6 ms·

How Pinball Ate itself: The Economics of Pinball

78 points by wakeless 17y ago

lurkinggrue 17y ago
Cool, he knows Eugene Jarvis! I wondered what happened to him.
- joezydeco 17y ago
  Eugene Jarvis left Midway about eight years ago and started Raw Thrills (http://www.rawthrills.com http://www.rawthrills.com). Eugene wasn't the host mentioned in the story, since he didn't work on design for Black Knight or High Speed (he does have a sound credit on HS, though). You're thinking of the other Vid Kid, Larry DeMar.
  - agent86 17y ago
    And I think the article takes a bit of a wide berth with the term "designer". Steve Ritchie actually designed those machines, Larry DeMar did the software for them. As other posters have pointed out, innovation really did not stop in 1992. Pinball 2000 was actually a success, but Williams decided to pull the plug despite that. The Pinball 2000 platform was quite revolutionary - from how the player played the game, to how the game was designed, maintained, and even upgraded. I don't think free play really had anything but an ancillary role in the decline of the hobby. It was likely the rise of video games, and specifically home consoles, that really hurt pinball. People played video games at home, and then played newer/better games in the arcade. Due to the cost a pinball machine in the home is a rarity to this day, and so the exposure it received was never the same. Kids learned Mario and Nintendo, they didn't learn the silver ball and flippers. Along the lines of the article, the most "interesting" idea I heard in pinball circles was that clear coating playfields was a harbinger of doom. Williams started doing this and called it "Diamond Plate". It was designed to reduce the need for mylar to protect the playfield. The premise is that the idea worked TOO well. Playfields on the machines could look like new forever. A machine's lifetime was extended, the impetus to replace the machine was lowered, and sales suffered.
    - koz1000 17y ago
      As someone that worked with Mr. DeMar at Williams, I can honestly say that he was a "designer" in every sense of the word. He was an essential part of every design team, and a lot of times took a boring playfield and turned it into a highly entertaining game. It's really not fair to diminish the role of a programmer in these games. You see, High Speed represented an inflection point in pinball history where the software became the star of the game, not the playfield geometry. The game told a story instead of just being a noisy point accumulator like previous solid-state games. All that choreography with lights, music, display animation, etc was a huge part of High Speed's success. The rest of the points you make are very accurate. The article gives a very interesting history of auto-replay percentaging and match tricks, but that had very little to do with the demise of pinball in the last decade.
ryanelkins 17y ago
I wonder why they weren't able to implement increasing levels of difficulty. They could have mechanically changed the playing field at certain thresholds, or even looked into using different sorts of balls (heavier, smaller, BOTH AT THE SAME TIME!!!). How about balls with uneven weight distribution? Most of this stuff I envision being unleashed as you advance, so it's similar to other video games where it gets progressively more difficult. It just seems like they could have done something other than just make a static game that was harder than the last version.
- Dove 17y ago
  Wow. Not only might that have solved the economic problem, it would also have been WAY COOL.
- roundsquare 17y ago
  mechanically changed the playing field at certain thresholds More moving parts means harder to maintain means costs more money to maintain. However, I guess this can be done by... for example, having parts of the board that open up as you get to higher scores. Still, there's only so much you can pack into the space a pinball machine has. using different sorts of balls Spectacular!
lmkg 17y ago
The balancing act between new and hardcore players is something that video game publishers have to deal with as well. They have an easier time of it, but it's by no means trivial. While video games are flexible with respect to skill required, as the article mentions, pinball is a more transferable skill than video games, which means that the balance has to be found on a game-by-game basis rather than across the industry. I've seen quite a few gamer communities that demand their games be more challenging and intricate. This article demonstrates the danger that pandering to that audience exclusively brings a danger of stagnation. It's difficult to provide a good challenge that doesn't have a noob-unfriendly learning curve. There's lessons in here for any other sort of community. Barriers to entry and a community that only cares for its own needs lead to stagnation. This is especially relevant to communities based around technology, such as software applications or programming languages.
- wakeless 17y ago
  Video game publishers also chicken out and add a difficulty level selector at the beginning of the game, rather than dynamically adjusting the level.
  - jac_no_k 17y ago
    There's a danger to having a dynamic difficulty. Case with coin op games: Games around the year 2000 was frustrating to play. A skilled player would run into impossible to resolve situation and lose a "life". There was no way to play for more then about 1 minute without losing and no way to complete a game on a single credit. From the players perspective, the game was cheating and playing too skillfully was a demerit. Recent coin op games seem to have moved away from this. It's possible to complete a level with one credit. The game board remains the same and the difficulty is selected by the board type or player specs. I think in general that games shouldn't change difficulty mid board. To the player, it becomes a disincentive to play too well. Let the player decide what challenges they want to face. It should at least be an option to toggle.
  - jerf 17y ago
    Dynamic difficulty is a terrible idea. It reduces the potential difficulty-space of the game to two basic cases: Always too easy and always too hard. It means that if you lost, it's because the game chose to make you lose, not because of an effect on your choices, and if you win, it's because the game chose to let you win, not because of your skill. Every couple of years I'll play a game with this new, innovative idea, and it's still the same story. It's sort of fun for a bit, until your brain catches up and realizes that as meaningless as most games are, this one is even more so. It's not a new idea and if it were going to work, it would have been made to work by now: http://www.intellivisiongames.com/bluesky/games/credits/space.html#astrosmash http://www.intellivisiongames.com/bluesky/games/credits/spac... (No, there is no in-between "just right". Simple control theory shows how you can't hover at the "just right" point; as you are at "just right", the system must dynamically adjust the difficulty above your level (or you even just hit a bad patch) and cause you to fail, at which point you're back at too easy. There's nowhere near enough data to get to "just right" even in theory.)
rnicholson 17y ago
This article reminded me of this documentary - http://www.tilt-movie.com/ http://www.tilt-movie.com/
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
snorkel 17y ago
It's not free play algorithms that doomed pinball so much as the fact that video game arcades were doomed by improved home gaming systems, and pinball machines are expensive to design, manufacture, and maintain, and pinball operators charge up to $1 per play.
- roundsquare 17y ago
  Actually, as I read the article, I didn't get the impression that he meant: free play algorithms --> demise In fact, he seemed to mean: transferable skills --> disparity in skills --> demise And free play algorithms were actually what kept the industry going for slightly longer.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - iron_ball 17y ago
    The same thing happened with fighting games (such as Street Fighter). This type of game is extremely deep and technical, with highly refined skills which can be transferred over successive generations of a series. There are people who have been honing their Street Fighter skills for 15 years now; that makes it difficult for new players to participate on a casual basis. As a result, the genre is pretty much a niche these days, despite the unexpected popularity of Street Fighter 4.
    - roundsquare 17y ago
      Interesting, makes sense. However, I would think this applies mainly to arcades, which I believe are dying in the US anyway (though I've heard they still flourish elsewhere). Console games allow one to play against the computer or against friends. At least against the computer a beginner can play and have fun. I wonder how this will evolve change as console's take advantage of the internet. A test case could be Starcraft. Anyone have any idea of how hard it is to break into Starcraft now for someone just starting?
dasil003 17y ago
There currently exists one botique manufacturer of pinball machines but its fair to say that innovation stopped in 1992. I don't think that's fair to say at all. Williams tried to save the Pinball industry by inventing the Pinball 2000 platform which had reflected video over the playfield. It was definitely as big an innovative step as anything that cam before since the invention of the flipper. Also, I might be biased having been 14 at the time, but I wouldn't call The Addams Family the end of innovation. I would call it the beginning of maturity. The machines Williams released in the 90s and the Stern machines of today reflect the perfection in pinball playability. The precise shooting lanes and the deep rulesets gave rise to 15 years of amazing machines that are just as much fun for beginners as they are for experts. It's a real shame the pinball machines are so expensive to maintain and thus so rare to find in good operating condition. When I see my first real liquidity event I plan on purchasing some of my favorites (The Twilight Zone, The Addams Family, Attack From Mars, Indiana Jones, Simpsons Pinball Party, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek: TNG, Arabian Nights, Medieval Madness, etc)
- willwagner 17y ago
  I have an old pinball machine that I purchased a few years ago (Maverick, 1994) and it's definitely a labor of love to keep the thing working properly. That being said, there is something really hacker-like about pinball. I am truly amazed at times the ingenuity that goes into designing and building a pinball machine and all its mechanical parts. I have this in my netflix queue, which supposedly describes the history of the Pinball 2000: http://www.tilt-movie.com/index.php http://www.tilt-movie.com/index.php
chris100 17y ago
The one thing that fascinates me about pinball is that unlike an arcade game, a PC can't properly simulate it. It has a physics/reality component to it that a computer can't touch. Just like playing tennis or golf on your wii isn't quite the real thing. Why is it that for arcade games (think Doom for instance), the disconnect with reality is not as noticeable?
- JacobAldridge 17y ago
  Maybe because I don't have specific experience of running through dungeons destroying invisible monsters with my bfg? (Yet.) You raise an interesting point. At a guess, I imagine if you asked a big game hunter or combat soldier with experience tracking a target and firing weapons with the intent to kill, they would probably notice the disconnect. I wonder if Guitar Hero has limited fans among those who can actually play the guitar, for this reason as well?
  - ramidarigaz 17y ago
    Several of my friends that play guitar detest Guitar Hero. I think you have a point. For those who can't play the real thing, it's a fun game, but it doesn't capture the experience the same way.
  - antdaddy 17y ago
    Playing Guitar Hero has more in common with playing a game like Simon than it does with playing a real guitar. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, it's just a very different experience.
  - hnal943 17y ago
    I play guitar and Guitar Hero; I enjoy them both. It isn't the same thing of course, but on the harder difficulties it does involve some of the same fretting motions. I guess I don't understand why real guitarists are such snobs about games like this. No one would argue that they are equivalent....
- roundsquare 17y ago
  One reason might be that truly simulating real life would probably make the game quite boring. Think about the limitations: 1) Your character gets tired. 2) You can't jump too high. 3) You can't carry 25 guns including a bazooka, sniper rifle and grenade launcher. 4) Reloading would take a long time. 5) If you jump off a ledge you get hurt. Etc... I think people notice its off, but ignore it in favor of having a good time. Eventually, if you play a game long enough, you might forget what you noticed, but thats more a result of playing a lot.

78 points by wakeless 17y ago

lurkinggrue 17y ago

Cool, he knows Eugene Jarvis! I wondered what happened to him.

joezydeco 17y ago
Eugene Jarvis left Midway about eight years ago and started Raw Thrills (http://www.rawthrills.com http://www.rawthrills.com). Eugene wasn't the host mentioned in the story, since he didn't work on design for Black Knight or High Speed (he does have a sound credit on HS, though). You're thinking of the other Vid Kid, Larry DeMar.
- agent86 17y ago
  And I think the article takes a bit of a wide berth with the term "designer". Steve Ritchie actually designed those machines, Larry DeMar did the software for them. As other posters have pointed out, innovation really did not stop in 1992. Pinball 2000 was actually a success, but Williams decided to pull the plug despite that. The Pinball 2000 platform was quite revolutionary - from how the player played the game, to how the game was designed, maintained, and even upgraded. I don't think free play really had anything but an ancillary role in the decline of the hobby. It was likely the rise of video games, and specifically home consoles, that really hurt pinball. People played video games at home, and then played newer/better games in the arcade. Due to the cost a pinball machine in the home is a rarity to this day, and so the exposure it received was never the same. Kids learned Mario and Nintendo, they didn't learn the silver ball and flippers. Along the lines of the article, the most "interesting" idea I heard in pinball circles was that clear coating playfields was a harbinger of doom. Williams started doing this and called it "Diamond Plate". It was designed to reduce the need for mylar to protect the playfield. The premise is that the idea worked TOO well. Playfields on the machines could look like new forever. A machine's lifetime was extended, the impetus to replace the machine was lowered, and sales suffered.
  - koz1000 17y ago
    As someone that worked with Mr. DeMar at Williams, I can honestly say that he was a "designer" in every sense of the word. He was an essential part of every design team, and a lot of times took a boring playfield and turned it into a highly entertaining game. It's really not fair to diminish the role of a programmer in these games. You see, High Speed represented an inflection point in pinball history where the software became the star of the game, not the playfield geometry. The game told a story instead of just being a noisy point accumulator like previous solid-state games. All that choreography with lights, music, display animation, etc was a huge part of High Speed's success. The rest of the points you make are very accurate. The article gives a very interesting history of auto-replay percentaging and match tricks, but that had very little to do with the demise of pinball in the last decade.

ryanelkins 17y ago

I wonder why they weren't able to implement increasing levels of difficulty. They could have mechanically changed the playing field at certain thresholds, or even looked into using different sorts of balls (heavier, smaller, BOTH AT THE SAME TIME!!!). How about balls with uneven weight distribution? Most of this stuff I envision being unleashed as you advance, so it's similar to other video games where it gets progressively more difficult. It just seems like they could have done something other than just make a static game that was harder than the last version.

Dove 17y ago
Wow. Not only might that have solved the economic problem, it would also have been WAY COOL.
roundsquare 17y ago
mechanically changed the playing field at certain thresholds More moving parts means harder to maintain means costs more money to maintain. However, I guess this can be done by... for example, having parts of the board that open up as you get to higher scores. Still, there's only so much you can pack into the space a pinball machine has. using different sorts of balls Spectacular!

lmkg 17y ago

The balancing act between new and hardcore players is something that video game publishers have to deal with as well. They have an easier time of it, but it's by no means trivial. While video games are flexible with respect to skill required, as the article mentions, pinball is a more transferable skill than video games, which means that the balance has to be found on a game-by-game basis rather than across the industry. I've seen quite a few gamer communities that demand their games be more challenging and intricate. This article demonstrates the danger that pandering to that audience exclusively brings a danger of stagnation. It's difficult to provide a good challenge that doesn't have a noob-unfriendly learning curve. There's lessons in here for any other sort of community. Barriers to entry and a community that only cares for its own needs lead to stagnation. This is especially relevant to communities based around technology, such as software applications or programming languages.

wakeless 17y ago
Video game publishers also chicken out and add a difficulty level selector at the beginning of the game, rather than dynamically adjusting the level.
- jac_no_k 17y ago
  There's a danger to having a dynamic difficulty. Case with coin op games: Games around the year 2000 was frustrating to play. A skilled player would run into impossible to resolve situation and lose a "life". There was no way to play for more then about 1 minute without losing and no way to complete a game on a single credit. From the players perspective, the game was cheating and playing too skillfully was a demerit. Recent coin op games seem to have moved away from this. It's possible to complete a level with one credit. The game board remains the same and the difficulty is selected by the board type or player specs. I think in general that games shouldn't change difficulty mid board. To the player, it becomes a disincentive to play too well. Let the player decide what challenges they want to face. It should at least be an option to toggle.
- jerf 17y ago
  Dynamic difficulty is a terrible idea. It reduces the potential difficulty-space of the game to two basic cases: Always too easy and always too hard. It means that if you lost, it's because the game chose to make you lose, not because of an effect on your choices, and if you win, it's because the game chose to let you win, not because of your skill. Every couple of years I'll play a game with this new, innovative idea, and it's still the same story. It's sort of fun for a bit, until your brain catches up and realizes that as meaningless as most games are, this one is even more so. It's not a new idea and if it were going to work, it would have been made to work by now: http://www.intellivisiongames.com/bluesky/games/credits/space.html#astrosmash http://www.intellivisiongames.com/bluesky/games/credits/spac... (No, there is no in-between "just right". Simple control theory shows how you can't hover at the "just right" point; as you are at "just right", the system must dynamically adjust the difficulty above your level (or you even just hit a bad patch) and cause you to fail, at which point you're back at too easy. There's nowhere near enough data to get to "just right" even in theory.)

rnicholson 17y ago

This article reminded me of this documentary - http://www.tilt-movie.com/ http://www.tilt-movie.com/

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

snorkel 17y ago

It's not free play algorithms that doomed pinball so much as the fact that video game arcades were doomed by improved home gaming systems, and pinball machines are expensive to design, manufacture, and maintain, and pinball operators charge up to $1 per play.

roundsquare 17y ago
Actually, as I read the article, I didn't get the impression that he meant: free play algorithms --> demise In fact, he seemed to mean: transferable skills --> disparity in skills --> demise And free play algorithms were actually what kept the industry going for slightly longer.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- iron_ball 17y ago
  The same thing happened with fighting games (such as Street Fighter). This type of game is extremely deep and technical, with highly refined skills which can be transferred over successive generations of a series. There are people who have been honing their Street Fighter skills for 15 years now; that makes it difficult for new players to participate on a casual basis. As a result, the genre is pretty much a niche these days, despite the unexpected popularity of Street Fighter 4.
  - roundsquare 17y ago
    Interesting, makes sense. However, I would think this applies mainly to arcades, which I believe are dying in the US anyway (though I've heard they still flourish elsewhere). Console games allow one to play against the computer or against friends. At least against the computer a beginner can play and have fun. I wonder how this will evolve change as console's take advantage of the internet. A test case could be Starcraft. Anyone have any idea of how hard it is to break into Starcraft now for someone just starting?

dasil003 17y ago

There currently exists one botique manufacturer of pinball machines but its fair to say that innovation stopped in 1992. I don't think that's fair to say at all. Williams tried to save the Pinball industry by inventing the Pinball 2000 platform which had reflected video over the playfield. It was definitely as big an innovative step as anything that cam before since the invention of the flipper. Also, I might be biased having been 14 at the time, but I wouldn't call The Addams Family the end of innovation. I would call it the beginning of maturity. The machines Williams released in the 90s and the Stern machines of today reflect the perfection in pinball playability. The precise shooting lanes and the deep rulesets gave rise to 15 years of amazing machines that are just as much fun for beginners as they are for experts. It's a real shame the pinball machines are so expensive to maintain and thus so rare to find in good operating condition. When I see my first real liquidity event I plan on purchasing some of my favorites (The Twilight Zone, The Addams Family, Attack From Mars, Indiana Jones, Simpsons Pinball Party, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek: TNG, Arabian Nights, Medieval Madness, etc)

willwagner 17y ago
I have an old pinball machine that I purchased a few years ago (Maverick, 1994) and it's definitely a labor of love to keep the thing working properly. That being said, there is something really hacker-like about pinball. I am truly amazed at times the ingenuity that goes into designing and building a pinball machine and all its mechanical parts. I have this in my netflix queue, which supposedly describes the history of the Pinball 2000: http://www.tilt-movie.com/index.php http://www.tilt-movie.com/index.php

chris100 17y ago

The one thing that fascinates me about pinball is that unlike an arcade game, a PC can't properly simulate it. It has a physics/reality component to it that a computer can't touch. Just like playing tennis or golf on your wii isn't quite the real thing. Why is it that for arcade games (think Doom for instance), the disconnect with reality is not as noticeable?

JacobAldridge 17y ago
Maybe because I don't have specific experience of running through dungeons destroying invisible monsters with my bfg? (Yet.) You raise an interesting point. At a guess, I imagine if you asked a big game hunter or combat soldier with experience tracking a target and firing weapons with the intent to kill, they would probably notice the disconnect. I wonder if Guitar Hero has limited fans among those who can actually play the guitar, for this reason as well?
- ramidarigaz 17y ago
  Several of my friends that play guitar detest Guitar Hero. I think you have a point. For those who can't play the real thing, it's a fun game, but it doesn't capture the experience the same way.
- antdaddy 17y ago
  Playing Guitar Hero has more in common with playing a game like Simon than it does with playing a real guitar. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, it's just a very different experience.
- hnal943 17y ago
  I play guitar and Guitar Hero; I enjoy them both. It isn't the same thing of course, but on the harder difficulties it does involve some of the same fretting motions. I guess I don't understand why real guitarists are such snobs about games like this. No one would argue that they are equivalent....
roundsquare 17y ago
One reason might be that truly simulating real life would probably make the game quite boring. Think about the limitations: 1) Your character gets tired. 2) You can't jump too high. 3) You can't carry 25 guns including a bazooka, sniper rifle and grenade launcher. 4) Reloading would take a long time. 5) If you jump off a ledge you get hurt. Etc... I think people notice its off, but ignore it in favor of having a good time. Eventually, if you play a game long enough, you might forget what you noticed, but thats more a result of playing a lot.