These are things Louis Koziarz shared that aren't tied to one specific game, and give broader views of the pinball industry and development process.
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| Williams #pinball 50027 is an interesting one too. "Limo" was going to be a Madonna-themed pin, a Python/Mark Ritchie joint. The story I heard was that Williams took Madonna to court over her "Sex" book, which featured a picture of Ms Ciccone being - ahem - "serviced" on top of a Williams Taxi pin. It was settled out of court, with Williams winning the ability to use her likeness on a future machine. In true Willy fashion, it was going to be a sequel to Taxi. |
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So I didn't get to Williams #Pinball on the first try, but I started meeting USENET friends in the area and eventually learned that pinball engineering was looking for programmers. Mostly because of the Capcom Pinball departures. Ted even wrote an ad for the Tribune.
"Projects may involve extended hours". 😂
At least Ted was honest.
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| My next attempt at Williams #Pinball was more successful. Thankfully I had a few years of rec.games.pinball work as evidence that I wasn't a complete jerk. Hopefully. The interview was tough but fair. And Ted handed me an offer letter at Pinball Expo 1994: |
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| More #pinball nostalgia on the way once I scan more stuff. Meanwhile, this is interesting. Won't run on Win10 though. @DigitalEclipse do you have a working copy? 🤔 |
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| Here's an interesting planning doc from Williams #Pinball engineering circa late 1997. P2K was in the planning phases to launch in 1Q99 but we needed more games to fill the pipeline until then. One more Lawlor design and one from Piotrowsky, a designer in training. The rumored Big Bang Bar conversion project was real. |
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| Here's a chart of how the 90s went for Williams. This was sent to vendors *after* the shutdown, perhaps to try and explain why? |
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Williams already had slimmed down #pinball engineering by mid-1996, taking out three design teams (Oursler, Trudeau, and Nordman) on a Thursday and shuffling other personnel to Midway. Nordman was laid off before Scared Stiff made it to the production line. Freres made a reference to it in the backglass.
Why a Thursday, you ask? WMS was a publicly held company at this point in time and had a P/R firm handle press releases. The press release about the layoffs was accidentally sent out to the newswires a day early. Some of us heard about the cut backs on the local news radio as we were driving to work. We all arrived to find our phones turned off and the engineering LAN offline. We all sat around waiting for middle management to scramble and have 1:1 meetings with all affected employees. |
So a few years after Williams kicked us out I bought the pinballfolklore.com domain and set up a wiki. The idea was for anyone that ever worked on games to contribute. Kind of like what the original Mac team did at https://www.folklore.org/
I got a handful of WMS people to contribute articles and photos. Then we kind of left it alone for a decade or two. The domain expired, but I saved it all. Some of this is kind of fun. Stay tuned.
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| #Pinball folklore: The Pinball Engineering department at Williams/Bally/Midway, circa late 1998. This might have been part of a magazine article that ran in London with the RFM launch. This image is buried in Pinball 2000 as an easter egg, if you know the flipper code. |
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| #Pinball folklore: Pat and George with the Holopin prototype, which became Pinball 2000. They built this thing away from Williams in Pat's garage, then brought it under cover of darkness to show to management. The video was driven by George's Amiga 1000, displayed over a junked NGG whitewood. (more...) |
#Pinball 2000 folklore story: It was March 1998 and I was in Las Vegas with Pat Lawlor for the ASI trade show. We were staying at Mirage and decided to share a cab with George Gomez and Steve Kordek over to Bally's for the WMS distributor presentation.
Very few people inside of Williams had seen the Holopin model, much less anyone on the outside. It was an exciting period knowing that we were on the verge of something new and different, and it was also very frustrating that we couldn't tell anyone about it yet.
We get into the cab.
Pat: We make pinball machines.
Cabbie: You know what you guys should invent? You should put 3-D holograms under the glass that people can whack around with the ball.
We couldn't believe it.
Pat: Yeah, that's a great idea.
Little did he know. Now when I hear cabbies talk about how they invented Teflon or eBay, I kind of wonder if maybe they're right. If Pinball 2000 had flourished you know this guy would be telling everyone he invented it!
Once a game was nearing completion, the pressure was on
to get the first "sample" games into boxes and out the door to our major distributors so they could show it to customers and take orders.
We all knew that the games really didn't stay in the showrooms - they went out on location for field test where the distributor could gauge the game's earnings and see how many they /really/ wanted to order. At Williams the initial orders determined the game's fate, so this was a tricky cat-and-mouse game.
The highest pressure was to send the first sample games to Europe, where Nova, the German distributor (Hans Rosenzweig) ruled all. If he liked a game you could be sure of decent sales.
A few times when we were still polishing up rules and software for the game, we'd send the first European sample games with code that had the coin accept routine crippled out. FREE PLAY ONLY.
That way we knew the game wouldn't be put out on location and it bought us some more time while the game was flying overseas on a cargo plane. We knew once the game was taking coins it would be out in a smoky bar somewhere and the code would *never* be upgraded again.
Sure enough, a few days later the fax would come in. The game won't take money? Horrors!
We'd send them pay-for-play software soon thereafter, but at least we had a week or so to get more stuff into the game.
So, you want to be a pinball programmer? Becoming a member of the pinball software department often required a grueling day-long interview where the candidates were questioned by the other pinball programmers and engineering staff. The questioning ranged from hobbies to impromptu programming quizzes. But, by far, the question that was given the most weight was the Towel question...
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| At lunch time we would make a group outing to the LaFinca Mexican restaurant. It was a short walk from the factory and offered some excellent food for lunch. On the wall of the restaurant, there was a wall hanging that depicted an ancient pyramid in Mexico. The pyramid pictured had vegetation growing on only half of the faces. The interview candidate was asked to explain why there was vegetation on only part of the pyramid and *creativity counts*. |
Some notable responses:
* That is the side they sacrifice the virgins on.
* They had to go into production before it was finished.
* The cord for the trimmer would only reach to the one side.
* When birds went south for the winter, that was the side they "fertilized"
* There was a goat chained to the pyramid to eat the weeds, the chain only went so far.
My answer was: IT'S A BEACH TOWEL!
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| #Pinball folkore: Dwight Sullivan's office door. When Williams closed the pinball division and sent us all home, management wrote out property passes to let us take our personal items out of the factory. Years earlier, Dwight had plastered his office door with STTNG backbox decals. He figured the next occupant wouldn't want this...so could he take the door home? Fedesna said yes. So Dwight carried the door home, past some really confused security guards. |
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