How Pinball Ate itself: The Economics of Pinball

<i>There currently exists one botique manufacturer of pinball machines but its fair to say that innovation stopped in 1992.</i><p>I don't think that's fair to say at all. Williams tried to save the Pinball industry by inventing the Pinball 2000 platform which had reflected video over the playfield. It was definitely as big an innovative step as anything that cam before since the invention of the flipper.<p>Also, I might be biased having been 14 at the time, but I wouldn't call The Addams Family the end of innovation. I would call it the beginning of maturity. The machines Williams released in the 90s and the Stern machines of today reflect the perfection in pinball playability. The precise shooting lanes and the deep rulesets gave rise to 15 years of amazing machines that are just as much fun for beginners as they are for experts.<p>It's a real shame the pinball machines are so expensive to maintain and thus so rare to find in good operating condition. When I see my first real liquidity event I plan on purchasing some of my favorites (The Twilight Zone, The Addams Family, Attack From Mars, Indiana Jones, Simpsons Pinball Party, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek: TNG, Arabian Nights, Medieval Madness, etc)

I wonder why they weren't able to implement increasing levels of difficulty. They could have mechanically changed the playing field at certain thresholds, or even looked into using different sorts of balls (heavier, smaller, BOTH AT THE SAME TIME!!!). How about balls with uneven weight distribution? Most of this stuff I envision being unleashed as you advance, so it's similar to other video games where it gets progressively more difficult.<p>It just seems like they could have done something other than just make a static game that was harder than the last version.

It's not free play algorithms that doomed pinball so much as the fact that video game arcades were doomed by improved home gaming systems, and pinball machines are expensive to design, manufacture, and maintain, and pinball operators charge up to $1 per play.

The balancing act between new and hardcore players is something that video game publishers have to deal with as well. They have an easier time of it, but it's by no means trivial. While video games are flexible with respect to skill required, as the article mentions, pinball is a more transferable skill than video games, which means that the balance has to be found on a game-by-game basis rather than across the industry. I've seen quite a few gamer communities that demand their games be more challenging and intricate. This article demonstrates the danger that pandering to that audience exclusively brings a danger of stagnation. It's difficult to provide a good challenge that doesn't have a noob-unfriendly learning curve.<p>There's lessons in here for any other sort of community. Barriers to entry and a community that only cares for its own needs lead to stagnation. This is especially relevant to communities based around technology, such as software applications or programming languages.

The one thing that fascinates me about pinball is that unlike an arcade game, a PC can't properly simulate it. It has a physics/reality component to it that a computer can't touch.<p>Just like playing tennis or golf on your wii isn't quite the real thing. Why is it that for arcade games (think Doom for instance), the disconnect with reality is not as noticeable?

This article reminded me of this documentary - <a href="http://www.tilt-movie.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tilt-movie.com/</a>

Cool, he knows Eugene Jarvis!<p>I wondered what happened to him.