We're heading into another rough time for pinball.
I believe the problem Stern faced in the late '00s is the question of "who are pinball machines for?" Part of the answer is kids going to arcades, or arcade-approximating locations, but they had missed the mark there with Family Guy (2007) being a machine that no kid-friendly location wanted. Shrek (2008), a re-skin of Family Guy, was a remedy to this.
Kids alone won't sustain pinball, especially when they have video games at home. Dedicated adult pinball players want to play for a long time and not spend a lot of money. And Stern hadn't yet figured out the pricing model for getting adult collectors with lots of money to spend that money on their machines. So we hit another pinball slump in 2009.
2009 also happens to be when the virtual pinball hobby community -- you know, the thing that has made this entire stream series possible -- was really getting going. Future Pinball provided the engine for anyone with an idea for a pinball table to make that table. Tonight's stream will end with two Future Pinball original tables, ones that endured enough to be preserved on web sites that are still up, and updated to modern graphics and physics.
Silver Ball Century starts at 8pm Eastern (@083) on https://twitch.tv/arborelia .
Here are the table links:
- Shrek - VPX by PaladinArcade
- Indiana Jones - VPX by JPSalas
- Batman: The Dark Knight - VPX by Bord
- CSI - VPX by Javier
- 24 - VPX by DGrimmReaper
- Superman - original table by SLAMT1LT - updated Future Pinball by TerryRed
- Blue vs. Pink - original table by Pinwizkid - updated Future Pinball by TerryRed
Oh by the way I can't really provide advice on how to set up Future Pinball so these tables work. Did you know that anything could have more elaborate and inexplicable steps than setting up VPX?
The only way I was able to do it was by following all the directions I could find in the Blue vs. Pink package, including getting halfway through and then they finally mention there's a pre-made zip file that has the correct versions of things, deleting the whole setup and starting fresh from that zip file, then re-running a bunch of configuration steps to fix things that weren't working in that pre-made zip file.