Expo 2008 - quick recap
After a good ten hours of much needed sleep I’m ready to tell you what happened at Expo. As Don and I drove from Michigan we spent the three hours discussing what questions people would probably ask. How much each of us would talk (anyone who knows me knows that I can do my fair share of talking.) The funny thing is we were preparing for what might happen at the Fireside Chat. We had no idea that there was excitement waiting for us when we walked in the hotel.
So Don and I arrive and went looking for Mike Pacak. We found him almost immediately and were surprised to find him very nervous. Mike can be fairly animated every time I’ve seen him but this time he was as animated as a cartoon cat walking on hot coals. He proceeded to tell us how wayne had been in contact with him a number of times trying to shut-down our presentation and that none of those attempts phased him. What had him very concerned was an email wayne sent him. He handed the email to us, we read it, and told him it was more of the same. He also mentioned that Williams head council and patent attorney would be sitting in the audience for our chat (the plot thickens…) So our first order of business was to settle Mike down =) Lucky for us Roger Sharp from Williams was about 50 feet away. Months ago we contacted Roger to make sure Williams had no problem with what we were doing (you can read the story on pinballnews.com) Roger knew of some rumblings going on about us and our product. I thought it was a good time to ask Roger if he knew that Gene Cunningham claims to have purchased a pinball 2000 patent when Williams sold him the part business. I think Roger was very surprised to hear this information. This was the “secret” information that we would later reveal at our chat. Wayne has been telling the world that he was the sole owner of the pinball 2000 patents and that the only things Gene owned were a ball through and some other non-essential patent. More about this later. Roger asked us for the patent number, which I provided. I reminded Roger that we wanted to be completely legal and make sure we were breaking no laws or infringing on anyone’s IP. He was very friendly as always then ran off to make a phone call Fortunately that settled Mike down and all was well.
We had five hours until our chat and thought we would look around and relax a little… HA! Jim from PinGame Journal cornered us. We spent nearly an hour telling him what was going on. Our moderator Gary Flower came by to go over the game plan. He informed us that Wayne wanted him to make a few statements. I said I had no problem with that as long none of them were lies. I ran back in the seminar hall where we had our machine setup and a professional (I believe) photographer was taking pictures of my machine. I told him he might want to come back when the computer was installed (we never left the computer in the machine while we weren’t near it.) After all that fun was over at was 5pm. Don and I wanted to grab a bite to eat. We ate and then went back to the hall to install the computer and test the machine. Everything worked perfectly. WOOT! Time for a shower.
At 7:15 we went back down to the hall to check everything. No problems. Larry DeMar showed up and I introduced myself. He is a legend in the gaming industry, Robotron, Defender, Pinball 2000, slots, this guys has done everything. I asked him to try the emulator out. He said, “YOU GUYS ARE CRAZY!” I acknowledged and asked what he thought after playing for a few minutes. He said, “This is INCREDIBLE! I have all the technical knowledge about this system and I COULDN’T DO THIS! YOU GUYS ARE CRAZY! ” He was smiling and laughing all the while. Of course I was smiling too =) They added a last minute seminar at 7:30 so we had to get off stage. The seminar ran just a tad long so we scrambled to get in place. Our moderator started speaking before we were done setting up the camera so that was a little hectic. The seminar will be available shortly on pinballnews.com so I’ll let you listen to that yourself. It was a huge success, I couldn’t have been happier.
After we were done they had the Williams guys get back up on stage with Don and me for photographs. I thought a couple of people might take a picture. I think everyone in the hall with a camera came up to shoot pictures of us for about 5 minutes. I felt like Brittany Spears getting out of a Bentley! After that everyone ran over to the machine to try it out. I was talking to Cameron Silver and someone said, “It seems to have shutdown…” I immediately went over and the machine was really hot. I rebooted it and it ran again. A few minutes later, black… I installed an Alpine 150watt amplifier just under the computer and though it was causing the cpu to overheat. We found out later that we had lost a case fan and it was indeed overheating. Luckily I brought a spare computer and took the fan out of it. The computer was rock solid all night Friday after that. I’m glad to report that we had zero bugs, zero non heat related crashes, and no weird anomalies. I haven’t checked the audits yet but judging how the playfield looks it got a ton of plays. The machine wasn’t idle for more than 2 minutes for the 6 hours we had it available for free play.
I wanted to take this time to thank everyone for their overwhelming support of our hard work. It’s time like this that makes all the work well worthwhile. It seems wayne isn't the only one holding Pinball 2000 Patents afterall...
