Thanks for posting. Good read

Neat, kind of sad to read though. I'm sure he was completely devastated that day.

I'm sure a lot of Williams people were.

The writing was on the wall for the other divisions too. Williams Atari, Williams Midway, Williams Touch Screen games.

Hell of a way to start a week after a successful P2K at Expo. People were starting to order parts for Wizard Blocks and were told to call back after the meeting.

What meeting ?

LTG : )

Anybody that hasn’t, needs to watch Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball. Tons of good info about this era.

Funny you posted this. I have to give a speech on the History of Pinball in a couple of months and I went back and watched George Gomez's famous speech on Pinball 2000 to help me prepare for my speech. I've watched this video literally a hundred times over the years and it never ceases to amaze me how well he told the story of designing RFM. I always found it very inspiring. If you haven't seen it look it up on You tube. I think all the people in that room were on such a high from this new design, including myself as I was sitting in the room that day too at the old Ramada. And then hearing the news a few days later on Monday morning that Williams was no longer in the pinball business, it's still hard to believe sometimes. I'm glad a lot of those people are still around in the pinball world. As George said, "Pinball will survive".

John

All of r.g.p, right up to the present day, can be viewed on groups.google.com and other sources, no membership needed. Try this:
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.pinball/search?q=%22I%20will%20miss%20Ted%27s%20thoughtfull%20analysis%20of%20a%20rule.%22&hl=en

New facts about WMS' closure of the pinball division were revealed at Pintastic New England 2022. The seminar will be posted on YouTube soon.
.................David Marston

Makes me wonder how the business side influenced his Toy Story 4 design and what may have been built otherwise.

hands down the best documentary, and overall most informative, piece of video on the topic. IMHO.

3rd that... If you weren't a fan of Pinball 2000 you will at least appreciate the effort that went into engineering it afterwards. The special features shows video of Gene Cunningham's protos of Wizard Blocks and Playboy

Early 90's. Used to be lots of industry people on it. Over time that valuable resource dried up.

LTG : )

RGP (rec.games.pinball) was launched on November 20, 1990. It was deemed necessary because there were so many postings about pinball in rec.games.video.arcade that protocols were merging to recognize the pinball content. The pinballers said, "We need our own newsgroup" and the (arcade) video gamers said, "We don't want to be over-run by pinball postings."
.................David Marston

Now up:

.................David Marston