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Gary Stern 75th Birthday Interview - Part 2

PodcastAnalysis updated 2d ago1 hr 29 min listenBy Martin Ayub, Jonathan Joosten
From the creator

As Gary Stern, President of Stern Pinball, celebrates his 75th birthday, Martin Ayub of Pinball News and Jonathan Joosten of Pinball Magazine send our congratulations to him, and mark this milestone...

Listen on Pinball News and Pinball Magazine Podcast

Highlights

  • Pinstar was founded by Gary Stern and Steve Kirk (among others) as a short-lived venture focusing on layout design simplification
  • Data East Pinball was founded in 1986 with Data East Japan/USA as original investor; Bob Lloyd (Data East USA manager) was key stakeholder
  • Williams circuit boards were reverse-engineered for Data East Pinball, but all software was written from scratch by Richard Denton (Free Radical Technology/Incredible Technology) to avoid copyright infringement
  • Williams sued Data East Pinball and Gary Stern personally multiple times; all suits were settled, never won by Williams
  • Data East sold the pinball division to Sega in 1994 to bail out the parent company's financial difficulties, not due to debt owed
  • Gary Stern purchased Stern Pinball back from Sega because Sega wanted a related business that fed into their core operations, which pinball did not
  • George Gomez/Shelley Jones (spelled 'Shelley' and 'Camico' in transcript) were instrumental early collaborators at Data East, presenting to investors alongside Gary
  • Licensing model shifted from original titles to licensed titles starting with Playboy 35th Anniversary, becoming standard practice after that
  • Licensing contracts have grown dramatically in complexity: early Jurassic Park contract was 12 tight pages; current contracts are 72+ pages
  • George Lucas's negotiation for ancillary rights after Star Wars fundamentally created the modern movie licensing industry worth billions

Notable quotes

“If you make a stuffed animal that looks like a mouse, you're not going to sell it unless you pay Walt and Mickey Mouse. So it gets the first attraction, and we say the first quarter, whatever. It also gives the designer four corners within which to design.”
Gary Stern
“If I call somebody and I say, I've got zombies from hell, they're going to say, the customer's going to say, send me two or three and I'll see what they look like and I'll test them and so forth. But if I say I got The Walking Dead, they say send me a container. You know, here's $200,000, $400,000, $200,000.”
Gary Stern
“I'm not an EE, I'm a lawyer. And it was like I turned on a light for him because this electronics engineer from Japan up to that point thought I was the dumbest electronic engineer I've ever met. And he now thinks I'm the smartest lawyer he ever met.”
Gary Stern
“We were buying nothing from the parent company in Sega. We were shipping no profit by buying their games or making profit. It's stuff that comes from them. And they're always concerned with the Japanese typically are concerned with the Japanese parent company.”
Gary Stern
“The marketplace is certainly, you know, we have, in fact, when Dave came in here, I said to him, you know, coming and looking, I said, you know, I'm the commercial guy and I've been running a commercial game business and we have developed and are developing a, you know, a large home segment.”
Gary Stern
“One size does not fit all. So they need different products the pro is often good for the enthusiast collector but it's mostly you see for operators and for rec room buyers.”
Gary Stern
“We really believe that this market exists and it will introduce more people to pinball and some of them will move on to become enthusiasts, collectors, competitors, whatever. But that's, you know, again, we, you know, this is this game is fun and we're trying to expand its reach.”
Gary Stern

Entities

  • Data East Pinball· company
  • Free Radical Technology· company
  • Pinstar· company
  • Sega Pinball· company
  • Stern Pinball· company
  • Williams Electronics· company
  • Bob Lloyd· person
  • Dave Peterson· person
  • David Schoenberg· person
  • Frank Ballew· person
  • Gary Stern· person
  • George Lucas· person
  • Joe Kaminkow· person
  • Ladd· person
  • Richard Denton· person
  • Shelley Jones· person
  • Steve Kirk· person
  • T. Fukuda· person

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