Jed Yingst's Story
JY: "Until this time, I had been an avid player, but I knew nothing about the business. I discovered Replay magazine at the local library, and found out that there was to be an AMOA convention in Chicago in the coming month. I decided to pitch the idea there. At the show, I wanted to approach Gottlieb first, as, growing up, they had built the most solid, playable machines, and they built most of their metal parts. I found a tech type guy at the Gottlieb display and asked him who would be the person to show a new design. He pointed out Gil Pollack, then Vice-President of Operations at Gottlieb, but told me that they had over a dozen people in engineering and didn't buy outside designs. After working up my courage, I approached Mr Pollock and made the pitch. I told him the machine played like nothing else I'd ever played, and showed him some line drawings done by Joe. We then walked over to the Williams area played a few games of Black Knight, which was the first multi-level machine I had seen. After beating him 2 out of 3 games, to my surprise, he asked me to bring the game to him the following week for evaluation."
|
