Arcade Collecting > Pinball

Stern layoffs

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RayB:
*Edit* Fixed the name there of Pinball Factory, but there's also "Pinball Manufacturing" who did a run of Big Bang Bar. I remember reading that someone at one of those companies guy dumped $1 million into a project and didn't make his money back

Mauzy:
Please excuse my ignorance, but what was so innovative in High Speed? Ive never played it, but Ive played The Getaway quite a bit.

RayB:

--- Quote from: Mauzy on November 05, 2008, 08:11:18 pm ---Please excuse my ignorance, but what was so innovative in High Speed? Ive never played it, but Ive played The Getaway quite a bit.
--- End quote ---
It's hard to describe... relying on memory and scanning through ipdb.org by year is helping me remember... Williams was already doing "ok" with pins like Comet and Space Shuttle, and Bally had a few good ones too, but in general leading up to the release of High Speed, pin play was usually on a flat playfield, and you'd hit the ball here and there and there were sounds... Yay. What High Speed really nailed as I remember, was a "feeling" like you get playing a really well tweaked classic video game (like comparing Centipede to boring space shooters that preceded its release). In HS they really managed to convey a feeling that your game had a "progression" to it -- taking off in a car and then you're chased by cops, and there's a full music sound track keeping the adrenaline going, plus extra "toys" like a real rotating emergency light on the top.

In other words they really nailed creating excitement, and conveying the theme (whereas most pinballs before, you had a theme, yes, but it was just art to look at, sound effects to hear, and some things to bat the ball at). You can see how they were ramping up this kind of attention to detail in their design of Comet for example, and also creating more "height" within the playfield to make more room for ramps and extra stuff, so it's not all flat. The production numbers speak for themselves (over 17,000 units of HS when 2000-3000 units was usually the norm).

Pin Bot was then released same year and it too had some real cool features, sold a lot.

Do an advanced search at www.ipdb.org and enter just a year. It's interesting to see the unit numbers and how Williams took a clear lead. Compare playfield designs and you can see how much more went into Williams pins. (For example compare "Bad Girls" to "Cyclone").

pinballwizard79:
Mustard  >:D

ChadTower:

High Speed didn't save pinball on its own.  It was the game that finally was the right balance between speed, progression, and fun.  It was just a great game.  The game that turned everything on its ear and started the industry turnaround was Black Knight.  First multilevel playfield, first magna save, first timed bonus balls, insane speed and looping, far deeper difficulty than usual.  It was a major advance in pinball concepts.  It was such a jump in difficulty, though, that I think it lost a lot of the more casual players, which is where High Speed came back in.  High Speed combined enough of those advancements in a game that was very intuitive to understand and accessible to novices but was hard enough to master that it kept the hardcore players happy.  That's when the sales numbers shot way up.

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