My Pinball Blog

Dutch Pinball Magazine Interview Part 6

2009-07-22T07:25:00.002-05:00

This is the last part of the interview
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How do you program priorities in voice calls and light animations?
On a high level, lamp effects, sound effects, and display effects for that matter all work similarly. In each game there is a list of effects. Each one has a number assigned to it that is its priority. When the software needs to run a particular effect it “request” that it run. The system looks at what is already running, compares priorities, and decides if the new request can run or not.

So the trick is to give each of the effects a priority that will allow it run when needed but not too high that it will step on other effects.

Do you have to call every lamp in a lamp animation separately, with a time code and so on, or are there easier develop tools to program these?
There are no time-codes. But yes you often have to specify exactly when and which lights you want on and in what order. Making light shows is an art that you have to have some amount of talent to make look great. You can get close with skill.

Often it is not good to develop an all-purpose tool that can do anything. Each time you think you have the tool just right someone else thinks up something new they want the tool to do. Then you have to add to it. Before you know it you have Frankenstein monster piece of unwieldy code. It is better to just think of a solution to the current problem and develop that.

When designing a game you don’t want to be constrained by what a tool can do. You want to say lets make the game rain and then go about figuring out how to do that. If you are limited to what a tool can do you will get games that all look the same.

Is there a reason why the source code to program pinball games is not available to others? E.G. Playstation does not keep the code to program games to themselves. Any reliable software company can get the code and design games for that platform. In pinball it would help if others could remove bugs from games, especially if Stern (or WMS for elder games) is not going to do it.
Not really sure. The main reason is the same for all these types of request. At all times there is a high priority wish list of items from Gary that wasn’t getting done fast enough. Leaving no time for anything like this.

Is there a way for others to work their way back and adapt the code?
There are people that have reversed engineered pinball code and then modified it.

What do you think about a professional user interface in which others can modify rules, sounds, and so on? Basically a program in which coils are programmed but anything else, like rules and so on, can be developed by the owner of the game. If something like that would exist for e.g. IJ4 users could convert the game into a game with 16 different modes, add sounds, and so on. The idea is it would result in various type of games on the same playfield. Someone might program is as if it is an old Bally game from the 80s, someone else might program the deepest rule sheet available.
I think the author of this question really doesn’t know what they are asking. I agree a product like this would be really neat but it is not doable.

Like I stated above; as soon as you make a tool that can do this someone would think up a feature or toy that didn’t fit any of the cookie-cutter molds you had in the tool.

If the tool is too basic then you just have a blank game. That’s what I start with each time anyway so there is no real savings.

If you really wanted to do this you should get the one game that you wanted to do it for. Reverse engineer the code. Create your blank game by removing all the code that didn’t fire coils and turn on lamps etcetera. THEN write all new rules. Good luck with that.

Is there a chance a home-rom for Star Trek TNG will show up somewhere in the future? It appears there are some very nice unused sounds in the roms.
In the future? Not a chance. There already are a number of home ROMs for ST:TNG. I believe all the sounds are being used by at least one of them. You will just have to hunt around and find someone with one and copy it.

Are there any games you worked on you like to see get a software update as you feel the current software is not finished yet, or could be improved?
WHO ? dunnit. I always planed to make a Super Sleuth mode after you finished all the cases. At the time it didn’t happen because management switched our schedule with another game requiring us to be done months ahead of time.

Do you have any closing thoughts on the future of pinball, pinball in general or anything else?
I believe that if pinball went away for a few years, at least five, it would have a better chance to bounce back again and be a major option vying for people’s precious entertainment minutes. You have to let the world forget about them in order for them to be new again. I imagine that after this down time a handful of people with different backgrounds and vocations, whom are also all into pinball, would all meet and reinvent pinball from the ground up. Make it feel like a modern piece of entertainment equipment (whatever that means at the time). Simultaneously they would insure that it retains what is great about pinball.

I am not wishing any ill on Stern Pinball. I just don’t believe that their path will succeed at revitalizing the industry. I feel Pinball has been dead since the late 90’s. Gary Stern was just really good at keeping it on life support. Which I feel is keeping it from a potential rebirth.

Dwight Sullivan
5/21/2009

Dutch Pinball Magazine Interview Part 5

2009-07-21T00:22:00.001-05:00

Technical questions
So how does programming a pinball game work? Which steps are required? In what kind of environment is code developed, with which assembler is the code converted to end up in eproms or the current type of files used in Stern games?
In broad terms you write the software each day in some form of text editor. Then you compile the code, link it, transfer the program to a pinball machine you have sitting next to your desk, test it, and repeat.

For most of my years we developed code written in 6809 Assembler. These were very slow 8-bit 2 MHz computers. Compared to today, desktop computers are 8 times more powerful and 1000 times faster.

Only during Pinball 2000 at Williams and then in the last few years at Stern did we have faster processors and were able to start writing in C++.

When you first start programming a game, the first thing you want to do is get your whitewood up and flipping. This means each time you shoot the ball it goes somewhere and if a device is involved the ball succeeds at coming back.

You start with a blank game; a standard set of files that allow you to define lamps, switches, coils, and so on. Now all the switches in the game are being called when the ball is activating them. These vectors are where you will write your very high level rules. Then you tell the operating system about any devices that can hold a ball and will require a coil to fire to get the ball back. Once done you can now flip the game for the first time. So that’s what I do next. Flip it. To see what is fun about it kinetically.

Then you start thinking about the device drivers you will need. Device drivers are special software for any physical device you have in the game that is not standard. Anything that is not a pop bumper or a sling will need special code to make it respond how you will need it to in the game. So you add files for each of these. Now you can flip the game and not only will the ball always come back but the ball might do other things like be diverted on the ramp or spin on a spinning disk.

Then you start adding files that define your core set of rules. To me the core rules are the rules that get you from pushing the start button through the game and into the final mode. Whatever that means.

Then you start adding more files. Two or three more files per feature or rule in the game. This would include, multiballs, modes, Wizard modes, mystery features, and so on. Each of these features has high level ways to activate them from the switch vectors.

When you are done you have dozens of files of code each with very specific scope.

As a programmer of pinball machines, how do you program the software to respond to actions on the playfield? Are those endless if-else cases?
No, they are not endless if-else cases.

Pinball programming is real-time. Meaning the software reacts to what is happening in the game in real time. When a switch is activated a particular part of the software is run. We call this a vector. Each switch vector is responsible for starting any and all other parts of software as needed. It is also responsible for any scoring that is needed. Ideally each vector doesn’t do any of its own “thinking”. It is only a short list of calls to other parts of the software.

// This is a switch vector for the left top lane
void swd_top_lane_left(void)
{
// this will also award completing the lanes if needed
Score_t score = award_top_lane();

// this will do all the generic work for all scoring switches
award_generic_switch(score, S_TOP_LANE_SW);
}

In the above example you can see that this switch doesn’t have much code but it handles everything that a top lane needs to handle. Keeping the code simple like this makes it easy to read and easy to fix if something was wrong.

Dutch Pinball Magazine Interview Part 4

2009-07-19T13:36:00.000-05:00

Sadly Stern let you go as a programmer. Did you already find a new job?
I did. I am currently back working at WMS Gaming, formerly known as Williams. I like it here and I feel like I am home again.

How do you see the future of Pinball? Do you think Stern will survive? Does a new manufacturer have a chance in today’s market? Is there a chance Stern might hire you for future projects?
I think the future of pinball is very bleak. It’s very hard to say whether or not Stern will survive. It also depends on how you define “Survive”. Any other manufacture would be out of their minds to attempt to get into the pinball business today! I really like where I am now and have no desire to return to Stern.

The last game you worked on at Stern is 24. What was you’re role in the design process?
24 is a theme I wanted to do for a long time. It made more sense back after the first couple seasons when the show was new and hot. But I was glad to be working on it because I was a fan of the show even though I knew it wasn’t a great license today.

Before I left, where the game was going was very much my design. Steve did what Steve does and made a fast flipping game with some toys. I had very little input with much of that. I did have input deciding what inserts were needed where, also where the ball needed to stop for presentations. Like the ramp. My core rules for 24 were going to be a bit different than normal pinball. I strongly felt they fit the theme and I was confident that I could present them well to the player. Then I brow-beat Steve into agreeing to my basic rule design.

Since Stern let both you and 24 designer Steve Ritchie go, the game was further developed by the remaining crew. Did the remaining crew keep in touch to make sure the game ends up like you and Steve intended or did they develop the game in another direction?
Both actually! Lonnie persuaded Gary to hire me back for a handful of hours just after laying me off. I tried to help brief them with the vision of the game and how far the game was in development. The ideas behind the software I had written and what I thought needed to be fixed.

Recently, I went over there to pay a visit and play the finished 24 for the first time. It is pretty different than my vision. They removed a couple key elements that I had in the game and changed how the game fundamentally unfolds.

I can not really blame them though. Everyone has to make a game their way. They made the game more mainstream and generic. Which is a safer bet with the time they had. Also, ironically how they changed the core rules was pretty much how Steve wanted to do the game from the beginning.

One thing I really do not understand is that when I played the game there was no clock and no “BEEP THUMP” sounds; two very signature items from the show. HOW CAN YOU MAKE A GAME ABOUT 24 AND NOT HAVE THOSE!?

Dutch Pinball Magazine Interview Part 3

2009-07-14T21:31:00.001-05:00

After almost 10 years at WMS you were (one of) the first former WMS employees to be hired by Stern. From Keith Johnsons Topcast interview we understood things were different at Stern than at Williams. What can you tell us about that period?
Stern was different in a couple ways. Mainly, it was smaller. I am noticing now that I am at a large company just how much the size of company dictates how the company goes about its day to day activities. Moving to the smaller Stern we noticed that everyone wears more hats. Meaning they have more responsibilities on their shoulders.

Was it different for you as a programmer working at Stern, compared to what you were used to at WMS?
Not really from a responsibility perspective. My job was pretty much the same. Do my best to make a fun game on time.

The problem at Stern was how little time we got to make the game fun. Lonnie used to claim that the schedules were just more compressed at Stern. Not true. The time frames were about the same at both companies. Each game got about a year to go from concept to production line. The problem at Stern was how much time was eaten up of that year at the beginning deciding what the theme should be and getting to the first white wood. That was something we did much better at Williams.

It’s clear to me and others that the sooner you have a flipping whitewood the better. Exponentially! It gives you time to flip the game with rules and see what is bad. Then time to replace it with a new idea. I feel this is the number one reason why Stern / Data East have produced inferior products.

Looking at the games produced by Stern and comparing them to the WMS games from the 90’s, some may conclude it probably was more fun for the design team to work at WMS. (more room for creativity, less licensed games with all the restrictions that come with that, more time, more challenges, and so on) Is that correct?
It was more fun to work at Williams than it was to work at Stern. For a lot of reasons including all those you listed above. Of course, once the black clouds came (potential layoffs every 3 months) times at Williams were less fun.

Keith and Lyman are very skilled pinball players. How about your pinball skills?
I am a very poor player compared to them. I love to play and I thought I was pretty good until I first started working at Williams and saw, that in fact, I was not. I think that this worked out to my advantage though. I have always been insistent that games I have worked on had to be at least fun for my skill level. I have always believed that my skill level and that of the average bar player were very close. So I used my skills as a litany test.

We heard Gary Stern say plenty of times deep rule sheets don’t matter to him. Some designers do think different about that. At Stern some games do have a deep rule sheet; other games have incomplete software or medium deep rule sheets. Is a deep rule sheet a budget matter? Or a deadline matter? Or just a programmer doing what he thinks is best?
Isn’t budget and deadline the same thing? Of course they are not but they have the same affect.

Every game I was in charge of at Stern went to production complete and the depth of the game was completely my choice, for better or for worse.

I believe it is important the game be fun for each skill level that steps-up to put money in it. This is a big part of why I think most people could not be a pinball designer. You need to consider all skill levels. In my mind and in broad terms there are three skill levels: the new player, the average player, and the good player. You need to have something fun for each of the 3 groups.

The average player, by far, is where the lion share of your cash box comes from. I believe it to be about 80% of the games played are by this group. This was the topic of much debate at Stern. Of course we had no real data, that would be silly, but I know I was right. These guys are the guys that stop off on the way home from work to have a beer and play a little pinball. To me it was most important to pace the game such that this player would be challenged. Meaning there should be high goals for this player placed at a challenging distance from the start button. A game that did this well was Monster Bash. Monster Bash is one of my favorite games that I didn’t work on. Partially because it had a Wizard Mode (Bash not Rock) that I could barely reach once in awhile. It was challenging for me and I consider my skill level to be smack in the middle of this group.

The new player does not account for much of the cash box but is still very important. He is the future of pinball and the lack of him playing / enjoying the game is a huge reason why the industry is where it’s at. Pinball is intrinsically a very confusing game. Even before you push start. Just looking at a game makes you go huh? So once a new player does get past that first hurdle of deciding to push start he has to 1 have fun and 2 understand at least a small part of what is going on. It’s ok if he doesn’t understand the whole package. In fact, I think it’s a draw if he doesn’t. People like to have some understanding at first but then discover the rest as they go, over the course of a few games. At least this is my philosophy. The magic is to not be too overwhelming in the beginning.

The good player. This is really two groups of people that I rudely lump into one, but these groups overlap quite a bit; it’s really hard to distinguish them. 1 - The player that is so into pinball they know the games really well but may not have great skill. 2 – The players with great skill that probably are also in category one. These are hobbyist and tournament players. To be honest this group I have spent the smallest amount of time worrying about. They are important though, so I always try to add a high end wizard mode that most likely I will never see when I play. I also justify this time spent because its great for the average player group to see goals that are even further down the road for them to attempt.

Dutch Pinball Magazine Interview Part 2

2009-07-11T09:15:00.001-05:00

After 2 games the Pinball2000 platform stopped as WMS quit making pinball machines. Still P2K made quite an impact. How do you think pinball would be today if the P2K concept was continued?
Well that is a pretty big IF. The premise you are proposing is that we succeeded at making a platform that was manufacture-able at a reasonable enough price, and large amounts of players returned to playing at a probably increased price per play, and someone bought the pinball division from Williams because Williams was focused on slots and no matter what, was getting out of the pinball business. So assuming that all this transpired, I think pinball today would ROCK!

We were so immersed in the platform at the time we all saw huge potential for the platform beyond what was happening in the first couple models. Games 3 and 4 were going to be quantum leaps ahead and games 5 and 6 would have been quantum leaps ahead again.

Think about the card swiping ability from that last EXPO. Add 5 more cool things like that that would have been added over time. Now couple with that the success that IT (Incredible Technologies) had with Golden Tee Golf. Couple with that we have been improving the look and feel of the platform all this time.

You walk up and see that the current wide area tournament has a top prize of $22,389. You put in $5 for the first 3 minutes and swipe your card. The game comes to life; “Good afternoon Mr. Bond” it thinks that your name is Bond because that’s how you filled out your tournament player card. The game continues: “When you were last here you just finished level 7, would you like to continue?” meanwhile the game is downloading up to the minute playing tips from the internet to show you and it is twittering on your behalf - MR BOND HAS JUST BEGUN LEVEL EIGHT - . When you are done it summarizes your entire experience into a short video and uploads it to YouTube.

Game designers often put their mark on a game as they have certain recognizable layouts or features. E.G. Steve Ritchie games are usually fast with a lot of flow. Do you have certain ‘trademarks’ that could be defined as typically Dwight Sullivan?
Lonnie Ropp, my previous boss at STERN, often claimed that a feature he called “a second economy” was my trade mark. Basically a second economy is a feature whereby throughout the game you collect something in addition to points. For example in Playboy you would collect bunnies. Ideally at thresholds, of this second economy, you would redeem them for something cool. In some games it worked better than in others. I, of course, didn’t invent this; I just liked it.
I do believe that I have “added to the fabric of pinball” though. In WHO?dunnit the Mystery Target gives you what you need at that moment, or at least that’s the idea. It's not random it's deterministic. It looks around at what the player is doing at that moment and tries to give something that makes sense. Over the years this feature caught on and appears in many more games. Most of the time it is a single target, but not always. In “24” it is the CHLOE bank. Which I thought was appropriate since, in the show, she was always great at getting Jack what he needed.

Are there any images, or similarities, of you to be found on the games you worked on?
I have made a couple appearances in the dot matrix as well as one in the Champion Pub back glass. I think that Pat McMahon did an excellent job of capturing several Williams engineers in that glass. Off the top of my head there is: Me, Pete Piotrowski, Pat himself, Paul Barker, Linda Deal, Steve Kordek, and of course Jim Patla as the bar fly.

In Creature from the Black Lagoon they filmed me as the peeping Tom that gets beat up. It was very painful recording that. They insisted that it had to look real! Amazingly when that game was available for testing, by the others at Williams, people were lined up to play that mode. I am not sure why. : - )

I have always been proud to tell people that it was my hand that reaches for the handle in T2 during the idle time when a player has not launched his ball.

Do you collect pinball machines? Or do you have any (or your own) games at home?
I would not say that I collect them but I do have a few. Today, I have a Revenge from Mars, High Speed, Road Show, Terminator 2, WHO ? dunnit, and a Star Trek the Next Generation. I have sold several games over the years. Sometimes I have regretted selling them but I never wanted an arcade just a handful.

What game was most fun for you to work on and why?
Star Trek the Next Generation was great fun to work on. The design team was an amazing group of talent which only helps exponentially. Plus I have been a member of the church of Star Trek since I was five. Plus I got to go to Paramount Studios and actually walk on the Enterprise.

Which of the games you were involved in are you most proud of? Or do you think is the best?
I am proud of WHO ? dunnit. Barry Oursler and I co-designed that game. So it was the first game where I had even more control than before.

Looking at the games you worked on, there seems to be some variation in your involvement. So what is your role usually? Does someone come up with an idea and you translate that into pinball code? Do you bring in your own ideas as well?
Well, yes. Over the years I have played many roles; designer, programmer, grunt. Normally my role was a mix of lead programmer and game designer. That’s the role I prefer; a role where the game designer / playfield designer and I work together from the start.

At first the Designer “picks” a theme. There are many factors that go into that. Soon after the theme is chosen we start talking about all the things we want to do in the game. Then he starts to draw a playfield and think about toys. Once we have a beginning, a rough foundation, we then include other people from the team to help us brainstorm and flesh it out. From there, typically, I would oversee anything that was not physical; dot matrix art, music, speech, choreography, insert / lamp placement. Also I would start designing the software for the core rules. The designer would oversee the rest; playfield layout, kinetics, toys, production concerns, bill of materials, and ball traps. All the while the two of us would meet to discuss how we could best dovetail the different parts together. We would both help direct the static art; back glass, cabinet, playfield, and so on.

Dutch Pinball Magazine Interview Part 1

2009-07-08T10:19:00.003-05:00

The following are questions sent to me from the Dutch pinball Magazine Spinner. I believe they were published recently there so it is now safe to publish them in English here.
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First I want to apologize. Months ago Jonathan sent me this list of questions that I, before seeing the list, agreed to answer.

Since there were so many I have broken it up into several blog posts that I will publish over a few days.

When I got the list of questions I was surprised by how “complete” it was. Right away after I got the email I started answering the long list of questions. At first it seemed that every time I answered 3 questions 4 more would appear at the end. So I would take a break from it now and then. Soon my breaks from it grew longer and longer. Then I stopped altogether; I got a new job and that started consuming all my spare time. Recently the new editor of this magazine, Bas, emailed me asking me to finish. I thought this was an opportunity to partially redeem myself.

I tried my best to answer each question as well as I could; giving as much interesting information as I could. This is part of why it has taken so long to complete. There are I believe 33 questions and many have inspired essay answers. Often as I go back to proof read and edit my answers I think up more I wanted to say about many of the topics. So I write more which then requires more proof reading and editing and SOMEBODY PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!

So I am sorry to Jonathan and all the people that sent in questions expecting a timely interview.

Finally, here it is:

For the people who don’t know you: Who is Dwight Sullivan?
The heck if I know! How is a man defined? I am family man; a father and husband. I don’t have very many close friends. I like my job and I find my biggest challenge is to balance my time between my family and my job. Lately, I have been a pretty happy man. I am a gamblin’ man. Today someone said I always listen to my mother and my response was I always play the odds.

For the first 19 years of my career I helped to design and write the software for pinball machines. I started just out of college working for Williams. I worked there for 10 years. Then in 1999 when Williams shut pinball down Lonnie Ropp at Stern Pinball hired me. I worked at Stern for 9 years until just a few months ago Gary Stern laid off over 50% of his staff including me.

How did you get involved in Pinball?
I stumbled into it pretty haphazardly. I went to a job fair near the end of my college career and someone there pointed me to a man at Williams whom was often hiring. I called him up and he brought me in for an interview. I failed to bring my resume to the interview but somehow they were impressed enough to give me a chance. I had always loved playing pinball. A high school buddy and I would spend hours each week at our local arcade.

(Based on the information I have so far) you started around 1990 with your first game being Riverboat Gambler. The list of games you were involved in according to the Internet Pinball Database:
o Riverboat Gambler (software)
o Terminator 2: Judgment Day (software)
o The Getaway: High Speed II (software)
o Star Trek: The Next Generation (design, software)
o Red & Ted's Road Show (design, software)
o WHO dunnit (concept, design, software)
o Junk Yard (concept, design, software)
o The Champion Pub (software)
o Revenge From Mars (software)
o Sharkey’s Shootout (concept, software)
o Playboy® (concept, design, software)
o Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (software)
o Elvis® (software)
o The Sopranos® (software)
o Pirates of the Caribbean (software)
o 24
Is this list complete, or did you also work on other (non pinball) games?
I started in November 1989.

I did very little on these games:
o Bugs Bunny's Birthday Ball (software)
o No Fear: Dangerous Sports (design)
o High Roller Casino (software)
o The Simpsons Pinball Party (software)
o The Lord of the Rings (software)

On Elvis, Family Guy, and Revenge from Mars I was only one of 3 programmers. BUT! On Revenge I wrote allot of code. I worked harder on that game than on Terminator 2; a game where I wrote all the code.

On Sopranos I didn’t do much design. George and Lyman had the game pretty well along when I joined the project. Also, as it turns out, I did very little on 24 too.

The non-pinball games I worked on were Simpsons Kookie Karnival and Spider-Man redemption.

Did you work on any games that in the end never saw the light of day?
I spent two years on again off again working on Spider-Man Redemption and I am not sure if it made it to production.

In your career you were involved in a few milestone games. Terminator 2 was the first WMS game with a dotmatrix display, which may have been technically very challenging. The Pinball 2000 platform had also to be created from scratch. What can you tell about such technical innovations and working on them?
They were lots of fun! T2 was in the beginning when I was very green. Mark Penacho got the original hardware up and running and then I took over because I took over for Mark on T2. T2 was going to be the first project with a Dot Matrix display. Gilligan’s Island beat us to the line though. So they were first. It is interesting today to see a T2 because its graphics are so simple.

Working on Pinball 2000 was an amazing time. We were a group of people on a mission. The mission was to save pinball. Larry DeMar was on fire. He saw the potential and worked extremely hard to not fail. I guess he figured we only had one shot at making a first impression so we needed to get it right. He, working hard with George Gomez and others, had a bullet list of new features they wanted P2K to incorporate. One of the coolest bullets on that list was how they designed the playfields to quickly change out with another playfield.

What changed in your work when you worked on Pinball 2000? Did you have to invent a lot of stuff to get the results you were looking for? Did you change things drastically when you had the chance, compared to the previous way of programming?
What changed the most was how large the teams became. We went from a core team of about 4.5 people to about 9; doubling in size. Also, despite the increase in personal the development time was much longer.

There are some really nice things about having small teams. You have way more control and small teams can turn on a dime. Meaning if you don’t like the direction the game is heading you can more easily throw it out and start over. This gives you the luxury of iterations.

With the larger P2K teams you could not do that. Much more had to be designed ahead of time. You had to get more right from the hip.

How was it to work during the development of Revenge from Mars, where the OS and game code were developed almost simultaneously? Did you program stuff for the P2K OS as well?
I didn’t do any programming for the OS. Working on Revenge was a lot of fun and a lot of work.

It was a bit challenging to work as the OS was being developed. But I had a head start at learning the system. Before I started on RFM, before we knew exactly what we were doing theme-wise or whom would be working on which projects, I wrote the very first mode for the knew P2K platform. I was trying to get a Playboy game up and working. I believe it was Peter Piotrowski’s playfield. There were a couple months in the beginning when we thought Playboy would be one of the first two games. So I got a mode up and flipping to see how fun it would be. During this timed mode the music “Centerfold” by the J Geils band played and each time you shot a shot overlapping stills of naked and half naked playmates would be displayed. It was pretty distracting as you can imagine.

Pinball design - Part 4 - Grace periods

2008-09-15T12:55:00.001-05:00

Grace periods are a large part of the pinball rule-set development time. I know it doesn’t seem that way but it’s true. I would put them 3rd in the list of time consuming pinball development areas. The top 5 would be: choreography, choreography conflicts, grace periods, device drivers, and finally the rules themselves.

In short a grace period is this. Some pinball feature / rule is available, and if the player does what the rule is asking for he will be rewarded, but you only have a limited amount of time to do it. If you succeed great you get the award. If the time runs out the game will seem to take away your opportunity. The light will go out and maybe even the music will change. Both indicate that your feature is no longer available.

BUT WAIT! What if the ball was flipped while the feature was available and the ball is now en route when the feature ends? Well when the ball arrives the software should remember that you had the feature available and give it to you anyway. This is a grace period; a period of time when you still can be awarded the feature even though the feature has gone away for whatever reason.

The first problem is when deciding when to show the total page. Often when a player finishes a timed event we like to show them how well they did for that event. We call this a total page. At first you would think that the total page would immediately show up when the event ends. Also the total page is important to add clousure to the feature that was running. The choreography could go like this: EVENT IS RUNNING 3 2 1 0 TOTAL PAGE and at the same time the music, background display, and lamps all change to reflect the feature has ended.

Now what about the grace period? The event ends and instantly you see the total page and then you score one more award during the grace. Now the total you saw is wrong. So should the Total page not come up until the grace period is over? But then you have akward presentation like this: EVENT IS RUNNING 3 2 1 0 music changes, display changes, lamps change A FEW MORE SECONDS then the total page. Lately this is how we have been doing it but I don’t like it that much.

Now there is the case where a grace period can restart the event. Imagine if you will you are playing a multiball like Battle Royal in Spider-Man. In Battle Royal you Super jackpot is lit by shooting each of the villain areas of the game. Then when you shoot the super jackpot shot you get an additional ball in play! Let’s say you have the super jackpot lit and you drain down to one ball ending the multiball. The super jackpot light goes out, but you shoot the shot during your grace peroid! The game will award you an additional ball into play and start your multiball up again! Cool huh?

In my current game, 24, there is a time in the game where you are trying to get someone to the hospital before they die. You have to make some number of shots or else they die. Let’s say you have one shot left and the time runs out and FLAT LINE! She dies. BUT then you make the shot during the grace period and it’s a miracle!

Anyway you can see that sometimes a lot of thought goes in to something as simple as grace periods.

Pinball design - part 3: Let the game birth the rules

2008-04-01T17:33:00.005-05:00

There are always some chunks of rules that have to come from flipping the game.

After flipping a game for the first few times you begin to realize that certain sequences of shots are fun, just kinetically. Therefore it’s really clear to me that you have to build at least some rules around the player performing that sequence.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation it was clear from flipping the game that there needed to be a special rule for shooting the left orbit followed by the left ramp. Thus the Picard Maneuver was born.

Terminator 2 is an example of a game that was largely birthed from flipping. When Steve Ritchie, Doug Watson, and I first started flipping the whitewood, it was plain that shooting the left and right ramps back and forth should be a big part of the game. Shooting that whitewood for the first time was lots of fun because it has really good flow.

Clearly when you shoot either ramp the goal should be to then shoot its counterpart. Each alternating ramp shot would build a ladder of lights until you reached the top. Also it was more fun if you did it quickly. So I added incentive for shooting the counterpart within a few seconds with the million plus rule.

But what should happen then? PAYBACK TIME! At first payback time was only awarded on the ramps. The thinking was you got here from being in a groove and shooting the ramps over and over. The rub came when people would miss their first 5 MILLION ramp shot and then flail and not get control of the ball for a length of time. Then the time would run out. So again the rules were changed / created from flipping the game; we made it so you could collect Payback Time from more than just the ramps.

Today games are more complicated. A great deal of the design work is done in team meetings and on paper. We often don’t have enough time to let the game tell you what the main rules will be. Once we get a whitewood a large percentage of the core rules have to be somewhat thought out.

Although, it’s not a good idea to completely design a game without flipping it. If you start flipping certain shots or sequence of shots and it is not easy or fun? Then you are stuck you cannot put in the rules you have mapped out there.

Pinball design - part 2: The distance from the start button

2008-02-14T11:30:00.006-06:00

While designing features for a pinball machine you have to think of the big picture at all times. Two things you have to consider are: How hard is the feature you are creating while you are playing it? And: How hard is the feature to get to?

This is what I mean by “distance from the start button”. How long it takes someone to get to the feature after they push the start button and start the game.

This is all about the pacing of the game. You want the game to be deep but you do not want there to be long stretches of “work” to artificially deepen the game. You want the game to be action packed but you can’t let all the action get too bunched up. You have to design the game so that the pace of the game is good. You have to place the different features at good distances from the start button.

The pacing of the game is very important. Where it is most noticeable is in how hard the various multiballs in the game are to achieve, or how far they are from the start button. The closest one is for the Novices, another one further away as a challenge for the beginning players and a stepping stone for the intermediate players, another to give the intermediate players a challenge, and lastly one really far from the start button for the experts.

A great example of this is in the recent Spider-Man pinball machine. Spider-Man has Doc Ock which is only two shots to start. Further out is Black Suit, then Battle Royal, and finally Super Hero is really far from the start button. Well done Lyman.

Pinball design - part 1: The Silhouette of a Pinball Machine

2008-02-06T15:11:00.001-06:00

Who plays our games? What I mean is what range of skill sets do the people that play our games have? Are they mostly novices or do they have some amount of skill? We have no means to do real research. So we mostly just guess.

Knowing who our players are is one of the first steps in knowing what game to design. How much of the game should be engineered for the novice, beginner, intermediate, expert, or Lyman?

My guess is people play our games first and foremost because they have the shape of a pinball machine. From a distance they have the silhouette of the game they know how to play on some level. I believe Pinball is like billiards, or darts, or bowling you have some idea what it’s about and you want to play it or you don’t. They are a form of entertainment but we are not a movie or bar band that people can passively participate in.

When I design a game I try and place emphasis on the beginning to intermediate player. I think it’s really important for the novice as well as the expert to have fun playing the game too. But I believe we should not bow down to the novice. We should instead make a game that intrigues the novice and pulls him in. Then after a few games the novice is no longer. In his place is a player on his way to being average. Yay!

The fear is that since a novice's skill is so low they will play once not achieve anything, decide that their original assessment was correct, pinball was not their “thing”, and not play anymore. So it is often argued that we should design to allow the novice to accomplish something every game.

I argue that an initial experience of a particular game is not one 2 minute game but a series of games. The goal then is after that series of games the player has learned enough about the game to want to play it again someday. I think it’s a mistake to design a game so that everyone every game sees every major feature.

There is one wrinkle in this line of thought. More and more games are being sold to be in basements. Most of which are people putting a Pin-table next to their bar and 60” flat screen for when they entertain guests. Guests will play pinball because it’s there even if they normally would not. They are novices that for the most part will not become a player but still need to be entertained.

..... A new begining

2008-02-01T15:59:00.000-06:00

I wrote this article in 2003. I wrote it for Michael Schalhoub whom asked me to write a few articles for his book "The Pinball Compendium: 1982 to Present"

This is the story of The last few months at Williams and how I got my job working for Stern Pinnball Inc 1999.

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To talk about my start at Stern is to talk about the end of Williams. It was the worst day of my life, October 25, 1999.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the end. For years, every three months there was another potential layoff of engineering peoples. Being a publicly held company, every three months is another quarterly report and the stockholders expect profits or action. Pinball, and the whole coin-op industry in general, was declining from mid-1994 on. Why it was declining is a whole ‘nother story. Layoffs were like vomiting. It is so gut wrenchingly painful as it is happening, but afterwards you feel better. You think, “That sucked, but maybe it’s over now, maybe things will get better from here.” You force yourself to have faith in the leadership of the company.

The beginning of the end to me was sometime in 1998. It had been made clear to us that we had to do something or we would be out of business. Even then I didn’t believe it. We would have meetings to discuss different ideas people had. We thought what we had to do was change the face of pinball. Make it look so different that it would draw new interest.

Looking for the answer was very difficult. In my own way of thinking it was like there was this really big field. We knew the answer was buried somewhere in the field. Some of us were walking around with a spade shovel digging holes at random. Some were walking around waving a metal detector back and forth in front of them and listening to little beeps. John Popadiuk was the most visible. His team was digging a really big hole with one of those large yellow diggers. George Gomez was often seen walking in straight lines, taking evenly spaced steps and often nervously glancing at a parchment. Sometimes George would take sharp right turns and continue pacing out of sight. In saner terms, we didn’t know what we were doing but John’s team had the most viable idea.

Basically, John wanted us to change pinball to have a new style of cabinet with a monitor instead of a dot-matrix display. He had many more ideas and some of them still persisted into what became Pinball 2000.

In a meeting with Neil Nicastro (the president), we were asked if everyone was behind John’s idea. I knew that we needed to sell it to Neil. I knew that it was important for us to stand behind the best idea and see it through. George Gomez thought differently. I followed George back to his office and asked him “What the hell are you doing?” He told me that he thought what John was doing was not the answer.

Time went by and we were pushing forward with John’s ideas. Later it was learned that George and Pat Lawlor worked at Pats garage building a demo to show the rest of us. When they brought in their demo it was clear to all that that was it, that we were done searching. This demo became Pinball 2000 and we were saved. Someone that saw the demo later said we had just “bought pinball 5 more years”.

What followed over the next many weeks was amazing. We became a group on a mission. We were reinventing pinball from the ground up. Everything was scrutinized to find a way to improve on the way it was done. The most visible part of Pinball 2000 was the interactive video, but this was just the tip of the iceberg. Very few people outside our group appreciate this today.

Lyman Sheats led Keith Johnson and I to write the software for Revenge from Mars, the first Pinball 2000 pinball machine. We were writing a game on a new platform while the Operating System itself was being developed. This was no easy task. Revenge from Mars, the second game (Star Wars Episode I), and the OS were almost all developed at the same time. We learned tons of things while we developed them. The next couple models were going to make great strides towards improving the platform.

We premiered Pinball 2000/Revenge from Mars at the ATEI show in London in January, 1999. The show was a huge success. While I had very little to do with the Pinball 2000 design or its OS, I worked harder on Revenge from Mars than any other game previous. Revenge from Mars sold well, 2 to 3 times more than any recent game.

Pinball Expo ‘99 was October 21st through the 24th. For two weeks prior to Expo, Tom Uban, Lyman Sheets, and others worked their butts off to get one of the newest additions to Pinball 2000 ready. While we developed Pinball 2000, we created and maintained a wish list of stuff to enhance it. We planned to develop these ideas when we got the time. One item was a card reader. The machine could know who was playing if the player had a card and scanned it before they started. This would have enabled lots of other cool features to follow. It did help facilitate the tournament at the Expo.

When I arrived to work on October 25th, the Monday following Expo, I learned that Williams laid-off the entire pinball department. This was over 400 people, including 45 engineers. I was devastated.

Meanwhile, Gary Stern had recently made a deal with Sega to take possession of the pinball division he was already in charge of.

In the next few days after the lay-off, we were allowed to clear out our offices. I had ten years of miscellaneous pinball junk in my office, most of which I didn’t want anymore given my disposition at the time.

Jim Patla was in charge of overseeing the archiving of the department. When I ran into him, he told me that when he last saw Ken Fedesna, our General Manager, Ken told him he was surprised Dwight didn’t take his door. My door is unique. It is covered in Star Trek: The Next Generation back-box decals. Jim and I took Kens comment as permission that I could have my door. Jim wrote me a property pass for it and I took my door home. I plan to use it someday when I finish my basement.

We were also given interviews at Midway, our sister company. I was half sure I didn’t want anything to do with making games anymore, ever.

Headhunters called me every couple days. I went on a couple of interviews.

Several of us made a date to drive down to see Gene Cunningham. The plan was to start a new pinball company. For a short while this seemed very interesting yet scary.

I heard from my good friend Cameron Silver that Lonnie Ropp was looking for software people at Stern.

I was offered a job at Midway.

I called Lonnie and he interviewed me over the phone. He had a lot to say and talk about. He seemed to already know a lot about me. He asked me to come in for an interview early next week.

On Sunday we drove down to meet with Gene. On the way back I was torn about how I felt. It seemed too good with lots of unanswered questions.

On Monday I put on my one suit (a different one from my interview at Williams, honest!) and gathered my letters of recommendations from Larry Demar and Ted Estes along with resumes into my leather notebook. I went in for an interview with Lonnie and Gary Stern. It went really well. I was confident that they would make me an offer.

The Gene Cunningham plan turned south. I think I dodged a bullet there. In the end, my only real choice was to work for Midway and learn to do video games or work for Stern doing what I had been doing for ten years. I started work for Stern Pinball Inc at the end of November 1999.

Gary Stern is a good man. He is passionate, hard working, and cares about pinball. While today pinball is still on very shaky grounds I believe it is in good hands.

Dwight Sullivan
July 10, 2003

Junk Yard Story

2008-01-25T16:02:00.000-06:00

This is the story I wrote to help explain some of the sillyness in the game.

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JUNK YARD.... The Story

"Nice Doggie!", I exclaimed. Where did this ugly dog come from? I was only looking at a beat up old toaster and the next thing I knew a mouth full of ivory spikes was chomping on my heels as I fled for my life.

"GRRRRFFFFF GRFF GRFFFFFF!" Snarled Spike.

"Maybe I have a Milkbone," it was lie. I rounded the corner and dashed through a large sliding gate. Spike was still coming, attitude and all. Dropping the toaster, I hurried to slide the gate shut as Spike's shadow grew all around me. CLANG! The gate closed and Spike was unable to stop in time.

Then I got a bad feeling as I heard laughter all around me echoing. "You're trapped in my junkyard. HA HA HA HA HA!!!" That must be CRAZY BOB, I thought. I'm going to have to build some kind of flying jalopy to get out of here.

The growls and snarls of Spike grew faint as I wandered deeper into the canyons of junk. I stumbled across a functional television set. Now, if I only had a weather vane I could create a radar device. I looked up and there was a weather vane sticking out of a telephone pole. Climbing on top of a stack of cars, I retrieved the weather vane. Using some extra wiring, I integrated the weather vane to the TV creating a radar device. It was time to test the device. I flipped through the channels on the TV. My choices were Christmas trees, time machines, fireworks, hot babes, junk, and Mean Dogs. I chose fireworks. Then I adjusted the tuner and bingo: the display showed me where and how close the fireworks were.

Just then I saw a hair dryer buried under some bicycle tires. I combined the hair dryer and the toaster creating a kind of toaster gun. Holding the gun I felt the urge to say 'feeling lucky PUNK!', but I resisted.

With new found confidence I made my way deeper into the labyrinth. I had a growing sensation. The sensation of being watched. Turning the corner I saw them. Down the alley, under a street lamp, hundreds, no thousands of rats were bubbling out of crates of fireworks. A sudden urge of stupidity swelled within me. I charged down the alley screaming at the top of my lungs and toaster gun blazing. As I reached the crates, I wasn't sure if it was toast or dead rats crunching under my shoes. I had a feeling that I would need these fireworks sooner or later.

I heard the distinct sound of water running. Climbing over stacks of tires I hid in the shadows and watched. A bare outstretched foot and a wet leg glistened in the moon light. She was taking a bath! I started to forget my surroundings when I heard a familiar yet loathing sound.

"GRRRRFFFFF GRFF GRFFFFFF!" Spike had a limited vocabulary. The bathing beauty leapt from the water naked and suds flying. I took a firm grip of the toaster gun, and a smile took control of my face.

"Somebody get this dog away from me!" She blurted. Leaping to my feet, I chased after them. FLANK FLANK FLANK, three pieces of toast whizzed past his head. I missed. I followed them to a small alcove. Locked in a figure eight, she was running for her life. I knew how she felt.

Crouching down I took aim. FLANK. Nervous, I shot too soon. The toast narrowly went between them. FLANK. This time I was successful! Spike, knocked down and away, the girl had time to escape. "Eat hot toast you scruffy old mutt!" I exclaimed victoriously.

That's when I had an idea. I tuned my radar device to the junk channel and calibrated it to search for a fan. I was lucky. There was a fan nearby. I tested the fan. I plugged the fan in and turned it on and the force blew me back against a wall of cars. The next thing I remembered was toast, dead rats, and small pieces of junk flying down the alley.

The bath tub still had her sweet smell. Digging the bike tires out I added them to the bath tub. I attached the fan to the rear. Using the fan as a means of locomotion and a rudder, I was soon tooling around the junk yard in my new jalopy.

I knew then that I would be able to collect all the junk I needed to finish this flying jalopy and go on many more adventures.

- J. W. O'Mally

WHO dunnit - TIMELINE

2008-01-23T15:55:00.000-06:00

While we were developing WHO ? dunnit it was important to me to have a back story that we could all draw from mainly to minimize the the continuity errors. It was also important to me for all the characters in the game to have real reasons to want to kill all the other characters in the game.

So I made most of the team sit in Barry's office for hours till we came up with the following background story for the game:

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Characters:

TONY’S PALACE – Casino, The place it all happens.

Nick Spade Private eye.

Tony 38 Owner of the casino and very content.
Trixie 23 Works as a dealer, for Tony
Bruno 42 Tony’s bouncer/ body guard.
Victoria 34 Spider Lady from Europe.
Butler 53 Victoria’s Manservant.

TIME LINE:
1900
Walter, a young wealthy playboy, and Mia, wife of the English Ambassador have a fling. They conceive VICTORIA, a secret VICTORIA’S mother keeps. She doesn’t tell him before he leaves never to see him again.

1911
TRIXIE’S mom dies giving birth to her. Tex is forced to be a single parent.

1915
Walter comes to town, meets TONY, and they become partners. They start the W&T PALACE, a struggling casino. TONY then cheats Walter out of his half of the casino and Walter disappears.

1917
Walter returns to Europe to learn that VICTORIA’S mother has died and that VICTORIA has grown up in a boarding school. VICTORIA looks amazingly like her mother. Walter can only think of how much he loved Mia when he sees VICTORIA. Walter changes his name to BUTLER. He tells VICTORIA that he used to work for her mom and she hires him as her manservant. BUTLER, trapped by the memory of Mia, does whatever VICTORIA says. VICTORIA treats BUTLER like dirt… as she does most everyone.

1919
Tex forms a partnership with TONY and they create the T&T PALACE. This casino thrives and they become rich. TONY and Tex each get a tattoo on their arm that reads T&T PALACE. TRIXIE is 8 and has a crush on TONY. TONY and Tex are like brothers.

1922 MAY
BUTLER suspects the fate of all his daughter’s past husbands and encourages VICTORIA to go after TONY. VICTORIA shows up with BUTLER. VICTORIA and TONY have been lovers off and on for a couple of years. TONY still avoids her grasp. VICTORIA marries Tex, her third husband. She becomes TRIXIE’S stepmother. TONY doesn’t recognize Walter because BUTLER is the shadow of the man Walter was and looks 10 years older.

1923 JANUARY
VICTORIA and TONY conspire to kill Tex. The plan was: VICTORIA gets the money and TONY gets the CASINO. Tex overhears VICTORIA’S half of the conspiracy. When she hangs up the phone he roughs her up and threatens that if anything happened to him she would be sorry. BUTLER witnessed Tex roughing her up. Unknowing to VICTORIA or TONY, BUTLER sabotages the brakes of Texs’ car. Tex drives off a cliff. Car explodes. Body was never found.

Tex, injured and disfigured, makes it to an underground doctor/plastic surgeon. Tex is reborn as BRUNO. BRUNO has one agenda, to get VICTORIA for attempting to kill him. No one will get in his way.

TRIXIE, now 11, moves in with TONY. VICTORIA cannot be tied down with a child. TONY is the closest family that TRIXIE has. She resents VICTORIA for this and still has a crush on TONY.

TONY and VICTORIA each believe that the other did the brake job on Tex. VICTORIA and BUTLER leave for Europe in search of another husband for VICTORIA.

T&T PALACE becomes TONY’S PALACE.

1930
TRIXIE and TONY are lovers but TONY will not commit. TONY gives her a job at his casino. He keeps her on a string, never letting her get enough money to be free.

1932
BRUNO goes on a fact-finding mission about VICTORIA. He learns all about her and her dead husbands. He learns about her real father. He also learns about her relationship with TONY. He now suspects TONY and VICTORIA of “fixing” his brakes.

TONY, unknowingly, hires BRUNO to work for him. BRUNO wants to be close because he knows that sooner or later VICTORIA will show up, and he wants to keep an eye on TRIXIE, his daughter. TRIXIE has been his only reason to live on some dark lonely nights. BRUNO keeps a locker full of TRIXIE pictures and news clippings.

1934 (Yesterday)
BRUNO waits for the day he can extract his revenge on VICTORIA and TONY.

TONY thinks all is well and is ready to enjoy the good life that he deserves.

TRIXIE has finally learned that TONY is not to be trusted and she must do what it takes to protect her-self.

VICTORIA and BUTLER show up to try and snag TONY once more!

WHO ? dunnit

2008-01-17T11:57:00.000-06:00

This is an article I wrote in 2003.

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WHO dunnit is the story of how I met Barry Oursler.

By 1995, with the help of many talented people, I had helped design some very successful games. While up to this point I had a great deal of input into those games, I wanted more control over the design of a game.

Through attrition of one sort or another, Barry Oursler, a game designer of almost 3 decades was left with a short design team. He often worked, in later years, with Mark Ritche, Bill Pfutzenreuter, or Python Angelo. I approached my bosses and Barry and suggested that I start co-designing games with him. They all agreed that that made sense.

I told Barry about an idea that I had been cooking. It was an idea to do a game about a murder mystery. He liked it and showed me a playfield that he had drawn. We started talking about how we could merry his playfield idea to my murder mystery game. Since it was my idea to do the theme we agreed that the buck would stop with me on theme related stuff and Barry would handle everything else.

My main goal in the design was to have the player solve the murder. To do this someone would have to die and there would have to be suspects. This means there would have to be a handful of characters. It also had to be different from game-to-game or murder-to-murder. If there is a different person killed each time and any of the remaining characters could have done it, then all the characters had to be related to each other in some way and all had to have a reason for wanting to kill any of the others. This lead to team meetings where we hashed out the background stories for all the characters. Paul Heitch (sound engineer), Linda Deal (artist), Adam Rhine (dot Artist), Barry, and I worked hard at making sure there would be no loopholes in the back-stories of the characters. It was a lot of fun.

At this point in pinball history, gamming machines in Europe called AWPs and just gambling in general were being blamed for the decline of coin-op/pinball. It was decided that our pinball machines needed to have more gambling themes. This changed the theme of our game a bit. We wrote into the story that it all took place in a casino, Tony’s Palace. We also then added the slot machine toy in the game.

Once we had the story and we mapped the theme to the playfield the rest of the game fell into place. We needed lights to show the players what was going on. We needed speech, lots of speech, to tell the player the background story. I think it was Barry that came up with the phone ‘toy’. I thought of how to use it. It is one of my favorite features in all of pinball. When a phone rings its clear what is going on. You have to answer it.

After WHO dunnit, Barry and I started to do another game that takes place in a junkyard. Since I was the lead of WHO dunnit Barry was going to take the lead of this game. Near the beginning of Junk Yard Barry was laid off from Williams.

Early in the development of WHO dunnit Barry and I started a group of people playing poker at his house every month. I still play poker at Barry’s house almost every month to this day.

Dwight Sullivan
8/18/03

“Somebody answer the phone”

The Famous Star Trek door

2008-01-14T13:47:00.000-06:00

The story goes like this:
Bill Grupp put two TWO Congo backbox decals nicely centered on his door. Well, I knew I had bunches of ST:TNG decals and decided to one (or several) up him. That’s how the door was created.

Years later we were all laid off. While many of us were still gathering and boxing up our stuff. Ken Fedesna in passing and I am sure half joking said "Dwight I am surprised that you didn't take your door with you". Well I took that to mean I had permission. I told the story to Jim Patla who agreed it must mean I had permission and Jim gave me a property pass so I could get the door out of building.

When I finish my basement someday I plan on using it, maybe.

Hidden brick game in ST:TNG

2008-01-11T16:11:00.000-06:00

I wrote the following in January 2004:

There is a hidden brick-video-game mode for the dot matrix display in the “Star Trek The Next Generation” pinball machine. It is similar to many of the brick video games that came out in the ‘80s. At one point, after the start of production of STTNG, to avoid any possible legal problems, it was decided that we should keep the mode a secret.

Since we decided to keep the game a secret only a handful of people knew how to get to it. This created a mystery. For a long time the mystery around this mode was the most asked question of enthusiast when I was at pinball events. Even today the topic comes up from time to time. It has been long enough now and finally I have the time to tell about this mode.

How do codes work on my games:
All the games I have programmed from “Riverboat Gambler” to today have all had a system of monitoring for Easter eggs. An Easter egg is something that is hidden in the game that most people don’t know about and mostly are simple and/or silly text messages on the display. All codes are four digits and are entered using the buttons on the game. Most of them just use the flipper buttons.

The most common system uses the right button to enter the current number and clear. The left button is to bump the current number by one.

To enter a code you only have to know the series of four numbers for that code.
Tap the right flipper button once. (Clear)
Tap the left flipper the number of times of the first number.
Tap the right flipper button once. (Enter and clear)
Tap the left flipper the number of times of the second number.
Tap the right flipper button once. (Enter and clear)
Tap the left flipper the number of times of the third number.
Tap the right flipper button once. (Enter and clear)
Tap the left flipper the number of times of the fourth number.
Tap the right flipper button once. (Enter and clear)
The code is now entered and the game will probably do something.

Try the code 3333 where R = right flipper and L = left flipper.
R LLL R LLL R LLL R LLL R
This will give a message from me to you on almost any of my newer games.
For older games like Star Trek you need to start the sequence by holding both flippers and release to clear, and you have to hit the right flipper one more time at the end.

The code 3333 on Star Trek:
B LLL R LLL R LLL R LLL R R

What is the code for the brick game?
0248 is the code for the brick game in STTNG.
B R LL R LLLL R LLLLLLLL R R

The only feedback you will get is the display will sort of flicker. (It is doing a wipe of itself on top of itself).

Then you have to play Riker’s Poker Night. If you did the above code you will get the brick game instead of getting Riker’s Poker Night.

You have to do this code while in a game. I normally do it at the beginning of the first ball. Then you try and light video mode. Then you try and shoot video mode. Then you select what would normally give you Riker’s Poker Night.

Riker’s Poker Night is in itself a hidden video mode. To get Riker’s Poker Night you have to light and shoot for video mode. Then at the opening screen, where you are given a choice of video mode or points, hold the ball launch trigger while you select the point’s option. This will start a poker game.

What is the brick game?
It is a video game played on the dot matrix where a square ball propelled by a paddle that you control tries to knock out all the layers bricks looming above.

When the ball comes down you have to use the flipper buttons to move the paddle left or right to keep the paddle under the ball.

When the ball hits the paddle it will then head back up. If the ball hits a brick the brick is destroyed and the ball heads back down. Every time the ball hits something it will bounce.

If the ball breaks through the top layer it will bounce off the ceiling and continue to destroy bricks from the top. When the last brick is gone a new set of bricks will appear and the game continues.

It is possible to destroy the last brick from the top and have the ball stuck between the top of the new set of bricks and the ceiling. It will then have to destroy much of the new set before you have to hit it with the paddle again. This is a personal high for me.

If you miss the ball with the paddle it will go off the screen through the bottom. When you miss your fifth ball the game ends and it will kick you back out to your normal pinball life.

This video mode gives no score to the pinball game.

T2, Getaway, and Star Trek: TNG

2008-01-10T11:03:00.000-06:00

This is a quick pass at the history of my time working on my 2nd, 3rd, and fourth games. There are couple areas here I want to revisit and talk about in more depth some day. None the least of which is my now 17 year history with Steve Ritchie.

First some background. The most recent hay day of the coin-op industry / Pinball was in the early 1990s. When I arrived at Williams the average sale of a particular title for us was about 3k. 5000 of a unit was a good day. For many reasons pinball popularity went through the roof for a few years. I happened to work on three of the highest earning and best selling pinball machines of that era.

In 1990, at Williams, game designer Steve Ritchie started designing / drawing a playfield that later became “The Getaway: High Speed II”. At an early stage of development he shelved what he had designed so far because he got an opportunity to do “Terminator 2” and took it.

To be in line with the release of the movie Steve would have to start right away designing a new game. Steve, some video game designers including George Petro, and others went to California to meet with James Cameron (the movie director) and others to learn what they could about the movie. By all accounts they had an amazing time. The plan was Williams would do a pinball machine and Midway would do a video game. At the time Midway was just the video game division downstairs.

I didn’t go because I was not on the Getaway team and therefore not on the T2 team. At this point in my pinball history I was a green pinball programmer with one game freshly tucked into my belt, “Riverboat Gambler”. I was having the time of my life and they were paying me. Money. I finished “Riverboat Gambler” and went on vacation with my girlfriend. When I got back from vacation I was told that I was going to be working with Steve on T2 and not to “mess it up”. Somewhere in here Steve had a falling out with the current programmer on his team, Mark Penacho. I knew very little of Steve at the time. Little did I know that I was about to grab the tail of a comet.

Terminator 2 was to be the first game with a dot matrix display. This new innovation did what we hoped it would do, it gave pinball a shot in the arm in sales. New games with dot matrixes made all old games look old when they sat next to them. In the end, Terminator 2 was the third game to reach production with a dot matrix display. “Gillian’s Island” beat us to production, but Checkpoint by Data East was the first pinball machine with a dot-matrix. Although it was not as tall, it was only 16x128. Compared to our ‘huge’ 32 tall by 128 pixels long display. :- >

The dot-matrix also enabled us to do video modes. This was something more we could do that was different from recent games. For a while most pins had video modes. Some had more than one.

One day near the very beginning of T2 development George Petro stopped me in the hall and told me he was concerned that T2 Pinball could make his game, T2 Video, look bad. I don’t think he was being funny and at the time I thought this was very rude but I didn’t say anything. In the end T2 Pinball outsold the video game and it out earned T2 video at most test locations. In fact Terminator 2 pinball sold over 15K games and is one of the all time top-selling pinball machines.

When T2 was done Steve and I quickly went into the next game, which was “The Getaway: High Speed II”. It went really fast because Steve already had a good start. Early in the development of “Getaway” we went to Steve’s house. He owned a “High Speed” and we wanted to review what that game was like. The funny thing is we spent only a few minutes playing and talking about “High Speed” and the rest of the evening checking out Steve’s new Big screen home theater equipment.

Soon after this Steve sold me his copy of High Speed. I was thrilled because High Speed was the game that got me into pinball and to this day is a jewel in my small collection.

Steve and I went to back-to-back trade shows with T2 and then with Getaway. Both were in Las Vegas. While we were at the second show, selling “The Getaway”, Larry DeMar noticed one of the large Las Vegas strip signs that face the road say the following: “… ENJOY OUR NEW ARCADE; FEATURING; T2 PINBALL”. “T2 PINBALL” filled their entire display. I think it was the Silver Dollar casino. Larry drove me to see it and I have a picture of it. We sold over 13K copies of Getaway at that trade show almost sight unseen.

After Getaway I had some spare time. In this spare time, one of the things I did was write a brick video game for the dot matrix display. It was fun.

For a while the game we were doing after “The Getaway” was going to be Under Siege based on the upcoming movie. Steve had ideas of putting two cannons on the right side of the playfield and dress that side up to look like half of a ship. The two cannons would look like cannons of the destroyer, the ship that is used as the setting of the movie. There was room for this because we were now in the land of wider games. I believe “Twilight Zone” started this trend.

I modified the brick game so the bricks looked like a ship that you were destroying. It was then to be a main video mode for the game. Not really sure how that fits the story of Under Siege but it would have been fun.

Then the opportunity came to do Star Trek: The Next Generation. Steve and I were both huge fans of the show. We switched tracks from Under Siege fast.

Steve Ritchie, Roger Sharpe, Greg Ferris, and I went to Hollywood. We went to Paramount Studios to talk to their licensing department. They took us on a tour of the Enterprise. I walked on the Enterprise! We saw the one large crew quarters that they filmed all crew quarter scenes. I saw the holodeck and Ten Forward. I was on the bridge (they had the chairs covered in plastic). You could walk right through the view screen. We saw them set up the lighting for a scene and on our way from there Gates Mcfadden (Doctor Crusher) walked right past us on her way to that scene. She was very tall.

After our tour of the Enterprise we had lunch in the Paramount commissary. This commissary was huge. Many other celebrity sightings were to be had. The coolest was Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard). He sat at the table directly behind Steve. The really interesting part was that just before he arrived we, the ladies of Paramount licensing department and us, had a very tense discussion about what we were allowed to do in the game. They wanted to make it clear that the Enterprise would never fire first and never before some negotiating. This was a great trip.

Even to this day Star Trek is my favorite game of all the games I have worked on.

In the begining....

2008-01-08T15:37:00.001-06:00

I wrote this article I beleive in 2003 (not sure). I wrote it for Michael Schalhoub whom asked me to write a few articles for his book "The Pinball Compendium: 1982 to Present"

This is the story of how I got my job in the coin-op industry working for Williams Electronic Games in 1989.

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It was mid-September, 1989. I was 24 years old. I was due to graduate from DeVry Institute of Technology next month. My counselor at DeVry was hard at work getting me interviews and telling me about job fairs. She told me about an entry-level job opening with Johnson Controls. She gave me the time and address of the hotel for the interview. I shaved, gathered some cool looking resumes into my leather-bound notebook, put on my one suit, and left. I had been on three previous interviews and had a good handle of the process. I was familiar with Johnson Controls and I wanted this job.

When I arrived at the hotel, to my dismay, there were no Johnson Controls interviews. My counselor had given me the wrong date. There was a job fair at the hotel that night instead. Many companies had hotel rooms that opened to a common area in the center of the hotel. You could go from room to room and talk with people that needed people. I was all dressed up so what could it hurt? I went to some of the rooms and started talking to people. After about three brief talks (“Sorry we are not looking for entry-level people”) I got the idea that this fair was not for entry-level people. The fourth interviewer was nicer. I wish I remembered her name. She told me that the fair was not for entry-level jobs but knew a man named Ed Suchocki who often called her looking for people. She asked if I would like to program games. My eyes lit up. It was hard to maintain some composure. She told me that Ed had graduated from DeVry too and that I should call him.

I called him the next day. I mentioned his female friend and that I was about to graduate. I told him I was in the EET (Electronics Engineering Technology) program at DeVry. I told him that I could put together a portfolio and come for an interview. When I hung up the phone I thought what the hell is a portfolio? It turned out not to be hard to gather some stuff I had done: Logic diagrams and schematics from school; art work I had drawn on a program I had written on my Mac; a spider-man picture I had had scanned with my black and white Mac and then did the color-separation to it and printed it back out; art work I had drawn for the playing pieces for a Monopoly game I was writing for the Mac; and some source code of a real-time game I wrote for the Commodore 64. My classmates had told me that I should try for a software job. Believe it or not I was the best at software in my class. Thinking of this and looking at my portfolio I was confident. My girlfriend kissed me, wished me luck, and I left for my interview with Ed.

At this point I was vague about what Williams/Bally/Midway was. My best friend Glenn Wilcox and I had spent many hours playing pinball and video games back in the suburbs of Detroit where I grew up. While High Speed and Defender were my favorite games, I barley knew they were made by the same company. I had no concept of design teams or designers for that matter.

When I arrived at 3401 N. California Avenue, I told the receptionist I was there to see Ed Suchocki. While I waited I couldn’t help but notice all the plaques and awards that filled one wall of the reception room. Mark Penacho and Bill Pfutzenreuter came down to greet me. They told me Ed was busy and that they would interview me. They took me to a small room off the reception area and we sat at a round table. I opened my briefcase and to my horror my leather-bound folder with my cool looking resumes was not there. I apologized to them and we started to go through all the other stuff I brought. It was hard to get a read on them. I wasn’t sure if Pfutz (Bill had told me to call him that) was impressed, but I thought Mark was somewhat interested. Mark then stood and left. He went to get Larry DeMar. Larry came in the room and I briefly went through all the stuff I brought again. At the time I didn’t understand why they were not that impressed with the source code I had brought. I now understand how small the software was.

When I was done talking about all the eclectic things I had brought, Larry didn’t really say anything. Instead Pfutz leaned forward, squinted at me with a very serious look and asked, “Would you rather work on pinball machines or on video games?” I was taken aback. I sat back and thought about it. Was this an offer or a test? These were all pinball people. “Pinball”, I said with a slight hesitation. I did prefer to play pinball to video but at the time would have taken a job in either.

After a small amount of questions about my portfolio, “Do you ever have bugs in your code?”, another test. After a slight pause I said “Yes, doesn’t everyone?”

“What are your favorite games?” I told them Defender and High Speed, not knowing at the time who Larry was.

On my way home I was convinced that I did not get the job. What kind of idiot leaves his resume at home? When I got home I told my girlfriend (later to be my wife) what an idiot I was. I put some resumes in a big envelope and mailed them off to Ed Suchocki. Less than a week later I called Ed to see if he had received them. He said he was glad I called and that he was about to call me. He told me that apparently I made quite an impression and that he wanted to hire me. He asked me what salary I was looking for. I had been told not to give a number to make them give the first number. "$25,000" I said. He said ok. I am not sure if he ever looked at the resumes.

I worked at Williams helping to design pinball machines from Nov 6th, 1989 to Oct 25th, 1999.