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Super hidden easter egg in Jack*Bot: This was a tribute to Game & Watch "Fire!", the first Nintendo title I ever owned. I used it as a coding exercise while learning WPC system calls and dot-matrix programming, then made it a full easter egg in attract mode. Which got me in trouble. (more)

Williams/Bally/Midway is gone. WMS is no more. But one artifact remains: WMS donated $2 million to the Park District to name the new boathouse on the Chicago River, opposite from the factory. Designed by famous Chicago architect Jeanne Gang. studiogang.com/projects/wms...

Neil Nicastro also didn't know or understand pinball history. Everyone else around him was VERY aware that Tom Nieman rescued Bally Pinball, and really the whole pinball industry, from a lackluster future by introducing licensed properties to their line.

In light of this great Addams Family #pinball oral history, I'll repost my github link here. This is a scanned example of the work Roger did to research upcoming movies and shows and inform the design teams about what was available and what had potential. raw.githubusercontent.com/lkoziarz/pin...

I never heard this quote from Nicastro but it's incredibly ironic. Once the movie licensing money was rolling in Neil got on a tear and started shoving licenses down the throats of the design teams. "Hey, Crichton wrote Jurassic Park and that was a smash. We're buying Congo and you're gonna do it."

Just finished a long road trip and had the time to take in a lot of coin-op history podcasts. 90% of them go like this: "Today we're going to talk about game XXX, a true groundbreaking classic in arcade game history. Co-host, what are your memories of game XXX? "Never even heard of it". 🙄

"Do you mind taking this with you to the factory?" "No problem. Anything important?" "Just a quarter million dollars worth of flash memory" 😳

Now I'm kind of pissed that MS didn't refactor Comic Chat into a casual interface to Copilot AI. Putting that out into the ether in the hopes that someone does it.

This is pretty awesome. #moo lives on! For #arcade history buffs, Comic Chat was co-developed by Tim Skelly, the famous designer/programmer from Cinematronics and Gottlieb/Mylstar/Ratslym. opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2026/07...

Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source | Microsoft Open Source BlogMicrosoft Comic Chat is now open source. Explore the IRC client that turned conversations into comics and helped introduce Comic Sans to the world.opensource.microsoft.com

For those that don't know the whole history, Tattoo Assassins was a Mortal Kombat type fighting game developed by Data East Pinball (before they became Sega Pinball, then Stern Pinball). The story of this game is pretty amazing. A few insiders tell the tale here: www.bunnyears.net/tattoo/

Happy 40th anniversary, Stern Pinball!