Chicago, IL
^I was wondering when Steve would be brought up.
Later on, Pat Lawlor designed many of the 90s Williams big sellers too, in particular TAF.
(Topic ID: 206864)
You're currently viewing posts by Pinsider jfre81.
Click here to go back to viewing the entire thread.
Eugene Jarvis. Did pinball code but is best known as a video game designer (Defender, Robotron: 2084)
Ed Boon is also best known as co-creator of Mortal Kombat, but programmed for pinball and was the voice of Rudy in FunHouse.
Mark Ritchie designed SlugFest, the pitch-and-bat that took plenty of tokens in exchange for a few baseball cards.
IIRC Bally/Midway lost the Namco Pac-Man license because they didn't have permission to make and sell Baby Pac-Man or the various Pac spinoffs.
Quoted from o-din:If they had spent a little more time finishing code on games like Cactus Canyon instead of trying to turn pinball into a video game, I think the world would be a better place now.
Unfortunately the environment of the world in 1998 did not support this. Arcade was dead, WMS corporate had already turned against pinball and wanted to make slot machines anyway. The silver ball was heading SDTM for the drain and nothing, not Pin2K, anything was going to save pinball as it had been. I wish as much as anyone it had been different. I did not stop playing pinball regularly because I lost interest, but because I lost access for the most part.
Quoted from o-din:On thing I have noticed was the lack of Steve Ritchie games near the end. His last one was No Fear in 1995 I believe.
He left and went back to Atari for a bit.
Quoted from o-din:Well I had a pocket full of quarters that said differently.
Unfortunately it was not enough quarters for WMS shareholders to be happy.
Quoted from o-din:OK that makes sense.
Wonder if things would have been a little different if he had stuck around and j-pop had gone back to whatever it was he had been doing.
Steve and JPop actually overlapped somewhat at Bally/WMS. Think Theatre of Magic came out before No Fear. SR has said in interviews he saw the writing on the wall both at WMS and for pinball on the scale they were making.
Williams/Midway fed both the arcade video game and pinball renaissance. Capcom and Street Fighter II kicked it off, but then came Mortal Kombat, made by Boon the former pinball programmer and callout voice. Then SR was essentially the voice of MK. Many other guys crossing over from one to the other to help make the arcade what it was in this era. When MKII came out it was THE big deal. Then for MK3 they were putting codes in pinballs like ToM. They made this symbiosis between their video and pinball that worked until the Internet and gaming/PC hardware advanced to where they could provide that video experience at home.
Pinball is mainly a victim of its being costly to manufacture and maintain, such that an arcade cannot be profitable operating strictly or mostly pinball. The video games created the environment that allowed a pinball like TAF to sell 20K+ or for later ones like TZ or ST:TNG to exist at all as made.
You're currently viewing posts by Pinsider jfre81.
Click here to go back to viewing the entire thread.
Reply
Wanna join the discussion? Please sign in to reply to this topic.
Hey there! Welcome to Pinside!
Donate to PinsideGreat to see you're enjoying Pinside! Did you know Pinside is able to run without any 3rd-party banners or ads, thanks to the support from our visitors? Please consider a donation to Pinside and get anext to your username to show for it! Or better yet, subscribe to Pinside+!
