Subject: Ask Uncle Willy #16; October 7, 1999 Date: Thu, 07 Oct 1999 18:51:18 -0500 From: Uncle Willy Organization: Williams Electronics Games, Inc. Newsgroups: rec.games.pinball At long last, Uncle Willy returns! Those awful people at Williams have been forcing Uncle Willy to toil day and night, carving pinballs from blocks of solid steel. Uncle Willy thinks they are lying when they say you can't just buy the steel already in the shape of a ball. But they looked away for a few minutes, so Uncle Willy thought he would try to write up this, the 16th installment of Ask Uncle Willy, while he had the chance. Uncle Willy is going to start by repeating, AGAIN, that same old plea: Uncle Willy cannot fix your game. Uncle Willy does not have any idea how much your game is worth. Uncle Willy does not know where you can buy a new backglass for your 1962 game. Yet Uncle Willy does know one thing: 90% of his mail will continue to be questions like those. Uncle Willy sighs. Now, on with the questions: Will Steve Ritchie design any more pinball machines? You may already know that Steve designed the California Speed video game for Atari, which was successful in both the arcade and home console versions. Uncle Willy managed to track down the ever-elusive Steve Ritchie at Atari Games in Milpitas, California. Steve professes to be quite happy with his current situation for many reasons...but he admits "you never know what the future will bring." (Uncle Willy has visions of Steve designing High Speed, The Hercules Edition now that he is working at Atari!) While Uncle Willy was tracking down elusive game designers, he figured he would get the answer to this next question, even though it is sure to cause another 8% of Uncle Willy's mail to be about video games, not pinball. Uncle Willy sighs again. I have been a diehard fan of Williams' 1988 arcade game NARC since the day it came out. I remember seeing a game that looked like a possible sequel to NARC for the PC in late 1989 called Crime Wave. Was this a sequel to NARC, and were there any sequels planned? Uncle Willy went to the source for this one- he got the scoop straight from Eugene Jarvis, and here is what Eugene says: "NARC of course, is one of the coolest video games ever made. The final scene fighting the skull is etched into my brain forever. (Featured in the original Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.) Crime Wave was an unauthorized clone for the PC. There has never been a sequel, but I hope to do one someday, 'cause the story has barely begun. We were going to put it in a greatest hits arcade classic thing, but the censors bonged it. NARC will rise again..." Uncle Willy can barely operate the flipper buttons independently, much less perform all the fancy joystick work on a video game, but that sure sounds like a game to look forward to! Uncle Willy is happy to see so many creative people out there thinking about pinball. He often gets letters like this: I have a really good idea for a pinball machine but you say you don't accept unsolicited ideas. I also don't want to risk you taking it from me without credit. You've hit the nail on the head. You can't possibly tell someone the whole idea without risking the idea being used without compensation. But someone can't possibly compensate you without knowing the idea first, because they can't know the value of it. It may also be an idea they had already come up with anyway, that just hadn't been implemented publicly yet. Because there is no way out of this quandary, Williams simply doesn't get into it: no outside ideas are accepted. Uncle Willy doesn't want to discourage your creativity and enthusiasm, though- by all means build a pinball game based on your ideas, who knows where it will lead! Recent pinball shows have featured some fascinating one-off pinball machines built by people who had similar visions. Some people took that last bit of advice before Uncle Willy even gave it, and end up asking question like this: I want to buy an older machine and redesign it. I would get an artist to re-design the artwork, and make a new game and sound ROMs. Are there any 'public' tools for doing these changes? I can understand if you are not very enthusiastic about discussing these kinds of matters. If you own a pinball machine, you can do whatever you like with it, aside from reverse- engineering the software. Uncle Willy isn't going to stop you from reworking an older machine into something of your own design...but you should not be surprised that Uncle Willy isn't going to help you with this project either. If you end up with something fun to play, Uncle Willy hopes you bring it to one of the pinball shows so he can see it. Sounds like this reader wants to do a little rework on his game: Was a video mode on Twilight Zone ever considered and if so what were the ideas for one? Uncle Willy has noticed that Pat Lawlor, the designer of Twilight Zone, has never put a video mode in any of his games. So it's a safe bet that a video mode was never even considered for Twilight Zone. While we're on the subject of Twilight Zone: I have a Twilight Zone pin with the "power-ball." I've noticed as predicted in your manual that it has changed color from White to Pearlescent. I wish to revive it. What are my options? Uncle Willy sees this question come up from time to time. There are those who have had success with various buffing compounds and techniques, but as noted in the manual this is not recommended. You can certainly purchase a new one, but due to the special nature of the ball it is an expensive beast. Whatever you do will just be a short term fix unless you stop playing the machine, and Uncle Willy can't possibly recommend not playing a pinball machine! Perhaps you can just accept the pearlescent color as the "natural" color of the ball? While we're talking about repairing games: I have a pin which has several peeling or chipped decals/stickers on the playfield. Can a replacement set of decals/stickers be had? These are not stickers or decals- they are part of the paint that is applied to the entire playfield at once, before hardcoating. Therefore, short of replacing the entire playfield with a "New Old Stock" (NOS) blank playfield swap, there is no way to replace these graphics with factory parts. There are several web sites and friendly folks on rec.games.pinball with advice on the care and feeding of old playfield art, and Uncle Willy defers to them for guidance on your options for dealing with this. Speaking of unpainted playfields: After whitewoods are produced, the layout decided upon and production begins on a game, what happens to the whitewoods? Is it possible for someone to obtain a whitewood from WMS? Some games have several iterations of whitewoods; some have one or two. Some whitewood playfields get built into complete functioning assemblies; some never get a single part bolted to them. Once a game is in production, these playfields have little further use to Williams; they are just so much lab scrap. Some designers keep their whitewoods; others give them away to members of the design team. Most often, the whitewoods are relegated to the trash. After all, a whitewood playfield is quite often incompatible with the finalized playfield (e.g. lamps, coils, and/or switches have been changed) and as such ends up having little or no functional software to control it. So, there are whitewood playfields out there in the world, but they are pretty scarce. If you ever wondered where those whitewood playfields come from: During the credits in the attract mode of the Williams pin Dracula, the "M.E.L. laboratory" is mentioned. What does "M.E.L." stand for? Uncle Willy is somewhat embarrassed to admit that Williams propagates a redundant acronym (see also: PIN number, ATM machine, and RAM memory). MEL is Williams' acronym for their "Manufacturing Excellence Laboratory." The first prototypes, or whitewoods, of a pinball machine are built from scratch in a prototyping lab. Then about a dozen games are made, using the first samples of production parts. These are not made on the real production line, as that would be too disruptive. Rather they are made in the MEL Lab (oof), where the workers note any problems with the parts, any potential problems in the manufacturing process, and so on. These games become the final development games for the programmers, the internal and external test site games, the ship test games, the FCC test games, and so on. Like the poor batter who comes up with 2 out in the bottom of the ninth, the MEL Lab (oof) workers are always in the position of having to pick up the slack of everyone in the process before them. It's behind schedule; parts which are all coming together from vendors for the first time aren't quite right; a part was accidentally left off the Bill Of Materials; oh, and we need the first 3 games by Monday please! Uncle Willy salutes those fine folks in the MEL Lab (oof), without whom he wouldn't have test machines to play at work! Speaking of building up games from parts: I have a Sonic Super Straight, and as far as I can see, it is a Williams game. The lock down bar, ball shooter assembly, front door, relays, fuse holders, etc. are all the same except instead of a W for Williams, there is a S with a circle around it. Was this company related to Williams or did Williams just manufacture and sell parts to them? Uncle Willy knows that Williams licensed pinball designs to Segasa of Spain, and that Segasa later traded under the name Sonic. Some machines were identical in every way to their Williams counterparts, others were the same basic design but with a slightly different name or theme. Uncle Willy has also heard stories of an incident where Segasa copied a Williams game (Grand Prix) down to the last detail without licensing it first. Williams took them to court in England and won. There must not have been any hard feelings over it though, because there were more licensed games after that! While Uncle Willy is sure that the games were manufactured in Spain from parts, he's less sure about all the subtle little details- were any of those parts made in Chicago and shipped to Spain? Did different artists do the playfield and backglass work for the Segasa/Sonic versions of the games? What were the exact terms of the licensing agreements? That information may be lost to the sands of time. Perhaps there is a "Tia Sonia" in Spain who answers questions like these? Uncle Willy shouldn't have done such a big article this time. It's getting hard to think up clever sentences in between each question: In Whodunnit, when you achieve the multi-ball mode by locking 3 balls in the basement, how many balls should there be present on the playfield? Also, should one ball always remain at the bottom of the sewer outlet? My game keeps one ball at the bottom of the sewer outlet and three balls in the trough. Is this correct, or do I have a problem? Uncle Willy would like to take this opportunity to remind folks that they can send questions like this to the game-specific e-mail address for each game (for instance, whodunnit@wms.com). Questions sent to those addresses will be answered much more quickly than waiting for Uncle Willy's mysterious publishing schedule. Part of the answer to this question actually contains an interesting bit of trivia, so Uncle Willy doesn't mind answering it here. One ball should indeed stay at the bottom of the sewer outlet. This "staged ball" concept was first implemented in Star Trek: The Next Generation and has been used in numerous games since, including Whodunnit. The idea is to return a ball to play quickly, so the player doesn't have to wait for a ball to traverse the sometimes long and winding under-playfield ball guides. The software is clever enough to sort out where the balls are, and tries to always keep one ball staged there. In answer to your other question, that multiball is a 3-ball multiball. Speaking of Whodunnit: Is that slot machine in Whodunnit a real slot machine and what was the name of the person who got murdered in Whodunnit? Uncle Willy chuckles at the idea of bolting a complete slot machine to the underside of a pinball playfield. No, it is just a few reel mechanisms with pictures on them, (cleverly!) designed to simulate the look of a slot machine. Williams has used this trick in the past, on mechanical games such as Yukon, and one of their first solid state games, Lucky Seven. As to who got murdered in the game's storyline, well, that changes with each game. Someone gets murdered and someone else is guilty and you, the player, need to figure out who it was. For more historical game trivia: How did "Move Your Car" originate? As you may have noticed, Uncle Willy has been quite busy and has not been publishing these articles very frequently. To help get this issue out on time, he has (somewhat reluctantly) enlisted the aid of Auntie Bally. So, take it away Auntie Bally: "Fine. Okay. Look. I've got to do Willy's laundry, the dishes, clean his old, stupid EM machines, and install third magnets in his Twilight Zones, just so he can do his research for these little articles. And don't even ask me about those color LCD panels. And now, he says he doesn't have time to research this question, so he asks ME to do this for him. Well, that old coot's got another thing coming if he expects me to do all of his little hobby here while he goes jetting off to some silly game auction. So I said I'll do it just this once. "Okay, so, here's the deal. Move Your Car first appeared in some game called Creature from the Black Lagoon. Using my obvious charm and beauty I sneaked deep into the heart of the WMS art catacombs and found an old sketch of the playfield where the guy yelling 'MOVE YOUR CAR' was a police officer, not a big tough guy. At this point I was jumped by some art guy who was wondering who I was. I clocked him over the head with a box of dried airbrush paint. When he came to, he found that he was tied to the base of a forgotten drafting table deep within the depths of the catacombs. Using my feminine wiles, he was more than willing to divulge the history of Move Your Car... "Apparently, it was at first a goofy rule that at a certain amount of switch hits, the game would basically shut down, and the only thing you do is shoot for the Move Your Car light. The display would show a van pulling in front of your view, and sit there, until you made the shot, and then, pull away, allowing the game to continue. Sounds pretty lame to me. At the very end of the development of the game, the rule was changed to a hurry-up feature. Now, whenever you made the shot, a guy in the van would open up the back door and shoot at the player with a machine gun. Great, no wonder society is falling apart. "At least that's what was supposed to happen. In an act of complete defiance, the animator apparently decided to go against the wishes of the team, and have the player be the one shooting, like a Tex Avery cartoon, at an indestructible van with an increasing damage toll around the van. Hrmph. I would've fired the guy on the spot. "Luckily for him, it was a big hit. Big enough to be referenced in future games, or so I've been told. Judge Dredd includes a direct copy of the game with different graphics during the Safecracker mode, AND a more direct homage to the Move Your Car Guy, during Traffic Jam, throwing axes into a fellow driver's head. Sick, sick, sick. "The Flintstones game takes the Move Your Car Guy back to the Stone Age, where now he's upset about the service he's getting at a drive-thru window. Rumor has it that the voice of the Move Your Car Guy in the Flintstones is actually the animator. Like I really care. "Finally, I was informed that the phrase 'Move Your Car' has been confirmed to appear in Theatre of Magic, and Indy 500. At this point, art-boy fell into a state of unconsciousness; guess I was too much woman for him. "Anyway, that's all I was able to dig up about Move Your Car. Pretty pathetic if you ask me." Ahem. Uncle Willy is not sure he'll be asking Auntie Bally for help again. Let's dig even farther back into game minutia: I am told that there are two versions of Jungle Lord...a red cabinet version and a blue cabinet version. Which one was the earlier version and do you know how many of each were made? I am also told that the blue ones are more common. Also, was the color change suggested by Barry or Constantino or a management decision to use up leftover paint? Uncle Willy has determined that red was used on the prototype games and possibly some or all of the sample games. As near as anyone can remember, the color was changed because somebody who had the power to decree such things didn't like red and wanted it to be blue. Uncle Willy notes that pinball manufacturing, like life, doesn't always make sense. For more nonsense, on to the next question: This is a bit out of your field but I am stumped and thought perhaps you would have some sources I am unaware of. We have a program called Discovering Economics published by DOK with no answers. The one that has me stumped is: what is the eagle on the back of the quarter perched on? It looks like an arrow to me, a quiver to someone else, and a branch to yet someone else. Uncle Willy just shakes his head and wonders whether people will start writing in asking for recipes, driving directions, and phone numbers. But since Uncle Willy always keeps a few quarters in his pocket to play pinball with, he took a look and now decrees that the answer is "a bunch of arrows without a quiver." All further US coinage questions should be directed to "Ask Uncle Sam." Perhaps this company could have used a few more quarters: A long time ago, I saw a promotion for Funhouse being made for computers (IBM, Amiga, Mac) in a computer games magazine. I also saw (and heard the laughing clown) in a 30 second promotion on the front end of Eight Ball Deluxe Pinball which had already been converted over to the computer. Did Funhouse ever make it to market? Uncle Willy asked around and was told that a company named Amtex was indeed in the process of making a version of Funhouse for the PC, but they went out of business before it was released. And, by the way, that is not a clown in Funhouse. Uncle Willy is drawing a blank on transition sentences again. Maybe nobody will notice as long as there is something vaguely resembling words written here: Could the Olympic Hockey game (#351 circa 1/72) been produced as early as 1952 or 1953? Short of something like a tear in the fabric of space and time, Uncle Willy is not sure how a 1972 pinball could have been produced in the early 50's. There is a 1952 Williams pinball called Olympics. 1951 saw the production of Sea Jockeys and late 1952 brought us Disk Jockey (both of which rhyme with "hockey") but that's as close as Uncle Willy can find to anything like a game named Olympic Hockey being produced by Williams in the 1950's. Uncle Willy is pretty certain he answered a similar question for No Fear a while back, but in case the Road Show owners of the world didn't read that: Did the original design for Road Show include a post between the flippers? My machine has the hole and artwork to suggest there was one. Is it possibly an early production playfield? Why was it removed? Like many pinball machines, Road Show was designed to have some flexibility in setup once it was a living, breathing machine out on test locations. A common way to add flexibility is to have the option of putting a post between the flippers. Road Show was designed with this flexibility, but it was determined that the game was better without the post, so it was never installed in production. Uncle Willy believes that at least some of the games shipped with the post in the spare parts bag, which would allow each game operator to make up his or her own mind about how to set up the game. Here is another issue that wasn't sorted out until after a game started production: What is the story with the Delco logos on the sample Corvette translites? The Corvette pinball design team wanted a Corvette race car in the backglass art, and race cars usually have sponsor logos on them. To avoid licensing issues, they decided to put Delco stickers on the bumpers. After all, they were licensing the Corvette name from GM, and GM owns Delco, so it had to be OK. Turns out it was not! Using the Delco logo would have required a separate licensing agreement, which they felt was not worth the effort, so the logo was removed from the artwork. Some small number of early games had the original artwork, but the majority of the games do not. Uncle Willy is sure this question has been gnawing at game collectors everywhere: I have noticed that under the instruction sheet, in the lower left corner of the playfield, there is a "hidden" red lamp insert. What is this for? Is it from some prototype feature that never made it into production? Uncle Willy had to do some digging before he could find anyone that knew the answer to this for sure. Even within Williams you can find several different theories on the purpose of this mystery insert! In years past, pinball manufacturers would test the coatings on their playfields destructively. The coating is less likely to stick to an insert than anywhere else, so the quality test was to scratch the coating on an insert and see if it could be easily peeled up. Even though this test was only done to a small sample of the playfields, it ruined them for use in games! Jim Patla made the bold suggestion of placing a sacrificial insert under the arch on every playfield. Now it is possible to test the coating quality of a playfield without destroying any visible part of it. That's a shame, Uncle Willy preferred the story about the insert lighting up as a secret signal to space aliens bent on the domination of the planet Earth. Uncle Willy received a large number of emails from psychology students at the Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Apparently they were given some sort of assignment to study what makes game machines attractive to people. Many of them seemed to think Uncle Willy should just tell them the answer. Once again, Uncle Willy apologizes if his lack of timely response caused anyone to fail their course. But then, depending on Uncle Willy's erratic publishing schedule to complete a homework assignment just doesn't seem like a very wise idea. Uncle Willy is sure this will somehow come back to haunt him, as these students will no doubt spot some previously undiscovered feature that will make games irresistible to players; will turn these discoveries into a profitable coin-operated game manufacturing business; will put Uncle Willy out of a job; and will come laugh at Uncle Willy, who will by then be living in an old pinball shipping carton under the "L" tracks in downtown Chicago. While huddled in that carton, Uncle Willy will no doubt remember better times: While flipping through a guide to coin-op games book, I saw what looked like an Addams Family with a gold coin door. It looks like the picture was taken at Expo. What is the story behind this TAF? To commemorate the historic event of breaking the modern pinball production record, the record-breaking game to come down the line on The Addams Family run was decked out with many gold-plated parts and was signed by all of the people that helped make it. This is probably the game you saw pictured, as it does have a gold coin door and it has made at least one appearance at the Pinball Expo. Uncle Willy has seen this game sitting at the Williams pinball manufacturing plant. As a historical note, The Addams Family Gold, with gold legs and trim (but just a normal black painted coin door) was actually a completely separate game theme as far as production records are concerned, and was produced some time after the run of The Addams Family completed. Back on the other end of The Addams Family development cycle: I've heard rumors about Funhouse machines with DMDs installed in them. Apparently they are some sort of hybrid game. Can you tell me more about how and when these were made? Uncle Willy hates to spoil a good legend, but this one is simply not true. Funhouse was never made into a dot matrix display-based game. However, someone once related a story to Uncle Willy about a game that was mocked up for a TV studio photo shoot for The Addams Family pinball. Because it was so early in the project, a complete game wasn't ready, so they grabbed a Funhouse that was kicking around (*) and used it for the mockup, which included fitting a dot matrix display so that The Addams Family attract mode graphics could be displayed. If this game even ran, it would have had simulated segmented score displays on the dot matrix display, as there was never any dot matrix art created for Funhouse. Uncle Willy wonders if perhaps this mockup game is the source of these rumors. (*) Uncle Willy understands the agony some of you feel as you read about Funhouse games just lying about, then being butchered for one-time promotional purposes. Such is life in the pinball business! For more on "life in the pinball business": How do I tell what serial number my game is? The reason I ask is the serial number on my High Speed is in the form 541 (space) 93xxx. Which would seem to indicate to me that it's serial number 93thousand and something. Only problem is that every source I've ever seen has said that only about 17k High Speeds were ever manufactured. Uncle Willy reminds his readers that he can't talk about production numbers for pinball machines past or present. Uncle Willy would also like to point out that from Williams' standpoint, the only important fact about serial numbers is that they are unique. They don't need to be in order, they don't need to start or end at certain numbers, and they don't have to inherently impart any information whatsoever other than uniquely identifying a specific game. (Uncle Willy does, however, wonder which game in the early 1980's ended up with serial number 500000 and where that game is now.) While we're on the subject of running out of ideas for segues: Does anything happen to 1990-1998 pinball machines in the year 2000? They plummet from the sky, killing everyone aboard. Oops, wait, that's commercial airliners. No, Uncle Willy thinks your Williams/Bally pinball machines will have no "Y2K" problems. You can read an official statement on this subject at the following web address: http://www.pinball.com/y2k.html Uncle Willy doesn't even think anyone reads these little transition sentences anyway: My Bally/Wulff Lady Luck machine appears to have been made in 1986 (the copyright tag on the backglass states this in Roman numerals), but the only references I can find to this machine say it was manufactured in 1968. Are there, in fact, two versions of this game? Williams did indeed make a game named Lady Luck in 1968, but if you have a Bally game with that name it was made in 1986. There are quite a few cases in the long history of pinball where game names are duplicated, especially when a common phrase like "Lady Luck" is used for the name. Uncle Willy is aware of an even earlier game with that name, made by Gottlieb in the mid-50's. In-way act-fay, Uncle-way Illy-way ould-cay obably-pray ite-wray e-thay ansition-tray in-way ig-pay atin-lay and-way obody-nay ould-way otice-nay: If you sell any t-shirts or hats with the Uncle Willy logo, or that say Uncle Willy, I would like a catalog. Uncle Willy is flattered that you would want to purchase anything with his image, but imagines the total market for such items would consist of about 7 people. And 6 of those would be Uncle Willy's mom. And finally, a pinball fan named Amy asks that Uncle Willy not use her name when answering the questions she mailed in. So Uncle Willy won't. -- "If hard data were the filtering criterion you could fit the entire contents of the Internet on a floppy disk." -- Cecil Adams