Play Meter

PLAY METER: Service companies in our industry
seem to be a fairly recent phenomenon. Why are
service companies starting up the way they are?
BUSH: The knowledge required to work on a
solid -state digital circuit is fairly new in itself. Take
a man that's been working for a distributor or
operator, fixing pinball machines. No matter how
smart he is, that knowledge wasn't available to him
five years ago. The whole field has to have been
learned in the last five or so years. The service
companies have arisen out of special circumstances,
the need for specialized knowledge due to changing
technology .
PLAY METER: Do you expect that there will be an
increase in the number of service companies as the
technology becomes even more complicated?
BUSH: I certainly do. They're not going to spring
up on every corner like TV shops, because there are
not that many things to be done for that many
people. But the expertise has got to be there
somewhere-elther the dlstrlbutors are going to
have to hire the people to do it, or the
manufacturers are going to have to provide the
facilities to have it done, or there are going to have
to be service companies.
PLAY METER: And you see a pretty rosy future
for the service company?
BUSH: Yes. The important point is that we can do
everybody a favor. We can do the distributor a
favor, the manufacturer a favor, the games
operator a favor. Time-wise, cost-wise, we've got
something that they can't really get anywhere else.
Not just us at Steed's, but any service company.
PLAY METER: You don't think then that as
individual operator's technicians become better
educated in this field that the need for the service
company will disappear?
BUSH: No, I don't, because a video game or a
solid-state game's circuitry doesn't break often
enough to allow the operator to train a technician to
fix it. There has to be a large number of boards or a
large number of machines out there breaking down
more than a few times a year and there
aren't- there's not the volume of repair necessary
for an individual operator to be able to afford to
train a technician.
PLA Y METER: What about the machines that test
themselves? Can they take your place?
BUSH: No. You can train a pinball mechanic to run
the RAM test on an Atari game or a Midway game,
but so it tells him something- what's he going to do
then?
PLA Y METER: I'm thinking particularly about the
new Bally pins, for example- they have a self-test
feature.
BUSH: We work almost entirely on video games, but
we have worked on one Night Rider, and the
problem was that the power supply was broken,
which meant that nothing worked, not even the
self-test. The guy bought it, paid $1500 or so, had it
on location for a month and a half, and made a
bundle of money on it. Then it broke. He went out
to 'fix it himself and pushed his self-test button,
being proud of that function, and it didn't do
anything for him. He took it back to the distributor;
the distributor punched the self-test button and it
didn't do anything. So they brought it to us.
PLAY METER: What kind of services do you
provide specifically, and what do you charge for
these services?
BUSH: Let me put it this way, first of all: probably
80 per cent of our business is done for distributors,
so we give them a better price than we would give
to Joe Blow who walked in off the street, because of
the volume of business they bring to us. Basically,
for a distributor, we'll fix a board for $25. They'll
turn around and charge $35 to the operator. They
make that $10 for handling it, shipping it, receiving
it, making the bill out, carrying the accounts
receivable, etc. And that's reasonable. If I were
charging $35, I'd be glad to reduce my price to $25
for them to do that. That's essentially what we
do. To the average guy who walks off the street
with a broken video game of some kind, it's $35 per
unit work done on it. And the unit can be a PC
board or a monitor or a cabinet dropped off the
truck. A lot of problems are related to
wiring- somebody's kicked the door in and broken
all the switches off, that sort of thing.
PLA Y METER: Do you do the actual servicing?
BUSH: No. I can change microswitches, fancy
things like that. And I can do some of the functional
stuff of getting the business done. Doyle is our chief
technician-he's the electronics smarts. He decides
that chip A-7 is bad. With our equipment, I can go
change chip A-7. We have some pretty sophistica-
ted desoldering equipment.
Also, working for the CPA firm and back in
college, I had some computer training. And we have
our own little computers down here so that we can
run diagnostics of our own, and this is very
non-technical really. You plug it up and put it
through the computer and the computer spits
out on the TV screen what's wrong.
PLAY METER: What's Doyle's background then?
BUSH: Before Steed's, he was working with Texas
Instruments here in Dallas for seven years,
working primarily on space related projects,
designing Mariner probes and moonshot and Viet
Nam radar type equipment. That's basically, I
guess, where the video games industry came from.
If we hadn't decided to go to the moon, there
wouldn't have been an Atari or a Midway.
PLAY METER: What kind of training would you
people recommend for the average operator's
mechanic?
BUSH: He should train himself in observation, to
sit back and use his head to figure out what does the
machine do that it's not supposed to do? What does
it not do that it's supposed to do? For example, is
the screen blank and if it's blank, is it blank white or
blank black? If the car is supposed to turn to the
right , does it turn to the right or does it turn to the
left, or does it turn to the left if you turn the
steering wheel either direction? What does it do?
Don't ever send a board in and just say, "It's
broke," because we could spend literally hours
trying to find out why it's broke. But if you send a
board in and say, for example, "You turn it on and it
gives a free game," then we can go to a specific
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