Fuck. :/

Lyman was the George Harrison of pinball. You had the Johns and Pauls as the designers, the face of the games, but it was Lyman, the George, that was the heart that made those games sing, that didn't get nearly enough credit, and who brought out the best in all the Ringos that also worked on the project.

The Indie Pinball Chick team will be writing an article all about how Lyman's approach to code and rules changed the pinball landscape. Never wasting any shots, never breaking up the action, never leaving the player with nothing to do no matter where the ball ends up, making games with more content but accessible to players of all skill levels, and allowing budgets to be trimmed when it started to matter in the 90s by having code make up for mechanical and design cutbacks, allowing more to be done with less in a way you don't really notice.

.

I was fortunate to be one of the first people in the UK to be able to get to grips with AC/DC Pro before it went into wide release, at the main amusement trade show early in that year. Early forum opinions had predominantly been to look at the playfield and dismiss it, saying 'oh, it's just another T2, you can see how everything's been reused and where'. I had the pleasure of going back to those same VP forums and telling them "I've played it and you are ALL talking out of your arses", and as much as it was Steve's game, and though the animations were still very incomplete, that was down to Lyman.

'Rest in peace'? If I were 55-year-old Lyman I wouldn't cross over, I'd stay right here and haunt the bloody lot of us.

...But in the nicest way.