Other for me.

Brian Eddy.

A genius far ahead of his time, not just in pinball design & programming. His work in Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy still sends shockwaves through current video game trends and their implementation of physics manipulation (ie Half-Life 2 and others).

Maybe one day after I win the lotto, I will own his opus, Medieval Madness.

Brian Eddy started doing pinball machine programming at Williams. He eventually got to lead design on some pinball machines. Many many years later around the time of Pinball 2K, Williams broke up into smaller divisions. One of them became the home video game developer we knew as Midway Home [Chicago office], who don't exist anymore incidentally. The studio was sold to Warner Brothers when Midway Home recently went bankrupt (no thanks to the financial mess we are in). Remnants of that team, who include video game design legend Ed Boon (aka Rudy from Funhouse), renamed their studio Netherealm Studios (the guys behind the upcoming Mortal Kombat reboot for Xbox 360 & PS3).

Midway Home was seperate from Midway Amusements (division who put out Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct, and late 90's pins like Scared Stiff/Attack from Mars/etc). During the era of the console and the fall of the arcade, you probably saw Midway publishing alot on PS2/Xbox/etc. Brian Eddy was design director at Midway Home [Chicago office] and was largely responsible for designing a video game called "Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy" for the PS2 & Xbox.

The 3rd-person action game was one of the first mainstream games to employ game world physics manipulation. Your guy had psychic powers and could levitate objects and use them to attack, traverse platforms, or solve puzzles (before Lucasarts ripped off the idea for "Star Wars: The Force Unleashed"). Much of the invention of using physics to affect gameplay (like the balance beam puzzles & gravity gun in Half Life 2) can be traced back to Brian Eddy's "Psi-Ops". Last I checked on my facebook & Linkedin friends list, Brian Eddy is still doing consulting work for tech companies after Midway closed (did some work for the guys behind Big Buck Hunter, Raw Thrills).

He really is a genius. Shame we didn't see more pins designed by him. He went out with a bang with Medieval Madness, as far as his career in pinball goes. A nuclear missile really.