A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME

Some people – far less perceptive and intelligent people than you, the good and wise viewers of Retro Gamer – always say the same thing whenever anyone makes a videogame about pinball. “But what’s the point of making a pinball videogame?”, they moan. “Pinball’s all about the physical sensations, and shoving the machine around in the pub and stuff.” These people are cretins, of course.

Pinball is simply the mechanical equivalent of an FPS – hundreds of games use the same basic formula, the difference between a good and a bad one is all about the level design, and the key to success is pinpoint shooting. (The Goldeneye pinball is pretty good, if you’re wondering.) But what happens when you try to turn other types of videogame into pinball? (Smooth link. – Ed) 

One of the most interesting aspects of the early videogames was the attempt by publishers to translate the core aspects of their gameplay to other media. In a previous issue of RG, for example, we looked at the early-80s board-game versions of some classics, of which there are far more than most people know (at least 20, going by the contents of my basement), and the same is true about pinball. A whole clutch of the iconic videogames from the Golden Era of the arcades also appeared in pinball form, with varying degrees of success and faithfulness to their source material. Tragically, nobody knows anything about them. Bummer.

Wait! I do! (Phew. - Ed)

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SPACE INVADERS (Bally Midway)
Videogame 1978, pinball 1980

In 1980, videogames were still seen by some in the arcade business as a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon which hadn’t yet proved itself to be the long-term successor of pinball. So when Taito’s seminal Space Invaders took the West by storm as it had done in Japan, US licensors Bally Midway decided to spin it off into their more traditional field of expertise, which was pinball. They even went to the trouble of concocting a story explaining the Invaders’ journey from screen to table, depicted in a four-page comic-book section of the lavish flyer.

For some reason, though, in the process of crossing the arcade divide, Tom-Tosh Nishikado’s octopus-like space monsters got transformed into creatures uncannily akin to the terrifying Xenomorph from Alien, and the entire machine and playfield, while undeniably striking, look far more like the work of H R Giger than the iconic art of Space Invaders. (Indeed, Bally Midway were successfully sued over the steal.)

Nothing else from the videogame made it to the pinball either – no gameplay elements, and an attempt at the trademark heartbeat sound which would have any doctor rushing the patient to intensive care with sirens blaring - and generally this looks for all the world like an Alien pinball that got hastily rebadged when someone lost the movie licence. Pinball was still mechanically quite primitive at the time, lacking even such basic features as ramps (flippers didn’t have the power to get the ball up them), and all Space Invaders had to work with was a pretty dull collection of bumpers and targets to light up, with a central horseshoe loop the closest thing to heady thrills on offer. It wasn’t an auspicious start for the crossover, but things would improve pretty soon.

 
Space Invaders was still such an enormous name at the time that over 11,000 Invaders
pinball machines were manufactured, a dizzyingly high number in the world of pinball.

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DEFENDER (Williams Electronics)
Videogame 1980, pinball 1982 

Williams, of course, started life as a pinball company, and the videogame version of Defender is actually full of sound effects that originated on Williams pintables. The game returned the favour by acting as inspiration for a pinball which, while barely any more technically advanced than Space Invaders, does an infinitely better job of paying homage to its parent.

Defender the pinball makes use of almost every facet of the videogame, with Landers, Mutants, Pods, Bombers, Baiters and Swarmers all represented in one way or another, attacking in “waves” just like their onscreen brethren. There’s even a Smart Bomb (which functions in much the same way as its video counterpart) and a Reverse button, which ingeniously implements a pioneering manual version of the outlane “kickback” feature found on almost every modern pin. The action is fast, furious and nearly as ferociously difficult as the legendarily challenging videogame version, and of course it’s got all the same sound effects, since they were pinball sound effects in the first place.

Just like its arcade daddy, the pinball Defender is an excellent game even today, but it would shortly have some serious competition in the videogame-pinball field.

Tragically, only 369 Defender pinball machines were known to have been made, so you’ll have an even
harder version tracking down a good-condition one for your game room than you will a video Defender.

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MR AND MRS PAC-MAN (Bally Midway)
Videogames 1981, pinball 1982 

Just a few months after the debut of Ms Pac-Man in late 1981, the hungry yellow hero followed up on the story shown in its between-level cutscenes and made an honest woman of her (the wedding photo is on the front of the machine’s advertising flyer). Bally celebrated the happy occasion with the release of this thoroughly splendid and inventive pinball – while the table itself is still basic 1982 drop-targets-and-bumpers stuff (except for one of the very first appearances in the modern pinball era of a plunger skill-shot), the gameplay focuses on making shots to collect moves for the inspired “Pac-Man” game which takes place on the light grid in the centre of the table.

Using one flipper to cycle movement directions and the other to actually move, Pac is chased around the wall-less “maze” by infamous red ghost Shadow (or, in this case, a red light), clearing levels by illuminating the whole grid. You can even earn power-pills on the pinball field, at which point the booming robotic commentator announces “Pac-Man Aggressive!” and you can chomp Shadow for bonus points, usually by catching him unawares and appearing from the other side of the screen, just like using the original’s escape tunnels. The constant shifting between the pinball field and the light maze keeps the player on their toes, and both sections are hard enough to make the game constantly tense and exciting. Realising that they’d hit onto something good, Bally would go on later the same year to take it to the next level.

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BABY PAC-MAN (Bally Midway)
Videogames 1981, pinball 1982

Ah. Now we see why the Pacs got married so hastily. Just five months after the wedding (Mr and Mrs was released in May, with Baby following along in October), the Pac-union produced the wocka-wocka of tiny jaws. (Incidentally, the third videogame in the series, Jr Pac-Man, showed up in 1983 and depicted the Pac-sprog as primary-school age, so maybe Pacs just have an accelerated development and there was nothing indecent going on all along.)

The accompanying game, however, was even more startling than Junior’s birth certificate. Baby Pac-Man was a natural extension of the design of Mr And Mrs Pac-Man, but this time the maze section was a proper full-blown videogame, with a joystick attached to the front of the cabinet as well as the traditional flipper buttons. The pinball field was shorter than usual, in order to keep the player’s head close to the video screen sited above it, on which a full-scale Pac-Man game (with several different mazes) played out.

Hitting pinball targets earns power pills (poor Baby starts life in the maze with none, but can scarper through exits at the bottom to get to the pinfield) and speeds up Baby in the tunnels, and you can only lose lives on the videogame screen. (There are no outlanes, and letting the ball escape through the flippers merely dumps Baby back to the video screen, but blocks the exits to the pinball field until the screen is cleared of dots or a life is lost.)

Baby Pac-Man is a superb game in its own right as well as being a very well-balanced hybrid of videogame and pinball.  For this reviewer it’s far more fun than either of its parents (the ghosts move much more unpredictably so it’s not just about learning patterns), and the switching back and forth from video world to physical world gives it a real Tron vibe. It’s a real high-water mark in imaginative arcade-game design, but it couldn’t stop pinball from being ever more steadily muscled out of the amusement halls.

A respectable 7000 units of Baby Pac-Man were sold, but it didn’t earn well and never made it out of the USA. Bally tried the hybrid formula once more, with 1984’s Granny And The Gators, but then gave up.

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Q*BERT’S QUEST (Gottlieb)
Videogame 1982, pinball 1983

Meanwhile, other companies were trying different ways of being original in their attempts to bring videogame properties to the pinball universe. Still restricted to rudimentary 2D pinball tech, Gottlieb made a very creditable stab at capturing the pyramid-traversing antics of their legendary orange foul-mouthed videogame bignose Q*Bert.

A strange, looping table layout coupled with a pair of very unusual down-facing backwards flippers at the bottom did a surprisingly good job of simulating Q*Bert’s journeys up and down his triangular world (the lower flippers, of course, acting as the flying saucers of the videogame), and lots of voice samples brought the fruit-coloured schnozzmeister to life. It’s a simple little game, but still diverting and cute, with the focus on loops giving it a very different feel to traditional pins of the time. Clearly, though, videogame publishers were running out of ways to transfer their successful video creations to the silver-ball field.

Even in 1983 the simple design and primary colours of Q*Bert’s Quest looked
a bit childish, and Gottlieb played safe by building fewer than 900 tables.

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SPY HUNTER (Bally Midway)
Videogame 1983, pinball 1984 

The last attempt anyone made in the videogame-to-pinball genre for almost a decade, and the final one to be tried with pre-ramps pinball tech, Spy Hunter was a very odd machine, with an almost unique off-centre playfield arrangement whereby there were no outlanes on the right, but two on the left. It’s a spartan sort of game, with almost nothing in common with its video ancestor except the “Peter Gunn” music, and after this everyone was clearly put off the whole idea of videogame-to-pinball ports for several years.

Barely over 2,000 Spy Hunter pinballs were built, and you’d
probably struggle to find 2,000 people who ever played one.

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SUPER MARIO BROS (Gottlieb)
Videogame 1985/1990, pinball 1992

As with so many things in the world of videogames, it was Mario who came to the rescue of a moribund genre, with the first videogame pinball of the modern age. Although called Super Mario Bros, this is really a pinball based on the Super Mario World universe (as can be seen by the typography, presence of Yoshi etc), and all the major characters are present and correct in an accessible and eventful game. The pinball field itself has little connection gameplay-wise to the original, but there’s a video mode, where the dot-matrix scoreboard suddenly turns into a scrolling platform world and the player uses the flipper buttons to send Mario running and jumping across pits and enemies.

Later the same year Gottlieb released Super Mario Bros Mushroom World, which was basically the same game but converted to a ticket-redemption machine and aimed at kids. The aiming was made easier by the conversion kit, which came with special adjustable legs enabling the table to be ratcheted down low enough for five-year-olds to play it.

Mario did pretty well in the pinball world, with the two versions
of the machine combining to sell a little over 5,000 pieces.

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STREET FIGHTER II CHAMPION EDITION (Gottlieb)
Videogame 1991, pinball 1993 

Come to think of it, as well as being a sort of physical version of an FPS, pinball works well as an analogy for fighting games too – you can exercise real skill, practicing over and over until you can hit targets with pixel-perfect, frame-accurate precision and timing, or you can just bang frantically on the buttons whenever anything comes near you and hope you get lucky, which you quite often will.

Anyway, flushed with the relative success of SMB, Gottlieb wasted little time in bringing another popular SNES property into pinball arcades. Street Fighter II is a brilliant pinball, full of little ties to the videogame right down a perpetually-rotating flipper simulating Chun-Li’s Spinning Bird Kick and a car-smashing bonus round, played out on a little mini-playfield complete with red plastic car. Features go off every 10 seconds as you hit various combination shots to tackle all your favourite SFII combatants, but you’ll have a tough job defeating all 12 opponents to get the Champion Challenge round, where you have to take down all 12 again in a sort of boss rush to net a 500,000,000 bonus.  

It’s not all that uncommon to still come across SFII and SMB tables now - if you’re somewhere that has pinball at all – and that’s testament to just how well-designed the games are

Appropriately for a better game, Street Fighter II did slightly better than Mario, shifting around
5,500 machines. Oddly, Gottlieb elected not to follow up this success with any more conversions.

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ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON (Stern Electronics)
Videogame 1999, pinball 2002 

Almost another decade would pass before anyone would attempt to follow SFII from the videogame world to the pinball one, and when it did it was one of the least obvious suspects. Since Stern revived pinball for the new millennium, it’s drawn on every corner of popular culture for its subject matter (Playboy, Family Guy, Terminator 3, Monopoly, The Sopranos, Elvis), and the inclusion of a videogame in this A-list of modern icons is a sure sign of how mainstream gaming is finally becoming, culturally speaking. A sim/strategy game is still a heck of a weird choice (you’d have thought Quake or Half-Life or The Sims, maybe), and unsurprisingly the only real link to the PC title is that, um, the ball rides some ramps that are a bit like rollercoasters.

So, er, a bit of a weak ending on this one. Sorry. Nevertheless, we’ve now learned that videogames have made a pretty respectable showing in at least two other fields of gaming (board games and pinball), and that in the hands of skilled designers it’s possible to translate identifiable gameplay elements across to what at first glance seems a completely incompatible discipline. Join us next time, when videogames try expanding even further to colonise an even more difficult territory – the world of the fruit machine. Conceal your excitement if you dare.

Few sales figures are available for Stern’s recent line-up, possibly because most of them are still very much ongoing catalogue items. But estimates for Rollercoaster Tycoon come in somewhere around the 2,500 area.

*Thanks to the Internet Pinball Machine Database for sales stats.