If Kevin's case was not deemed criminal I think John's does not have to worry much. F'd up....but really the laws and lawyers protect the crooks.

Kevin having no rights then out right lying about it and still takimg money.
John with a damn pyramid type scam knowing full well not one person would ever get a product.

Need a new years Lynch mob to fix things right. Both of em!

The whole mob just needs to make a NDA. No discussing anymore!

Happy new year all!

Just disable his Van

Don't get it but what did whoms van ever do to you?

Supposedly he bought a new van and was going to be living out of it. Disabling his can would cause him to have to live at his shop. The guy is just wrong. John needs to pay for what he has done.

My hope is he ends up in his stupid new van and one day seeks forgiveness.

Right now, he is an unapologetic douche of a superior kind.

Supposedly he bought a new van and was going to be living out of it. Disabling his can would cause him to have to live at his shop. The guy is just wrong. John needs to pay for what he has done.

My hope is he ends up in his stupid new van and one day seeks forgiveness.

Right now, he is an unapologetic douche of a superior kind.

I think disabling his can is going to far...

Legally or morally, cause we know there is a vast difference.

Yeah, maybe make his f*ing can disappear where the sun don't shine....
Maybe make him live on a little Ex-Lax.

Disable his noodling ability. I wish he would leave the country. The guy is the lowest form of trash on the planet.

Well. him and Bill Cosby...

I was curious, so I jumped back 1 year in this thread... had to go all the way back to page 58.... so we've had 300 pages in the year since.

This is what we were talking about 1 year ago:

How bizar...

So what's new? Seems like the same verbal masturbation as a year ago. John screwed us and we're still F&*%ed.

I keep getting rinsed and repeated through the same flashback. He was a great deceiver, I will give him that. Master of the magic.

John's greatest skill isn't as a pinball designer, he is a master scam artist! What's crazy is that he fooled people like me with phony pics of games that were basically unplayable props, but I talked to multiple people who went to his shop and saw what he was doing and he fooled them too... Crazy F'in prestidigitation!

john always complained about pinside comments of his work. Just think, in a few years he'll be forgotten and few will ever talk about him again. Wish granted!

I hate to say it, and I know everyone here would agree, but with John it was just excuse after excuse. I remember about 4 years ago getting a call from him and just being blown away. We talked for a couple hours about all of the different pinball games I'd played as a kid that he had designed and where pinball was moving.

He'd asked me to be a software engineer for Magic Girl and some other projects he had planned. At first when I asked "Do you have a control system picked out so I can figure out what that environment might look like, or do we need to shop around?" and there were crickets, I just wrote it off as "Oh, well its still early in the project, these things should iron themselves out soon." However, a year later he was still asking me the same questions. Another thing was that I told him that I couldn't move out to Chicago unless the pay was right because the cost of living was higher out there. He kept calling the job a "pinball apprenticeship" and that "I'd be learning from the experienced designers how to design games."

The reason I mention this was that because on Coast2Coast he mentioned that "We asked for lawyers, engineers and pinball programmers but nobody stepped up." I realize that he spewed a bunch of crap on that podcast, but the reality was that many of us stepped up. In fact, many of the people I work with on a normal basis stepped up and everyone either got the runaround or even worse... I was lucky that I avoided the trainwreck by turning him down outright. Of course this is just one footnote in an entire book of people that John screwed along the way.

For shits & giggles, I'm reposting what John posted on his blog exactly 1 year ago. This was only a few months before the Pintasia "I don't have any money left" announcement, and the fact that RAZA was NEVER close to completion (I've highlighted a few places), and MG was barely playable:

Zombie Winter Update

I wanted to get back on the blog with some updated news and events, to let you know what we have been working on and what is being completed. Currently still on track to show a fully built Zombie Adventureland game in February. Most of the design work and art is up to date, along with much of the lcd screen art, test mode system, sounds, and other items. As reported previous we are doing separations now for the play field and back glass. So you will get a good feel for what the game will be like. We are still waiting for vendor parts and other items we have to finalize, as there are so many small details to deal with in pinball, along with making sure the game looks really nice!

All these important items will be posted separately and continuing on until all is shown. A lot of work has been accomplished and I need to get it out. I can only ask forgiveness in all of this, as a pinball designer (that is what I am really), I am trying to do what has never been attempted ever, to make the pinball community more vibrant and exciting for all while building the best games I have ever been apart of. That is what I want to do, and all the work and platform we have made has come from a blank sheet of paper.

Zidware is (in process) of bringing on some pro help including Chris in PR and Chad in operations, communications and pinball help in the studio. They both have a solid approach to getting information out and being out in front for updates and going out more to Pinside, Pinball News with timely updates as they happen. We do discuss a lot of what is going on to plan a way that will work in the future.

Obviously I need others who have a good feel for what you and the pinball community need as far as updates, communication and interaction. I do the best I can. With the current workload it is very hard for me to keep up in these items, and plow thru game development items which is the prime focus. Everything is vital though ultimately.

Also we are agreed here to begin to show all items and features related to the game. For example, we have ended up with a larger inside cabinet wall next to the playfield, and decided to create “interactive mirror blades” (I call it 4D play), which are part reflective, part illustrated decal, and part mechanical. So for raza we have the monster on the left wall and the zombie-shock ferris wheel on the right as part of this new pinball feature.

Also it looks like we will be able to have the new lcd mini play field as I talked about earlier. A good source of quality / affordable lcds has been found along with the new Invidia Graphics Control board to drive things, that has a rocket graphics chip section we are testing. Our current patent application covers lcd devices in the playfield space, as a back panel, play field or interactive device.

The development blog will be used less, starting in February, as we will move all news and information to the Zidware web site, and more frequent posts to Pinside or Pinball News. We would update with game info, pictures, inside pics and other basic items as we move towards setting up for production planning in April.

Part of our task list for this winter was review where things are dev wise and also visit some other small boutique manufacturers to see their shop, operations, and get our space set up. We are almost complete in the design of our efficient build space to handle game assembly. Talks have gone on with some potential partners to help us grow a bit and provide added experience, value, but this never goes fast enough. Also the factory facility where we make our cabinets and playfields, has about 4x more square footage of extra manufacturing space with a dedicated team of production help (if we need it) who have experience building complete games for Sega, Raw Thrills, Global VR, Namco and other companies.

Also Adobe® Systems Incorporated (makers of Photoshop and Illustrator) have created a really interesting feature on one of my artists, Jeremy, and came to the shop to film us working. This feature was slated for release this March, but they pushed it for January release to iPad and the website because it caused so much internal excitement. We use mostly Adobe® products in our game design process.

http://inspire.adobe.com/2014/12/18/zombies_yetis_pinball.html

Ok, back to work for me now. I will try to get caught up on internal items as best I can, and keep moving forward. Actually the game building (as we have completed much already) is something I feel we have a good handle on, as we move forward to make high-quality custom products as the focus now is on showing the completed game to all. I have learned putting a pinball game together is not the same as putting together something of quality. Jpop

Knowing the ego on this guy, it's a bummer he got to felate himself with the Adobe feature, but I'm glad he never got to do his big reveal standing beside his machine at NW and after that the ruse was up and he was persona non grata and doesn't show his face anymore.

I talked to him at one point as well about doing some coding, and then I talked with a few folks who had dealt or worked with him, and the message was loud and clear: DON'T

CAD Monkey cluster-f avoided here.

Boy those people sure did you a kindness.

And John's version of things is people don't step up to help him and that's why this failed.

Step up means 'do for free' correct?..?

Seems to be the pattern. Some got paid in the beginning, but then that stopped at some point.

It was really a perfect storm of a bunch of small stuff:

- He's a designer, but he's not able to do the engineering, programming and all the other tasks it takes to build a machine. He can't do a new machine from start to finish solo
- He doesn't know when to finalize a design and stop tweaking
- He doesn't work well with others
- He's not good with the business end and seemed unable to take on and work with someone who had those skills
- He's not focused.

and the fact he's a dreamer who wouldn't accept he was doomed to go off a cliff was like throwing gas on the fire.

That term is about as useful as "shopped". To vague.

And he did not program, he did not do the art.
He redesigned a cabinet and not well I hear.

He did manage to convince lots of folks to part with money. So his title may need changing. I'll let the title renaming of this turd begin.

+1

Hey hey, let's not insult garbage now

In issue #139 (March 2010) of the PinGame Journal, there is an article titled "In The Shadow Of A Genius... The Creation Of Bally's Alice In Wonderland". This article details Michael Hanley meeting John Popadiuk back in 1989, and includes some interesting details concerning the creation of the Bally Alice In Wonderland prototype a few years later. Hanley wrote something interesting about Popadiuk in this excerpt from the article detailing him and his wife's first meeting with John:

"A couple of days went by and our new contact (John Popadiuk) stopped by to meet us in person. We ended up talking for hours! We were fascinated by him as he was different from all our other friends. It took me a few months to figure out why, but I came to realize he is an artist and can visualize like no one else I know. It could be that left side / right side of the brain thing. He can take a new concept, work it around in his mind until it is fact. Then he can sell it to other people and have them all believe in it. If he stopped there, we would call him a scam artist. But what sets John into the genius catagory is that he has the ability to then make it happen, to bring his vision into reality. He gets an idea and shortly thereafter he has a product. And he can re-invent himself."

I was recently re-reading a lot of my old PGJs and I came across that article, and I though the above was a pretty interesting paragraph in retrospect.

Thats-Gold-Jerry-Gold-Kenny-Bania-Seinfeld-Quote_(resized).png

I actually know Mike Hanley, and he visits (or did) jpop pretty regularly, and it was his "reality distortion field" reports to me about how things were going, which were contrary to the reality I knew was going on, that I realized John lies to his best friends. Then I knew what a big problem we had. Too late, obviously.

I don't want to disparage or upset Mike by posting that article excerpt, and I hope he doesn't mind. I was just surprised to see that Mike's initial thought of "This guy could be a scam artist" (I'm paraphrasing him there) turned out ringing very true a few years later, unfortunately for all involved.

That's why his 'genius' and 'creativity' worked at Bally / WMS with a ton of minions, loads of structure, and management supervising him, and why he became an absolute train wreck outside of that. Creative director for specific projects within a much larger company - fine. Doing anything, probably even household chores, alone and unsupervised, and there's a car crash.

beLIEve!

Aaron
FAST Pinball

Aaron, I'm curious... with everything we know now, do you think there was any way to "save" John's games had he sent a MG playfield to you a year ago?

Was enough of it completed to even take it to a finished state? Or was it impossible?

Half the mechs wouldn't work as designed.

These games were never going to work, ever.

That's my understanding. Was curious to hear Aaron's thoughts though. Or was it another "bullet dodged" like some of the others and would have turned into a nightmare.

yes they did, unfortunately most of them got burnt by john in some form. Many did not share details, at that time, of what happened, but I trusted them enough to listen.

Like others have said, John is a passionate guy about what he does, has a creative mind and vision, and can get folks excited about it. Unfortunately that is just a very small part of making a killer pinball machine (or running a company), and that was something he refused to understand (limited self awareness). I guess he his so right brained, that ANY left brain kind of processing, including understanding he had limited left brain processing, was impossible.

His pinball inventor (what a joke of a title) page has been taken down again

John! You suck!

The one thing I get comfort from is knowing he ran out of (our) money. No more free ride. No more making more money from "not" making games than those who are. From what's been said, he's been out of money for over a year. A year of his life wasted. His delusions and ego finally got the best of him and there's no one left to bail him out.

Been reading JPop and Roger Sharpe's interviews in pinball magazine #3 in regard to the Kiss project. Interesting but saddening.

time to close this tread.
Nothing new last 100 pages.

No way, this thread needs to stay bumped and readable. Don't let people forget what a piece of crap JPop is.

Close thread?

Never!

True. He's still out there "trying to make it work". Translation: Trying to find someone else with money.

He's blamed this thread for ruining things for him previously. Just imagine all the additional money and people hurt by throwing more money at him.

That Pintasia announcement alone said the games had years left to complete them. And those were his own words.

Besides, Pinside has a "drain" feature. Drain away.

To think he was still taking deposits after he knew damn well it was not gonna happen. Thats just one part that is truly bad.

And just a reminder that this still exists: http://www.zidwareglasses.com/

I still get pissed about that pic a few days before expo with a group. Think it was with pinball magazine.
I believe ripping off the community strips you of your recognition. Disgusting that folks want to hang out and take pics with him.

This thread is in zero danger of being closed.