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Pinball 2000 Part 2 - Featuring George Gomez
PodcastAnalysis updated 3d ago1 hr 39 min listen
The one that we have been waiting for....featuring George Gomez!
Highlights
- John Papaduke's original Pinball 2000 concept featured a 25-26 inch CRT mounted in the backbox with a Nintendo 64 connected to it, creating two separate but disjointed gaming experiences.
- Williams/Midway pinball had six to seven design teams working on a staggered cadence, launching Valley and Williams titles in fall with potentially additional spring releases.
- Gomez got a patent on the coincidence/interaction between virtual objects and real objects (ball switches triggering video transformations), which has since expired.
- CEO Neil Nicastro told the design team in a mandatory meeting that the company's future depended on supporting the Pinball 2000 platform initiative.
- Gomez built a foam core prototype in three weeks (weekends only) using an Amiga 1000, a 19-inch monitor, smoked acrylic, and a robot animation to demonstrate the mirror-and-video concept to internal stakeholders.
- The prototype demonstration immediately convinced leadership to abandon Papaduke's design and commit to Gomez and Lawlor's approach as the future platform.
- Williams had a standing company policy that the designer/engineer who pioneered a new technology got to design the first game using that technology.
- The early Pinball 2000 development team explored using a PC as the hardware basis for the video system, believing PC evolution would allow future growth, but this proved problematic due to constant motherboard format changes.
Notable quotes
“I don't like the fact that to this day I feel like a back glass is a significant element of pinball. Absolutely, 100%. I think companies that fill the back box with a monitor and stuff are off base.”
“If you guys, you know, you're either with this thing or you're not. But, you know, we got to do something.”
“There's a way of combining the video images right down on the play field. And everybody thought I was crazy.”
“The real twist that I added to it was the notion that if I park of, you know, if I make the interaction, if I can take the video element, like, for the sake of everybody understanding, if you take a Martian, and you can make the Martian look like he's standing on a play field, and I put a rollover switch directly beneath that Martian, when the ball sees that, when the switch sees the ball go over it, I can transform, I can sense that signal and then in essence I can transform that Martian.”
“Pat Lawlor and I were kind of talking, and he said, you know what? He said, we got to do something because this is, you know, this is going to go in that direction. And I had tried in the meeting, I had tried to describe to them the, you know, I said, hey, guys, there's another way.”
“And I remember Neil said, you know, if you guys, you know, you're either with this thing or you're not. But, you know, we got to do something. And it was a really depressing meeting because basically nobody in the meeting was very excited about this.”
“We called it like, I've got a picture of us standing next to the camera. I'll have to find it and send it to you also.”
Entities
- Dave Nutting and Associates· company
- Midway· company
- Williams Electronics (Williams/Midway)· company
- Baby Pac-Man· game
- Cosmic Cruiser· game
- Fast Break· game
- Granny and the Gators· game
- Monster Bash· game
- Pinball 2000· game
- Revenge of Mars· game
- Space Invaders· game
- Fresh Pinball Podcast· organization
- George Gomez· person
- John Papaduke· person
- Kenny Fedesna· person
- Kyle, Corbin, Zach· person
- Larry DeMar· person
- Lyman Sheets· person
- Neil Nicastro· person
- Pat Lawlor· person
- Steve Ritchie· person
- Amiga 1000· product
- Johnny Mnemonic· product
- WPC 95· product
- Deluxe Paint Animation· software
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