October '88
"A fast, furious and incredibly addictive pinball game featuring - Trapdoors, Rollover Lanes, Mega-bumpers, 4 flippers, Bonus Lanes, extra balls, Ball Trap, Mystery Tube, realistic movement and MUCH MORE!!!"
What the press said
Light Gun Version
Codemasters were approached to make some games for Cheetah, a peripheral manufacturer. They had a Spectrum LightGun, showed us how it worked and said they needed it to ship with a bunch of Lightgun Games. The deadline was very short, a couple of months. We were busy but said that we could adapt Pinball Simulator and it would work. It wasn't the greatest game for a lightgun, but we helped delivered on the promise that Codemasters had made.
Having created a great system for being able to produce side on platformers and also a series of Simulators we wondered if we could start another series of games this time based on Pinball tables. The idea was to create one great high-quality generic Pinball table engine and editor and then be able to re-skin it quickly with different themes as a series of games. Ideally making each new Pinball game in a week.
Unfortunately, the reality was that we found the maths required on an 8-bit computer was beyond our skill base. The ball movement wasn’t perfect and that’s probably because we tackled it in completely the wrong way. The ball reads low-resolution screen pixels for collisions and angles rather than using a table of vectors to describe the visuals. As a result, half-way through production, we decided to cut our losses, and tidy this one up as much as possible and ship it as a stand-alone game that was added to the Simulator series.
Critically and commercially it did fairly well and people enjoyed the game, but several reviewers noticed the ball movement problems.
Story Behind Advanced Pinball Simulator
Fusion Retro Magazine : Issue 10
March ‘20
In this 4 page article, we explain to Chris Wilkins the story behind creating our first and last Pinball game.
Buy Fusion Retro Game Magazine here
