iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 01/10/2026

Looks like Bobby Tables got his first job at McDonald's.

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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

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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 · 17/09/2026

Pat also got a deal on some old lathes and whatnot and one day a truck shows up and we forklift it in.

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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 · 14/09/2026

I added the UP, DOWN, ESCAPE, and ENTER commands which look silly when you're typing away on the console. But when I created macros in my terminal program to emit those strings, suddenly you had the coin door buttons on your PC's F-keys =) That made writing the test/audit system a LOT easier.

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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

Bummer! Maybe next time. I'm curious why coin-op hardware doesn't have much of a presence at this show other than MAME devices. The spectrum of devices is insane. Like someone recreated Bob Bishop's Tic-Tac-Dough game show set. 🤩

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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

And the new owner kept the Grand Lizard drop target sticker 😍

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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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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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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 27/08/2026

Test games usually had mechanical problems, and an attendant might give out service credits to compensate. The Williams door switch had a UX problem: in a dark arcade you might miss the credit button and accidentally lower the game volume instead.

The WPC era door switch layout. Note that the service credit button is next to the volume down button.

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

We negotiated to have PLD's company name and logo on Monopoly, which kind of forced Gary's hand. But at this point in history it was a matter of doing whatever it took to keep sales up and the factory open.

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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

Got the same in the western suburbs! Wow!

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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 · 01/08/2026

PLEIADS! That game nobody could spell correctly!

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

The flipper code is both flippers, then 23R-1L-26R-1L-25R-1L-28R. Flippers move the fireman, the falling/burning babies bounce on their own since I didn't finish the collision logic. Game ends on it's own after some amount of time. Have fun.

Wheezy's Cheezy Fire! game, hidden in the Jack*Bot ROM.

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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

Given the fact that the river went right by the United/Williams plant AND a power company station full of PCB-leaking transformers, there's no way I would swim in this part of the river. We used to look out the windows during -20°F polar vortex storms and the river... did not freeze.

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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

The sales material brags about the technical ability of the PCB facility, but the photos are all of System 11 pinball boards being stuffed and tested. Hawes also notes that WIT (the electronics arm of WMS) also built modems for USRobotics and... Apple. Still tracking these models down.

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

That's another fun rabbit hole. I have some info. These emerged when some laws changed and allowed businesses to own their own payphone equipment. So Williams jumped in around 85-86, probably as a hedge against pinball failing again. They managed to build some number of phones.

The Gurnee factory built a lot of other circuit boards for pinball and video and was a natural location to build the phones. Hassler and Smolucha ran the California Avenue pinball plant in the 90s.

A product sticker that looks like the pinball ones, but is not.

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

Another fun Bally acquisition was the Barnaby's Pizza chain in the mid 80s. They remodelled a handful of stores into "TomFoolery", a hybrid restaurant/arcade with a game room full of Bally/Midway titles of course. And they REALLY leaned into the Pac-Man connection. I went a few times, it was neat.

A menu from Bally's TomFoolery, which is shaped like Pac-Man.

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

And there are *still* pieces loosely covered:

A single from Bally Records, a label created by the parent company 1955-1957.

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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

That moment was the perfect intersection of "yeah we're following the security rules" and "who the fuck cares?" Dwight Sullivan took his office door home.

Dwight had plastered his door with STTNG backbox decals and said it would be too much work to clean it off before leaving. Could he just take the door home? Ken Fedesna said sure.

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

Joey had a thing for microwaves. Note the other DE inside jokes and easter eggs in this endscreen from TA.

"A.C. Current Shoves Koldan's Head in Microwave Oven!"
(By Joe Kaminkow, KOLDAN TODAY)
"Sega Enterprises buys Data East Pinball!"
"Deathball 3000 takes more lives!"

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

"...or Cruise Ship fatality." The cruise ship fatality was Joe, we had heard these stories that Kaminkow was shopping an action movie script he wrote, similar to "Under Siege" but takes place on a cruise ship. The ship had a room-sized microwave oven (why?) where the villain meets his demise.

The "eat ship and die" fatality from Tattoo Assassins, where a miniature cruise ship crushes the losing opponent. Why is the boat small? Nobody knows.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 06/07/2026

We can love/hate private equity but it really saved the big two companies from completely disappearing when times got tough a while back. And yeah, now they expect a ROI and $10K games + subscriptions are the way to do it. There'd be no more pinball otherwise - street locations are a dead end. (pun)

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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

Swiss Maid Bakery! Looks like they changed hands but the building looks the same. Best cheese danish in the county. The lady behind the counter had our order ready to go most mornings.

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

The fun part about being that far out is we would regularly encounter drunken Cubs fans that passed out on the train after a game and wound up at the end of the line. "Where the hell am I?" We would ask ourselves the same thing from time to time.

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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

I worked next door to the ComEd plant that served the neighborhoods near Wrigley Field and Tom Skilling's studio @ WGN TV. The power grid was so old and overloaded that transformers were exploding. Chicago Fire set up hoses to try and keep the remaining ones cooled down.

The view outside my office, July 1995. Addison St / California Ave.

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Louis Koziarz @koziarz.com · 27/06/2026

Get the PLD store back online, too!

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