iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 25/09/2026

PLD Roller Coaster Tycoon Pinball: The whitewood is flipping and we're coding. Just not a lot of rules yet.

Pat Lawlor tries the RCT playfield, I'm either coding or reading IRC or both. PLD offices, January 2002. Photo credit @heyrocker.com

We have some dots! Just not a rule. Photo credit @heyrocker.com

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 24/09/2026

PLD RCT pinball, whitewood time. #2 went together pretty quickly but with the usual Lawlor complement of holes in the playfield that went nowhere. There's packing tape all over the place to keep balls at ground leve.

Pat working on Roller Coaster Tycoon, whitewood 2

Some of the ramps and wireforms were already playable at this point.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 23/09/2026

PLD RCT pinball: The new workshop also gave Krutsch a lot more room to hand model ramps and wireforms.

John Krutsch cutting ramp plastics on a bandsaw.

Brass wire being cut and soldered in to shape by hand. RCT whitewood 2.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 22/09/2026

You help the kid apply to college and you see all the hoity talk about their achievements and academic prowess. Then you get to the first football game and it's "we can't kick off until Goober the Goat rings the highly coveted Ding Dong Bell by kicking it with his hind legs! Yee-haw! (gunfire)"

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 17/09/2026

PLD RCT Pinball: our new offices had a lot more open room for workshop space. The wood router stayed in his garage but all the other metalworking tools came over.

Pat Lawlor and Greg Dunlap inspecting... something.

PLD's magnificently equipped model shop.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 16/09/2026

PLD RCT early days: After moving offices to Harvard we whipped up a quick first whitewood to show shots. Then we started getting the next playfield up after the holidays.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 16/09/2026

PLD RCT pinball: After Expo 2001 Pat started getting the license in place. Why RCT? I don't totally recall. Pat loved SimCity (c.f. Dialed In) and Gary wouldn't do an original amusement park theme. I think the relationship with Hasbro helped as they sold the game to Infogrames.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 15/09/2026

Thanks for the reminder @backglass.bsky.social! It's time to keep digging out PLD history and we're up to RollerCoaster Tycoon...

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 14/09/2026

The P2K hackers found the serial console but never understood all the things we could do with that. It was an amazing tool and saved our bacon more than a few times during dev and debug. (more)

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 14/09/2026

Obscure Pinball 2000 artifact I found in a box today: a custom boot ROM for the SMC8416 network card in our development machines. This would allow us to boot CPUs over the network during development, as well as other things we had planned. 🙁

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 13/09/2026

I asked LED if there was a VidKidz connection to PERC and High Speed, he clarified that he was at Williams at that time when he wrote PERC, and used a Gimix-ed version of that code to write Space Shuttle and High Speed. Then Jarvis used it for F-14 Tomcat.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 13/09/2026

RALF's owner also told me he's been in contact with the person that owns the other two Gimix boxes, MYKE and PSINDY. Stuff is getting archived! 🤯

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 13/09/2026

Had an awesome find at #vcfmw today. The old Vid Kidz RALF machine looking all cleaned up and enjoying retirement! He's in very good hands now. www.backglass.org/duncan/gimix/

"Used for Development by the Vid kids Eugene Jarvis and
Larry DeMar of Williams Electronics Inc"

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Reposted by Louis Koziarz

Retro Tech Dreams @retrotechdreams.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Remember to pay for WinZip.

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Reposted by Louis Koziarz

Harebrained @harebrained.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

This is the patron saint of National Gyros Day. Happy NGD to all who celebrate. #chicago

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 01/09/2026

Twenty five years ago (and one day).

The first MONOPOLY pinball rolls off the line at Stern Pinball, 30 August 2001.
The PLD design team L to R: Greg Dunlap, John Krutsch, Pat Lawlor, Louis Koziarz.

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Reposted by Louis Koziarz

Pinball Map @pinballmap.com · 31/08/2026

OPDB has added a "machines that are missing photos" list. If you have very nice backglass imagery of any of these machines, please contribute. app.matchplay.events/opdb/missing...

app.matchplay.events

Match Play Events

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Reposted by Louis Koziarz

weinberg @weinbergs.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Tim Curry and Jaye P. Morgan were both in Home Alone 2.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 26/08/2026

Wrong 80 year-old. Again. Damn.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 25/08/2026

The kid has moved off to college and I have inherited a hedgehog.

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Reposted by Louis Koziarz

Ken Tremendous @kentremendous.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Wrote about the proposed Paramount-WBD merger and why it is bad across the board.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 12/08/2026

It's an interesting historical project to figure out what was the first pinball to have the designer's name on it, and then other team members after that. Kirk goes on about his struggle with Gary Stern to put his name on Stars (1978), and we know that Gary has always been reluctant to do this.

PLAY METER: The whole reason we investigated this area is to help the operator make more intelligent buying decisions, if he knows games by certain designers are more likely to be better games than games by other designers. Shouldn't this carry over to having the designer's name on the advertising information?

KIRK: This is the point where I lost out. That's where Gary Stern drew the line. He felt that was going too far because I was, in effect, an independent contractor and not locked into him. He was getting feedback from his distributors that they wanted another game from this guy Kirk, and he did send out information on a separate piece of paper that the game was designed by me. But it wasn't advertised to the trade as a whole.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 11/08/2026

Going through my pinball files, I found a photocopied article. It was a 1985 PlayMeter interview with designer Steve Kirk about the "creative crisis in coin-op". It must have been circulated at Williams when it came out. I used to read Kordek's library during downtime and this was in there. (more)

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 10/08/2026

"Oh but MacOS only needs 256MB to show you the outside temperature so that's a win"

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Reposted by Louis Koziarz

Ólafur Waage @olafurw.com · 10/08/2026

[back in the day] Low level programmers: "It's all about optimizing every byte and every cycle, use as little RAM as you can" Other devs: "Nonsense. We have plenty of RAM" [today] Low level programmers: "Well well well"

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 28/07/2026

Super hidden easter egg in Jack*Bot: This was a tribute to Game & Watch "Fire!", the first Nintendo title I ever owned. I used it as a coding exercise while learning WPC system calls and dot-matrix programming, then made it a full easter egg in attract mode. Which got me in trouble. (more)

A picture of the FIRE model of Nintendo's Game & Watch circa 1980.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 25/07/2026

Williams/Bally/Midway is gone. WMS is no more. But one artifact remains: WMS donated $2 million to the Park District to name the new boathouse on the Chicago River, opposite from the factory. Designed by famous Chicago architect Jeanne Gang. studiogang.com/projects/wms...

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 23/07/2026

Neil Nicastro also didn't know or understand pinball history. Everyone else around him was VERY aware that Tom Nieman rescued Bally Pinball, and really the whole pinball industry, from a lackluster future by introducing licensed properties to their line.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 22/07/2026

In light of this great Addams Family #pinball oral history, I'll repost my github link here. This is a scanned example of the work Roger did to research upcoming movies and shows and inform the design teams about what was available and what had potential. raw.githubusercontent.com/lkoziarz/pin...

raw.githubusercontent.com

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 22/07/2026

I never heard this quote from Nicastro but it's incredibly ironic. Once the movie licensing money was rolling in Neil got on a tear and started shoving licenses down the throats of the design teams. "Hey, Crichton wrote Jurassic Park and that was a smash. We're buying Congo and you're gonna do it."

"The response I wound up getting from Neil Nicastro — son of the president of the company, eventually the president of Williams Bally — was, "Well, look where that got Bally. What did licensing do for them?"

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 22/07/2026

Just finished a long road trip and had the time to take in a lot of coin-op history podcasts. 90% of them go like this: "Today we're going to talk about game XXX, a true groundbreaking classic in arcade game history. Co-host, what are your memories of game XXX? "Never even heard of it". 🙄

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 20/07/2026

"Do you mind taking this with you to the factory?" "No problem. Anything important?" "Just a quarter million dollars worth of flash memory" 😳

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Reposted by Louis Koziarz

Ben Towle @benzilla.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Damn... RIP Dave Kendall, host of MTV's 120 Minutes. Kinda hard to fathom now, but back in the day you basically had 3 ways to get exposed to good, new, cool music: living somewhere w college radio station, hip older sibling, 120 Minutes. consequence.net/2026/07/dave...

consequence.net

Dave Kendall, Creator and Host of MTV's 120 Minutes, Has Died

Dave Kendall, creator and former host of MTV’s 120 Minutes, has died.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 16/07/2026

Now I'm kind of pissed that MS didn't refactor Comic Chat into a casual interface to Copilot AI. Putting that out into the ether in the hopes that someone does it.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 16/07/2026

This is pretty awesome. #moo lives on! For #arcade history buffs, Comic Chat was co-developed by Tim Skelly, the famous designer/programmer from Cinematronics and Gottlieb/Mylstar/Ratslym. opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2026/07...

opensource.microsoft.com

Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source | Microsoft Open Source Blog

Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source. Explore the IRC client that turned conversations into comics and helped introduce Comic Sans to the world.

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Reposted by Louis Koziarz

Brittany Ellich @brittanyellich.com · 14/07/2026

Btw y'all cheeseburger.world might be the coolest new Atproto app 😎

cheeseburger.world

Cheeseburger Database

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 14/07/2026

For those that don't know the whole history, Tattoo Assassins was a Mortal Kombat type fighting game developed by Data East Pinball (before they became Sega Pinball, then Stern Pinball). The story of this game is pretty amazing. A few insiders tell the tale here: www.bunnyears.net/tattoo/

bunnyears.net

Dan's Tattoo Assassins Page

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 11/07/2026

Happy 40th anniversary, Stern Pinball!

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 02/07/2026

I was at the U of Illinois in 1990 and I recall a petition from the users of the computer lab (which sat next to the Union arcade). The AAAHHH-FIGHT! every 2 min in attract was driving them nuts. Lawlor told me bartenders would switch the game OFF if attract was too obnoxious. You don't want that.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 01/07/2026

Phillips' Law: If your design has an I2C bus it will take 20% of your design time but cause 80% of your bring-up headaches. 😖

SDA struggglingggg to make it to 3.3V. C'mon little buddy you can DO it!

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 30/06/2026

PLD, post-Monopoly. We finally set up our new office and had some space to think and work. And now we needed to start designing the next game ASAP.

We needed a conference table. The desks were set up first.

Pat got the office with a door, the rest of us were in the large room together. @heyrocker.com's flannel shirt keeps an eternal vigil.

My programmer's cave, transported to the new PLD HQ.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 29/06/2026

PLD, Post-Monopoly. With the game in production and some pinball money coming in, Pat decided it was time to get out of the garage. Or his family decided we had to go. Probably both. We moved to an office building in downtown Harvard, IL, sharing the building with a hair salon and a psychologist.

243 E Front Street. It's now an Italian restaurant.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 29/06/2026

@pinballmap.com do you offer a reverse search? As in "where is the nearest <x> machine?". 🤔

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 26/06/2026

Monopoly Pinball easter egg: Backdoor to Land Grab final mode. Game must be in FREE PLAY, enter this during attract mode: 1R-1L-1R-2L-1R-3L-1R (ABC) Pennybags will tell you he loves to build houses. Shoot mode start to begin. Don't be a jerk and do this in tournaments. 😝

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 26/06/2026

Monopoly Pinball design team easter egg: 2R-7L-1R-4L-1R-4L-1R (GDD)

GDD because KOZ is waaayyyy too many flipper presses.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 25/06/2026

PLD Post-Monopoly stuff. The game was launched and things were moving. Stern was happy with the relationship so we were discussing another title and batting about ideas. We also went to Pinball Expo and did a "Making Of" presentation. Steve Kordek was kind enough to be our hype man.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 25/06/2026

Yup! There was a Titanic redemption from Sega, and it was... something. 1/n www.youtube.com/shorts/jxTO-...

youtube.com

9038 TITANIC MEGA JACKPOT

YouTube video by Artisan Fine Living

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 24/06/2026

This existed, I have a photo of it somewhere at a trade show. Peak Kaminkow.

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