Wedgehead Pinball Podcast

In this episode we are belatedly celebrating our one year anniversary of hosting this weekly pinball show.

We asked y'all to submit some questions, and boy did you!  We try and answer all of your questions that you sent in to us, although a few came in after we recorded this episode and we will save them for another time.

Thank you to each and every one of you that has listened to our show over the last year plus, and thanks for sharing us with your family and friends.  We feel rejuvenated, and can't wait for what year number has in store for the show!

Note: y'all should know by now, but we do swear a little bit sometimes.

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Our buddy Mike from Quarters and Quarters Sugarhouse joins us on the show to discuss operating two arcade bars in Salt Lake City, Utah.

We talk about his start in the bar business, and all the unique challenges that running a bar in the state of Utah entails.  Mike enlightens us on his local pinball scene and speaks about the decision to open a second location in the same city.

Note: We are adults, so we swear a little bit.

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This is the second part of our series about the groundbreaking Williams System 11 games, and we discuss the second half of them, including games from the recently acquired Bally pinball division which injected even more creative juice into the parent company.

Ty Palmer is back for part two, and we talk about games like Whirlwind, Elvira and the Party Monsters, Diner, and Dr. Dude amongst all the others, and further discuss the many design tropes that emerged from this era including which ones stuck and which ones fell by the wayside.

We even do a quick snake draft at the end to pick our own top 3 from the era.  But we are adults, so adult language is used. 

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Our good friend and solid state pinball guru, Ty Palmer joins us for the first episode in our two part series on the Williams System 11 platform, a pinball board set and software framework that massively changed the game of pinball.

Larry Demar designed and engineered this groundbreaking system, and programmed many of the best games from this era too.  It spanned 5 years from 1986 to 1991, and includes 30 pinball machines.

We discuss the first 15 of them in this episode including highlights like High Speed, Pinbot, Banzai Run, Grand Lizard, and more.

This era marks the change from classic to modern, and is the grandfather of all the machines we see to this day. System 11 is to pinball what Black Sabbath is to all subsequent metal bands.

Listen up, this is a good one!

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In this episode Alan and Alex discuss the best games to trick your normie friends and family into liking and playing pinball.  We discuss the parameters of what we think makes a great gateway game, what makes a bad gateway game, and tips for making their first time playing more fun.

We are also now accepting questions for our 1 year anniversary episode, so send all your questions or comments that you want us to read and discuss on that episode to [email protected]

Note: We're not werewolves, but we are little swearwolves.  Sensitive ears be warned.

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In this episode, freelance pinball artist Jonathan Bergeron joins us from his studio in Montreal, Canada to discuss his life as a commercial artist doing gig posters and merch designs for bands like Mastodon, Guns 'n Roses, Suicidal Tendencies, Judas Priest, and many many more, as well as how he got pulled into the pinball industry as the artist for Stern's Jurassic Park.

He did 5 different dinosaur themed art packages for all the different editions of that game, and we discuss his transition into doing art for something as big as a pinball machine.

We discuss his other released pinball art packages on games like former guest of the show, Sean Irby's Eight Ball Beyond homebrew, Scott Danesi's Final Resistance for the P3 platform, and his latest project for Barrels of Fun and their first game Labyrinth!

...but you must be warned that we do happen to swear just a little bit in this episode.

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The man/myth/legend Roger Sharpe is back again on the show to speak more about the pinball renaissance of the 1990s.  In this second episode we dive more into some of the many people that made these games special.

We talk about designers like Steve Ritchie, Pat Lawlor, and Dennis Nordman. Programmers like Larry DeMar, Lyman Sheats, and Dwight Sullivan, as well as the sound design and musical compositions of Chris Granner amongst others.  Roger tells us some fantastic stories of licensing, the industry competition at the time, and how he feels about this decade of pinball and its lasting impact today.

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Alan and Alex are joined on the show once again by Roger Sharpe, aka the 'Man Who Saved Pinball' to discuss his career at Williams from 1988-1999 as the Marketing Director.  Roger tells us some great stories about getting hired, the merger of Bally into Williams, his role in licensing games, and more.

And we discuss a lot about the different technological advances that made this era of games so dynamic and interesting, from the software and rules, to the DMD display, to the big mechanical toys that were being engineered and put into these games, the 1990s saw a rapid rise and fall in pinball, but it changed the game forever.

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Alan and Alex are joined on the show by their friend Tyler White from LA to discuss Stern's Insider Connected platform, and why he loves to use it, and how he wants to see it grow into the future.

Stern's IC is a feature that has been on all their games since Godzilla (2021), and has retrofit kits to connect all their Spike 2 games going back to Batman '66 (2016).

We discuss what the new platform has meant through the eyes of players and operators, and how connecting pinball machines has changed the game for some, and not mattered at all to others.

But the boys definitely used some salty adult language throughout the episode, so this is the obligatory explicit warning for sensitive widdle ears.

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In this episode, our friend and member of our local Portland Pinball scene, Nate Tayloe joins us on the show to educate us on the weird case where Gottlieb chose to sue Paramount Pictures over alleged copyright and trademark infringement due to the inclusion of Gottlieb's "Silver Slugger" pinball machine in the 2000 movie, "What Women Want" starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt.

Nate learned about this case while he was in law school, and he wanted to bring this story of the case to our show, and discuss the nebulous issue of copyright in other forms of art.

We discussed in the episode a website where all known inclusions of pinball machines appearing in film are listed, but Nate couldn't remember the website name in the moment.  But in case you're interested, here's a link to it: https://www.pingeek.com/film/film.htm

As always though, this is an adult show and we sometimes use naughty words to express ourselves.

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