From: tyager@maxx.UUCP (Tom Yager)
Newsgroups: rec.games.pinball
Subject: Re: licensed themes
Date: 10 Sep 92 06:50:19 GMT
Organization: New Hampshire Public Access UNIX

In article <BuBw6D.37v@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>, mdchaney@fractal.ucs.indiana.edu (M Darrin Chaney) writes:
> I'm sure there's gotta be some theme.  If I just put a pin out with a 
> bunch of targets, each with a letter, and a point value, maybe some ramps...
> it wouldn't do as well as the flashy games.
> On the other hand, the flashy stuff doesn't add that much to game play,
> it's probably just a little more aesthetically pleasing.

A lot of what gets written off as "flash" is actually strategy. Back in the E-M
days, when you had a lot of grease and gears determining game rules, there
wasn't a lot of depth or strategy. What sets well-done modern games apart from
their "non-thinking" predecessors is that you can no longer win just by keeping
the ball in play. There have been exceptions (Hurricane comes to mind, although
I was never inclined to bother keeping the ball in play on that one), but if
what you're calling "flash" is the trend toward deeper game rules, I vote
for keeping it. Williams' Pat Lawlor (late of Funhouse and The Addams Family)
is my favorite designer for that reason--you can play one of his games ten
times or more and still not have been through all the rules and feature
modes. Call me a commie for not longing for the old "just keep the ball
a-movin'" days, but I like the challenge of a game that takes a few plays
to beat. The fringe benefit to those is that it takes a lot longer to
get bored with a game that has some depth--if you get a little tired of the
same-old-same-old, you can just switch to another playing style, focusing on
a different set of features.

Pat Lawlor and Williams aren't the only ones doing this. Premier's Surf 'N
Safari and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Super Mario Bros., both had pretty
deep rules sets and lots of feature modes to keep things interesting. DE is
getting better at it, but Williams still has the upper hand in one important
(to me, at any rate) area: feature mode overlap. Multiball AND Frenzy AND
Super Dog? No problem! That's good code.

> This isn't always true.  Funhouse is an excellent modern example.  It was
> hugely successful, and there were no royalties.  The Williams natural
> disaster series was popular, also, and again, no royalties.  Certain 
> companies like DE have to use some gimmick (latest movie, for instance)
> to attempt to make their otherwise boring games semi-palatable to the
> normal crowd.  Sorry, DE, I don't go for it.

Williams ran an ad in the latest Play Meter thanking its customers for making
The Addams Family its best-selling pinball machine ever. It's breaking earn-
ings records left and right. Find another reason to pick on Data East; they're
hardly the only ones playing the licensing game.

What is inherently wrong with licensed themes? If Williams, Data East or
A.G. & Company choose to throw $10 per game at some movie studio, why should
you care as long as the game is good? Very frankly, one major reason for my
appreciation of The Addams Family is the terrific Raul Julia digitized
voice soundtrack. I'll admit that I used to be more of a purist, worrying over
whether I'd still like a game if the licensed artwork, music and voices were
stripped from it, but now I don't think that way. Yeah, so it's blatant
commercialism. Welcome to America. That TAF was licensed didn't make it
any less enjoyable or successful; the same is true of T2. And in both cases
I feel strongly that Williams/Bally's handling of the licensed theme actually
resulted in a more enjoyable game than if they had just done a non-licensed
piece based on roughly the same idea.

I will say, though, that I have no special affection for licensed themes. I,
too, thought Funhouse, Whirlwind, and even High Speed II were fine games. And
certainly Bugs Bunny and Harley-Davidson proved that even Williams/Bally can
choke on a license. Does it change the odds? Perhaps, but not that I've
noticed. A license doesn't make a good game worse, and it can't make a bad
game any better.

> I wouldn't like my generic pin up there, either.  Funhouse was great, partly
> because of Rudy continuously talking.  That's probably some of the attraction
> of TAF.  Gomez talks quite a bit, and it's really funny (I just recently
> got a chance to start playing regularly at the local Putt-Putt.).  Sure,
> it's something of a gimmick, but the game is interesting.

Pinball itself is a gimmick. It's a machine engineered to take your money and
give you just enough entertainment to make you want to play it again (but no
more than that). Gifted people stay up until all hours figuring out how to
keep playing time to around 3 minutes, and move things around on the playfield
to help the ball drain faster. Yep, it's art, and it's certainly fun, but
underneath it all, these are vending machines, and they use gimmicks to
make you want to shovel money into them.

> >(2) What makes the public want to play a game (hence good for the operator)
> >and profitable for the maker. 

(my apologies to the author of this part of the thread--I didn't attribute
you properly)

I made the argument earlier that a license can't make a bad game any better.
What it does do, however, is help draw that all-important first play. I've
played "fly on the wall" at some popular arcades in my area, and I'm seeing
TAF attract a lot of first-time players, including people who aren't
generally seen as pinball players, like women and people in their
40s and up. If a backglass and playfield artwork based on a licensed
theme can get someone who ordinarily doesn't play pinball to pop in a couple
of tokens, then it's worth the money the manufacturer shelled out for the
license. It's been my experience that licensed games have that drawing
power over non-licensed themes, even when the licensed games are standing
next to non-licensed games that are arguably better. The people who participate
in this newsgroup know a good game when they see one, and just don't care
whether a game's licensed or not. But Joe Arcade, faced with an array of
machines, is a lot more likely to drop his first tokens into a game with a
familiar theme. If Joe likes the game, he'll play again, and that's when
the power of the license sometimes fades. A license alone isn't enough to
bring in repeat business, and with new games costing $3000, either you
get repeat plays or you go under.

> >(4) Will a straight forward minimalist game ever compare with TAF for
> >excitment and profit.

Williams/Bally tried that with Harley-Davidson. Bleh. I will say, though,
that Premier's Silver Slugger (the first game I bought) is still one of
my favorites. It's got sentimental value, sure, but it's a kick for a single-
level game. There's certainly no danger of confusing it with an E-M pin,
though--there's still decent depth to the game's rules.

> Doubtfully.  The power of the computer has drastically changed pinball, and
> for the better.  I suspect that in the near future, we might be able to
> choose a certain "rule set" to play under when we walk up to a pinball
> game.  That would be interesting.

I like that. There's nothing stopping them; manufacturers have already made
room for bank-switched ROM sets that virtually eliminate the code-size
ceiling that once limited game programmers. I'm waiting for the day when
playfields, ROM code and backglass art become modular so pinball machines
can be changed over like video games. I wonder how much operators could save
by keeping the cabinet, electronics and coin door and swapping out the rest.

Giving the player more control over the game is something that's on the rise.
Fish Tales, Black Rose and Super Mario Bros. all let the player select
feature modes at various times during game play--I must say I prefer this to
"psuedo-random" feature mode selection. It makes you think on your feet, and
it's all part of the overall strategy-oriented challenge. I think your
vision of a machine letting you pick a rules set with your flippers will
come to pass, and it won't be long.

By the way, I just thought of a version of your notion: Premier's Car Hop
let you choose at game start whether you were playing in "modern" or
"nostalgia" mode, the latter knocking scores down to E-M levels and replacing
the sound effects with badly-done chime imitations. There is some precendent.

> mdchaney@iubacs mdchaney@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu mdchaney@rose.ucs.indiana.edu

This is an interesting thread, and I enjoyed your contribution to it. Very
thoughtful.
(ty)

-- 
Tom Yager, BYTE Multimedia Lab Director
           Author, Addison-Wesley UNIX programming book (Summer, 1991)
           Author, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich multimedia book (Fall, 1992)
           decvax!maxx!tyager, maxx!tyager@bytepb.byte.com