Seasons Greetings from all of us at Williams/Bally/Midway! (1997)

For the tiny Venn diagram slice of "pinball players that listen to classical music radio", Peter was the voice of the Narrator in Tales of the Arabian Nights. Glad to see he's still working.

not really funny

Just so I'm clear on this, computer memory has tripled in price because a bunch of it that hasn't been produced yet has been ordered to populate GPUs that aren't installed in data centers that aren't built yet in order to service a demand that doesn't exist to make profits that don't happen.

I remember seeing this in the system code we were getting from Stern for SAM1. It was to help the factory staff read the test menus as they worked. 😉

"HR" was Henry "Hank" Ross. He was one of United's lead design engineers in 1956 and would leave the company about two years later to start Midway Manufacturing with partner Marcine "Iggy" Wolverton. www.replaymag.com/midway-bally... videogamehistorian.wordpress.com/tag/midway-m...

Coin-op game programming, 70 years ago....

Pssstt... You want the good stuff? 512GB DDR5... Matched pairs... Meet me around the corner...

Very special pinball artifacts from the box: early test sculptures and final mold shots for the Tales of the Arabian Nights genie toy.

Congrats to @noobde.bsky.social for making MK the only gaming IP worthy of the Netflix merger deck. 😎

Every engineering organization, sooner or later, wants to start tracking time spent on projects to review and maintain costs. Williams pinball was no exception. Did YOU fill out your timesheet this week? 🤔

OMG another pinball artifact: Placeholder Genie bash toy from Tales of the Arabian Nights. Used to test pose and position of the final sculpted toy. Art by McMahon on xerox and colored pencil with butyrate cover.

There's a G-File I wrote back in the BBS days that's archived on @textfiles.com, I wrote it exactly 40 years ago while bored at home during Thanksgiving break from high school. My first published work! And, no, I'm not sharing the link. It's embarrassingly bad.

Next random pinball artifact: A Pinball 2000 PUB card. After the launch we got feedback that P2K's software update system was a bit exotic for most operators. It needed a laptop, serial cable, a network connection to download files, and some detailed instructions. Some found it confusing. (more)

Random pinball artifacts incoming! I'm cleaning house and everything must go. Maybe a virtual garage sale?

The Williams pinball factory was in such a rough part of town, employees were given company issued switchblades.

If you're a Williams/Bally/Midway pinball or video game buff, I highly recommend Ken's book. I wasn't privy to all of the history that went on in that shop, but his accounts are accurate and fair. It tells the story very well, including the bad times. www.amazon.com/Pinballs-Pix...

Illinois Pin Ball, Part 0: (thanks @heyrocker.com for the reminder). When pinball was laid off, employees were allowed to come back to the factory for a week or so to clean out their offices. We had decades of stuff that the company didn't want anymore, so we hauled it ALL off. (more)

Illinois Pin Ball, part 6: In hindsight, it's now pretty clear that we ALL avoided disaster on many levels. A lot of us would have sunk time and money into a project that would go nowhere, or bankrupt us all. And Gene would have gone to the rest of you all to sell shares, which would be worthless.

Illinois Pin Ball, part 5: With the idea of the resurrected Williams now done, everyone went off in different directions. Dwight and Keith went to Stern, for example. Lawlor, Krutsch, and I decided to give PLD a try but he needed the winter to get ready.

Illinois Pin Ball, part 4: We decided to proceed anyway and figure things out together. But by Thanksgiving most of it had fallen apart. Gene wanted control of the company, and we started getting bad vibes about it all. We all walked away by early December and it was over. Pat decided to start PLD.

Illinois Pin Ball, part 3. Gene believed that by recruiting a solid group of ex-WMS staff, the company could be revived. There would be some financial input from all of us, and then Gene would go out to the public and try to raise funds. From my notes, he was seriously mistaken on a lot of issues.

@flylanddesigns.bsky.social feel free to add this contribution to your art. 🤣 #pinballcats

The TOTAN artwork is pretty special to me but I don't mind this updated genie at all. Pretty badass. Just keep my cats on the backglass kthxbye.

"I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time." #democracy https://werd.io/i-want-you-to-understand-chicago/

Unexpected meetings with deliberately vague titles (“Sync”, “Chat”, “Check-in”) are almost always bad news.

This Polygon article about Gene Cunningham is good background reading, if you don't know much about him. It's about his ordeal with Big Bang Bar, but that took place AFTER all these events I'm retelling. www.polygon.com/features/201...

Illinois Pin Ball, part 2: So we got the invite to talk to Gene. A bunch of us drove down and met with him to discuss how this would work. I tried to take photos and notes to record the event.

I think we've covered enough of the #pinball 2000 years, I still have more in the archives to post soon. For now I can try to retell what happened right after we were all fired. Some engineers were going to Midway or WMS Gaming. I got a job offer from Turmell. But then another phone call came in...

The documentary with the Mortal Kombat Kollection has a ton of great stuff for arcade/pinball sickos like me, like this delightful photo of Roger Sharpe at his office at Williams/Midway.

Concept design for Count Pacula, a canceled video game/pinball hybrid arcade game. The game was developed by Bally Midway, the North American distributor for Pac-Man arcade games in the early 1980s. #namco #pacman #videogames #retrogaming #halloween

Something for the font enthusiasts

The dream is real, the PinballArtBot (@backglass.bsky.social) is up and running. Do you like pinball art? Follow the bot! Thanks to @shaneus.bsky.social for the idea and @hgstrp.com for making a kick-ass database source.

So I'm pondering @shaneus.bsky.social 's idea of doing a bot that posts pinball images every hour/day/whatever. Scraping them from IMDB is possible but I'm wary of ownership and copyright issues, either from the photog or the factories. Am I overthinking this? Any other ideas? Should I ask Duncan?

Here's an old #pinball programming tip for all you aspiring homebrew developers out there: Your lamp matrix is probably represented in memory by a few bytes or words. You can write a really cool effect in under a minute by filling it with 0xAA (10101010) and then 0x55 (01010101) back and forth.

Fun fact about the aftermath of the Williams #pinball closure: PLD helped Stern review the P2K IP @ WMS. We looked to see if buying their PC platform could be a cost saving + dev time accelerant. We joked that it should be named SPIKE (Stern Pinball Industry Killing Engine) since P2K killed WMS.

Let's find the lamenting from #pinball players when things went from alphanumeric displays to dot-matrix. Was there any? Was it too early in Internet history to archive?

I can't imagine how many people walked by this group of legends at Expo today and had no clue... (photo credit @playhistory.bsky.social)

white house has joined bluesky click here to block all official us government accounts instantly bsky.app/profile/did:...

It's nice to know that even virtual machines can be badly adjusted.

The original pre-Expo internet gathering, 1994. @heyrocker.com @tedestes.bsky.social @dwhoops.bsky.social

Finally achieved a lifelong dream, sorry to all my haters who doubted me

OG Family Guy

What a great theme, wishing these guys well! We kind of went down the same road with Ripley: is there a license (Gary's request) that leaves us wide open to lots of interesting stuff (Pat's request)?

and I feel fine

The frogs have landed in Chicago!

Classified advertisement in BYTE Magazine, January 1980. Hmm.

How do you describe a firm where all the early engineers and architects have left and what remains are younger people that happily fuck around in meetings all day but have no idea how any of the systems actually work? I liken it to Logan's Run but that's lost on people as well because I'm an old.