Coming Soon from Data East...
Around now, when a pinball manufacturer wants to build up hype for their new table, they can do YouTube and Twitch streams and go on podcasts and stuff. These are not things that Data East could do in the '90s.
When they started making tables with dot matrix displays (DMDs), they took the opportunity to have the attract mode of the display occasionally show a preview of their next game, like a movie preview, except 5 seconds long and in dot matrix form.
This caught me by surprise when it started happening on my Silver Ball Century streams -- I'd be setting up Batman and, wait, why is it playing the Star Trek music?
It's a great marketing tactic and I'm impressed that they had their releases planned out enough to do it. It also fits the flashy popcorn blockbuster vibe of their tables in general. The previews form an almost-chain of 11 pinball tables, with a Star Wars-shaped interruption:
- Batman has a preview of Star Trek, where the Enterprise glides across the display while the Star Trek theme briefly plays, in a much more familiar form than the over-the-top remix on the actual table.
- Star Trek has a preview of Hook. It flashes "COMING ATTRACTION", then a movie-rating-like box with a rating of "GF" for "Great Fun", then shows a sparkly Hook movie logo as it plays a snippet of its music.
- Hook does the same movie-style preview, rated GF for Great Fun, for Lethal Weapon 3.
- Lethal Weapon 3 jumps way forward and has a preview of Tales from the Crypt, a table that would not come out until a year and a half later. I wonder if they originally had one for Star Wars and then Lucasarts yelled at them for using their IP wrong?
- Star Wars has a preview of Rocky and Bullwinkle. The Star Wars table playing the Rocky and Bullwinkle theme, while flashing playfield inserts make a spotlight effect that waves over R2-D2 and the Death Star, is maybe the most incongruous example of a Data East preview.
- Rocky and Bullwinkle briefly puts up the Jurassic Park logo, with no music, which makes me even more convinced they got in trouble earlier for a Star Wars preview.
- Jurassic Park announces "ARNOLD'S BACK!" to begin the preview of The Last Action Hero.
- Last Action Hero has nearly the same preview of Tales from the Crypt that appeared on LW3.
- Tales from the Crypt previews Tommy with the musical logo and the motif from "See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me".
- Tommy, after you wait through the entire credits of the touring Tommy musical, shows a preview for WWF Royal Rumble.
- And WWF Royal Rumble has a preview for something called Deathball 2000, "the game people are dying to play!"
So what is Deathball 2000? Is it a game they planned but never made, as some have guessed?
Nope! It's a joking reference to a Weekly World News article.
Data East was increasingly getting in trouble with their licensors, who were often massive media conglomerates, for advertising things belonging to other media conglomerates on their tables. Movies have a long tradition of being able to do this, but as much as Data East wanted to advertise their pinball tables like movies, they couldn't keep doing it. So in some code updates, they took out the previews.
They never had a preview for their final tables, Guns N' Roses and Maverick. I figure that Deathball 2000 was them having fun with the end of that tradition.