THE SITUATION facing the pinball designers at Williams Electronic Games in 1998: come up with something new, or see the | dG1fMzcyRXFZWFJtbm8
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00:00Williams was the king. Over the course of, you know, 50-some years, guys like us had been always the best at what they did.
00:13We've been getting beat up pretty badly on a regular basis from management saying,
00:17we're not selling any games, and if you guys don't come up with a way to change that,
00:22we're throwing you all out of work and we're closing the division.
00:25George and I mocked up a model of what we called a hollow pin.
00:30An upper management basically came in and they were blown away.
00:33All these ideas, one after another, from the entire engineering department and people were smiling again and high-fiving each other.
00:39Neil stood there and he looked up and said, I see the future of pinball and it's starting right here.
00:44We said, you know, we have to get everything right because there's no second chance.
00:49A lot of pinball people, the whole idea of a TV monitor and a pinball machine is abhorrent.
00:55I've seen this product. I don't like it. It's a video game. This isn't pinball.
00:59They thought we were actually taking pinball and just destroying it.
01:02When people saw this game, there wasn't any, you know, why'd you do this? Why'd you do that?
01:08It was like, this is just unbelievable.
01:11They thought that they had, you know, reinvented the wheel. And in many respects, they did.
01:16Our combined company was a profitable slot machine company and a dying pinball company.
01:23As far as Wall Street was concerned, the slot machine company couldn't be valued the way they should be
01:29because they had this anchor ball and chain.
01:32One of my sources had said, Monday, it's over. And I was incredulous.
01:37Everyone was in awe. They couldn't understand why it happened.
01:41Or here we had just done this thing that, from all that we could tell, was a total success.
01:47Why would they do that?
01:50To be continued...
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