Skling !

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/pinball/comments/1lohfuy/pinball_2000_development_lore_or_qa/

I worked at Williams, as a programmer, mostly on Pinball 2000. If there are sufficient people who would like to hear some of the inside folklore of developing the system and working on the games, I’d enjoy sharing some of that and/or asking people’s questions. It was an intense period in my life, full of emotions, and I expect there are things only I know and also things only I remember. Mods, if this is out of line or there are specific ways to handle this, let me know and we can figure out an appropriate format

This was long, long before I came out to myself, so you won’t find anyone called Coral on any playfield. Please don’t out me, it’s not a secret but it is a rude thing to do to anyone! I figure this community will be kind, which is partly why I’m offering to share stories from the dinosaur days.

I’m going to gather up questions and answer them in top level comments so people don’t have to scroll around too much. I want to keep this about Pinball 2000 although I’ll cover some things to do with pinball at Williams in the broader sense, so I won’t get into what I did before that time, or after. Similarly I won’t tell other people’s stories unless I was part of what happened. So:

AMA and/or podcasts? Sure, I’ve no idea how an actual Reddit AMA works, and I don’t listen to podcasts, but if I got a sense that the audience was there I’d be amenable. I’d also consider being a guest on Twitch streams although I’d want a VTuber image or something rather than actual video from me

Which games did I work on?
Revenge From Mars, Star Wars Ep 1, Wizard Blocks

Other themes?
Haunted house, pinup girl, my own idea was for a sci-fi dive bar (I did the WPC version of Big Bang Bar). I’m sure there were others but I don’t remember them because I was so focused on WB

When? Mid 1996 to October 25th 1999

Working with the team? Awesome. I learned SO much in a very short period of time. It was my first real programming job after graduating. Everyone was super talented in either technical ability, game design sense, or both. Meeting so many of my idols like that was mindblowing. I treasure my memories of that time in my life

Drug use? Caffeine was probably universal, a handful also for nicotine

Background? I was hired to work on pinball, I didn’t transfer from elsewhere in the company

Workflow? For Pinball 2000 specifically we had PCI cards with flash memory instead of ROM, and an ISA card that could boot the system and download code via TFTP. We cross-compiled on Windows, downloaded and ran. The tools, including the ones for audio and video, had to run on Windows anyway so the artists and sound guys could use them. I used Visual Studio for all the tools, sometimes it was much easier to find bugs in them with source level debugging. We had a debugger for the Pinball 2000 runtime, but for what I did it was more useful to have a command line over a serial port that code could register commands and variables with. I’d just make a test command. I did a lot of low-level system work and in particular lots of graphics code, so I had a monitor and hardware before a full cabinet. It was easier when I could see the screen directly.

Round 2 of answers. I’ll also lay out what I think would be a good structure for longer posts so people can comment:

Leaving WPC?
We knew it would be a BIG deal. APPLE (the WPC system code) was very full-featured and so easy to work with. There was no getting around it though, if we hadn’t taken on Pin2k or something very like it we would’ve all been laid off probably in early 1998

Game 4?
I deliberately didn’t name it because I don’t know what the business details were. I wasn’t involved so it’s not my story to tell

Aerosmith?
Not to my knowledge. There’s Revolution X, the gun game from 1993-ish so maybe it’s to do with that. I wasn’t involved with licensing or with that game

Star Wars in secret?
Yes, it was strictly confidential and I’ll talk about that in a post. Point of order though, Midway was its own company at that time. The secrecy definitely affected the game’s development

Things cut from games?
Every game starts out with more ideas than can or would be implemented. All creative projects come with that sort of tension and part of making a good game is figuring out the right tradeoffs. I’ll talk about the ones I remember in regards to RfM in a post

Platform vs game development?
We did both games and pretty much all the platform/system work in parallel. There was so much to be done that we couldn’t have done them serially, plus having game programmers and artists with real needs helped me come up with better solutions to things that I had evidence were important rather than just having to guess. The motion-video stuff (for long animations like the Bally pinball-to-Mars attract mode movie, or the multiball start movie) is a great example of that

Post structure
Background, seeing the first prototype and joining the programming team
Early decisions on how to handle graphics and the display
Satisfying artists while still making smart compromises
Mutual respect and handling high pressure situations with big personalities
Higher-level support for graphical “display effects” akin to the WPC way of thinking
Miscellaneous silly anecdotes (as a break from the more technical things)
How we handled playfield lamps and flashlamps
Things I broke on accident
Why and how I made a whole FMV codec in a few short weeks
What I did on Revenge From Mars
What I did on Star Wars Episode 1 and how we handled the secrecy requirements
What I did on Wizard Blocks
What I would’ve done if I’d been able to make an entire game with my own vision

That’s 13 topics, and I won’t guarantee any particular schedule. If you have strong opinions on these topics, feel free to comment. Just remember the caveats I already laid out below!