(Topic ID: 271561)

Artifacts of Gene Cunningham/Illinois Pinball

By dudah

3 years ago


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54 key posts have been marked in this topic, showing the first 10 items.

Display key post list sorted by: Post date | Keypost summary | User name

Post #1 2020 photos of what’s left of Gene’s place. Posted by dudah (3 years ago)

Post #8 Dougram’s first installment of their part of Gene’s story. Posted by dougram69 (3 years ago)

Post #14 Dougram part 2 Posted by dougram69 (3 years ago)

Post #19 Link to an article about the history of Big Bang Bar. Posted by WODKA (3 years ago)

Post #28 Dougram part 3- some inventory arrives. Posted by dougram69 (3 years ago)

Post #83 Link to TOPcast episode 11, interview with Gene. Posted by wallybgood (3 years ago)

Post #87 Dougram part 5- musing about Atlas memories. Posted by dougram69 (3 years ago)


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#246 3 years ago
Quoted from pinballlife:

It was the offical bankruptcy auction. Are those federal? Heck, I don't know. Luckily I have never had to gain much of an understanding of what is all involved in bankruptcy proceedings.
Nothing was sold before the *auction*. It wasn't an auction in the typical *live auction* sense. PPS had put in a bid and that bid had to be topped before a certain date. I think Wayne cleared up how it all worked with the documentation he posted.

Yes its federal... they basically were liquidating his assets... trustee is responsible in trying to obtain the best outcome in terms of return for the creditors. Sounds like in this case they went around soliciting bids from buyers to try to arrange a sale. Like you said, not a live auction... but auction in the sense the assets were sold off to the highest bidder by the trustee.

What we really need is james and darrin (sp) from Phoenix arcades to tell us about james days before the “north amercian pinball parts alliance”... how that whole three way came together... fell apart... and the closing chapters of how he helped pushed gene into bankruptcy

#251 3 years ago
Quoted from Bryan_Kelly:

Kerry Stair with Mantis Amusement, James Loflin with Pinball Inc and Darin Jacobs with Phoenix Arcade. The three if them could write a book about dealing with Gene.

What were the names of the bearcave guys? That was something that always seemed to be some sort of unspoken thing... after their involvement with bbb blew up they seemed to disappear?

James seemed to go quiet after the legal fights started... and of course his selling of the ramp biz... but being back now, the closure of the legal fights, and genes death being a bit in the past now... hoping he would tell his full version. Kerry has been pretty tight lipped about it all once the project wrapped...

#270 3 years ago
Quoted from unigroove:

From what I understood from Gene, he preferred working with third parties that would manufacture new spare parts. As a royalty, let's say 10%, Gene didn't ask for money, but he wanted 10% of the products made. So if someone was making 100 cabinet decal sets for a certain game, he had to send 10 sets to Gene, who would then be able to sell them. I found that an interesting concept.

So did the irs it seems...

Sounds like a classic approach to getting stuff with fuzzy values, records, etc

12
#271 3 years ago
Quoted from Skeets:

Lots of crazy personalities and parts drama, nothing like it is today.

Instead they follow podcasters as prophets... ones without any clue ... sad isn’t ?

#273 3 years ago
Quoted from pinballlife:

If Gene ever managed to make any parts (and he made precious few for the first 5 years or more), it was always highly visible *brag* parts like cabinet decals, playfield plastic sets, or the like. He rarely, if ever, manufactured things like a flipper pawl, a rod and ring assembly, rubber rings, leg bolts, etc. Where was the glory in that? Gene wanted attention, respect, and adoration. Would a V-crank assembly bring him that? No.

Agree!

I always stayed away from ordering from them because i knew it was this people chain of “maybes...” hunts... time... i’d see ipb and mikeP at allentown... but that was enough contact for me to see what those two groups could possibly do.

Luckily for me in those years i didnt have big need for parts as my games were complete and I wasn’t refurbing stuff. When marco opened their e-commerce site with photos of most parts that was game changer... and when you started it was a great addition as you had the great products, great prices, and your amazing personal involvement in any question or concern. I always turned to pbl if it was kit you carried.

Looking back now, and the photos, ipb looks far more organized than i even thought they were. It seemed like at the time they didnt have a clue what they had... just you could make a request and theyd go hunt. Maybe they had no real inventory stuff.... but at least it’s organized on shelves and maybe separated

21
#298 3 years ago

Ahhh... a breath of fresh air. This is what the hobby used to be. People sharing insights, help, howto... leads etc. Not the biggest noise being about rankings, loud mouths, and narcissistic insignificant people.

Keep it coming!

Now i need to go back and listen to some of these offbeat podcasts

#302 3 years ago
Quoted from DennisK:

Fascinating thread.
I don't have any direct Gene Cunningham stories to tell. However, I will pass on a couple that Keith Johnson shared during the charity stream Special When Lit ran a few months ago as they were pretty entertaining and I've not seen them mentioned in this thread.
The first is that Gene originally was looking at buying Williams pinball and keeping it going. Initially this had a lot of interest with the engineers who had been working at Williams. Over time as the discussions continued the group shrunk down (as folks found other jobs and such) to Gene plus four others (one of which was Keith) that were committed to making it happen. It all was looking good until the equity split. The four non-Gene individuals all went in assuming equal equity stakes (so 20% each). At a subsequent meeting Gene stated he was getting 50%, the four other partners would have 49%, and Gene's daughter would get 1%. The potential partners insisted it needed to be equal and Gene said no. Keith stayed at Stern, the other three formed Pat Lawlor Design, and Gene did what Gene did.
The second involves Cactus Canyon. Years after the first story another company was looking to remake Medieval Madness and Cactus Canyon. Gene owned the rights to the patent on the Cactus Canyon drop targets (which were a single-coil design unique to that game). Gene wasn't paying the upkeep on it but still would have been able to keep it. But Keith had interest in the coil design for a possible game in the future, and wasn't pleased with Gene's prior behavior, and never told him and the patent expired.
Here's a link to my source. Keith tells the story far better than my summary. There's a brief gap between story one and story two. Link should take you to the very start of story one and story two ends about ten minutes after that.

The time marks disnt seem to survive the post... can you mention the time points you are referring to? Thx

#328 3 years ago
Quoted from aeneas:

As I remember it the games for Europe were produced first and shipped to their buyers in secret.
Games for USA buyers would be produced and delivered later, this would take another 6 months or so ?
The plan was that European buyers could not reveal their games until USA machines were ready ?
An know collector in Germany spilled the beans and revealed he had his BBB, and other European buyers would show their reveal pictures too..

It wasn't that it was a secret... just that it wasn't something that was 'expected' in the general public in how the games would be delivered. As the project slide further and further behind the original timelines... the import ban became another barrier.. and they rushed those games to ship first to try to avoid the cutoff.

It became a 'wave 1', 'wave 2' kind of thing.. and something that seemed to be worked out on the fly vs something that was communicated before. But that was pretty common for the program.. and part of why there was so much angst in the general RGP population over the probability of the games actually getting finished. The lack of visibility into progress, runway left, obstacles left, etc. The ROHS rush was just yet another 'unexpected reveal'

#347 3 years ago
Quoted from KozMckPinball:

Is that why he went bankrupt?

No, his other general business practices caught up to him... Look at the list of creditors in the bankruptcy case listed earlier.

BBB was expensive at the time (remember.. most people weren't even buying NIB games at the time) but wasn't priced like a JPop Magic Girl fantasy....

#349 3 years ago
Quoted from JodyG:

If Gene already had the boards for the game from Capcom, I would think that wouldn't be included in his BOM cost. So there would be even more padding in that $4500 price.

yeah but its not like he got those parts for free... his sales price would try to recoup some of his capcom expenses plus the new stuff needed.

#374 3 years ago
Quoted from Tommy-dog:

IPB bought Capcom out (all their remaining inventory, worth approx $1M) for only $20K when they went out of business. Gene got a lot of boardsets (approx 200 CPU boards, 500 driverboards, and several hundred misc boards) in this $20K Capcom deal. The $20K deal also included lots of plastic sets for the production Capcom games, misc hardware, a pallet of Coin Control coin doors, drop targets, a Capcom test fixture, and a handful of extra NOS Capcom playfields (Pinball Magic, Breakshoot, Airborn, Flipper Football). IPB sold the Capcom parts to PMI (Gene’s newly formed company to make the BBB games). PMI bought the Capcom parts from IPB and IPB sold the parts to PMI (on paper) as a profit. PMI took the capital gains loss on BBB but IPB made big profits on the Capcom parts that he sold to PMI.

I've never heard a source of what Gene paid for Capcom's inventory... But I don't understand why they would take the loss in the LLC setup just to do BBB - where they really have no taxable property or gains to offset... vs the IPB entity. All that said though... I don't see how it disputes what I said, where Gene (under either company) wasn't getting the boards for free... and has a reasonable expectation of a return on buying that inventory. The original comment suggested that the boards would be excluded from any cost calculations simply because he already had them. I'm simply saying just because you didn't reproduce something doesn't mean it was zero cost.

Quoted from Tommy-dog:

The true cost to make these new BBB games were around $3K according to Gene

Then... according to gene.. where did he lose another almost 4k per game.. also according to gene?

#448 3 years ago
Quoted from gdonovan:

Seems to me the major factor in the desirability of BBB is its exclusiveness, play wise seems to be no big shakes.
Unless they update the rules I don't see a pile of them running out the door as the exclusivity is gone.
Polish and balance the rules, add a color DMD and it might give it some legs.
Parties of the originals will be happy as will folks buying the 2.0 version.

Pretty much same story as kingpin

#453 3 years ago
Quoted from LTG:

Kingpin was more developed than BBB. The ones most people have played didn't have the ramp optos and other things not working.
The one I had here, we got everything working. The game is a blast.
LTG : )

I don't know where Jeff Reynolds got his and if HEP went through it or not (he had a ton of HEP games) but played his when he had his collection of unicorns. I had played a lot of it on emulation as well. I like playing the game... but I still feel most of the lure was the 'game that never was...' more than it was for it's pinball appeal. Plus, played the remake a good bit too. Fun project... worth 10k+? nah...

#459 3 years ago
Quoted from Mr68:

Jeff Reynolds of Gary Cubeta fame and RGP Radio? Oh man, those were my rookie days on RGP and Gary was my first troll experience. This thread is memory lane for me.

The same... jeff went hog wild in building out his game room and collection and was a local to me. All the unobtainable games...

#478 3 years ago
Quoted from LTG:

What I once heard from a famous programmer is simple. Stern wasn't building what he needed to sell. Jack had built up quite a market with Pinball Sales, and he knew what he needed for them.

And Gene tried to do it 'in house' w/o any real prior expertise. Jack from the start went it at by identifying expertise and bringing it in to form the basis of a long term organization. He went in to build a business - not simply swipe at an opportunity. Jack was involved with other full fledged businesses.. the validation was more in (IMO) his distribution and engagement with his customers. He believed the market wanted Cadillac games and he proved it.

1 year later
#598 1 year ago

Maybe the contractor was 'Deeproot Construction' - left in the same half ass state as the rest of DR projects

1 month later
#617 1 year ago
Quoted from goatdan:

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

Mawr plz

#618 1 year ago
Quoted from goatdan:

Without BBB, how many people would remember the ILLinois Pin Ball Co. today? (And seriously, why did the Pin Ball community have such odd CAPitalizatIONS back in the Day?)

With all the people who complain about how Steve @PBR works... imagine all these people trying to deal with IPB? hahah

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