koz1000

I was at Williams Pinball around this time and we had the "SAY NO TO DRUGS" as part of the built-in attract mode loop.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/423338433692506875/

We all hated it...but it was gently explained to us by our marketing staff that we were dependent on staying in good terms with Hollywood because we wanted to be able to license movie themes for upcoming games. We were also told that the FBI could have seriously messed with that relationship if they wanted to, to the point of shutting us out. Of course we had to please the AMOA/AAMA and all the other industry groups as well that were receiving pressure...

So in it stayed...for releases to the USA. The home versions and export versions had it removed.

So I had a similar idea a long time ago (when I worked at a gaming company) to put a large illuminated button right on the front panel of the machine, simply labelled:

    [ LUCK ]

...that did absolutely nothing. It would have (by design) NOT been connected to anything other than lamp power. I'm convinced it would have been a great hit. My colleagues were not as convinced.

A wise man once told me: all project management eventually becomes an Excel spreadsheet.

The idea has been around forever, probably from the moment someone figured out how to attach a unique ID to a radio transmitter. I pitched the idea myself (half-heartedly) fifteen years ago which puts me 7 years before this guy. And others commented with their prior art.

http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Theme_20Park_20Leash#10639908...

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Awesome!

About that last line. It actually has a double meaning. I don't think Pat has ever discussed it.

First one was that Pat is a big NASCAR fan (we were trying to get that license even back in the Williams days). So that's an obvious one. Pedal down and turn left!

The second one was a dig at Williams management. Pat had tried to reason with them to not overproduce games and/or stuff them down the throats of distributors. Forcing weak games on customers and stuffing the pipe was bad for business and things had already taken a serious turn for the worse business-wise (and we were still a full 2 years before shutdown).

IIRC, the conversation with management was "if you don't slow down we're gonna hit the wall" and the reply was "f* it, full throttle!" This is why Pat hid that text in the back loop where nobody would really see it.

Well, I can only take credit for one of those but thanks. It's always great meeting people that played our stuff all those years ago.

Very nice work. Now that you have a platform, you can start on the next mountain: making a fun game. =)

Here's an old presentation I did on designing the MONOPOLY pinball machine for Stern back in 2001. (so old I had to dig it out of the Internet Archive)

https://web.archive.org/web/20040806155145/http://www.patlaw...

I worked with Steve for a number of years at Williams.

One of the most remarkable things about Steve is that he never retired. He came into the Williams plant every day up until the close of the pinball division and for years after. He was in his late eighties by that point.

I've never had a job before or since where I could walk across the hall and speak with someone that was in the business since nearly the beginning. The man had over 60 years of pinball knowledge in his head and readily accessible. He would always take time to answer any question you had. We avoided a lot of mistakes by having someone like him on our team.

At Steve's wake an ex-coworker remembered a story about how AutoCAD was first showing up on the design floor. Pins were still designed on drafting tables up until the early 90s. Steve saw a few guys trying out AutoCAD and immediately ran to the store and installed it on his machine. He was probably 85 at the time.

Every time I read a HN story about being too old for the job, I remember that story.

Try the Internet Pinball Database:

http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=1254

Humpty Dumpty added player-controlled flippers (which was a breakthrough in itself) but if you look at the images you'll see that the placement was awkward and hard to map between the buttons you were touching and the motions that the flippers made.

Triple Action put them on the bottom and swung them like bats - something that felt more natural and enjoyable.

As someone that worked with Mr. DeMar at Williams, I can honestly say that he was a "designer" in every sense of the word. He was an essential part of every design team, and a lot of times took a boring playfield and turned it into a highly entertaining game. It's really not fair to diminish the role of a programmer in these games.

You see, High Speed represented an inflection point in pinball history where the software became the star of the game, not the playfield geometry. The game told a story instead of just being a noisy point accumulator like previous solid-state games. All that choreography with lights, music, display animation, etc was a huge part of High Speed's success.

The rest of the points you make are very accurate. The article gives a very interesting history of auto-replay percentaging and match tricks, but that had very little to do with the demise of pinball in the last decade.