Episode 11 - Life of a Former Pinball Programmer

Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/wedgeheadpodcast

In this episode, Alan and Alex are joined by Greg Dunlap, a computer programmer that worked at both Bally/Williams doing slot machines and then later at Pat Lawlor Designs, working on programming lightshows and animations for Early Stern Pinball machine titles like Ripley's Believe It or Not, Monopoly, Nascar, and Roller Coaster Tycoon. Hear about how a lifelong pinball fan becomes a a part of the industry he loves, and about what it was actually like.

Greg is a great example of one of the hundreds of unknown people that work as a team to create a final pinball machine.  We had a blast talking to him about shooting the Monster Bash whitewood with Lyman Sheets and going out gambling on a riverboat afterwards, working with Pat Lawlor at his house during the early Stern years (aka the dark ages), and discuss what it was actually like being a regular person working at a pinball company, including watching the conception of the infamous Pinball2000 attempt to save the pinball department at Williams, and his time running the Pinball Outreach Project (or POP) with his wife when he lived  in Portland.

Greg no longer works in the pinball industry, which we think makes this a uniquely interesting interview. We found it super interesting to hear a bit about the day to day life of being a pinball grunt, and we hope you will as well. 

Episode is made by adults, so...we may swear sometimes.

Transcript

[00:00:21.210] - Alan
Hello, everyone. This is Alan from the Wedgehead Pinball podcast. I am one half owner of the Portland Pinball bar Wedgehead, of which the podcast is named. We are in my co host, Alex the Water Boy's basement studio. How are you doing this evening, Alex?

[00:00:36.740] - Alex
I'm doing great this evening. I'm Alex. I'm one half of the Wedgehead podcast, if you're just tuning in for the first time. And we're also joined today by our friend Greg Dunlap, former resident of Portland. And as you're going to see, he's been involved with the pinball industry. He's a great guy, and we're excited to have with us today.

[00:00:53.200] - Alan
How are you doing, Greg?

[00:00:54.250] - Greg
Good.

[00:00:55.410] - Alan
You were one of the first people to reach out when we started this podcast.

[00:00:59.260] - Greg
Yeah.

[00:00:59.700] - Alan
Which I appreciate. You had some nice words to say and you didn't have to.

[00:01:06.870] - Greg
I'm not one to be nice unless I meet it, so you know that it was cool.

[00:01:11.380] - Alan
So that's why I felt good. I knew that much about you. I think we want to start talking with you about how did you get into the amusement and gaming industry and what year did you start at Williams?

[00:01:22.030] - Greg
I had been a pinball enthusiast since the played in my first pinball tournament in 1994. I was living in Chicago at the time. And for anyone who doesn't know, Chicago has always been the center of pinball. For all of history, basically, all of the pinball machines that were made in the United States have been made in Chicago. That's a little different now, but for most of history, that's been true. What would happen is that when the manufacturers had new games and they wanted to test them before they put them on the production line, they would make sample games and put them in arcades in the Chicago area. A lot of us who were into pinball would go and play those games. And as a result, sometimes the people at the manufacturers would come to change the code or clean the play field or check the audits or whatever, and you would run into them and you would meet them and you would get to know each other. The first person I ever met actually was World Cup Soccer was the game that was out at the time, and I was playing it. And the guy came up to check the audits, and he introduced himself and he said, "Hi, my name's Larry."

[00:02:30.090] - Greg
And it turned out that it was Larry Demar, who is not only a legend in the pinball industry, but also responsible for designing and programming a couple of video games that people might have heard of, namely Defender and Robotron and you know, so we would meet, get to know these guys, and they would come to Pinball Expo, and we would talk, and there were people who would throw parties, and they would come and stuff. And that was one of the cool things. And it got me thinking about how people make these, like, you know, you go out and you play pinball, but you never really think about the fact that there are people whose job it is to do this, right? And so at some point, I was at a job, and it was going like crap. And I reached out to Larry, and I said, hey, I'm interested in coming to work for you all. What do you got? And so I went in there and interviewed. I talked to him. I talked to Ted Estes. It went really well. But the problem was that at that time, this was, like, 1995 or 1996. Pinball was already well into its decline.

[00:03:33.770] - Greg
And they were like, we don't have anything in the pinball department, but there are a bunch of pinball people who are hanging out in the slot machine department. How would you like to work on slot machines? There's this group of people who are kind of biding their time in the hope that the pinball industry comes back and then we can all migrate back to the pinball department. And I said, that sounds great. I would love it. And that's what happened. And I went and worked at Williams on slot machines. But the thing is, all of their software engineering at the time was on the same floor. The offices were all mixed up with each other. And so I was, like, right in the thick of it as far as pinball went. And I had a lot of friends there already. I already knew Lyman. I already knew Dwight Sullivan. I already knew Louis Koziarz. I knew Ted and Larry. And so it was cool because I was, like, right there and hanging out with a bunch of people who I knew and were in the pinball. But I was working on slot machines, which was actually totally fascinating, too.

[00:04:30.470] - Alan
Tell us a little bit about working on slot machines. So what did you do for slot machines? What was the programming like that you did? And do you still see any of those machines out? Like, if we go to Vegas.... 

[00:04:42.620] - Greg
They all got retired.

[00:04:43.150] - Alan
Even in old Vegas? Because my mother in law lives in Vegas. So even if I go to Fremont, there's not maybe a couple of the ones that you worked on in the late 90s still around?

[00:04:53.140] - Greg
Probably not. Okay, so Williams started making some slot machines with the DMDs in them and kind of programming them to be a little more fun and light hearted. And so I worked on software for a couple of those. I found the gambling industry really interesting. I found sort of the psychology of how gambling works really interesting. I found, like, there's different things, like in the math of how they work and how working for a very regulated industry like the gambling industry. And I just found the whole business kind of fascinating.

[00:05:25.610] - Alex
Yeah, definitely.

[00:05:26.470] - Greg
I did that. But at the same time, when I walked into Williams, the first thing I did was to go say hi to Lyman, and he had a Whitewood on his office, and it was Monster Bash. And so that was like when I came in, was when monster Bash was in Whitewood. It was incredible. I find it hard to describe with words. It was a really amazing experience.

[00:05:48.720] - Alex
That's very cool.

[00:05:49.760] - Alan
Yeah. So, anyone listening at home, Lyman Sheats, the late Lyman Sheets was a programmer at Williams, previously at Data East, I think for a time, and then later on at Stern. He's pretty much considered the best pinball programmer of all time. Everyone has a lot of respect for him. He's a former PAPA pinball world champion as a player, just all around great human. I don't know anyone that has anything bad to say about Lyman as a person, and everyone really has a lot of respect for his games. So that's really cool that you got to be there with Lyman, and you were friends with Lyman and worked in the same building as Lyman.

[00:06:28.570] - Greg
It was one of those places where I always wanted to be there, and I lived like 5 miles away, so I lived really close. And so I would just go and I would work my day, and then I would just hang know me, and Lyman would play Monster Bash for a couple hours, or he'd say, hey, let's call Don and go out to the riverboats, and we'd go out to the riverboats and play blackjack until midnight. And more and more people started coming in. Like Keith Johnson started to work there and other people. And so it was really just like this community of people who always wanted to be just embedded in pinball constantly, and it was really cool.

[00:07:02.600] - Alex
That's interesting. I didn't ever really realize that it pulled so many pinball enthusiasts. I kind of thought back then it was just kind of like taking different talent.

[00:07:11.810] - Greg
Yeah, a lot of people like Louis Koziarzs, Keith. There's a guy, Duncan Brown, who was working there, another guy, Cameron Silver. And they were basically all recruited off of recgames pinball group. And that was how a lot of them got the attention of the manufacturers, because there were fans, and Larry always wanted to hire people who were passionate and creative more than anything else. Like, he wanted people who loved what they were doing and were going to bring lots of ideas to it.

[00:07:40.800] - Alex
That's really cool.

[00:07:41.490] - Alan
You can see it in the games, man, those games were awesome. Like the 90s Bally Williams games were a high point for pinball. I think a lot of creativity went in those games as far as the way the layouts that you were getting, the toys, the mechanisms and even the codes that we might look back now and go, these may be shallow by today's standards, by modern standards, but they were incredibly deep and offered a rich experience. I mean, we got wizard modes and you got very cool things that didn't happen in pinball before. Even though they were made for a location market, they still offered a deep and rich kind of playing experience. And still, honestly, some of my favorite games today.

[00:08:18.460] - Greg
Yeah, me too, for sure.

[00:08:19.900] - Alex
I guess after that. How long were you at Williams?

[00:08:22.970] - Greg
So I was there for about five years. What happened was Monster Bash got made and Cactus Canyon was in the works at the time, too. Everyone was trying to think, but everybody knew that the signs were not good for pinball. And that's when sort of the whole pinball 2000 thing started. And so it's always hard for me because I don't want to talk about it as if I am responsible for any of this work that happened. I just happened to be around and watch it happen as kind of an observer, which is interesting in and of itself. But I was there all through Pinball 2000 and then all through the shutdown, and then after that, all of the remaining pinball people in the slot department in the next year kind of all drifted off and bailed. I have to say that watching the pinball 2000 thing happen was probably one of the most amazing. I've never seen any group of people come together and pivot like that and just like reinvent every single piece of what they did for a living, top to bottom, in a year.

[00:09:28.010] - Alan
That was incredible.

[00:09:29.260] - Greg
It was absolutely amazing to see happen.

[00:09:32.280] - Alan
And on the inside, I saw the documentary, Tilt: the Battle to Save Pinball, I've seen it a bunch of times. The documentary sort of portrays it as like they were given a task to increase sales of pinball machines and do something different. And it seems like the project was successful, but then they shut it down anyway. Was it really a surprise like they say in the documentary, as far as, like, you were still getting shut down? Did any of the others like Pat (Lawlor) or George (Gomez) who are working on pin 2000, did they feel like it was actually going to save Pinball? And were they actually surprised that after Expo, I think it was supposed to be announced, and they were all surprised that they were still shutting down the pinball division after all?

[00:10:11.030] - Greg
Yeah. What had happened was that we had all gotten ready to take Star Wars: Episode One to Expo, actually. It was really incredible. They built this. I don't know if you all have seen this, but they built a tournament networking system for it so that you could get a card with a barcode on it and swipe it on a game, and then it would identify you, and then it would take your score and upload it to a central server so that you had live stats of the scores.

[00:10:37.610] - Alex
So you're telling me that stern insider connected is just Gomez redoing that? That's hilarious.

[00:10:44.800] - Greg
Pretty much.

[00:10:45.440] - Alex
And it's like the same technology and everything.

[00:10:47.840] - Greg
And it was funny because the pinball. Lyman and Cameron Silver, who are the ones who put this together, they kind of just did it in their spare time because it would be fun for expo. And so it was like everybody was busting their ass to make a show, that this game was good and that this work was important. Nobody was acting like they were going to get laid off. And then everybody went to expo. It was super exciting. It was super fun. It was super reinvigorating. And on Monday, everybody got fired.

[00:11:14.490] - Alan
So it was a feeling of hope for the pinball industry and that you guys had done it and that you'd live to fight another day, so to speak, and the rug just got pulled out. That's interesting.

[00:11:25.900] - Greg
I don't think that people felt that they were out of the woods, but I don't think that people felt that things were dire, either.

[00:11:31.790] - Alex
You kind of have an idea, if you've been in, like, a hiring freeze for years and stuff, that things aren't great, but that's still abrupt.

[00:11:39.570] - Greg
That day that we found out about shutdown, it was like one of the saddest days of my life. It was so depressing. It was really sad. And then to be on the floor, like, as everybody was moving out and it was, like, dead and quiet up there, that was a rough tone. Yeah.

[00:11:54.770] - Alex
That's kind of a unique perspective for you, watching that one from the sidelines a bit.

[00:11:58.730] - Greg
Yeah.

[00:11:59.220] - Alan
I would say for our listeners, and we'll probably maybe do a whole episode on pinball 2000 in the future, and I'd love to have you back for that one, Greg.

[00:12:08.030] - Greg
Sure.

[00:12:08.570] - Alan
For the listeners out there, there's a great documentary called Tilt: the Battle to Save Pinball, like I mentioned earlier, but check that out, because it'll give you the whole story of the end of Williams and their move into slot machines only and selling off the pinball business. Could you talk about how you get linked up with Pat Lawler and his design company: Pat Lawlor Designs? Can you explain how all that worked to the listeners? Because it was a time when Stern pinball, Gary Stern buys the assets to, I think at the time it was data east, then it was Sega. And he bought those assets and rebranded it as Stern Pinball. And he's the only pinball manufacturer left. And you started working for Pat Lawlor Designs. How did that happen?

[00:12:52.650] - Greg
Well, basically, Pat ended up after Williams closed, there was a flurry of activity where people were kind of hanging out, waiting to see what happened. If the pinball division will get sold. And then if it got sold, would all the employees go with it? Would they still be able to keep the gang together? Basically. And when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, people started drifting off and doing their own things. And one of the things that Pat did was he started his own design company. And what basically he was, was a contractor to Stern. So he didn't want to work for Stern. He wanted to kind of like build games on his own and sell them to Stern. Then Stern would license them and produce them. And that's the same deal that Steve Ritchie had for a while as well.

[00:13:39.320] - Alex
And more recently, that's what Scott Danesi has done for Spooky.

[00:13:43.050] - Greg
Yeah.

[00:13:46.420] - Greg
You know, we would get together for lunch or whatever. And Pat had hired already had his group together with Louis Koziarzs, who was a coder who had worked on No Good Gophers and Jack-bot and some of Pat's later games. And then John Krutsch, who was Pat's mechanical engineer for basically his entire career. Like, he designed the motorcycle mech on Bonzai Run. He designed the shaker motor for Earthshaker. He designed the gumball machine in Twilight Zone. Him and Pat have a long history.

[00:14:14.160] - Alan
 Whoah, okay.

[00:14:15.480] - Greg
And they were doing their thing. And I was kind of just chatting with Pat a bit, and I was like, the job I got after Williams is kind of a shit show. I would love to come work with you guys if you have anything. And what was happening was that they were working on the game that turned out to be Monopoly. And they were getting very behind on code and they needed some help. He's like, if you want to come work for us, you can. And he didn't have a ton of money to pay, and he also was working out of a town called Marengo, which is an hour and a half from downtown Chicago, where I lived on days when there was no traffic, and there was never days with no traffic.

[00:14:53.650] - Alex
Not quite the five minute commute, no.

[00:14:55.920] - Greg
And I said yes. And so that's what happened. I went to work with Pat, and we did four games together. I worked on Monopoly, and Roller Coaster Tycoon, Ripley's Believe it or not. And NASCAR.

[00:15:09.630] - Alex
Hell, yeah.

[00:15:10.320] - Alan
I want to give this floor to Alex here, because one of these games that you worked on is one of the games he talks about all the time and is one of the games he ran into when he was going to college in Sioux Falls. They had a NASCAR on location, and he loves this game. And so I want to give him the floor and ask you a couple questions and be a little fanboy to you, but, yeah, go ahead, Alex.

[00:15:34.500] - Alex
Man, I don't even know where to start with NASCAR. I do genuinely love NASCAR. It's one of those games. I'm kind of worried now that I've been playing pinball for a long time. I don't want to spoil it, so I never play it too much, but pretty much every time I see one, I play it, and every time I enjoy it, and it kind of makes me want to own one myself so I could set it up how I'd like. As far as questions for you, man, just seeing the development of Pat Lawlor's greatest game of all time in real life, undeniably the best at that point, I guess when you're kind of working under Pat Lawlor, was Pat just doing whatever the hell he wanted? Because that era of Sterns, they're loaded. They've got a lot of mechs. It doesn't seem like he was concerned with the bill of materials. So was there really any oversight, or was it was just kind of Pat going crazy?

[00:16:25.930] - Greg
Oh, no, there was oversight, for sure. Especially. It was a little better after we had been there for a while. But when we started, Stern was still very much in dire circumstances, and there was a very long period of time there, probably up until much later, like around when Iron Man came out, when I was like, this is Stern's last year. They're never going to make it another year. Every year, I would be completely convinced that it was all over and there was going to be no more pinball. And I was very wrong, thankfully. But there was definitely oversight. One of the interesting things about NASCAR is that because it's got the cycling loop thing that eats up a lot of space in the cabinets. And so there's not as much space to put other stuff because it's not like there are any other real toys on that game.

[00:17:15.280] - Alex
Yeah, you almost have like a Safecracker sized playfield.

[00:17:19.550] - Greg
There's that, like up down car in the middle of the playfield.

[00:17:24.210] - Alex
You got that trailer with the spinning lock.

[00:17:26.730] - Greg
With the spinning thing. Yeah, but other than that, there's not a lot on that.

[00:17:30.210] - Alan
What I like about NASCAR is I like that it plays fast for a Pat game.

[00:17:36.160] - Greg
Yeah.

[00:17:36.520] - Alan
Pat sort of gets pigeonholed as like, the stop and go guy, as sort of the opposite of Steve Ritchie. Like, when people talk about the classic pinball designers and they contrast their styles a lot. I really like Steve Ritchie. I like Pat Lawlor games, too and there are some Pat Lawlor games I love a lot, but they're typically like, hit a shot, set up another shot. Very controlled. He likes to hold the ball a lot. And NASCAR's faster, which I think obviously fits the theme.

[00:18:03.860] - Alex
It's kind of like Getaway. It fools you into thinking it's faster than it is because it's just, well, throwing balls around with a magnet.

[00:18:09.790] - Alan
But, I mean, you can hit combos in NASCAR, and you can hit combos in other Pat Lawlor games too. It's not that you can't, but it's just, you know what I mean? It's like you play funhouse. It's a slow game. You're always in a subway, you're always in a scoop. It's always catching the ball behind or you're throwing in Rudy's mouth. And it's a great pinball machine, but it's just way different than playing AC/DC or Spiderman or any of the Steve Ritchie games.

[00:18:34.430] - Greg
Yeah. And it's interesting because I've always loved Pat's games much more than Steve's games. But I think that's just because I'm by nature a much more nerdy and analytical kind of person. So I like the opportunity to do something, to stop, to think about what I'm going to do next and set it up and do it and then recover and then think about what I'm going to do next. It's just like, in my nature, but definitely on, like, I think that Pat wanted to kind of channel a lot more of that Steve Ritchie energy into that game. And he was a huge NASCAR fan himself, so I think he wanted to find some of that energy.

[00:19:08.420] - Alan
I guess that's what we want to talk about next is how are these themes, you know, full disclosure, some of these themes, I don't think people think of as "A-list" themes.

[00:19:18.230] - Alex
I don't know what you're talking about, dude... the hit Ripley's Believe it or Not? The Massive IP?

[00:19:23.200] - Alan
I wonder if was it just a product of the times? Like is this just what Gary could get? You and I have spoken privately about some of these things and you were able to enlighten me on how some of these themes came to be, but I wonder if you could bring that to the podcast for the listeners. Like how did Monopoly come to be? How did a roller coaster come to be? How did these games come to be, and like, who decided the themes, like, was it the teams? Was it Pat? Was it all of you collectively?

[00:19:50.000] - Greg
It worked different ways. Like I was mentioning earlier before we got on that podcast that Pat had wanted to do a Monopoly game for a long time, and in fact he had designed Safecracker to be Monopoly and they couldn't get the license worked out. And I think they were a lot more protective of the license back at the time that Safecracker came out after they did the Monopoly slot machines at Williams. I think that Monopoly became a little more open to different use cases, and that's part of the reason why I think the Monopoly pinball later ended up happening. They had already acquired the license when I started, so I wasn't really privy to that. But I know that Pat had been interested in doing that for some time. But I think that it was different in different instances. I think most of the time people would say, I have an idea for a game or a license, and they would take it to Gary, and Gary would say yes or no. And if he said yes, then it would know, contact the licensee. Can we make this work at an affordable way? And if so, then you can go with it.

[00:20:53.390] - Greg
But sometimes the licensees would come to Gary and say, hey, are you guys interested in doing a game? And then Gary would go around to the teams and ask them if they had any interest in it. Sometimes Gary would say yes, and you couldn't get the licensers on board and so you'd have to pivot. So some interesting ways that that worked out, I'll talk about here for Roller Coaster Tycoon. When we were first talking about it, I've long been a huge Chuck Jones and Bugs Bunny fan, and I have always thought that Looney tunes would be an incredible theme for pinball. And so I brought that up to Pat. And Pat liked the idea and then he brought it to Gary, and Gary said no because he thought it was for kids.

[00:21:36.910] - Alan
Interesting.

[00:21:38.430] - Greg
And now, of course, Spooky is doing the Looney Tunes game, so I'm interested in seeing how that comes out. Yeah. But then we were talking about other things, and Pat wanted to do another theme park game. We talked about ways to do it, and we tried to talk Gary into doing it unlicensed, and he said no. And there had been a period of time where a bunch of us at Williams were kind of obsessed with the Roller Coaster Tycoon video game. 

[00:22:02.440] - Alex
Makes sense, that game is super fun.

[00:22:05.020] - Greg
It was fun as hell.

[00:22:06.950] - Alan
Yeah. And it was of its time. At the time that machine came out, it was very of the time.

[00:22:13.930] - Alex
Yeah. All of my friends, we would go over to each other's houses and watch each other play roller coaster tycoon, which is insane.

[00:22:20.630] - Alan
Maybe some younger listeners or people new to the hobby maybe don't realize that, but Roller Coaster Tycoon was a kick ass PC game. 

[00:22:29.340] - Alex
And it spawned a ton of knockoff or spinoff games of, like, all kinds.

[00:22:33.460] - Greg
Yeah. There was, like, railroad tycoon and skyscraper tycoon, all of this stuff. Anyway, we proposed that to Gary, and he said yes. And so that's how roller coaster tycoon came to be. Pat wanted to do a theme park game, but we had to have a license, and so we worked a license into this concept. Ripley's has a funny story. Pat's original idea for Ripley's was that he wanted to do Crocodile Hunter and he wanted to bring back, there's this old EM game called Nip-It, and it has this feature...

[00:23:03.750] - Alan
Oh, I'm familiar. It's alligator themed. I'm familiar.

[00:23:07.270] - Alex
Yeah, it's alligator themed.

[00:23:09.170] - Greg
There's an extra button on the cabinet where this alligator mech comes out and grabs the ball. And Pat wanted to revive that idea in a modern pinball game, but we could never get the Crocodile Hunter people to return our calls. And so we pivoted, and Pat wanted to do something kind of, like spooky or creepy. And again, Pat had an idea, and we backed a theme into the idea, and then we ended up getting very lucky. You know, Steve Irwin tragically was killed, like, six months later, and that would have been, like, a real drag.

[00:23:45.890] - Alan
Terrible time to market your new game.

[00:23:48.360] - Alex
No, you just throw a little angel halo and wings on him on the backglass. 

[00:23:55.370] - Greg
Well, it would have really sucked. So we dodged a bullet on that one.

[00:23:58.840] - Alan
Historically speaking, I think a lot of these games aren't Pat's most famous games or the games that people remember most fondly but I do think that does seem like Ripley's, Believe it or not, is well regarded nowadays, probably because Keith Elwin came out and said that he loves that game. So the Church of Keith Elwin, everyone all of a sudden is like, this game's incredible. I want to ask you, what do you think of those four games that you worked on with Pat Lawlor designs? Which one is your favorite and why?

[00:24:27.910] - Greg
I think that from a top to bottom standpoint, NASCAR is the most well rounded.

[00:24:33.710] - Alex
Hell, yeah.

[00:24:36.390] - Greg
If you look at the rules and the play field combined, it's not my favorite of the four play fields by any means, but the way that the rules and the theme are integrated with the playfield, I think makes it, as a package the best game of the four. I would say that my favorite playfield of the four is probably Roller Coaster Tycoon. 

[00:24:58.990] - Alex
Yeah, I agree with that, I like that one.

[00:24:59.840] - Greg
I don't really think that the way that the rules came together on that game highlighted it in a way that I think was as successful.

[00:25:07.180] - Alan
Interesting. We do a trip where we take our, we call it boy ride, which we'll do an episode on that later, but we take some of us and we travel to different cities, we do a little daily road trip, and we go to different places, and we ended up at a brewery. And we were playing their Roller Coaster Tycoon for a long time and having a great time, really, because it had been a while since any one of us had gotten to play it. And it was fun to shoot. It was definitely fun to shoot. Can't speak really for the code or the rule set because we didn't play it long enough, but it was a good time. When that troll kind of bounces up and down and then the ball drops down to start the multiball, it makes me laugh, and I'm like, "this is why I love pinball."

[00:25:44.040] - Alex
I really loved it as someone, like, when I was a kid and I played pinball before I understood rules or anything, all I cared were about habitrails, like cool ramps, cool rails, and roller coaster tycoon is so cool.

[00:25:57.760] - Alan
Yeah, it delivers that.

[00:25:59.140] - Alex
Yeah, it's got, like, the three different bright colors, which you don't see a lot of colored habitrails around that time. And so it's just cool.

[00:26:06.100] - Alan
Well, and like we said, we were all fans of the IP. I think we grew up like Alex and I grew up playing the video game. 

[00:26:15.190] - Alex
You're talking about the best selling CD rom game.

[00:26:17.770] - Alan
Yeah, exactly. It always had a badge on it that said, like, best selling into all the millions, or 10s of million units or whatever it sold.

[00:26:26.330] - Alex
I just love that they put that on the actual cabinet art.

[00:26:28.740] - Alan
I think I want to end about your time working on pinball. I do want to clarify. I see on IPDB, it says that you worked on dots and animations. Can you describe your programming and what goes into that for the listeners?

[00:26:42.140] - Greg
So basically, a typical division of labor for software on a pinball machine is somebody would write the game code, the rules, basically. And then somebody would work on the dots or the display. And it was usually kind of the person working on the display was sort of like what you gave the new kids to work on because it was easier. And it's much less likely to make something catch on fire or whatever. And so I mostly did dot programming and a little bit, like, I would do light shows, I would do choreography, basically.

[00:27:16.640] - Alan
Oh, that's dope.

[00:27:17.780] - Greg
And so what would happen is that we would sit down and we would talk about, say, a mode. And we would say, okay, here's this mode we've got. What kind of art do we want for it? And what do we want the screen to look like? Or what do we want to be happening? Then we would take that to the artist and he would put together some animations for it. And then I would convert those to a digital representation. And then I would make them happen. I would lay out the screen. I would make them animate. We would have places for things like, where are we going to put the score? What is the text going to be?

[00:28:00.250] - Alex
That's cool.

[00:28:00.880] - Greg
yeah, because it would be like five more X to do Y. And then what happens when somebody makes a shot? What's the animation going to look like for that? And stuff like that. And then some of it, you could figure it out yourself. Like, for instance, in roller coaster tycoon for the multi balls, there are these little animal characters in roller coaster tycoon. Like there's a tiger and a panda bear and stuff like that. And I told the animator in a multi ball, when you're not hitting any jackpots, when you're just flying around, it shows the score. And then I wanted to have one of these characters be animated and dancing, like the characters in the Snoopy Christmas.

[00:28:44.950] - Alan
Nice

[00:28:46.390] - Greg
And so there's one where the tiger's dancing and his head is just going back and forth and stuff like this. They're all mimicking the peanuts characters. So we could do fun stuff like that. But like, day to day, I was just like putting screens together, animating them, testing them Louis would send me a bunch of codes and I would try them out. And you'd have to test things like, what happens if somebody scores 10 million points? Or if they add another digit, does it make the score roll off the end of the screen or things like that, and make sure it looks good with different. If you've got 50 of something versus five of something. And then we would have to do stuff because it gets translated into other languages. So you would have to do things like, German was always a pain in the ass because German is a very long language. So we would have to remake the screens for Germany because the text is so long. And that was always at the end of the project, and doing the translations was always really tedious. But the part where you're putting screens together and trying them out and it's fun and you're doing new.

[00:29:48.080] - Greg
Like, I did a thing where in monopoly, where if you hit the bank, it takes a snapshot of the screen and shakes it. And there was no code to do that, so I just had to figure it out myself. And it's like different things along those lines.

[00:30:04.710] - Alex
Yeah, those are kind of the fun little things that test you at work that actually keep it interesting.

[00:30:09.080] - Greg
And there was always discussions about, the fun part for me was the beginning part, where we're talking about what we want on the screen, what kind of light shows do we want, how do we want to work it all together? What's going to happen when you hit a shot and all of this kind of stuff and then putting it together other was also fun, but not as fun as coming up with the ideas and then doing the stuff at the end where you're doing, like, I've got to do the display for the administrative text for this fixture, or translations and stuff that was always kind of like, dragged on at the end. In a lot of ways, it's like any other job in that there are parts of it that are really fun, and parts of it, they were really tedious. But of course, the upside is that at the end of the day, you get to go out to a bar and see a pinball machine that you made getting played by people, which is really fucking rad.

[00:30:58.530] - Alex
That was pretty much my biggest question for you. I would kind of expect that. I work, I'm an electrical engineer. And so my day to day is just kind of a grind. And I'm always curious how much of a difference it makes just on a day to day satisfaction level, if you're passionate about the end product and is that something you really miss and is it something you would move away from California for again if you were given the opportunity?

[00:31:26.350] - Greg
Again, it's kind of a hit and miss, and I think that it was really interesting. I think that one of the things that we really missed at PLD was because we were working out at Pat's house rather than at the Stern offices. We didn't have that communal atmosphere that we had at Williams where everybody's on the floor, everybody's talking about each other's games. There's that real feedback loop.

[00:31:47.170] - Alex
That would be a huge difference.

[00:31:48.980] - Greg
We didn't really have that, and I think that was a bummer, and I think it hurts some of the games, if I'm honest about it. Like, other people might disagree. But that's my feeling also. I have to say now, and I don't say this in any way to be saying anything negative about Pat, who is a genius, but we didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things in the rules and stuff like that. And so there was a lot of conflict there. And sometimes two people have conflict, and neither of them are right or wrong. Right. It's just like different visions, right?

[00:32:18.010] - Alan
Oh, 100%, yeah.

[00:32:19.630] - Greg
So from that perspective, it was a bit of a struggle for me because I was working on pinball, and there is nothing like seeing something that you've made out in the world and people having fun with it. And that still is a big thrill for me today. But also, it's kind of a bummer because I feel like a lot of myself isn't in those games where not as much as I would want. It really is like any other job in that way. It was very special, but it was also like any other job in that there were some things that were great about it and some things that sucked about it. And sometimes people don't see eye to eye on things, and sometimes situationally, it's not the greatest, and so it's easy to glamorize, but there's a lot about it that was just like the same problems you have anytime you get a group of people together.

[00:33:04.410] - Alex
That makes sense. And that's kind of why I was excited to talk to you, because it's just a different perspective than the big name celebrities you normally hear on pinball podcasts.

[00:33:13.800] - Alan
What do you mean, Greg Dunlap here isn't a celebrity?

[00:33:16.390] - Alex
No offense.

[00:33:18.270] - Greg
I've also been out of the industry for long enough that I can say whatever I want and I don't worry about my job.

[00:33:25.650] - Alan
We were excited to have you on. Alex was very excited when I said that you wanted to come on and talk on the podcast, because no shade to anyone on any other podcast or whatever. But it's like a lot of times they have people that are currently working at pinball machine companies and they can't say a lot. I mean, they can't really talk about the new game they're working on. If anything went wrong or got yanked out of their game, they can't say they lost a battle and it would have been better with their vision. They can't because they're still working at the company. So a lot of those interviews aren't as interesting as I think they could be. And I found some of the best interviews were like, there was one that I listened to with Chris Granner after he had been out of the industry for long enough, who was a sound designer.

[00:34:13.000] - Greg
Yeah, Chris did sound for all of the PLD games.

[00:34:15.480] - Alan
Dude, Chris Granner's the fucking man.

[00:34:17.890] - Greg
He is. My God, he is incredible. The work that he did on games like Fun House and Bonzai Run.

[00:34:25.270] - Greg
Not Banzai Run, but Twilight Zone, Addams Family. That guy, he was really good.

[00:34:29.480] - Alan
Yeah, Fishtales, Whitewater. I mean, the dude is a legend. We'll do a whole episode on him. Just because I'm a super fan of Chris Granner and I believe that his sound design added so much to games, and that I think he's the goat. And I really don't understand why he doesn't do any more pinball work nowadays with the industry doing better than it did before. I'm sure he makes more money working in video games now or whatever, but like, oh, man, he's just so good at pinball. I just feel like the pinball world is lacking something without him in it.

[00:35:01.720] - Greg
 I won't disagree.

[00:35:05.450] - Alan
That's good. Greg, it was nice to chat with you. I just want to talk about after you left Pat Lawlor designs and you stopped making pinball machines, you were working for the Pinball Outreach Project, or POP for short, and you had a location in Portland that I used to go to, and I got to play a lot of really cool games there for the first time. I got to play Volley, which is a cool late...

[00:35:29.120] - Greg
Oh, yeah.

[00:35:29.870] - Alan
Full size flipper EM from Gottlieb, a wedgehead, and then Beat the Clock is the other one I remember.

[00:35:36.220] - Greg
Oh, yeah, that game's cool.

[00:35:38.510] - Alan
Yeah. Which is a George Christian game, the guy that did Eight Ball Deluxe and Frontier, and some other great games, but that game is not, you don't have balls. It's timed play. And a couple of pinball machines did that, but that's probably the best one.

[00:35:53.680] - Greg
Yeah.

[00:35:54.120] - Alan
Or maybe the only fun one. I don't know.

[00:35:56.180] - Greg
Yeah. So Pinball Outreach Project was an organization that was started by my wife, Nicole, and she was getting active in the pinball community in the Bay area. And she had a friend who worked at UCSF, and she just had a situation in which I believe I've got this story right. Her sister had had a pregnancy that was difficult. And so they were spending some time in a children's hospital, and she was just thinking about kind of how bleak the place was, right? Thinking about how it would be much better if they could have pinball in children's hospitals so that families and kids, especially those who were in them for a longer period of time, would have something fun to know. And so she started working with some people in the Bay Area to do events at different places. Like, she would do an event at UCSF children's Hospital, and they would do other kinds of events using borrowed games and whatever. After we met, she moved up to Portland, and we started working on putting games permanently on location in places. And so right now, there are four pop games on location in Portland at Randall's Children's Hospital, and a couple of Ronald McDonald houses and things.

[00:37:16.830] - Greg
But her dream had always been to have a location where that was, all ages, kid friendly, where she could hold events, and where we could offer free pinball for kids. And that was really for the promotion of pinball to kids. It was a really cool thing that we did, and it was really fun. But the problem was, it was just not like it ended up being, like a part time job for me personally, like, helping to run the place. We had some amazing volunteers, many of them from the Portland pinball community. And I am always thankful to them for the efforts that they put in over the years to POP. But it was never enough to keep the place going in a way that I didn't have to still be, or Nicole, spending a significant amount of time there running it. And so it was like, over time, it was just like, taking more and more of a toll for us. And a lot of times, it was barely breaking even, too. Because one of the unfortunate things for me about pinball in the modern age is that if you have a place where people can't come and drink, because the pinball audience is so tied to the bar audience now, it's very hard to make money.

[00:38:30.150] - Alan
Oh, yeah. That's something I'm going to talk about. I have a whole series planned for this podcast. That's about pinball economics and about just that, where it's like, I don't think a lot of people realize this, but, like, pinball itself, even if they're like a dollar a play or whatever, they're not making money at that. It's like the parts and the labor, there's no way they're making money that way. Everything's subsidized by alcohol sales. That's why it's hard to find a place where if you have kids and getting them to play pinball, it's hard to find because so many of these machines are at bars, and they're at bars because the bar makes the money and the pinball machines just brings people to the bar. That's how operating pins makes money nowadays.

[00:39:11.910] - Greg
Yes, that's true. And the funny thing is that most of the value in the pinball you don't get to see until you sell them. Because right now pinballs hold their value so well. But it's like if you buy a $6,000 game and put it on your floor, it's like buying a house. That $6,000 doesn't mean anything to you until you sell the game.

[00:39:33.190] - Alex
That's what I think a lot of the hobbyists don't realize for operators, it's like an operator is not selling games. So the sunk cost just hurts them.

[00:39:42.570] - Alan
Yeah, I mean, you could always sell them, but then if you're trying to...

[00:39:45.960] - Greg
But then you don't have the games on the floor to operate.

[00:39:47.520] - Alan
Exactly. Yeah, it's this cycle of like, you don't make money operating games. I'm going to go further into that in the future. Anyway to get it back to pop...

[00:39:55.870] - Alex
That's a very cool project. I didn't realize you guys still had pins at hospitals and stuff up here.

[00:40:01.600] - Greg
Yeah, yeah. And we're actually looking into, like doing more. I live in Monterey, California right now, and we're talking just one of the hospital groups down here just opened a mental health center for kids, and we're going to be putting a game in. So, you know, I won't say that POP is super active, but it's not like a done deal by any means either. 

[00:40:22.490] - Alex
That's really cool.

[00:40:23.580] - Alan
Well, I will say, personally, I loved going to POP. I mean, we opened Wedgehead a little bit after I think you ended or the same year you ended in 2017 or so is when we opened. And that's what we always tried to do with Wedgehead. You know, my business partner, Rhodesie, very well, I got to meet you through Rhodesie, but I always appreciated being able to go somewhere and play games of all eras. It's something that we try to do now at Wedgehead. It's something that we focus on. Rhodesie and I will always fight because there'll always be a new game coming out and he'll want to bring in some stern machine from the last five years or something that we know works and people will like, and I'm like, no, we got to bring another EM in. Or we have to prioritize making sure that we always offer a selection of games so that it doesn't just end up being Sterns from the last five years.

[00:41:14.730] - Alex
It's so easy to default to all Sterns because they're reliable. They just are going to work. People want to play them when they're new anyway. It's always kind of an effort to put out older games.

[00:41:26.750] - Alan
A lot of effort. You don't get any credit for operating old games. I mean nobody gives you credit for it. And there's plenty of players that just completely ignore the fact that they're on the floor at all. But there's a whole other group of people that they live to see an Embryon or a Paragon or something out on location, or a Volley on location and get to see those games. And that's what we travel for. That's what I travel for. I will travel to locations that put those games out. And for Wedgehead, I always want to be that space as well. POP was that. It was awesome.

[00:42:02.790] - Greg
It was great when we would have grandparents bring their kids in and the kids would be playing Iron Man or Spiderman and then the grandparents would play Volley and you could see their eyes light up because it's like so nostalgic for them. Like the chimes and the score reels and like, it was really cool.

[00:42:19.080] - Alan
That is cool. Well, I think we had a nice long chat there. I just want to thank everyone for listening. I want to thank our guest Greg for joining us. I hope that helped everyone understand a little bit of what it's like a peek behind the curtain into the pinball industry from someone that used to work in it, then later transitioned out of it, but is still a pinball player. You're still a pinball head. He loves pinball as much as anyone I've ever met. And I want to thank you for joining us. For everyone else out there, that is listening, I want to end this like I end every episode, which is to encourage you to go out and play pinball.

[00:42:52.650] - Greg
Yeah.

[00:42:53.020] - Alex
And specifically play Pat Lawlor's best game of all time, Stern NASCAR.

[00:42:59.520] - Alan
Specifically focus on playing the Dunlap masterpieces.

[00:43:03.760] - Alex
The quadrilogy?

[00:43:04.870] - Alan
Yeah, the quadrilogy. You're going to need to play all of them. So find a monopoly, find a roller coaster tycoon, find a Ripley's. Find a NASCAR, and go out and play them.

[00:43:13.260] - Greg
Yep.

[00:43:13.670] - Alan
Till next time, everyone. Good luck. Don't suck!