Quoted from goatdan:

Okay, wow, I have no idea how I stumbled upon this thread a few hours ago as I don't spend as much time on here or posting about pinball lately, but man, what a trip down memory lane. I have a number of stories about Gene that may or may not contribute anything, but I feel compelled to share at least some of them after reading these.
There are a number of people who have stated that they don't want to speak ill of the dead, so they won't share their stories of Gene. A few others have shared their thoughts of why Gene was in it, and what his end goal truly was. I am not discounting their opinions at all, but I got a different sense for him - that everything he did was for the story - and he would love nothing more than to see a thread like this where he was remembered years later.
I first met Gene in 2003 hosting the Midwest Gaming Classic. As noted on the second page, pinwhoo suggested that he should come to our show as we were trying to grow pinball, and without much of a sales pitch, Gene was in. I spoke with him on the phone a couple times before the show to confirm details and things like that, but didn't really get to know him until after that 2003 show.
I'll expand upon some of that this more at another point when it isn't so late, but to explain what Gene was like, I would suggest he is a cross between the main character in Big Fish and the real life PT Barnum. He found things that he enjoyed, then found ways to weave narratives around them that put him at the center of the small universe he took part in so everyone talked about him. At the same time, he absolutely exploited relationships when they would become a bigger story. He would play with how he presented the truth for the most drama at any given point in time.
Did he lose a million dollars on BBB? I believe *he believed* he did, but it was due to the sorts of funny math that people have alluded to in this thread. Even if we assume a total of 200 games were made and sold, the total revenue on them would have been $900,000. That would mean each game Gene made would have lost him at least $5,000. Considering the amount of free labor he used, as well as incredible deals that he did to receive the parts, I can't find any reasonable way that he lost that much. But if you talked with him, he was extremely sincere that he did it for the love of the game, and because he wanted to be a hero in the pinball story above all else. The best way to do that was to lose money.
But, if you got him talking about business, he would talk about how he did such a great job with the reproduction of BBB, and he was able to pull off the project for a price where he made money, and produced a product that the new buyers were so excited to get, they were worth double what they paid for them the first day, which he then was able to make more of them with the spare parts afterward to sell for that inflated margin. In this story, Gene needed to be the hero of the business story, and *he believed* that not just did he make a great game like no one else could do, it was a smashing success in the way of business and for the customers. Everyone won! When Gene presented it this way, he was now the hero in the business story.
I have personally had both conversations with Gene, and heard him lay them out. The key I found with him was to ask a question every once in a while, and he would go in that direction. I was also in a unique case where I don't think Gene ever figured out that I was a pinball guy. I think he saw me as both a really young guy, and someone who was trying to start businesses, so he would often come at me in his conversations from the "oh man, I'm a super successful businessman!" standpoint, so it was much more likely I would hear him telling someone one thing, and then he would sort of pull me to the side to make a quip about how he was working a strategy to 'increase sales' or 'drive demand' or whatever. He *loved* giving me ideas about how I could better run the Midwest Gaming Classic, or the video game business we were doing, or how I should move into real estate, or whatever. Sometimes, he would say really insightful things. Sometimes, he was full of it.
Because of this relationship, I feel like I've probably been told stuff in a different lens than many others on here. I'll try sharing some of how Gene presented Gene to me moving forward if there is interest in this thread. I'll just add one more thing for tonight though:
Gene actually officially announced he was producing Big Bang Bar twice. In the pinball version of the story, he announced the game at Pinball Expo in October of 2004, but he actually first announced it in May at the Midwest Gaming Classic. The Midwest Gaming Classic announcement is mostly lost to time for a variety of reasons - I think the biggest one being that after he announced it and told people he expected it would be done in about a year, he didn't have much interest at our show. It wasn't good story.
But, he absolutely stood up in the speaking hall (Wisconsin Rooms 3/4 if memory serves at the Brookfield Sheraton) and told everyone he was taking orders for the machines. I remember this presentation as it was one of the only ones at *any* show I've run that I got to attend. He kept telling me that he was going to show me something incredibly exciting that I would get to do if we kept working at growing our business, but he was only going to do it if I showed up. He had made it clear when he opted to come back in 2004 - a story I'll tell another time - that he wanted to use our show to make this exciting new announcement. And for whatever reason, me being in the room was critical.
So I was there. But, he wanted to make it into some sort of surprise, and gave us little to promote, so I think it was just called something like "Gene Cunningham talks about Pinball Parts" or something incredibly generic and dull sounding. Gene was known to tell the same stories, so the majority of the pinball people at our show that year didn't show up. I would be surprised if there were 20 people in the room including Gene.
The presentation was darn near the exact same thing that he did for Pinball Expo, in what is widely considered to be the real launch of the game and for practical purposes, really probably was. I wasn't in the room for that one, but Gene was elated to see me at Expo in 2004, believing that I came down just to see him - partially due to that more or less happening in 2003 - where he told me he did basically the same presentation. He told me there that he had about 25 sign ups after the Midwest Gaming Classic announcement, and after he announced it at Expo he was above the 55 preorders that he needed to move forward.
Again, and this was the sort of mystery of Gene - I don't think he was lying about any of it. He absolutely didn't have 25 people sign up at MGC that year. I would be floored if he had more than 5 people sign up at the show. But, he always said to me "After my presentation at your show, I got a ton of great interest with more than 25 people signing up!" Technically, those people could have signed up at Expo, and it was still after the presentation at "my show." I also heard him directly tell people at Expo 04 that he had already reached the 55 number 'all from people who signed up after hearing my presentation!', so again, who knows where the real truth lies. But the fact he never said to anyone other than me that he announced it at MGC I think is a perfect example of how he would fit the truth into whatever suited him best for the story that he wanted to tell, where he was the hero of the moment to the segment he thought he was playing too.
I'll close by saying this - my mother's father was *extremely* similar to Gene, except without all the shiesty stuff and he was an engineer, not someone who owned his own businesses. Grandpa had all of these insane stories, and as a family we would often find ourselves rolling our eyes as he would describe something impossible sounding. He passed away in 2003, essentially at nearly the same time that I ended up meeting Gene, and after his death as I helped my family sort through his belongings, we found out that many of his insane stories held at least a significant slice of truth to them. I think getting this perspective at the same time I started interacting with Gene really got me to see Gene in a different light, and again, his lack of understanding that I was also into pinball made him change his stories to present himself in what he thought would be a better light to me.
Okay, yeesh, I wanted this to be quick and just spent a long time doing it. Hope someone cared to read Again, if people are interested in more, I've probably got 10ish more stories about Gene that I can share in the future, some that paint him in a better light, and some that don't. But all, I think, would make Gene really happy to know his stories were being shared after his death.