Transcript
Speaker: Thanks for tuning in to the loser kid pinball podcast.
Speaker: I am Josh Roop here with me.
Speaker: My co-captain is always Scott Larson and Scott.
Speaker: Should we hurry?
Speaker: Let's hurry and talk about flipping out really quick.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Let's talk about the, the sponsor of the show, flipping out pinball.
Speaker: If you're looking for that new pinball machine and you've been cooped up a little bit inside your game room and you're looking for that new itch.
Speaker: Go ahead and contact Zach and Nicole at Flippin' Out Pinball.
Speaker: They are able to, if they get some sock in soon, they'll be able to hook you up with a new machine, but they also know when the manufacturing guidelines are and when they're planned.
Speaker: So if you have that Guardians of the Galaxy that you really want in your game room, go ahead and contact them.
Speaker: They'll be able to get you on the list.
Speaker: Or also, if you want to get on maybe a future title, if you want Keith Owens' next game, just go ahead and say, hey, put me on the list.
Speaker: Wait, Keith's designing?
Speaker: I didn't know that.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So I want to talk about, this is a pre-epic guest we have on.
Speaker: I would dare say that pinball would not be what it is today without this man.
Speaker: not only because of the partnership he made early on with Gary Stern, but because of the licensing and changing the game from what it was in the 80s into the 90s.
Speaker: We have Mr. Joe Kamenkao on.
Speaker: How are you doing, sir?
Speaker: I'm doing great.
Speaker: Thanks for having me on, guys.
Speaker: And you were like multiple.
Speaker: You're in the Pinball Hall of Fame.
Speaker: You're like in the Slots Awards Hall of Fame.
Speaker: I mean, you've.
Speaker: Gaming.
Speaker: You're very titled.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And so I feel very honored to have you on.
Speaker: It's awesome to have you here.
Speaker: Yeah, one or two to go, I guess.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, so I'm curious because when you get in an industry like this, you start as a fan.
Speaker: And then you figure out how to get in and be part of the industry.
Speaker: So what started you out?
Speaker: Because you were a young man when you started getting into the gaming industry.
Speaker: Well, younger than most actually would know, I was actually five.
Speaker: I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland.
Speaker: When I was five years of age, my father became the comptroller of a company called General Vending in Baltimore, Maryland.
Speaker: And they were the largest game distributor, jukebox vending machine company in the Baltimore, Maryland area.
Speaker: So at that point in time, they were a Gottlieb pinball company.
Speaker: And I used to go on Saturdays with my dad to work.
Speaker: He seemed to work on Saturdays as well.
Speaker: Would hang out in the showroom and play games, see the games.
Speaker: And then eventually, you know, after I got bored doing that and had my crackers and juice box or whatever it was, I'd start folding brochures and putting them in envelopes or learn to go to the back of the house and
Speaker: watch the guys fix the games or do whatever.
Speaker: So, um, really at a very early form of age, I may even have a picture here.
Speaker: I could probably show you if you give me one moment, my favorites.
Speaker: Um, I have an interesting photo of me at the, uh, Virginia music operator show.
Speaker: probably when I was about six or seven years of age and a kid.
Speaker: So I sort of
Speaker: dare say I grew up in the business.
Speaker: I became a second generation person in the industry.
Speaker: And then in 1974, my father moved to Boston and went to work with a company called Bally Northeast.
Speaker: Used to be Robert Jones International.
Speaker: Bally had three distributorships.
Speaker: They had Advance in San Francisco, run by Chuck McMurdy.
Speaker: Joe Robbins ran Empire in Chicago and dad ran Valley Northeast in New England.
Speaker: And of course they were Valley and Midway and early Atari distributors.
Speaker: You know, dad knew, you know, Nolan and all these guys at the very beginning of all of their careers.
Speaker: And, you know, again, moved to Boston and, you know, when I'm 14 or whatever, you know, I go after work, I go on the weekends.
Speaker: It was my summer job.
Speaker: working at the distribution.
Speaker: So I was always around games.
Speaker: And then when I was in college in the 80s, I started operating games.
Speaker: So I had Curry College, University of Maine in Orono, Stonehill College I owned.
Speaker: video games and pinball machines that I would put in their jukeboxes, work as an operator, and then opened up a chain of arcades called That's Entertainment in Maryland with a friend whose father owned a variety of Luskins, if you remember Luskins.
Speaker: They owned a variety of appliance stores, and we carved like 2,500 square feet out of the appliance stores.
Speaker: When the arcade business was, you know, Pac-Man Red Hot and started, you know, operating games there.
Speaker: So at some point in time, you know, I was 20 years old.
Speaker: I owned several hundred games while I operated.
Speaker: What was where that led to next is, you know, I met, you know, for instance, you know, in 75 or 76, whenever it was, when the Who's Tommy came out, Tom Neiman got tickets for me and dad.
Speaker: And we went to New York and saw the opening of Tommy.
Speaker: So, you know,
Speaker: You know, it was very intriguing to me.
Speaker: I looked at some of the pinballs.
Speaker: I was like, I was really disappointed when Space Invaders came out that it looked like a Geiger thing.
Speaker: I like Paul Ferris's work, of course, but, you know, it didn't look like what I thought Space Invaders should look like.
Speaker: So when I had my arcades,
Speaker: I was buying a lot of games and like, you know, kick man or things like that.
Speaker: I'm like, man, this is really not something I want to play.
Speaker: And I'm sitting here spending money.
Speaker: I go, I probably could do something better than these guys are doing currently.
Speaker: Now I had an engineer named Tom Doe that used to come into my, my, my arcade from Westinghouse missile systems engineering.
Speaker: And he's like, Oh, he loved playing games.
Speaker: We started talking.
Speaker: He goes, I can make a better game than this.
Speaker: It's like, I'd like to make a better game than this.
Speaker: And in 1981, we had a company called Logical Highs that we sold the right of first refusal to our very first video game to Williams.
Speaker: We had talked to Stern and a bunch of others.
Speaker: This is coincidentally is a picture of me at the West Virginia Operator Show.
Speaker: Okay, that's so great.
Speaker: It's a great video of it.
Speaker: It's probably like what, late 60s, early 70s?
Speaker: Oh, I would say that was probably 67.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We just decided to make a game.
Speaker: We never had never made a game.
Speaker: I really didn't know what I was doing.
Speaker: I talked a good game.
Speaker: I think we got $500,000 advance from Williams and went off and made a really suck ass bad game.
Speaker: A really bad, sorry, a really bad game.
Speaker: You're fine.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But we learned a lot and then we turned into a second product.
Speaker: And then Williams, Mike Stroll offered me an opportunity to come work at the company in marketing and market research, which my goal was get there and get into game design.
Speaker: One of the games I, my very first pinball was a defender pinball, which was kind of, kind of funny when I think about it.
Speaker: I sold Williams the right to make defender pinball, even though they own the right to defender, but I came up with the idea of turning into a pinball.
Speaker: So if anybody ever sees the fender and,
Speaker: You see there's like two pop-upers on that game.
Speaker: Right by it, all the credit they would give me was certain design services by to Williams Electronics Inc.
Speaker: by Logical Highs Inc.
Speaker: is on that game.
Speaker: Is that around the time they also made Joust too?
Speaker: Because those were right in the same era.
Speaker: Yeah, same time.
Speaker: Yeah, this was me at Williams.
Speaker: That was the first video game I made.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: Very cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So kind of fun.
Speaker: I'm sure I have a picture of Defender in here somewhere too.
Speaker: And then, and of course, you know, the Williams hit, hit the skids.
Speaker: I mean, the,
Speaker: Well, the video game industry crashed in around like 1982.
Speaker: It imploded.
Speaker: Yeah, more than it was really 83.
Speaker: I went over to Japan.
Speaker: I got the rights to 1942, but Williams really didn't want to sell a conversion kit.
Speaker: Didn't think they could sell a real game.
Speaker: And Star Rider happened, which is the Laserdisc game that Bill Fudson Rider and Python worked on.
Speaker: And it was a beyond disaster product.
Speaker: There's me with Larry Holmes at a Bali trade show booth.
Speaker: And I was probably 77, 78.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But, um,
Speaker: The business imploded.
Speaker: I mean, literally the factory shut down.
Speaker: There was no hope.
Speaker: We, I went over a license, 1942, Arabato, we sold a couple hundred conversion kits.
Speaker: Um, Luden Castro basically said, if you don't get like 4,500 orders or some number, I don't remember the exact number, but it was a very large number of games.
Speaker: He's basically said, I'm not reopening Williams ever again.
Speaker: It's done.
Speaker: We had just finished making like Mystic Marathon and I don't remember the name of the dumb game.
Speaker: It was a dumb pinball with like mushroom theme.
Speaker: It was awful.
Speaker: And we had like two games in process.
Speaker: One was Mark Ritchie was working on a game called Sorcerer.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And we were working on a game that became Space Shuttle.
Speaker: Mark Springer came in, did the first art on the game.
Speaker: Larry was programming it.
Speaker: Eugene, we got to go.
Speaker: He was at Berkeley getting his MBA.
Speaker: We got him to do a new sound package for us.
Speaker: Went back and convinced everybody to put the Harris CVSD back on it to do speech.
Speaker: Mark Springer came in, and it was really funny.
Speaker: He was having a hard time.
Speaker: drawing the back glass and not having the tail kind of looked like it was laying down.
Speaker: So Larry and I went over to Toys R Us at lunch one day, which was on the other side of the river behind Williams, bought a styrofoam space shuttle and brought it back.
Speaker: And Barry had the drawing on his play field where the ramp came up into the orbit.
Speaker: So just here, show this to Mark and, you know, Barry's cutting a hole out of the piece of styrofoam and it's sitting on the ramp and it's under the back under the glass.
Speaker: And that's sort of how that happened.
Speaker: And then Mark did eventually get his tail fixed.
Speaker: And we told Mike, you know, if the future of the company depends on the game, we weren't scheduled to be next.
Speaker: But Larry and I lobbied hard to make space shuttle the next game.
Speaker: And we went to the trade show, had a thousand dollar marketing budget where we bought a bunch of blow up space shuttles.
Speaker: And.
Speaker: If it wasn't for that game, Williams wouldn't exist.
Speaker: Williams would have closed.
Speaker: It was over.
Speaker: And what year was that?
Speaker: Because I distinctly remember when the Challenger exploded because that was a very... That was summer of 80.
Speaker: That was AMOA of 1984.
Speaker: The game went into production in 85.
Speaker: We had a post in the middle, flash lamps, and it was dynamic and it was exciting.
Speaker: The business was done.
Speaker: That literally reopened Williams.
Speaker: I've got notes here that you sold about 7,000 of those.
Speaker: Does that sound about right?
Speaker: Might've been more, but at least seven.
Speaker: I think it was, it was a, it was a pretty big number.
Speaker: And the big thing was we got enough games to get the factory open again on that order from the AMOA show.
Speaker: I mean, and then Mike left the company about four months later, but, um, and then I left not too far after Mike.
Speaker: um went over to game plan and made um what was it called let's see um Loch Ness Monster and they kind of ran out of money they made Cyclops instead of Loch Ness Monster which Roger did didn't go anywhere and uh that's kind of like you know Gary and I knew of each other that's where Gary Gary was doing pin star at the time and he connected with me and I was the young hot
Speaker: designer, right?
Speaker: Like they get to make something cool and did something interesting and had a different vision of how to get, get it done.
Speaker: And, um, we kinda, you know, struck our, our partnership and, you know, it was me, Gary and Shelly in the basement of his house, we were gonna start a pinball company.
Speaker: And we went to a Konami.
Speaker: Endata East to see if either would fund us.
Speaker: Both were very interested.
Speaker: Eddie Pellegrini lent us some money, helped us get this thing going.
Speaker: And as I said, the rest is history.
Speaker: You know, we started the company.
Speaker: We made Laser War, cobbled together the first four games with
Speaker: The first game I designed over, I started on Thanksgiving Day, 1986.
Speaker: It was a Thursday.
Speaker: On Monday, I h ad a finished play field design, and by the end of the week, we had a working whitewood.
Speaker: And we had a road King that we bought, took off all the parts, rewired it on our whiteboard and stuck it back in their cabinet and turned on the lights and just kind of made it cycle the ball to shoot it and pop some pop bumpers to make sure it worked.
Speaker: And that's, that's how it started.
Speaker: Wasn't, wasn't very fancy, but it worked.
Speaker: You were pretty early on seeing the value in licensing.
Speaker: And I'm looking at what you did.
Speaker: And the things that always jumped out at me of the Data East era is that they had identifiable themes already already.
Speaker: you know, purchased and put into a pinball machine.
Speaker: I mean, you have, you have Playboy, you have Robocop, uh, back to the future, a fan of the opera, which, um, you know, it was probably, um, it was almost leveraged, but not quite.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It was, it was leveraging a musical that was well known, but, uh, and so, you know, you had turtles, you had Batman, you had Star Trek.
Speaker: So all these titles are well known.
Speaker: Uh, what led you in that direction?
Speaker: Well, you know, Valley did in the early days.
Speaker: Um, even laser war, by the way, was supposed to be laser tag.
Speaker: We just couldn't get with worlds of wonder to get the deal done.
Speaker: So we just kind of did a rivet of what was really red hot at the moment.
Speaker: You know, Bally's heyday when Tom Neiman was there was stuff like Dolly Parton, right?
Speaker: Or $6 million man or Tommy or, you know, pinball wizard, right?
Speaker: Um, Gary did Ted Nugent and, and, and we had, uh,
Speaker: Globetrotters and Nitro Groundshaker was kind of a Prudhomme type of thing, you know, snake versus mongoose.
Speaker: And there was always value in, you know, that something will end up in your basement and have more intrinsic value.
Speaker: And it was a really good reflection of pop culture.
Speaker: I mean, one of the ones I'm really, probably two that were really, ones I was super proud of,
Speaker: I mean, we were the second licensor in the world to have The Simpsons.
Speaker: I mean, The Simpsons, the Tracy Ullman show, we identified this brand and went after it.
Speaker: I mean, as Matt was so shocked that we were so early, you know, we ended up spending a lot of time with Matt, granting the creator of Simpsons.
Speaker: And, you know, he actually flew to David Letterman's show.
Speaker: talked about the pinball on the David Letterman show and flew to New Orleans the next day for the MOA show, which we had four of the biggest security guards you've ever seen walk somebody into a trade show.
Speaker: Nobody knew who Matt was, but next thing you know, it's like, wow, who is this guy with all these security guards?
Speaker: And he signed autographs for, I think, the next eight hours and drew pictures of Bart.
Speaker: So had it broken by then?
Speaker: Because exactly what you said.
Speaker: It just happened in a big way, but we were a year ahead of it in the license.
Speaker: Yeah, because for those of you who don't know, the origin of The Simpsons was it was on a variety show.
Speaker: It was a one-woman variety show, the Tracy Ullman show.
Speaker: Yeah, it was...
Speaker: Yeah, Matt was doing life as hell before that.
Speaker: Or South Park, you know, before we had YouTube and viral videos, all my friends in Hollywood are sending me these videotapes of this thing called the Spirit of Christmas.
Speaker: I got like 30 videotapes in a week of Christmas.
Speaker: I'm like, what the hell is South Park?
Speaker: And went and got that brand very early.
Speaker: Jurassic Park was a product, but we had a relationship through Back to the Future and through Amblin and through doing a book that allowed us to, you know,
Speaker: get Jurassic Park and not have other competitors get it.
Speaker: But I mean, some of the things we did were amazingly serendipitous.
Speaker: So for instance, we did Back to the Future.
Speaker: We only had six weeks to do the game from the time we licensed it till the time it came out.
Speaker: Six weeks.
Speaker: Six weeks.
Speaker: I mean, the play field we did in two days and programmed it in a month.
Speaker: And we had a game that, you know, someone had created, which wasn't very good.
Speaker: And we scrapped it and we had to fill the line, keep the line running.
Speaker: And then at the last minute, Michael J. Fox decided not to be on the game.
Speaker: And.
Speaker: You know, we still pulled off a great game, but, you know, I looked at that relationship.
Speaker: I built a great friendship.
Speaker: As a matter of fact, this past weekend, I was in London with Bob Gale, who wrote Back to the Future and the new Back to the Future musical just opened there.
Speaker: And I'm an investor in it.
Speaker: Oh, good for you.
Speaker: Bob and Bob all these years later.
Speaker: But back to the future, you know, I ended up becoming great friends with Bob Gale.
Speaker: I was at his 40th birthday party.
Speaker: He and Zemeckis came up and said, hey, why don't you go back and do Tales from the Crypt?
Speaker: Because, you know, Walter Hill, Bob Zemeckis, Dick Donner, and Joel Silver own that brand.
Speaker: So I went over to see Dick Donner.
Speaker: He was filming Lethal Weapon 3.
Speaker: And next thing you know, I'm with Mel Gibson in his trailer, and he's doing three Stooges impersonations for me.
Speaker: And I think I'm the only person that Mel ever gave his likeness rights to between that Lethal Weapon and Maverick.
Speaker: So that happened because of Back to the Future that then we got to Joel Silver and did Tales from the Crypt.
Speaker: And you probably heard I did a custom one of a kind Joel Silver pinball that Dick gave to Joel as a Christmas gift that year.
Speaker: And then that led to Aaron Spelling.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, I mean, it's.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's been a very serendipitous ride.
Speaker: And, you know, fortunately, we've been able to network and, you know, build wonderful friendships that have been enduring for decades.
Speaker: And, you know, obviously, these same brands and these same friendships became very valuable at IGT as we changed the slot machine business.
Speaker: The social game business at Edzinga, you know, we have games that are played by literally h ave a billion downloads that we've created that, you know, I'll wake up and 1.8 million people are concurrently playing one of my games.
Speaker: 1.8 million at the moment.
Speaker: So, you know, it's kind of been, but back to the licensed product, you know, we,
Speaker: And I think Gary even strayed for a while and made some non-licensed product early in the post-Sega days and realized that the great value of a good brand ends up in somebody's basement.
Speaker: Or if you remember how our business used to operate, an operator buys a game, operates it for a year or two years, whatever it is.
Speaker: Hardcodes, they last a lot longer.
Speaker: They don't wear out.
Speaker: And then they sell the game at the value of what they paid for it or more.
Speaker: the profit that the game made during that period of time is really their net value in what the game produced.
Speaker: And, you know, obviously something less that's not as generic gets a higher dollar back into the house, right?
Speaker: Because, you know, somebody is more excited about putting lethal.
Speaker: I mean, I look at, you know, we made almost 11,000 lethal weapons.
Speaker: I never see a lethal weapon hardly ever for sale.
Speaker: I mean, that game was 20 years old.
Speaker: I never see a South Park for sale.
Speaker: I never see my original Simpsons for sale.
Speaker: I never see a Rocky and Bullwinkle for sale.
Speaker: I mean, these games had, they're just like a sponge.
Speaker: They got sucked up and they're just gone, right?
Speaker: I mean, they just, they had great, great value.
Speaker: Even when I see something like the original Guns N' Roses we did, you know, sells for more than the one that's being sold by Jersey Jack today.
Speaker: You know, it had better value.
Speaker: So, yeah, that's a little bit about the license space.
Speaker: Oh, that's awesome.
Speaker: My other question, too, I don't know if you know a bunch about this, but how did you guys get, because you had the very first dot matrix display pinball machine.
Speaker: What brought that about and how did you guys decide to implement that?
Speaker: Well, we decided to implement it poorly.
Speaker: You know, we had the bigger one originally.
Speaker: And the game is actually supposed to have been out on The Simpsons.
Speaker: We actually had it up and running and working on The Simpsons.
Speaker: And Gene Lipkin at the time basically said to me and Gary, your feet are in cement.
Speaker: If you basically mess this up, the company's going to go out of business and we're going to fire you.
Speaker: So delay it again.
Speaker: It probably would have been out, you know, eight months before.
Speaker: And at the time we looked at the bigger display, one that Williams ended up going to.
Speaker: And just in our bomb cost and going from displays to other things, it was more in line with what our expense was for the existing 16 segment alphanumerics.
Speaker: Hindsight being 20-20, we ended up going to the bigger one again and then even eventually even a bigger or the better dot pitch.
Speaker: when we got to games like Baywatch.
Speaker: But we always looked at, if you're a student of the industry,
Speaker: and you think about what things made the business go through growth spurts.
Speaker: It was going from numeric displays from six segments to seven, going to alphanumeric, all of a sudden having score inflation where you could not just put up text, but put up the word a million or make a million for a shot.
Speaker: So all of a sudden, the flexibility of being able to
Speaker: have more digits
Speaker: the dot matrix kind of gave you or six players.
Speaker: You know, we had versions that allowed two players to play against each other or six players at a time or the bigger player to have a bigger font that was up.
Speaker: But it always drove new, it wasn't a wider cabinet or a wider play field that drove new sales.
Speaker: It was obsolescence, right?
Speaker: So when you went from score reels to numerics, from numerics to alphanumerics,
Speaker: from alphanumerics to dot and now from dot to full tft color displays right you look at you know the new stuff gary makes today and you put it next to a dot matrix game it looks like a dinosaur right it's old and feeble and you know at some point gary will come up with another version will be bigger white or whatever that will make the generation before it
Speaker: less attractive.
Speaker: You know, a blinking light is a blinking light.
Speaker: I don't care if it's an incandescent light or if it's a tricolor lead.
Speaker: Now, certainly the tricolor leads give you the opportunity to put a clear insert on and make it red sometimes or make a blue or make the light shows more interesting.
Speaker: But more than anything, the dot matrix is what had or display changes throughout the history, right?
Speaker: Score, you know, we started with a back glass that had light bulbs.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: 100 plus 200 plus 50.
Speaker: Oh, I got, you know, that's my score.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: To score drums.
Speaker: To eventually alphanumerics, alphanumerics, the dot matrix to bigger dot matrix to try colored lead dot matrix to color display.
Speaker: So it's sort of a natural thing.
Speaker: And that's what we were thinking at the time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What transitioned you?
Speaker: Because after when pinball was declining, I guess, in the 90s, you went in a different direction.
Speaker: So what opened your eyes to those opportunities?
Speaker: Because you've been wildly successful, Adam.
Speaker: Well, a couple of things.
Speaker: First off, you know, the early nineties were unbelievable how many games we made during that period of time.
Speaker: And when we were doing, you know, we went from Jurassic park to star Wars to lethal weapon, you know, that in some order, I think we, we put out 30,000 games in nine months.
Speaker: And we were, you know, we were filling up the casinos and, you know, we got to the point we weren't innovating and we were getting squeezed and build materials and metals and everything else.
Speaker: And I used to go to the trade shows in Vegas and I would look at these slot machines and I go, oh, my God, they're feeble, right?
Speaker: The lighting, the sound.
Speaker: And one of our good customers, Hans Kloss at Ballywolf,
Speaker: became president of Bali when Alan Mase had some issue, I think, if I recall, he got busted for trying to bribe somebody in New Orleans or something.
Speaker: So, you know, he came in and was running it and I went out and visited with him.
Speaker: I was like, why don't we put sounds in a slot machine?
Speaker: Why don't we put displays?
Speaker: We actually mocked up a firework display.
Speaker: Brian Schmidt did some sounds and they actually adopted it onto a Valley game years before Williams ever came out with the dot matrix and their slots, you know, 15, you know, seven years later, the Valley actually had it.
Speaker: They just, they had a guy who just had no creative vision, who was their head of engineering.
Speaker: And, you know, as the business started to decline and shrink and, you know, Sega had purchased us at that point in time.
Speaker: And, you know, I met with Mr. Nakayama about, you know, he asked me if I'd consider helping in the gaming side of Sega at the time.
Speaker: I had been approached by Bally at that time.
Speaker: It was run by like Joel Kirschbaum and Kutz the Caesar and a few others in like 98.
Speaker: And Williams was starting to make inroads.
Speaker: as they were pivoting their business into slots and they were doing like the atom, not atom sound, it's monopoly.
Speaker: And they had some sounds and some better graphics and I GT really was not equipped to make that change.
Speaker: And I met with them in like 98 as well.
Speaker: And we didn't really go anywhere.
Speaker: And about a year later, Williams is starting to make more inroads and they reached back out to me again and flew back out to Reno and
Speaker: It was a pretty big jump to go back at 40 years of age and totally change your career.
Speaker: But there was a skill set that both I had because I looked at a lot of the things where they were.
Speaker: I mean, at that point in time, Sega was already at a million polygons a second, right, with Virtual Fighter.
Speaker: And I'm looking at this company going, oh my gosh, there are 32 pallets and 256 colors.
Speaker: Well, that was 1981 Williams video game hardware.
Speaker: I mean, literally there were 20 years behind the time.
Speaker: I mean, they were still breaking down pallets to try and make colors work when the rest of the world's, you know, you know, doing VGA color graphics.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: I joined them.
Speaker: I didn't think the business was big enough to financially support both Gary and I. Though, when I left Gary, I still helped him get Harley Davidson, helped him get Austin Powers.
Speaker: As a matter of fact, the artwork for Austin Powers was done by Romy Vasquez, who was an artist at IGT.
Speaker: I don't know if you guys knew that or not.
Speaker: I didn't.
Speaker: Gary was kind of in trouble, was having trouble getting art terms.
Speaker: you know, we have had an artful partnership and collaboration for the 20 years since I left the company.
Speaker: You know, I love Gary and I love what we built and would do nothing but help him in any way I always could.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: But the business wasn't big enough to support both of us at that time.
Speaker: And I give Gary great credit.
Speaker: I mean, he went through some really tough times with that company.
Speaker: The business really cratered a few times.
Speaker: Dave Peterson came in as a wonderful partner for Gary.
Speaker: He's a great guy, brought a discipline that Gary didn't have in certain aspects of the business, had a different vision of the collectible hobby component of the company, and became a great partner for him.
Speaker: And
Speaker: you know for me um i was very fortunate i was able to use you know my skill set my ability to you know walk into a very big company that was very slow i mean they had a uh a system that if i wanted to put a sound in a game we i'd have to do an engineering request the people would have to assess the work and fill out a report
Speaker: of what the work would be.
Speaker: Now, it may take them an hour to do the report for a task that would take them five minutes.
Speaker: could have done the task yeah but you know 12 times over uh so we we had to change some things there i remember being uh being there once and saying to an engineer you know i need a you know i want a sound when you land on the first symbol and th is is the second symbol that's also in that pay table the second sound and if you if you miss then you know a losing sound or a winning sound or if you don't get the symbol you don't on the first one you don't make a sound
Speaker: And if you get it on the second and third, but you can't possibly win it, you don't play the sound.
Speaker: And, you know, someone looked at me and said, well, that'll take us like about six months or six weeks to do.
Speaker: And I said, well, you know, from a code standpoint, logic standpoint, it should take you about six hours, maybe.
Speaker: And if you can't get it done, I'll find somebody that can get it done.
Speaker: And for some miraculous reason, it was done in about four hours.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: Six months.
Speaker: And that's when everything changed at IGT and got much better because there became, you know, fortunately, I've been around enough hardware, software, hardware development, mechanical engineering development that these disciplines and being a hands-on manager
Speaker: allowed me to cut through the crap and say, let's just get it done.
Speaker: And if you can't figure it out, let me help you figure it out.
Speaker: And, you know, it became, you know, ITT became a phenomenal financial success.
Speaker: In the first several years I was there, I think, you know, our stock went from $14 a share to maybe $200 a share.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: So you stepped away from pinball for a little bit, but what made you decide to come back and start doing Batman 66 and the Beatles?
Speaker: Well, you know, I had, you know, done slots for, you know, 13, 14 years.
Speaker: took a hiatus when we had a third management change at the company and started with Larry DeMar and some other people, a company called Spooky Cool.
Speaker: And we sold a very, our first game was a disaster didn't do as well as we thought.
Speaker: Brian Eddy worked on that game.
Speaker: It was a big part of it.
Speaker: And what a lot of learnings were had.
Speaker: And then we pivoted into social slots, which, you know, slots is something I knew a lot about at the time.
Speaker: And then, you know, I have a Batmobile.
Speaker: Some people know that or don't.
Speaker: And became good friends with George Barris and really good friends with Adam West and was able to secure the Batman 66 title and get Adam to agree to participate in it.
Speaker: And we ended up deciding the best method was to go back and modify the original game George did.
Speaker: There were some things like that he and I thought we could do better together, change the ramps, change a lot of the rules.
Speaker: Lima did all new rules.
Speaker: And, you know, you know, it was really one of the last projects Adam ever worked on.
Speaker: And the Beatles I pursued for a decade.
Speaker: I mean, literally a decade before I got it.
Speaker: It may be the only million dollar plus license in the history of our business.
Speaker: I was able to secure the brand, finally made a vision that they like.
Speaker: They really like the retro concept.
Speaker: And I really love the game.
Speaker: I mean, I don't know if you've played it or not.
Speaker: It's a bit of a throwback.
Speaker: It's not overly complex.
Speaker: It's for, you know, everybody kept saying to Gary, we were going to do an originally an original play field and original, you know, ramps and everything else.
Speaker: And we're like, you know, this is 60s.
Speaker: Nobody ever made a Beatles game in the 60s.
Speaker: And we looked at, you know, everybody kept going, you know, give us a classic meteor or classic sea witch or classic whatever.
Speaker: And we went back and we said, you know what?
Speaker: Sea witch was a great playing game.
Speaker: But there were some problems with the ball, got stuck behind metal parts, and the orbit was a little clunky, and we needed a magnet to stop the ball on top, and we'll have more drop targets.
Speaker: So we use that as a starting point.
Speaker: Basically, George, we redid the play field.
Speaker: I mean, it's like saying, you know, here's the Volkswagen Beetle, and then here's the new Beetle.
Speaker: Yeah, they're both Beetles.
Speaker: But they're different cars.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we went back and redid the game and we are very happy with the result.
Speaker: The game is sold out.
Speaker: We have orders waiting for the balance of the very final part of the run.
Speaker: Getting the music was so hard and having it approved by Proy, Paul, Ringo, Olivia and Yoko is no easy task.
Speaker: Let me tell you.
Speaker: And Franchi did an extraordinary job.
Speaker: Both George with the play field and Franchi with the art.
Speaker: I mean, he so nailed it perfectly.
Speaker: And then, you know, there's another project Gary's got that I helped bring to him that he's currently in design with.
Speaker: And then hopefully I'll get Harry Potter for the future at some point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We'll secure that brand.
Speaker: Because I just finished doing a Harry Potter game for Zynga that I've been working on with Mark Tramiel and a few others for the past four years.
Speaker: Okay, so there's two questions I have.
Speaker: One, so you were saying that Beatles is sold out.
Speaker: Sold out.
Speaker: Or at least the orders are in.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: We have, I think, maybe a final 200 to make.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And they're all spoken for.
Speaker: I think there's probably a little bit left in the final 200 because we haven't announced 200, but we have orders backed up in the product.
Speaker: Gotcha.
Speaker: The Beetle store keeps taking orders that we keep promising we'll deliver.
Speaker: Gary's having, like anybody else, container and raw material part problems.
Speaker: If he knows everything from foam to whatever is unavailable.
Speaker: I have three games pending, but I thought Beatles was sold out.
Speaker: So I may reach out and see if I can possibly secure one of those.
Speaker: It is sold out.
Speaker: I think we're going back and making a final run October, November.
Speaker: I think a good portion of them are spoken for at this point in time, but yeah, it's a great game.
Speaker: And, you know, people like John Taffer from, you know, Bar Rescue and a bunch of other good friends have gotten them and they're just, they adore the game.
Speaker: I love the game.
Speaker: It's a great game.
Speaker: I love the game and I actually bought the topper about a year ago with the anticipation of being able to buy it.
Speaker: But there are no more.
Speaker: Yeah, there are no more.
Speaker: So that's why I bought the topper because I was planning on buying it.
Speaker: So I'm going to have to reach out and see if I can scoop up one of those last ones.
Speaker: Yeah, the last available one that I know that was available in the States, I think John Taffer purchased from Bar Rescue.
Speaker: John's a good friend of mine and I helped him find the game, but there are none to be found.
Speaker: So I've noticed since you've done two games with Stern, you've kind of kept Gomez as your designer and Franchi as your artwork.
Speaker: Hopefully on your next project.
Speaker: I helped him get Munsters.
Speaker: I don't know if you know that or not.
Speaker: He did Munsters, yes.
Speaker: I brought the license to Gary.
Speaker: Okay, awesome.
Speaker: um do you think you'll kind of keep the band together for your next kapow title or your next project or um the next one i'm doing i think there's a different artist on it um i think kevin's working on it but um you know i i'm sure chris and i will do a project or two again in the future okay
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I like, I like, you know, I think Chris is just, you know, he's a little bit of a wild man and, you know, I kind of like, you know, and he worked for me at Zynga for about a year and a half too.
Speaker: I don't know if you know that.
Speaker: Um, that's worked for me on the Willy Wonka game we did, but he's, he's really a great talent.
Speaker: So, you know, it's like anything, you know, it's, we try and find the right person that whose skills and passion on the brand is,
Speaker: just right and you know chris was certainly just right but for both beetles and monsters and and uh batman i i did like that you casually dropped in the little tidbit of at some point you'd like to get harry potter that was like that that was like flying by really quickly but i think everybody's antennas went up because i know that's been on the top 10 most requested and it's usually been everybody's gonna get it it's gonna be
Speaker: Well, you've already done a Harry Potter slot machine, correct?
Speaker: No, Harry Potter match three was Zynga.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So you've already dealt with that license and the people that are involved with it.
Speaker: We have a great relationship with Warner Brothers.
Speaker: Yeah, because there's always been that.
Speaker: This is the longstanding rumor, and I don't know if there's any validity, but this is what they've said, is that J.K.
Speaker: Rowlands doesn't like pinball because she thinks it's gambling.
Speaker: No, I think what happened early on in the license, either somebody said something or somebody did something or she wasn't ready.
Speaker: I mean, there's a Harry Potter license for practically everything under the sun.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I would suspect in the future there'll be some softening around pinball for whatever the reason.
Speaker: Yeah, I think you would sell 15,000 of those.
Speaker: Well, and, you know, sure.
Speaker: I like, you know, Keith to make the game or some of the other designers to do that.
Speaker: So hopefully I'll be able to, you know, work with Gary and collaborate on that.
Speaker: If, like I said, if anybody's going to get the brand, I'm sure it'll be me.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: I'll almost bet on it.
Speaker: So one of the other things we were kind of talking about with you beforehand that we would really like to talk with you now is with your expertise of starting a pinball company with Gary back in the eighties and all that capital and everything like that.
Speaker: Um, how do you want to warn this Scott?
Speaker: I'm trying to think.
Speaker: Well, okay.
Speaker: I, I have,
Speaker: I have pounded on deep root for over a year for the complete lack of professionalism.
Speaker: But I'm just going to say from someone who I have never manufactured a pinball machine, I have never produced anything.
Speaker: I don't know how the pinball industry works, but you do.
Speaker: And so, you know, I'll give you my take on it.
Speaker: First off, I really take my hat off to Spooky Pinball.
Speaker: I take my hat off to American Pinball.
Speaker: I take my hat off to Andrew Highway.
Speaker: I take my hat off to Jersey Jack.
Speaker: It is a very difficult thing to start a pinball company.
Speaker: even with all the hobbyist things the hobbyist hardware and other things because it takes a lot of different disciplines whether it be the discipline of creating a play field programming rules lights having inserts figuring out how to put hard code on or paint something or whatever there's a whole second discipline of just creating a bill of material
Speaker: that drives an MRP system that drives the manufacturing side of getting all those different parts in because you're missing one part, you can't even put it together.
Speaker: The discipline of material management, procurement, quality inspection of the parts that come in because it's so easy to overbend a bracket or have brittle metal or not plate something properly or
Speaker: not to burr a side rail or whatever it is.
Speaker: It's really complex.
Speaker: There's a lot of wire.
Speaker: There's a lot of ESD testing.
Speaker: There's a lot of FCC testing and everything else you've got to do.
Speaker: And when I heard...
Speaker: Bob Mueller talking smack about Gary.
Speaker: He was going to show us all.
Speaker: And I sit back and I go, well, let's see, who has he surrounded himself with?
Speaker: A lot of guys that have been around the pinball business, but really haven't had great success.
Speaker: And Barry hasn't made a game in 20 years.
Speaker: John Norris hasn't made a game in 20 years.
Speaker: I love Dennis.
Speaker: He's made some successful games and some not so successful games like Wheel of Fortune.
Speaker: Like I said, a few years ago, I was running ITT and going, how do you make Wheel of Fortune and not put a wheel on it?
Speaker: right yeah it's duh um and this guy is talking smack about gary and gary doesn't know he's doing like who is this ass clown was all i could think and you know i went back and i did some research and i even had a few people call and talk to him about making an investment in the company i was curious
Speaker: And I told several people, and this is very, very early on, this guy's going to end up scamming people.
Speaker: If you remember, there was a thing called, remember All Me?
Speaker: Do you guys remember All Me?
Speaker: I don't.
Speaker: So like in 1987 or 88, pre-Michael Gottlieb trying to start a pinball company, his dad again, some lady that used to work for Alvin Gottlieb, you can ask Rob Burke about it, some guy
Speaker: lady and it was like a secretary and she's like a church lady.
Speaker: It was really weird.
Speaker: Um, and some other guy, they showed up at a, at the pinball expo and they were started at pinball company called all me and Claude Fernandez quit stern to go work at all me as their head designer.
Speaker: Now just the word all me, it's all about me.
Speaker: All like A L L M E. All me.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And the guy, whatever money he got invested several hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Scammed them all.
Speaker: And I'm looking at this guy, you know, talking about, you know, look, we know John Pompadou is a nice person.
Speaker: And good intentions are one thing.
Speaker: One thing with taking people's money and not ever producing anything for it is another thing.
Speaker: And like I said, good intentions are great, but implementation is another thing.
Speaker: And you go, okay, you know, for whatever reason, there's this, let's not forget Capcom pinball who blew a hundred million dollars trying to go in the pinball business.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This concept of,
Speaker: Oh, my God, I want Cactus Canyon.
Speaker: You know, Cactus Canyon wasn't any good when Williams made it the first time.
Speaker: And it wasn't collectible then.
Speaker: And it was basically the last gasp of a dying company then.
Speaker: Why somebody thinks it's because it's bad, it's collectible is beyond me.
Speaker: You know, I'm glad you have Kingpin.
Speaker: You maybe have one of them, but it's still fun to play when you try it, right?
Speaker: So when I saw this guy talking smack and talking about what he was going to do, and I saw the couple, you know, look, it's one thing to take money and be trying to pay us.
Speaker: I'm glad Barry got a salary, and I hope Papa Duke got a salary during this period of time.
Speaker: This guy, when I read the, did you guys read the complaints?
Speaker: Yeah, we actually read it over last week or last episode where he funded two marriages, one divorce, a place in Kauai.
Speaker: And that was where I lost it because I said, that's not someone who's trying to run a business.
Speaker: That's someone who's trying to fund his extravagant lifestyle.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: He ran a pyramid scam and he paid first investors back with second investors money while at that time enriching himself personally.
Speaker: And I hope he goes to jail.
Speaker: I feel badly for people that sold their insurance policies or retirees that, you know, had faith in this guy.
Speaker: But anytime somebody tells you they're going to give you 7% guaranteed money,
Speaker: because I'll tell you, Fidelity High Net Worth will not do that for me.
Speaker: You should run.
Speaker: And this guy was scamming.
Speaker: And maybe he thought,
Speaker: And I guess as most scammers do that, Oh, well maybe pinball really isn't that hard.
Speaker: And there's a thousand dollars or $2,000 margin.
Speaker: I'll come up with Raza and I'll sell a thousand and I'll make a 20 million on it.
Speaker: So I want to have, I'll be able to either keep my investors going and keep, you know, paying.
Speaker: And eventually maybe somehow I'll even out the books or whatever, but,
Speaker: Starting a pinball company is really hard.
Speaker: I can go to, you know, Wicco or whoever is the supplier of parts, say, and buy, I can buy flippers, I can buy bumpers, I can buy most parts for the hobbyist.
Speaker: But to go build a thousand games down a production line in Texas where nobody's ever built a gamer or put one of these little metal things on a switch and twisted it just an eighth of an inch so that contact is just right as the ball goes over it.
Speaker: You've never done that.
Speaker: Or if you've never realized you've got to put those little metal things on the bottom of the flipper and set your flipper and then knock them into the play field.
Speaker: Or if you've never gone through and figured out how to make DuPont Imran actually work as a hard code,
Speaker: Yeah, good luck.
Speaker: Anybody with a fraction of a brain could sniff this out.
Speaker: Gary and I laughed about it for the past two and a half, three years because Gary's got tough.
Speaker: He's a tough old bird.
Speaker: Probably his Robert's hurled insults bothered me more than they probably bothered Gary because I'm protective of Gary.
Speaker: But
Speaker: you know, you just knew this guy was gonna, there was no possible outcome where it would be good or they would make something competitive.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Period.
Speaker: I mean, just, I saw that piece of crap they tried to show a year ago and I just laughed.
Speaker: What about food truck?
Speaker: I mean, that is a license that I think will sell thousands.
Speaker: You know, I think all me, one of their games was wall street.
Speaker: I'm not mistaken.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, Food Truck is great.
Speaker: It was a wonderful Jon Favreau movie, and I thought it was delightful.
Speaker: Let's just do something that's as inane as we possibly can come up with.
Speaker: Day Trader, that'll be perfect.
Speaker: I can't help them play the game.
Speaker: I heard C-SPAN's really good, too.
Speaker: I heard that do a great thing.
Speaker: Look, I think... Root Canal.
Speaker: Root Canal's the next one.
Speaker: You know, I feel bad for, you know, Barry and Pompidou probably got two years of salary out of it and thought they were going on this magical mystery ride with this guy that was going to.
Speaker: you know, save them.
Speaker: I mean, I, I worked with Barry in 84 and he's a delightful, wonderful person.
Speaker: And I, I wish him nothing but happiness and health in his life.
Speaker: I'm the same thing with Papa Duke.
Speaker: You know, he's John's just, you know, he's an artist, you know, it was John made neon, right?
Speaker: He made pretty things.
Speaker: He made pretty things, right.
Speaker: He does circus Voltaire.
Speaker: Larry helped him do, uh, uh, the, the,
Speaker: the world cup game kind of sold in Europe, but you know, he's not had a lot of great success, but he's a, he's a nice person, but Robert Mueller, um, he's going to get what he deserves.
Speaker: And, and, uh, and, you know, any of these people that were foolish and parted with their hard earned money to buy this unproven crap without a factory.
Speaker: Well, you know,
Speaker: you kind of get what you deserve sometimes, you know, do your homework.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it hurts the pinball echoes.
Speaker: It hurts the ball business, but no, well by a stern, you'll, you'll,
Speaker: You know, no one's going to lose money buying a Stern pinball.
Speaker: No one's going to h ave a game that's not going to work, that's not going to be supported, that's not going to have parts, that's not going to have resale value.
Speaker: But you want to go speculate on Atomic Girl Big Bang Lost Railroad, well, I guess buy one.
Speaker: I don't care.
Speaker: It's not really valuable.
Speaker: I think some people were thinking, and some people reached out to us when we were questioning why you would do it.
Speaker: And some people said, I know it was a risk.
Speaker: I said, I invested in it saying that maybe I would get something.
Speaker: But I do feel bad for the people who aren't going to get their money.
Speaker: I think it was a risky investment.
Speaker: It was a stupid investment.
Speaker: You build them when you can, like even I think some of these guys that invest in some of these other companies are still risky.
Speaker: Am I going to get my Hot Wheels car or whatever else it's going to be?
Speaker: At the end of the day, why do you want that game?
Speaker: Because it's probably not going to work.
Speaker: It's going to be unsupported.
Speaker: It's not going to have hardware that's going to be around when a chip goes bad or something and there's no parts for it, I guess.
Speaker: If you want to own a brick you can put in your backyard, I guess that's okay.
Speaker: Or you want to say you own something really special, but there's nothing special about it.
Speaker: That's the funny thing.
Speaker: I mean, I want a game that's fun and works.
Speaker: It doesn't work and it's not fun.
Speaker: But there's that, oh, let's do it without a license.
Speaker: Well, there have been plenty of games made without licenses.
Speaker: Nobody bought Oktoberfest.
Speaker: Nobody bought, really, Black Knight.
Speaker: Maybe you'll do high speed five next.
Speaker: Oh, great.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Who cares?
Speaker: Well, they could do fast and furious though.
Speaker: Go ahead.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I mean, that's, that's my, my point is, yeah, you're buying a pin, but I'd rather buy a car.
Speaker: You know, I, I look at it like a Fisker, you know, Fisker.
Speaker: Oh, I love the Fiskers.
Speaker: They look so pretty.
Speaker: It's going to be a fantastic flower pot one day.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It looked pretty though.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But it's going to brick.
Speaker: They call an electric car that won't drive anymore.
Speaker: It's a brick.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, some of these pinballs are just going to be,
Speaker: bricks.
Speaker: So, you know, my recommendation, anybody that's really looking to buy a game, stick with Stern, it'll work.
Speaker: You'll have parts for when it stops working.
Speaker: And it'll have more value when you want to trade it and sell it and get your next game or you get tired of it.
Speaker: You want something new.
Speaker: So, Joe, the other question I have, too, because pinball right now is at an interesting place because of, like you've been saying, it's hard to get materials, especially raw materials.
Speaker: I mean, you can't get foam for sofas right now.
Speaker: You can't get containers.
Speaker: You know, containers were $3,000 to ship something.
Speaker: If I told you $10,000 for a container, you'd go, that's outrageous.
Speaker: If you could get a container for $10,000 right now, you'd be a hero.
Speaker: Containers are costing $25,000 to $30,000 a container.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: You know, it's really brutal.
Speaker: And some of these things you can't get except from manufacturers overseas today because of
Speaker: OSHA requirements or requirements around plating of things and, you know, you know, air and water and other quality standards.
Speaker: I mean, when I worked at Williams in 1984, we had a plating room.
Speaker: I mean, the biggest rats you've ever seen in the world in that plating room, but it was a plating room.
Speaker: You know, they'd stamp their own big parts and plate them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So do you think that this is something temporary, though?
Speaker: Or do you think this is something that not only all companies are going to have to adjust for, but do you think pinball is going to have to adjust for the future of pinball?
Speaker: There are a variety of things happening.
Speaker: Petroleum exports are more expensive.
Speaker: because we went through a period of time where we didn't use petroleum, right?
Speaker: And then we had the problem with the Keystone pipeline or, you know, where the colony oil had the cyber attack or Texas shut down for a month because of snow or, you know, so petroleum-based things, you know, which are rubbers and plastics are more expensive.
Speaker: um there is a dramatic chip shortage um for a couple reasons a the factories were shut down because people were sick one of the larger factories in malaysia got shut down because they had a water shortage we couldn't and they didn't properly prepare to filter clean or reuse their water a couple company couple did but one of the larger ones did not and then people became ill with covid both in shipping
Speaker: um product and um and working in the ports and get things out of the ports so i mean and it's affecting not just pinball it's affecting i mean you're reading about toyota cutting their production by 40 because they can't get chips but they can't get tft displays or um you know factory is sick or you know covet unfortunately
Speaker: we have not gotten rid of because half of the idiots in the world won't take the vaccine or wash their hands or wear a mask you know somehow it became if we went from public health to political virtue um but internationally it's a problem the other problem that's happened to and you know fortunately i was in london last weekend but you know the eu is closing down all travel to u.s citizens again
Speaker: So where I used to go on a cruise once or twice a year, I've not been on a cruise.
Speaker: I used to fly a million miles a year.
Speaker: I've been on four airplanes this year.
Speaker: I used to go to Broadway and see shows.
Speaker: I used to go to concerts.
Speaker: I'm not doing any of this.
Speaker: So what's happened now, we are home with some of us still working, working from home or whatever, or PPE money or whatever, with disposable income, sitting in our houses going, you know, gosh, this couch I've been sitting on for years, I've been working at home for a year, it's not as comfortable.
Speaker: Or I need, or all the people, if you can think about the...
Speaker: hundreds of millions of people that all of a sudden needed a laptop at home because the desktop is still at the desk at their office, but they need to be working remotely or the television is in high definition, but now we're home.
Speaker: And by the way, we're not going to movie theaters.
Speaker: You know, our habits changed, you know, Gary's business, you know, you would have thought, gosh, maybe because Gary's not selling to the arcade space.
Speaker: that maybe his business would have gone south like it did more for Eugene at Raw Thrills where people aren't buying giant Jurassic Park gun games, but a pinball machine you can kind of fit at home or even you buy one and it's kind of fun.
Speaker: Let's build a wall.
Speaker: Let's have two of them or three of them or four of them.
Speaker: I'm on the board of a company called Arcade One Up.
Speaker: Are you familiar with that?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: However, there's a couple of things I did want to point out.
Speaker: They have some, we were just talking about this earlier because they reached out to us about their little pinball emulator and they talked about coming on and we haven't heard, we've reached out a few times.
Speaker: So we would love to talk to them about the emulator.
Speaker: I'm on the board of directors.
Speaker: Yeah, we'd love to talk about it because I was just looking at their site today because I saw some images on Tron and I saw some images on Simpsons.
Speaker: And there's a few of those that I'd like to get a hold of.
Speaker: Oh, there's a beautiful product coming from them.
Speaker: They built, Scott, Bachrach, and his team, they're building some
Speaker: Great, great things for your collection.
Speaker: You're going to be very pleased.
Speaker: And, you know, the pinball product's been very successful for them.
Speaker: Well, we would love to talk to someone about the pinball product because I'm serious.
Speaker: I think there's, yeah, my friend who just barely bought a Mandalorian, he's a huge Star Wars fan.
Speaker: And I just, it was his first machine.
Speaker: I helped him get downstairs.
Speaker: And I was even telling him, I'm like, actually, Arcade 1-Up has a...
Speaker: They have a Star Wars emulator that would be fun and it's reasonably priced and you can throw it next to your Mandalorian.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Be perfect.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a good product.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: How'd you get associated with Arcade One Up?
Speaker: You know, I met their founder at the CES show a couple years ago.
Speaker: And I was in their booth and I was looking at one of their products and one of their sales guys or something came over and
Speaker: Oh, this Joe and Mac game.
Speaker: Have you seen it before?
Speaker: I said, well, I'm the Joe of Joe and Mac.
Speaker: And no, you're not.
Speaker: So yes, I am.
Speaker: So thanks.
Speaker: I met their founder, Scott Bacharach.
Speaker: And he and I chatted and continued to chat and started to build a relationship.
Speaker: And, you know, there are not that many guys that have a memory or a history of
Speaker: of the game business of the past 40 years that probably, you know, probably Eugene and a few others do, but you know, that they can talk reasonably about what was made when and what was successful.
Speaker: I think with some of my success in the business world, licensing world, game world, and maybe my perspective on how to make a company successful, there were some things that I felt like it had some value to their board and they felt so too.
Speaker: So it ended up being a good opportunity for both of us.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: I think it's great.
Speaker: There's some people who talk about it's not the same as having a classic one.
Speaker: And I was actually... What's a classic one?
Speaker: I mean, I look at a classic Tron and it smells like 30 years of sour beer and cigarette smoke and it's disgusting and it's too big and...
Speaker: This is a really nice product.
Speaker: You described exactly the interaction I had today on the forum because someone posted it and I was going back and forth and I said, actually, I would prefer the arcade one up because people at home have limited space and there's not much you can do.
Speaker: And you can buy this thing for, I think the suggested price is 800 bucks and you can put it, oh, there's one of them right there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I can't fit a full size arcade in my lobby.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: It might be Chels, but, you know, I can fit one very nicely right here and I put it together.
Speaker: They're actually, if you've built one, they're very fun to put together.
Speaker: It's a really nice sense of accomplishment that you can do this.
Speaker: And, you know, when I go back and look at the roadmap of the next 36 months of, you know, really classic arcade games or
Speaker: You know, maybe we'll go back and do, you know, a Robotron that's in the pre-production colors and make a thousand of them.
Speaker: I think what you'll find the arcade one business could evolve a little bit into the collectible space, sort of like a, like a Supreme or a sneaker company where we'll come out with some limited edition versions of things that are special or, you know, maybe signed by Eugene Jarvis or George Gomez or some of these other guys and,
Speaker: Who doesn't want a nice, clean Spy Hunter?
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I don't want a smelly, gummed up, dirty product.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And if you played the Outrun that they made last year, the Outrun's a great little version of Outrun.
Speaker: Yeah, actually, Outrun would be great.
Speaker: Yeah, it's good to have a racing game.
Speaker: I have a shooter game.
Speaker: It's good to have a racing game.
Speaker: I saw there was a Terminator coming out.
Speaker: Yeah, George D. Cho has gone back and modified the original Terminator gun game.
Speaker: We did Big Buck Hunter a year ago, and the Terminator game looks great.
Speaker: It runs at a pretty good frame rate.
Speaker: If you've seen the touch table we have,
Speaker: Um, that's got, you know, like 50 built-in games and board games and word games.
Speaker: And, um, I mean, it's what a surface table should have been.
Speaker: Um, it's one of the best consumer product of this year.
Speaker: So I think you'll, uh, I think you'll really like a lot of the things that are coming out.
Speaker: I'm really pleased.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: I'm excited.
Speaker: Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker: It's fun to be a big part of these things still.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, Joe, we're, uh, we're running up on about an hour and we appreciate you on, um, Josh, anything else that you can think of that, uh, last, last question for Mr. Joe Cameco.
Speaker: You know, you've been awesome and you've answered a lot of our questions.
Speaker: I feel like there's questions I have, but I don't want to ask out of professional courtesy.
Speaker: Cause I'm like, we're always curious of what's coming in the future.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But we don't,
Speaker: But we don't want to be giving away trade secrets here either.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: No, but it won't.
Speaker: We're looking forward to things.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Well, the future has not yet been invented, but I'm sure it'll be a good one, as my friend Bob Gale always says.
Speaker: I think Gary continues to build great product.
Speaker: I really have enjoyed a couple of games I've played from Spooky.
Speaker: They're really terrifically nice people up there.
Speaker: I'm really happy for their success.
Speaker: And there's room for lots of people.
Speaker: you know, um, it's nice to see people embrace the hobby and, you know, it's kind of fun to watch people soup their game up or go to Toys R Us and buy a Mandalorian and screw it to the top of their game or whatever it is.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: uh fun to see brian eddie back making games again that is fun definitely it's nice and uh you know well you know we'll see how the other guys that have recently made some changes uh do and fair and in a new environment so um it'll be entertaining to see i do have actually one final question for you um are you gonna be going to pinball expo this year
Speaker: I don't think so.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: You know, I told Rob, you know, I'm thinking about it, but with the current Delta variant, even though I've had my third vaccine shot, I've had my booster,
Speaker: I think I can probably wait a year.
Speaker: I may venture to a Raiders game or two, but we are still, my wife and I are still being very careful with our protocols.
Speaker: We still eat outside.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: We still wash our hands abundantly and bring hand sanitizer and wear appropriate mask when we're around groups of people we don't know.
Speaker: We don't get together with unvaccinated people at this point in time because I know nine people that died from COVID of various ages, you know, from, you know, 30s to their octogenarians.
Speaker: So we take it really seriously what has occurred here.
Speaker: And I think right now, it's even hard for me to go to, I think I've been into two casinos in a year.
Speaker: Now our casino business is really robust at Aristocrat.
Speaker: We're doing, you saw the Nevada numbers for the month of July.
Speaker: The gaming take was, I think, maybe the highest ever.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We'll, we'll, I think personally we'll continue.
Speaker: We, we, you know, we participated in the virtual pinball expo last year.
Speaker: Um, we'll probably, you know, choose to be a little more cautious until, you know, it looks like the Delta variant burned itself out in London, but, um,
Speaker: We'll see.
Speaker: I won't say never, but the likelihood of me making the travel, getting on a plane, going to Chicago, touching a bunch of pinball machines that other people have touched probably isn't in the cards right now.
Speaker: I'll play at home and wish Gary well at that one.
Speaker: What game are you playing at home right now?
Speaker: Oh, let's see.
Speaker: At home right now, I have Beatles, Munsters,
Speaker: Stranger Things, Avengers, and these are all the LEs, and the Led Zeppelin.
Speaker: I think my personal favorite right now is, I think, the playfield for the LE Avengers.
Speaker: It's maybe one of the best playfields I've ever played ever, ever.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: It's just the flow, the shots, the upshot, the...
Speaker: you know, it's just a really fun game to play.
Speaker: I mean, I just find I lose an hour every time I step in front of it.
Speaker: Led Zeppelin I've enjoyed with the music.
Speaker: The game is really a tight, for me, it's a bit tight and I feel like I'm always banging post on it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I have one in that upper flipper shot is really hard.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, it's just, but I just feel like I'm just always busting post and the ball's always in my face, but I've, I mean, I've had fun.
Speaker: I mean, it's a hard game to play.
Speaker: I mean, I love playing my Beatles game.
Speaker: Um, monsters is really fun though.
Speaker: Maybe a little too much Paul in speech for me.
Speaker: I've always pitched about that.
Speaker: And, um, I've really enjoyed stranger things.
Speaker: Um, people that come to the house and then have the thing fold down and you should,
Speaker: the little projector and everything.
Speaker: I mean, it's a really pretty game.
Speaker: I think the game, um, doesn't get the, uh, the credit it deserves.
Speaker: And I just took it.
Speaker: It's grown though.
Speaker: It's, it's actually become very popular.
Speaker: I, I tell people about it because I think it's a great thing and I tell them definitely get the black, um, the black light mod.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: It's a really fun game.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: And then I just took delivery of a Mandalorian, but it's not out of the box yet.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: We'll come help you.
Speaker: And I think I may have ordered an Ultraman just because I thought it's such a wacky theme.
Speaker: That is a total wacky theme.
Speaker: I'd never heard of it before.
Speaker: Well, we've both been vaccinated, so we'd be more than happy to come help you set up.
Speaker: And I work at a hospital, so I know how to mask up, so.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, it's like, you know, I pray for our country right now and hope we can steer through it.
Speaker: I mean, I just find it kind of mind blowing that people will readily put horse deworming medicine in their mouth, but won't take the vaccine.
Speaker: So I, I, I, it kind of astounds me, to be honest with you, the, um,
Speaker: yeah i i don't get it either you know okay but you know i you know you could keep reading about these conservative talk show guys and keep dying um and keep going like you know uh what are you all thinking but that's you know we'll stick with pinball tonight but any other questions or anything guys
Speaker: Well, we want to tell you to stick around a little bit because the video is recording on your end and it will upload.
Speaker: So when we stop, just stick around a little bit and we'll make sure we get that.
Speaker: And we definitely want to send you a big box of that.
Speaker: So we'll find out exactly where you want us to send that.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And we'll make sure that you're all hooked up with your Loser Kid gear.
Speaker: Okay, well, thanks for supporting Pinball and talking about it and the enthusiasts.
Speaker: Hey, guys that are out there that play games, I don't care if they're old games, new games, I hope you get a chance to come out and see the facility that got built in Vegas.
Speaker: It looks really nice on the strip.
Speaker: It's very iconic.
Speaker: There's Pinball, big and bright.
Speaker: I give Tim credit for that.
Speaker: Needs a couple newer games in his place.
Speaker: But at least it's good to see people
Speaker: People like pinball still.
Speaker: And, you know, there are very much more to do these days.
Speaker: So enjoy it.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: Well, if you want to get a hold of us, we are LoserKidPinballPodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: You can also get a hold of us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch, all at LoserKidPinball.
Speaker: Before we wrap this up, though, we've got to hurry and announce our winner from doing the PinQuest Challenge.
Speaker: If you remember, you could set a high score either on World Cup soccer or on Avengers.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we had over 85 participants to that.
Speaker: And they said that there was 11 completions on World Cup and 13 on Avengers.
Speaker: So about 10%.
Speaker: Well, no, sorry, that's about 20%.
Speaker: We want to congratulate Clint Reeves.
Speaker: Yeah, Clint.
Speaker: So congratulations.
Speaker: We'll be sending you a hat soon.
Speaker: And we want to thank again, Joe, for being on.
Speaker: Scott, what else you got for us before we leave?
Speaker: I think it's great.
Speaker: Stay safe.
Speaker: And I want everybody to get out there when you're comfortable to play pinball.
Speaker: If you do mask up and definitely use the hand sanitizer.
Speaker: We can all get through this with our mental health in check as long as we're taking safe precautions.
Speaker: And even if that if that's playing at home, that it certainly keeps the keeps the juice running.
Speaker: And I'm going to end it on this.
Speaker: Zach Manny, you're wrong about Star Wars and about Goonies.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: See you in two weeks.
Speaker: Oh, he says it's a good theme and I say it's trash.
Speaker: Shut up and sit down.
