Ask Uncle Willy #16: January 4, 2000
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:
Question: Will Steve Ritchie design any more pinball machines?
Answer: 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.
Question: 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?
Answer: 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:
Question: 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.
Answer: 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:
Question: 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.
Answer: 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:
Question: Was a video mode on Twilight Zone ever considered and if so what were
the ideas for one?
Answer: 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:
Question: 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?
Answer: 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:
Question: I have a pin which has several peeling or chipped decals/stickers on the
playfield. Can a replacement set of decals/stickers be had?
Answer: 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:
Question: 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?
Answer:
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:
Question: 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?
Answer: 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:
Question: 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?
Answer: 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:
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?
Answer: 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:
Question: Is that slot machine in Whodunnit a real slot machine and what was the
name of the person who got murdered in Whodunnit?
Answer: 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:
Question: How did "Move Your Car" originate?
Answer: 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:
Question: 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?
Answer: 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:
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.
Answer: 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:
Question: 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?
Answer: 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:
Question: Could the Olympic Hockey game (#351 circa 1/72) been produced as early
as 1952 or 1953?
Answer: 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:
Question: 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?
Answer: 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:
Question: What is the story with the Delco logos on the sample Corvette
translites?
Answer: 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:
Question: 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?
Answer: 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:
Question: 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?
Answer: 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:
Question: 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?
Answer: 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":
Question: 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.
Answer: 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:
Question: Does anything happen to 1990-1998 pinball machines in the year 2000?
Answer: 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:
Question: 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?
Answer: 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:
Question: If you sell any t-shirts or hats with the Uncle Willy logo, or that say
Uncle Willy, I would like a catalog.
Answer: 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.
All text and images (C) 2000 Williams Electronics Games, Inc.
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