Pinball Magazine: Pat Lawlor interview on Dialed In by Pinball Magazine

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cover story

Cover story: the Mark Ritchie interview Interview: Jonathan Joosten, Copy editing: Mark Ritchie, Erik Kos, Gisi Cannizzaro

ark Ritchie (born August 20, 1958) is a well-known former pinball designer who worked in pinball for Atari, Williams and Capom between 1976 and 1996. Working his way up the ladder he got a chance to design his first game at Williams, where he went on to design successful games like Taxi, Fish Tales and Indiana Jones, as well as many other games. While often referred to as the younger brother of pinball designer Steve Ritchie, Mark built a reputation of his own in pinball and beyond. Pinball Magazine talked to Mark Ritchie about his career in pinball and coin-operated amusement. PM: Mark, you grew up in California. Any memories of how you got acquainted with pinball then as a kid? Mark Ritchie: Very few, but yes. My first exposure to pinball was probably when I was about five or six. My mother went to a bowling alley and bowled every Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon. She would let me go in the game room there and they had a few woodrail pinballs. I couldn’t tell you which they were. I had to stand on a platform box – a soapbox or something – to play the games. I remember that was the first time I played pinball. The game name I don’t know. PM: Did you enjoy it? Mark Ritchie: Yeah, I thought it was fun but I didn’t get addicted at that point. I was quite young and like all kids that age, had a limited attention span. My uncle used to have a summer home up near the Russian River in California and we, as a family, would go for a week or two at a time. We used to go to a miniature golf place that had a game room in a little town on the Russian River known as Monte Rio. They had lots of arcade and Pinball games. I remember playing Gottli-

eb’s Subway. Anyway, my Mom and Dad would take us there usually on a Saturday night. We’d play a round of mini-golf as a family and then hit the arcade. The place had probably 15 to 20 pinball machines. Atari The years went by and then one Thanksgiving. I was maybe 18 or 19 years old. I was still in high school and my brother Steve was already working at Atari. Apparently, there was a Capt. Fantastic at Atari that Atari engineering guys were checking out. Steve was able to borrow the game over the Thanksgiving holiday. I played it for about a week straight. That’s the game that really got me interested in pinball. PM: Now, speaking of your brother, when Steve started at Atari, did he go straight into pinball, or was he working somewhere else? Mark Ritchie: No, Steve worked in video game test engineering. I think he started on the assembly line. In those days, you

. . . continued in Pinball Magazine No. 4

Some pages from the in-depth, career covering Mark Ritchie cover story

full time.

that foamcore and work with PM: Did you gs? f to try thin .I kind of stuf h with foamcore muc did r neve No. I Mark Ritchie: tewood. drawing to whi went right from entire designed the ically you PM: So bas rd. a drawing boa e was scal The playfield on ar. on Myl Yes, by hand, Mark Ritchie: to one. obviously one

ut the game? you tell abo between PM: What can rid, a cross It was a hyb a good idea Mark Ritchie: seemed like ch whi o, like that at pinball and vide ects proj few a re were which at the time. The nder pinball, of them was Defe . We Williams. One the same time k, right around .I actually did wor tched rule sets farfe ty pret e do som ng different were trying to ethi som do d be bold and e, gam the to thought I coul e e structur lement a wav would – maybe imp target and you you against the lost your lives where it was you l unti le in the sadd -based basically stay to create a time I was trying e(or balls). So e-like rules. Tim with video gam le to pinball machine cult for peop diffi very are games stomed to based pinball accu so are use people pinball. understand beca of the legacy of – this is part three-ball play tive with this ova inn be tried to PM: So you r did it? ybe even ove ball game, and ma because of the Yes, primarily ball Mark Ritchie: There was no ged. chan em. It kickers two e delivery syst wer re ter lane. The shooter, no shoo the flippers and ball out behind the e forc was ld that wou flippers, which directly to the , but the deliver the ball to patent that We even tried very innovative. ion denied. patent applicat e than I different mor trying to be was I think I was . I thought that ething practical som g g to put doin tryin was . I was me at the time ideas. I important for y who had new ebod som as e , let’s myself out ther d chew. So yeah more than I coul ents. think I bit off prouder mom n’t one of my just say it was w about people kno not many were PM: Since er how you you rememb the game, do it? play to ons on supposed you got two butt cally basi Yes, and one Mark Ritchie: for the flipper the cabinet; one where, either side of er which was . I don’t rememb come out to feed the ball the ball would and on butt do is but press one g you want to thin first er. The game, so right to the flipp a wave-based targets. It was e: hit the drop g in every wav g the same thin doin cally e all you’re basi ets and complet n the drop targ try to knock dow

Drawings that

were part of

ication

Photo credit:

all patent appl

the Thunderb

Jay Stafford

Taxi Williams

: Mark Ritchie,

ts, Design 1988, 7,303 uni

was games. Taxi of my favorite This was one t in my caMark Ritchie: e up to that poin ed making a gam mat had I auto an fun t the mos was almost like r for all of us. It happened afte reer. It was fun game. One idea we got into this othly. smo ly process when real went together just we and another that out to me is i that stands gs about Tax in a game that One of the thin been involved time that I had ork. That rst fi artw the good was it etry and sound, good geom ctly. I’m very blended good rienced that dire first time I expe game was the game. proud of that great job. I reand he did a r the programmer room, day afte Ed Boon was went on in that crazy stuff that member the a blast. just was It day. ul pinball marst real successf this was my fi I also think that 54

hon Anghelo

Artwork: Pyt

lessons and ned a lot of hard lpoint I had lear to not be rebe chine. Up to this of all, you need r to get it. First got to bring you ’ve I think I started you ul, essf e. I tried want to be succ gam you r If you s. liou need to like ers and players players. It was game to play towards novice lean to t poin game. very hard at that k, in and out was a fun, quic accessible; it on drove the cab and myself who on Pyth h muc t. We were mak It was pretty and it was grea on was just nuts t at the bestar to have this one. Pyth I t, to tell this righ t I was But f. wha stuf and e ing good on the taxi them how we came ginning, about e. that in the gam doing before Prix, Formula e this a Grand going to mak sequel to do another Originally I was , I was going 1976. So game. In fact nd Prix from 1, car racing Gra ’s dek to Steve Kor Premier time that und game, this time Prix II. Aro g to be Grand this was goin

ered on Forory, a game cent .” e out with Vict myself, “Oh shit Technology cam e out, I said to When that cam exception ng. the raci 1 with a it, w mul e field as you kno cam play gs the thin of t se I had mos Out feature. Tho and the Spin of the catapult later.

i? change to Tax g did the theme i, we were goin PM: So how going to be Tax ramp Before it was lanes. I had this Mark Ritchie: airp or ort ng with an airp f. itsel by fun to do somethi t and which was grea action going on, 55

Plus others commenting on working with Mark Ritchie others about M ark Ritchie

Steve Ritchie

Legendary pinb

all designer, olde

r brother of Mar

k Ritchie

others about M ark Ritchie

M: Steve, wha t do you rememb er about grow California with ing up in Mark as your little brother? Steve Ritchie: Mark is eight years younger we never foug than me, so ht like brothers som etimes do. We ing and fishin had fun huntg with our fath er and many and riding a crud uncles and frien e motorcycle ds, called a Bonanza through the mou Trail Blazer ntains all arou nd our good childhoo neighborhood. d for us. It was a PM: At some point you star ted working wanted that as at Atari and well. Mark Steve Ritchie: Mark wanted a job at Atari. have been wor I may or may king as a designer not at that time, but enough and resp Mark was old onsible enough to work at Atar find a position i. I did help him at Atari. There was an opening nance departm in the mainteent, and he beg an to work with friendly people. a bunch of goo d PM: At some point you left for Williams landed a job and Mark finall in Pinball Eng y ineering, whe How did you re you just had feel about that left. ? Steve Ritchie: I knew I would miss my whole nia, but it was fam ily in a great opportu Californity to work with and storied pinb an established all manufacture r. It was a chan if I wanted to ce I had to take be a professiona l game designer enjoyed working . I’m sure in Atari’s Pinb Mark all Engineering department. PM: Not muc h later Atari shut their pinb Did you pull som all division dow e strings at Will n. iams to get Mar there? k a position Steve Ritchie: Absolutely. Mik e Stroll agreed him, hoping that to hire the game desi gn gene ran in the family, and it did. Mark kne w his way around building pinball machines and helped me on

some projects before he got his own team project, Thunder and pinball desi ball. gn PM: So Mark moved to Chic ago and started ball tech at Will working as a piniams, helping the designers How did you on their gam feel about wor es. king with you same departm r brother in ent? the Steve Ritchie: It was fine. It was good to have Chicago. We got some family in along. I helped him if he wanted alone if he didn it, and left him ’t. PM: At some point Mark star ted designing How did you his first games. feel about that ? S t e v e Ritchie: At Will iams, we striv ed to make the very best pinball machine s. It was a global goal beca use a string of hits from our various desi gners really stirr ed up operators to buy and operate pinballs mak ing good money. We were actu ally driving the market upward by making goo d games that peo ple wanted to buy, operate and play.

The competi tion between internal team friendly. You have s was fierce to understand , but that there wer Barry Oursler, e a bunch of us; Steve Kordek was still working Tony Kraemer pinball projects , Mark and mys , elf, all designin wanted Mark g games in 198 to succeed and 0. I he did. PM: When Mar k started desi gning you had some very succ already designe essful games. d Was it difficult up to your repu for Mark to live tation? Steve Ritchie: Maybe. You’ll have to ask Mark that knew that he question. I wanted to be a good and succ er. essful game desi gnPM: Was ther e ever any tens ion on the wor the two of you k floor between ? Steve Ritchie: The only tens ion I remember motorcycles. is when we bou I bought a stre ght et bike and he so we couldn’t bought a dirt ride together bike, ! Later, I added garage, and he a dirt bike to bought a street my bike, and we rode It was awesom a lot together e! . We both like motorcycles, shooting guns We formed a and other acti band at Williams vities. and called it Mark played “Brane Damij. bass, Eugene ” Jarvis played and I played guit keyboards and ar and sang. We sang, had a drummer Williams, and from outside we got special perm issio Williams and n for him to rehearse in a come to back room at We had fun doin Williams afte r hours. g this and perf ormed at seve manship is an ral parties. Sho important ingr wedient in gam writing mus e design. Play ic ing and gave us confidence others did and an edge not have on man y levels. PM: With gam es like Taxi, Fish Tales and Indiana

Jone s M a r k pro bab ly moved up in the ranks at Williams. How did you feel about that ? Steve Ritchie: It

was great. I enjo yed those gam es very much. he was doing I was proud that well. It made Will iams stronger, also. PM: Following Indiana Jones Mark left for ly Williams’ man Capcom. Clea agement was rn’t happy with leaving for Cap that. Did Mar com affect you k since you wer liams? After Mar e still at Wilk left you only did one more liams, so that game for Wilcould be related. Steve Ritchie: It made for stra ined relations still talked and between us. We got together away from Will hard for me to iams, but it was watch Williams try to take lega Mark. I couldn’t l action against do anything abo ut the wrath of management. There is no relationship betw een my leaving Mark working Williams and at Capcom. Whe n you have been wor ball as long as king in pinI have, you have access to a lot from the street, of information sales numbers of our titles, dist and arcade visit ributor actions s. I could see that the for pinball (at writing was on least for that era) the wall , and that ther cline in sales. e would be a de-

Video was stro ng, redemption machines wer general arcade e earning and attendance was in down as well My best work as collections. didn’t sell the numbers that Star Trek:The Nex we had expected t Generation was . the last five-digit game. We follo production wed that with Popeye, and dist trying to get out ributors began of contracts with Williams in whic to buy a number h they had of every model we made. It was time to leave pinball and work in video to keep my valu gam es. I wanted e as a game desi gner, and not would love to just in pinball. have a video gam I e project righ video game proj t now. Successf ects are worth ul far more than even today, but pinb all projects, it’s the best gam e that will sell today’s market. well enough in There is a lot of competition business. in the video gam e PM: How wou ld you describe your current Mark? relationship with Steve Ritchie: Good. I don’t see him that busy on projects much; we are , and I gave up both street motorcy I could hear abso cling. I had to. lutely nothing through the ride. We have helmet on my been shooting last together from time to time. PM: Any clos ing comments on hav ing Mark as a working with brother or him? Steve Ritchie: I wish him the best in his care always get alon er. I hope we g and have mor can e fun together he has made . I am proud that some great gam es – games that including me. are loved by man << y,

others about M ark Ritchie Chris Granne

Sounds and mus

ic on all of Mar

k Ritchie pinball

games from Roa

d Kings onwards

Including cont

ributions by:

Steve Ritchie Chris Granner Eugene jarvis George Petro Roger Sharpe Gary Flower Andrew Heigh way Trudy Jacobs R itchie Tim and Rand i Ritchie www.pinball-

108 Photo Credit:

Drew Heidgerken

magazine.com

pinball art

tails on e d h it w le ic t r -page a Page 1 of a 15 ki, Timeshock s w o b e L ig B e The Hobbit, Th and more!

Jean-Paul de Win: pinball LCD animation, artwork and more Interview: Jonathan Joosten, Copy editing: Erik Kos

ean-Paul de Win is a Dutch animation artist who apprenticed with pinball artist Greg Freres at Williams Pinball. A few weeks after he started work, the pinball department was shut down, so he continued his internship in video. Following that, Jean-Paul started creating animations for several national Dutch television stations, which he did for more than 10 years. In 2011 Greg Freres recommended him to Jack Guarnieri, which resulted in Jean-Paul joining the team at Jersey Jack Pinball (JJP). Almost all the LCD animations in The Wizard of Oz (WOZ), as well as the layout of the various elements on the screen, were Jean-Paulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work. Along the way, Jean-Paul not only continued to work for JJP, but also on various projects for other new companies such as Dutch Pinball, Silver Castle Pinball, Pinball Universe and more. Pinball Magazine talked to Jean-Paul about his recent projects, which include The Hobbit and The Big Lebowski.

168

. . . continued in Pinball Magazine No. 4

game development

Page 1 of a ! 17-page article

Dutch Pinball: The making of The Big Lebowski Interview: Jonathan Joosten, Copy editing: Erik Kos, Gisi Cannizzaro

n 2014 Dutch Pinball took Pinball Expo by storm by presenting three working prototypes of The Big LebowskiTM pinball. The impact of the game was huge and created quite a buzz. The game was without a doubt the game of the show. At other shows where the game was presented, the game saw huge lines of people waiting to play it, with the same enthusiastic response as a result. The next step was obviously to get the game into production. As many start-up pinball companies have already experienced, making pinball games is hard. It’s a long road with ups and downs. After 18 months, game production finally started. Since then, the first container of games has been delivered in the United States and the first owners are still raving about the high quality and fun factor of the game. Pinball Magazine caught up with Barry Driessen and Jaap Nauta of Dutch Pinball to discuss their Big Lebowski adventure.

PM: Barry, for those who don’t know Dutch Pinball, can you briefly talk about how the company started and what you were working on? Barry Driessen: Dutch Pinball started off in 2011 as a hobby project with Bride of Pin•Bot 2.0. That was quite successful. We showed the game at Pinball Expo in 2012, and even won an award at that event. People wanted to buy an upgrade kit from us. That was great, so we figured out how to do that. [The Machine – Bride of Pin•Bot is a Williams pinball machine from 1991, originally fitted with an alphanumeric display. Unhappy with the shallow ruleset of the game, Barry and Koen developed new rules and replaced the original displays with an LCD that runs animations in color. They were able to commercialize the project and offer a 2.0 upgrade kit for these games. – PM]

That project was mainly Koen Heltzel doing the programming, Jules Reivers doing the music and sound effects and me doing the graphics and animation. At that point Jaap was not involved, although we already knew each other. He knew that we were doing Bride of Pin•Bot 2.0 as a

. . . continued in Pinball Magazine No. 4

189

showtime

Texas Pinball Festival

Page 1 of a ! 12-page article

Interview: Jonathan Joosten, Copy editing: Erik Kos, Gisi Cannizzaro

he Texas Pinball Festival (TPF) has become one of the major pinball shows in the United States. Recent editions of the show, currently held just north of Dallas in the Hilton Embassy in Frisco, Texas, occupy a 40,000-square-foot ballroom with roughly 400 pinball machines from all eras. The event draws about 5,000 pinball enthusiasts over the course of a weekend, but due to the available space it doesn’t feel crowded at all. The event is mainly organized by Ken Kemp, Paul McKinney and Kim and Ed VanderVeen. Of those four Ed is the most visible as he acts as the frontman for the festival. Pinball Magazine attended the event twice and caught up with Ed to ﬁnd out more about this impressive show. Ed VanderVeen: First of all, thank you for mentioning Ken, Paul and Kim. That’s important. I seem to get the most attention sometimes because I’m the guy always up front talking to people, but there’s Paul, Ken and Kim, too. Kim especially, as she’s pretty much the one that runs the show. I’m just out front talking to you and everybody else. So thank you for recognizing there are other organizers besides just me.

PM: The Texas Pinball Festival has been running for quite a few years now. Ed VanderVeen: Yes. The 2017 show will be our 16th show. Originally when the show started in 2001 it was called Pinarama. That was before I was part of it. In 2002 they changed the name to Texas Pinball Festival. The only documentation on that show I could ﬁnd is a show report on Pinball News, but that was the ﬁrst edition under that name.

PM: Did the name change result in more people showing up? Ed VanderVeen: Not the name change itself. The 2002 show was a little bit bigger and then once word started spreading it grew. Remember this was the beginning of the internet, with newsgroups like Rec.Games.Pinball and such. So it was a lot easier to get the word out to people. We didn’t have to run ads in magazines and that kind of thing. Once word started to spread people started to come. In 2002 pinball designer Steve Ritchie was our very ﬁrst special guest and as far as I know Steve has been to every Texas Pinball Festival since then. I tease him all the time that he’s the show’s mascot. Of course it helps to have Steve there. He’s a big draw – people want to see him and get their stuff signed.

PM: As I understand these ﬁrst shows were not as big as the current show. Just to put things in perspective, how big were these shows? Ed VanderVeen: You would have to ask Paul McKinney. Of the four of us, he’s the only one who was there since the beginning. I believe there were like 80 pinball machines and a few arcade games in a very small ballroom.

PM: So how did the show grow? Ed VanderVeen: Little by little. We would do a show, make a little money and put the money right back into the next show to bring in more guests. We were very good about including the community. It is so important to get people who own a pinball machine to bring it to the show and make them feel like it’s their show. I hear so many times people who bring games (exhibitors) talk about the Texas Pinball Festival and

. . . continued in Pinball Magazine No. 4

Articles on prewar games, Lone Star Pinball Museum, Dallas Makerspace

prewar games

Jeff Frick with

ld Series and

Rockola’s Wor

Bally’s Airway

ball showca ’s History of Pin

Jeff Frick

, Cop

athan Joosten

Interview: Jon

Kos, Gisi y editing: Erik

Cannizzaro

g twelve booth, featurin tory of Pinball . In their nged the His and playable functional Jeff Frick arra ms e restored, tival (TPF) . Today it see wer Fes es ices ball dev gam Pin e as games. All -operated gam However, t the 2016 Tex War II pinball with them. profitable coin pre-World gare unfamiliar y popular and flipperless Pinball Ma es were ver e most people y fun games. games, sinc ingl of these gam e y pris thes man sur in , e ed day in for som are interest games were ball hobby. dful of people some of the side of the pin that only a han liar and played ami look unf er y, k a clos use not a lot of ut this, for man those who too r machines beca k to talk abo w ed Jeff Fric most of the olde by – if you kno azine contact to be right on easy to come beUnthem. They’re how did you onably priced. people collect beginning, normally reas the ’re at t they star and ly priced. – PM: Jeff, to es? where to look never reasonab are gam e se r Tho thes . olde hine ed in ld’s Series. always liked come interest ing pinball mac less it’s a Wor antiques. I’ve ld’s best-sell always liked es is the wor s. I’ve had sol70,000 units. Jeff Frick: I’ve World’s Seri in the early 1990 game sold over trometed in pinball t I’ve read that liking the elec things. I star ever. From wha I found myself I and ar time s prew long hine a t the for id-state mac gued me abou solid-states. So a ent of more than the r thing that intri I think it was chanical stuff ct. Ninety perc I think the othe s. From there gambling aspe nical machine of gambling. see the intricacy s is the entire and kind r e hine did electromecha olde som mac in used aw see ion. As you grow machines were ething like a Jigs Series,, you can natural progress these prewar together som on the World’s lved in putting the backglass kwork mechanding on the that was invo If you look at of points depe look at that cloc rent amounts that’s the Series, and you constructed, re you earn diffe or a World’s was whe that how pens artistry of price also hap nism and the g pinball. The I was collectin path I took as

r machines as for a lot of othe that And that goes had a payout score you got. s that actually Airway machine s; if you get d cent foun I 50 . well ts you get ch is get 12,000 poin of thing. Whi said that if you ar – that kind doll a d, get roye you were dest 15,000 points al and they all were made illeg why, when they red. bling disappea a lot of that gam s that are pure t other machine y t talking abou machines, earl When you star ulators, the slot g and the trade stim all for gamblin ly mechanical: were they , you stuff like that Skee Ball and play EM bingos and you n w whe that. You kno that? Next year I really enjoy s and stuff like tic spiders, ring give them little get little plas points and then let people earn at TPF I may ld be fun. wou that k s. I thin plastic gimmick the e sold from e games wer lot of the day thes that was a PM: Back in . Back then $30 to $40 factory for e you could get money. Especially sinc a lot of money. Jeff Frick: It was dime? for a what, a er dinn k a stea rn a huge retu ly also had games probab PM: But the I ent. the gambling. with on investm lly ecia yone y’ve got to. Esp Because ever Jeff Frick: The on investment. if they ed the return in the game, think that help more coin into one put to at always wants , or a dollar rette, or a beer can win a ciga the bar. ut your coltell a bit abo PM: Can you and other coin war pinball lection of pre es? operated gam ed restoration l, I just finish Jeff Frick: Wel gumball maonal Hunter on a 1949 Nati ly nice. I have real out ed chine. That turn pinballs, of es Seri World’s three 1934 ribbon for a best in show which one won . A 1933 s at TPF 2016 hine mac in pre-1960 hine – but it’s mac that Jigsaw – I love have also I . ored rest being the middle of a Gottlieb , which was a 1932 Majestic bog colla Manufacturin and Standard to shows ging that one ration. I’m brin ar colg out my prew as well. Roundin which ay, Airw Bally lection is a 1933 games at in pre-1960s won second of ted the History star and TPF 2015 idea. Pinball booth t of tioned mos PM: You men ably are reason these games where to w kno you priced if pinjukebox and look. At the es prewar gam ball shows the m to e never see shown ther priced. ably son be rea e they t, well, whil Jeff Frick: Righ

buylot of people , I don’t see a priced like that machines at seemed to be es I put on my price. The pric can have t it then you ing them at that wan ly real I e of a “if you right now, so TPF were mor in my collection t those games ld’s Series righ it” price. I like have three Wor I’m ing them. I do be a bit less. intend on keep one go for may let to be ng will willi . I’m hoping that now, so I’d be now t righ second one Hopefully I will working on the I can bring two. that year’s TPF, so with that one ready for next ’60s category w in the prewin Best in Sho year as well. th Pinball boo le History of did the who e behind PM: So how driving forc Who was the ? ther toge come ay ght my Airw that? percent. I brou that t was me 100 enjoyed playing Jeff Frick: Tha ybody super 2015 and ever ribbon. It was w Sho in to the TPF in a Best ody nd place for $100 to anyb game. I got seco it. I was offering The the kids liked se no one did. wonderful, all hole and of cour games to ten balls in a able to get all es, so I had two Seri ld’s Wor s, got the n in Austin, Texa dow next year I also lives also Whittle, who he liked the bring. Brandon well because ar games as la, one prew erel two Cind ght a had bou hines. I also have to had four mac it would be neat Airway. So I rs. I thought es with flippe playing that Airof the first gam y people liked y ther. So man display as man to be it put them all toge ld wou to a ght, “How cool I haven’t been way that I thou Partly because as possible?” one prewar mathat even show vals festi of lot chine. Chiof TPF at the ed Kim and Ed idea So I approach and floated the Expo last year cago Pinball h. They said, of Pinball boot ory Hist a g y maof doin idea. How man t grea a be “That would a booth?” And you get in such I chines could .” I knew that work on that g I said, “Let me don would brin two and Bran g brin ld wou in Austin, other friends our of two. One got me to six. that so two, Scott, also has on the Pinside promoting it Then I started p and other oo prewar grou forum, the Yah do this Histowere going to we that es, plac Festival Texas Pinball h. boot all ry of Pinb I created me the space. graciously gave like, “I’ll and people were a big poster ” So we too! bring one, bring one.” “I’ll at the 2016 twelve games ended up with t. So I told TPF grea was it show and I’m h out. Next year they better watc 24 to 30 space for like going to ask . things my way games, if I have n at TPF was whe My favorite part Series the World’s people played the just shooting and they were . play to knowing how ball, not really s, everyspins in the base When that ball 81

Rockola’s 1934 World Series

museum areas out back I use as storage rent sheds that ’t have listed. and three diffe ll parts I don and with parts. Sma about 500 coils and they’re filled . I picked up t coils of list part I know wha I do have a nice for the most so , base the data I put them in . and things I have kind of parts es, most of g on these gam ulike workin e with a man PM: Since you ly didn’t com fix them? games probab these older learn how to you did manual. tics. How come with a ’t al or schema don lly : Well, they usua working on Dan Ferguson s, a fixer. I like cars, a tinker, I gues yed working on I’ve always been teenager I enjo ics when I when I was a ed in electron things. Even train was I s. also did nograph puter stuff. I radios and pho com did I was ice and then work when I was in the serv g construction the job was doin exposed to all drafting. Our ge. So I was dthrough colle es. From woo putting myself these old gam all on k wor rs to pute and stuff you need way before com from ics, c electron relays. It’s a difand s working to basi noid all sole that stuff. It’s on those and chips and all through working pattern you go ferent thought newer boards. my ys worked with parts. I alwa h is of mechanical it works, whic There’s a lot ring out how of it is just figu hands. A lot

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nt coin-op amuseme ay of books on um has a displ with games Top: The muse is also packed of the museum Below: The attic

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131

www.pinball-magazine.com

restoration Dallas Makersp Interview: Jon

restoration

ace’ VECTOR Co m

athan Joosten

mittee

, Copy editing

: Erik Kos, Gis

i Cannizzaro

Mortal Combat

Shawn Chr istian (37), certified pinb hoarder and all one of the origi nal founders of the Dallas/F ort Worth Pinb all & Arcade Club. Actively participates in anyt hing pinball-related and served as the floor manager at the last three Texas Pinb all Festival shows, as well as partial orga nizer of the TPF swap mee t. Has been activ e in the pinball hobby for seven years and currently owns approxim ately 75 pins and other arcade games . . . a number whic h is destined to keep growing.

Nicholas Sch ell (44), a.k.a . Nick Dangerous and foun der of the VEC TOR Committee. A lifelo ng rebellious arcade geek who formally joined the pinb all hobby in late 2013. Own s 20 classic EM’ s and three solid-state pins , following a “best of both worlds” appr oach to resto ration using old and new tech nology. Tend s not to trust anyone who doesn’t like Led Zeppelin. Has also been known to appe ar in public dressed as Lo Pan.

t the 2016 Texas Pinball Festival, the TOR Commit VECtee (Vintage Electromec Conservancy hanical of Technology Restoration , Operation, ) of the Dal and las Makerspa about a doz ce showcased en games res tored by its house. Two members inof the machin es (Mortal Snow Derby) Kombat X and won Best in Show categor and two oth y ribbons ers (Time Wa rp and Freedo won runner m prototype) -up ribbons as well. In ord more about er to find out the Dallas Ma kerspace and Committee, the VECTOR Pinball Ma gazine inte rviewed VEC 84 -

Jayson Woo ds (29), curr ent chairperson of the VEC TOR Committ ee. Recently joined the doub le-digit club with 10 machines in his collection inclu ding his first EM-rifle gam e. Also the chie f “Imagineer” of the Scottish Rite Children ’s Hospital which features whimsical art installations, train sets, inter active games and other unique amusem ents.

TOR founde r Nicholas Sch ell, Shawn Chr Jayson Woods istian, and VECTOR Com mittee Chair. PM: Jayson , for those tha t have no idea erspace is, what a Makcould you brie fly explain the the Dallas Ma idea behind kerspace? Jayson Woods: The easiest way to describe a Mak that it is a spac erspace is e for sharing tools and kno tribute our reso wledge. We all urces so that coneveryone can to do. Our mem do what they bers pay about want $50 a granted 24/7 month a piec access to all e and are of the tools and the facility itsel f.

and Snow Derb

y were awarded Best in Show ribbons at TPF Left to right: 2016, Nich

olas Schell, Rod Freedom and Time Warp were a lot of EMs to ney Black, Nick runners up. the Texas Pinb Sainz, Shawn Christian all Festival. I trend. We have think it started since about dou a bled the num Sha wn are at the show Chr istian: One inte ber of EMs that . It used to be resting thing very the abo solid-state heav Dallas Makersp days there are ut the members y. Nowaa lot of EMs and ace, especiall at y in VECTOR many are in tophave a complem tion. The bar , is how man notch condientary backgrou goes up every y year on the vari nd or technica are a lot who of the games. ety and the qua l skill. There work in IT with Usually there lity networks, com are some terr min g, rations at the electronics, facil puters, program ific woodrail show, too. ity maintenance restoa lot of technica and so on. So l competency we have in the mix. Gen people who are Nicholas Sch erally the kind able to pick up ell: I can rem of a skill rapidly ember attendin lot of the issu many years befo and don’t have g TPF for man es you might enco re I actively got a y, unter with peo clue about wha into the hobby restoring pinb ple who have t they are doin of fixing and all machines. no g: just tearing I remember breaking it, putt way the EMs something apar I always love ing looked and soun it t, back together d the ded on the festi wrong and it smoke. in those earlier goes up in val floor. But days – when I was just a play ways annoyed er – I was alby the fact that so many of them PM: All three mechanisms, of you guys had sloppy reels that wou have been doi ldn’t turn, wea torations at bumpers – just ng k pin flipp ball resVEC ers and pop TOR on you so many prob r own games. lems. Ultimat any plans to people away beca ely, the EMs drov Are there take things use they set such e a step further Nicholas Schell: low expectations sad, really, beca ? Eventually, yes. . Which is use EMs are the I have a few cust best! That’s why mind that I’d liver the best om games in like to develop I want to deEM experience once I get past I can for othe phase. From nowadays, so the big restorat rs. Especially a psychologica few people even ion since, l perspective remember how about what exac they played whe I’ve been thin fast and snap tly a pinball mac king n new. py hine is. Like, pelling about what is so com the good one s? What is it Is it about the abo Shawn Christia ut the geometry? flow? Or the shot n: EM games s? Or the over look simple, it oscillate betw very simple and all pacing? Doe and the rules een fast and straight forward, s are slow play style compelling? Wha but these gam designed to eat s? Is the ligh es have been t makes it so, ting your money. The and why? y really make Recently I star you work for ted looking into it. EM rifle gam Pinball itself EM arcade gam es and other is a microcosm es. I just enjo old of the entire ente y the old gam ness. The ligh the new ones rtainment busi es a lot more ts, the callouts, and they’re a than the visceral app lot more affo and ear – you getting into the rdable when eals to the eye see it in public hobby. you’re kiosks, marque – it is designed es, light displays entirely just to call attention pect fascinates to itself. That me. Especially aswhen thinking ences between about the diffe EMs and solid r-state games. EMs are like slot

Contents of Pinball Magazine No. 4: Huge in-depth, career covering cover story on Mark Ritchie + lots of others talking about working with Mark Ritchie 17-page article on the making of Dutch Pinball’s The Big Lebowski 15-page interview with LCD artist Jean-Paul de Win 12-page article on Texas Pinball Festival 12-page interview with Jay Stafford on the Internet Pinball Database 4-page interview with Jeff Frick on collecting prewar games 7-page article on Dallas Makerspace’ VECTOR Comittee 6-page article on Lone Star Pinball Museum 8-page interview with Binge Trigger artist Lippy 6-page article on Pinball Universe (Germany) and more . . . (over 180 pages in total) Pinball Magazine No. 4 will be available early November 2016 For all (ordering) info, please visit:

www.pinball-magazine.com (it’s more like a book)

special

Pinball designer Pat Lawlor talks Dialed In! Interview: Jonathan Joosten, Copy editor: Paul Rubens

In 2014 Jack Guarnieri of Jersey Jack Pinball (JJP) announced that veteran pinball designer Pat Lawlor (The Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Road Show, Whirlwind, Earthshaker and many other titles) would be designing the third game to be manufactured by JJP. It would be a game in a standard cabinet, not a widebody, and it would have an original theme. It took almost three years, but JJP’s third game was finally revealed during Pinball Expo 2016 as Dialed In! The playfield is not only packed with interactive features, but it also plays great. Some info like the name, theme and some of the features of the game were leaked online, so people knew the theme was related to a cell phone and many had their doubts about it. But playing is believing. While the game does feature a cell phone, that’s not what the game is all about. Pinball Magazine talked to game designer Pat Lawlor for about an hour, two days after the initial presentation of the game. PM: Pat, first of all I have to compliment you on a great game. What can you tell me about it? Pat Lawlor: Dialed In! started 2 years ago when I went to work with Jack. It started out as an original development idea. The idea was that you ended up with a phone that was really powerful. It could connect you with strange events in

this difficult place that we had created. The entire world of Quantum City – this strange place with its moving signs and all kinds of other things – came later. It was part of the natural progression of building the game up. I think it turned out pretty nice. Almost everybody I’ve met this weekend has said, “Wow, this is really nice”.

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The idea with the cell phone was the phone would have different things on it that would allow you to connect with disasters in the city. It wouldn’t effect what’s causing the disaster, although you will be connected to strange people who were telling you what was going on. PM: If we look back at some of your game designs, like Earthshaker and Whirlwind, it seems logical to figure you like to use natural disasters as game themes. In Dialed In! you combineseveral different disasters in one game.

Pat Lawlor: Early in my career, I did a couple of games that, by the end of the second one, people were calling me the “Master of Disaster”. I did Earthshaker of course and I did Whirlwind. When you do a disaster theme on a cartoon level, people seem to connect. Of course you don’t focus on what a real disaster does to people. You do it on a cartoon level. People connect with that right away. They understand what it is. And because those kinds of things are understandable by everybody around the world, I don’t have to go through great explanations of what’s going on. I just have to present this cartoon effect of what it is and then people have fun playing with it.

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special PM: Contrary to earlier games you worked on that had some budget restraints, here you had carte blanche. Pat Lawlor: When Jack hired me, he kept telling me, “Other pinball companies are always trying to figure out what they can remove from the game. We’re trying to figure out what we can put on the game.” He really believes that his business direction is that his pinball machines should be as full-featured as possible. His customers want games that are as full as possible of toys, effects, lights – the whole thing that you see on a lot of games. He realizes that that’s a lot more expensive to build. His belief always was that if he produced those games then he still would be able to sell more of them on the back-end. I think that’s been borne out by his first two games. If you take a look at Wizard of Oz, they’re still building Wizard of Ozs three years in now. People still order that game for Christmas, for example. I think he has proven that in the modern era of building pinball machines, you can do what you need to do to build that kind of product. PM: As game designer you didn’t just design the playfield of the game, but you also redesigned the cabinet. Pat Lawlor: Yes, I redesigned the cabinet. There were a couple of things that came into play here. First of which was that there was nothing wrong with the cabinet that they had done for Wizard of Oz and for The Hobbit. They were fine. But you can always fix the details, right? You can always come back and make things a little better and a little better and better. When they started the company, they were more worried about trying to get a pinball game together than they were trying to reinvent the wheel with the cabinet. They had problems early on where they were trying to think what they could do with the electronic system and they ended up putting it at the bottom of the cabinet. Everybody understands that’s not an optimal way to put the electronics in a pinball machine, because it’s harder to get to, you can drop things into the electronics, et cetera. One of the goals was to get the electronics up in the backbox, where it had been for many years. There were some other goals that I added on for myself when I was redesigning the backbox and the cabinet.

The first of which was that cabinets in my view always should come out of the box, we should be able to put them up on their legs and the game should be at 6 ½ degrees, which is what we expect the game to be. I shouldn’t have to go flip the levelers to try to get the game to be what it wants. If it’s on a leveled floor, it should be pretty much ready to go. So that was goal one. One of the secondary goals was, they wanted to get the volume control switch off from the coin door where it had been put on the first couple of games. As long as we we’re doing that, the software guys talked about how they could make the volume switch on the game software controllable for a home user, so that you don’t have to open the coin door to change the volume on the game. The other part that we did in the base cabinet was, we stiffened the cabinet so that when the bass speaker was used in the cabinet, we didn’t get any rattling or problems that would go with that – we actually stiffened the mounting for the speakers. For the backbox (which I’m pretty proud of), we wanted to be able to move more air with the speakers. The way Wizard of Oz and Hobbit was done was, they had these small midrange speakers that were up there. And again, they were fine. They did what they were supposed to do. But we were trying to move some more air, so we can get a little more mid range out of the game and get better separation of what we were doing. So I came up with putting speakers and mounting them in a reflex fashion so that we could fit the speakers in without them pointing directly at you. I was sitting and sketching and in doing that ultimately I came up with the new mounting system for the display. It had always been a goal of mine that if we have a display back there, it had to be serviceable. There’s nothing worse if you go to service a pinball machine than fighting with the components while we have to just simply change a fuse for example. So I went to my workshop and welded up a couple of different hinges and we worked on it. After I came in with the prototype – the mechanical engineering group that

special worked with me — we came up with the latching system that’s in the back. We went through five or six iterations so that it was nice, smooth, wonderful and all that stuff.

underneath the game. A lot of the mechanisms that we build require some minimum amount of room under a game in order to get them to work.

Then of course the art on the backglass had to fit in all of this somehow. That was another thing I came up with on my drawing board. I had the speaker panel mounting on top of two screws and then you could slide the backglass in behind it, drop it back down and it would all fit.

In fact, I can give you a perfect example for that happening as a problem in The Hobbit. They had the electronics, which were in the base of the cabinet. They had to come up with a way for all the pop-up characters that were on the playfield to fit in the space between the lowered playfield and the electronics. Those mechanisms had to be redesigned about six times to try and make them work doing that. There’s only so much space you’ve got to do that kind of stuff. The more you’re limited on space – it becomes a mental gymnastics exercise of trying to figure out how mechanically you can get it to work. So you want to leave some space down there if you’re doing mechanical pinball.

Without getting into the crazy technical details, there’s some amazing work that our cabinet makers had to do to make all of this possible, because the geometry was being changed somewhat. One of the mantras in what we do as manufacturers, especially for our European customers, is that we do everything we can to never change a cabinet so that less games could be put into a container. There are obvious reasons for that. The people who are ordering games in Europe would be paying a much higher shipping cost, which they have to pass on to their customers. So the mantra is that we have to keep the form factor of the cabinet and the backbox the same, so that we can slide it into a box that allows the same number of games to go into a shipping container. We went through probably six iterations, modeling it in Solidworks, of how we did that cabinet, how it goes together and how it does what it does. You look at it normally and think: “Well, it’s just another cabinet,” but if you very carefully look at all the dimensions of what we’ve built, you would see that there were some radical differences in what we did to make it look the same, look elegant and still fit in a container. PM: Did you ever try to get more games into a container? Pat Lawlor: Well, you’ve got the form factor of what a modern pinball machine is. You could change that if you wanted to make the game smaller. For example, a Safe Cracker-sized game, you could probably get more games in a container. The question would be: “Would your customers accept that?” At this point in time, especially with what Jersey Jack Pinball believes is what people want, we decided the form factor should stay the same. It should be a full pinball machine.

PM: If we don’t count Revenge from Mars, this is your first game with an LCD in the backbox. How did that influence your design? Pat Lawlor: Originally when I started this with Jack, the game team talked about possibly using a slightly smaller monitor, just because we were doing an original theme and we were worried about being able to fill up the screen. The more we thought about it, the more we though: “Well, everybody expects that a JJP game has the full monitor, so we’ll just use the same monitor we’ve always used. What we’re going to have to do is, we’re going to figure out what we’re going to put on this.” Early on we were throwing out ideas for various scenarios for what we could do in the back. One of the earliest was the idea of the city and that the city would be back in the monitor. As you travel around the city you would see different parts of the city – and the fact that it’s a disaster theme – being destroyed. Somewhere into the first six months, we then came up with the secondary idea of turning it into like a news program, where you’re watching a news program of what was going on in the city. We’ve tossed those ideas around for a little bit. Once we explained to people what we were up to, they grasped the idea. It’s pretty intuitive to be looking at the back glass and seeing what’s happening all around the city. And then of course we’ve built on top of that and on top of that and on top of that.

PM: I was more thinking like making the cabinet less deep and still have enough room to fit in all the mechanisms coming down from the playfield. Pat Lawlor: You can do that. However, you’ll run into two problems, one of which isn’t obvious. The first thing is when people play a pinball machine – especially people who have played pinball for a long time – they expect that the game has some amount of heft to it. If you start to lighten the game, it begins to feel like a toy. They really like the idea that when they walk up to a pinball machine, they can push it around a little bit. It takes a lot to do that.

Any game with a video monitor takes a whole lot of work compared to an older pinball machine, because you have to get those video assets from somewhere. In the case of The Hobbit or Wizard of Oz, those video assets came from the movies. But still if you look at Wizard of Oz, there’s a lot of artistic overlay work being done for stories, trying to tell you what’s going on in the game. All of that work has to be done by someone. It’s a lot of video work.

Part two is that if you start to change the bottom cabinet much – as a game designer – that severely impacts what you can do

So our game teams have grown from what they had been, to include three or four video people whose sole job is sitting

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John Youssi’s original sketch of Quantum City

there generating some of those assets all day. In the case of Dialed In!, we didn’t have the assets from a movie. We were starting from scratch. In effect they had to build what looked like a video game, put it in a backglass and generate all those assets from scratch. That started with a 2D artist, John Youssi, who sketched the city and then ended up going through the video guys who took all of that, turned it into real assets that they could put in the back and then had to render them all to do what we want. We also made the decision early on that unlike a real video game – where those assets are done in 3D so that you can move around in them the way you would do when you’re playing a Playstation – we we’re a pinball machine and we didn’t need to go to that extreme. At least not yet. The assets that are in Dialed In! are what I call the 2½D assets. You see the buildings, you see the things that are going on and you can move around. But in fact, they’re pretty much rendered 2D models that we can zoom in, zoom out and do things with, which saved us a tremendous amount of time over trying to do that with 3D model with what we could do. Like I’ve said, we’re not a first-person shooter game. We don’t need to have people wandering around in our city, so we didn’t really need to be spending time doing that much stuff. PM: The animations on the LCD are made by JeanPaul de Win, who is featured in the upcoming fourth issue of Pinball Magazine. Now that the game has been presented we decided to add Dialed In! to that interview. Currently the city is empty, but Jean Paul mentioned the plan is to add people in these 2D animations so that they responded to what happens in the city. Pat Lawlor: Always in a comical sense. Always as if you were watching that. In this country, cartoons are on TV on Saturday morning for kids. I said last night at the talk I gave that we were very careful when we were doing this, based on world events and based on things that happen in the modern era. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t have people with guns. We didn’t want people with bombs. We didn’t want terrorists in our city. We didn’t want any of that. I don’t want a ten-year old going to sleep being afraid to play their pinball machine.

JJP prides itself on being a family friendly game company. We know that not everybody that plays the game has a tenyear old kid, but we also know that some of them do. And we want to make sure that the kind of entertainment we’re building is suitable for all audiences. We have meteor storms in the game and acid rain. As everybody’s been saying all weekend, there’s only about 20% of the software in the game right now. There’s a whole whiteboard back at our office that’s full of what is yet to come in the game. And some of it’s pretty fun. We just ran out of time before we were going to show the game to do what we were going to do. PM: You definitely stole the show here at Pinball Expo with this game. Of the three new game titles that were revealed Dialed In! was the only one that had five games on the show floor. All five were playable and they seemed to hold up very well. Pat Pawlor: I appreciate that. One of the things that I’m most heartened about this weekend – I spent an inordinate amount of time with our mechanical engineering guys and women, telling them that: “What we do has to be bulletproof.” We went through many iterations of some of the mechanisms that are on that game. We just spent three days here with the games being played non-stop. I have a picture in my phone I took because I was so excited. I hadn’t seen this in years. There were people waiting three and four deep to play the game. We have five games. They were waiting three or four deep to play!

special The games have been played non-stop since we’ve presented thm and not once did we go in to one of those games to fix any mechanical issue. We’ve had a ball trap, which we knew we would have, because I didn’t have enough time to finish doing that. But we have not any mechanical issues in the game at all. So I’m really, really heartened by that that we did our homework and that the stuff we’re putting in the game is going to be ready for primetime when they’re ready to go. PM: You’ve mentioned that the software is currently at 20%-25%. How long is it going to take to get to 100%? Pat Lawlor: The new management at JJP’s goal is that when we ship our product, it will be 100% software complete. Now of course you’ll always going to find a bug somewhere after you ship a game that you want to fix. But the norm in pinball the last five years has been that people ship games that aren’t complete. And then they tell you: “Oh we’ll get around to 70% software someday.” We don’t want to do that. We want to say: “You’re spending a lot of money on a product. You expect that the product should come out of the box, be fun and be ready to go. You shouldn’t have to wait to play the toy you just bought because we couldn’t get around to doing the software on time.” So one of the goals is when we ship Dialed In! it will be complete. They said the other night they’re talking about the second quarter of next year. The secret part of this is that if we can get them done faster, we will. We’re looking forward to putting in the rest of what we had in mind and then getting the game on the assembly line.

Some of the things that are being scrolled across the bottom are science headlines that are strange but true. We really, really wanted to build in some of that kind of humor. You don’t have to get it to play the game. You don’t have to understand that part of the game. But my goal always was that somebody’s going to be sitting in a bar somewhere, they’re going to be staring at the game, they’re going to see the name of the characters – QED, they’re going to pick up their cell phones, type in QED and see what it is. I always thought that would be humorous to do. PM: You also brought back Crazy Bob. Pat Lawlor: Crazy Bob is a staple that we used to have in some of our games at Williams. He’s a generic character who either sells things, or buys things. He just turns up everywhere. In this case, Crazy Bob is the guy who sold you the cell phone by mistake. He wasn’t supposed to get the cell phone to begin with and he sold you the cell phone by mistake. Now he turns up in the game from time to time, bringing you different things. Crazy stuff from his store. I would say that this weekend, out of all of the reception for the game, the Selfie Mode in the game – where the game is taking your picture and putting it up on the backglass – has been the most well received function that we did for the game. If I told you that a whole room full of grown men would be standing around laughing and playing a pinball machine that had a Selfie Mode in it, you would say to yourself: “Well, that makes no sense. These are grown men. They won’t think that’s fun at all.” And I just watched a room full of people all standing there laughing, playing and having a great time doing it.

The technology that’s driving that in our game is pretty impressive. We have the camera on the game that goes looking PM: You mentioned how the game portrays what’s for faces. It does facial recognition. If you have people - like happening in Quantum City in a comical way. You’ve we have here at the show – standing around the game, it will also managed to bring back humor into pinball. pick out different faces and display the different people standSome of the headlines scrolling by on the LCD are hiing around the person playing the game. larious. Pat Lawlor: There’s literally hundreds of those that are going PM: So it’s not a static camera, but it can actually to end up in the final version of the game. One of my mantras move? in building these games is that somebody who’s just sitting Pat Lawlor: The camera can’t move but it scans the entire there watching the game should see things – after it’s been played for a month – that they’ve still never The screen of Dialed In! with the news headlins scrolling at the bottom seen before. Those little headlines that are coming across the bottom, there’s some really funny things. The other thing about Quantum City that’s pretty funny is that – I’m a closet physics junkie – one of the things that we’re trying to build in here are lots of inside jokes for the physics guys. The little electric company mascot that’s charging the phone – its initials are QED, which stands for Quantum Electro Dynamics, which is a branch of physics. Quantum mechanics is another part of physics.

special This is one of the tiny little things that we do when we design a pinball. The bracket that holds that phone was redesigned four times in order to get it to be where we wanted so that you could see the right loop shot coming to the right upper flipper, so that you could see the ball in the jet bumpers, so that you could see what was going on around the phone. There’s a whole sightline thing that we worked on to ensure that the player experience is as good as we could make it.

Screenshot of the Selfie Mode, taken from the Buffalo Pinball live stream with Steven Bowden playing the game

field of vision and goes looking for faces. It’s doing that all in real-time and rendering it all to go with the game, which is pretty amazing. There’s more features that are being added using that in the game, as we progress. One of those features is that the phone company wants their phone back, so you become a “wanted” person and you’re going to appear on the wanted poster on the back of the game. So it’s not just Selfie Mode we’re doing. We’re also integrating it in the total theme that goes with that.

PM: If we look at the layout of the playfield there are some elements that are reminiscent of shots from games like The Addams Family, Road Show, Ripley’s and other games you designed. Do you have any comments on the playfield design? Pat Lawlor: There are some things I’d wanted to do for a long time that I have put into this game. The shot lines that are in there with the inserts, which I had originally planned on putting in Wizard Blocks. It’s been eighteen years since Wizard Blocks. That’s two decades. In that time, nobody figured out what I was going to do in Wizard Blocks. The characters in this game actually can attack you. And what people find when they get to see this in person is we did a little bit better work on the software.

PM: It’s an action-packed game, full-featured, the first pinball game with three displays. The When you’re in multiball, you can cell phone is helping the playshoot jackpots like you can in every er by telling them what to do. other game. But once you started It’s also placed on the playfield shooting jackpots, the characters where players can actually look in the game start attacking you at it during the game, instead of back. There are incoming shot looking at the backbox. lines on those small inserts that Pat Lawlor: One of the criticisms are in toward your flippers and outside of this building this weekthey trace on in. If you can hit end was: “Well, I hate my cell where the shot came from bephone so I must hate this game.” fore it hits you you’ll get a SuIt’s really funny that people who per Jackpot. If you don’t hit it are playing the game here just get before it hits you, there is a it. They understand that this deThe prototype playfield of Pat Lawlor’s Wizard Blocks, the third Pinball 2000 game that never went into production big explosion and then you’ll vice that looks like a cell phone, lose control of that flipper it starts modes, it explains to for some small amount of time. It accomplishes a lot of things. you what’s going on in the game and it delivers new and difFirst of all, it’s very exciting because once players understand ferent experiences in the game. It was very difficult for me to that there’s something incoming and they’re in trouble, they place that in the game where it didn’t block the view of the get really crazy in trying to do anything they can to stop it. It’s other things that were going on in the game. I think we did gratifying in that you get a Super Jackpot for stopping that what we’d started out to do. I had it in different spots when I shot if you can manage to do that. And it solves the problem of was doing the layout of the game. the extreme tournament players standing there cradling two balls on a flipper for fifteen minutes, while they play with one, One of the things that I always keep in mind when I’m doing because now there’s an incoming shot and you can’t leave the the layout of the game is I’m constantly visualizing them in balls on that flipper. You have to play the game. And I’m a 3D.“What does this look like to a player? Is this ramp going big fan of forcing people to play the game. I’ve always felt like to be in front of something I really want to see? Is this thing that’s part of what my job is. that I want to put in the game going to be blocking the view of something else that I really want to see?”

special There’s nothing worse than playing against a guy who’s sitting there trapping two balls on a flipper and then playing with the other ball for the next ten minutes. I find that a complete perversion of what pinball is really all about. It’s okay to catch the balls, it’s okay to set up a shot – it’s okay to do that. But don’t stand there and shut down the rest of the game by doing that. Right now we have preliminary software, it’s not explained very well right now, but it’s been really fun this weekend watching people play. Once they understand what’s going on, when they see that feature, they just go crazy. They love it. PM: Usually the game designer is overseeing the contributions of everybody on the team, like artwork, animations, mechanical engineering and so on. The design team is much bigger now than on previous games you did. Does that make it more difficult for you? Pat Lawlor: Way more difficult. The game designer was always like a manager. Not only did he do the game design, but he had to know what the members of his team were up to and where they were going and that kind of stuff. With the added video assets, and the complexity of what we built in mechanical, there was an awful lot going on. On a given day I come in to work and there’s a line of people waiting for me to ask, “What do we do here? What should we do here? This doesn’t work. What can we do to fix that?” It can be a very stressful experience if you haven’t done it before. The other thing is at JJP we’re in the process of building our staff from the ground up. So we have people that we are teaching how pinball works. By that I don’t mean how the game play is, I mean how we design the mechanical stuff so it lives in an environment like a pinball machine. And a lot of that is not obvious. There’s a lot of not obvious things for mechanical engineers to learn about what we do. They’re usually shocked when we tell them that not only does their mechanism have to survive a million cycles of running around back and forth, but it has to be hit by a steel ball that’s trying to tear it to pieces. That’s a very upsetting thing to a lot of mechanical people. So we’re teaching people, we’re bringing people on the line. The people who are the current investors in JJP are in this for the long haul. They want to build the best pinball company in the world. If that means we’re not the biggest pinball company in the world, that’s okay. We’re fine with that. We want to build Mercedeses, we don’t want to build Yugos. We think that there’s a customer base for that kind of pinball machine, which is why we’re doing what we’re doing. PM: At Pinball Expo the Limited Edition and Collector’s Edition were announced. A week later Jack Guarnieri announced a Standard model of the game and the production numbers of the LE were also adjusted. Pat Lawlor: Right now what the upper management is doing is they’re deciding how they want to do the marketing for the product. And I have to defer those questions to them. They

know what’s going on with that. I’m the guy who has to dress the game up to look pretty and do all the things that you’d expect a modern pinball machine to do. I really want to see these games still put on location, so a lot of work that we do in these games is still about getting them to make enough money to put them out on the street. PM: A lot of games are becoming too expensive for operators to operate. Pat Lawlor: There’s an easy answer for that. The easy answer is, the price for the game is a sliding scale for an operator. An operator is a business man and he’s looking for a return on investment. So if the game makes whatever amount of money it makes, and that is a fair return on investment, then they will operate the games. Let’s look back in the ‘90s – we sold our pinball machines to distribution for approximately $2,800 (USD). They were then taken and sold across the world at whatever mark up needed to be done to handle the shipping and what went with it. In the ‘90s for example, in Germany, they were able to get one Deutsche Mark per play and they were able to get a special amount of plays for five Marks. In the United States, we were never able to get that equivalent of money per play. People were ingrained in the idea that they will only pay 25 cents or 50 cents (US) to play a pinball machine. Because in Germany they were able to get that incremental amount of money into the game, even though they have to pay the shipping and they were paying more for the product, the German business people still had a return on investment. It was a business for them. In the US, we made less money on the games. But of course the games weren’t near the costs of shipping or whatever. They were cheaper to buy here. So as a result, the cost for play could stay lower and there was still a return on investment for that business person. I’ve said now for the last few years, these games are beautiful. If you could get a game with a dollar bill acceptor on it and it takes $1 to play the game, and that game could make $500 a week – which is well within the realm of possibility you have a business again. Because even though the game is $8,000, your return on investment becomes 20 weeks with the decline. Now a businessman can look at the product again and can say, “Oh, there’s a return on investment here for me. I can afford to deal with this again.” PM: Plus, there’s a higher resale value if the operator ever sells the game. Pat Lawlor: Correct. One of the goals we’re working on internally is getting our games on location to break that barrier again. To get the players who would look at it and say, “This looks like this could be fun. I’ll try this.” And we’ll see. Part of the design strategy inside Dialed In! was those kinds of features in the game where we could entice people to play the game who might ordinarily not play pinball.

special PM: I have a question on what may be a sensitive subject. On Dialed in! you put a theater that displays an image the player can shoot using a similar technique as on Pinball 2000. During the development of the game some information on the game’s features leaked online. A similar feature then appeared on a competitor’s game long before Dialed In! was shown to the public. Was that a result of that leak, or were they working on that themselves? How did it affect you when you found out? Or is this something you don’t want to address? Pat Lawlor: It’s okay, I can talk a little bit about it. I can’t speak for our competition. I do however know that the leak that was leaked was by a former disgruntled employee. There were a lot of things that we were working on in Dialed In! that two years ago were very different and unique. You asked me how I felt. That kind of leak is damaging. Not just to me personally, because I’ve kept and dreamed this stuff up and figured out how I’m going to do it. But it’s damaging to all the employees of the company. These people all rely on what we do for their livelihood. They come to work every day, they have kids, they get a paycheck. Our stock in trade is putting new, unusual and fun things in games that people want to play. That kind of thing is damaging to everybody. As far as what our competition was told, we have it on pretty good authority they were told what we were up to. I’ll let your readers draw their own conclusions. PM: You briefly mentioned how the online reception to the unveiling of the game was. It seems that online people seem to be reserved, to put it mildly, while people that played it here love the game. Pat Lawlor: Again, everybody that we’ve seen here, when they play it they turn around and say: “This isn’t a game about cell phone. This is a game that’s about this crazy city. And it’s fun!” In the modern age, I cautioned people that in any hobby, what you read online specifically from people who have never seen the product, you should take it with a grain of salt. It’s easy to form an opinion based on a picture. Especially when it comes to interactive entertainment it’s oftentimes very illuminating to make your own decision and decide what you might like, or what you’d like to see. Part of what occurred online this weekend was that when we did our presentation on Thursday night, we had no idea. We were not told that we were going to be streaming that presentation with the bad cameras that were there out on the internet. You can make the argument: “Oh you should’ve known.” But we didn’t know. We built that presentation based around the people in the room and what we wanted to present to the people in the room. When we get done, those people flooded to the front of the room. There were five games and they were actually playing the game. There were big smiles. What you told me was true: they love the game.

Once again, I’ve seen this over and over and over again. When I read things online, there’s an echo chamber of a certain group of people who feel like they have to feel vindicated that their point of view was always the right one. Everyone has an opinion there. There’s nothing wrong with opinions. I would say it’s always good to make an informed opinion as opposed to an opinion from something you’ve seen. PM: Well, it’s always better to form your opinion on actually playing the game yourself instead of assuming what it would be like. Pat Lawlor: Right. One of the things that’s about to occur is that all of the games that we’ve had here this weekend are getting ready to go. Jack’s taking them all out to shows. Jack’s taking them to Europe. Jack’s taking them to Australia. The world is going to get to actually visit and see these games. I would suggest for anybody who is just dead sure that this game is not something they might like that they get out and try it, because there’s an awful lot of fun built in to this game. There’s an awful lot of fun in this game. PM: Is there anything you would like to add? Pat Lawlor: Not really. Every once in a while, you build a game that is special. I’ve been lucky enough to build a lot of games in my career. The people who have seen this game this weekend have universally come up to me and said, “Pat, this game is special. It’s close. It’s fast. We get what it’s up to. There’s a lot of fun built in here. It can be challenging to play. And there’s a lot of humor in it.” I’m pretty certain that once people get a chance to experience this game for themselves, they’re going to hop on board and see what we were up to. The other thing was, we’re always trying to design pinball machines so that we can get new players to come play. We can’t just keep affording to have the same 50-year old people buying the games, who are stuck in one timeframe for what pinball used to be. I’m not saying that in a negative way. I’m saying people can like what they like. But the life of getting new business is new customers. So we’re going to keep pushing the envelope on features, technology and things that these games can do that people in the 21st century expect that a piece of entertainment should do. We can’t live in 1990 anymore, where we had the same display technology. My gosh! These are consumer products. Most people don’t even want a cell phone from five years ago. They don’t want a tablet from three years ago. They want the coolest, newest thing that they can get their hands on. PM: I think it’s safe to say you definitely raised the bar, not only for the competition, but also for yourself. Pat Lawlor: I appreciate that. I would say that our competition was pretty unhappy recently. [Laughing] Link: www.jerseyjackpinball.com

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Playfield detail of CENTAUR, Bally (1981). Design: Jim Patla, Art: Paul Faris.