- Mar 14, 2012
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An Afternoon At FarSight Studios
By Chris Friebus (aka shutyertrap)
By Chris Friebus (aka shutyertrap)
When most people think of Southern California, it’s of Hollywood, palm trees, and 70 degree weather. We locals like to brag about the fact that you can literally hit the beach in the morning, and go skiing in the afternoon thanks to the local mountain range where Big Bear Lake is, 7000 feet above and only 2 hours away from the ocean. That’s great in theory, but we the drivers of SoCal seem to lose our minds when so much as a drop of water hits the asphalt, and have no clue what to do when encountering snow, which in my case is why I don’t travel up the mountain in winter. I made an exception today though, ‘cause I had been invited to visit FarSight Studios as a representative of the Pinball Arcade Fan Forums. I’ve driven 350 miles just to play pinball in Vegas, as if I’m not gonna brave a little winter ice on the road to talk up the guys behind The Pinball Arcade.
Okay, I almost didn’t go.
And it’s a long story about me not having chains for my car and getting halfway up the mountain before finding out I needed them for real, as opposed to it being merely an ‘advisory’, and blah, blah, blah, get to some damned pinball already!
So I get to FarSight, walk in the front doors, and am greeted with something that puts a big smile on my face. A pinball table kinda but not really announced yet. It’s just sitting there next to the receptionist’s desk, as if it had been dropped off not 5 minutes earlier. Not really the case, but there it was, greeting me instead of the empty chair at the front desk. Across from the desk is a conference room. And it’s got Ripley’s and Cirqus Voltaire and Bride of Pinbot and Medieval Madness and Arabian Nights and a few others, just sitting there, powered down. And there’s not a person in sight or a voice to be heard. Actually, throughout my time spent there, FarSight Studios was a very quiet place.
Not wanting to be rude and start wandering about, tempted as I was, I took a look at the lobby walls. Much like a recording studio would do, mounted in frames everywhere were all of FarSight’s previous games, back to when they were doing educational titles for the NES and sports titles for Sega. While we fans of TPA might like to think of FarSight only in terms of pinball, the lobby walls attest to something else. But then there was that conference room of tables staring at me. Yep, it’s pinball all day, everyday now.
Eventually Bobby King finds me and starts giving me the tour. For those that don’t know, Bobby is the Director of Development at FarSight and Lead Designer of the Pinball Arcade.. Every office I poke my head into has a table, but they’re all powered down. Real quickly I realized, this isn’t an arcade that happens to have offices in it, which is what my fantasy version of FarSight was. Instead what I see in each office is a guy hunkered down in front of monitors, working on code. The tables are there for reference, not entertainment. Or at least not during office hours! As Norman Stepansky, FarSight’s audio engineer later put it, plenty of the guys clock out at the end of the day and then go right to playing the tables. Stopping by on a Saturday to play isn’t unheard of either.
Bobby leads me into a room with more tables, half of which I can’t mention. Let’s just say I’m very much looking forward to the next 6 months. They’re in various states of repair or tear down for future builds. In the middle of the room is Twilight Zone, glass still off the table (as is the case with a lot of the tables throughout the building), across from it is ST:TNG. Freakin’ pinball nirvana surrounds me.
We work our way to Bobby’s office, where Creature and Scared Stiff sit, powered down and glass off. Yeah, having tables not 5 feet from you with attract mode going is probably not conducive to getting work done. Bobby’s desk was much like everyone else’s I’d eventually visit; multiple monitors with controllers and developer kits at the ready.
As we start talking, it’s quickly established how aware of the fans everyone at FarSight is. Particularly those of us posting on digitalpinballfans.com. Bobby understands how excitable we can get for upcoming table releases, because he gets excited too. “It’s one of the treats of making this game; we get to dive into something that we love to play. It’s a different feeling than when you’re designing an original title, where with this game we’re recreating great classics that we like to play too. So the anticipation that you guys feel, we’ve been enjoying for like the 2 months before that.”
Of course, there’s a flip side too; anticipating the fan’s reaction. While iOS and Android will always get tables first (sorry console owners, that’s not gonna change!), those aren’t the preferred versions of most in the offices due to them having more limitations.
And not being able to nudge properly.
The tables are built for the consoles, and from there FarSight programmers try and eke out the best possible version and smoothest performance of that for the mobile devices. Sometimes that means ramps will be opaque, like on No Good Gofers. Other times it means special lighting tricks need pulling off like with what was done for Black Hole. So that first feedback FarSight gets is often met with them wanting to respond, “wait till you see it on the PS3!”
Bobby and I talked of what it was like for FarSight a year ago, just prior to the first pack of tables being released. They needed to drum up support from the pinball community. “Our biggest fear, which is a fear of everyone releasing a mobile title primarily through digital distribution channels was, are people going to notice our game. I mean, there are hundreds of games or apps being approved by Apple everyday. Were we just going to have a few sales in the first month and then it just trickle off?”
Fortunately The Pinball Arcade got a large push from Apple, being a featured game of the week, from Sony who eventually did similar on PSN, and Google who invited FarSight to their booth at Mobile World Congress. One year later, not only is the install base strong, it’s growing. And all with minimal advertising. FarSight embraced the fans early on, and despite having to deal with what sometimes might look like a non stop barrage of complaints on Facebook, it’s obviously paid off. “To get your guy’s feedback and help, cause you know, the fans on the fan forum, a bunch of you guys get beta builds and help us a lot out before we even release. That’s been very, very helpful.”
He’s counting on us for the future too. Bobby says, “One of our fears is that, well our goal is to release the best 50 tables of all time, and we’re gonna run out of those tables eventually! We’re not going to get them all, obviously. Some are just licenses that are impossible. We’ll end up having to release lesser known tables. So we want to create a fan base of people who are going to appreciate tables for at least a few more years.”
Ah, licenses. Talk about a convoluted mess. At various points in the day, I was treated to some insider talk of how silly it can get. Each license FarSight secures is good for only the one table intended. For instance, if they got the license for Indiana Jones and planned on doing the Williams version, they’d have to go through the entire process again to secure the rights for the Stern version. Before you get excited, Indy was never part of any of those discussions I was privy to. It’s just an example people!
Where it really can get screwy though is when you have ST:TNG, which is a CBS license, but Paramount holds the current movie license. Someone out there gets a wild hair up their butt that Star Trek in general is Paramount, and now you have to prove your license in fact has nothing to do with them, nor should it.
That’s a not so made up example!
What isn’t made up is that this is just a drop in the bucket for what’s going on with everyone’s favorite table request.
“Addams Family, you know we’d love to do, we’re just having problems getting an actual figure, a number of what that license would cost.”
Considering TZ and ST:TNG are out, I’d say 2 out of 3 isn’t bad when it comes to top requests. But what happens when neither of the tables in a pack are top 20? Are we, the core audience and customers in general, going to buy and appreciate older tables?
I asked about FarSight holding the license for only a limited amount of Williams/Bally tables and what that means for the future. I had heard Zen wanted to make ‘classic’ tables, and wondered if that spelled trouble. Bobby assured me that not only does FarSight have exclusivity on anything already made, it also includes a list of unmade tables. An extensive list that I was assured pretty much covered everything we’d ever want to see anyways. He did confirm though that Zen a few years back had gone after the Bally license, so the threat was real. Past tense.