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| PINBALL EXPO 2009: FIRESIDE CHATS |
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Date: October 14th - 18th, 2009 We come now to the longer talks given by luminaries of the pinball world in a more casual, intimate setting - the fireside chats. Once held in Rob Berk's penthouse suite, these now take place in the regular seminar room, but the podium and stage are eschewed for the armchair and the side table. The first of our fireside chats features Larry DeMar.
Famed for his ground-breaking work in the video, pinball and slot machine businesses, Larry has done it all; programmer, designer, head of Engineering at Williams and now creating new ideas for gaming machines with his own company. Larry began by addressing an issue which came up in an earlier seminar about the dangers of allowing deep access to the operating system of a pinball. Allowing anyone to get at the lowest level of programming could result in loops which lock on coils and cause them to catch fire. Next, Larry talked about his first days at Williams under the stewardship of Eugene Jarvis and Steve Ritchie, which he said tells you everything you need to know. He attributed his success in the business to their tutorage. He went on to praise all those in the hobby with the passion to keep pinball alive through new developments and their not-for-profit ventures, both online and in the physical world.
The first question asked about the size and nature of the pinball development teams at Willaims when the pinball division closed. Larry replied by saying there were four teams led by George Gomez, Pat Lawlor, John Popadiuk and Dwight Sullivan & Pete Petrowski. Talking about the Pinball 2000 project, Larry said he experienced something with Pinball 2000 he has only felt three times in his career – first with Defender, then Pinball 2000 and more recently with a new gaming project he is developing for IGT. He said everyone involved in the project – all forty people - knew the size of the task facing them – designing an entirely new pinball system from scratch. Many had their own reasons for wanting it to succeed but everyone bought into it and that removed so many of the obstacles and boundaries which could have slowed them down. Before Pinball 2000, Larry said there were as many as eight design teams and although none of them ever did anything to harm the success of another team’s project, there was fierce competition between the teams to produce the best (and best-selling) game.
The next questioner asked if Larry thought there was any chance Williams would produce a pinball-related product in the near future, maybe to commemorate the ten years since the division was closed. Larry’s reply was that he thought there was no chance of this happening. Nearly all the WMS directors at that time had left the company and the executives in charge now had no interest or history in pinball. Larry described his job at Williams after he was made Director of Engineering In 1995 and talked about the layoffs which happened the following year, taking the headcount from around 100 down to just 40. This was also the time when the gaming division was starting to grow, but Larry said he thought the management at Williams thought they had the wrong people in the wrong areas – the talented, experienced game designers were working on pinball which was in serious decline, while the less experienced teams were working on the slot which as the growth area. So Larry was put in charge of about half the slot machine teams as well as the pinball teams. This got him involved in the gaming industry and finding out what ideas worked, which didn’t and what made people buy and play the machines. The working environment at Williams was the subject of the next question which led to Larry describing the building at N. California Ave as ‘a dump’. He spoke about the state of disrepair and the various animals which inhabited it. But he said Ken Fedesna and Mike Stroll knew the way to make the company grow was to employ talented people and let them get on with creating the products in their own way. He said as long as people got the work done, nobody kept too many checks on the hours they worked. Next, Larry was asked about his take on the way the intellectual property from the Williams pinball division was split up between Gene Cunningham and Wayne Gillard and the issues that ensued. Larry cited the problems Don and Chuck had in developing Nucore and how difficult it was to negotiate the legal issues involved. He said he thought the reason things had turned out as they have is greed – attempting to get too much money from assets which are becoming less and less valuable over time. Larry thought there was a realistic offer from Nova Games in Germany to buy the pinball division when Williams wanted rid of it, but Hans who was in charge at Nova didn’t believe Williams were seriously thinking of closing and so didn’t pursue the deal any further. How did pinball get to the state it’s in currently? That was the next question and Larry agreed with one of the audience that it was essential down to the poor return on investment operators got from operating pinballs. He said everyone at Williams had their own theories and solutions to that problem, but he agreed with Gary Stern how had spoken earlier in the day about how the ball became too controllable and not random enough, leading to extended game time, reduced income and too steep a learning curve for new or casual players. Steve Kordek then spoke about pinball’s decline. He said there were 15,000 bars in Chicago alone and each one used to have a pinball and a jukebox. Then, they started putting TV in bars and customers watched that instead of playing pinball or the jukebox. Operators wouldn’t buy games they couldn’t put on location and they had a glut of games coming back from bars. That was the start of the decline, Steve said, and it just went downhill from there.
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This was due to legislation passed in 1976 which prevented the importation of electronic goods into Brazil. The only way Taito could continue selling new pinball machines was to make them themselves from scratch. After importing some games and discovering how they technically worked Taito opened up their own factory in 1977. In this factory they build Brazilian versions of Stern, Bally, Williams and Gotttlieb games - all based on the same boardset. Occasionally names were changed, as well as the artwork and the layout. Many Brazilian games have their own rules which differ from the original American game. 1980–1984 are referred to as the Golden pinball years. In 1985 Taito shut down. Not because they needed to, but they found the money they were earning from pinball was no longer attractive enough. At that time it was impossible for collectors to buy machines new, as they were more expensive than an average car. That meant people had to play on location. Despite being expensive, a pinball machine would earn plenty of money on location, with some machines recovering their initial outlay within just 40 days. Taito was Brazil's biggest manufacturer. Exact numbers are unknown, but it is known that Cosmic - the Brazilian version of Stern's Galaxy - sold over 28000 units. However all documentation was lost when Taito shut down. In 1990, the 14-year-old law banning imports was overturned and American pinball machines were allowed to be brought into the country again. In 1999 a special pinball club was opened in Sao Paolo. Collectors could store their games here as they usually have small houses where pinball machines are not commonly found.
Five years later in 2004, a second pinball club was formed in Rio De Janeiro and in 2005 the first Brazilian tournament was held. Since then, another pinball club has opened just outside Sao Paolo and two more will open soon. Each club has over 100 games inside. The goal is not only to collect but also to save the machines. Due lack of space in people's homes, many games have been destroyed in the past. Similarly, when Taito closed, all remaining stock that couldn’t be sold - including approximately 1500 machines, many of them brand new - was burned at a farm outside Sao Paolo. Cid and Iure explained how they are used to playing 5 balls per game in Brazil. When Cavallo Negro (Black Knight) came out with different artwork and new rules, they tried a 3 ball setting but it was rejected by the players. Taito almost closed their operation at that point, until they got their games playing properly with 5 balls. After playing some voice samples from Cavallo Negro which spoke Portuguese but with an American accent, they showed some pictures comparing the Brazilian machines with their US originals, inviting the audience to name to original and win a T-shirt. Although Taito were the biggest Brazilian manufacturer, they weren't the only one making pinballs. Companies such as Rowamet, Diverama, J Steban and LTD were all active in the '80s and also took several US designs in order to copy them. LTD in particular were very active, producing 24 different models over a period of just 18 months.
Cid explained how the pinball hobby has become very popular in Brazil and prices have risen dramatically as a result. Parts are also expensive with import fees for parts bought outside Brazil adding between 60-120% to the price. Stern's machines cost over $11,000 to buy new in Brazil. Another effect of the number of collectors is a shortage of restorers and repairers. The two main restorers in Brazil have lead times of over a year and now people are coming into the hobby purely to make money. To end their presentation, Cid and Iure showed a video tour of their San Paulo pinball club and then brought all the Brazilian visitor to the front for a group picture.
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There was a range of prizes on offer to those who provided the first correct answers. Some of the questions stretched the knowledge of the audience to the limit and required precise descriptions of what was happening in the game to win.
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The opportunity to buy a new-in-box Time Warp for $700 presented itself which gave them a complete set of parts. The name was created by combining the most common themes from successful pinball machines - cards, poker, space, etc. The name of the manufacturer was Willy Goërn Inc! - made up from the names of various pinball companies - Williams, Bally, Gottlieb Stern and Game Plan Inc. To make his playfield, Duncan got some regular plywood from the Home Depot over the road from the arcade and got to work incorporating the lamps inserts, the switches and the game's biggest feature - a 5x5 array of drop targets.
He made the surround out of a coin box lid as he said nobody ever used those to cover the coin box and so they were an easy source of sheet metal. He used another beneath the drop targets to mount new switches to register the targets.
Duncan's original design had a string of lamp inserts running up the centre of the game. Duncan said he was glad he didn't put them in because, knowing what he knows now, the first time the playfield was lifted and put on the support arm it would have snapped in half.
The design included an under-playfield tunnel - an innovative feature at the time - which ejected the ball through a baseball game-type flap on the playfield, twin vari-targets on the left side and a lane which required the player to lift the upper-right flipper to allow the ball to pass through - rather like the Spider Sense lane in Spider-Man. In order to program the game to incorporate his ruleset, Duncan reverse-engineered the Time Warp ROM and worked out what each instruction was doing. He didn't have a computer of his own at this time, so he used a circuit and some LEDs to read the contents of every address and wrote everything down on paper. Duncan brought the game to the show and put it on the floor for people to play. He had to partially rebuild it as it had been stripped for parts over the years but was almost back to its original state in time for the show. Asked what he thought of the game now, with his years of experience working at Williams, Duncan proudly said it was probably the worst pinball ever designed, inviting the audience to go onto the floor and discover that for themselves. You can now listen to this seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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The games operated in the area that time were mainly Bally and Stern early solid-state machines and they largely remained even as more advanced games from companies like Williams became very popular elsewhere. So Derek became very familiar with those types of games. Derek's first game was a Christmas gift from his parents - a Mylstar Alien Star - which he received in 1988 and still has in his game room. He noted how the flyer showed a skinny coin door whereas his has a full sized one. Another game Derek owns is Eldorado - City Of Gold. In fact he owns two of them; one branded with the Mylstar name and one with the Permier name. The company made 160 Mylstar machines and 735 Premier ones.
Derek's third game is a Mylstar Ready... Aim... Fire and like all three machines in the picture above, it is sample game. When Derek got it, it came with a test earnings report and a letter from Gottlieb to test operators asking them to provide earnings data for the first two months of operation. Derek said his favourite Gottlieb designer was John Osborne, not only for his well known Haunted House design but also for his innovative features in earlier EM machines such as the first lane change. The changeover from electro-mechanical to solid state relegated a number of EM designs to near-obscurity. Derek investigated a number of these forgotten machines, describing the differences between them and their solid-state counterparts and any cool features which captured his interest. He explained how several machines were created in order to use up excess inventory at the factory. You can now listen to this seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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Mark began by describing how to prepare a coin door for re-spraying, how to apply a base coat of paint and which paint they suggest.
Don then picked up and talked about the various fuses used in pinball games and suitable ratings of thermal circuit breakers which can be used in place of the fuses when fault finding. He described how to solder connecting leads onto the breakers so they can easily connect to a fuse holder. Mark then spoke about making ramp flaps, starting with ways to remove old flaps which have been riveted to a ramp. By using the old flap as a template, Mark showed how to cut a new flap using shears before filing or sanding the edges. To drill the mounting holes, Mark advised using a punch to make a drill point and using cobalt drills to break through the hard surface of the spring steel.
After showing how to rivet the flap back onto the ramp (using a washer if the ramp is plastic) Mark and Don moved on to the prize quiz part of their seminar. Each member of the audience was given a ticket and a random draw selected audience members who could choose either a pinball "guess the game" picture question, or a rock and roll question. Winners got their choice of pinball items from the prize table while losers got candy bars. These were interspersed with "stump the tech" questions where the resident technician would try to diagnose game faults with only three questions. You can now listen to this seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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Scott spoke about the problems importing containers of machines due to the inspections undertaken by customs officials, the damage they can cause and the charges they impose. Scott then showed a series of pictures taken in his business, describing the different rows of games, the assorted memorabilia and the stories behind a few of them.
At the time of his seminar, Scott said 'business really sucks' and unless the situation picks up in time for the holiday season he wasn't sure his business would survive, citing the difference in sales between his expected sales for this time of year and recent business levels. 'Never throw anything away' was Scott's motto, and to illustrate this he brought along a bottle of used lamps he had saved.
He invited the audience to guess the number of lamps and whoever got closest to the correct answer would receive a choice of backglasses. The result would be announced at the banquet on Saturday night. Ron then took over to give a brief talk on the different types of multimeters and how to use them in pinball repair.
Scott closed the seminar by advising everyone to take advantage of the many famous pinball personalities at the show and to get their pinball memorabilia autographed for posterity. You can now listen to this seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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Bruce explained how LEDs only produce light in a certain part of the spectrum as opposed to incandescent lamps which produce a broad range of wavelengths, making them ideal for use under coloured inserts, under pop bumper caps and behind translites to produce much more vibrant colours than filament lamps produce. He then went on to speak about the potential for customising the look of a game to your personal preference using coloured LEDs. As the man behind BC's Pinball Amusements, Bruce described the different types of LEDs, the various ways they emit light and the 14 colours his company sells, including the types of warm white colour used to match the light produced by incandescent lamps. He said one of his 2 Watt LEDs produces approximately 90% of the light output of a 44 lamp.
Every manufacturer's machines work differently, said Bruce, so you can't use off-the-shelf LEDs and expect them to work. All the tooling for LED manufacture is in China, he said, and he has investigated 15 different manufacturers of which he is currently working with two of them to develop his products. His aim, he said, is to emulate the way incandescent lamps work and some of his products are very close through the use of built-in bridge rectifiers and capacitors, but it isn't economical to make them work in exactly the same way. The price of LEDs has fallen steadily over the years. Bruce said his first LEDs cost $6-$7 each when he began working on them. At the show he was selling his cheapest LEDs at 50c each but the cost for a whole machine was still prohibitive for Stern Pinball to consider using them instead of incandescent lamps in their new machines. You can now listen to this seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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Rob began by summarising what makes a great pinball game - the objectives, the storyline, the social side and the desire to play the game again and again - before recounting his first experiences of mechanical and computer-based pinball. He cited Pinball Dreams on the Commodore Amiga as a breakthrough game which offered many of the features of real games and in the case of one of the tables, was actually based on the Terminator 2 layout. Microsoft Pinball Arcade continued the development and was once again based on real (Gottlieb) games. Visual Pinball (and VPinMAME) took things to the next level, allowing the creation and editing of new games alongside the recreation of existing designs on a home computer. Future Pinball now takes that one stage further with a true 3D environment. When Rob tried Future Pinball, he was so impressed by the Three Angels game he wanted to take the concept further and build it into a real pinball cabinet. He took a water-damaged Dirty Harry base, cut it down so it fitted the LCD screen he was using to display the playfield and built a backbox to house a second display to create his game. Rob described how he added the PC to the cabinet, the sound system and the emotional effect the Three Angels game had on him. Rob brought his Three Angels game to Pinball Expo and placed it in the exhibit hall for visitors to play and enjoy. He concluded his presentation by talking about how the Space Cadet pinball game included with Windows XP is probably the most widely available computer pinball game, and also about new releases of pinball emulations for the X-Box 360, Playstation 3 and Wii consoles.
In the question and answer session which followed, Rob addressed the problem of players losing interest in a game once they 'complete' it by achieving all the goals, the use of motion sensors which attach to a cabinet to sense nudging by the player and the problem of the delay between the player hitting the flipper buttons and the game flipping, and possible ways to address that. You can now listen to this seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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He showed how the game’s original 31 sounds could be sampled and stored on a memory card to exactly replicate how the game was intended to sound. He demonstrated this using a Rocky game and then described how he could take some alternative sounds from a Rocky DVD using DVD Audio Extractor, load them into the game and improve the quality and variety of effects available.
Mark described how the original sound board worked with the CPU board and the limitations that places on the GSound replacement . He cited continuous background sounds a being problematic since the sound board is only told to play specific effects by the CPU board and so doesn’t necessarily know when the ball is in play, when the ball has drained or when the game has finished. He thought the Ni-Wumpf System 80 CPU board could be used in conjunction with the GSound and some new game code to allow background sounds to be incorporated. Mark revealed the GSound board allows an advanced configuration mode to be implemented where the same sound call from the CPU can be made to cycle through a list of effects to increase the variety, or provide a randomised effect based on a list of samples and the percentage of time they will be called. The GSound board works with either System 1 or System 80 machines, and Mark had his Rocky machine set up in the exhibition hall so visitors could experience the new sounds for themselves. You can now listen to this seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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Chuck spoke about the hurdles they overcame on the way to getting the two agreements and the reasons why they felt they needed to bring both licensees on board along with Williams themselves. One immediate advantage they said was the public release of the Revenge From Mars and Star Wars Episode 1 ROM code which removed the need for a separate ROM reader board as a part of the NuCore kit. By the time of Pinball Expo, the duo - who trade under the name Big Guys Pinball - had a finished, released product. Don talked about the different hardware components which make up the NuCore system and some of the problems they found during development. Chuck then described some of the additional features they have planned. This included an internet-based tournament system and the possibility of external kits which plug into the USB port to add extra functions such as a real knocker solenoid, a saucer LED kit for RFM and external drivers which would allow new versions of the two existing Pinball 2000 games to be created with different playfield features. Another of their future plans, according to Chuck, is to add a video jukebox to supplement the audio jukebox and breakout game currently included in the code. Besides new version of existing games, Chuck and Don explored the possibilities NuCore creates for unfinished Pinball 2000 games such as Wizard Blocks, along with the difficulties which still exist before these games could be produced. One such problem is the availability of a programming environment for people to write code to run the game. Another is the involvement of those who developed these games initially and whether they should be, or need to be, brought on board to complete the games they began. Larry DeMar then spoke from the audience to congratulate Chuck and Don before talking about what they had achieved by not only creating the NuCore system but getting it to market. Chuck went on to explain how he and Don could act as a conduit for Wayne and Gene to co-operate over the production of games such as Wizard Blocks or Playboy where both sides hold various patents and rights which anyone contemplating such a product would need. One question from the audience asked which size LCD monitor was best suited to replace the CRT display. Chuck said he found a 22-inch widescreen worked best and filled the width of the playfield nicely. He said the LCD has a minor issue where the blacks are slightly brighter than pure black - an issue common to all LCD monitors - but the improved colour reproduction and vibrancy more than compensated in his opinion. You can now listen to this seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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He reiterated how any competitive company entering the pinball manufacturing market would certainly fail and could easily take down Stern Pinball with them. Gary recognised that his company couldn't keep doing the same thing while the market shrank and the profits with them. He said some of the changes he's making will be appreciated by the audience and others would not. He then continued and spoke about the recent layoffs - what he called 'rightsizing' - and a similar rightsizing of game costs which would mean fewer unique mechanical devices. Gary cited Batman as a game which was too expensive to manufacture with the crane, the Joker reveal and the teeter-totter. He spoke openly about the relative merits of those devices and said in future, Stern Pinball games would only contain one unique device. He hoped, at some time over the coming year to be in a position to pass some of those savings back and reduce the price of the product. He then talked about how he wanted to reduce the skill element of the gameplay and increase the luck, or randomness, to put the novice play more of an even footing against the expert and have a good time playing the game. Revealing some statistics, Gary said export sales accounted for 40% of his company's sales. Of the 60% which is sold domestically, the largest market is not the coin-op industry - which is both shrinking and looking towards gambling machines as their next growth area - but sales to home owners for their game room. Addressing that market, it was usually the wife who signed off the purchase of a pinball, Gary said, which is why there hasn't been any raunchy artwork on a Stern game since Playboy, which didn't sell too well in this US-based homeowner market. Secondly, he said these buyers were buying their games based largely on the title. That's why he didn't think a non-licensed theme would appeal to this large market segment. Licensing brought a lot to the game, Gary explained, and although some licenses haven't been the best, others have worked extremely well for the company. Addressing why Stern didn't produce a Transformers game, Gary said it all came down to money and it would have simply been too expensive to acquire that license.
Gary then returned to the market for his games and said many coin-op distributors were no longer buying games to hold in their storerooms or warehouses until a buyer came along, but were buying from Stern when they had the orders. That meant Stern didn't get the same guaranteed number of sales for each model and distributors didn't end up with stock they needed to close out. Gary said he needed to expand the number of businesses selling his products, so he as signed up a number of billiard sales companies to sell Stern games as well as companies such as Amazon and Sears to increase the reach and availability. Referring to the story we broke here at Pinball News, Gary talked briefly about the liquidity problems in general business at that time and the re-financing deal he had entered into with private equity investment firm Hagerty Peterson and Company. During the factory tour, the only products being made were cable looms for a forthcoming run of Lord Of The Rings machines. Gary said over the coming months they would be making small runs of various different models - CSI, Batman, Shrek, Spider-Man and NBA - in the run up to the holiday season. Gary asked for the audience's understanding of the changes taking place at the company and the reasoning behind them. He urged players to get out and play pinball on location, bug location owners to get a pinball if they don't yet have one or even think about operating one yourself if the operator can't or won't supply one. During a question and answer session which followed Gary's talk, he spoke about the costs involved in creating and programming the dot matrix animations for his licensed games suggested he might be interested in reproducing some of the classic early Stern games if there was sufficient demand. He said there wasn't any money for marketing but he was using the resources of companies such as Costco with their website and mailings to get the word out to potential buyers. Gary closed by talking about how Shrek came to happen. He said the game operators didn't get the Family Guy theme when that game came out and so missed out on what their customers would like. Gary said Dreamworks wanted to do a Shrek pinball but Gary told them it wasn't a suitable title to go into bars and suggested a redemption game instead which Dreamworks declined. When Family Guy didn't sell in the expected numbers and left a large number of parts unused, the opportunity to convert the design into a Shrek-themed game solved two problems at once. You can now listen to this seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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Dennis then provided a brief history of his time in the pinball business starting with his first job creating alternative cabinet designs. Greg also spoke about his introduction to the business up until the first game in the evolution in 1987.
Greg came up with the idea of animals behaving like humans in a party setting with he tried unsuccessfully to get incorporated into an existing design, but it wasn't until Dennis bought into the idea that it really took off. Greg reeled-off the various events and pop culture references which influenced his and Dennis's thinking in creating the first game in the evolution. Elvira and the Party Monsters was Roger Sharpe's first pinball license and after some persuasion, management at Williams (Bally had been taken over by that stage and Greg and Dennis were now Williams employees) bought into the concept. Dennis had essentially finished the playfield design before he was hospitalised following a bike accident. Greg related how the game was completed, who helped to make sure the project was finished in time for the trade show and how the machine went on to win the best new product award at the show. The two spoke about how Dr Dude came about after the theme for Dennis's design was changed from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. After all the time Dennis had spent in hopspital, a doctor and nurse theme seemed appropriate and led to the game being called Dr Doom. A check of the name revealed it was already used as a comic book character, so it became Dr Dude and the party animals evolved a little further.
Party Zone followed hot on its heels and the technology had moved on, which allowed more speech, more music, more personality to be incorporated into the game along with a dot matrix display. The game was launched alongside the hugely successful T2 machine which put Party Zone in the shade and the party came to a halt. Dennis and Greg split to work on seperate projects - Dennis doing Whitewater, Demolition Man and Indianapolis 500, Greg working with Steve Ritchie - until they were re-united on the final game on the evolutionary timeline - Scared Stiff. Greg said the project faced an uphill struggle - slot machines with trail features were very popular in Europe, so Scared Stiff needed to have a similar feature in the backbox, people were wary of bringing back the Elvira theme and there were lots of people facing lay-offs at the factory which led to Dennis himself losing his job. They wanted to create a game which was easier to understand, explained Greg, without deep rules so it would appeal more to the casual player. Dennis said there was a lot more money to spend on the game, so that's why there were all the custom molded parts such as the flippers, the slingshots, the bones on the ramp and claw flasher lamp holders.
Even so, some parts had to be taken out for cost reasons. Dennis said the luminous paint on the bones was not supposed to cost any more but when it came time to have them made there was an additional charge which resulted in the luminous effect being dropped along with the eye-ball shooter rod, the dancing boogie men and the LEDs in the skull pile. You can now listen to this seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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Jim's selection from his video library was then shown on a projector. Because the presentation is overwhelmingly visual, and because Jim also sells these DVDs to benefit the Pinball Hall of Fame, we haven't included audio from the video portion of his presentation but instead bring you his introduction and closing comments. You can now listen to these parts of the seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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Rob highlighted the many pinball-related items available through Ebay including the large amount of paperwork - schematics, manuals, flyers, comic books, playing cards, advertisements and magazines - readily available and generally quite inexpensive. If you collect anything to do with pinball, there are plenty of books which feature the game in one way or another. Apart from the pinball-specific magazines, pinball often features in more general interest magazines from time to time, from Playboy to Cigar Aficionado and beyond as well as several novels. Following on from Jim's seminar, Rob covered the range of pinball videos available - instructional, humorous, technical and more general coin-op videos - which include pinball as part of the mix of games they cover. Pinball has featured numerous themes over the years and Rob touched on the possibilities if you cross-collect, adding items from themes which have appeared on pinball games such as comic book heroes, sports stars and movies. Some early pinball machines, more modern miniature games and toy versions of pinball are sufficiently small that a significant collection can be built-up without being overwhelmed by the space required to store them. They can even be hung on the wall as display pieces. Other items to hang on the wall include pinball signs - neon, fluorescent, backlit or faux street signs - and pinball clocks, again in as many different styles as you like. If you cover your walls with pinball-themed items, why not wear them too. Rob moved on to look at the wide range of pinball-themed clothing available. Jackets, shirts, ties, hoodies, dresses, baby-wear, there's something for everyone and all the T-shirts you could ever wear.
Rob continued with pinball jewellery, furniture, Pinball Wizard-specific items, pinball Christmas toys, pinball mugs, themed licence plates and assorted pinball candy dispensers. The gamut of pinball art available to collect is huge and Rob showed a variety from his own collection as well as items featured in exhibits around the world. After looking at the number of one-off games out in the hobby and the range of tattoos with a pinball connection, Rob showed some more exotic pinball artwork as well as some sexually explicit games to round off his seminar. You can now listen to this seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player. Warning, contains adult language in the final section.
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Turning to the more positive things happening in pinball, Clay spoke about the upcoming opening of the new Pinball Hall of Fame building in Las Vegas along with other museums such as the National Pinball Museum and the Pacific Pinball Museum. With regard to the PPM, Clay talked about the recent Pacific Pinball Expo show and invited Michael Schiess and Larry Zartarian, respectively Executive Director and Board Chairman of the Pacific Pinball Museum, to come up and talk a little about the show, the museum and their aims for both.
Michael and Larry described the beginnings of the PPM from the birth of the Lucky Ju Ju in 2002, its growth through the hosting of art exhibitions, the donation of machines through to the first Pacific Pinball Expos. Larry spoke about the museum's mission to teach history, art and science through pinball and to preserve and promote pinball as a classic American cultural icon. He stressed their desire to keep the games accessible and playable by the public while Michael addressed the need to keep the museum financially sustainable. They described this year's Pacific Pinball Expo which had taken place two weeks earlier, listed many of the notable collections of games set up for visitors to enjoy, and spoke about the large donations of machines to the Museum from the collections from Gordon Hasse Jr and Richard Conger. Clay then showed a video clip of the Metallica and Hellacopters pinball conversions which were available to play at the PPE. Michael talked about the two Visible Pinball machines which were also at the show, after which Clay showed a video demonstrating how these games worked. Michael and Larry concluded their presentation by talking about their plans for a much larger building to allow the bulk of their collection to to be set up and put on display. They mentioned one possible building which might become available in eighteen months to two years time and ways members of the audience could help through word of mouth promotion of the game or though donations of various kinds to the museum. Clay then continued but instead of his intended seminar on electro-mechanical repair he showed two more videos taken during his visit to the west coast. The first was a trip to a collection at the home of Berkley Mac who holds a regular private pinball party at his house each Friday. The second showed the audience around Richard Conger's collection of mostly pre-war games at his home, the Silverball Ranch. These two videos took us up to the opening of the main show hall at 6pm. You can now listen to the non-video parts of the seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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He described the components used, the limitations they imposed and the results of running them at or beyond their rated output in terms of increased heat and potential premature failure of the device. Brett said his motivation in designing new and improved boards is to keep games running while providing additional features in a plug-and-play product.
When designing a new power supply board, Brett took into account at the increased use of LEDs in games both for illumination and for displays, so he wanted to make the high voltage section an optional plug-in card and provide DC power rather than AC which should go a long way towards eliminating the flicker many LEDs exhibit in a pinball game. Brett chose an existing low-cost but highly efficient 5V regulator, which ran at 93% efficiency under full load and dissipated only 1.5W, resulting in the need for only a very small heatsink or sometimes none at all. The result of this design work is the new JOLT range of PinScore boards for Williams systems 3-11B and the Bally/Williams system 11C games which are currently available to buy for around $100. Brett said so far over 4,000 PinScore LED display products have been sold and the failure rate has been less than 1%, the majority of those coming from boards being dropped, damaged or plugged in incorrectly. He revealed the PinScore would be releasing a new dot matrix driver board in around six months' time along with a WPC power driver board with added features such as custom graphics uploads and an optional high voltage section. In addition Brett said he would be producing a new LED dot matrix display which will be available in the classic orange colour and also in green. You can now listen to these parts of the seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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Greg proposed his idea to Dennis who liked it, and they agreed to work together to take an old game, customise the cabinet and playfield art and create something new and unique. Without the ability to re-write game code, they decided to use an EM machine for their first custom game. Dennis had bought a Continental Cafe machine after seeing one at the Tilt! - The Art of Pinball exhibition, but when it arrived it had a broken backglass and didn't work. It would soon be fixed and transformed into the first of their new games. Dennis said he'd always been a fan of fruit crate label designs and Greg thought if they could combine that look with the Roy Parker/George Molentin style of pin-up artwork, they could produce something distinctive and attractive. What they came up with was a game called "Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons".
Greg and Dennis showed some Dennis's early sketches of the cabinet artwork which Greg turned into a prototype design. Dennis built the cabinet so the result looked like an old, distressed fruit crate. There were no legs on the game. Instead, the cabinet sat on another crate of the same design and Greg's artwork made it look as though there were melons inside.
The duo decided to call their joint venture the Whiz Bang Pinball Company. They stressed it was still early days and there was much development work still to do but they wanted to show what they were working on and the plans they had for the future.
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He worked at his father's arcade for 7 years and has, for 37 years, participated in the ownership of SS Billiards in Hopkins, MN where he can be found 360 days a year.
Lloyd continued by telling some stories about the coin-op business over the years from an operator's viewpoint, including his experience with various gangsters, other assorted shady characters and the many dangerous situations he found himself in. These anecdotes were interspersed with regular draws for translites, t-shirts and many other pinball-related goodies.
Asked which machine had the most coins jammed in the coin chute, Lloyd replied without hesitation that it was the cigarette machines he used to refill when he worked for a route operator. When the regular price of a game was 25¢, Black Knight was the first to be priced at 50¢ per play. Lloyd said there wasn't much resistance to the price hike and the two-level playfield helped sell the increase to the players. Lloyd said Black Knight was the game which started Steve Ritchie's successful career, but his brother Mark is Lloyd's favourite designer and his Kingpin game is Lloyd's favourite game ever. Lloyd then spoke about some of the scrapes he had been involved in over the years including being held up at gunpoint while working at the county fair and being robbed in his father's arcade, along with the details of how that story ended. Over the years, Lloyd has tested many video and pinball games for the manufacturers. He talked about how various companies responded to his comments, how they used the test reports along with which games he tested and which he rejected. He also related some of the many ways players try to cheat both the game and the operator, by trying to get free games or steal money from the cash box. Lloyd then explained the origins of his LTG moniker which stemmed from the days when he would fix games on location. Back then, there was no battery backup of scores, so the first test game Lloyd would play would often get him an entry on the default high score table. Not wanting to publicise his personal details, he created the "Lloyd The Great" or LTG name to use instead. Speculation on the origins of the name on the rec.games.pinball newsgroup lead to the suggestion it stood for "Launch Those Geese" which turned into the name (and theme) of several of his pinball parties at SS Billiards. You can now listen to Lloyd's seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player. Warning: contains adult language
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Ray recalled how he came to work in the industry, starting at Seeburg in Chicago in 1965, learning about printed circuit board (PCB) design. During his 6 years there he created board designs for the company's jukeboxes and test fixtures. In the Spring of 1976, Williams - who had been acquired by Seeburg in 1964 and was run as a separate division - were starting the move into solid-state pinball machines and Seeburg designed the first solid state game for them. Ray said he wasn't involved in the project but saw how the system wasn't reliable enough for production and despite the engineers' protests, the company's executives chose to close that project down. Shortly after that, Ray was introduced to Mike Stroll from Williams who was in charge of product development, which encompassed the development of the first production solid-state game. Mike and his team (which included Ken Fedesna) moved to Seeburg to develop the game, where he worked with Ray on the driver board. Mike was impressed with Ray's board layout and brought him the CPU board schematic to work on as well. A month later, Mike asked Ray's boss if Ray could transfer to his team and Ray began working directly with the solid-state pinball project group. In late Autumn of 1976, the first populated circuit boards arrived from the manufacturer and once they were fitted in the backbox they all agreed that the board set looked much better than the original Seeburg attempt. Once testing had been completed, the system proved to be reliable and ready for production. Ray returned to his previous Seeburg position but wanted to work more with Williams, so he asked Mike about joining and, with the permission of his boss, Ray moved across to Williams in time for the spin-off of Williams as a separate company. Ray described his time designing the speech board for the first talking pinball - Gorgar - and working with Ken Fedesna to modify the board layout and reduce the spacing of the analogue components in order to improve the quality of the speech. The transition from traditional hand-drawn design methods to computer-aided design (CAD) took place in the early '80s and by 1983 Ray was using the CAD at Williams to design the upcoming system 9 boards. Ray closed his presentation by recalling many of the people he came to know well during his time at Williams, including Mark Loffredo, Steve Kordek, Steve Ritchie, Larry DeMar and Roger Sharpe. Because Ray has been deaf since he was 15 months old, his seminar was presented using American sign language and relayed to the audience by two interpreters. Ray then handed over to Eric Kamen who is a long time repairer of pinballs, video games, slot machines and many other mechanical and electronic amusement games.
Eric described how he too is deaf and was surprised to find out that some of the circuit boards he had been repairing had been designed by another deaf man. So he set out to find out more about Ray. In 2000 he made a trip to Chicago and visited the Midway factory where he finally got to meet Ray after years working on his boards. Eric said he wanted to address the audience to let them know how Ray overcame all the problems which stemmed from his deafness to produce some amazing work which should be celebrated. After Eric, Steve Kordek said a few words about how important it was to work with people who would produce consistently good work and Ray epitomised that with the designs he created over the years. Then Larry DeMar spoke of the time he and Ray worked together, his recollections of the process of creating board layouts with pieces of tape, and the first days of video games at Williams where he and Eugene Jarvis worked with Ray on Defender. Finally, Mark Loffredo addressed the audience to describe how Ray became the expert of the CAD system at Williams, teaching many new employees the intricacies of the software as the requirements for new and more complicated designs grew.
You can now listen to Ray's seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player. Note: Ray and Eric's words are spoken by two sign language interpreters.
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Steve said suitable scanners are now hard to find, so he showed a way to use a regular digital camera to photograph the playfield and then use various tools to correct the distortions and colour-correct the image. He demonstrated how quick this system could be used on a Stern Meteor playfield. Taking a picture directly from overhead the playfield is often not desirable, especially if you are using a built-in flash as you will get too much glare from the flash. Steve showed a grid printed on a sheet of paper with the centre cut out. By laying this on the playfield so the required area is seen through the cut out, it is possible to use the grid to correct the perspective in a photo editing software program.
By printing the grid with a known spacing, Steve could then rescale the flattened image to the correct dimensions. This grid can also be placed on an undamaged playfield and photographed to create an overlay decal, without having to spend time retouching damaged artwork. Using a camera to capture the artwork also avoids having to strip down part or all of the surrounding area to fit in a scanner.
Getting the artwork looking good on the screen is one thing, but getting the printed colours to match those on the playfield is another. To help with this, Steve suggested printing off some colour charts showing variations of green and blue with a fixed value of red.
Steve then printed out these charts and cut out the white strips between the columns, so the colours on the paper can be compared to the colour you are trying to match on the playfield, and the RGB values read off the paper. These grids are available for download from Steve's website where you can also download a grid and make your own colour strips. You can now listen to Steve's seminar for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player.
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Asked about the team he enjoyed working with the most, and which was his favourite game to come out of that collaboration, Pat described the supportive and creative atmosphere at Williams, the freedom and trust that came out of that and described how he got a taste of that recently working on a redemption game with Larry DeMar. Apart from Larry, Pat named John Youssi, John Krutsch in his dream design team. In choosing the best game to come out of that team, Pat said he was most proud of the games where new ideas were tried. He conceded not all of them were successful, but they all broke new ground in trying something different. He chose Earthshaker! but said it was for a number of personal reasons as well; such as being the first game he could design from scratch and the fact it was so different to the other games being produced at the time. Steve Kordek asked Pat when he first became interested in building pinball games. Pat spoke about his early days in the coin-op business working for Dave Nutting & Associates as a video game programmer until the collapse of the video game market in 1983. After that one of his subsequent jobs - programming bowling pin-setters - put him in contact with Larry. Pat had already roughed-out an idea for a combined horizontal & vertical pinball game and Larry supported and promoted the idea, leading to them both working with Williams and turning the game into Banzai Run.
The next questioner asked Pat about Wizard Blocks, where the development of the game was going and could recent developments in Pinball 2000 help make the game complete? Pat began his answer by describing the history of Pinball 2000, the way earnings on old style games were in steady decline and the need to create something new which made money for the manufacturer and the operator. In Pat's view, Pinball 2000 did what was asked of it, and the closure of Williams was due to many different factors, many of them unrelated to pinball. Regarding Wizard Blocks, Pat said they were about 6 weeks away from putting the game on test when Williams' closure was announced, but he stressed that the game was a long way from being complete at that time. It was, he said, his vision of what Pinball 2000 could be, building on the work done to get Revenge from Mars and Star Wars Episode One ready and addressing some of the issues from those two games. Pat continued by talking about his personal design philosophies, the story behind Safecracker and the magic tokens, how CSI came about and what was taken out before production, would he ever design a gaming machine, which non-coin-op games he plays, how whitewoods develop through the design of a game, why mylar is evil, what he's working on now and what needs to be done to get public interest back into pinball. The speaker has asked that we do not make audio of his seminar available, so we are regrettably unable to bring it to you at this time.
Alvin Gottlieb was the first to speak, congratulating Rob and Mike on the 25th anniversary Expo. However, this was also the first time this seminar had been held since the death of their buddy Norm Clark, who passed away earlier in the year, so Michael Gottlieb paid tribute to him and his huge portfolio of highly-talented work.
Alvin resumed and described how he and Wayne were introduced at Alvin's father's factory when David Gottlieb placed Alvin with Wayne to learn the skills of pinball design.
Alvin said he never enjoyed working with anyone as much as he did with Wayne, and he continued by describing the family atmosphere which existed at the D. Gottlieb factory during its heyday. The first question to the panel was about the company "American Molded Products" and it's President, Charles E. Caestecker. American Molded Products manufactured many of the plastic parts used in pinball machines, including the first pop bumper and the fixed rubber-ringed plastic bumper which Harry Mabs later controlled electrically to create the first flipper. Wayne spoke about some of the problems with early plastic parts and contrasted them with the great products available today. Alvin then described the pre-flipper game Guys Dolls which featured six pop-up plastic posts to propel the ball up the playfield and the the trouble they had soon after production when reports of the posts breaking started to arrive at the factory. The posts had been mistakenly made out of acetate instead of Zytel nylon resin which caused them to fall apart very quickly. Alvin described how he and Wayne had to track down hundreds of game and replace the faulty posts with the correct ones.
Michael then spoke about the very first flipper games and how soft the action of the flippers was. He asked Steve to talk about his Triple Action game which is famous for being the first to have just two flippers down at the bottom of the playfield.
Steve recalled how Gottlieb's six-flippered Humpty Dumpty came out in late 1947 and caused a storm. With a trade show coming up in January 1948 and their designer Harvey Heiss off sick, they turned to Steve to come up with a game for the show in Chicago in just one month. Steve's conservative design teachings led him to use only two flippers, but he chose to place them at the bottom of the playfield. That decision proved to be hugely popular and before long all the other pinball companies had copied him and that became the de-facto position for flippers to the present day. The question of patents was asked but the speed at which the business operated at that time meant as soon as a new idea was introduced, it had been copied by numerous other companies. Similarly, David Gottlieb was of the opinion that what was good for his company was good for the industry and patented very few ideas and enforced fewer still. Steve reinforced that camaraderie by saying if one company ran out of a particular part, one of the other companies would let them have some of theirs. Another questioner asked if David Gottlieb's likeness ever appeared in any of his games' artwork. Both Alvin and Wayne were sure Roy Parker would never do such a thing, but thought perhaps Gordon Morrison might have quietly slipped David's image into one of his backglasses. Steve talked about how the games at Genco used DC for their relays when everyone else was using AC. He explained how using DC allowed him to fine tune the relays' reaction and hold times through the use of copper washers applied to different sides of the mechanism. Asked about their memories of Harry Williams and Ray Maloney, Steve recalled how when Harry left the Williams company and Sam Stern took control, Harry would continue to send in game designs, some of which Steve would use for his games. Steve said he still has 50 drawings received from Harry with unused game designs. Alvin then spoke about Ray Maloney's lifelong business relationship with his father David Gottlieb and the way Ray moved into making his own games rather than selling Gottlieb games. Alvin said he too knew Harry Williams and also stressed how, despite being competitors, everyone worked together and was very supportive of everyone else in the business. Wayne described Harry Williams as probably the best designer of the time - or any time. His work with Lynn Durant at Exhibit Supply couldn't be touched by anyone, he said. Michael Gottlieb wrapped up the seminar by praising Steve Kordek's faith and vision in keeping pinball alive during what he described as "the dark days" - the time when video was king and pinball looked dead - in hiring new designers and putting his trust in key personnel to make sure pinball could come back in the late '80s and into the '90s. After the seminar, Rob Berk played a tape of a fireside chat made in 1987 with Steve Kordek and Harvey Heiss where they reminisced about their years working together. He and Steve joined the audience in watching it, 22 years after it was shot.
You can now listen to Michael, Alvin, Steve and Wayne for yourself. Either click the play button on the player below, click on the link to the MP3 or right-click on the link to save it to your own computer or MP3 player. Note: There was a faulty microphone cable which introduced some clicks and pops into the recording as well as causing a microphone to stop working at one point. Hopefully we have adjusted the sound so it won't spoil your enjoyment of the seminar.
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That concludes our coverage of all the seminars from Pinball Expo 2009. Many thanks to Rob Berk and Mike Pacak for allowing us to make them available to you and for giving you a taste of all the great presentations you can see - and the people you can meet - by coming to Pinball Expo for yourself. Thanks also to Jonathan Joosten for all his help in editing and re-mixing many of these seminars to improve the audio quality.
© Pinball News 2010 |
