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defrogITEM: Cheap Talk has an interesting piece on pinball technology and economics in the 1980s – specifically, how the games Black Knight and High Speed changed the pinball industry – and eventually killed it.
Which is probably meaningless to most of you. But it interests me in no small part because I got into pinball just a couple of years before Black Knight came out in 1980, which not only brought pinball into the digital age, but also introduced the concept of an elevated playing area within the table and, of course, multiball.
Turns out High Speed – which came out six years later – was even more advanced, because the boffins at Williams figured out how to use the software to create dynamic incentives for replays.
Both tables paved the way for more challenging games, which was necessary because – unlike video games – the necessary skills to play can be used on any machine. On the downside, the more challenging the games became, the less likely newbies would try them, limiting yr traffic to the hardcore pinball crowd.
And so pinball became too clever for its own good, basically.
That’s too bad. I dropped hundreds of thousands of quarters into pinball coin slots between 1978 and 1999 (which was the last time the local arcades in Hong Kong had a working pinball game – they are gone now). It was money well spent.
Anyway, it’s nice to know some of the tech tricks behind it all, even though admittedly hearing tales of how pinball makers game the players is kind of like hearing about pro wrestling really works, or how stage magicians saw women in half. You know yr being swindled, but in a way that’s also what yr paying for.
Under the table,
This is dF
Which is probably meaningless to most of you. But it interests me in no small part because I got into pinball just a couple of years before Black Knight came out in 1980, which not only brought pinball into the digital age, but also introduced the concept of an elevated playing area within the table and, of course, multiball.
Turns out High Speed – which came out six years later – was even more advanced, because the boffins at Williams figured out how to use the software to create dynamic incentives for replays.
Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually re-programmed the software. High Speed changed all that. It was pre-loaded with an algorithm that adjusted the replay score according to the distribution of scores on the specified machine over a specific time interval.
Both tables paved the way for more challenging games, which was necessary because – unlike video games – the necessary skills to play can be used on any machine. On the downside, the more challenging the games became, the less likely newbies would try them, limiting yr traffic to the hardcore pinball crowd.
And so pinball became too clever for its own good, basically.
That’s too bad. I dropped hundreds of thousands of quarters into pinball coin slots between 1978 and 1999 (which was the last time the local arcades in Hong Kong had a working pinball game – they are gone now). It was money well spent.
Anyway, it’s nice to know some of the tech tricks behind it all, even though admittedly hearing tales of how pinball makers game the players is kind of like hearing about pro wrestling really works, or how stage magicians saw women in half. You know yr being swindled, but in a way that’s also what yr paying for.
Under the table,
This is dF
