There is no doubt that pinball is currently going through a great resurgence and is the ‘in’ thing right now, but the silverball game was struggling to stay relevant in the 21stcentury and was subsequently killed off in October 1999 before it could showcase the future of pinball with the Pinball 2000 platform. Wow, that was 20 years ago!
To observe the anniversary of pinball’s downfall, let’s turn the clock back two decades. It was the last year of the nineties and the last for the 20th century, so just like Prince sang many moons ago, “I’m gonna party like it’s nineteen ninety-nine”! Ah 1999, we were all panicking about the inevitable doom that the Y2K bug was going to befall on all of us, but at least the year started well for pinball.
The story goes back a few years to 1997, the then President and CEO of Williams (WMS), Neil Nicastro, challenged the pinball division to come up with something new or risk being closed down. Williams’ designers worked hard throughout 1998 to come up with something innovative, a brand new kind of pinball machine, which became Pinball 2000. Pinball 2000 (P2K) fused video with classic pinball gameplay, almost like an early augmented reality (AR), it aimed to preserve what was great about pinball yet opening up new possibilities for a product that was on its last legs.
One of the most successful pinball designers of the decade, George Gomez and Pat Lawlor had shown their new modular creation and future of pinball, with the official unveiling of the Pinball 2000 architecture and the first game on the platform, Revenge From Mars, in January 1999. Even though Pinball 2000 was a success with Revenge From Mars selling 6800+ units, Williams’ President did not see that his pinball division had innovated enough to reinvigorate pinball. Once the last Pinball 2000 machine, John Popadiuk’s Star Wars: Episode 1, was released, Neil Dicastro and his executive team dropped a bombshell by jettisoning pinball in favour of gaming (gambling) slot machines, which was very lucrative for Williams. This meant that the next two Pinball 2000 machines, Wizard Blocks and Playboy, would never see the light of day – which is a darn shame. Closing down the Williams pinball division seemed like, at the time, the death of pinball.
As history would have it, the story of Pinball 2000 came to be, and its inevitable death, at the hands of Williams’ executives, but there was one company that survived and kept the pinball light flickering, Stern Pinball. A lot has transpired in pinball since 1999, with a new golden age that is currently in full swing, so the rest, as they say, is history. Long live PINBALL!
PS: There is a great in-depth documentary on Pinball 2000, TILT: The Battle To Save Pinball, which you can watch on Amazon Prime right now!
image sources: pinball2000.de & The Arcade Flyer Archive
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