I wrote this article I beleive in 2003 (not sure). I wrote it for Michael Schalhoub whom asked me to write a few articles for his book “The Pinball Compendium: 1982 to Present“

This is the story of how I got my job in the coin-op industry working for Williams Electronic Games in 1989.

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It was mid-September, 1989. I was 24 years old. I was due to graduate from DeVry Institute of Technology next month. My counselor at DeVry was hard at work getting me interviews and telling me about job fairs. She told me about an entry-level job opening with Johnson Controls. She gave me the time and address of the hotel for the interview. I shaved, gathered some cool looking resumes into my leather-bound notebook, put on my one suit, and left. I had been on three previous interviews and had a good handle of the process. I was familiar with Johnson Controls and I wanted this job.

When I arrived at the hotel, to my dismay, there were no Johnson Controls interviews. My counselor had given me the wrong date. There was a job fair at the hotel that night instead. Many companies had hotel rooms that opened to a common area in the center of the hotel. You could go from room to room and talk with people that needed people. I was all dressed up so what could it hurt? I went to some of the rooms and started talking to people. After about three brief talks (“Sorry we are not looking for entry-level people”) I got the idea that this fair was not for entry-level people. The fourth interviewer was nicer. I wish I remembered her name. She told me that the fair was not for entry-level jobs but knew a man named Ed Suchocki who often called her looking for people. She asked if I would like to program games. My eyes lit up. It was hard to maintain some composure. She told me that Ed had graduated from DeVry too and that I should call him.

I called him the next day. I mentioned his female friend and that I was about to graduate. I told him I was in the EET (Electronics Engineering Technology) program at DeVry. I told him that I could put together a portfolio and come for an interview. When I hung up the phone I thought what the hell is a portfolio? It turned out not to be hard to gather some stuff I had done: Logic diagrams and schematics from school; art work I had drawn on a program I had written on my Mac; a spider-man picture I had had scanned with my black and white Mac and then did the color-separation to it and printed it back out; art work I had drawn for the playing pieces for a Monopoly game I was writing for the Mac; and some source code of a real-time game I wrote for the Commodore 64. My classmates had told me that I should try for a software job. Believe it or not I was the best at software in my class. Thinking of this and looking at my portfolio I was confident. My girlfriend kissed me, wished me luck, and I left for my interview with Ed.

At this point I was vague about what Williams/Bally/Midway was. My best friend Glenn Wilcox and I had spent many hours playing pinball and video games back in the suburbs of Detroit where I grew up. While High Speed and Defender were my favorite games, I barley knew they were made by the same company. I had no concept of design teams or designers for that matter.

When I arrived at 3401 N. California Avenue, I told the receptionist I was there to see Ed Suchocki. While I waited I couldn’t help but notice all the plaques and awards that filled one wall of the reception room. Mark Penacho and Bill Pfutzenreuter came down to greet me. They told me Ed was busy and that they would interview me. They took me to a small room off the reception area and we sat at a round table. I opened my briefcase and to my horror my leather-bound folder with my cool looking resumes was not there. I apologized to them and we started to go through all the other stuff I brought. It was hard to get a read on them. I wasn’t sure if Pfutz (Bill had told me to call him that) was impressed, but I thought Mark was somewhat interested. Mark then stood and left. He went to get Larry DeMar. Larry came in the room and I briefly went through all the stuff I brought again. At the time I didn’t understand why they were not that impressed with the source code I had brought. I now understand how small the software was.

When I was done talking about all the eclectic things I had brought, Larry didn’t really say anything. Instead Pfutz leaned forward, squinted at me with a very serious look and asked, “Would you rather work on pinball machines or on video games?” I was taken aback. I sat back and thought about it. Was this an offer or a test? These were all pinball people. “Pinball”, I said with a slight hesitation. I did prefer to play pinball to video but at the time would have taken a job in either.

After a small amount of questions about my portfolio, “Do you ever have bugs in your code?”, another test. After a slight pause I said “Yes, doesn’t everyone?”

“What are your favorite games?” I told them Defender and High Speed, not knowing at the time who Larry was.

On my way home I was convinced that I did not get the job. What kind of idiot leaves his resume at home? When I got home I told my girlfriend (later to be my wife) what an idiot I was. I put some resumes in a big envelope and mailed them off to Ed Suchocki. Less than a week later I called Ed to see if he had received them. He said he was glad I called and that he was about to call me. He told me that apparently I made quite an impression and that he wanted to hire me. He asked me what salary I was looking for. I had been told not to give a number to make them give the first number. “$25,000″ I said. He said ok. I am not sure if he ever looked at the resumes.

I worked at Williams helping to design pinball machines from Nov 6th, 1989 to Oct 25th, 1999.

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I wrote this article in 2003. I wrote it for Michael Schalhoub whom asked me to write a few articles for his book “The Pinball Compendium: 1982 to Present“

This is the story of The last few months at Williams and how I got my job working for Stern Pinnball Inc 1999.

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To talk about my start at Stern is to talk about the end of Williams. It was the worst day of my life, October 25, 1999.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the end. For years, every three months there was another potential layoff of engineering peoples. Being a publicly held company, every three months is another quarterly report and the stockholders expect profits or action. Pinball, and the whole coin-op industry in general, was declining from mid-1994 on. Why it was declining is a whole ‘nother story. Layoffs were like vomiting. It is so gut wrenchingly painful as it is happening, but afterwards you feel better. You think, “That sucked, but maybe it’s over now, maybe things will get better from here.” You force yourself to have faith in the leadership of the company.

The beginning of the end to me was sometime in 1998. It had been made clear to us that we had to do something or we would be out of business. Even then I didn’t believe it. We would have meetings to discuss different ideas people had. We thought what we had to do was change the face of pinball. Make it look so different that it would draw new interest.

Looking for the answer was very difficult. In my own way of thinking it was like there was this really big field. We knew the answer was buried somewhere in the field. Some of us were walking around with a spade shovel digging holes at random. Some were walking around waving a metal detector back and forth in front of them and listening to little beeps. John Popadiuk was the most visible. His team was digging a really big hole with one of those large yellow diggers. George Gomez was often seen walking in straight lines, taking evenly spaced steps and often nervously glancing at a parchment. Sometimes George would take sharp right turns and continue pacing out of sight. In saner terms, we didn’t know what we were doing but John’s team had the most viable idea.

Basically, John wanted us to change pinball to have a new style of cabinet with a monitor instead of a dot-matrix display. He had many more ideas and some of them still persisted into what became Pinball 2000.

In a meeting with Neil Nicastro (the president), we were asked if everyone was behind John’s idea. I knew that we needed to sell it to Neil. I knew that it was important for us to stand behind the best idea and see it through. George Gomez thought differently. I followed George back to his office and asked him “What the hell are you doing?” He told me that he thought what John was doing was not the answer.

Time went by and we were pushing forward with John’s ideas. Later it was learned that George and Pat Lawlor worked at Pats garage building a demo to show the rest of us. When they brought in their demo it was clear to all that that was it, that we were done searching. This demo became Pinball 2000 and we were saved. Someone that saw the demo later said we had just “bought pinball 5 more years”.

What followed over the next many weeks was amazing. We became a group on a mission. We were reinventing pinball from the ground up. Everything was scrutinized to find a way to improve on the way it was done. The most visible part of Pinball 2000 was the interactive video, but this was just the tip of the iceberg. Very few people outside our group appreciate this today.

Lyman Sheats led Keith Johnson and I to write the software for Revenge from Mars, the first Pinball 2000 pinball machine. We were writing a game on a new platform while the Operating System itself was being developed. This was no easy task. Revenge from Mars, the second game (Star Wars Episode I), and the OS were almost all developed at the same time. We learned tons of things while we developed them. The next couple models were going to make great strides towards improving the platform.

We premiered Pinball 2000/Revenge from Mars at the ATEI show in London in January, 1999. The show was a huge success. While I had very little to do with the Pinball 2000 design or its OS, I worked harder on Revenge from Mars than any other game previous. Revenge from Mars sold well, 2 to 3 times more than any recent game.

Pinball Expo ‘99 was October 21st through the 24th. For two weeks prior to Expo, Tom Uban, Lyman Sheets, and others worked their butts off to get one of the newest additions to Pinball 2000 ready. While we developed Pinball 2000, we created and maintained a wish list of stuff to enhance it. We planned to develop these ideas when we got the time. One item was a card reader. The machine could know who was playing if the player had a card and scanned it before they started. This would have enabled lots of other cool features to follow. It did help facilitate the tournament at the Expo.

When I arrived to work on October 25th, the Monday following Expo, I learned that Williams laid-off the entire pinball department. This was over 400 people, including 45 engineers. I was devastated.

Meanwhile, Gary Stern had recently made a deal with Sega to take possession of the pinball division he was already in charge of.

In the next few days after the lay-off, we were allowed to clear out our offices. I had ten years of miscellaneous pinball junk in my office, most of which I didn’t want anymore given my disposition at the time.

Jim Patla was in charge of overseeing the archiving of the department. When I ran into him, he told me that when he last saw Ken Fedesna, our General Manager, Ken told him he was surprised Dwight didn’t take his door. My door is unique. It is covered in Star Trek: The Next Generation back-box decals. Jim and I took Kens comment as permission that I could have my door. Jim wrote me a property pass for it and I took my door home. I plan to use it someday when I finish my basement.

We were also given interviews at Midway, our sister company. I was half sure I didn’t want anything to do with making games anymore, ever.

Headhunters called me every couple days. I went on a couple of interviews.

Several of us made a date to drive down to see Gene Cunningham. The plan was to start a new pinball company. For a short while this seemed very interesting yet scary.

I heard from my good friend Cameron Silver that Lonnie Ropp was looking for software people at Stern.

I was offered a job at Midway.

I called Lonnie and he interviewed me over the phone. He had a lot to say and talk about. He seemed to already know a lot about me. He asked me to come in for an interview early next week.

On Sunday we drove down to meet with Gene. On the way back I was torn about how I felt. It seemed too good with lots of unanswered questions.

On Monday I put on my one suit (a different one from my interview at Williams, honest!) and gathered my letters of recommendations from Larry Demar and Ted Estes along with resumes into my leather notebook. I went in for an interview with Lonnie and Gary Stern. It went really well. I was confident that they would make me an offer.

The Gene Cunningham plan turned south. I think I dodged a bullet there. In the end, my only real choice was to work for Midway and learn to do video games or work for Stern doing what I had been doing for ten years. I started work for Stern Pinball Inc at the end of November 1999.

Gary Stern is a good man. He is passionate, hard working, and cares about pinball. While today pinball is still on very shaky grounds I believe it is in good hands.

Dwight Sullivan
July 10, 2003

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