I'm leaving VMware and going to help accelerate a PINBALL startup!

Earlier this month, I emailed my colleagues at VMware to let them know that I was resigning from my position as Distinguished Technologist in the EUC Office of the CTO and that I would be leaving the company. (Which I did on February 4.)

As I write this today, I’m happy to announce that I’m hooking up with a three-person (err, four-person, now) Seattle-area company called FAST Pinball. No, “FAST Pinball” isn’t a cutesy ironic name for a tech incubator. They're in the real pinball industry! Not digital pinball; not an app—rather those 300-pound boxes of blinking lights and mechanical awesomeness you find in bars and arcades!

Those who know me know I love pinball and that I’ve been involved in the amazing community of makers who build pinball custom machines for almost ten years. (Yeah, there’s a subculture for everything.) In this post I’ll share more about my history with pinball, what the pinball industry looks like in 2022, what exactly FAST Pinball does (we are a pinball platform company! ??????), and what I'll be doing here.

My History with Pinball

I’ve always loved mechanical things, bright colors, flashing lights, and the energy of the arcade, and I recall loving pinball as far back as I can remember. When I was in grade school I used to build my own pinball machines using cardboard, paper towel tubes, masking tape, rubber bands, pencils, and marbles; and then later using Construx. In high school I attempted to build a “real” pinball machine with wood and electronics. I built the cabinet from scratch, got an old non-working machine for donor parts, started designing the electronics control system, started designing the software—everything! I never actually finished that machine; I think I learned about dating and started fixing computers and never really came back to it, but I still loved pinball.

When I was at my mom’s house last summer, in the basement I found my old notebook full of pinball machine design sketches, diagrams, and notes from high school in 1995:

And some photos of the shell of the machine I started to build when I was 17:

I had a few pinball machines in the apartment that Gabe Knuth and I shared in Cleveland in our young 20s. Luckily I got Gabe hooked on pinball too, and when he finished his basement in his current house in 2013, he bought his favorite machine at the time, a 1993 Williams Star Trek: The Next Generation.

While visiting him to play with (ok, “troubleshoot”) it, we got to talking about how I’d always wanted to build a pinball machine, and after some internet searching we found an entire community of pinball geeks who build their own machines! Technology had progressed in the 15 years since I’d attempted it in high school, and we learned about an electronic board from 2009 called a “P-ROC” which you could use to control a real pinball machine with a regular computer via USB.

This was very cool, because it meant you could write new game code for an old pinball machine in a modern computer language, or if you were really bold, you could even use it to build a new machine from scratch! We decided (probably that night) that we’d make our own pinball machine—Gabe would build the physical machine and hardware, and I’d handle the software.

For the software, there was an open source project that a lot of people used back then, but you had to know how to program in Python to use it. So I dove in and started learning Python and planning all the code. Funny that if you look at my pinball notebook from 2013, it doesn’t look too different from what I was doing in 1995!

The Mission Pinball Framework

After a year of noodling around, working on the code for our machine and contributing reusable open source code modules back to the community, I realized that the "just learn Python, use the forums, and figure it out on your own" approach was really limiting how much new pinball was coming into the world. Sure, in my personal case, I had the time and wherewithal to become a Python expert just to make pinball, but after seeing several newbies vanish after being overwhelmed with it all, I wondered many pinball machine projects never got started because the barrier of coding was too high?

Being a guy who built a career around creating big new things as well as writing and explaining technical concepts, I realized there was an opportunity to take a step back and rethink the whole approach to open source pinball software.

First, I wanted to make something that was easy for newbies and non-programmers. That meant (1) lots of documentation and tutorials, and (2) building the software around text-based configuration files which hid much of the complexity and heavy lifting.

Second, I figured if everyone in the pinball community who was also a computer programmer worked together to create a single framework, rather than re-writing everything as one-offs for each project, we'd elevate the quality and capabilities for the entire market. (Obviously this is the whole point of large-scale open source projects. You get it.)

And third, the existing open source pinball software projects only worked with that P-ROC board. That was fine in 2009 when the P-ROC was the only choice, but by 2014 there were more options. FAST Pinball (where I work now) was just emerging with a novel control system involving a ring network of distributed processors; another group was designing an open source hardware control system; new machines from real manufacturers started using x86 and ARM architectures which could run new code; and the "maker" movement was in full swing, with people wanting to use little hardware trinkets from places like Adafruit and SparkFun in their pinball machines to control serial RGB LEDs, RGB dot-matrix displays, servos, stepper motors, cameras, tiny LCD screens, NFC readers, accelerometers, projectors, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc.

So I decided to start fresh and build a complete and powerful pinball software framework, with most features configured via text-based files, that would abstract the hardware so it could run on everything. I also committed to spending equal time writing the documentation, tutorials, and how-to guides to walk newbies through the entire process.

At the time I was living in San Francisco’s Mission District, so I decided to call my project “The Mission Pinball Framework,” or MPF for short. (Check out my original June 2014 announcement of MPF on Pinside, the main online community for pinball nerds—or “pinheads” as we call ourselves.)

MPF was my main focus in life (outside of BrianMadden.com and BriForum) from 2014-2017. I ate, slept, and dreamt pinball. MPF grew in popularity as more people found the project and helped out. (Two guys at that time, Jan Kantert and Quinn Capen, both pinheads and “real” software engineers, took on huge roles and grew MPF to the next level.) We would travel to pinball shows (yeah, that’s a thing) and give talks on MPF, and I recorded videos, wrote instructions, wrote code—everything and anything I could do to help more people get more pinball into the world.

I carried a notebook with me everywhere I went. If you came to a presentation I did or a BriForum in 2013-2016, I most likely had this in my backpack:

The first complete project Gabe and I did with MPF was to take a 1974 Gottlieb electro-mechanical Big Shot machine, rip out all the old mechanical guts, put one of those P-ROC boards in it, and use MPF to run it with modern rules and capabilities. We put a “time machine” switch on the front which let the player flip between the original 1974 game play and more modern rules on the fly. We took it to Pinball Expo 2014 in Chicago and delighted as people played it, expecting the original game but being confused as to how it was playing with modern rules. ?? (We even used the 3-tone chimes to play songs!)

We presented a breakout session about it at the show where Gil Pollock—the last president of Gottlieb (the company that made that machine in the 70s)—was in the audience and loved the project. Very cool!

The first modern machine which was completed using MPF was a retheme of a machine for the Pitchfork Music Festival Paris in 2015 which incorporated all the festival bands into the game. They had the game on free play during the festival where it received over 1,000 plays!

The Mission Pinball Framework continued to grow in popularity, with dozens of contributors, over ten thousand commits on GitHub, and support for a mind-boggling list of hardware platforms and devices. We built installers, hooks into virtual pinball simulation environments, hooks into game engines like Kivy, Unity, and Godot (to drive the LCD display content in a pinball machine’s back box and on mini screens throughout the machines), a full CI/CD pipeline, tools for monitoring and troubleshooting, iPhone interfaces (use your phone to mess with the active player), tools to create coordinated light show animations—everything!

By 2017, I was getting burned out in my role as the creator of MPF (you’ve read lots of stories of how the “work” for founders of open source projects gets to be a lot), and by then MPF was really rocking and rolling on its own. (Again thanks to Jan, Quinn, and lots of other awesome pinheads who took the reins.)

Fast-forward to 2022, and MPF is by far the most popular software framework people use to re-code, re-theme, or build complete pinball machines. It’s been used for hundreds of machine projects, including some real commercial machines you can buy from your local distributor or find taking quarters in bars. It's so freaking cool to walk into an arcade and see a machine which I know runs MPF and to think “My code is in this thing!” If you’re curious about MPF, check out missionpinball.org for all the details, with links to the documentation, the various GitHub repos, etc.

The people building stuff with MPF are so amazing and inspiring—I feel like me originating MPF was the easy part! Check out a random sample of machines powered by MPF:

FAST Pinball

So that’s my history with pinball and MPF. As I wrote in the headline of this story, I’ve now joined up with my friends at FAST Pinball. FAST Pinball was formed in 2014 when two guys—Aaron Davis and Dave Beecher—met via the Seattle pinball community and geeked out over the idea of a completely new approach to pinball control systems.

FAST Pinball is a pinball platform company. They make the electronic boards that go into pinball machines. Their system is distributed, meaning there are lots of small boards spread around the inside a machine rather than large central boards like the old days. Each FAST board has multiple ARM processors, so the whole system is distributed and smart, rather than a single processor on a central board controlling everything. (Literally the more boards you add, the faster the whole system gets. It's... FAST Pinball! ??????) If you're up to speed on the IoT / edge concept, it's like that, but inside a pinball machine. These guys are brilliant, super fun, and not afraid to shake up the status quo. They are my magicians.

Also they make hardware, which is just geeky cool, assembled here in the Pacific Northwest. If you've never heard of a "pick and place" machine, it's kinda fun to watch. Here's a video I found on YouTube showing the process.

At FAST Pinball, Aaron is the big-thinking visionary who oozes passion and can get anyone excited about pinball. Dave is the technical visionary and systems architect who designs all the boards, protocols, and distributed processing system. They’re the prototypical startup CEO and CTO, though Aaron knows his way around an electronics lab and Dave is super fun to talk to also.

I clicked with them immediately, having gotten to know them back in 2014 when I was working on MPF and they were developing their new distributed platform, so we spent a lot of time together brainstorming and pushing each other. We started going to shows together too. Here’s me, Dave, and Aaron on stage at CAX 2016:

In the meantime, the third guy, Eli Curtz, another Pacific Northwest pinball lover and software engineer, joined Aaron and Dave a few years ago to focus on the low-level firmware and embedded software which make the FAST Pinball distributed platform shine. (Eli had already made a name for himself in the pinball “modders” community building ridiculously cool electronic enhancements for existing machines.)

For the past eight years, the guys ran FAST Pinball as a side business. They had the proverbial “day jobs” to pay their bills while iterating on their pinball products, pushing the boundaries of what was possible while their boards got years of hardening in the wild. They operated like a pinball R&D lab. Aaron would get some crazy idea, Dave would whip up a board, Eli would write some code, and they'd share it with some friends. A true pinball innovation factory!

In the meantime, the overall pinball industry continued to heat up. Smaller and startup pinball manufacturers started contacting them, looking to use the FAST Modern Platform in their machines. Indie game designers wanted to use their FAST Retro Platform for pinball upgrade kits. (FAST virtualizes and emulates the original processors in their Retro Platform much like a hypervisor and VMs do.) And of course homebrew hobbyists still loved using FAST boards and the FAST community for the machines they were creating.

Spending time together recently, and looking at the momentum building around FAST Pinball and their modern platform ecosystem, the four of us discussed how the time was right to give FAST Pinball the proper attention it deserves. They're building so many cool things, and have so many ideas for the future, and so much potential, that we all made the choice to shift things around in our personal lives so we can each make FAST Pinball our primary focus for a while and build this company into something great!

My role at FAST Pinball

At FAST Pinball, Aaron is the CEO and visionary, Dave is the CTO and hardware engineer, and Eli is the software/firmware engineer. But what about me?

I’m the “Brian Madden” of the company. ??

Honestly my role won’t be that different than what I’ve been doing for the past 25 years, except it will be about pinball. I’m a storyteller who will handle the marketing and how we share our story with the world. I’m a tech writer who write our technical documentation and how-to guides. I’m a teacher who will record video tutorials and demos. I’m a blogger who will write blogs, post to social media, and engage with the community. I’m an analytical “green brain” who will be a product manager and marketer, bringing the backlog of cool things they’ve designed to market. And I'm an entertainer who will travel to pinball conferences, giving speeches on stage for customers, partners, and fellow pinheads.

It's a great time to be a maker and into pinball. Fueled by nostalgia and the novelty of a physical world under glass that cannot be replicated digitally, pinball is experiencing a renaissance. Designing and building a physical pinball machine is the ultimate team-based creative experience, touching every hobby discipline: woodworking, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, metal working, vacuum forming, 3D modeling & printing, sculpting, painting, software coding, storytelling, art, animation, music composition, audio tracks, voice callouts, lighting effects, and general hackery in its most pure and true sense.

Every day I’ll wake up with a big stupid smile, knowing how lucky I am to be part of a team who’s passionate and engaged, with amazing products, going to work with the sole purpose of helping to bring more pinball into the world. What a fun world!