaker
But you can put some things together that create cohesion.
00:09:34
Speaker
And Scott is an expert at that.
00:09:37
Speaker
I don't think I ever will be.
00:09:39
Speaker
I actually mentioned Scott and I told him this.
00:09:41
Speaker
It was just an interesting story that when TNA came out, I downloaded the soundtrack and I work at a hospital.
00:09:49
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?
00:09:59
Speaker
I like it.
00:10:00
Speaker
And I said, well, it's a pinball soundtrack.
00:10:02
Speaker
And he said, oh, yeah.
00:10:04
Speaker
Okay.
00:10:06
Speaker
Then he went back to surgery.
00:10:08
Speaker
I don't think in a million years he would have anticipated that would have been my answer.
00:10:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:13
Speaker
And Scott has a real pace for...
00:10:18
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
00:10:42
Speaker
cohesive whole.
00:10:44
Speaker
That's one of the things that if you look at TNA, that's to me why it's very successful.
00:10:49
Speaker
That everything that happens in that game, the music, the lights, the action of the play, everything, all serves one purpose.
00:10:58
Speaker
It's super cohesive.
00:11:00
Speaker
And maybe that's because it's his vision.
00:11:04
Speaker
But I also think that's one thing that Spooky does as a design team really well.
00:11:08
Speaker
And you can see it in Alice Cooper and basically every Spooky game.
00:11:12
Speaker
that a small team working together can make a cohesive story, make a cohesive, uh, art and, uh, sound and rules package.
00:11:25
Speaker
It, uh, it works.
00:11:26
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,
00:11:42
Speaker
it makes it difficult to make the game as cohesive.
00:11:45
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.
00:11:55
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.
00:12:05
Speaker
Do you think that
00:12:07
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?
00:12:14
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.
00:12:33
Speaker
None of those are really innovations that have to do with gameplay.
00:12:38
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.
00:12:49
Speaker
Just about everything I could think of has been done in some game.
00:12:54
Speaker
And so it's a matter of then hooking all those things together
00:12:59
Speaker
Like, it's kind of cool.
00:13:00
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.
00:13:16
Speaker
I think that's something that on Alice Cooper does well, too, is it has this...
00:13:20
Speaker
these five different entrances to the subway.
00:13:23
Speaker
So you'll hit a ball into something.
00:13:25
Speaker
You're not quite sure where it's going to come out.
00:13:27
Speaker
And then it comes out and you're like, Oh damn, it's over there now.
00:13:31
Speaker
Those, those things are fun and they can bring in a new player or a casual player and make them want to,
00:13:38
Speaker
dig into a game more deeply.
00:13:41
Speaker
But I do see like some games seem to have more innovation than others and that's okay.
00:13:49
Speaker
And the innovative games might not be the best playing games.
00:13:54
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
00:14:04
Speaker
box thing or whatever it was on Houdini and the ramps and the feeds on Oktoberfest.
00:14:13
Speaker
But it's hard because it doesn't necessarily translate into the most fun machine to play.
00:14:19
Speaker
And that balance is impossible to strike.
00:14:22
Speaker
You basically have to just go with what you think is right and hope it works.
00:14:28
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.
00:14:41
Speaker
So you've been doing this for years.
00:14:45
Speaker
What keeps pinball interesting for you?
Pinball Skills and Innovations
00:14:48
Speaker
It's that thing.
00:14:50
Speaker
Wait, no.
00:14:52
Speaker
It really varies a lot.
00:14:53
Speaker
I think that one of the things that has kept me...
00:14:57
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.
00:15:08
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.
00:15:24
Speaker
and fire through loops like it's not even there.
00:15:27
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.
00:15:39
Speaker
And the, I don't know how he does that.
00:15:44
Speaker
I mean, I know how he does that.
00:15:45
Speaker
I just don't know how he does that.
00:15:48
Speaker
Right.
00:15:49
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.
00:16:02
Speaker
And I don't know how he got there.
00:16:04
Speaker
Is he practicing a lot?
00:16:05
Speaker
Is he just naturally amazing?
00:16:07
Speaker
Is it this particular machine?
00:16:11
Speaker
But all those things make me want to play more because they make me want to
00:16:15
Speaker
advance my own skills and try and attempt to compete with these folks.
00:16:19
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.
00:16:27
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.
00:16:37
Speaker
And in doing so,
00:16:39
Speaker
I became a better player on modern machines.
00:16:42
Speaker
And the fact that there are so many machines and such variety to them, that is fantastic.
00:16:48
Speaker
It keeps me going.
00:16:49
Speaker
And you always see, year over year, you see machines you've never seen before that are super old.
00:16:55
Speaker
I got to play a game recently called Four Seasons.
00:17:00
Speaker
It's an old Gottlieb.
00:17:03
Speaker
And in the middle of the playfield, it had these two arrows.
00:17:07
Speaker
and you could whack the ball with the arrows and change how much things were worth.
00:17:12
Speaker
So the one arrow, the arrow on the left was like one, two, three, four, five.
00:17:16
Speaker
And the arrow on the right was times one, times 10, times 100.
00:17:20
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.
00:17:31
Speaker
Or you could make them worth one point a shot.
00:17:35
Speaker
And I had never seen that before, never seen that kind of device on a game.
00:17:40
Speaker
And it makes me wonder, like, okay, this has to show up in some other pinball machine someday.
00:17:45
Speaker
It's too cool.
00:17:47
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.
00:17:54
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.
00:18:05
Speaker
Could you imagine Pinside blowing up over a 500 times multiplier?
00:18:10
Speaker
I mean, they lost their mind over the 40 times multiplier.
00:18:14
Speaker
Why is this a problem?
00:18:16
Speaker
500x multiplier?
00:18:17
Speaker
I think games should have a 1,000x multiplier.
00:18:21
Speaker
That would not be an exploit in terms of settings.
00:18:25
Speaker
So what do we want then?
00:18:26
Speaker
A 0.1% multiplier?
00:18:28
Speaker
We'll make it divide by 1,000?
00:18:33
Speaker
Actually, do you know what I would like?
00:18:34
Speaker
I would like the ability to attack my opponent's score.
00:18:38
Speaker
So if I do something, then it multiplies the score by 0.75.
00:18:41
Speaker
And so it actually shaves points off them.
00:18:44
Speaker
That's what I want.
00:18:46
Speaker
Point shaving incidents.
00:18:47
Speaker
Uh-oh.
00:18:52
Speaker
Has there ever been a pinball machine where it shaved off points?
00:18:54
Speaker
I mean, it doesn't sound like, I don't know.
00:18:56
Speaker
It sounds like a terrible idea to me because you start losing points.
00:19:01
Speaker
It has happened.
00:19:03
Speaker
It happened on Bugs Bunny's birthday ball.
00:19:05
Speaker
Um, and, uh, there may be another game besides that, but it's generally a really bad idea.
00:19:11
Speaker
Uh, pirates of the Caribbean on Jersey Jack actually does allow you to, uh, steal score from other players.
00:19:18
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.
00:19:34
Speaker
And,
00:19:34
Speaker
I'd rather rob from player three and help player one out.
00:19:38
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.
00:19:50
Speaker
That's a good point.
00:19:52
Speaker
But it doesn't mean you can't do it.
00:19:54
Speaker
You can totally do it in programming and you can build games that have that.
00:19:59
Speaker
You just have to have the ability to shut that off when it comes time for a competition.
00:20:03
Speaker
And that's one of the things that the Jersey Jack Pirates does well.
00:20:06
Speaker
It allows you to decide how much of that plundering
00:20:10
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
00:20:28
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.
00:20:42
Speaker
I would because I don't have very many pinball machines around me.
00:20:45
Speaker
And so when I went to a tournament.
00:20:48
Speaker
It would be fantastic to learn the machine.
00:20:50
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?
00:21:00
Speaker
The the inner loop, the inner sanctum loop or whatever it is.
00:21:04
Speaker
And the points are just the points are going nuts.
00:21:06
Speaker
And you're like, this is absurd.
00:21:08
Speaker
I just I love it.
00:21:09
Speaker
It's fantastic.
00:21:11
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.
00:21:23
Speaker
And it's very satisfying.
00:21:25
Speaker
Yes.
00:21:26
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.
00:21:43
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.
00:21:52
Speaker
I remember spending eight hours playing X-Men.
00:21:56
Speaker
trying desperately to get to danger room.
00:21:59
Speaker
And I finally got there and it was over within 20 seconds.
00:22:02
Speaker
It was just, I was like, screw it.
00:22:06
Speaker
I don't care.
00:22:06
Speaker
That is the, that's the game.
00:22:08
Speaker
That's the one we're going with.
00:22:10
Speaker
There is, and I'm not spending another eight hours trying to get back there.
00:22:16
Speaker
Well, that makes me feel good.
00:22:18
Speaker
That makes me feel good about deciding to sell my X-Men now.
Tutorial Videos and Educational Influence
00:22:23
Speaker
What convinced you, though, to start doing the pop-it tutorials?
00:22:25
Speaker
Was it just people kept asking you how to play this game, and you're like, that's it?
00:22:28
Speaker
I'm making videos?
00:22:30
Speaker
I had work in Pittsburgh every two months.
00:22:33
Speaker
I worked for Pittsburgh Public Schools.
00:22:35
Speaker
I live near Boston.
00:22:37
Speaker
And so I would go to Pittsburgh every two months.
00:22:40
Speaker
work a day for the schools.
00:22:42
Speaker
And then in the evening, I would just go over to Papa and play some games with friends.
00:22:48
Speaker
And they had just gotten these cameras in.
00:22:50
Speaker
They'd used them for the Papa World Championship the year before.
00:22:53
Speaker
Papa 13 was the first one with top-down cameras.
00:22:58
Speaker
And I was like, well, what are we doing with these cameras?
00:23:00
Speaker
What could we do with these cameras?
00:23:03
Speaker
like, oh, I can talk over a game and just play it out and see how it goes.
00:23:09
Speaker
And so we made a few, not really expecting very many people to watch them.
00:23:13
Speaker
We weren't sure how to even show them.
00:23:16
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.
00:23:26
Speaker
And lo and behold, they were all right.
00:23:30
Speaker
And every two months we'd come back and
00:23:32
Speaker
I come back and film another one, film two more, maybe depending on how quickly we can get them done.
00:23:37
Speaker
And the library grew.
00:23:39
Speaker
And now it turned out that in 2017, I was no longer going to Pittsburgh for work.
00:23:49
Speaker
And I was like, well, I guess that's it.
00:23:50
Speaker
That's the end of the videos.
00:23:53
Speaker
And someone asked me to set up a Patreon.
00:23:58
Speaker
Say, well, you could make a little money on the Patreon and then eventually build up to have enough money to make trips.
00:24:04
Speaker
And it's been running strong now for two plus years.
00:24:07
Speaker
And we continue to make trips.
00:24:09
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.
00:24:24
Speaker
Well, the, uh, the tutorials, they're a big hit, obviously, uh, get a lot of streaming on them.
00:24:30
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.
00:24:39
Speaker
Um, and.
00:24:42
Speaker
When you are involved in in Papa, how involved are you in game acquisition?
00:24:49
Speaker
Do they ask you, do you choose the games?
00:24:52
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.
Advisory and Tournament Logistics
00:25:04
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.
00:25:18
Speaker
It's much more on Mark Steinman and Doug Polka and Elizabeth Cromwell.
00:25:24
Speaker
And the technicians and other people who actually live in Pittsburgh who make those decisions.
00:25:30
Speaker
Every so often, they'll send me a list and an email.
00:25:33
Speaker
They'll be like, here are some games we could acquire.
00:25:36
Speaker
Do you have any feel for whether these are competitively viable?
00:25:40
Speaker
And so if Lost World shows up on that list, I'll say, no, do not get another Lost World.
00:25:46
Speaker
But otherwise, I usually have some input about like, oh, that game looks good or that game is like this game.
00:25:53
Speaker
That game is terrible.
00:25:54
Speaker
And then they'll use that to make their choices.
00:25:57
Speaker
So in particular, they've greatly increased the number of classic Stern machines they've had in the last few years.
00:26:06
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.
00:26:21
Speaker
How do you keep them going?
00:26:23
Speaker
When I was in Denver, there was a Barakora, I was playing the classics and then Barakora basically caught on fire.
00:26:32
Speaker
They had to unplug it.
00:26:33
Speaker
And so it basically, we stopped it before, but it started smoking and you could definitely smell it.
00:26:40
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.
00:26:51
Speaker
for four or five days.
00:26:53
Speaker
How do you maintain them and keep them linear, I guess?
00:26:58
Speaker
So this is where the team, the preparation, and the format of the event shine.
00:27:06
Speaker
So first it's the team.
00:27:07
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
00:27:19
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.
00:27:26
Speaker
The preparation for the tournament locally in Pittsburgh is to run little mini weeklies at PAPA on a small set of games.
00:27:36
Speaker
And everyone who goes, they're called fight clubs.
00:27:38
Speaker
But I'm not allowed to talk about it.
00:27:39
Speaker
Nobody talks about fight clubs.
00:27:41
Speaker
The players are responsible there for also making note of anything they see on those games that is out of whack.
00:27:51
Speaker
And then the technicians will go through it and then that's it.
00:27:54
Speaker
They'll leave that game off to the side, ready to go to the convention center.
00:27:59
Speaker
And they will do that for all 388 machines that are being used in the tournaments.
00:28:06
Speaker
And that doesn't mean there won't be problems on site because games still go down, games still catch on fire.
00:28:12
Speaker
My favorite of all was two years ago, we had some rain and the rain leaked through the roof at the convention center.
00:28:21
Speaker
And it took down one of the pinball machines.
00:28:24
Speaker
And the reason this is hilarious is because it was Torpedo Alley.
00:28:27
Speaker
So Torpedo Alley was underwater and got taken out.
00:28:35
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.
00:28:46
Speaker
I don't have to compare someone's score on day one to someone else's score on day three.
00:28:52
Speaker
That means if we look at a game, we realize, oh, yeah, we forgot to take the in-lane rubbers off this game.
00:28:57
Speaker
I'm thinking of you, World Poker Tour.
00:29:00
Speaker
Then we can take those rubbers off once we realize it's too easy.
00:29:06
Speaker
Or we can pull a game entirely because it's just not reliable and bring in a different game to replace it.
00:29:12
Speaker
We have 10 backup games of each type, and those backup games can be brought into a bank.
00:29:18
Speaker
Or when something goes down in mid-game, we say, all right, go over there.
00:29:22
Speaker
Go over there, see Lewis.
00:29:23
Speaker
Lewis will set you up with a backup game.
00:29:28
Speaker
And that format is, I'm happy to have helped develop that format.
00:29:33
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.
00:29:39
Speaker
And that matters way more in a tournament of this size than people tend to think.
00:29:47
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 –
00:29:55
Speaker
leaks of Jurassic Park and he's like, first rule of Fight Club, you don't talk about Fight Club.
00:30:01
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?
00:30:19
Speaker
No one talks about Fight Club.
00:30:21
Speaker
Why is there so many people here?
00:30:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:23
Speaker
And that's exactly how it is with the pinball hobby.
00:30:25
Speaker
They're like, here's the new Jurassic Park.
00:30:28
Speaker
Don't tell anyone.
00:30:29
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.
00:30:34
Speaker
And then those two friends say something.
00:30:37
Speaker
And before you know it, we've all seen the pitchers.
00:30:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:43
Speaker
Well, now being in the industry, I see a whole different side of that because we're working on a game.
00:30:49
Speaker
And frankly, we're not supposed to tell anybody what's in it.
00:30:54
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?
00:31:03
Speaker
How many ramps is it going to have?
00:31:05
Speaker
How many?
00:31:05
Speaker
I say ramps?
00:31:09
Speaker
But...
00:31:11
Speaker
Those are legitimate questions for people to be asking, but I can't tell anybody.
00:31:16
Speaker
If I tell anybody, pretty much it's gone.
00:31:20
Speaker
And it's interesting, too, because there are people who I would love to talk about for brainstorming purposes.
00:31:28
Speaker
who are interesting people and might have a lot to say about it.
00:31:31
Speaker
And what do you do?
00:31:32
Speaker
Do you bring them in with an NDA?
00:31:34
Speaker
Do you trust that they're not going to tell anybody?
00:31:36
Speaker
Do you just eat it and do what you're going to do anyway?
00:31:42
Speaker
I don't really know.
00:31:42
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,
00:31:52
Speaker
what do you think this should do in this multi-ball?
00:31:55
Speaker
It would be a better game for it.
00:31:58
Speaker
I can't do that.
00:32:00
Speaker
So there are possible leak sources.
00:32:03
Speaker
We've actually been talking behind the scenes.
00:32:06
Speaker
Who do you think is leaking it?
00:32:09
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.
00:32:28
Speaker
Do you have any thoughts on any of that?
00:32:31
Speaker
So by guerrilla marketing, you're saying there's a King Kong game coming?
00:32:33
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:32:34
Speaker
Yes.
00:32:35
Speaker
Yes.
00:32:35
Speaker
King Kong versus Godzilla.
00:32:37
Speaker
It has to be both.
00:32:37
Speaker
Yes.
00:32:39
Speaker
You heard it first.
00:32:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:41
Speaker
So one of the issues here with any kind, well, this is also the issue between being licensed and unlicensed.
00:32:47
Speaker
That if you are a licensed title, you have to work with the licensor in a way that is mainly up to them.
00:32:55
Speaker
So suddenly they could just drop.
00:32:57
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.
00:33:06
Speaker
Or the example of Elvira announcing that the game is coming this fall.
00:33:15
Speaker
I doubt that was approved by Stern or they would have done something different.
00:33:20
Speaker
So at Spooky, we haven't had to deal with a licensor, even when we had a license.
00:33:27
Speaker
Alice Cooper was like the easiest licensor ever.
00:33:30
Speaker
He just basically was like, yeah, do what you want, man.
00:33:34
Speaker
The...
00:33:36
Speaker
Strangely, not only that, he now has built his tour around the way the pinball machine was designed.
00:33:43
Speaker
If you get a chance to see those pictures, it's ridiculous.
00:33:46
Speaker
Yeah, I saw them.
00:33:47
Speaker
They were fantastic.
00:33:49
Speaker
That's a guy who knows what to do.
00:33:52
Speaker
Well, coming back to it, it's a difficult thing to go.
00:33:55
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.
00:34:05
Speaker
sometimes these things are done on purpose to try and drive hype on a game.
00:34:09
Speaker
I don't, I don't know.
00:34:10
Speaker
I don't like any of it.
00:34:11
Speaker
I just like, look, let's just make a game and put it out there.
00:34:14
Speaker
And maybe spooky flies under the radar on that stuff.
00:34:17
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.
00:34:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:31
Speaker
I do.
00:34:32
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.
00:34:44
Speaker
Let's check it out.
00:34:45
Speaker
And so that seemed to be a lot more fun.
00:34:48
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.
00:34:55
Speaker
Part of me says, well, okay, I don't know what's coming out, but it's probably one of these five.
00:35:02
Speaker
So it seems to kind of take a little bit of the air out of the sail for me.
00:35:06
Speaker
I like being surprised.
00:35:09
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.
00:35:22
Speaker
And I'm like, oh my God, it's Terminator 2.
00:35:25
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.
00:35:31
Speaker
I remember looking at the right loop on that game because it was labeled as million plus.
00:35:36
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.
00:35:45
Speaker
And then you get to play it, you're like, oh my God, this is amazing.
00:35:48
Speaker
There's a gun and there's a super jackpot and there's all this, oh my God.
00:35:52
Speaker
That is a really visceral experience of seeing a game for the first time.
00:35:57
Speaker
It's an experience that people who are brand new to pinball still get because they don't follow any of that stuff.
00:36:05
Speaker
They'll just show up in arcade and I'm like, oh my God, they made a game out of the Munsters.
00:36:09
Speaker
Or they made a game out of Twilight Zone because they haven't seen pinball in 25 years.
00:36:14
Speaker
And that's a great experience.
00:36:16
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
Pinball's Appeal and Market Dynamics
00:36:26
Speaker
there.
00:36:26
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.
00:36:34
Speaker
Well, what's funny to me is like, I didn't even follow the stuff on Tuesday.
00:36:38
Speaker
It's like, as soon as the floodgates open, all of a sudden it's flying everywhere.
00:36:43
Speaker
Like, it's Mountain Standard Time, nine o'clock Mountain Standard Time.
00:36:48
Speaker
I've got emails.
00:36:49
Speaker
I've got text messages.
00:36:51
Speaker
I've got Facebook messages.
00:36:54
Speaker
I'm like, well, Jurassic Park must have been leaked because why else would my phone be blowing up from all these people?
00:37:00
Speaker
You know what I'm saying?
00:37:01
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.
00:37:09
Speaker
I don't know.
00:37:09
Speaker
Or maybe it's because we're all friends with each other and we're all like, dude, check this out.
00:37:14
Speaker
We all need to talk about it right now.
00:37:16
Speaker
So it's just so weird going from what it was 20 years ago to what it is today.
00:37:22
Speaker
Yeah, I agree.
00:37:23
Speaker
Like you said.
00:37:23
Speaker
Realistically, all you had to do was follow Keith Elwin's Facebook where he was constantly playing Jurassic Park with his dad.
00:37:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:30
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.
00:37:43
Speaker
So yeah, that, that was, that was a brilliant move.
00:37:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:47
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.
00:38:07
Speaker
And yeah,
00:38:08
Speaker
Because we are such a, it's a big community, but it's also an interconnected community.
00:38:14
Speaker
Just like Josh said, when the pictures came out, he was getting it from multiple different sources.
00:38:20
Speaker
Just like you said, I think the leaks are coming from multiple.
00:38:25
Speaker
It's not just one area.
00:38:27
Speaker
It's so many different areas because people are excited about their product.
00:38:31
Speaker
And I guess that's a really good thing.
00:38:35
Speaker
So it certainly gives us stuff to talk about between releases.
00:38:42
Speaker
Very true.
00:38:42
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.
00:38:53
Speaker
And people will ask me, so what do you know about who's working on this?
00:38:57
Speaker
I don't pay any attention to that.
00:38:58
Speaker
I've got my own junk to think of.
00:39:01
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.
00:39:07
Speaker
I gotta say.
00:39:08
Speaker
But even before that, I wasn't paying attention to any of those rumors until like, okay, pictures.
00:39:13
Speaker
And even when pictures come out, I want to play the game.
00:39:15
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.
00:39:24
Speaker
And I've been...
00:39:26
Speaker
Burned on that a couple times where I go like, oh yeah, this game looks amazing or this game looks like crap.
00:39:31
Speaker
And then you find out from actually playing it that, oh, this is what it is.
00:39:35
Speaker
Okay.
00:39:37
Speaker
Getting in there and playing the game matters so much.
00:39:39
Speaker
Hopefully that will happen soon.
00:39:42
Speaker
A tendency for Stern, I think, is to get this information out there only weeks before the game ships.
00:39:49
Speaker
So I suspect we'll be seeing these games before the end of the month, before the end of August.
00:39:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think it looks, it looks great.
00:39:58
Speaker
It's a, it's a theme that I would be interested in.
00:40:01
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.
00:40:12
Speaker
Well, because it's the first time the computers took it.
00:40:16
Speaker
I mean, it was sad.
00:40:17
Speaker
So dinosaurs were real.
00:40:19
Speaker
Well, okay.
00:40:20
Speaker
You know what I mean.
00:40:22
Speaker
Imagine how they would be in life.
00:40:25
Speaker
It was sad that they had to poison the Triceratops so they could film that scene.
00:40:30
Speaker
But, you know, it's...
00:40:34
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.
00:40:52
Speaker
I'm really excited to see how the theme is integrated and how the game is played, though.
00:40:57
Speaker
With his first game with Iron Maiden, such a huge hit.
00:41:01
Speaker
I'm excited to see what the follow-up is.
00:41:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think he's just going to stick to the 25-year-old licenses at this point.
00:41:08
Speaker
I think so.
00:41:12
Speaker
Well, it is the wheelhouse.
00:41:13
Speaker
It's the 40- to 50-year-old people who grew up in the 80s.
00:41:18
Speaker
That is exactly right.
00:41:19
Speaker
It's the old white guy.
00:41:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:22
Speaker
Well, what it is, is the game room effect because we don't have arcades anymore.
00:41:26
Speaker
So we have to take the arcades and put them in our house.
00:41:30
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.
00:41:38
Speaker
That's the reason.
00:41:39
Speaker
There just aren't as many places to receive machines on location.
00:41:45
Speaker
And it used to be in the 90s that...
00:41:49
Speaker
People in the industry wouldn't really necessarily care about home users.
00:41:52
Speaker
Home users were secondary market to the distributors and to the arcades.
00:41:58
Speaker
And now that's completely flipped.
00:42:01
Speaker
Now, following up on that, is pinball relevant to anybody who's not in the hobby?
00:42:08
Speaker
I can't tell you how many times people talk about, oh, what's your hobby?
00:42:12
Speaker
And I just say, well, I play pinball.
00:42:14
Speaker
And they say, really?
00:42:16
Speaker
Do they still – they say that every time.
00:42:19
Speaker
Do you still make pinball?
00:42:20
Speaker
And it's like, yeah, actually, they –
00:42:22
Speaker
They're still making them and it's still going strong.
00:42:26
Speaker
But certainly to the average person, they don't even know that pinball is still, they think all of the companies vanished.
00:42:36
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?
00:42:57
Speaker
My opinion is that we haven't had that level of mass appeal since the 1970s.
00:43:03
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.
00:43:14
Speaker
You would see kids go to arcades, but they wouldn't go to arcades thinking, I'm going to play pinball.
00:43:20
Speaker
They'd think I'm going to arcades to play Mortal Kombat or NBA Jam or that.
00:43:26
Speaker
Those games...
00:43:28
Speaker
don't even match the same category as Adam's family.
00:43:32
Speaker
They sold thousands and thousands and thousands of arcade units and then the consoles started coming and the consoles destroyed all the arcades.
00:43:43
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.
00:43:54
Speaker
without voice, without dot matrix or LCD, without any of what we see today.
00:44:02
Speaker
So what would it take?
00:44:03
Speaker
I honestly have no idea.
00:44:07
Speaker
it would be a huge change in the industry.
00:44:12
Speaker
I don't see how it would even be possible.
00:44:14
Speaker
I like the industry that we have.
00:44:16
Speaker
And I like that we get to expose new people to pinball often.
00:44:21
Speaker
But I don't think it can ever come back to where it was in the 70s.
00:44:26
Speaker
So my question is with the rise of the, I would say the new arcade where it would be the barcade.
00:44:35
Speaker
So people aren't really exposed to pinball before they actually start going to bars.
00:44:42
Speaker
Most arcades have really turned into kind of a ticket redemption centers.
00:44:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:50
Speaker
You go in there and it's kiddie gambling everywhere.
00:44:53
Speaker
And every single machine is a Rothrill's machine with a ticket dispenser.
00:44:58
Speaker
And I'm not sure.
00:45:01
Speaker
Hey, kudos to Josh Sharp for getting it done.
00:45:04
Speaker
But it's not really the same because those machines don't require the maintenance that a pinball machine does.
00:45:12
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.
00:45:23
Speaker
So where is the next generation coming from?
00:45:26
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.
00:45:42
Speaker
I'm just wondering where that next generation is coming from.
00:45:46
Speaker
I really wish I had a good answer for you.
00:45:49
Speaker
There isn't a good answer other than the children of the other people who already play pinball.
00:45:54
Speaker
Because as you said, many of the locations are 21 plus.
00:45:59
Speaker
And the ones that are full family tend to have only say one machine.
00:46:06
Speaker
We just don't see pinball machines in restaurants and 7-Elevens and just on the corner.
00:46:15
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.
00:46:27
Speaker
And you also get the crowd of
00:46:29
Speaker
just people who super care about pinball and want to create an amazing location.
00:46:34
Speaker
And then they do that because they love it.
00:46:37
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.
00:46:48
Speaker
Any of these places that you said that have had this increasing scene, it's been individuals.
00:46:54
Speaker
It's been small groups of people,
00:46:56
Speaker
who have just dedicated themselves to acquiring games and putting them on location and making that work somehow.
00:47:03
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.
00:47:14
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...
00:47:26
Speaker
I'm going to have a really hard time finding a buyer at the original sale price.
00:47:32
Speaker
Whether that's enough to want people to put more games on location, I have no idea.
00:47:36
Speaker
I doubt it.
00:47:38
Speaker
I also wonder if the manufacturers and anybody can take this and run, I'm not copywriting it.
00:47:45
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.
00:48:06
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.
00:48:17
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
00:48:27
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.
00:48:31
Speaker
I'm going to be able to maintain it myself.
00:48:33
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.
00:48:38
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.
00:48:44
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.
00:48:49
Speaker
Let's go get the drop zone.
00:48:50
Speaker
Let's go get, uh, these, uh, kitty ice games where we do carnival stuff.
00:48:55
Speaker
And, um,
00:48:57
Speaker
have kids pay a dollar or throw for tickets.
00:49:02
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.
00:49:16
Speaker
But it does happen.
00:49:17
Speaker
Like there's an arcade in Boston where they've had, they started out with three pinball machines.
00:49:23
Speaker
They found, oh, these are the best earning games in the place.
00:49:25
Speaker
Let's make more.
00:49:25
Speaker
Let's have six pinball machines.
00:49:27
Speaker
Now they have 11 pinball machines.
00:49:29
Speaker
And they're starting to crowd out all the video games in that place.
00:49:33
Speaker
For all I know, it'll be a pinball only place eventually, but still has the same problem.
00:49:39
Speaker
It's 21 plus.
00:49:40
Speaker
I think another potential venue for drawing new players, and this is a difficult one, is the potential for the visibility of competitions.
00:49:51
Speaker
And like the IFPA world champion is a teenager.
00:49:54
Speaker
Now the last winner of Papa was a teenager.
00:49:58
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.
00:50:19
Speaker
The point where someone would say...
00:50:20
Speaker
I want a pinball machine.
00:50:21
Speaker
Where is one?
00:50:22
Speaker
And if you get enough drive from players to say, where's my pinball machine?
00:50:28
Speaker
Please make one.
00:50:29
Speaker
Bring one here.
00:50:31
Speaker
That works.
00:50:32
Speaker
It really works.
00:50:33
Speaker
And then once people get to actually play pinball on location, they usually like it.
00:50:39
Speaker
They like it a lot.
00:50:41
Speaker
These people will say, oh, they even make pinball these days?
00:50:44
Speaker
Once you get them in front of a game, they love it and they want to play more.
00:50:49
Speaker
the followup question I always get when someone comes over and sees my games is they immediately say, huh?
00:50:55
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?
00:51:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:03
Speaker
Theoretically, how much does one of these things cost?
00:51:06
Speaker
Cause they're immediately thinking, wow, this is pretty fun.
00:51:08
Speaker
I wonder how I can get one in my basement.
00:51:11
Speaker
So.
00:51:12
Speaker
It's a price point of 400, $400 per game and everything will be fine.
00:51:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:18
Speaker
Well, and that's actually where I was defending Stern's attempt at doing the pin or, you know, the Star Wars pin.
00:51:25
Speaker
Because I thought, you know what, people were saying it's not a big deal to go from that to a pro.
00:51:34
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.
00:51:46
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.
00:51:52
Speaker
Maybe they'll be able to do something like that.
00:51:54
Speaker
Yeah, I have my opinion on this is that the price is still way too high.
00:52:01
Speaker
That $4,000 is not something that people generally would look at for something that they're going to.
00:52:07
Speaker
use as a consumer device.
00:52:10
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.
00:52:19
Speaker
And get a fully featured game with a theme I really enjoy.
00:52:22
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,
00:52:32
Speaker
I think the rules on that game are solid.
00:52:34
Speaker
They're done by Duncan Brown, who's done Beatles and a number of other games.
00:52:38
Speaker
He's been in the industry for two decades.
00:52:40
Speaker
So dismissing it as a bad game is not true.
00:52:45
Speaker
It's a good game.
00:52:48
Speaker
But it doesn't look like a good game on the surface to people with pinball experience.
00:52:57
Speaker
And then for people who don't have pinball experience, they look at it, they go, oh, this looks interesting.
00:53:02
Speaker
Wait, how much is it?
00:53:03
Speaker
$4,000.
00:53:03
Speaker
And that's it.
00:53:06
Speaker
They're done.
00:53:08
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.
00:53:13
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.
00:53:19
Speaker
It's around the same.
00:53:21
Speaker
If a pinball machine were available at that price range,
00:53:25
Speaker
It could win, but it's not going to win at $4,000 in those spaces, I think.
00:53:31
Speaker
But they have a different opinion on this.
00:53:35
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.
00:53:46
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.
00:53:53
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.
00:54:10
Speaker
And so I think people are out there wanting to buy pinball machines for the home.
00:54:13
Speaker
They really want...
00:54:15
Speaker
They love the nostalgia.
00:54:17
Speaker
They love everything about it.
00:54:18
Speaker
They want one in their corner next to their air hockey table or their pool table, wherever it is.
00:54:24
Speaker
And so they're looking for that lower end stuff.
00:54:27
Speaker
I think that's why it's so hard to find one.
00:54:29
Speaker
And that's the other thing is a further strike against the pin from Star Wars.
00:54:34
Speaker
Very few people just lay out $4,000 whenever they feel like it.
00:54:40
Speaker
And some of those people are going to lay out $5,500 whenever they feel like it instead.
00:54:46
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?
00:54:57
Speaker
And they might pick up a full-sized 80 star Wars for 3000 or a, uh, or a Paragon.
00:55:04
Speaker
I hopefully, um,
00:55:07
Speaker
I don't know.
00:55:08
Speaker
Data in Star Wars is a pretty good gateway drug into other pinball, though.
00:55:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:13
Speaker
Well, here's my argument for anyone that's trying to get into the hobby.
00:55:16
Speaker
This is what I tell a lot of people.
00:55:17
Speaker
When the inevitable question comes up, how much does this cost?
00:55:21
Speaker
I usually tell them, honestly, my whole collection's paid for itself.
00:55:26
Speaker
I've bought one, then I've sold it.
00:55:27
Speaker
And I slowly grew my collection.
00:55:30
Speaker
I didn't go to what I have now just because I spent it all over one night.
00:55:34
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,
00:55:43
Speaker
or maybe take a hundred dollar, $200 hit.
00:55:46
Speaker
And so if you buy one and you don't like it, don't worry.
00:55:51
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.
00:56:03
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.
00:56:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:12
Speaker
Then, uh,
00:56:13
Speaker
So it helps.
00:56:17
Speaker
It's shockingly low risk compared to other similar investments into electronics.
00:56:23
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.
00:56:32
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.
00:56:41
Speaker
Don't people recognize that the Salt Lake is really not a good place to drive a boat?
00:56:47
Speaker
I mean, what are they doing?
00:56:48
Speaker
Well, actually, Salt Lake is more for sailing.
00:56:51
Speaker
There is actually sailing out there, but there are tons of reservoirs out here.
00:56:55
Speaker
So it is kind of a mecca if you like water skiing or wakeboarding or surfing or whatever the kids are doing nowadays.
00:57:03
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.
00:57:11
Speaker
It's pretty awesome.
00:57:12
Speaker
Yeah, awesome and slightly shocking when you see a 12-year-old driving their dad's $100,000 boat.
00:57:20
Speaker
Yep, yep, yep.
00:57:21
Speaker
Kids need supervision from kind of like one-hour course.
00:57:26
Speaker
Well, watch a YouTube thing.
00:57:27
Speaker
It's all on YouTube nowadays.
00:57:30
Speaker
Okay.
00:57:30
Speaker
So my son's eight and he drives the tractor.
00:57:33
Speaker
So, uh, well, there you go.
00:57:34
Speaker
Right.
00:57:34
Speaker
Well, okay.
00:57:35
Speaker
But there's nothing to hit Invernal except for dinosaur bones.
00:57:38
Speaker
So, um, Hey, we got two reservoirs around here.
00:57:41
Speaker
Okay.
00:57:42
Speaker
Well, there you go.
00:57:43
Speaker
Okay.
00:57:44
Speaker
We've kept you super late.
00:57:45
Speaker
I appreciate you for going away.
00:57:47
Speaker
I want to wrap up on one final question or at least a final topic.
00:57:52
Speaker
Um,
00:57:53
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.
00:58:06
Speaker
So do you feel that right now Papa's not running, at least doing the other major tournament?
00:58:13
Speaker
And so do you feel a loss?
00:58:14
Speaker
Do you feel a possibility of missing out that you can't actually compete with these elite players?
00:58:20
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.
00:58:29
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.
00:58:38
Speaker
Um,
00:58:43
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.
Pinberg Development and Reflection
00:58:53
Speaker
And finally, in 2011, they agreed and they're like, all right, let's do it.
00:58:57
Speaker
And this is now year nine of Pinberg.
00:58:59
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.
00:59:10
Speaker
And there are so many other people involved now,
00:59:14
Speaker
like Doug Polka, who is the full tournament director, that I could step away and it would still be all right.
00:59:22
Speaker
It would still run itself.
00:59:23
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.
00:59:38
Speaker
There are definitely a lot of events out there where elite players have
00:59:42
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.
00:59:47
Speaker
And Pinnberg is not just for elite players.
00:59:51
Speaker
It's for all 1,000 players to have the same experience.
00:59:55
Speaker
And I'm really proud of that, and I think that it needs people like me to help run it.
01:00:01
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
01:00:11
Speaker
from talking with friends and seeing people fly across the country and across the world to be part of this.
01:00:19
Speaker
And it's something rare to be able to build the thing of this caliber and size.
01:00:28
Speaker
A thousand people in a pinball tournament?
01:00:30
Speaker
What is this?
01:00:31
Speaker
It's not supposed to be possible.
01:00:33
Speaker
And the fact that we have a team that can do it is amazing to me.
01:00:39
Speaker
Well, awesome, Bolin.
01:00:40
Speaker
We thank you so much for coming on and coming and joining us, little peons.
01:00:44
Speaker
I know that we've always appreciated having you out here in Utah when you come out to hang out with us.
01:00:49
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.
01:00:55
Speaker
Yeah, congratulations on the growth of that.
01:00:58
Speaker
The growth of the con there has been really cool to see.
01:01:01
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
01:01:03
Speaker
If someone wants to get a hold of you, what's the best way to contact you?
01:01:06
Speaker
No, you can just find me on Facebook or on Twitter.
01:01:10
Speaker
It's pretty easy to find me just about everywhere.
01:01:13
Speaker
If you're coming to Pinnberg, say hello.
01:01:16
Speaker
A lot of people are like, I didn't want to stop you.
01:01:19
Speaker
You seem important.
01:01:20
Speaker
I'm just this guy.
01:01:23
Speaker
So I hope nobody's intimidated by me being whoever I am.
01:01:30
Speaker
I don't even understand that personally.
01:01:32
Speaker
It's just a thing that happens.
01:01:36
Speaker
Well, we're going to send you out a hat.
01:01:38
Speaker
We're going to send you out a hat as a thank you.
01:01:40
Speaker
And I hope you at least proudly wear it one of the days when you're walking around Pinbrook.
01:01:44
Speaker
Thanks.
01:01:45
Speaker
Free hat.
01:01:45
Speaker
Yay.
01:01:48
Speaker
And on that note too, we're not doing the hat giveaway on this episode.
01:01:53
Speaker
It will be the next episode that we do.
01:01:55
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.
01:02:11
Speaker
It's hard to keep track of all of them.
01:02:12
Speaker
So...
01:02:15
Speaker
Anyway, thanks again, Bowen.
01:02:16
Speaker
We really appreciate it.
01:02:17
Speaker
And staying up super late on the East Coast for us.
01:02:21
Speaker
Sure thing.
01:02:21
Speaker
It's a real good time talking with you.
01:02:23
Speaker
And I'll catch up with you again soon.