- Mar 14, 2012
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I am a pinthusiast. Someone mentions pinball, and I’m all ears. Get me started talking about pinball and it’s hard to shut me up. I have my opinions and I’m all too happy to express them, whether you care to hear them or not. My wife can attest to this all too well, which is why she tells me to go find other pinthusiasts to talk to. She has a point too, because there’s quite a lot of fun for me in talking with a fellow pinhead, someone that gets the joy of flipping a ball up a ramp for a 4-way combo, or appreciates the artistry of table layouts, or likes debating the look of incandescent lights versus LEDs. More than that, I love to play real pinball with other people. So excuse the sorry pun of this and future articles, but flippin’ out is what I do over pinball. What follows is one such time…
Scott Shelton is an employee of FarSight Studios, makers of The Pinball Arcade. I have both the good fortune to live somewhat close to FarSight and to have access to its employees. For me, TPA has been a godsend. The amount of quarters it has saved me…well not many actually since I can’t seem to find a decent working selection of tables near me, or at least it often feels that way. No, what TPA has allowed me to do is learn how to play a table inside and out. Knowing how to score and extend the life of a ball? Yes please. The fact that I can walk up to a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not machine (again, if I could find one) and immediately know how to advance continents and set up 2x bonuses and just play the thing, well that’s half the battle, right? The other half is actually executing what you’ve learned. I still gotta work on that part.
What does any of this have to do with Scott? Well if you’ve ever played The Pinball Arcade, you’re familiar with his work. If you haven’t played, what’s wrong with you? 40+ machines, at your fingertips! It’s on practically every digital platform known to man! Pull your head out.
Where was I? Oh yeah, Scott’s work. So Scott is not a programmer, nor is he part of the art team, and he doesn’t deal with sound or the UI. You ever go into the table menu and read the instructions? Scott wrote those. You ever try and beat the Standard and Wizard goals? He set those up. Wonder who set the high scores to beat on each table? Yep, that’s him again. Do you enjoy vibration in your controller? Thank you, Scott.
So what better person to challenge to a round of pinball? And golly, at FarSight they just happen to have a whole slew of machines at the ready! Scott being the host, I let him pick the machine. He chose…
Cactus Canyon!
From 1998, the last table Bally ever made, and only 903 were produced (thanks internet!). I’ve been fortunate to play it in the pinball league I’m a part of, but unfortunately it kicks my butt solidly every time. And Scott knows all the rules. Some quick math here…I’m an average player on real tables and I only have a passing familiarity with how to score vs. the guy that wrote 413 pages of instructions for it. Uh oh.
[SIZE=+1]BALL ONE[/SIZE]
I go first. I ask Scott what he’d tell somebody new to the table to concentrate on. “The mineshaft for sure. Shooting the mine 2 or 3 times will activate multiball.” Easy enough, I seem to have an inability to not hit it in TPA!
“Hit the Bart head as often as you can.” Sure, big target, seemingly safe shot.
“The five pop up drop targets. These are used for Quick Draws and Gunfights, and after hitting one you’ll wanna collect the bounty at the head.” Okay, doable. Sounds like the approach I normally take anyway! Confidence somewhat restored.
I ask if there are any sucker shots, something to cause instant drains. He warns against the ramps. Dammit. I’m attracted to ramps like a moth to the flame. “If you don’t get the ball all the way up the ramp, when it comes back down, it really comes back down!”
I plunge, immediately have a bad guy pop up, shoot and miss, the ball goes part way up the left loop. (It helps if you read this like a basketball announcer calling play by play!) I try to catch the ball with the left flipper, it bounces and clears the slingshot…and into the left outlane. Yep, this machine hates me. But wait, ball saver was still active! Hurray for losing a ball within 10 seconds. Another bad guy has popped up. I nail him and collect the bounty. And then I inexplicably forget where the ball is gonna come from and watch it get sent down the center. Oops.
Scott takes his turn, almost immediately collects a bounty. The ball gets sent to the bumpers, where it proceeds to bounce around for a solid 15 seconds. No nudging needed, that ball just bounced and bounced and bounced. Once it came down, two flips, a wild bounce, and a rocket down the middle.
2 million to 1.7, I’m leading. “Playing real pinball reminds me of how lousy I am at it,” says Scott.
I ask Scott how he approaches a table when it comes to finding out all the rules and modes there are. While every table has that index card with some basics printed on it, it’s usually about as informative as asking how to paint a portrait and being told to find your subject, mix some paint, and put it on the canvas. Easy!
“Pinball Database has some rules that are often maybe 50-60% accurate, but it’s a good place to start. Our goal is to make it a whole lot more detailed.” After that, when Scott has the table in front of him, he tries to identify all the major modes, of which he makes a list. With the glass off, he starts rolling the ball around the table, seeing how scores are tallied, what changes each time something new is activated.
“A lot of times to start multiball, the locks are lit immediately, but each time after it takes more and more hits. I try to show how as things progress they get harder and harder.” Scott has written every instruction list for every table since Pinball Hall of Fame: Williams Collection. He says he has refined his approach and gotten a lot better since those days. “Back then when I wrote ‘em, I was like, shoot some targets, activate multiball, have fun!” When it came time to write the rules again for Pinball Arcade, he started with that text, but wound up throwing it out, rather than just adding to what was already written.
“Not only was it too short and not detailed, I was often just plain wrong!”
It’s no small task Scott is attempting. It takes a lot of time to run through every possible scenario a table might offer. He does say it has gotten easier though. “I’ve gotten much better, to the point that now I can identify a given designer’s tricks.” For instance, if it’s a Steve Ritchie table, he knows there’s gonna be a hurry up, probably some alternating ramp shots, some ball locks, that sort of thing.
Sometimes even Scott gets stumped though. For instance, he might know there’s a particular mode that opens only after a certain sequence is shot, but can’t figure out what that sequence is. A classic example of this applies to Cactus Canyon. On some rule cards that went out with the machine, Bionic Bart is mentioned. Scott, not knowing the history of the table and the demise of its development team, was at wits end trying to figure out how to activate Bionic Bart. Only after consulting pinball boards did he come to find out that double B was dropped from the final game.
“I don’t think the table manufacturers were ever expecting that some 25 years down the line someone would come and try and break down how to play a game in its entirety.”
Norman Stepansky, sound designer for FarSight has suddenly appeared. “Gottlieb tables were the worst, with little 16 page instructions!” Norman can’t resist conversations like this. Norman pretty much can’t resist any pinball discussion. I’m saving him for another day though!
When Scott was putting together the instructions for the PHOF collections, it was worse. “I was going off videos of the guys that worked here before me, and I could only see what they recorded, as they poked and prodded various switches. The old tables that we didn’t emulate, were just sooo wrong.”
Witness what happened with Black Hole. When FarSight originally put out the table, they had it set so that when the ball went into the lower playfield, the gate that is triggered by shots down there would just open and close as you hit targets. The reason being, the machine they were using at Tim Arnold’s Pinball Hall of Fame had a broken lower field! Scott and others were purely speculating on what should happen. He looked at the manual, and based on how it was worded, thought the gate reacted each time targets were hit.
“We later finally got a real working Black Hole here, and when we played it for the first time we were like, whoa, that really changes how you play the game!” Funnily enough, after fixing it, some people complained and said FarSight broke Black Hole. “No, you just never saw it working correctly.”
[SIZE=+1]BALL TWO[/SIZE]
From the launch, I get a gunfight. I dispose of the baddy right away, collect the bounty. So far Scott’s advice is proving correct. The train starts rolling, which means shooting for ramps. Hate to say it Polly, but yer gonna die! And die she does, as my shot for a ramp leads straight to a drain. Just as Scott had warned.
Scott’s second ball also starts with a gunfight. His villain is a little more elusive. It takes a few tries, but he does “ventilate” his bad guy. Immediately a Quick Draw event happens. He nails it, collects bounty, and starts yet another gunfight! His ball finished much like mine, in a failure to rescue Polly.
Somehow, despite not really accomplishing anything, I come just shy of 4 million points. Scott meanwhile now has just over 4 million. Can you stand the tension?!
Another aspect of Scott’s job is to come up with the table goals. “Any goal people think is impossible, I’m the guy to yell at,” he says with a wicked smile. Coming up with goals on older tables, like the EMs, he finds tricky, especially when making it point based. Skill levels vary so much among players, it’s hard to find the proper balance.
“I write the goals after I’ve written the instructions. I set the default high scores, and even that is difficult.” Scott plays The Pinball Arcade a lot. Like, over and over again, for hours. Nothing like being your own testing department. At least he has an office with windows! He needs to be sure the rules he observed on the real table are applying to the digital version. As such, most around the office say he is quite good at playing it. So what he does to set the high scores in game is, take his average high score and cut it in half. Usually that’s fine.
“On Cactus Canyon, there was a major re-tuning of the game the day before it was submitted. That made the 800 million I had set as the high score quite unobtainable. Like I would look at the leaderboard and no one was even close!”
They sent in a fix for it, but if anyone had already set a score before the fix, they were stuck with the 800 million to beat.
“I’ve set some too high, others too low, but it’s just really difficult to judge everyone’s skill level. We want you to feel like you are a great pinball player. It’s not 100% accurate to a real table, because let’s face it, these things were designed to take your money.”
[SIZE=+1]BALL THREE[/SIZE]
I’ve hit drop target bad guys, I’ve hit Bart’s head to collect bounties and such, time to try Scott’s 3rd tip, shooting the mine for multiball. But first I gotta eliminate another bad guy that just popped up. Done. Collect the bounty, shoot for the mine. I said shoot for the mine. What the hell? This mine shaft has some sort of force field around it! It has to, because I can’t get the ball in there after repeated tries. Instead I get yet another gunfight, I dispose of…GET IN THAT SHAFT! Yeah! One ball locked. Now let’s get another. Or not. Lost the ball. Crappola.
Scott can smell victory. He locks one ball. He locks a second ball. I’m preparing to hang my head in shame. If he hits that 3rd lock, it’s multiball for him and his score will rocket beyond mine. Norman appears again and distracts me from my demise with talk of buying actual machines. A few moments later, it’s all over.
I asked Scott for a little history of his pinballing experience. “I’m 41, so when I was starting to get into it, pinball was starting to die.” He goes on to say that his dad was really into playing, so from the time he was a little kid he’d see his dad play, learning by osmosis.
“We’d go to a bowling alley and my dad would drop the coin in and just play all day on that one quarter.”
Scott being of the generation he is, helped usher in the demise of pinball in a way. Video games were much more appealing. It’s all your fault Scott. Having not really touched a table since the early 80’s, getting the job at FarSight was a bit of an eye opener.
“I was aware that pinball was still being made, but seeing the toys and level of interactivity…my preference now is for DMD games, anything after 1990.”
Apart from playing them at the various shows FarSight goes to, Scott hasn’t played much of the newer Sterns. He’d love to get the opportunity to break one down and delve into its rule set. I warned him to be careful what he wishes for. He’s not sure anything could be worse than Twilight Zone.
“The sheer number of modes…I call them pages, but they’re really lines of instructions, and Twilight Zone had 700 and something.” The next nearest only hits around 500. Every day for a month, all Scott was doing was breaking down modes on TZ. How does that compare to the norm? (No, not that one!) Most tables he can break down the rules for in a week. On really older tables, it only takes a day.
Like I mentioned earlier, Scott writes the rules, and then he has to test them in game. He says sometimes things pop up that surprise him, and Norman chimed in. (Again? Dude, I swear I’ll interview you eventually!) Sometimes Norman had the wrong ROM chip installed on the machine compared to what is in the game, which obviously meant Scott had to write up and test a new set of instruction pages.
While Bobby King does all the tuning of the tables for TPA, Scott sends him a big list of adjustments he feels is needed as he intimately knows how hard or easy getting certain shots should really be. He tries to make sure that everything you can do on the real table can be done in game too. The Pinball Arcade is set according to how the machines at FarSight play, and we all know that no two tables play exactly alike. 40 tables in, it’s fairly apparent that there is an established FarSight sensibility as to how tables play in the game.
“We know, the way these machines are designed, what the manufacturer intended for you to be able to do. For us, we want there to be some satisfaction in accomplishing that. Being able to backhand, the way a ball will bounce from flipper to flipper, we’ve had to tune all that.”
[SIZE=+1]FINAL SCORE[/SIZE]
My sad little score that came nowhere near the 30 million needed for a replay? 7.2 million. Scott’s final tally? 6.5 million. How is that possible? Apparently only going for the mineshaft isn’t the way to go.
I win! Much rejoicing. I accept a FarSight t-shirt as my prize.
Okay, I would have gotten the t-shirt regardless. The true prize was getting to play real pinball, as it always is. You know how there’s that saying, “a bad day fishing is always better than a good day at work”? I think the same can be applied to pinball. Especially when you are playing it with someone just as passionate about pinball as yourself.
And beating them doesn’t suck either!
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good stuff. notice any random popouts from the right orbit?
