Ask HN: Why is there no modern successor to the 3D Pinball games of yesteryear? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is there no modern successor to the 3D Pinball games of yesteryear?

88 pointseigenvalue87 comments

I recall games like Full Tilt! Pinball and the 3D pinball game included in Windows were pretty popular and good showcases for the speed and quality of computer graphics back in the 90s. Then it occured to me that modern GPUs like the nVidia 4090 would be incredible for simulating a pinball machine with insane fidelity using RTX ray tracing and the optimized physics simulator (PhysX) they have. You could probably end up with something that truly looks and feels like the real thing. I'm certainly no expert on the subject, but after doing a quick search on Steam, I don't see anything like that on the market. Why do you think that is? Would it really be so hard to do? Wouldn't that be popular?

I know I'd love to see it just because it would be such a great showcase for the power of modern machines, especially the integration of super realistic physics. Imagine bumping the machine hard to cheat? Or being able to smash the glass with a hammer and then put objects in the case and see what happens to them while you play? Could also be an amazing physics education thing if you could see real-time free-body diagrams overlaid on the ball that you could freeze in time and study showing all the forces acting on it. You could turn a dial and see what it would be like to play pinball on the moon! I hope someone sees this and makes it!

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We're working on something like that using Unity[1]. It's nice, because contrarily to the commercial platforms, we don't need to support low-end devices like the switch. And yes, the DXR features will make a difference[2] (sorry, I don't have a more recent video).

Concerning physics, we're using VPX's engine, which is very well tuned to pinball. Not sure if the breaking the glass is going to be a thing, but PR welcome if you think so. ;)

[1] https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CfZImFl1ME

If you're taking requests for future pinball machines, I'd love to see the 1975 Gottlieb Soccer machine. My parents had one in our basement for most of my childhood. It was broken half the time, and was hard to find a pinball mechanic to fix it, but lots of great memories.

A long shot, I'm sure, I just never really see this one get any love anymore. Volley seems pretty similar though, and looks like they're only a year apart from each other.

Gameplay video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COiudbUYN1k

Already implemented in Visual Pinball. It has VR support as well.

https://virtual-pinball-spreadsheet.web.app/game/x6-6z6GA/

BTW, folks like phreezie that work on the engine and the like are often not the folks that develop the tables. A lot of work goes into each side of it and they are doing it in their free time.

Yes, Volley was a nice project because one of the dev team has one at home, so we got ultra detailed assets. It was also a great use case to test Visual Scripting.

But before we dive into more table builds, we'll be focusing on the engine work.

For sure! Looking forward to you getting back to VPE now that the whole DMD thing is sorted thanks to your efforts. Do you have a rough idea of what things you'll be focusing on next? I know there was mention of a dedicated player a while back...

I'll post an update to VPU in a few weeks!

Oh great! Thanks, I'll check it out.

There's actually a pretty active part of the virtual pinball community that recreates old EM machines (Electro-Mechanical). Check out www.VPForums.com and maybe post a request there.

When authoring a virtual version of these older tables one of the challenges is getting a decent scan of the bare playfield. Fortunately, there are a lot of EM collectors who acquire and restore physical machines and they tend to be quite supportive of virtual preservation efforts - so they can be a great source for playfield scans (since they take it all apart when restoring anyway). Finding a hi-res scan or a potentially willing source for a scan will put you a good ways toward getting your virtual table made.

Also keep in mind that a virtual version is usually close but sometimes the tables have particular quirks. For example I had a stars machine. I could back the ball up into the side chute with a flipper flick for some easy points. But virtually that does not work as it relies on the elasticity of the rubber band and the weight of the ball distorting it a bit on the flipper.

Saw one guy who made VR version of these and made a physical stand which was just the plunger and buttons for him to hold onto. In VR it looked like he was playing a full thing. Tactically it felt that way too. Almost dumped 3k into that mess when I saw that before I came to my senses.

There are also large collections of them out there you can get. Most of the popular tables are recreated in some way. But in varying conditions of 'done'.

So would this be extended to physical cabinets with flipper buttons?

Absolutely, that's the main goal. I've built my cabinet over 10 years ago, so testing is assured. ;)

For a physical build, just curious if you've thought about integrating something like OpenTrack to track head/ eye position of the player and modify the camera position - to make the table look even more real when it's in a physical cabinet?

Yes, I also have a Tilt Five kit, which is awesome.

We're still doing lots of work on the core parts though, so these things will come later.

Support for something like this already exists for Visual Pinball thanks to BAM. Use a Kinect V2 for best results.

https://www.ravarcade.pl/

People have done this with an old Kinect. It works okay, but most people say it's not good enough to use regularly.

Yeah, I used to work on the Kinect which is why my mind went there - but the v1 certainly wouldn’t be up for this.

Fun fact, originally, the resolution of the depth sensor was 640x480 but was nerfed in firmware to 320x240. Why?

The makers of Rock Band wanted to make a Kinect version. But, with a Rock Band mic, bass, two guitars, and keyboard plus Kinect, the Xbox 360’s USB bus couldn’t handle it. So the Kinect got nerfed.

The company behind Rock Band either shut down or went bankrupt before the Kinect went on sale. At that point, way too much of the tooling (not to mention pose estimation modeling) around the Kinect had been built with the 320x240 resolution constraint so it wasn’t feasible to “unlock” the full res.

It's so sad that microsoft fucked over kinect at every conceivable opportunity. I used it a lot for 'creative coding' open frameworks and processing projects (many in that community did). Thank god they bought the original from primesense and didn't have the ability, or didn't exercise the ability, to break their multi-platform sdk.

When the Kinect 2 sdk was windows only it was a huge turd in the punchbowl and a clear sign that microsoft was not serious about making it a real tool to do real work with. I did do one project with the kinect 2 and learned just enough of the sdk to write a shim in c# to run the camera and pipe the data out over the network to a box that was actually doing the rendering.

The kinect 2 also was excessively picky about it's usb3 port, I remember going through about half a dozen usb3 cards until I found one that worked.

This is amazing work - the lighting effects in the video are stunning. Kudos!

Have the recent Unity shenanigans made you consider an alternative engine?

Yes.

But at the end of the day, this is a hobby, and Unity is an awesome engine to work with. I'm following Godot more closely than ever, but too much effort to still be able to call it fun would be necessary to port this over.

Wow, that looks really good!

Two points:

1) PC Pinball games have basically been done to the platonic ideal, unless you're intent on recreating something in like VR which would truly change the experience. The reason PC pinball games emerged early is because the physics of a solid, heavy sphere of uniform density are pretty well known from classical mechanics. The fact that a ball is a sphere means that it can be rendered as a circle, and the fact a pinball machine can be rendered entirely without the need for 3D processing means that you can build a large degree of fidelity into that physical simulation. Adding more 3D gimmicks or raytracing BS does not improve the core pinball experience (and is more likely to detract, truth be told).

2) The market for a "high-fidelity PC pinball" game is not large enough to justify development costs. A 3D game is significantly more complex than a 2D game. A modern AAA game has artists specialized down to making materials that other artists can then put onto geometry. All these people need to eat and pay rent in order for the game to exist, and it's a hard sell to get people to pay $40+ for a pinball game when the platonic ideal has existed from the 90s.

Even in VR, there’s already an excellent VR pinball game on the Meta VR store with fantastic pinball machines. You can buy new machines as DLC and put them in your virtual arcade. I think Pinball FX?

I guess the ultimate step there will be the introduction of this to augmented reality, where you can have a box where the front looks like a pinball machine and it just projects the image over it.

Then it's just... a worse pinball machine. A pinball machine without the charm of mechanical engineering or physical craftsmanship.

I can understand that point of view and used to think the same. I even tried a little virtual pinball unit at some discount warehouse club and it sucked. Then I actually tried a really good virtual pinball cabinet running recent, high-quality open source tables at 120fps 4K HDR with haptic feedback transducers providing positional tactile feedback to the point where I could close my eyes and feel the virtual ball rolling across the table from side to side. It also had a 6-axis accelerometer allowing me to 'nudge' the table to influence the trajectory of the ball just like I do on one of the real pinball tables I own.

I was impressed enough to set up a virtual pinball table of my own and now that I have extensive experience with both - I like playing them both. Playing a virtual pinball vs a physical pinball is simply a different kind of experience. Neither is a replacement for the other. When played on a high-end, perfectly-tuned table, virtual pinball is like a cross between a pinball game and a video game. It shares similarities with both but is its own distinct thing that's different and (IHMO) quite enjoyable.

Notably, that setup seems to cost the same as an actual commercial pinball table, ~$7,000. Granted you can play many different pinball games on one table, but it's not exactly comparable to an affordable software option.

My favorite pinball game machine costs $7,000. https://sternpinball.com/game/deadpool/

I won't be buying that any time soon, but I can absolutely grab a $20 pinball simulator for my $300 VR headset.

There are options where you can buy a full pinball cabinet [0] that is 100% virtual. There are fairly large communities around virtual pinball using future pinball [1] and virtual pinball [2] as the emulators. The community has gone very far in adding details into the tables as well as making VR tables as well.

[0] https://virtuapin.net/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Pinball [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Pinball

Called "vitrual pinball" where the playfield has been replaced with a screen. I've heard about this but never played on. There are little virtual desktop units, some people have taken old pinball machines and retrofitted them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualpinball/

they sell pre builts. I can't attest to the quality. https://www.amazon.com/Multiple-Games-Licensed-Invaders-Blue...

edit: apparently there is kinda like "MAME" for pinball. Its called "Visual Pinball". Its a pinball emulator and people make tables for it. A world I didn't know existed.. "Simulates pinball table physics and renders the table with DirectX or OpenGL"

And its on github.

https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball

A website thats mostly forums.

https://vpuniverse.com/

"VPUniverse is a site dedicated to digital pinball simulations and anything pinball in general. Our primary focus is on Digital Pinball formats including Visual Pinball, Future Pinball, and many more pinball simulators. All content is provided on this site for free to all registered members."

The open source "Visual Pinball" engine is pretty amazing and also constantly improving with an active community of artists and devs releasing new 3D pinball tables nearly every week for free. I have a virtual pinball cabinet with a dedicated PC driving the playfield screen and I love it. The quality of the visuals and the precision of the physics are impressively good (and I have real pinball machines next to it to compare). The quality and capabilities of the entire platform (especially physics) have greatly accelerated just in the last couple years so I highly recommend sticking to the latest version of Visual Pinball called VPX and tables made (or updated) specifically for it - of which there are now hundreds.

Visual Pinball is the visual rendering and scripting engine that runs on top of PinMAME, which is based on MAME, and dedicated to emulating the ROMs, inputs, lights, etc of real pinball machines. As far as the ROM code knows, it's running on real hardware and connected to physical solenoids, relays, switches and lights. Visual Pinball turns all the outputs into real-time rendered visuals. All the best real pinball machines have been lovingly recreated by the community and there are a growing number of entirely original virtual pinball tables being released which never existed as physical machines. On a graphics card from the last three-ish years or so, VPX can render 120fps 4K HDR and beyond.

It's easy to download everything necessary for free to try it out on any decent PC with just a keyboard or USB game controller, although adding some dedicated pinball controls does elevate the experience to another level. Another good site in addition to the ones you mentioned above is https://www.vpforums.com.

Additional Note: ROM code from real commercial pinball machines falls into the same legal gray area as MAME video game ROMs and thus aren't bundled with the open source engines. However, full ROM sets are downloadable from the same kinds of places (torrents, www.archive.org, community sites, etc.)

Interesting. I'm always amazed at the passion and talent that people put towards these things. And a community I wasn't familiar with. thanks!

Visual Pinball X [1] is a free modern pinball simulator. It also supports VR, and comes pretty close to feeling like the real thing (sans realistic bumping).

There are hundreds of VPX format tables available online including original works, replicas of physical tables and replicas of existing digital tables. I've played dozens of hours of Stern's Tron Legacy both on a physical table and in Visual Pinball X, and I prefer VPX over the real thing.

There's also a high quality remake of 3D Space Cadet [2] available. Playing that one in VR feels like stepping into a PC in the 90s.

[1] https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball [2] https://www.vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=16...

There is this

https://store.steampowered.com/app/547590/Pinball_FX2_VR/

but it's getting old but it is out for the quest

https://www.meta.com/experiences/1995306573932043/

like it or not the quest is the mainstream of VR, I kept away from it because I didn't want to log in with a Facebook account but I am likely to get a Quest 3to support 3D software development, stereogram viewing and stuff like that.

Yeah I mean my interest is less in having a fun arcade game and more in having a ridiculously realistic complex simulation that really leverages the modern marvel that is current gen GPUs.

If you're younger and have no idea where the poster is coming from... let me tell you about the beginning of the CD-ROM era.

Everyone thought "Gee, we've got all this storage space! What should we build?"

... and everyone answered "A pinball game!"

I have no idea why, but essentially every PC game magazine demo disc, bargain bin "20 games!" collection, etc. had at least one pinball game.

It was bizarre.

I guess the game design space was constrained enough for pinball games that fly-by-night companies had no problem getting funding to build one?

My most bizarre memory was actually playing a ton of Outpost Odyssey pinball.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz24m_5Zki4

Which was a Sierra pinball game... built in the theme of another Sierra game (Outpost)... that itself was a bit harder scifi SimCity.

I guess it was good pinball?

There are many modern successors to the 3D pinball games of yesteryear. The scene may not be part of the official commercial world, but underground pinballers have built massive resources, over the past couple of decades of PC pinball development.

If you want to play your favourite pinball game in 4K, or VR, right-now-today, chances are that you probably can. Not necessarily in the OPs vision of "full nvidia 4090 pizazz", but that'll come, as those standards percolate down through the masses.

Licensing is one of the bugbears, where recreations of actual tables are concerned. Many of the most popular tables contain images, voices, IP, of some pretty huge individuals and companies, and the rights to use each were painstakingly negotiated and carefully limited, originally. Who now will go to Schwarzenegger? to Universal Studios? to the casts of Star Trek and the Addams Family?, and ask "how much?" - nobody without a very fat wallet could even dream to.

This also comes with the less-spoken implication that parts of the semi-anonymous underground modern scene take liberties (and, as such, must stay 'underground') that commercial projects could not.

If you're in for a deep dive into this "underground" community, I've co-authored an article about it last year.

https://www.thisweekinpinball.com/a-peek-into-the-digital-cr...

I think part of the reason is a whole generation of people for whom a realistic simulation of how nudging the entire cabinet causes vibrations and wobble would be an anti-feature, because they aren't intuitive to the current majority of gamers who have never ever handled a physical pinball machine, and they would rather mechanics that are more visual and less tactile, focusing on the gameplay that can be fully represented on the screens and devices they use instead of attempting to simulate a real, physical machine.

The market niche of people who'd appreciate insane fidelity of physics simulation in pinball is shrinking every year, so we'd expect less games now than yesteryear, and even less such games in future. On the other hand, there could be a market for more 'gamey' mechanics (as you say, smashing the glass with a hammer) in the style of many 'physicsy' virtual reality games, but the preferences of that market is probably the opposite of what pinball purists would want.

I was watching a video [1] about pinball machines the other day and thought about creating a pinball using my "physics engine" [2]. I was able to create a simple billiards [3] game using it. I've been pretty busy with work and other personal projects, but I've been meaning to get back to program for fun.

1 - https://youtu.be/ue-1JoJQaEg?si=hlZxp2yI-BSTYmOY

2 - https://github.com/victorqribeiro/sphereCollision

3 - https://github.com/victorqribeiro/fingerPool

Hah! That video was the inspiration for my post. Great Youtube channel.

I find it difficult to get a sufficient velocity in the pool game to enjoy.

The force is based on how fast you drag the cue ball

I know. But that didn't work for me. I could never get it to drag fast enough.

In the words of AI Trump: Skill Issue.

Pinball FX by Zen Studios is close. They have a large amount of fantasy tables and after getting the Williams license from Farsight they are slowly releasing more real tables. They also have some newer tables from Stern available. Farsight had far more real tables but they really let their software languish, hopefully Zen keeps improving.

Interestingly, Zen studios just announced a layoff of 32 staff members

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-i-pinball-fx-i-dev-z...

Visual Pinball and Future Pinball are keeping digital pinball alive from a emulation/simulation perspective. Pinball FX is a commercial answer.

Start here. The latest nFozzy physics is very good, there is VR support or simulated 3D with anaglyph glasses, you can do head tracking via Kinect2, build your own dot matrix display with Hub75 Panels and drive it with ZeDMD, have animated backglasses on a second monitor, etc etc etc. https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball

Historically this has been windows only but support for Linux, MacOS, Android in work and shaping up very nicely. https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/blob/standalone/standal...

Then check out the incredible multitude of tables for it here. Some of these are phenomenal: https://virtual-pinball-spreadsheet.web.app/

And then when you decide you want to build your own table, you go here. But be careful, it is a slippery slope, and before you know it, you're buying a 42" OLED TV for a display and a pretty capable gaming PC to run the show http://mjrnet.org/pinscape/BuildGuideV2/

How is the VR support? I'm lucky to live near a huge pinball spot but it's 20 min away from me. I'd love to play pinball in VR.

I don't have a VR setup but my understanding is it is really good. Best to check out the Visual Pinball Discord where there is a channel dedicated to VR.

https://discord.gg/B7pG7pRD

All the kids that played the Pinball game that came with Windows have grown up, become hipsters, got jobs, now have a little money, and either build their own pinball machines made with LCD screens, or have legit old retro machines.

There are expo's and stuff, people love this shit. In pinball there is a real strong connection to a physical (either with LCD, or mechanical) machine, it just isn't nearly as good on a computer, phone, tablet or in VR.

I wonder the same thing about Asteroids! We have https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum... as a multiplayer variant but I can't find anything else!

Windows used to come with so many cute games that my family (and kids who couldn't afford video games) loved. I spent so much time on Inkball for Windows Vista; my siblings loved Purble Place and Chess Titans.

Windows Vista and 7 were peak in that regard. Then with Windows 8, no more fun allowed.

A little further back, us kids loved DOS shareware games like Epic Pinball (yes, that Epic)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/263/epic-pinball/

what was more annoying was the version check they added in so many of them would not even run in newer versions.

No expert, but someday I hope to build a full-on digital pinball machine inspired by Jeff Atwood's blog post a few years ago: https://blog.codinghorror.com/your-digital-pinball-machine/

For software he mentions both https://store.steampowered.com/app/238260/Pinball_Arcade and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Pinball . They both looked quite good even back in 2016. Not sure how they've aged.

About the GPU:

> but I plan to play only fully 3D pinball sims and the 1050 Ti gets excellent reviews for $140, so I went for it

That's $ 450+ for the 4050 Ti now...

I've got a virtual pinball machine standing next to me running Visual Pinball X - it's a fun hobby finding and setting up new tables on it.

It's also worth noting that Zen Studios is best known for Pinball FX which is available in various flavors for just about every platform. https://zenstudios.com/games/pinball-fx/

Good for a casual pickup on your xbox or ipad or whatever you like, and they put a lot of effort into their tables, although it can be pricey to buy a lot of them.

Pinball is boring and old school by todays standard, so not much money is made with modern pinball-games. And not enough money being made, means not many have enough resources and motivation to invest into a high end-implementation. And high end-cards like the 4090 have not that units around either, so the market is even smaller.

Though, you probably don't need high end-cards and big money for a high end-pinball today. Maybe just some motivated well skilled small team would be enough?

Try some Zen Pinball (especially the Star Wars tables) on a big iPad.

There's a really fun game from 2018 called Yoku's Island Express where the core mechanic is pinball-like. It's a 2d side scroller, looks gorgeous

I don't see it being hugely popular considering real life pinball machines are not so ever present in game arcades (now dominated by computer games).

Yeah I guess this would be more in the domain of those demos that Nvidia used to release with every new generation of Geforce card back in the day highlighting the new features. But I do think it could have a lot of educational value (especially if it were open source).

My guess is that most of the people who are interested in pinball mostly enjoy the clunky parts.

Maybe for these virtual pinball tables that use a screen instead of an electromechanical table, but with all sorts of stuff to give some tactile feedback and actual mechanical sounds. There are typically accelerometers and tilt sensors in there too, so you can bump the machine and the software simulates the effect on the ball.

It would be that hard to do. The state of the art is currently represented by Visual Pinball and Pinball FX.

The first is open source and relies all on homebrew content, and most are remakes of existing games as you would expect, with MAME software emulation for the digital games. The software package contains a painful, CAD-like tool to define the playfield - very precise but hard to work with. You can make a new playfield in probably a month of effort, and then tinker with the game's rules for much longer.

The second, Pinball FX(which dropped the numbered titles in its fourth version), has a mix of licenses and originals, and which it's definitely become more accurate, the goal is primarily a visual showcase. It already pressures a modern GPU reasonably well when you crank the settings.

Neither one is doing anything to push the physics simulation further. Visual Pinball's physics rely on analytic methods for each mechanism, and while it has little details like computing the movement of the skirt on the pops as the ball rolls over them, it does not simulate whole-table vibrations, which are actually essential to gameplay because control is achieved through nudging the entire cabinet. And there's a huge realm of details that emerge from that where thousands of physics objects, down to the individual screw, need to wake up and interact in very fine detail, and the force creates a directed wave across the playfield, the wood needs to be able to wobble a bit. Adding a force to the ball is not sufficient. And actually achieving that means you now have to model everything the game has, including the insides, which is far more work than a playfield and magic mechanisms.

Pinball FX is not open source but I already know it isn't trying to be that detailed either.

But when you ask the broader audience about pinball video games, they point at Demon's Tilt. Which is not even trying, as far as the simulation goes - it is a video game, through and through. The problem is that broad demographic isn't really there because people who don't play pinball don't know the difference, and the niche of people who do, go play real pinballs. Which leaves a tiny space for roughly three or four companies that are focused mostly on licenses.

Of those, the pinball video game I play the most is Pinball Deluxe Reloaded, which is all originals, but most importantly, it's intentionally 2D and ideal for phones. And the sim quality is decent. And just by doing those things, it's done something none of the competition achieved, even in their mobile ports, because they put the sim first and have a 3D camera and no way of getting a simple flat projection.

I think the main reason is simply because most people buying and playing games these days haven’t grown up around physical pinball machines. So there isn’t the same demand for virtual tables like there once was.

I’m not saying the market is zero though, but small enough that even most indie studios wouldn’t see any profit.

In my universe Xenotilt https://store.steampowered.com/app/2008980/XENOTILT_HOSTILE_... has been quite popular and well received, but it makes no claim of realism.

Where I am the retro arcade scene has been almost completely taken over by physical pinball machines and collectors, and everyone notices that kids that are exposed to it seem to be amazed. Those of us that prefer basking in glowing phosphor seem to be in a very distinct minority.

I just realized that a pinball game with Sony Dualsense support (or similar, I’m not sure about Microsoft controllers) would also be pretty amazing simply because of the haptic triggers.

There are plenty of new pinball games released on Steam every year.

Adding Virtual Aquariums from the early 2000s to this list. When those came out I was mind blown! Today, I haven't seen much better. Would be cool for someone to create a "push-the-boundaries" virtual aquarium that can be played on a large format display. (Maybe it's just easier to pull up a youtube video of a fishtank on a 6 hour loop.)

3d AR glasses running 3d pinball games with ability to use interpret hand/arm or other movement jestures isn't a modern successor?

Or more like star trek holo-emersion and you're the pinball take on dance-dance, sprinting to keep up with where to move cues?

Or video project 3d pinball game of choice onto surface?

I could imagine pinball machines would be a good use for VR, but honestly I wouldn't enjoy playing ultra-realistic-looking pinball on a TV. What's the point? I can't bump the machine. I can't change my perspective to view the machine from different angles.

Pinball FXn is great if you want simulated pinball. I prefer: https://store.steampowered.com/app/422510/DEMONS_TILT/

I’d look at retro fantasy consoles:

PICO-8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

WASM-4: https://wasm4.org/

Maybe a hybrid approach using Tilt Five headsets https://www.tiltfive.com/ . Easy to retheme a playfield, and your friends can watch in 3D as well.

Oh you brought memories of playing Slam Tilt (which just had great design) and 3d ultra pinball creep night (not that great, but nice music).

I wonder why games like "where is my water" disappeared. It is probably one of the best mobile games.

Check out the Japanese Pachinko machines. Pachinko is massive in Japan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachinko

There is virtual pinball.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0DXlcbVsWg

My guess would be that very few people are around who ever played physical pinball machines. Can't trade off the nostalgia any more.

New Pinball games have been made, they didn’t go in the direction you suggest though, they made pinball in virtual reality.

Flipnic came out, and what could ever truly top it?

pinball in general is long overdue for a resurgence in popularity.

lots of indie games today are becoming more arcadey and pinball-like in many ways, if you squint.

in many ways, pinball is the original "roguelite"—I fully expect indie pinball (both in video game form and even in physical form) to take the scene by storm, any day now, as soon as someone makes the Vampire Survivors of pinball games.

> pinball in general is long overdue for a resurgence in popularity.

It is already surging to the moon. In the last three years prices for good, used pinball machines have roughly doubled and many newly built machines are sold-out and on back-order. They simply can't make them fast enough. These days you're lucky if you can find a new one at only MSRP. My wife fell in love with the new Stern Godzilla pinball and we finally just got it after a year and a half on the waiting list (and it cost >$10k).

I don't know anything about markets or why things trend certain ways, but I am an avid pinball player. In fact, as I write this, I've traveled halfway across the country to attend the Chicago Pinball Expo with a buddy of mine.

I note that Full Tilt! released in what is often referred to as The Dark Ages of Pinball. There was a slump there in the 90s where every manufacturer of pinball tables folded, except for Stern, and they subsisted on making a pretty thin, bog standard sequence of tables. Pinball would resurge in the mid-to-late '00s.

I think the 90s was a moment where there was a group of people who enjoyed pinball, but it was hard to find venues that took care of tables. You certainly weren't getting very cool new tables every year. Full Tilt may have filled that gap.

Nowadays, you can just look up your area on pinballmap.com and find tables near you. That wasn't an option in the 90s. If you didn't know of an arcade with good tables, your only option was digital.

Stern releases a new, awesome, KME-designed table every year or two. Multiple other manufacturers have emerged to answer the increasing demand. A new company just announced a Labyrinth that I am so, so stoked to try.

Personally, I don't much care for digital pinball. The physical nature of the game is core to it. The simulated nudging doesn't do it for me. The consistent kickouts on many virtual pinball tables makes it a bit samey. I think they're great for learning and internalizing the rulesets of classic tables, and certainly there are things that a digital medium can do that the physical medium just can't. That's just my two cents.

Neat website, what's your take on the virtual pinball cabinets that try to simulate some of the physical behavior of the real thing? Can you elaborate on the "samey" point?

stuff like this guy's build https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxilHoceiNo&list=PLrqlHbqP7F...

The class of games that "PC Pinball" fell into has been subsumed by mobile games— the criteria fit in terms of small numbers of inputs, ease of learning, friendliness to short play sessions, and over the top graphics/scoring/progression.

Even if Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Flight Control, Subway Surfer, Candy Crush, Temple Run, and their thousands of descendants are not anything like actual pinball-based games, I expect that they're occupying much of the mindspace that would be filled by pinball in the market.

Even indie games trying to do pinball-y things are having to build considerably on the formula to make a "big" enough game, eg turning it into a Metroidvania a la Yoku's Island Express.

A more niche mobile Pinball game that I like (gacha game with surprising complexity) is called World Flipper. It does exactly what you said: Builds a lot on standard pinball with RPG elements and party building. The unfortunate reality is that it's a pretty simplistic "pinball" and that framing for the game takes a heavy backseat to all the other things it's doing. I'd personally love a game that leans more heavily into being a pinball game but still having the really nice complexity of what World Flipper offers.

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