{"id":1193,"date":"2013-06-29T20:20:52","date_gmt":"2013-06-29T18:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pinball-magazine.com\/?p=1193"},"modified":"2013-06-30T03:41:35","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T01:41:35","slug":"preview-of-the-dennis-nordman-interview-part-23","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pinball-magazine.com\/?p=1193","title":{"rendered":"Preview of the Dennis Nordman interview (part 2\/3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is part 2\/3 of \u00a0the first chapter of the Dennis Nordman interview, published in Pinball Magazine No. 2. Part 1<\/a> was published two days ago. Part 3 will be published in two days. In the first chapter of the interview Dennis about how he became a pinball designer. In the remaining seventeen chapters all of Dennis’ pinball designs are discussed by Dennis and graphic artist Greg Freres. Greg worked closely with Dennis on at least five of his designs. The entire interview covers 90 pages in Pinball Magazine No. 2, not counting contributions by people like pinball designers Steve Ritchie and \u00a0John Popadiuk, graphic artists Doug Watson, John Youssi and Pat McMahon, technical right hands Mark Weyna and Ken Walker and others.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The prototype cabinet Dennis built in college<\/p><\/div>\n

PM: Why are the\u00a0Demolition Man\u00a0<\/i>images on there?<\/b><\/p>\n

DN: That was the game I was working on at the time. When I built the model in college it had no art work on it so, I changed it to\u00a0Demolition Man.\u00a0<\/i>It was not a model for\u00a0Demolition Man<\/i>; I just wanted to put some artwork on it, so I chose\u00a0Demolition Man.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After I built the full-size version of the cabinet, I found a photographer who also studied at OSU. He came out and outside the shed he hung a big white backdrop, we set up the game there and he set up his lights all around. I had gone to the mall a few days before looking for some attractive girl who would model for me. It was really like the first girl I asked, and she said she\u2019d love to do it. So then I used those slides to make my presentation at Bally.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Now here\u2019s the really, really, really interesting thing about that girl; She did the modeling and I took her out to dinner and we saw each other a few times, but nothing ever developed out of that. So, I get my job at Bally and was working there\u00a0for however long, and one year I went to the Pinball Expo. I\u2019m walking around and there\u2019s the girl. I was like \u201cOh my God. How did you get here? What are you doing here?\u201d She was Rob Berk\u2019s (one of the organizers of Pinball Expo – PM) girlfriend at the time. Rob Berk is from Warren, Ohio. I was from Columbus, Ohio and this girl was working at a mall in Columbus, but she was from Cleveland. That was a unique connection there.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PM: Did you consider other companies as well, beside Bally to show your cabinet?<\/b><\/p>\n

DN: No, I didn\u2019t, I had that connection with Bally. Chuck said he\u2019d hire me so that\u2019s who I went with. It took them a couple of weeks to make the decision; they didn\u2019t hire me that day.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PM: But you never went back to college?<\/b><\/p>\n

DN: No. I didn\u2019t go back.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PM: So now you\u2019re hired at Bally to work on cabinets, what was the first project you were assigned to?\u00a0<\/b>DN: When I got to Bally they put me in a little office with this kid; He was about eighteen or nineteen years old; I was about thirty-one. He was showing me all his pinball ideas and he was working on a game design. His name was John Popadiuk! That\u2019s how I met John. John was probably the first guy I became friends with when I arrived in Chicago. Later, he got laid off along with Ward Pemberton, because things weren\u2019t going that well for Bally at the time. I think John went back to Canada for a while and he didn\u2019t get back into the industry until later.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PM: Tell us about some of your early cabinet designs.<\/b><\/p>\n

DN: The first game I worked on was probably the\u00a0Rapid Fire\u00a0<\/i>cabinet. Bally didn\u2019t move many\u00a0Rapid Fire\u00a0<\/i>games and they had a lot of cabinets left. So when they did\u00a0Eightball Deluxe Limited Edition<\/i>, they reused those cabinets, and again for\u00a0Centaur II<\/i>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The Rapid Fire cabinet<\/p><\/div>\n

I also did some work on the\u00a0Rapid Fire\u00a0<\/i>playfield design. I was still a pretty new guy when that project came into being. The VP of Bally was insisting we do something like\u00a0Hyperball\u00a0<\/i>[Williams\u2019 1981 Flipperless game – PM] . They thought that game was the future of the industry, or something. I don\u2019t think<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Norm Clark was too interested in doing it. He didn\u2019t want to do it, so, since I was the new guy, he gave it to me as a project. I thought it was a\u00a0great opportunity until I realized nobody was really crazy about doing that project.<\/p>\n

Internally it was known as Project\u00a0Xerox.<\/p>\n

I remember I built the wood molds for the vacuum- formed tanks along each\u00a0side. I remember staying up all night at home working on those things. The game was later taken over by Jim\u00a0Patla \u2013 somebody with experience \u2013 who could get it done. The Force Field was my idea, I think there were some thumb buttons on the handle, and you could move the Force Field back and forward and block the shots from the bad guys.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Eightball<\/a> \"centaur<\/a> \"mr&mrs<\/a>The\u00a0Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man\u00a0<\/i>cabinet was a whole differentbackbox; I was just trying to do some things differently. The artists didn\u2019t like that one \u2013 actually they didn\u2019t like the\u00a0Rapid Fire\u00a0<\/i>cabinet either \u2013 because it made their backglasses smaller, they had less space to work with. So the artists, including Greg (Freres), Kevin O\u2019Conner, Margaret Hudson, Pat McMahon and Paul Faris, weren\u2019t that impressed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PM: Anything else important happen in those early days?<\/b><\/p>\n

DN: The most important thing, as soon as I came to Bally, was when I had my talk with the president and made my presentation. I met the president\u2019s secretary. The first time I saw her I thought, \u201cWow what a stunning woman that is.\u201d When I started at Bally we talked more and more and then we started going out and a year later we got married. That\u2019s how I met my dear wife Barbara.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

She was Billy O\u2019Donnell\u2019s secretary, and then she was Chuck Farmer\u2019s secretary. After we merged with Williams she was Joe Dillon\u2019s secretary for a while. She has some great stories from the old days, but she won\u2019t tell them to anybody. She\u2019s a good secretary.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PM: So, what is it with pinball designers hitting on their bosses\u2019 secretaries?<\/b><\/p>\n

DN: Bally was a small company. There were not a lot of people there and yet I can think of four marriages that came about from the people that met while working there. Maybe playing pinball brought them together, or there\u2019s something in the water over there. Greg Freres and his wife Andi also met at Bally. Andi and Barbara sat across from each other. Then there was Ward\u2019s wife Joyce and Pat McMahon\u2019s wife Debbie. So, at least four couples met there. I think Jim Patla also met his wife at Bally, but he was already married when I got there. That\u2019s a lot of marriages.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Now as for my wife Barbara, if you knew how much stuff she used to throw away, all this promotional stuff that would be worth a fortune on eBay today; flyers, brochures, give-aways. If she needed to make room for a new game, she just took all the stuff from an old game and threw it in the trash. Pens, T-shirts, the stuff she threw away would make you cry.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PM: So she\u2019s not that much into pinball?<\/b><\/p>\n

DN: No, not at all. When I was at Williams and I would bring home some stuff from a game I worked on, she could tell me: \u201cQuit bringing all that sh*t home.\u201d [laughing]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PM: Apart from bringing the scoring displays closer to the playfield, which was the case on\u00a0Rapid Fire<\/i>,\u00a0Centaur II<\/i>,\u00a0Eightball Deluxe Limited Edition\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man<\/i>, did Bally use any of your other\u00a0<\/b>innovations on their games?<\/b><\/p>\n

DN: I think the speaker in\u00a0Rapid Fire\u00a0<\/i>was in the middle of the displays, just above the playfield. So here were two things. The other stuff never happened. They already had experience from building\u00a0Kiss\u00a0<\/i>with a fiberglass cabinet. I remember seeing it, but it wasn\u2019t a good experience for Bally, so they wanted to stay away from fiberglass. Besides, they wanted to put the money into the game, not the cabinet. The game wasn\u2019t meant for home use. Operators didn\u2019t care about cabinet design; they just wanted to know how much money the game took in. It was hard to justify spending money on the cabinet.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tradeshows<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I first started at Bally, I went to my first tradeshow. I think Patla had\u00a0Centaur\u00a0<\/i>there. I was so impressed being around so many pinball game designers. I thought, \u201cWhat a cool job\u201d and \u201cLook, he created this game and everybody\u2019s playing it and everybody loves it.\u201d Then we went to the Bally party afterwards and I never saw a thing like that in my life. I mean there was a huge ballroom with a ten- or fifteen-piece orchestra playing music. They had ice sculptures and hors d\u2019oeuvre bars with things like lamb chops and shrimp. Man, those were pretty exciting days. Everybody was drinking and acting crazy. It was fun! I went to three or four tradeshows like that before things went to hell. [laughing] The tradeshows were really cool. Also because you got to play the competition\u2019s games and see what all the other companies were doing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Orbitor 1<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I remember when I saw Stern\u2019s\u00a0Orbitor 1\u00a0<\/i>at one of the tradeshows I was very impressed. The thing I didn\u2019t like was the way it curved around the flippers. I thought everything else was really cool, but you didn\u2019t have any control by the flippers. That\u2019s the one thing I didn\u2019t like about it, but I loved everything else. I loved the vacuum-formed playfield with the moon scene under it and the spinners. The pop bumpers were very innovative. If they had made it so that you\u2019d have ball control by the flippers I think it would have been a much more successful game.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PM: Then what happened?<\/b><\/p>\n

DN: Within a year I got laid off. Bally merged with Midway and that\u2019s when I got laid off. I was just in and already let go. The interesting thing about this is that my wife knew about the layoffs and couldn\u2019t tell me. She was a good secretary.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Within a day or two I got a job at Gottlieb, before they changed to Mylstar. I wasn\u2019t hired to do anything with pinball, but instead to create video game concepts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

>>> To be continued<\/em>\u00a0>>><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The entire Dennis Nordman & Greg Freres interview, which covers more than 100 pages, is published in Pinball Magazine No. 2. Order your copy in the\u00a0Pinball Magazine web shop<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is part 2\/3 of \u00a0the first chapter of the Dennis Nordman interview, published in Pinball Magazine No. 2. Part 1 was published two days ago. Part 3 will be published in two days. In the first chapter of the interview Dennis about how he became a pinball designer. In the remaining seventeen chapters all of Dennis’ pinball designs are discussed by Dennis and graphic artist Greg Freres. Greg worked closely with Dennis on at least five of his designs. The entire interview covers 90 pages in Pinball Magazine No. 2, not counting contributions by people like pinball designers Steve Ritchie and \u00a0John Popadiuk, graphic artists Doug Watson, John Youssi and Pat McMahon, technical right hands Mark Weyna and Ken Walker and others.  …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-pinball-magazine-no-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinball-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinball-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinball-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinball-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinball-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1193"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinball-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1264,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinball-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions\/1264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pinball-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinball-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pinball-magazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}