Web Profits Blog

This time we wont rank the bad celebrity pinball machines, well look at several different genres of bad celebrity tie ins:

THE BOX OFFICE BOMB THEMED MACHINE:

In 1991 Williams Pinball released a machine based on Terminator 2 and it was good. It had a gun trigger to launch the ball and a ton of Arnold’s catch phrases like “Ill be back” keyed to various game objectives. The film was a huge hit, and everything worked well together. Now the bad news: because of the success of this machine the production companies thought “Hmm. What well do is release the pinball machine simultaneously with the film. That way we can use the machine to market the film and popularize the characters and catch phrases. That’ll also help our merchandising sales.”

Unfortunately, this thinking led to a number of pinball machines based on films that were absolute bombs. For example, there wasnt a cooler cartoon than The Flintstones. So how do you screw up a Flintstones pinball machine? Just base the theme not on the classic Hanna Barbara cartoon, but on the horrible film starring John Goodman and Rosie ODonnell.

My two favorites are The Shadow which is hilarious because Alec Baldwin is on the backglass and Waterworld. Waterworld was released in 1995 starring Kevin Costner and quickly became the definitive big budget, no box office film replacing Michael Ciminos Heavens Gate and the Dustin Hoffman/Warren Beatty comedy Ishtar.

Playing a bomb themed pinball machine is downright surreal. The most pitiful thing is when the machine booms out a catch phrase from the film that no one is familiar with.

THE DUBIOUSLY TIMED THEME:

In this genre I include themes that would have been pretty cool, except for the fact they were released well after the subjects popularity had begun to ebb. Gilligans Island would have been great back in the mid-1960s or even in the late 70s when a new generation discovered the show in syndication. In 1991 it was just creepy since nearly half of the cast members depicted on the backglass were dead. The Six Million Dollar Man was released in the fall of 1978, just in time for the shows cancellation. Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry would have been a perfect fit for a pinball theme, except that its 1995 release came 8 years after the debut of the last film in the series (The Dead Pool). Popeye Saves the Earth was released 15 years after the release of the Robert Altman film.

The strangest machine of this genre is 1994s Mario Andretti. Andretti is certainly worthy of a pinball machine as hes a legitimate auto racing legend. Whats strange about this machine, however, is the backglass which displays an image of grizzled old Mario Andretti. Having the sixty-something race car driver on the backglass is vaguely akin to having your grandfather looking over your shoulder while you play.

ROOT,ROOT, ROOT FOR THE HOME TEAM:

A comment on the original celebrity theme article mentioned this genre and it is a good one. Its important to understand that the pinball industry has been based in Chicago for most of its history. Presumably for that reason there have been some machines featuring the local sports teams and stars. Chicago Cubs Triple Play isnt too bad due to the Cubbies national popularity. That’s not the case with 1978s Bobby Orrs Power Play, released not long after the trade that sent Orr from Boston to Chicago. Nationally, no one outside of Boston and Chicago cared. My hunch is that it was made to scam some free season tickets out of the Blackhawks management.

THE BAD CONVERSION FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MARKET:

During the height of pinball’s popularity was common practice to rebrand a perfectly good game for the International market. Sometimes it was released by the US company, other times it was licensed to a foreign operation. Youd think that there would be some creative control over the rebranded themes. Youd be wrong.

While I have a good grasp on the US pinball demographic I have no idea who plays pinball internationally. Based on some of the re-themed machines its probably better I dont know. Mata Hari was a classic machine of the early 1980s. The German release was rethemed as the more foreboding Lady Death. This one at least makes sense as they had some Nazi imagery that Germans are understandably sensitive about (despite being historically inaccurate, since the real Mata Hari was executed during WW I). Less understandable is the retheming of a military themed game called Special Force in the US to the downright bizarre Special Forces Girls, featuring comely women in low cut, cleavage baring fatigues.

Ross Everett is a freelance writer and noted authority on bookmaking software. His writing has appeared on a variety of sports sites including sportsbooks and price per head sites. He lives in Las Vegas, Nevada with three Jack Russell Terriers and a kangaroo. He is currently working on an autobiography of former energy secretary Donald Hodell.

The video game is now a ubiquitous part of American pop culture but pinball still holds a cachet of cool. Pinball went through a few lean years during the early years of the video boom, when designers tried to cram as much stuff onto the playfield as possible, perhaps feeling the clutter was needed to replicate the video game experience. In recent years, however, designers appear to have concluded–and rightly so–that pinball cannot be a video game, nor should it want to be.

A great game of recent vintage is the 1997 Bally release “Cirqus Voltaire”. The theme is sort of a ‘Cirque du Soleil” on acid, and the iconography of the circus that they cram into the design and play of the game is amazing. The ultimate object of the game is to “join the cirqus”, which, of course, is a classical American archetype of freedom and escape.

The game play offers a lot of what we’ve come to expect from Williams/Bally, with sweeping ramp shots, clever uses of time-worn features (like the disappearing pop bumper, reincarnated here as a balloon. As is very common with pinball games today, the game’s ultimate object is to work your way through a variety of ‘modes’. Sometimes this is a confusing endeavor, but here is very easy to understand–yet still very challenging to the player.

At its nadir, pinball companies were cranking out games featuring themes and subjects that offered little, if any, synergy with game play. The low point might have been some of the celebrity tie-in games of the early eighties (which gave the world debacles like a Dolly Parton and Roy Clark tie-in). “Cirqus Voltaire” may represent a high point of thematic unity between game subjects, aesthetic design and play experience. It offers an otherworldly interpretation on a circus, with subtext, nuance and detail.

The really great thing about the game is the multiple levels of contextual awareness it offers. It alternately provides a celebration and condemnation of the circus and, deeper still, of the popular culture that spawns embraces them. This is not a new notion for a pinball machine to offer different levels of interpretation of seemingly innocuous events (it dates back to the pioneering artist Roy Parker, if not before) but in recent years it may not have been done more deftly than in Cirqus Voltaire.

Ross Everett is a experienced freelance writer who covers travel, casino gambling and sports handicapping. He is a staff handicapper for Anatta Sports where he is responsible for providing daily free sports picks. In his spare time he enjoys fine dining, falconry and scuba diving. He lives in Las Vegas with four dogs and a pet coyote.

Having survived a couple of World Wars, countless recessions, the indignation of lifestyle police, and most recently the video game phenomenon it appeared that pinball was just too tough to kill. Thats why it was a surprise when WMS Industries, the dominant player in the industry for the past decade and the maker of Williams and Bally machines, announced that it was getting out of the business several years ago. Shed no tears for WMS, who is making money hand over fist with their video poker and slot machine division. In fact, following the announcement that they were getting out of the pinball business the companys stock experienced a small but substantial gain.

At one point, pinball dominated the arcade. During the mid to late 1970s and on the heels of the movie version of the Who pinball themed rock opera Tommy arcades nationwide featured row upon row of gleaming new machines from one of over a half dozen US manufacturers (with many others made worldwide). The first salvo of the video game industry was fairly innocuous”Pong didnt do much to dent pinballs popularity since it didnt exactly offer the same immerse challenge. The first challenge to the popularity of the pinball machine in the arcade began with Midways Space Invaders and Ataris Asteroids. These games could be played alone, and offered the same sort of escapism that pinball provided. For the arcade owner, these games took up less space, required less maintenance, and offered a higher customer turnover.

Pinball hung in there, however, and through the early eighties continued to make some solid games. The ones that come immediately to mind are games like Firepower (which helped launched the now ubiquitous multi-ball feature), Black Knight (offering an early version of the looping ramps found on many modern machines) and a couple of fun machines from Bally Paragon and Flash Gordon. Several games were spun off from video games, including a couple of good ones”Spy Hunter and Space Invaders and a number of not so good ones based on the Pac Man video games. Bally even made a game called Baby Pac Man that was a video/pinball hybrid. For awhile, the choice between pinball and video games was similar to the choice between Pepsi and Coke: both were equally pervasive and it was simply a matter of personal preference.

It was the late 1980s”when video games became more technologically advanced and began to offer superior play experiences”that pinball lost its way. Depending on the manufacturer, they did it in different ways. Gottlieb and others made simple, traditional games that just couldnt compete with their video counterparts. Bally and other manufacturers went the opposite route”by cramming so much onto a playfield that the game hardly resembled traditional pinball. Some of Ballys late 1980s games”with so much playfield gimmickry going on”were nearly unplayable. By this point the video game had taken over the arcade. Some larger arcades continued to offer a few pinball machines to placate hardcores, while some eliminated pinball altogether. In the 1970′s most decent arcades would feature over a dozen machines, with large facilities having several dozen. By the mid 1980′s, it was rare to see more than three or four pinball machines in one location.

In the 1990′s, pinball began to experience a bit of a comeback driven by well designed, enjoyable games that finally got the balance between traditional gameplay and modern technology right. Williams was at the forefront of the return to excellent design and gameplay, and its hard to think of a Williams game from this period that wasnt a fun game to play, if not a borderline classic. The mainstream media began to notice the renaissance, and noted that the average pinball machine received much more repeat business than the average video game and about the devotion of the pinball player.

With the century drawing to a close, it seemed that the Williams/Bally outfit had found a niche and would be able to grind out pinball machines for the aficionados forever. The final nail in the coffin, however, was a lot of societal changes beyond their control. For one, video games and video arcades became less profitable as companies like Sony and Nintendo were able to transform a lot of the high end gameplay to the home platform. Meanwhile, trends like new urbanism,which saw a return to downtown storefronts and the growth of online shopping combined to hurt traditional shopping malls. Eventually the WMS corporate braintrust decided to pull the plug on pinball and concentrate on their highly profitable gambling machine business. From a business standpoint, it probably made sense but that didnt make it any easier for lifelong pinball enthusiasts to reconcile with.

So what now? Stern Pinball is still committed to building new games, and is starting to get some traction both among retail owners and home collectors. Still, it appears that the only hope for pinball players is that some effort will be made to preserve the machines that already exist. With the capital investment required for a new company to get into the business, its hard to envision any new manufacturers popping up.

Ross Everett is heavy metal editor for The Savage Science, a website covering both MMA news and popular entertainment culture. He’s an also a fight sport expert, and reportsUFC news for several mainstream sports broadcasts and websites. He’s studied judo since childhood and has earned the rank of black belt.