Anyone have any questions to ask John Trudeau (BR, CFTBL designer)

[Richard B]

Tomorrow at the Expo, John Trudeau is the guest speaker this year. Anyone have any questions for him in case I get called on to ask one?

 

[Captain B. Zarre]

I would like you to ask about what inspired the Move Your Car mode in CFTBL, and how it was received among Williams / Bally workers.

 

[invitro]

I would just ask him to tell a funny Brian Eddy story.

 

[PinballLizard (Mark Wyda)]

I'd like to know why Black Rose wasn't very well recieved. It's a 92 pin, but for that year has a very low production run (>/= 3.000 units).

I love the design personally, and especially the music.

He also designed Victory, which IMO would be a great table if it just had better production values and more to it, like a multiball mode.

 

[RagingBull888]

I was at the Expo today and sat in on most of the Trudeau seminar. It was pretty entertaining for what it was; John showing pictures of the various pinball machines he has worked on with little tidbits of information that might not have been common knowledge. For instance, the original design for Victory had a small playfield below the main playfield. I did not know that but now see it is on the IPDB. I'm sure Richard stayed for the whole thing including the chat with Python

 

[Richard B]

I was at the Expo today and sat in on most of the Trudeau seminar. It was pretty entertaining for what it was; John showing pictures of the various pinball machines he has worked on with little tidbits of information that might not have been common knowledge. For instance, the original design for Victory had a small playfield below the main playfield. I did not know that but now see it is on the IPDB. I'm sure Richard stayed for the whole thing including the chat with Python

Yes, I stayed for the whole thing. While Trudeau was incredibly nice and down to Earth (he gave me a signed Black Rose flyer), Python was the memorable one' he spoke via Skype (since he is sick with cancer and undergoing chemotherapy). He included some interesting anecdotes, such as several rejected ideas on Taxi, such as making the Ayatollah Khomeini the taxi driver (since his experience with cabs are that most drivers are Middle Easterners) but this was shot down in fear of the Islamists starting a fatwah against Williams. He also wanted Santa to have his sleigh reindeer wrapped around a pole (hence the need for a Taxi) and he wanted the three Marilyn (changed to Lola) targets to be drop targets of the three Kennedy brothers, who you have to "shoot down" to get to Marilyn. Needless to say, that didn't fly.
Oh, I asked if his parents really named him Python, and he said of course not. Trudeau says there's several stories on how he got that nickname. The one he told me was that, right after birth, his father looked at his newborn infant body, and noticed something unusual beneath the waist, prompting his father to say "we must call him python!"