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Ep 32.1: Past, Present & Future with Roger Sharpe
48 Plays5 years ago
The Loserkids interview the Legendary pinball man himself, Roger Sharpe! In part 1 of this 2 part interview, Roger talks about life before he made the world famous shot, the court hearing to reinstate pinball, and his days at Bally/Williams. We also talk about subjects like PAPA, Steve Kirk, and his book entitled, "Pinball!".
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Transcript
Introduction and Nostalgia
00:00:06
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to the Loser Kid Pinball Podcast.
00:00:09
Speaker
We are on episode number 32.
00:00:11
Speaker
This is a very special number to me because growing up, I was a huge fan of Karl Malone, who was number 32, which is a hero in Utah, right, Scott?
00:00:20
Speaker
Sure.
00:00:22
Speaker
Actually, Karl did a lot of good for Utah.
00:00:26
Speaker
He was like any other prima donna athlete.
00:00:29
Speaker
He was always interested in doing what Karl Malone wants to do.
00:00:32
Speaker
Yeah.
Meet Roger Sharp
00:00:34
Speaker
So with that in mind, a legendary person in NBA, we decided let's get a legendary person for the podcast today.
00:00:40
Speaker
Right, Scott?
00:00:42
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:00:42
Speaker
So today we have coming live from Chicago, we have Michael Jordan who won six champions.
00:00:48
Speaker
Okay.
00:00:50
Speaker
Okay, so we have Roger Sharp.
00:00:53
Speaker
So for everybody who is even remotely connected to pinball, basic background to Roger Sharp is Roger Sharp is actually what brought pinball to the masses.
00:01:02
Speaker
He is basically the Moses that took pinball out of exile across the Red Sea and took it worldwide.
00:01:10
Speaker
Roger, welcome to the show.
00:01:14
Speaker
Well, thank you for the introduction.
00:01:16
Speaker
Wow.
00:01:17
Speaker
I never thought of myself as Charlton Heston, but I appreciate it.
00:01:21
Speaker
I always think of myself as just being the father of Josh and Zach.
00:01:25
Speaker
But partying the Red Sea, kind of cool.
00:01:29
Speaker
It would be impressive.
00:01:30
Speaker
I wish I could do that.
00:01:31
Speaker
So do I. If there was a LaGuardia Sea, you parted it for us, right?
00:01:37
Speaker
And let us through on dry land.
00:01:38
Speaker
There you go.
00:01:40
Speaker
Part of the Red Sea of pinball.
00:01:43
Speaker
Now, Roger, for the research of this interview, I tried to go through everywhere to find out a recent documented story of exactly how the legalization of pinball happened.
00:01:59
Speaker
And most people just kind of referred to it casually.
00:02:02
Speaker
It was more of a...
00:02:04
Speaker
a snapshot.
00:02:06
Speaker
And so I actually wanted to take this time to talk about the history of pinball.
00:02:10
Speaker
And so you would be able to put on the, you know, on record, what exactly was going on and why it was a big deal.
00:02:18
Speaker
Cause it seems to me that pinball it's a game it's, it's outside there.
00:02:23
Speaker
So I don't even know why in the world was it illegal in the first place?
Pinball's Controversial Past
00:02:28
Speaker
Well, I think if you go back to the beginning, and we're not talking about all the way back to the beginning with Montague Redgrave's improvements in Bagatelle in 1871, but really around the Depression, and the fact that you had these startup companies, D. Gottlieb and so many others, that were carving out a niche, creating simple pin games, affordable entertainment for a penny,
00:02:56
Speaker
literally everywhere and anywhere that you could find games.
00:03:01
Speaker
And I think that as things move forward with more, we'll call them simplistic technological innovations, like thumper bumpers and electricity and back boxes.
00:03:18
Speaker
In 1934, Bally actually created the first pinball payout machine.
00:03:24
Speaker
And I think the line started getting blurred.
00:03:26
Speaker
And the concern by communities, cities, was that young children were spending their lunch money playing these terrible games.
00:03:37
Speaker
And I think it built to some type of a crescendo back in the late 30s, early 40s, and admittedly many cities, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York,
00:03:51
Speaker
and other major metropolitan areas, as well as any of the outlying areas, started saying that they didn't want pin games around.
00:04:00
Speaker
And Mayor LaGuardia, with a flourish, wound up chopping up games, throwing them into the East River, and banning pinball.
00:04:09
Speaker
And I think that much of it was predicated on a couple of factors.
00:04:13
Speaker
One, that children were spending their lunch money.
00:04:17
Speaker
That was first.
00:04:18
Speaker
Two, that some of the games afforded people to gamble, which in all honesty was in fact true.
00:04:26
Speaker
Three, more importantly, I think behind all of that was the assumption that somehow the mob was involved.
00:04:37
Speaker
And I know in my pinball book, I talk about a movie called Bullets or Ballots with R.G.
00:04:42
Speaker
Robinson and talking about, you know,
00:04:45
Speaker
how their nefarious activities were.
00:04:48
Speaker
And I always found it somewhat incomprehensible to assume that somebody was going around taking collections with, you know, bags of pennies and going into, we'll use Al Capone because he was Chicago, going into Al Capone and dropping the pennies down and saying, here you go, here's our take.
00:05:08
Speaker
We picked up $43 this week from all our pin games and forget about the numbers that we're running or
00:05:14
Speaker
whatever else was going on.
00:05:16
Speaker
And I always thought, you know, seriously, really?
00:05:18
Speaker
Now, that's not to say that somehow there was not some undesirable elements that were involved specifically in operations on the street, but to assume that any of the manufacturers were somehow tainted was the part that I think, number one, I personally found offensive
Pinball's Cultural Battles
00:05:36
Speaker
and was able to document in my book that that was not the case.
00:05:41
Speaker
But I think that the outcry really was the fact that, you know,
00:05:46
Speaker
These games became a place of congregation and as such, young, old, whatever, that something terrible was going on and they need to be outlawed and banned.
00:05:57
Speaker
So that was the setup for it all.
00:06:00
Speaker
And the only analogy that I'll use for people who probably think of that as being totally and completely ludicrous, I think about somebody by the name of Ronnie Lamb.
00:06:13
Speaker
And this is before you guys were probably born.
00:06:16
Speaker
But Ronnie Lamb made a name for herself when video games hit on the scene.
00:06:21
Speaker
And suddenly on Phil Donahue and other talk shows, she was commenting and lamenting that we were getting ready to develop and evolve a generation of robotic children that were playing all these terrible video games.
00:06:36
Speaker
They need to all be thrown out.
00:06:41
Speaker
And this is before Mortal Kombat.
00:06:43
Speaker
This is before Columbine.
00:06:45
Speaker
and all the rest of it that wound up subsequently taking place some decades later.
00:06:49
Speaker
But I think that when there is something that has so much appeal, I think that adults, if you will, politicians specifically, wind up looking for that trigger point, that soft spot of what they can do to create a platform upon which to preach, regulate, legislate,
00:07:14
Speaker
and provide them more gravitas in the public eye than they would have otherwise.
00:07:21
Speaker
You know, there's another analogy, maybe even better, the movie Footloose that some people may or may not remember with Kevin Bacon.
00:07:30
Speaker
It was based on a true story.
00:07:32
Speaker
There was, in fact, a town that outlawed dancing because dancing was terrible.
00:07:38
Speaker
It somehow raised the libido of these teenage children, and oh my God,
00:07:42
Speaker
We have to outlaw dancing or watching Elvis Presley for the first time on Ed Sullivan, where they blacked out the bottom of the screen so that you didn't see his hips moving.
00:07:53
Speaker
I mean, we've always been in some way, shape or form a society predicated on censorship.
00:07:59
Speaker
And I think, again, without going too far afield or off tangent, I think that pin games back during that time suffered the same fate.
00:08:09
Speaker
So do you feel like it was more of a moral and political crusade than it was based off of the gambling and whatnot?
00:08:19
Speaker
I think bottom line, it probably was.
00:08:22
Speaker
I don't think that any of the legislators, LaGuardia included, because if you look at some of the newsreel footage, he wasn't just destroying pin games.
00:08:31
Speaker
He was destroying jukeboxes and, uh,
00:08:35
Speaker
It wasn't video games, but shuffle alleys.
00:08:38
Speaker
I mean, it was everything and anything that had a coin slot.
00:08:42
Speaker
And I think that the moralistic tone of what was taking place during that time, pinball was just ripe for it.
00:08:49
Speaker
It wasn't as if there was a hue and cry necessarily from the industry.
00:08:53
Speaker
If anything, the industry just hoped that everything would go away, leave us alone.
00:08:58
Speaker
If we don't have these cities, communities, and towns to sell our product into, we still have other places.
00:09:04
Speaker
So it's not as if it's going to be completely and totally injurious to us as a budding industry.
00:09:12
Speaker
But I think that it was more that than it was the gambling part.
00:09:17
Speaker
Although, admittedly, the gambling part really became the cornerstone for the Keefoffer Commission and the Supreme Court case in 1956.
00:09:26
Speaker
which actually defined amusement-only pinball machines and bingo-style pinball machines.
00:09:34
Speaker
Okay.
Pinball Accessibility
00:09:37
Speaker
So if it was illegal in New York and many of these major cities, it was still in the United States.
00:09:44
Speaker
So where was it?
00:09:45
Speaker
Like, where did people get exposed to pinball then?
00:09:49
Speaker
Well, I mean, I'll speak for myself.
00:09:52
Speaker
I mean, I grew up in Chicago.
00:09:53
Speaker
I grew up on the South Side.
00:09:55
Speaker
And admittedly, there was no pinball machines.
00:09:59
Speaker
And again, in my book, I wind up taking people on a journey back in time where I was very little and out in California at a spa with my parents.
00:10:10
Speaker
And that's where I first discovered pinball machines.
00:10:13
Speaker
But
00:10:14
Speaker
I have an older sister who went to the University of Illinois and we would travel down for a Mom's Day weekend or Dad's Day weekend or some other event and there were pinball machines everywhere.
00:10:23
Speaker
We'd go out for lunch and I'd play pinball.
00:10:25
Speaker
I didn't think anything of it when I'd go back home and it wasn't there anymore.
00:10:28
Speaker
It was only when I went to
00:10:31
Speaker
college in Wisconsin that I started really playing pinball.
00:10:36
Speaker
So it did exist.
00:10:39
Speaker
I mean, the games were out there.
00:10:40
Speaker
Don't get me wrong.
00:10:42
Speaker
Whether they were at truck stops, gas stations, and other locales, there were penny arcades in some cities that did not have restrictions on pinball.
00:10:54
Speaker
So if you look at, we'll use New York City as an example, if you went out on the island or if you went down to New Jersey, you could find pinball machines.
00:11:04
Speaker
It just wasn't in the city proper, although it was, but unless you encountered someplace, either by mistake or happenchance, by and large, pinball machines just didn't exist.
00:11:17
Speaker
So it's not to assume that
00:11:21
Speaker
the entire country was blanketed with this restriction.
00:11:24
Speaker
Far from it, there were towns, communities.
00:11:28
Speaker
Now that we're post-World War II, the emerging suburbs of major cities did have places where people could find a pinball machine or two or three.
00:11:38
Speaker
And specifically, if you're looking at Chicago and east of the Mississippi, bars and taverns most definitely had a pinball machine.
00:11:48
Speaker
You know, there were no widescreen TVs set up to watch sporting events.
00:11:53
Speaker
There was probably a pool table, a dart, a jukebox, a payphone, and a pinball machine for all their patrons to enjoy.
00:12:00
Speaker
The idea being if we have something there for them, maybe they will stay longer and come back more often rather than just sitting at the bar.
00:12:10
Speaker
So how did pinball companies... I mean, we talk about the numbers being like 3,000 to 5,000 or whatnot for today's standards for a pinball machine being manufactured.
00:12:21
Speaker
But during those times, it seemed like they produced a lot more.
00:12:27
Speaker
I guess you kind of answered where the market was, but do you know how they kind of, I guess, weathered that economic storm during those times?
00:12:36
Speaker
Well, I mean, you had companies...
00:12:38
Speaker
Let's go back to the mid-1930s and early 1930s.
00:12:41
Speaker
You were looking at a still embryonic industry that was feeding a society that had never had this before.
00:12:49
Speaker
You know, the old penny arcades featuring mutoscopes and other things suddenly had these pin games.
00:12:56
Speaker
World Series from Rockola sold over 50,000 games.
00:13:00
Speaker
Baffle Ball sold.
00:13:02
Speaker
from Gottlieb sold a comparable number because you were suddenly seeding that marketplace and asking the question as to how everybody survived.
00:13:14
Speaker
The volume and the numbers were staggering back then.
00:13:18
Speaker
You know, the only thing that really stopped it all was World War II.
00:13:23
Speaker
And, you know, the fact that you didn't have three major metropolitan areas, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York,
00:13:30
Speaker
Allowing pinball did not mean that you couldn't play pinball machines, I guess, in Houston, Texas, or in Atlanta, or in New Orleans, or, you know, any other major metropolitan areas.
00:13:44
Speaker
So, you know, I think that to answer the question in a better fashion, it wasn't as if they needed to weather the storm.
00:13:53
Speaker
It was really just a question of trying to be practical in regard to their business operations, having their salespeople and their distributors being able to place games out there in locations with operators and just maintain those games.
00:14:09
Speaker
So it really was not a problem.
00:14:12
Speaker
And if you look at the production numbers,
00:14:14
Speaker
But I know Jay Stafford has been very meticulous in providing through the Internet Pinball Database.
00:14:20
Speaker
The numbers were fine in regard to the cost to design, develop and manufacture.
00:14:29
Speaker
You know, let's let's be honest.
00:14:32
Speaker
The extravagance that exists today and the cost of building a pinball machine and the net cost back to a potential purchaser is far different with numbers of zeros compared to let's buy this pin game for $100.
00:14:45
Speaker
Let's buy this brand new machine for $125.
00:14:50
Speaker
And maybe we'll make our money back in six months.
00:14:53
Speaker
You know, it wasn't a question of spending thousands upon thousands of dollars.
00:14:58
Speaker
Does that make sense at all in the scheme of things?
00:15:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:01
Speaker
Okay.
00:15:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:02
Speaker
And Roger, you have mentioned your book a few times.
00:15:04
Speaker
Now I have looked for this book and I can't find it anywhere.
00:15:08
Speaker
I I've even looked on Amazon and there's three used copies for $80 and three hard, hard cover copies for $140.
00:15:20
Speaker
So how can we get ahold of this book?
00:15:24
Speaker
I guess where you just went.
00:15:25
Speaker
I know that at Expo and some other events over the years, I have actually signed library copies, I hate to say, and others where somebody has said to me, here, I was able to get this one for $325.
00:15:38
Speaker
And it's like, are you kidding me?
00:15:40
Speaker
Seriously?
00:15:42
Speaker
So, yeah, I will share with everybody.
00:15:46
Speaker
I hate to say it, but I've actually written other books as well.
00:15:51
Speaker
And I think it was last year for Zachary's birthday.
00:15:55
Speaker
I was asking, I said, well, you have a copy of the pinball book, don't you?
00:15:58
Speaker
And he said, no, I don't.
00:16:00
Speaker
Are you serious?
00:16:02
Speaker
And I actually have a few copies left in my own possession.
00:16:06
Speaker
And I wound up digging one out and giving it to Zachary so that he has it.
00:16:11
Speaker
But yeah, you know, I never thought that
00:16:16
Speaker
number one, that the book would have such a lasting endurance.
00:16:20
Speaker
Um, I am amazed and flattered, humbled, but when I hear what the prices are for some of them, trust me, uh, I think that it's crazy and outlandish, but what can I say?
00:16:35
Speaker
It's the best way to do it.
00:16:37
Speaker
Um, if you really want the book, um,
00:16:41
Speaker
I've talked to people over the years about redoing the book.
00:16:46
Speaker
There has been discussions to maybe do, how about volume two?
00:16:54
Speaker
Come on, Roger.
00:16:55
Speaker
And it's like, it took me three years to do the book.
00:16:59
Speaker
I had the ability and the opportunity, along with a spectacular photographer in James Hamilton,
00:17:04
Speaker
to travel literally around Europe and throughout the United States, taking pictures.
00:17:09
Speaker
We took over 5,000 pictures, of which under 300 exist in the book.
00:17:17
Speaker
Interviews that were voluminous.
00:17:20
Speaker
The book, in all honesty, had a... The manuscript was a little over 300 pages, the final manuscript, and it's a long story.
00:17:30
Speaker
We don't have to dwell on it.
00:17:32
Speaker
pain and the anguish.
00:17:33
Speaker
The ultimate manuscript was under 100 pages, just because of some changes that the editor on the project at E.P.
00:17:43
Speaker
Dutton decided.
00:17:45
Speaker
So I poured my heart and soul into it.
00:17:47
Speaker
The idea of doing a second volume, when it came up, I don't know, let's say 30 years ago, the idea of going back out and traveling, by then so many of the arcades and game rooms had closed.
The Elusive Pinball Book
00:18:03
Speaker
there was not the same level of proliferation.
00:18:06
Speaker
And it was, you know, comments were made, well, just put brochures in, pictures of that.
00:18:12
Speaker
And it's like, no, that's not the way that I do it.
00:18:14
Speaker
I mean, I take nothing away from any of the other folks who have done books on pinball machines.
00:18:20
Speaker
But, you know, it has to be the same.
00:18:23
Speaker
It just can't be somebody's collection in a museum.
00:18:26
Speaker
I want it to be in places that are obscure, where you turn a page and it's like, oh, my God, it's in a laundromat.
00:18:34
Speaker
Look at that.
00:18:35
Speaker
Look at those people there.
00:18:36
Speaker
Look at that young girl.
00:18:37
Speaker
Look at that young boy.
00:18:39
Speaker
Look at the grandmother holding on to her grandson playing.
00:18:42
Speaker
I mean, I wanted to capture the essence of the totality of who was able to play, who enjoyed playing, and the places where you could find it.
00:18:52
Speaker
That was really the defining part, as well as bringing life and image to the people behind the scenes.
00:19:00
Speaker
And the idea of kind of, you know, starting it all over.
00:19:03
Speaker
And then people said, well, just add on to the book.
00:19:07
Speaker
Update it.
00:19:09
Speaker
It's from 1977.
00:19:11
Speaker
Come on.
00:19:11
Speaker
10 years have passed.
00:19:12
Speaker
20 years have passed.
00:19:14
Speaker
Add more.
00:19:15
Speaker
And I actually did reach out.
00:19:18
Speaker
The book was actually printed by a Japanese company called Dainippon.
00:19:24
Speaker
And I did call them to see if they still had the dead matter because all the rights reverted back to me.
00:19:32
Speaker
And I probably waited a couple of decades too long because they did not have anything.
00:19:38
Speaker
So that was the closest that I wound up getting.
00:19:41
Speaker
And Joshua, a couple of years ago, asked if I had the tapes of the interviews.
00:19:48
Speaker
And I said, yeah.
00:19:51
Speaker
do they play or whatever?
00:19:53
Speaker
And I don't know.
00:19:54
Speaker
I haven't put them into my cassette recorder for a few decades.
00:20:00
Speaker
So he wound up getting me to transfer them all onto a disc so that at least they're on proper media as opposed to being on ill-fated little cassettes.
00:20:15
Speaker
And I know that, I think a couple of them I did, um,
00:20:21
Speaker
with, wow, my mind just went blank.
00:20:26
Speaker
Don't tell me.
00:20:28
Speaker
Mr. Shivers, Nate.
00:20:30
Speaker
Yes.
00:20:31
Speaker
So we did a couple of them where we allowed people to actually hear how Harry Williams talked or Sam Stern and a couple of others.
00:20:40
Speaker
And I know that there's still more to go through.
00:20:42
Speaker
And, you know, there's been discussions about putting it into some digital form in some way, shape or form and
00:20:50
Speaker
I don't know.
00:20:51
Speaker
I guess my feeling is I'll be up to the boys after I'm long gone to kind of do whatever they want with it.
00:20:58
Speaker
Probably not the answer that you wanted when you first asked, how do I get the book?
00:21:02
Speaker
Roger.
00:21:04
Speaker
Well, I was hoping you said, I have a digital copy right here and I'm about to release it on Amazon.
00:21:08
Speaker
And so you can download it on your Kindle.
00:21:10
Speaker
But yeah.
00:21:11
Speaker
Right.
00:21:12
Speaker
Yeah, no.
00:21:14
Speaker
No, it's all in my archives or as my sons like to think I'm a hoarder.
00:21:18
Speaker
And I said, think of me as an archivist.
00:21:21
Speaker
There's lots of stuff here for you guys to go through.
00:21:23
Speaker
When all is said and done.
00:21:25
Speaker
You're a museum curator, a personal museum.
00:21:29
Speaker
Yes.
00:21:30
Speaker
I mean, maybe I'm the strong museum West.
00:21:34
Speaker
I don't know.
00:21:35
Speaker
Maybe something like that.
00:21:39
Speaker
And maybe ultimately that will be, you know, how I'll bequeath all of the stuff that I do have because my files are fairly extensive, to say the least.
The Famous Pinball Shot
00:21:51
Speaker
you wrote the book shortly after you made the shot.
00:21:54
Speaker
Everyone knows.
00:21:55
Speaker
And if I remember correctly, it wasn't just one shot, correct?
00:21:58
Speaker
You got it.
00:21:59
Speaker
So take us through the history.
00:22:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:02
Speaker
Scott and I were talking about this.
00:22:03
Speaker
We're like, we don't know if we've ever actually heard the story of how you even got contacted to do this.
00:22:09
Speaker
And then I know that you've, you've told the story of actually making the shot, but just kind of events leading up to it and what got you through it after that.
00:22:19
Speaker
Okay.
00:22:19
Speaker
Well, uh,
00:22:21
Speaker
I was living in New York.
00:22:23
Speaker
At the time, I was the associate editor at GQ magazine.
00:22:28
Speaker
There were a couple of spots that I had found in the village and elsewhere where I could play pinball.
00:22:36
Speaker
Otherwise, because I had started doing game reviews for Play Meter magazine, which was one of the point-operated amusement game trade magazines at the time.
00:22:44
Speaker
And I traveled down to the distributorships in New Jersey around the...
00:22:50
Speaker
West side of New York to see the new games and then review them and what have you.
00:22:56
Speaker
And, uh, you know, being a Midwesterner, I did have a car in New York city, which was somewhat insane, but also being able to leave the city to go out and play.
00:23:05
Speaker
And that became somewhat, uh, tedious, uh, overwhelming.
00:23:13
Speaker
Um, and I wanted to play pinball and I thought if I, uh,
00:23:21
Speaker
do an article for GQ on pinball, I will be able to meet the right people and buy a game.
00:23:30
Speaker
It was purely a selfish endeavor.
00:23:33
Speaker
And I mentioned it to the editor.
00:23:37
Speaker
It's 1974.
00:23:38
Speaker
We were beginning to plan out what was going to be this luxurious end-of-the-year extravaganza
00:23:46
Speaker
for the winter issue of 1975.
00:23:49
Speaker
And you have long lead times in the world of magazines, at least monthlies.
00:23:54
Speaker
And I went to the New York City Library to start doing my research.
00:23:59
Speaker
And I went into the stacks and looked up pinball, nothing, flippers, tilt.
00:24:07
Speaker
I mean, any word that I could think of.
00:24:10
Speaker
And, oh, my God, there's no books on the subject.
00:24:14
Speaker
And I thought, I am screwed.
00:24:17
Speaker
There had been one article that had been published in 1972.
00:24:21
Speaker
And I forget if it was either Esquire or Playboy by Anthony Lucas.
00:24:28
Speaker
And the game featured in there, which gives you a time frame, was actually Fireball from Bally.
00:24:34
Speaker
And I went back to the editor and I said, well, it's going to be a little bit more difficult for me to write the feature I want to write.
00:24:42
Speaker
And his comment offhandedly.
00:24:44
Speaker
I was, well, you think you know so much?
00:24:45
Speaker
Write a book.
00:24:46
Speaker
And he laughed, and I went around the corner to my office, and it was like, okay.
00:24:52
Speaker
And I called my sister, who was living in the city, actually working at Simon & Schuster, I think at that time, or maybe she was still in advertising at Burson Marsteller.
00:25:03
Speaker
And she gave me the name of a publisher, Chelsea House Publishing, and I called up the editor-in-chief.
00:25:11
Speaker
And set up a meeting and thank God my editor was there with me.
00:25:18
Speaker
One of my associates working with me, copy editor, Peter Simon, I will name him.
00:25:27
Speaker
And Peter said, what are you taking with you to the meeting?
00:25:30
Speaker
And it's like, huh?
00:25:32
Speaker
You got to take something.
00:25:34
Speaker
He said, you know, you have some of those flyers that you got.
00:25:36
Speaker
Okay, I can take some flyers, I guess.
00:25:39
Speaker
And you've got to do an outline.
00:25:40
Speaker
And in probably about 20 minutes, I did like a rough little outline of what the book would be.
00:25:45
Speaker
And I went with about three or four game brochures, this one little piece of paper that I probably actually have somewhere because I tend not to throw anything out that outlined everything.
00:25:56
Speaker
And I wound up sitting down and meeting with the publisher and walked out an hour later with a contract.
00:26:04
Speaker
To do the book.
00:26:06
Speaker
And I called up my sister somewhat frantically saying, hi, I have a contract.
00:26:11
Speaker
I don't know what to do.
00:26:12
Speaker
Well, you need an attorney.
00:26:15
Speaker
Okay, thank you.
00:26:18
Speaker
And she gave me the name of an attorney and I wound up setting up a meeting with the attorney and I went in and met with him and I showed him the contract and he reviewed it.
00:26:26
Speaker
And he said, looks okay to me.
00:26:28
Speaker
Is that going to be enough money?
00:26:31
Speaker
I don't know.
00:26:32
Speaker
Well, you need an agent.
00:26:34
Speaker
okay, I mean, I'm going through these phases and stages.
00:26:38
Speaker
And ultimately what wound up happening was we kind of went far afield for the feature that ultimately ran in the winter issue of GQ, which embraced not only pinball machines, but an advanced look at the future.
00:26:55
Speaker
The advanced look of the future was Laserdisc players and large screen TVs.
00:26:59
Speaker
And I think I actually put in an eight player,
00:27:02
Speaker
indie racing video game from Atari that people could buy for their homes.
00:27:07
Speaker
I mean, outrageous stuff.
00:27:11
Speaker
From that, and having then, at that point in time, secured an agreement with E.P.
00:27:16
Speaker
Dutton to do the book after actually dealing with five other major publishers who all said yes, but did not have the same vision that I had for a book.
00:27:26
Speaker
I want an oversized cocktail table book, and it has to be these kinds of dimensions so it fits a play field.
00:27:33
Speaker
full size.
00:27:35
Speaker
And I want it to be this chronicle of the history of pinball.
00:27:40
Speaker
I want to do interviews.
00:27:41
Speaker
You know, my, my, my inspiration for that, I tend to be a big Marx Brothers fan.
00:27:46
Speaker
I was, there was a book called the Marx Brothers scrapbook.
00:27:50
Speaker
And if you look at it, the Marx Brothers scrapbook is really based on interviews with the brothers and family members kind of recounting the
00:28:00
Speaker
from their start as Minnie's Boys on through.
00:28:04
Speaker
And I thought, wouldn't it be wonderful to really take that journey through the eyes and the voices and the remembrances of the people who shaped the industry.
00:28:14
Speaker
So that was the premise.
00:28:16
Speaker
And E.P.
00:28:16
Speaker
Dutton, at that point in time, got it before they shifted gears on me.
00:28:20
Speaker
But
00:28:21
Speaker
with James Hamilton becoming my photographer for the GQ feature, that led to George Del Marico, who was at that time the art director for the arts and leisure section at the New York Times, for me to do a piece that was featured end of the year in the New York Times on pinball.
00:28:43
Speaker
And at that point in time, I had already been to a couple of conventions.
00:28:47
Speaker
People kind of knew who I was, what I was doing.
00:28:51
Speaker
At that point in time, I was somewhat of an accomplished player, a show-off.
00:28:57
Speaker
I had some incredible mad skills.
00:29:02
Speaker
And the New York Amusement Association...
00:29:09
Speaker
contacted me because they were getting ready to launch a whole new initiative to try to overturn the law that had been on the books since 1941 and asked if I would be willing to testify as well as demonstrate that pinball was a game of skill.
00:29:25
Speaker
And so they knew about you because of your book that you were writing or because of your playing or?
00:29:32
Speaker
They knew about me because of the book that I was writing and doing research for.
00:29:39
Speaker
the fact that, yes, I had already garnered some acclaim as being this exceptional pinball player.
00:29:46
Speaker
I had access to all the factories at the time, so I was going into the various development areas and playing Whitewoods and offering commentary of what I thought about a game or how would I change it or whatever else.
00:30:02
Speaker
So my reputation, I guess, preceded me as being this young whippersnapper
00:30:08
Speaker
who had all of these credentials, if you will.
00:30:12
Speaker
I will get into a little bit of the background story without hopefully offending anybody.
00:30:22
Speaker
But at the time...
00:30:25
Speaker
with the New York State Association.
00:30:27
Speaker
And it was Irving Holtzman, Ben Tchaikovsky.
00:30:30
Speaker
Their PR person was a fellow by the name of Danny Frank.
00:30:34
Speaker
And I went to their offices, which I think were on 57th Street in New York.
00:30:40
Speaker
And they held up these large posters that they had created showing the front of peep shows and other adult venues.
00:30:47
Speaker
And their premise was going to be, you're allowing this in, why can't you allow in pinball?
00:30:55
Speaker
And I was just dumbfounded.
00:30:58
Speaker
At that point in time, having been around things for a couple of years, I had really grown into having very, very deep and, I believe, very personal relationships with Harry Williams and Alvin Gottlieb and Sam Stern and Sam Ginsberg and the designer, everybody.
00:31:16
Speaker
And I felt really, you know, you're going to put pinball in this position as to what it's the lesser of two evils.
00:31:25
Speaker
I said, if that's the position that you're going to take, I want no part of it.
00:31:30
Speaker
And they convened for a couple of moments and said, OK, fine.
00:31:33
Speaker
We won't do it that way.
00:31:34
Speaker
We'll follow your lead.
00:31:36
Speaker
And I said, good.
00:31:37
Speaker
I mean, I've traveled around.
00:31:38
Speaker
I've talked to these people.
00:31:40
Speaker
I have hours upon hours of interviews and research that I've done and gone through files and microfiche and what have you.
00:31:48
Speaker
I'm still working and compiling this, you know, this book, this epic.
00:31:55
Speaker
And I said, you know, we don't have to do that.
00:31:58
Speaker
And they said, okay.
00:32:01
Speaker
And the rest, as they say, took place.
00:32:03
Speaker
I mean, April 2nd of 1976, I ventured into the courtroom and, you know,
00:32:10
Speaker
I am somewhat claustrophobic, far less now, but I was somewhat claustrophobic, much more so back then.
00:32:16
Speaker
And I was nervous.
00:32:19
Speaker
I'm going to be in a position, sitting in a chair.
00:32:22
Speaker
What happens if I have to go to the bathroom?
00:32:25
Speaker
I'm trapped.
00:32:26
Speaker
And Rufus King, an incredible attorney representing both Gottlieb and Williams back in 1956,
00:32:35
Speaker
came over to me.
00:32:36
Speaker
He said, relax.
00:32:38
Speaker
You know, if you feel uncomfortable, you can take a break.
00:32:41
Speaker
You're not locked in there.
00:32:42
Speaker
And I said, but still.
00:32:43
Speaker
And he said, plus, you're going to be talking about things that you know everything about.
00:32:47
Speaker
It's going to be fine.
00:32:49
Speaker
Just calm down.
00:32:51
Speaker
And I think the turning point for me was when I was sworn in.
00:32:57
Speaker
And the first questions I asked were, so who's paying for you to be here?
00:33:02
Speaker
I'm sorry, what?
00:33:04
Speaker
Which company do you work for?
00:33:06
Speaker
Huh?
00:33:07
Speaker
I mean, there's a picture.
00:33:09
Speaker
I think everybody or most people know that picture.
00:33:11
Speaker
The gruff gentleman to my left, I think, if I'm not mistaken from memory, with the gray suit and the white hair and the kind of more cherubic face.
00:33:22
Speaker
Yep, he's right there.
00:33:25
Speaker
Was the head of the city council.
00:33:28
Speaker
And Eugene Mastropiore was one of the members of the city council.
00:33:31
Speaker
He was the one...
00:33:32
Speaker
as a councilman who had advanced the new law that was going to be voted on.
00:33:39
Speaker
And Eleanor Guggenheim was the commissioner of consumer affairs who felt proactively, let's make this change.
00:33:47
Speaker
You know, the time has come.
00:33:50
Speaker
So everybody was kind of like there for it, except for this fellow,
00:33:54
Speaker
And he was the one that was kind of lambasting me.
00:33:56
Speaker
And any kind of nervousness that I felt suddenly dissipated and totally disappeared.
00:34:02
Speaker
It was like, really?
00:34:04
Speaker
And you're writing a book.
00:34:05
Speaker
Who's paying for that book?
00:34:07
Speaker
And it was, you know, stop.
00:34:09
Speaker
You know, stop attacking me.
00:34:11
Speaker
E.P.
00:34:11
Speaker
Dutton, I'm a journalist.
00:34:13
Speaker
I work for a magazine.
00:34:15
Speaker
I'm working on a book.
00:34:17
Speaker
and kind of went through that process from that point forward to provide my testimony, if you will.
00:34:25
Speaker
There were two games that were set up and different than what some people have speculated or written or what have you.
00:34:33
Speaker
Number one, I did not pick the games.
00:34:36
Speaker
Number two, I was very familiar with both El Dorado and Bankshot.
00:34:43
Speaker
Number three...
00:34:45
Speaker
When I went to go play the game, I think the description was, you know, now it's time for you to play.
00:34:54
Speaker
And I got up and I turned to my left because El Dorado was the game that had been set up for me to play.
00:35:01
Speaker
And this fellow said, and he pointed very sternly, not that game, that game over there.
00:35:10
Speaker
And all the camera crews from the local media and everything else had to stop.
00:35:14
Speaker
There was a recess where they had to move over.
00:35:17
Speaker
And I think truly he probably thought that El Dorado was rigged.
Legalization of Pinball
00:35:22
Speaker
And the game over there that nobody was paying attention to will use that one.
00:35:27
Speaker
And let's face it, it's a pinball machine.
00:35:30
Speaker
If something breaks, there was a backup.
00:35:32
Speaker
And truly it did not matter to me.
00:35:34
Speaker
In retrospect,
00:35:36
Speaker
It was probably better than it was bank shot because at least thematically, I was able to kind of walk through and talk through the game.
00:35:44
Speaker
Design from the standpoint of geometry, what the rules and objectives were.
00:35:48
Speaker
It's a pool game.
00:35:49
Speaker
All of these targets and switches and areas correspond to various pool balls.
00:35:54
Speaker
I need to get all of these shots so that I'm completing the rack of pool balls.
00:36:01
Speaker
Pure and simple.
00:36:01
Speaker
If it had been Eldorado, it's a spell out game.
00:36:04
Speaker
I need to do all.
00:36:05
Speaker
I mean, I would have still been able to to come up with an approach that I think would have fundamentally been hopefully as successful.
00:36:15
Speaker
So, you know, plunge the first ball.
00:36:17
Speaker
I'm talking as I'm playing.
00:36:20
Speaker
The ball comes down to a flipper.
00:36:22
Speaker
I cradle it.
00:36:23
Speaker
And it's like, okay, I want to make that shot for the 15.
00:36:27
Speaker
Make the shot.
00:36:28
Speaker
Ball comes back.
00:36:29
Speaker
Okay.
00:36:30
Speaker
That kickout hole up on the top is now lit.
00:36:32
Speaker
I need to make that shot because I'm going to score extra points or collect a bonus, whatever it was.
00:36:38
Speaker
So forgive the inability to remember precisely and exactly how the game scores.
00:36:43
Speaker
But I was cradling and making shots repeatedly.
00:36:51
Speaker
I think because I was making them repeatedly and did it for the first two balls, it probably did not have the impact that ultimately the beginning of ball three did have.
00:37:03
Speaker
It's a five-ball game.
00:37:06
Speaker
I had encountered a game, interestingly, just outside of Chicago in a suburb called Skokie, Illinois.
00:37:12
Speaker
It was in a bowling alley when I was traveling around with James.
00:37:17
Speaker
Bowling Alley had any number of pinball machines.
00:37:20
Speaker
And lo and behold, all of those pinball machines were fine except for the fact this is going to sound very, very strange to you and probably to many of your listeners.
00:37:29
Speaker
Because what I'm about to say has now become somewhat accepted and ordinary, but back then it wasn't.
00:37:39
Speaker
The plungers were taken off the game.
00:37:42
Speaker
It was a press button and the ball just kind of went up.
00:37:47
Speaker
which I hated and detested because the games back then were not designed to be that way.
00:37:53
Speaker
So just as I was ready to pull back the plunger for ball three to continue my dissertation, if you will, I stopped and I said, see these gradient lines down here?
00:38:07
Speaker
That is because there's skill even down to the plunger.
00:38:11
Speaker
This is a five ball game.
00:38:15
Speaker
There is no way other than maybe the ball taking a very nice bounce off of these bumpers to go back up through one of those top five lanes.
00:38:26
Speaker
I have to complete all of those five lanes in order to be able to complete my rack of balls.
00:38:31
Speaker
If I pull the plunger back just right, it's going to go right down the center lane.
00:38:37
Speaker
I pulled the plunger back.
00:38:38
Speaker
It went up.
00:38:39
Speaker
It hit the rubber, came down in a marvelous arc, and went straight down
00:38:45
Speaker
the center lane, nothing but net.
00:38:49
Speaker
And my little gruff, cherubic person said, that's enough.
00:38:54
Speaker
All right, we've seen enough.
00:38:55
Speaker
And I still wanted to, I mean, the ball is still in play.
00:38:58
Speaker
My hands have not left the flippers, but everybody kind of left.
00:39:01
Speaker
I walked away from the game.
00:39:03
Speaker
And I think that it was because I was able to actually do something as precisely as that, and not suggesting that any of my
00:39:11
Speaker
Flipper shots were not as precise, but the fact that they happened in such rapid succession, I think this was like the crowning event, if you will, of my demonstration and why it has stood out to be, you know, it's not even the shot heard around the world.
00:39:29
Speaker
It was the plunger that made it.
00:39:32
Speaker
And people have asked, they said, so you pulled back the plunger?
00:39:35
Speaker
I said, yeah, I mean, I did.
00:39:37
Speaker
And if it hadn't gone in,
00:39:39
Speaker
I would have tried to nudge a little bit.
00:39:40
Speaker
I mean, I would have had some type of repartee to justify whatever had just taken place.
00:39:48
Speaker
In this case, I didn't have to say or do anything.
00:39:51
Speaker
I had already done it.
00:39:53
Speaker
So, you know.
00:39:56
Speaker
Later, I forget the exact time.
00:39:58
Speaker
It was probably within a week.
00:40:00
Speaker
The verdict came back and the city council, by a unanimous vote of six to zero, allowed pinball back into New York.
00:40:11
Speaker
And I've always thought with all due modesty that on my birthday, August 1st, then Mayor Abe Abraham Beam signed it into law and pinball was allowed back into New York.
00:40:26
Speaker
And it became something of a domino effect, in all honesty, I think, because it was New York in some ways, because New York is New York.
00:40:34
Speaker
Look, Los Angeles had voted back pinball back in 1972, but it was on the West Coast.
00:40:41
Speaker
And, you know, we didn't have the same world back in the mid 70s that we have now in terms of instantaneous news and
00:40:49
Speaker
the internet and whatever else.
00:40:51
Speaker
But Chicago followed later in 1976 to allow pinball in.
00:40:56
Speaker
I had actually testified in a couple of other court cases around the country and had offered some other input and guidance and some others.
00:41:04
Speaker
So I think New York really became that one place
00:41:10
Speaker
that one verdict, if you will, that kind of made pinball back in the limelight to a greater effect than it would have had if it had been in Tuscaloosa or some other city or town.
00:41:24
Speaker
And the rest of it, they say, is history.
00:41:29
Speaker
Do you have one of those games?
00:41:33
Speaker
I do not have an Eldorado and I do not have a bank shot.
00:41:36
Speaker
No, I don't.
00:41:37
Speaker
It was never, neither of them were ever on my wish list.
00:41:41
Speaker
I hate to say my wish list was either a hurdy gurdy central park or a buckaroo cowpoke.
00:41:49
Speaker
Those are the games that I played religiously and maddeningly Lee when I was at the university of Wisconsin.
00:41:55
Speaker
And in fact, hurdy gurdy was the first game that I ever turned and
00:42:01
Speaker
And cowpoke was the one game where I watched my fraternity brother play and saw that there was actually skill involved.
00:42:11
Speaker
I won't take you through the arduous process of how terrible I was when I first started playing pinball and how accomplished I became.
00:42:21
Speaker
But it was dazzlingly...
00:42:25
Speaker
really painful to watch how I played.
00:42:28
Speaker
I mean, suffice it to say my first entry into playing pinball when I was in college, you put your money in, you pull back the plunger and you just start flipping maddeningly.
00:42:40
Speaker
Ball's not even down close to the flippers, but I am just flipping both flippers.
00:42:46
Speaker
And it was different epiphanies of, I don't have to start flipping like a crazy person until the ball is close to the flippers.
00:42:53
Speaker
Okay, good.
00:42:54
Speaker
You know what?
00:42:55
Speaker
If the ball is only going to be on the left, I only have to flip crazy on the left or on the right.
00:43:01
Speaker
I mean, it was all of these kind of various self-educating steps to become, again, a little bit more proficient.
00:43:12
Speaker
So at the time you were working for GQ, you're making this book, you've done the testimonials and stuff.
00:43:18
Speaker
What made you jump from GQ and doing stuff like that into the pinball industry and to helping it actually in the industry?
00:43:28
Speaker
Well, the book came out.
00:43:33
Speaker
I had taken a leave of absence from GQ and actually went back and became managing editor when I came back.
00:43:42
Speaker
it was an interesting call that I got from the publisher who finally reached me.
00:43:46
Speaker
I've been trying to reach you forever.
00:43:47
Speaker
And it's like, well, I've been traveling.
00:43:49
Speaker
I've been in Europe, been around the United States, working on my pinball book.
00:43:53
Speaker
Did you give any thought of ever coming back to the magazine?
00:43:56
Speaker
And I said, not really.
00:43:57
Speaker
He said, well, I'd like you to come back as the editor.
00:44:01
Speaker
And there's a whole story that we don't have to get into.
00:44:03
Speaker
And I turned that down, but I did come back as the managing editor.
00:44:08
Speaker
And I always thought,
00:44:09
Speaker
So from associate editor, managing editor, based on what?
00:44:14
Speaker
The fact that I was gone for a few months?
00:44:17
Speaker
In real time, it was only a few months.
00:44:19
Speaker
In publishing time, I actually did not miss any issues just because of lead times and the fact that at that point, GQ was only eight issues a year.
00:44:29
Speaker
But here I'm back as managing editor based on what?
00:44:33
Speaker
The strength of working on a pinball book?
00:44:39
Speaker
So from 74 until 1982, I was a GQ.
00:44:44
Speaker
And I was absolutely involved with the pinball industry and everybody kind of knew it.
00:44:50
Speaker
I actually wrote other books during that period of time.
00:44:53
Speaker
I wrote a couple of self-help books with a clinical psychologist and a number of other books that, again, are of no interest to anybody in the pinball world, I would assume.
00:45:05
Speaker
But I also had a chance to design my first pinball machine.
00:45:09
Speaker
So there was actually an appetite and a desire because I was still writing for all the trade magazines, replay, play meter, vending times, cash box.
00:45:20
Speaker
Um, so I was still very deeply involved in the industry and would travel back to Chicago on a somewhat frequent basis and go to the trade show, the major one back then there was only one, which was the AMOA in the fall.
00:45:34
Speaker
Um, and, uh,
00:45:36
Speaker
Got the opportunity to design my first game, which was Sharpshooter.
00:45:42
Speaker
And had thought about wanting to be part of the industry and was made a job offer by then president of Williams, Michael Stroll, to come in and head up marketing.
00:45:59
Speaker
The timing just wasn't right.
00:46:02
Speaker
Had a chance to work at D. Gottlieb.
00:46:07
Speaker
in 1981 1980.
00:46:09
Speaker
And again, the timing wasn't right in terms of their transitioning with the, uh, the purchase and ultimate sale from Columbia pictures and then Coca-Cola and then, uh, being on its own.
00:46:23
Speaker
And, uh, lo and behold, in 1988, uh, wound up getting a phone call from, uh, Ken Fidesna at, uh, Williams asking if I would be willing to, uh,
00:46:37
Speaker
join Williams to head up marketing.
00:46:40
Speaker
And I had always wanted to come back to Chicago.
00:46:42
Speaker
At that point in time, I had left GQ, had worked briefly for a marketing and sales promotion company, and then joined on with a small publisher, took over the editorship of Video Games Magazine, and
00:46:57
Speaker
started up a magazine called easy home computer and another magazine called exercise for men, um, did a series of computer user guides.
00:47:08
Speaker
Um, so yeah, you know, had moved on to Connecticut working for a computer startup that was funded by Kodak and Xerox, uh, with some new innovative technology.
00:47:22
Speaker
And lo and behold, there was this opportunity to come back home and, uh,
00:47:27
Speaker
The rest, as I say, is history.
00:47:28
Speaker
I started at Williams in 1988 and was there for 26 and a half years.
00:47:33
Speaker
So you designed all of your pinball machines, not actually full-time in the industry.
00:47:39
Speaker
It sounds like this was a side hobby or a side gig for you.
00:47:46
Speaker
It was absolutely a side thing for me to do sharpshooter.
00:47:52
Speaker
for me to tell them, do not do Coney Island and just flop the play field, but they didn't listen.
00:47:59
Speaker
I had worked on a game for D Gottlieb with Ray Tanzer, who was still in school at the time.
00:48:06
Speaker
It was a summer thing.
00:48:08
Speaker
And if the Bondo buildup that Ray had put on the play field, it probably weighed about a thousand pounds.
00:48:17
Speaker
If I had known to call it a ramp or a hill,
00:48:21
Speaker
maybe that game would have seen the light of day.
00:48:26
Speaker
Barakora started off as Las Vegas that I worked on with Steve Epstein.
00:48:32
Speaker
And yeah, so everything was done as an aside with Cyclops and Global Warfare.
00:48:41
Speaker
Stingray, which I kind of worked on.
00:48:44
Speaker
That was interesting only because I was meeting with Sam
00:48:50
Speaker
at Stern.
00:48:51
Speaker
And we went out to the factory.
00:48:53
Speaker
We were going out for lunch.
00:48:55
Speaker
And Sam stopped.
00:48:56
Speaker
Mike Kubin was working on a whitewood.
00:48:59
Speaker
And they asked me what I thought of the game.
00:49:02
Speaker
And it was like, well, not bad.
00:49:05
Speaker
I'd do a spinner over here.
00:49:08
Speaker
I would do some kind of a small little area to get back up to the right.
00:49:12
Speaker
I never realized the influence that Wizard had on the design.
00:49:17
Speaker
But I didn't like wizard because there was no way to get back up to the top on the right side.
00:49:21
Speaker
It was all closed off.
00:49:23
Speaker
And it was like, here, do this with some rollovers and do this so I can get back up to the top.
00:49:29
Speaker
Talked about doing something in the middle that effectively was a way to double up the same values that existed in a kick out hole on the top.
00:49:40
Speaker
and just made all of those kinds of observations.
00:49:43
Speaker
We went out to lunch, came back, and lo and behold, Mike Koopin had done all of those changes, and Stingray was born.
00:49:51
Speaker
So yes, I mean, there were some other games that I had an influence in, and then again, having the games that I had designed actually see the light of day, along with any number of other layouts and game concepts that never really did see the light of day.
00:50:09
Speaker
I had a three-game contract with Williams, and only Barracora wound up getting built and
Pinball Design Journey
00:50:16
Speaker
designed.
00:50:16
Speaker
Thank you, Barry Osler, who was handed off to say, here, you do this project.
00:50:22
Speaker
So yeah, it was all part-time sideline.
00:50:26
Speaker
So back in the day, I know that you started the first competitive.
00:50:30
Speaker
It wasn't Papa.
00:50:31
Speaker
It was originally, I can't remember what it was originally called.
00:50:34
Speaker
It was called Papa.
00:50:36
Speaker
Oh, was it Papa?
00:50:37
Speaker
Absolutely, because I am into somewhat, and I forget what you call these things.
00:50:42
Speaker
It does not come to mind, but Papa is the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association.
00:50:48
Speaker
And the reason for that was that I was, I guess, the guest commentator invited out by Bally for their Super Shooter tournament and got very much involved with that.
00:51:05
Speaker
which actually in some ways led me to get involved with Pumpkin Press and ultimately Video Games Magazine.
00:51:12
Speaker
I had been writing for Electronic Fun and Games, or actually Electronic Games.
00:51:17
Speaker
It wasn't Electronic Fun and Games, but Electronic Games with Arnie Katz and Joyce Worley and Bill Kunkel.
00:51:23
Speaker
I was writing commentary for them on arcade games.
00:51:29
Speaker
And was out in Chicago, the Playboy Towers, for Bally Super Shooter.
00:51:36
Speaker
And actually, there was a celebrity tournament.
00:51:39
Speaker
God, Gilda Radner was there, Walter Payton, Bill Murray.
00:51:43
Speaker
I mean, it was a whole stellar group of people.
00:51:45
Speaker
And there was a celebrity tournament to see who would get the chance to play against me.
00:51:52
Speaker
And Walter Payton actually won and had a chance to play against me.
00:51:57
Speaker
And probably somewhere I still have the sweater that Bill Murray ripped.
00:52:01
Speaker
Because I was still on my first ball when Walter was still playing his third game.
00:52:07
Speaker
And Bill Murray wanted to stop me and he grabbed the back of my sweater and it ripped.
00:52:13
Speaker
But it was, hey, sorry.
00:52:15
Speaker
Because I told all the guys, the competitors, and there was a top 20 players.
00:52:20
Speaker
They'd all competed at Aladdin's Castles around the country to come in and win a Datsun 280Z and a whole other prize package of stuff.
00:52:29
Speaker
And I remember...
00:52:30
Speaker
quite distinctly that the age range was a 10 year old on up to somebody who was 32.
00:52:36
Speaker
There was one gal and it was, it was quite an undertaking.
00:52:44
Speaker
It was sensational.
00:52:46
Speaker
Nothing like that had ever happened before.
00:52:48
Speaker
There was lies live news coverage and all the rest of it, which was spectacular, but the person who ultimately won.
00:52:56
Speaker
And I know that I've said their names in vain before,
00:52:59
Speaker
And I mean, again, not to take any umbrage on them.
00:53:03
Speaker
Ken Lunsford won from Plains, Georgia.
00:53:07
Speaker
Amazingly the same city that Jimmy Carter, the president, came from.
00:53:12
Speaker
And this is 1977, 78.
00:53:16
Speaker
I think as I take a sip of tea, don't mind me.
00:53:24
Speaker
Joe Grillo was a person he was playing in the finals.
00:53:26
Speaker
And Joe, I thought, played.
00:53:30
Speaker
a much more stable, higher level of games than Ken.
00:53:35
Speaker
Ken made a shot, and the shot proved to be the difference on eight ball, where he got 5X bonus and wound up winning the tournament.
00:53:44
Speaker
And I remember going back, and at that point in time, I was one of the regulars hanging out with Steve Epstein at the Broadway Arcade, playing games,
00:54:02
Speaker
playing games when the arcade was shutting down, during the day, whenever.
00:54:11
Speaker
And I was able to talk Steve into playing along with Lionel Martinez, not really a great player.
00:54:20
Speaker
Lionel was a film editor and one of the regulars.
00:54:24
Speaker
And it was the three of us, and over a period of about three years, doing everything by hand, I wanted to come up with a scoring system.
00:54:33
Speaker
I realized that doing scoring on a pinball machine didn't make sense because admittedly every game is different.
00:54:42
Speaker
Totaling up the scores, the way that things were done with the ballet tournament was, there was a certain inequity.
00:54:50
Speaker
And I thought if I could come up with something, a PEBGA, you guys are shaking your head saying, huh?
00:54:59
Speaker
Point efficiency per game average.
00:55:03
Speaker
See, I'm into these kind of mnemonic, alliterative things.
00:55:07
Speaker
Acronyms.
00:55:08
Speaker
Acronyms.
00:55:09
Speaker
Thank you.
00:55:09
Speaker
Okay.
00:55:10
Speaker
Thank you.
00:55:10
Speaker
That's the word I was searching for.
00:55:12
Speaker
So a PEBGA, a point efficiency per game average that would be somewhat of a handicap, the way that you have it in bowling, because I was thinking of it on that basis because I was also a bowler, that somehow I could equate things so that if I had a 4.2 PEBGA versus somebody with a 2.4,
00:55:33
Speaker
Somehow I could work those numbers in such a fashion that I could equalize and balance out the same way that a person with a 200 average could compete head to head with somebody who only averaged 180.
00:55:44
Speaker
That that disparity would be different.
00:55:49
Speaker
And that's how PAPA was started.
00:55:52
Speaker
It was, let me work these numbers.
00:55:54
Speaker
Let me figure things out.
00:55:55
Speaker
And an arduous, arduous task with the three of us playing games.
00:56:01
Speaker
me going back and transferring all of my handwriting into typed pages.
00:56:05
Speaker
And yes, somewhere I have seven, six foot high file cabinets here.
00:56:10
Speaker
Somewhere those pages do exist to see what I wound up doing.
00:56:15
Speaker
It got very intense with the three of us and then doing matchups with people.
00:56:18
Speaker
And I wound up being, I cannot do a PEPGA.
00:56:22
Speaker
It doesn't work, but I have all of these things.
00:56:25
Speaker
Let me try to allocate points, 10, five, and one.
00:56:30
Speaker
Let's see how that works.
00:56:33
Speaker
Seven, five, three and one.
00:56:35
Speaker
When we started getting a fourth player involved and I started being able to get some other people to be our.
00:56:43
Speaker
Our focus group, if you will, some college students coming by who had done a little documentary and worked with me.
00:56:50
Speaker
Bring your friends in.
00:56:51
Speaker
I want to just take the scores down.
00:56:53
Speaker
It doesn't really matter, but I just need to collate scores.
00:56:57
Speaker
And I could have just made up scores, but I wanted to do it based on reality, if you will.
00:57:02
Speaker
And to try to come up with something that I thought, all right, if it's a three-game series, how would this work?
00:57:08
Speaker
Again, bowling, it's a three-game series.
00:57:10
Speaker
Do I get an extra point over here?
00:57:12
Speaker
How do I do this?
00:57:13
Speaker
And working things out.
00:57:15
Speaker
And the first test, the first trial test,
00:57:18
Speaker
was through a very dear friend in Pinebrook, New Jersey, Ron Colucci, who had Game Town.
00:57:25
Speaker
It was a converted church and just wanted to expose his players and said, will they come on a Sunday morning?
00:57:32
Speaker
We'll provide donuts and bagels and things.
00:57:35
Speaker
Will they do it?
00:57:36
Speaker
And at that point in time, I was already living in Connecticut and Westport.
00:57:43
Speaker
I would travel down
00:57:46
Speaker
to this place in New Jersey and Steve would drive up from his house in New Jersey and we would be there.
00:57:52
Speaker
And I would, of course, get all of the scores and post things and come up with a schedule.
00:57:58
Speaker
I mean, it was all this stuff to see if it would work.
00:58:02
Speaker
And then Steve started the first leagues in the Broadway arcade in New York city.
00:58:08
Speaker
The idea was fundamentally, if we could start leagues,
00:58:14
Speaker
And the leagues could then go into a local competition.
00:58:21
Speaker
And that local competition could go into a regional competition, go into a state competition, could go into a national competition to try to do something where the leagues were the essence, the underbelly, the foundation that would provide location owners and operators with steady clientele the same way that
00:58:44
Speaker
Bowling owners of bowling alleys, bowling centers had everything secured, typically throughout the fall and winter, with people buying time to reserve X number of leagues for their engineering group or their company outings or whatever it might be for 20 weeks, 30 weeks.
00:59:03
Speaker
That was what I thought could be possible.
00:59:07
Speaker
And Papa was started.
00:59:09
Speaker
And we took those first leagues...
00:59:13
Speaker
for the first Papa Championships that were staged in New York City to crown the first Papa Champion.
00:59:19
Speaker
And it kind of grew from there.
00:59:22
Speaker
And lo and behold, Papa was formed.
00:59:25
Speaker
I think we did three or four before Steve was approached by someone in Las Vegas who promised all this great, wonderful stuff.
00:59:35
Speaker
And we did the Papa Tournament in Las Vegas that wasn't as successful as we thought it would be.
00:59:43
Speaker
At the same point in time, I got very much involved because I was at Williams, Bally, with the Amusement Game Association, the AMOA, who wanted to start up, guess what, pinball tournaments and leagues the same way that they had done it with darts and with pool.
01:00:05
Speaker
And they wanted to create their own association of sorts.
01:00:09
Speaker
And I thought, well, Papa already exists.
01:00:12
Speaker
No, no, no, no.
01:00:12
Speaker
Papa's already out there.
01:00:14
Speaker
We want our own.
01:00:16
Speaker
And it was going to be the IPA, like the NDA, National Dart Association.
01:00:22
Speaker
And I remember we had a meeting at their corporate offices in Chicago.
01:00:26
Speaker
And it was going to be international bimbo.
01:00:32
Speaker
And I said, nope, can't be.
01:00:33
Speaker
What?
01:00:35
Speaker
Because in some parts of the world, the games are known as flipper games.
01:00:41
Speaker
It needs to be the IFPA, the International Flipper Pinball Association.
01:00:47
Speaker
Okay.
01:00:49
Speaker
And the International Flipper Pinball Association really was geared to help many of the distributors and their clientele with a way to secure locations.
01:01:02
Speaker
Get a contract.
01:01:03
Speaker
You have a contract for them to do pool.
01:01:06
Speaker
At that bar, you need a contract for them to have pinball so that you can secure your business locations as operators and distributors.
01:01:14
Speaker
And the first tournament was held in Chicago at the Hilton at the O'Hare Airport.
Competitive Pinball Evolution
01:01:26
Speaker
I tried, implored the people, because again, this is part of the Amusement Game Association,
01:01:34
Speaker
I implored them not to have the games be with extra balls.
01:01:40
Speaker
Oh, no, no, no, no.
01:01:42
Speaker
It's fine.
01:01:42
Speaker
It's fine.
01:01:42
Speaker
It's fine.
01:01:45
Speaker
It was torturous.
01:01:47
Speaker
Early on during these sessions with players coming from Wisconsin, players coming from Minnesota and Michigan, because that's where much of
01:02:00
Speaker
Everything was based for the association as well as the manufacturers being there because we had, as Pinball Expo had designed it, we had our own manufacturers division because we weren't allowed to play in the regular open competitions at Pinball Expo.
01:02:17
Speaker
We could only play in ours because everybody thought we had an unfair advantage because we were working for the manufacturers, which obviously has now dissipated if you look at
01:02:29
Speaker
the past years of the combination of whoever is working as a designer or working wherever, playing with all of the regular people.
01:02:37
Speaker
But back then we weren't allowed to play with regular people.
01:02:41
Speaker
And early on during the sessions, I remember one of the distributors turning to me saying, this is taking forever.
01:02:51
Speaker
And I said, yeah.
01:02:52
Speaker
He said, well, with darts, the better you are, the quicker it is.
01:02:55
Speaker
I said, yes.
01:02:56
Speaker
Guess what?
01:02:57
Speaker
In pinball, the better you are, the longer it takes.
01:03:01
Speaker
And the first tournament took forever.
01:03:05
Speaker
I will tell you right now that I went through three doubles partners in the doubles team competition for the manufacturers because people had to go home.
01:03:17
Speaker
Had to go home to their families.
01:03:19
Speaker
Tom Cahill left and suddenly it was Ed Boone
01:03:22
Speaker
person behind and responsible for Mortal Kombat.
01:03:26
Speaker
Suddenly it was another partner that I had.
01:03:28
Speaker
I think it was actually Brian Eddy who played with me.
01:03:30
Speaker
And Brian is now back with Stranger Things and Stern competing against the other manufacturers.
01:03:37
Speaker
We were representing Williams Bally and it was like, okay, fine.
01:03:41
Speaker
And I still remember the singles competition came down to John Norris representing Premier.
01:03:50
Speaker
And it was either Larry DeMar or myself for Williams Valley.
01:03:55
Speaker
And Larry just said, I can't play anymore.
01:03:57
Speaker
I'm exhausted.
01:03:58
Speaker
Will you play against John?
01:04:00
Speaker
And I think one of the games was hoops.
01:04:03
Speaker
Uh, the game was checkpoint.
01:04:05
Speaker
I don't remember what the game might've been for, uh, for Williams and Valley, but I took on John and, uh, somehow we slogged through a best of five and, uh,
01:04:17
Speaker
It went down to the last game and John eked out a win.
01:04:20
Speaker
He may remember it differently.
01:04:22
Speaker
He may think that he just totally railed all over me and just destroyed me, but I don't think it was that.
01:04:27
Speaker
I think that at some point in time, probably both of us just said, do you want to win?
01:04:33
Speaker
I'll let you just win.
01:04:34
Speaker
Can we just end this?
01:04:36
Speaker
We've been here since eight o'clock in the morning and it's now midnight.
01:04:39
Speaker
Really?
01:04:40
Speaker
For what?
01:04:42
Speaker
So we got a little bit smarter for the second IFPA tournament that was held up near
01:04:47
Speaker
the airport in Mitchell Field airport outside of Milwaukee where there was no extra balls.
01:04:54
Speaker
But there were a couple of other IFPA tournaments before things kind of just petered out for whatever reason.
01:05:03
Speaker
And I'm sure if I really kind of go back through my memory banks, there are probably any number of reasons, the most of them being politically charged in regard to the industry and what have you.
01:05:16
Speaker
I know that
01:05:17
Speaker
We ran some IFPA tournaments at, uh, the trade shows at that point in time.
01:05:22
Speaker
Uh, there was the spring show, um, the, uh, AOE, uh, that was in new Orleans.
01:05:29
Speaker
And then ultimately, uh, in the Chicagoland area, there was still the fall show.
01:05:34
Speaker
So we did that.
01:05:35
Speaker
Papa was still going strong and then Papa stopped because Steve wound up losing the arcade in New York.
01:05:43
Speaker
Um, and, uh, ultimately he, uh,
01:05:46
Speaker
wound up selling the assets to Kevin Martin.
01:05:49
Speaker
And Papa continued.
01:05:52
Speaker
And Joshua and Zachary approached me, I think it's now 11 or 12 years ago, saying, can you get the rights to the IFPA?
01:06:03
Speaker
And I was like, huh?
01:06:04
Speaker
We want to start something.
01:06:08
Speaker
Really?
01:06:09
Speaker
And I wound up getting the rights and the IFPA was started.
01:06:12
Speaker
And admittedly, over the past decade plus,
01:06:15
Speaker
Much of what I had envisioned and dreamed of and hoped that would happen has far exceeded any of those dreams, hopes, and wishes.
01:06:24
Speaker
It's become a phenomenon, and I am pleased that, number one, I had a small part in it.
01:06:31
Speaker
Number two, that I'm still alive to witness it.
01:06:33
Speaker
Number three, to actually participate a little bit.
01:06:36
Speaker
So that is somewhat of the history of Papa and of the IFPA.
01:06:43
Speaker
I don't remember if that was the exact question that was asked, and probably I've spoken far too long, but hopefully that gives you a little bit of insight.
01:06:53
Speaker
You're totally fine, Roger.
01:06:54
Speaker
It just astounds me.
01:06:56
Speaker
I don't know.
01:06:56
Speaker
It's just awesome to hear this stuff.
01:06:59
Speaker
I have no complaints whatsoever.
01:07:01
Speaker
It is fantastic.
01:07:03
Speaker
The only follow-up question I had, I know that Steve Kirk has become quite the – his games have become quite desired here recently.
01:07:11
Speaker
I didn't know if you did anything with Steve Kirk because I know that people have talked that he was kind of one of the forefathers also of competitive pinball and saying that doing some of those bigger tournaments back then.
01:07:24
Speaker
I didn't know if you worked with him on those stuff and whatnot.
01:07:27
Speaker
All right.
01:07:28
Speaker
my first exposure to Steve Kirk, and there's stories about Steve, and we don't have to get into the dark side of Steve because he was an interesting fellow, to say the least.
01:07:40
Speaker
My first exposure to him was at the AMOA show.
01:07:45
Speaker
It had to be, probably it had to be like 75, because at that point in time, in the fall, I would have already had a book contract.
01:07:55
Speaker
I guess Steve was working on a book and I'm there with James Hamilton playing a game and he comes by with, I think it had to be Bobby Natkin, who I think he worked with on his book.
01:08:10
Speaker
And he said, hi, I'm Steve Kirk.
01:08:13
Speaker
We're going to play pinball and whoever wins, their book comes out first.
01:08:19
Speaker
Huh?
01:08:20
Speaker
Who are you?
01:08:20
Speaker
What?
01:08:23
Speaker
What are you talking about?
01:08:25
Speaker
I don't know who the hell you are.
01:08:27
Speaker
And it doesn't work that way.
01:08:29
Speaker
I'm more than willing to play pinball with you, but seriously.
01:08:34
Speaker
And I wound up getting some background on Steve.
01:08:39
Speaker
Steve had started at a younger age at Gottlieb, as a matter of fact, working with Wayne Nines and Ed Krinsky, doing some, I think, some mechanical and build-up work.
01:08:51
Speaker
And maybe there's better information about that.
01:08:55
Speaker
I do know at the time he was bothering literally everybody.
01:09:01
Speaker
He had opened up an arcade on the near north side in Chicago where he would make changes to the games that he wound up getting.
01:09:12
Speaker
He put in and he was notorious for putting in a center post and he'd make other adjustments to the games because he didn't think that anybody's games were as good as he could make them.
01:09:23
Speaker
And he was somewhat ostracized by everybody.
01:09:26
Speaker
Burned a lot of bridges.
01:09:27
Speaker
Nobody would want to work with him.
01:09:28
Speaker
And he made the rounds.
01:09:29
Speaker
I mean, literally, he was like everywhere.
01:09:34
Speaker
A very, very capable person.
01:09:39
Speaker
I will say that I wound up loaning him money and never got it.
01:09:43
Speaker
I wasn't the only one.
01:09:45
Speaker
He was just a very strange case.
01:09:48
Speaker
Anything that Steve said, and again, I don't want to do anything to impugn whatever his legacy might be or however anybody thinks of him.
01:10:00
Speaker
Eccentric comes to mind.
01:10:03
Speaker
I felt bad for him.
01:10:04
Speaker
I mean, that's the best way to describe it.
01:10:06
Speaker
I knew that there were some issues that he had personally and otherwise.
01:10:13
Speaker
And the skill level, Meteor, Nineball, Stars.
01:10:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, some remarkable work.
01:10:24
Speaker
I think his great weakness was he couldn't do tops to save his life.
01:10:30
Speaker
But the intricacies of what he did do, I give him all the credit in the world for that.
01:10:36
Speaker
And I think that the games from that era,
01:10:39
Speaker
really kind of stand up much more so now that both the IFPA and absolutely Kevin's collection allowed people to experience games from another era and not just new games.
01:10:56
Speaker
Let's face it, for Pinball Expo over the years, because every cycle we were there with either the brand new Bally game or the brand new Williams game, that was the game that you played for the tournament.
Competitions and Exposure
01:11:08
Speaker
There wasn't the lineup of games outside in the hallway or any of the other shows that were taking place at that point in time, because there weren't any early on, where you were playing any of the older games.
01:11:21
Speaker
And I think that, you know, my son, I think specifically Josh, always thought, wouldn't it be great if you could play games from different eras if he did a line?
01:11:30
Speaker
My lineup for Papa always was, you know,
01:11:34
Speaker
eight games or nine games, and you had to play them from right to left or from left to right, and they were set up in a certain way, and that was your run.
01:11:43
Speaker
And, you know, those things kind of changed, but everything was always based on new games.
01:11:48
Speaker
And I think the ability and the desire to have people be tested on games from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s,
01:12:01
Speaker
I think has given people number one exposure to these lost treasures.
01:12:08
Speaker
See, which comes to mind a marvelous game, the Joe juice I wanted designing.
01:12:13
Speaker
And then Joe Kamen cow brought it back with the Beatles, Steve Kirk's games, some of my games even that people have discovered.
01:12:24
Speaker
So I think the eccentricity of Steve is,
01:12:30
Speaker
probably stands out more in terms of how I remember him and the fact that I think that his games were uniquely different enough compared to the Greg Kamiks, Jim Patla, Dennis Nordman, Steve Ritchie, Mark, and all the other designers of that bygone era with many of them still around.
01:12:53
Speaker
So in some ways, I think,
01:12:56
Speaker
He was a tragic hero of pinball.
01:13:00
Speaker
So I want to take you into the 90s, the time at Williams.
01:13:07
Speaker
You saw this giant upsurge of popularity.
01:13:12
Speaker
And sadly, we all know how the era ended in the 90s.
01:13:18
Speaker
So take us through your emotional highs and lows of that time and what you remember most about it.
Revitalizing Pinball's Image
01:13:28
Speaker
I'll back up one moment to try to keep things in what I think of as being a perspective.
01:13:36
Speaker
There was a golden era around the time of my pinball book.
01:13:42
Speaker
Not so coincidentally, also the movie Tommy, the changeover from electromechanics to solid state.
01:13:50
Speaker
But all the publicity that I wound up doing that brought pinball to life with my book, and there were a couple of other books that wound up coming out as well, but none of them, in all honesty, had the same level of success that my pinball book did.
01:14:07
Speaker
And being on the Today Show, being on Good Morning America, being on other podcasts,
01:14:13
Speaker
programs, the book being touted by Gene Shallot on a Today Show as being one of the books to buy for Christmas time, this oversized cocktail table book.
01:14:26
Speaker
So all of that was great and wonderful.
01:14:30
Speaker
And then a couple of years go by, pinball fades into the background because there's something called video games that take over and pinball's gone.
01:14:40
Speaker
not to be really heard of and forgotten.
01:14:42
Speaker
That's old.
01:14:45
Speaker
Video games are new, and video games are evolving.
01:14:47
Speaker
I mean, thanks to the likes of somebody like Eugene Jarvis, who proved that there could be a world beyond the screen that you saw with a game like Defender, that you could have controls with dual joysticks on Robotron.
01:15:01
Speaker
I mean...
01:15:02
Speaker
The discussions of raster versus vector graphics kind of went out the window as Atari took hold and Williams took hold and the Japanese influence of companies like Nintendo, Nikobuchi, Taito, and others coming on board.
01:15:18
Speaker
Home systems emerging.
01:15:22
Speaker
Timbal was kind of like an afterthought.
01:15:25
Speaker
And I'd like to think that in some way, maybe there was some influencing that I had because suddenly that silence was broken through in 1988 when I started.
01:15:38
Speaker
I really believed that there needed to be more outreach.
01:15:41
Speaker
And maybe because of all of my work in publishing in both books and magazines and newspapers, I felt very strongly about wanting to do something that would propel pinball back into the limelight.
01:15:55
Speaker
And I started a PR campaign to try to publicize pinball.
01:16:00
Speaker
And not just Williams Valley, but just pinball in general.
01:16:02
Speaker
But of course, yes, a focus on Williams and Valley.
01:16:07
Speaker
And started in March of 1988, started sending out press releases,
01:16:17
Speaker
It wasn't until, and I know the first one, it wasn't until I think February of 1989 that the Milwaukee Journal printed something about pinball.
01:16:28
Speaker
Nice big colors, pictures, and story about pinball being back and buying everything that I was selling, if you will.
01:16:38
Speaker
New York Times, suddenly there was something in Time Magazine.
01:16:40
Speaker
There was something in Newsweek.
01:16:42
Speaker
There was something happening on air.
01:16:45
Speaker
not only in local news, but also national media.
01:16:50
Speaker
Thank God, at the same time, we started, because I really believed in wanting to do brand licensing, we started with Elvira as the first license theme that I worked on.
01:17:03
Speaker
And suddenly, pinball kind of became something cool again.
01:17:07
Speaker
It had a personality.
01:17:08
Speaker
There was, you know, I used to use the old term that it's not your father's Oldsmobile, it's not your father's pinball machine.
01:17:15
Speaker
There's something uniquely different about it.
01:17:18
Speaker
It embraces all the new technologies.
01:17:20
Speaker
It is influencing video games.
01:17:22
Speaker
Video games are influencing pinball.
01:17:24
Speaker
Isn't this wonderful and marvelous?
01:17:26
Speaker
And just to have the incredibly talented and gifted group of designers across the board at Premiere, at Stern, Data East, Sega, whatever its incarnation was at the time, Williams and Bally,
01:17:42
Speaker
There were spectacular games coming out.
01:17:44
Speaker
So all that I was doing was basically elevating the whole exposure and awareness of pinball along with, guess what?
01:17:55
Speaker
A pop-a tournament and having Lyman Sheets playing in the middle of Times Square, freezing his ass off, excuse the term, on the morning news show because he had just been crowned the pinball champion of the world.
01:18:10
Speaker
You know, having the backdrop on MTV, having some games in their studio set up.
01:18:16
Speaker
You know, making pinball everywhere so that everywhere you turn, it had to have a pinball machine in some way, shape or form.
01:18:27
Speaker
So I think that, you know, being a part of that and not, look, by no stretch of the imagination, am I wanting to suggest that I take all the credit for it.
01:18:37
Speaker
But I'd like to think that there has been some influencing, because if I look historically at where pinball's peak has been in regard to the worldview of it,
01:18:50
Speaker
Kind of been around it a little bit.
01:18:52
Speaker
But again, with an incredible supporting cast, I could not have done it without all of the help, skill of all of the folks that I was basically promoting.
01:19:07
Speaker
All of the people that I wanted to put in the spotlight.
01:19:10
Speaker
Well, truthfully, I was more than willing to stay in the background.
01:19:15
Speaker
You know, I don't know if everybody ever knows or appreciates the fact that every licensed game from 1988 until past 2000 for both pinball machines, video games, as well as even novelty redemption products that Williams Ballet did, all those games were games that I worked on.
01:19:35
Speaker
All those licenses were licenses that I wound up securing.
01:19:39
Speaker
And I think that, you know, again, I take my hat off to all of the designers and programmers and graphic artists and everybody else who brought all of those particular games to life.
01:19:53
Speaker
So I don't know if that's an answer to the question, but the change that I saw was a remarkable upswing from Cyclone, which won best pinball of the year, three years running,
01:20:07
Speaker
To games like Adam's Family and Twilight Zone and high-speed follow-ups from Steve and all that he did and Mark Ritchie with Indiana Jones and got, you know, the list goes on and
Creative Peak at Bally Williams
01:20:22
Speaker
on.
01:20:22
Speaker
But the first one, the one that knocked it out of the park was Elvira.
01:20:27
Speaker
What was it like working for Bally Williams?
01:20:29
Speaker
I know that they're highly regarded for their games now.
01:20:33
Speaker
But a lot of the documentaries I've seen are special when lit.
01:20:38
Speaker
It's kind of the end of the tale.
01:20:40
Speaker
And I don't think we hear much of the middle of it.
01:20:43
Speaker
And so can you walk us through the day and what it was like being there?
01:20:49
Speaker
It was magical.
01:20:50
Speaker
I mean, for me especially.
01:20:52
Speaker
You know, I had obviously an affinity for the industry.
01:20:59
Speaker
It was something of a dream job, a great career path.
01:21:03
Speaker
It wasn't something that I ever thought would have happened.
01:21:06
Speaker
And the best of both worlds was it allowed me to come back home to Chicago and have my boys be raised in the Midwest, which was important to me.
01:21:15
Speaker
But it was...
01:21:19
Speaker
It was this creative, energetic think tank of these amazing individuals who were kind of set free to work on their projects and see all of their dreams come to fruition.
01:21:39
Speaker
that was a part that was remarkable.
01:21:40
Speaker
It wasn't as if there were any barriers.
01:21:42
Speaker
Yes, definitely there were bill of materials and yes, there were features and functionality of games and other things that needed to be taken out because it exceeded whatever the cost of goods was and you couldn't do it that way.
01:21:56
Speaker
But if you look at the talent,
01:22:00
Speaker
from Python Angelo and Greg Ferris on through to all the other artists and the programmers, you know, the Dwight Sullomans of the world coming into their own and others that I'm forgetting and my apologies in advance to the designers.
01:22:18
Speaker
I mean, this was the gold standard.
01:22:20
Speaker
You know, people used to ask, who's your biggest competitor?
01:22:26
Speaker
You know, is it, again, is it Stern or Data East or Sega, whichever they were at the time?
01:22:32
Speaker
Is it Premiere?
01:22:33
Speaker
And it was like, no, it's our own older games.
01:22:35
Speaker
We have to raise the bar.
01:22:38
Speaker
Everybody wanted to raise the bar.
01:22:41
Speaker
Everybody had, God, this level of inventiveness, this dynamic quality of being able to express themselves.
01:22:52
Speaker
And it was exciting.
01:22:53
Speaker
I mean, going into work every day.
01:22:56
Speaker
All right.
01:22:57
Speaker
I will say something because I think maybe it defines it to the best.
01:23:03
Speaker
I would come into work and I would leave.
01:23:06
Speaker
I don't know.
01:23:07
Speaker
Pat Lawler would call me up to his office to play a Whitewood, see what I think.
01:23:11
Speaker
Or Steve or Dennis or Mark or anybody else would say, here, Roger, see what you think.
01:23:18
Speaker
Steve Kordak would be there.
01:23:21
Speaker
And maybe I'd come home at around, you know, 7.30, 8.00.
01:23:25
Speaker
And the boys would be getting ready to go to bed.
01:23:28
Speaker
And I'd have my dinner.
01:23:29
Speaker
And there was one time where I came home and I was like, so I'm like a good dad, aren't I?
01:23:36
Speaker
I mean, guys,
01:23:39
Speaker
And whether it was Josh or Zach, I was like, yeah, I mean, you come home.
01:23:44
Speaker
We've had dinner and you say goodnight to us.
01:23:46
Speaker
And, you know, that's good.
01:23:47
Speaker
We have you on the weekends.
01:23:48
Speaker
And it was like a dagger going into my heart.
Balancing Passion and Family
01:23:53
Speaker
And I just remember fundamentally saying, guys, I am leaving here at six.
01:23:57
Speaker
If you want to see me, have me come up late in the afternoon.
01:24:02
Speaker
But I need to get home.
01:24:03
Speaker
I want to have dinner with my sons.
01:24:06
Speaker
A pinball taken over my world.
01:24:08
Speaker
When I would come out and visit, and this is prior to starting at Williams full-time, and I'd make my visit and I'd be at the Bally Factory or the Williams Factory or Gottlieb, and it would be, you know, hanging out with the designers and all the creative people.
01:24:22
Speaker
It's like, all right, so where are we going to go?
01:24:25
Speaker
Huh?
01:24:26
Speaker
Are we going to go to Mother's?
01:24:28
Speaker
Are we going to Galaxy?
01:24:29
Speaker
Where are we going?
01:24:29
Speaker
Where are we going to go to play pinball?
01:24:31
Speaker
Roger, we've been playing pinball.
01:24:33
Speaker
I understand we've been playing all day.
01:24:34
Speaker
Where are we going to go?
01:24:34
Speaker
Where are we going to go?
01:24:37
Speaker
And I used to drag people out to play.
01:24:39
Speaker
I still remember, God, the old Bally plant.
01:24:44
Speaker
Bill O'Donnell was the president of the company.
01:24:47
Speaker
And I'd be out visiting.
01:24:49
Speaker
And they had a game room right by the front door.
01:24:52
Speaker
And everybody would be gone and Bill would be leaving.
01:24:54
Speaker
This is before I was married or anything else.
01:24:57
Speaker
I'd be out in Chicago visiting.
01:24:59
Speaker
And Bill would come by and I'd be like the last one.
01:25:03
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:04
Speaker
in the factory.
01:25:06
Speaker
And I'm playing pinball.
01:25:07
Speaker
I'm playing games that have yet to see the light of day.
01:25:10
Speaker
And Bill would turn and he'd say, oh, it's only you, Roger?
01:25:13
Speaker
All right, you know how to leave.
01:25:14
Speaker
Just make sure you turn off the lights and just close the door.
01:25:17
Speaker
Okay, fine.
01:25:17
Speaker
Thank you.
01:25:19
Speaker
I mean, it was mesmerizing.
01:25:21
Speaker
And I used to feel that way when I'd come in and visit.
01:25:25
Speaker
It'd be like, all right, where are we going now?
01:25:26
Speaker
What are we doing?
01:25:27
Speaker
Come on, let's go, let's go, let's go.
01:25:29
Speaker
And I'd drag people out to go play games.
01:25:31
Speaker
Let's watch people play.
01:25:33
Speaker
Let's see what's happening out there.
01:25:35
Speaker
And I think that that was that level of energy, that enthusiasm, that intensity that carried over with everybody.
01:25:42
Speaker
Look, I started the first Papa League in Chicago at a place called Diversions, which is one of our test locations.
01:25:50
Speaker
I had Brian Eddy, Ed Boone, Larry DeMar, and others, and Jason Werdrick, and a friend of his who were very young back then, who were regulars playing video games or whatever.
01:26:00
Speaker
I dragged them in and
01:26:02
Speaker
Jason, I think, as everybody kind of knows, is a fairly accomplished player.
01:26:06
Speaker
But he started in my little embryonic first attempt at doing a league here and doing other events like that and starting with pin golf and some of the other things at places like Galaxy Games and Gala North and Just for Fun to try to get things kind of going, getting some momentum.
01:26:28
Speaker
And I think that everybody fed off of each other.
01:26:32
Speaker
Yes, there was a competitiveness, but I think that the competitiveness was somewhat of a friendly rivalry.
01:26:40
Speaker
And I think that just going in, you felt elevated, at least I did.
01:26:47
Speaker
And I think that those middle years were some of the best years ever.
01:26:50
Speaker
And I think if you take a look
01:26:52
Speaker
at the games that came out back then, there were not many missteps.
01:26:58
Speaker
I think that every game truly was magical and unique, and it allowed people to really express themselves.
01:27:08
Speaker
You know, whether it was like a George Gomez working on something or a John Papaduke or a John Trudeau.
01:27:13
Speaker
I mean, the list goes on and on of the people who were assembled under that roof.
01:27:18
Speaker
And at the same time, understand something.
01:27:21
Speaker
At the same time, brilliance was happening in video games.
01:27:26
Speaker
We did have, you know, Eugene Jarvis and Mark Trammell and George Petro and Jack Hager.
01:27:32
Speaker
I mean, we had NFL Blitz, NBA Jam.
01:27:37
Speaker
I mean, my God, Total Carnage, Mortal Kombat.
01:27:41
Speaker
I mean, Cruisin'.
01:27:43
Speaker
The list goes on and on where fundamentally, we at Williams-Balley Midway
01:27:50
Speaker
We're turning an entire industry on its head.
01:27:53
Speaker
And to be part of that, and even in some small way, it was just magical.
01:27:59
Speaker
And, you know, I have seen some of the documentaries and some of the other things that have taken place.
01:28:06
Speaker
And you wind up stepping back because at the time, at least for me, I don't think that you imagine what you are a part of.
01:28:15
Speaker
You just kind of take it for granted.
01:28:18
Speaker
And looking back now, I think of it and realize just how fortunate I was, how blessed I was to be around all of it.
01:28:30
Speaker
And unfortunately, to also be around all of the stages and steps that brought it all to its end.
01:28:39
Speaker
Tragically, unfortunately, and I will say unnecessarily.
01:28:43
Speaker
All right, we're going to pause the interview right here.
01:28:46
Speaker
This is part one of the two-part interview we did with Roger Sharp.
01:28:50
Speaker
We thank you for tuning in today.
01:28:51
Speaker
Once again, if you want to get a hold of us, we are LoserKidPinballPodcast at gmail.com or connect with us through Facebook at LoserKidPinballPodcast.
01:29:00
Speaker
Also, we're on Instagram.
01:29:02
Speaker
If you're enjoying the interview, please let us know.
01:29:04
Speaker
Part two will be next week.
01:29:05
Speaker
Hope to see you then.