Early personal computer pinball
May. 29th, 2019 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinSo, as the previous post mentioned, I was messing around a little with a few early personal-computer pinball games, specifically the Atari 400/800/etc. ports. How are they?
I think I'm a little spoiled for these tables, actually, because they're based on real pinball machines that I'm already overly familiar with, both in real life and in later simulations. The first big hit in computer pinball was Bill Budge's 1981 Raster Blaster, originally a program for the Apple II, ported before too long to everywhere else. Here's Mackinstyle's video of the Apple II version:
The Atari version looks pretty similar, except that there are purple As in place of the Apple logos on the bumpers, and the artifacting colors aren't quite as elaborate (I couldn't find a video that showed them properly). Anyway, a pinball fan will immediately recognize this table as an unlicensed imitation of Firepower, a pioneering 1980 table designed by Steve Ritchie.
(If you're primarily a video game fan, you probably know Ritchie better as a voice actor: "FINISH HIM!!!" His impressive voice is also often heard coming from his pinballs.)
It wasn't, by a long shot, the first multiball pinball, but it was the first multiball of the solid-state era, and the moment when it took, so to speak: after Firepower, almost every pinball had a multiball mode. It was also the first one where the user could rotate the lit rollover lanes by pressing the flipper button. It's a fast, simple, kind of brutal layout. The only real long-term table goal is multiball. You've got to hit those six little standup targets in the center repeatedly to light the locks for multiball, and every time you do, you risk draining the ball right down the middle. I find it addictive. I first encountered it in Farsight Software's Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection, played it more in their later sim The Pinball Arcade, and eventually got to play it for real at the late lamented Pinball Wizard Arcade.
How does Raster Blaster stack up to the original? It looks almost drab by comparison, for one thing: the real pinball is covered with all this glorious fake-Jack-Kirby-meets-fake-Star-Wars art. Budge couldn't do anything like that with the simple graphics at his disposal. He did get in a clever parody of the Bally logo, though.
The feel is OK but not great. It feels to me like the ball is very light and floaty (a common problem with early simulated pinballs) but the flippers are weak to compensate. Sort of the opposite of Zen Pinball FX's excesses. But if you'd never played pinball on a computer before, or only encountered something like Atari's 2600 Video Pinball cartridge, this would have been amazing--it's aping a real machine and one that had made a big splash just one year before.
My previous post showcased David's Midnight Magic by David Snider, which came out not long after. You'll notice a similarity of presentation, down to the big script-lettering version of the author's name (no longer parodying the Bally logo, I suppose). But whereas Raster Blaster imitated Firepower, David's Midnight Magic imitated... Steve Ritchie's other great 1980 pinball machine Black Knight. This was one of the first machines to have a multi-level playfield, and I think it also introduced Magna-Save. It's another one that I was introduced to through Farsight's sims (unfortunately Farsight lost the Williams license so you can't buy these in The Pinball Arcade any more!) and also eventually played in real life. I'm not quite as fond of it as Firepower (I prefer the sequel Black Knight 2000), but it's if anything more famous than Firepower. Long before I played any version of it, I remember reading about it in a Science 80 article covering the development of a new pinball (Black Knight) and a new videogame (which was Star Castle).
Again, the technical impossibility of even approaching the great artwork of Black Knight is unfortunate, but we can chalk that up to the times. I think the feel of the table has similar problems to Raster Blaster: the ball feels too floaty (almost like the light plastic Powerball in Twilight Zone) but the flippers too weak. But, again, this would have been amazing in 1982. When Atari tried to make a port for the 2600, they were probably stymied by the platform's technical limitations and ended up with a completely different, unrelated pinball, marketed as just Midnight Magic--which I personally find far more addictive than David's Midnight Magic, for some reason, though it doesn't have multiball or a two-part playfield.
Bill Budge, for his part, went on to make the epochal Pinball Construction Set for the nascent Electronic Arts (back when they were the cool, artsy, envelope-pushing video game company), one of the first games to offer the general public an editor that they could use to make their very own custom games! I didn't have this program back in the day and I've only scratched the surface of it--my impression from messing with it just a little is that its user interface is kind of touchy and unforgiving by modern standards, but a lot of time has passed since the early 1980s. One of the things it could do was allow you to save your pinball as a standalone executable, and apparently these user-created pinballs (most of them undoubtedly very bad) absolutely infested the BBS scene in those days.
I think I'm a little spoiled for these tables, actually, because they're based on real pinball machines that I'm already overly familiar with, both in real life and in later simulations. The first big hit in computer pinball was Bill Budge's 1981 Raster Blaster, originally a program for the Apple II, ported before too long to everywhere else. Here's Mackinstyle's video of the Apple II version:
The Atari version looks pretty similar, except that there are purple As in place of the Apple logos on the bumpers, and the artifacting colors aren't quite as elaborate (I couldn't find a video that showed them properly). Anyway, a pinball fan will immediately recognize this table as an unlicensed imitation of Firepower, a pioneering 1980 table designed by Steve Ritchie.
(If you're primarily a video game fan, you probably know Ritchie better as a voice actor: "FINISH HIM!!!" His impressive voice is also often heard coming from his pinballs.)
It wasn't, by a long shot, the first multiball pinball, but it was the first multiball of the solid-state era, and the moment when it took, so to speak: after Firepower, almost every pinball had a multiball mode. It was also the first one where the user could rotate the lit rollover lanes by pressing the flipper button. It's a fast, simple, kind of brutal layout. The only real long-term table goal is multiball. You've got to hit those six little standup targets in the center repeatedly to light the locks for multiball, and every time you do, you risk draining the ball right down the middle. I find it addictive. I first encountered it in Farsight Software's Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection, played it more in their later sim The Pinball Arcade, and eventually got to play it for real at the late lamented Pinball Wizard Arcade.
How does Raster Blaster stack up to the original? It looks almost drab by comparison, for one thing: the real pinball is covered with all this glorious fake-Jack-Kirby-meets-fake-Star-Wars art. Budge couldn't do anything like that with the simple graphics at his disposal. He did get in a clever parody of the Bally logo, though.
The feel is OK but not great. It feels to me like the ball is very light and floaty (a common problem with early simulated pinballs) but the flippers are weak to compensate. Sort of the opposite of Zen Pinball FX's excesses. But if you'd never played pinball on a computer before, or only encountered something like Atari's 2600 Video Pinball cartridge, this would have been amazing--it's aping a real machine and one that had made a big splash just one year before.
My previous post showcased David's Midnight Magic by David Snider, which came out not long after. You'll notice a similarity of presentation, down to the big script-lettering version of the author's name (no longer parodying the Bally logo, I suppose). But whereas Raster Blaster imitated Firepower, David's Midnight Magic imitated... Steve Ritchie's other great 1980 pinball machine Black Knight. This was one of the first machines to have a multi-level playfield, and I think it also introduced Magna-Save. It's another one that I was introduced to through Farsight's sims (unfortunately Farsight lost the Williams license so you can't buy these in The Pinball Arcade any more!) and also eventually played in real life. I'm not quite as fond of it as Firepower (I prefer the sequel Black Knight 2000), but it's if anything more famous than Firepower. Long before I played any version of it, I remember reading about it in a Science 80 article covering the development of a new pinball (Black Knight) and a new videogame (which was Star Castle).
Again, the technical impossibility of even approaching the great artwork of Black Knight is unfortunate, but we can chalk that up to the times. I think the feel of the table has similar problems to Raster Blaster: the ball feels too floaty (almost like the light plastic Powerball in Twilight Zone) but the flippers too weak. But, again, this would have been amazing in 1982. When Atari tried to make a port for the 2600, they were probably stymied by the platform's technical limitations and ended up with a completely different, unrelated pinball, marketed as just Midnight Magic--which I personally find far more addictive than David's Midnight Magic, for some reason, though it doesn't have multiball or a two-part playfield.
Bill Budge, for his part, went on to make the epochal Pinball Construction Set for the nascent Electronic Arts (back when they were the cool, artsy, envelope-pushing video game company), one of the first games to offer the general public an editor that they could use to make their very own custom games! I didn't have this program back in the day and I've only scratched the surface of it--my impression from messing with it just a little is that its user interface is kind of touchy and unforgiving by modern standards, but a lot of time has passed since the early 1980s. One of the things it could do was allow you to save your pinball as a standalone executable, and apparently these user-created pinballs (most of them undoubtedly very bad) absolutely infested the BBS scene in those days.
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Date: 2019-05-30 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-31 03:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-31 03:40 am (UTC)Raster Blaster seems to have been intended to be played with a joystick controller in each hand, with the buttons acting as flipper buttons.
David's Midnight Magic uses something like the 2600 Video Pinball scheme, where you push left and right on a single joystick to operate the flippers... but the mapping seems to be backwards: pushing left operates the right flipper and vice versa. I don't know if this is some emulation quirk or if it's actually how it worked.
The box art lifted from the Apple version shows the player holding two paddle controllers (kind of like with 2600 Bumper Bash), and with Atari's paddle controllers, because of the way they were mapped, the buttons would indeed operate the flippers that way... but it left no way to operate the plunger to shoot the ball, so that wouldn't actually work. The game also had a one-dimensional nudge via the space bar; the tilt seems pretty sensitive. I think there are keyboard controls for the Magna-Saves but I haven't figured them out.