LAH (August '93) was a definite nail in the industry coffin, as was the vast quantity of money spaffed away on Python Anghelo's vanity Popeye project (February '94). But the precise tipping point where the whole industry overbalances can be placed between Star Trek TNG at the close of 1993 and World Cup Soccer at the start of '94. It coincidences neatly with both Genesis and SNES owners being able to binge-play SF2 Turbo at home.

TNG is the last 'silver age' pinball to crack over 10,000 units in sales, and before that, Indiana Jones. Both are Superpins. Things appear to start off well in 1994, but in hindsight, 8,700 units of the official pinball of the biggest sporting event in the world, in which the biggest pinball market is also the host nation, and the game is a standard body, should have been the biggest of big red flags for the industry. It's also backed up by the other two top sellers of the year being Demolition Man and Red & Ted... also the last two other Superpins.

All of the above proved three things. 1: Home console ports were now good enough to eat into JAMMA arcade revenue, specifically games that earned most from competitive play, and that would also knock on to pinball revenue. 2: Along with Street Fighter 2 and the fighting game craze, the novelty of Superpins had helped keep Williams, and by extention the pinball industry as a whole, artificially buoyant. 3: The moment the 30 percent extra development cost for Superpins stopped being justifiable, there was nowhere for the industry to go but down.

She also has a venture capital family background; many, many, many long-time gaming industry friends and contacts; her father started at Atari in the 1970s; and during the Ray Kassar reign of terror was one of the first offered to jump ship to a position in Apple, and later invest in the Macintosh. He's seen everything that went on in the gaming and manufacturing industry, or been confided in it by other figures who were actually there.

For the time, it was. It was also Gottlieb's last chance under Columbia's ownership and it killed them. Their Krull arcade game also ate financial shit. But everything about Krull, the projects that jumped on it and how they utterly failed to pan out, can be explained away very simply. Krull was originally supposed to be a Dungeons & Dragons movie.

It's pretty well known that even Barry Oursler felt Popeye was the worst project he was ever involved with, and only got stuck with it because absolutely nobody else other than management's ear, whom Python could talk the hind legs off of, wanted to give Python's ideas the time of day. I can't be the only person Barry ever related this to, multiple times.

Any game with four designers all with a valid claim to a credit will have either overspent, been overproduced, or been stuck in problematic development hell for ages, even if every cent isn't immediately apparent on the final finished playfield or the game turns out as good as it's potentially allowed to be. I know, because I worked on one.

December 10th, 1993. Spot on with the point in time I'm talking about as well.

The 'right' answer, for those not so familiar with engineering, is more than just raw parts. What makes the crane 'complex' isn't the mechs per se but the control and engineering tolerances that factor in. This would have been more difficult for a company like Data East Pinball in 1993* than Stern today. R2D2 doesn't need to worry about that, the movement is vertical and the weight is balanced. If he wobbles a bit, it makes no difference. But LAH was the first time anything like the crane had really been attempted in a pinball environment, and it wasn't going to be perfect. It needs to be strong for the long horizontal length and ball hanging off the end not to act as a pivot. More important are the control switches that tell the mech how and when to start and stop - if those fail for any reason, the motor may decide not to switch off and keep trying to push the crane past the start or end point. That's where the burnout risk would lie.

(*One reason: in order to stay competitive with Williams, Data East had to beat them to the punch with a number of 'industry firsts' with fewer resources to spare. First 'solid state' flippers, first DMD, first sound board to replace the Yamaha synth. According to the IPDB, the first DMD was put on Checkpoint instead of Simpsons because if the new display had been rushed and failed to be reliable, management were concerned it would bankrupt the company.)

Right, the individual parts aren't new but the level at which they're being asked to perform is. That small turning circle at the motor point becomes a giant arc at the end. CBW has the giant cue but it's decoration. The arc is that of the kicker coil, and it doesn't need to be quite so accurate as long as it still goes back and forth. Same with T2's cannon.

No offence intended; I was answering for the benefit of the non-engineers in the thread, citing company history that's easy to find (from Joe Keenan), and giving the example of the mathematical considerations and safety margins involved when designing such an object and the environment it has to work with, since we know an entire playfield is subject to tolerances and they all add up, and that any device is only as bullet-proof as its weakest part. That's going to be the microswitches here. (Safety margins are always heavily on my mind when I'm designing a whole playfield and all the interactions, I have to assume everything on it can flex and move.) The crane may operate on easy core principles and stock mechanics but the *application* of what it's doing and the 'wow' factor on the player is still quite ambitious for summer '93. At the same time over at Williams, European distros were able to get the Deadworld crane on Judge Dredd nerfed by citing its *potential* for failure (though the engineers knew damn well they just didn't like it).

First pin I ever owned was a Data East Star Wars actually. Had it for several years before I moved to Wales. Still think it's the best SW pin ever.

Well I discovered why Stargate was so expensive to develop: they shitcanned the prototype and started again from scratch. I'm hearing that with toys, the lift ramp and the lower playfield added, Gottlieb's conservative production run estimates would have costed the completed prototype at around $8000 per unit sale in 1994. Whether that's true or not I think they made the right call; it looks way more fun at first glance but scrutinise it and the flow looks goddamn awful.

https://www.ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=2847&picno=67322&zoom=1