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Bonus Podcast: Interviews with Ed VanderVeen (Texas Pinball Festival) and Gerry Stellenberg (Multimorphic)
PodcastAnalysis updated yesterday1 hr 25 min listenBy Martin Ayub, Jonathan Joosten
Pre Texas Pinball Festival special featuring interviews with TPF organizer Ed VanderVeen and Multimorphic's Gerry Stellenberg.
Highlights
- Texas Pinball Festival will feature approximately 485 pinball machines (pushing 500), with ~85% privately owned collector machines
- Multimorphic moved to in-house production 4 months prior to interview to avoid contract manufacturer inefficiencies and ethical labor issues
- Base P3 platform takes 4-5 man-days to build; simple playfields take ~2 hours, complex ones (Cosmic Kart Racing) take 14-15 hours
- Multimorphic facility is 5,000 square feet in Round Rock, Texas
- Texas Wizard tournament sold out in 30 minutes with 160 players; women's tournament and side tournaments added this year
- Vendor booth sizes reduced from 10x12 to 8x10 to better fit smaller vendors and accommodate show growth
- Gerry Stellenberg spends 30-40% of his time on logistics/vendor management rather than game design
- Multimorphic designed the P3 platform from inception to support in-house, external, and customer-developed games
Notable quotes
“This is the biggest Texas Pinball Festival we've had. Of course, I say that every year. And it's true. And it's true.”
“I play zero pinball during the show. I do get to go enjoy the big smoke on Friday night.”
“I wouldn't feel right even paying a contract manufacturer to go hire 10 people to support a short burst of manufacturing and then tell them we're done, go fire your people or lay them off.”
“Building pinball machines is only as complex as you allow it to be. And here we have very well-defined assembly instructions and drawings.”
“I would like for you to have a show entry. But if you're not interested in coming into the show, but you've got a giant garage full of parts... the swap meet is completely free.”
“Really my wife Kim and Paul McKinney, they're also organizers, and they play a big part. Kim is really the one that puts on the show.”
“Logistical management unfortunately takes a good 30 to 40% of my time when I'd rather be working with the assemblers and working on designing new games.”
Entities
- American Pinball· company
- Chicago Gaming· company
- Deep Root· company
- Dutch Pinball· company
- Heighway Pinball· company
- Multimorphic· company
- Stern Pinball· company
- Texas Pinball Festival· event
- Texas Wizard· event
- Texas Pinball Museum· event/venue
- Cosmic Kart Racing· game
- Christopher Franchi· person
- Darren Kammerer· person
- Ed VanderVeen· person
- Gerry Stellenberg· person
- John Borg· person
- Jonathan Newson· person
- Kim VanderVeen· person
- Martin Ayer· person
- Paul McKinney· person
- Steve Ritchie· person
- P3 Platform· product
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