Maker PINBALL’S REVENGE: The playfield of Revenge From Mars (above), the first of two Pinball 2000 games; the Pinball 2000 cabinet (right) needed a larger backbox than traditional pinball in order to hold its video monitor in the proper orientation.
The bottom cabinet and playfield came from an
old pinball machine Lawlor had at home, but the
other, more novel parts of their prototype required
some ingenuity. Video images were supplied by 2D
artwork Gomez had stored on an old Amiga 1000,
displayed on a salvaged 19-inch arcade monitor. To
reflect the monitor image, the prototype needed a
playfield glass that was semi-reflective. “We mirrored
the glass with off-the-shelf limo window tint film from
the local auto parts store,” says Gomez.
After two months of hard work, they got their
“eureka” moment when they saw an image — in this
case, a bitmapped illustration of a robot — seemingly standing on the pinball playfield. Says Gomez,
“I still remember the excitement when I realized
that it was really going to work.”
Their prototype was still crude — the game’s
static video images didn’t interact with the ball —
but there wasn’t time to take the idea further. The
original Pinball 2000 concept was advancing, and
Gomez and Lawlor got the hint that it was now or
never for their alternative.
They packed up their “Holo-Pin” prototype and
headed back to Williams to unveil it to management
and engineering teams. The anticipated reaction?
“I had no idea,” says Lawlor. He and Gomez had
already flatly rejected the concept their co-workers
were now throwing all their effort behind. “Politically,
what we were doing was very upsetting to many
people.”
But any rancor vanished when the two men
showed what they’d done. Everyone loved it, even
the team developing the current version of Pinball
2000.
“I was blown away,” says former engineering
director Larry DeMar, no stranger to coin-op
success as the co-creator of video hits Defender and
Robotron: 2084. “The prototype worked so well that
it was instantly clear to me that this was big.”
But not only was it a big idea: it was an enormous
undertaking. “Pinball teams would acquire a video
game component,” notes Gomez. “We needed
display technology, artists, animators, cinema guys;
the software team would have to expand with dedicated programmers for the video elements. We’d
have to redesign assembly lines. The thing needed
a new box. We were asking the company to turn its
entire world upside down.”
Williams’ 50-person pinball team went into overdrive converting the prototype into a real product
Photography by Greg Maletic (left), and Duncan Brown
36 Make: Volume
22
