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Ep 39: Roger Sharpe & The License Of Impossibility
PodcastAnalysis updated 4d ago1 hr 23 min listenBy Jeff Teolis & Martin Robbins
Final Round Pinball Podcast Episode 39: Roger Sharpe & The License Of Impossibility Hosts: Martin Robbins & Jeff Teolis Special Guest: Roger Sharpe Happy birthday to Roger this weekend! – How to get...
Highlights
- Roger Sharpe has attended licensing shows since 1987 and has worked with virtually every major studio, agent, and manager in the entertainment industry.
- Modern licensing negotiations are more complex due to requirements for likeness rates, talent, audio, and video assets compared to the dot matrix era.
- Production volumes for modern pinball are far lower than the Williams Valley era (10,000-15,000 units average) which affects licensing negotiations.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger personally recorded all speech calls for the Terminator 2 pinball machine and video game after rejecting sound-alike voice actors.
- An unnamed recent game obtained video assets but not audio assets due to actor contract limitations and ADR/looping session approval requirements.
- Bally's 8-Ball game featured unauthorized use of Happy Days characters (Fonz, Pinky Tuscadero, Henry Winkler) and required a settlement with the rights holders.
- Space Invaders pinball led to a financial settlement when the studio came after Bally over the use of the alien character.
- Roger Sharpe personally intervened to settle a licensing dispute where an unnamed company falsely claimed to have a license and faced potential jail time and asset seizure.
- Modern licensors are less interested in pinball than legacy media due to pinball's reduced cultural prominence and smaller audience, making ego and vanity primary motivators rather than guaranteed revenue.
- Approximately 90% plus of all licensed pinball themes from the late 1980s through 1990s were either acquired or turned down by Roger Sharpe.
Notable quotes
“I will only accept no's on two conditions when I'm negotiating for anything. One is that the financials are just incomprehensible and don't make sense... The other is if there is a notion and a belief that the marketplace is different than what it actually is.”
“The biggest thing is trying to gain trust with folks... overcoming the stigma of what a coin-operated amusement game is, specifically a pinball machine, and that we're not out there trying to totally destroy young minds and hearts.”
“You have to be really, really careful... I actually stepped in to rescue this person and to settle everything with the studio so that they could come up with a reasonable settlement.”
“I think that what winds up happening now versus back in prehistory... you could bury a bad game without destroying your company. Now the risk is such that so many of the companies are relying on a single theme, a single property.”
“For pinball, it's not necessarily money. It's ego, vanity. It is a desire because they have a thing for pinball. Wouldn't it be neat and kind of cool to be part of that?”
“Do you know instinctively what is going to be an easier or hard license to get just by somebody saying, I want this particular license? Yeah, pretty much... There isn't anybody that I have not worked with or anybody that I can't get to.”
“I turned down American Gladiators. In retrospect, I probably should have gone with American Gladiators.”
“Mandalorian obviously comes on board because it's an adjunct to Star Wars. So it's a derivative. So it's not totally and completely unknown.”
Entities
- Bally· company
- Haggis Pinball· company
- Jersey Jack Pinball· company
- Spooky Pinball· company
- Stern Pinball· company
- Williams Valley· company
- 8-Ball· game_title
- Final Round Pinball Podcast· media
- Adam's Family· media_property
- Jurassic Park· media_property
- Mandalorian· media_property
- Space Invaders· media_property
- Stranger Things· media_property
- Terminator 2· media_property
- Pinball Network· organization
- Arnold Schwarzenegger· person
- Cassandra (Cassandra Peterson)· person
- Jeff Teolis· person
- Martin Robbins· person
- Roger Sharpe· person
- Steve Ritchie· person
- Tom Neiman· person
- Zach Sharpe· person
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