Well, as I finally got an interview with Digital Illusions I thought it would be a good Idea to make a club mail and include it. DI is, if you didn't already know it, the famous company (at least when you talk about pinballs) that made the even more famous pinball, Pinball Dreams! When PD came, it was new and very high tech, it made new standards in the making of pinball simulations and it also showed us that pinballs on the computer can be very good. It wasn't first and I'm not saying classics such as David's Midnight Magic or Nightmission are bad, but they belong to their own genre of pinballs, PD was the beginning of a new. I guess I sound a little dramatic, so what?? :)
There is also some smaller articles in the mail that I thougth could me fun to read. One article from the news page is also included. I had no Idea a vr pinball existed untill some weeks ago when I happened to find an article about it.
Also I have this time added a club survey, thought I'd ask some questions concerning the page and so. It is just a some questions that might be of general interest.
Andreas Axelsson (AXL) is one of the founders of Digital Illusions, the swedish programming company that made the famous pinball trilogy consisting of: Pinball Dreams (1992), Pinball Fantasies (1992) and Pinball Illusions (1994). They also released True Pinball (1996) for playstation, TP is a 3D version of Pinball Illusions.
Today Digital Illusions consist of 19 people working full time. The founders and owners are Andreas Axelsson and Fredrik Liliegren.
Since I for one love DIs pinballs and since Pinball Dreams was the first really good pinball simulation (the one that really showed people pinball simulations can be good), I can only se reasons to why this interview should be and has been made. I hope you will like it!!
* The Interview
B I O G R A P H Y
Q: Introduce yourself a little! Who are you, where do you live, etc...
A: Ah, well, I'm 24 years old, and I live in Gothenburg, Sweden. Apart from working at DI, I work out with my guitar, watch action-movies, meet my friends and try to do all the stuff I never had time to do when I was younger.
Q: How was your youth, where did you grow up, family?
A: I was brought up far out in the middle of nowhere, a place called BlΣdinge, in the south of Sweden. I don't care much about that place now, but I had lots of time to hack away on the computer. My parents have moved away from there anyway. I have a brother and a sister, both younger than me. Thanks to my dad who bought my early computers. I owe him one!
Q: What was your relation to pinballs (real ones and/or sims), did you play them a lot? Which one was/is your favorites?
A: The place where I lived didn't have many real pinball-games, so each time I got near one I just had to play it. I compensated by playing a lot of sims. Pinball Wizard (amiga) and Night Mission (C64) are the ones I remember the most. Right now I play Twilight Zone, Attack from Mars and some others.
Q: How did you come in contact with computers? Did you use them a lot?
A: I was parked in front of an ABC80 once when my mom was having a meeting with someone. I believe I played "masken" without interrupt for the whole hour. I was nine or ten years old then. Soon after my dad bought an ABC80, cause I'd been begging for a computer since that day. After that I was hooked. I used it as often as possible.
Q: When did you start programming and how come you got interested in programming at all?
A: With the ABC80 came a few books on BASIC-programming, and since the computer was swedish, the manual was in swedish too. I think I made my first <print "hello"> about a month after I got the ABC80.
Q: Did you make any early programs or games that you still remember?
A: I got halfway through a conversion of Boulder Dash (C64) on the Amiga, but I made a lot of small tools and utils before that. A paint-program on ZX Spectrum was the first real utility. I was 12 then I think.
Q: What did you do before you started Digital Illusions? Read you had a demo group, The Silents?
A: I never cared too much about the "scene". I was in it for about two years, before I thought games would be more interesting. I was a member of The Silents, but I didn't give it much effort. I had come to know Fredrik (Animal) since he lived in Alvesta, close to where I come from, and I joined Silents cause he wanted me to. I only made one or two demos for them, nothing spectacular. Pinball Dreams was originally supposed to be a Silents product though.
D I G I T A L I L L U S I O N S
Q: How come Digital Illusions was formed. I understand Pinball Dreams had a lot to do with it, tell me more.
A: Digital Illusions was, quite simply, formed from members of The Silents, when we discovered that Pinball Dreams would actually be a real game that we could sell.
Q: Where did the name Digital Illusions come from?
A: Two boxes of beer and a hard night. :)
Q: When you formed DI, what were the future plans? Did you have a lot of trouble finding someone who would publish your first product (Pinball Dreams)?
A: The only plan right then was to get Dreams published. We were turned down by a lot of companies before 21st Century picked us up. I still remember Gary Bracey at Ocean who didn't even want to look at it. Ocean later bought True Pinball though, and I heard Gary got fired.
Q: Of course since you had seen what a big success PD was you could safely release a sequel. But still, how come you at DI dared to enter this unsafe territory from the beginning, a territory where it might be hard to make your products name a name all gamers knew. Maybe I am wrong and it wasnÆt that risky and unsafe, how was it?
A: It wasn't at all risky, since we'd done everything as a hobby project. If nobody had bought it, we'd probably released it as a Silents game and made something else. All of us were still in school, so getting PD published was nothing we depended on.
Q: Who were the original members of DI, did anyone join in as the company made a name? Who are the members today? Introduce them briefly.
A: DI started out with me (programming), Fredrik Liliegren (moral, design, testing), Olof Gustafsson (music, sfx) and Ulf Mandorff (ball-handler programming). We tested a few different graphics-artists before we settled on Markus Nystr÷m, who was a new recrute in Silents at the time. During the next two years we added four new people and Ulf quit. The new people were two coders (Bosse, Thomas) and two graphics-artists (Joakim, Patrik), working on two projects. After that we've grown quite a lot, and during the last year (96-97) we've become 19 people working full-time.
Q: What was your role in Digital Illusions? I understand you were one of the two owners but I wonder more about your role in the team. I understand you where the main programmer, what was it like?
A: I'm mainly a programmer, but the role is going more towards a project manager, since I've been in the business so long. Right now I'm coding utility libraries for our future projects, as well as finishing off the AI routines for our new racing-game.
Q: DI programmed a lot of games for the Amiga, did you program for other computers too? Also I understand you went over to program only for the PC, how come?
A: Personally I programmed whatever got in my way, but the games were just for Amiga back then. When we left the Amiga, it was dying. There was no way a game could have sold enough for us to make a living. All eight people at that time were all working solely for DI and had no other income. We didn't go for the PC right away, but we needed the PC to do games for Saturn and Playstation. The development hardware wasn't available for any other platform. Last year we started working on our first in-house PC game ever.
Q: I read you worked on a version of Pinball Dreams for GameBoy, was that ever finished?
A: Both PD and PF were released for Gameboy, but the conversion was done by Spidersoft Ltd. DI had nothing to do with that.
Q: Is Digital Illusions still in the business? I canÆt remember hearing anything about DI in the last few years. If so, what are DI working on now? If not, why, what happened, DI seemed to be going well!?
A: Our last product was S40 Racing for PC, which was released about a month ago. It's a branch of a much larger game which're finishing right now. Before that we released True Pinball for Saturn and Playstation. It's mainly a 3d prerendered version of PI, but it's got completely reworked code, modes, sounds and graphics.
Q: What are you and the rest of DI doing today? Still living in Sweden?
A: We've got our head office in Gothenburg and we're currently 19 people.
Q: What is your best memory from the time you have been working with Digital Illusions?
A: I hope I haven't experienced it yet! But if I have to choose then getting Pinball Dreams published was probably the most exiting thing so far, even if I might have enjoyed other things more.
P I N B A L L T R I L O G Y
Q: Tell me the background for Pinball Dreams, I guess you didnÆt just decide to make a pinball and then sat down and started doing one.
A: You just wrote the answer right there, though I'd say the starting spark was a friend who'd drawn a few pinball-tables for fun. It was just something to do instead of another demo.
Q: Pinball Dreams really was impressing both in feeling and layout when it came out. Where did the ideas for the table designs and such come from (also where did the I deas for the other pinballs tables come from)?
A: I guess we've been influenced from every pinball-game there is. You can probably find constructs that look quite a lot like parts from various tables on our designs, but there is just so much you can do with steel wire and plastic. We usually got a basic idea which we created as an outline in black and white, and adjusted until it felt good to hit all spots. The ball-handler was written before we even considered making anything else, and thus we could test the tables from scratch.
Q: You released Pinball Fantasies, the second pinball in your trilogy, the same year as Pinball Dreams got out. Where you that sure Pinball Dreams would be a success that you had a sequel ready or where you just fast programmers? Just curious :)
A: Fast programmers! No, to be honest, we'd been working for over three years with PD and we had to get it finished, but we had so many ideas left that we couldn't cram into PD that PF was more of a 1.5 code with 2.0 tables than a complete 2.0. <Yeah, they only improved three things. Graphics, Sound and Playability... - Iain> As soon as we finished PD we went to USA and spent three months with some friends in Seattle while working on PF. It was almost finished when we got back home.
Q: If now Pinball Dreams had impressed people, Pinball Fantasies did a even better job. How did it feel to have made a pinball that stayed at Top Lists for months and yet more months.
A: Great!
Q: What do you think was the reason that Pinball Fantasies became so popular?
A: It stayed true to it's objective of creating a good simulation of a pinball-game, and there wasn't really any competition back then.
Q: Your third pinball, Pinball Illusions, has recived some mixed reviews, but is often mentioned as the best one in the trilogy (I like PF more somehow). It really is different from Dreams and Fantasies. How come it became so different?
A: We'd lost the one of our programmers, Ulf, that originally made the ball-handler, and to be honest, I didn't understand how it worked, so I had to make a new one. I think that's the biggest difference really. The fact that we had a lot more processing-power added more to the scoring-system and effects than to the gameplay.
Q: Pinball Illusions also became your last pinball (at least you havenÆt released any more at the time), how come?
A: Pinball Illusions evolved into True Pinball for Saturn and Playstation, so there is a new game, but to the point. When we released True Pinball, I'd personally been working, or spending nearly all my available free time on the pinball projects for about seven years. We thought there was time to do something different. The market got flooded with crappy immitations too, and we didn't think our name was big enough for people to raise an eye for the right one.
Q: Still I wonder, are there any plans to make another, fourth, pinball?
A: Hehe, have I tried to sneak away from that question over the years... I wouldn't leap with joy over the opportunity, and we defenitely haven't got any plans that I know of. Never say never though.
O T H E R
Q: Some years back you wrote a kind of diary for a time in the swedish computer magazine DMZ (r.i.p), I know because I still have some of the issues (not all) with it left! I read there that you were working on lots of things, pc versions of some of your pinballs, Malfunction, Benefactor, Hardcore and some car game. What more games did you develop?
A: Malfunction was canned, 'cause I got bored with it. It would have been a little like System Shock on the PC if it had been finished. Benefactor was released for Amiga and CD32 and Hardcore was almost finished for Sega Megadrive, but was canned byt the publisher when 16-bit suddenly died overnight. Honestly, I don't remember what we did all that time, cause we lived some kind of life outside the real world. I sometimes had problems telling what month it was, and we were often working until 8 o'clock in the morning.
Q: Benefactor I bought, kinda liked it, fun puzzling but too easy (ok, maybe I sat with it a while then ;)). But what happened to all those other games you were working on? Did anything become as popular as PD, anything that you were especially satisfied with?
A: See last question. Additionally I can say that Hardcore would've kicked major ass if it had been released on the Megadrive. It was the best shoot-em up ever on that machine. I'd buy a Megadrive today, solely to play that game if we could get it on a cartridge.
Q: What do you think of the pinball simulations that has been released today? Got any favourites? btw. Funny how some of them almost always have layouts that in some way resembles your pinballs tables! :)
A: To be honest, I haven't played them. I can afford real pinball now and when playing games I prefer flight-sims or racing-games.
Q: Got anything else to add?
A: I'd like to thank everyone who bought our games (and spit in the face of those who pirated them). BTW, FMV sucks and I can't imagine how I'd ever be able to fill an entire DVD-disc without making it an advertisement for music or real film. Realtime rules. Check out our www-site on http://www.bdi.bonnier.se (slowest update on the net, but at last it's there!) The diary is back there too!
B T W
Q: Could you email me your autograph (or autographs, the others at DI can send theirs too ;)) ? Perhaps a color outprint of one of the Pinball Dreams tables with the names of those who made it on it. Hey, maybe it will get collectors value some day!! Ok, don't take me that seriously on this question, just kidding ;) (my adress: sam gabrielsson, x#xñx, x/(xx, x+x0x 30, xx1 xx, bxxxn).
A: I'll just not take this question seriously then.
Released on October 8th (sometime around that date), 3D Ultra Pinball(3): The Lost Continent. It is the third pinball in Sierras pinball series.
This time you are part of a team that has crash landed in a unexplored jungle. You notice that dinosaurs and cave-men still exist there, it is like the place was protected by time. A lost continent. You must now explore the jungle by playing trough various multi-tables linked together in different ways. The object seems to be to find the plane, which pieces are spread out all over the jungle, and get home.
As you might have figured out the tables layouts are based up on jungle like surroundings and also feautures dinosaurs that move over the table. It is a lot like Jurassic Park, at least the intro (stomping sound and shimmering water). From the little I have played I can only say that I thought the feeling was quite similar to the other two in the series, maybe a little bit improved but hardly noticeable.
I belive that if you liked any of the other two in the series you will like this one. Otherwise I haven't played enough of it to give it a fair review.
The installation is extremely easy. You just follow the steps of the installer and you have a working version of Windows95 on your Mac. Since VirtualPC emulates the working of the Intel chip (plus sound card, plus video card) everything works fine. In a sense it is easier to work with VirtualPC than with a real PC machine since all the settings are done through the VirtualPC emulator.
Testing the pinballs
A major drawback of VirtualPC: it does not distinguish between left and right shift keys. This is a Mac related difficulty but since VirtualPC is meant to create a PC inside your Mac it should have taken care of this problem already in this version. I intend to contact Connectix and ask that they provide a fix for this problem. As a result of the nondifferentiation of left and right shift keys and since most PC pinballs use these keys for the flippers one cannot play them correctly. (Of the PC pinballs in my possession: Pinball Arcade, Pinball Dreams, Pinball Fantasies, Extreme Pinball and Royal Flush only the first allows the player to remap the flipper keys. This is something one should talk about to the developers of pinball simulations).
Conclusion
The main conclusion concerning playability: everything works VERY slowly. I guess that the speed is not better than that of a 20 MHz machine. Royal Flush has the extra problem that the ball disappears most of the time which makes the game certainly non playable. All the tests were performed on a 3400 Powerbook with a 180 MHz 603e processor. One would probably obtain better performances out of a faster machine (but the faster in my possession is a 9500 with a 132MHz 604 processor).
Psyberball is the probably only pinball under development directly and exclusively for OS/2. Well, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that part about it being the only one. This pinball has been under development for a long long time now, so I thought I'd try to find out how it is going with it. The pinball is being developed by a group called Psybermedia (former Mages/2).
I talked a little with the graphics designer of Psyberball:
"I'm not sure how it's going with Psyberball completely anymore. It's always been a very strange project, because it's being done by people who have never, and very likely never will, meet. Almost everyone's in a separate country. I am the designer for the graphics, but have done little with them recently, for a couple of reasons which I hope to be able to explain on the web page sometime soon. There haven't been any further alpha [beta] versions released since early 96 for those reasons. I don't have any pictures of Psyberball, but it probably wouldn't be difficult for me to make one up. I don't think the tables I have worked on are very finished though. A couple of the themes I have worked on were a billards/pool table, and a lightning-storm. The graphics intended for the next release had a cartoon bee. There is supposed to be a table construction set so that people can make their own table-themes."
Official Psyberball Homepage: http://www.nmia.com/~graphiti/psyberball/
Pro Pinball: Timeshock! has now entered the PC Games Top 100. It first entered at position number 100 and has now climbed to position 81!!!
If you like it and want to vote for it, go to http://www.worldcharts.com/
The more votes it gets the higher it will climb in the chart and hopefully it will then get more exposure. Remember: More exposure means even more magazines will write about it and that more stores will support the game which leads to it making more many and the more money leads to more great pinballs!!! Well, hopefully it is like that! :)
In case you have missed, a demo for Pro Pinball: Timeshock! is available from the official site for the pinball at Empire.
The demo is around 20Mb big. The demo is win95 only and requires DirectX 3 (or better) to run. It is score limited (50M). There is some speech, no music. Only one table view. Graphics resolution limited to 640x480 with up to 64K colors.
The demo will also probably appear on coverdisks to different computer magazines in the US. Uncertain if it will also appear in Europe.
Have you ever visited Toronto's CN Tower? Among the many attractions that the CN Tower has to offer, included is the MindWarp theatre. This is a motion simulator ride attraction that opened in March of 1994. Here they show among other things, "Cosmic Pinball".
This VR simulation creates the illusion of a wild trip through a giant pinball machine - in which the audience "becomes" a pinball. Bouncing the stout-of-heart along in classic cars turned into giant pinballs, the high velocity ride offers up an ever changing barrage of computer-generated scenes. It's all there: the flashing lights, the flippers, the bumpers, the pitfalls. But this time you're not watching the action stooped over a pizza parlor retread. You're a part of it. You are a PINBALL!!
In reality, you're sitting aboard a converted 747 flight simulator as you watch a digitally enhanced high-definition video. With split second precision, the Simulator Theatre will have you honestly believing you're playing pinball...
It's just like a home theatre. That is, if your floor moved with the picture and you had a 15 foot by 6 foot TV.
How does pinball and beer go together? Well real pinballs might have a connection somewhere since pinballs can be found at pubs. But do yo really sit at home and drink beer and play pinball, well I do but do you? (uhm, actually I don't, it was a joke)
Dommelsch Bier (a beer company in the Netherlands) seem to think you do, at least if you take their new sales promotion seriously. If you buy 24 bottles of their beer you can get a free copy of their pinball game, Roll 'M Up (developed by Lostboys). The pinball really is good, it is not a topscoring one but it isn't bad at all, I really liked it. You play to reach the wiz mode where every target is Dommelsch!! There is even a hiscore list for it on their web site! You can send in your hiscore to the page directly through the pinball or if you prefere, have it saved to a floppy and then send it in.
There is a pinball simulation that you can carry with you always. It even fits in your pocket. Just get a Gameboy and Pinball Fantasies and Pinball Dreams for it!!! :) Ok, so those pinballs got out for gameboy a couple of years back but I just thought it was worth pointing out. At least the sentence "Moveable Pinball Simulation" is a hit?
For the Nintendo 8-bit (NES) there is a pinball called Rock'n'Ball, it got out years ago. Well there is a two player table in it, not the regular kind where you wait for your turn. Here you play on each side of the pinballs table. In front of you the table is tilted upwards to the middle and then it tilts downwards. Each player plays on one side and tries to manouver the ball over to the opponents side. You have a flipper on the opponents side and can use it to make things harder for him. You can also freeze the opponents flippers for a while and do some other fun things. I only know of one real pinball like this, Flipper Football (might be more, I don't know).
I guess many of you wonder over the release dates for new pinball simulations. It is really impossible (or at least hard) to give out correct dates. But here is a try...
Addiction Pinball: The deadeline for this pinball seems to be before christmas (that is the reason one table was taken away). So it is possible it will get out late november early december, your guess is better then mine.
Balls of Steel: Well, I'm pretty sure it will get out this year, can't be so much more accurate at the time.
2UP-Tilt!: I know nothing about this pinball, absolutely nothing. Tried to get hold of the demo for it but that didn't go so well. It was supposed to have been released in may...
Electronic Pinball: Next year?
PCK Patch and Deluxe version: Hmm, november is a good guess here too. Or maybe december? Was supposed to have been released in October, don't think it has been.
Pinball Construction Kit 2: Next year? :)
Pro Pinball: Timeshock! (US): November, that is a good guess, isn't it?
This list shows what pinballs are available for the pc and mac.
The list is simple. First I have written the name of the pinball (if it has two names they are separated by a "/"). Second I have written the developers name, in a few cases the publishers name (those are surrounded by brackets). Last you will find what platforms that pinball is available for. The list might contain errors, so please correct me if IÆm not wrong. :)
(E) = Pinball Editor
(P) = Pinball Pack
(PC) = Available for PC
(MAC) = Available for MAC
3D Pinball Vcr / Total Pinball - Spiderdoft (PC)
3D Ultra Pinball - Sierra (PC/MAC)
3D Ultra Pinball(2): Creep Night - Sierra (PC/MAC)
3D Ultra Pinball(3): The Lost Continent - Sierra (PC/MAC)
3D Hyper Pinball/TILT! - Virgin (PC)
Absolute Pinball - UDS (PC)
Alien Spaceball - brian Porter (PC)
Angel Egg Pinball - Little Wing (PC)
Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set - Bill Budge (E) (PC)
Crystal Caliburn - Solid State + Little Wing (PC/MAC)
Is there anyone that like to play with source codes? Especially ones written in Turbo Pascal 6.0 or higher. The source code for PC Spiel Pinball (PCS) is available at vIRTUAL tECHNOLOGIES (ah, don't you just love those fanzy names ;)) homepage and may be freely used in whatever way you want. So I thought (well not I, I was suggested) that it might be a good Idea to have a pinball programming contest. The object of it would be to do the best of the source code for PCS.
PC Spiel Pinball is a rather lowrating pinball simulation, it has lots of things in it that is irritating. So there is lots to be done to it.
I would set up a special page during the contest on which I would list competitors and also have the source available for download. There would be no special rules, you would alone or as a team try to make something good out of the source and then when the contest ends (it would be held between two specific dates) it should be send in to me and I would judge a winner. The winners version would then be available for download on the page. No real prize would be handed out except the personal glory! ;) But who knows, a prize might turn up (but that is uncertain).
Extracts from the readme file included with the PCS source code:
"Yes, you guessed it: This is the FULL Source-Code for the pinball as we released it in the PC Spiel 12/95 ! This archive also includes all utilities we wrote for the Pinball and all graphics. You'll need TP 6.0 or higher to compile. This program runs only in real mode. Don't run it from the IDE!"
I thought it would be stupid to just put up the page about the contest without having checked if there is any interest for something like this.
If you are interested, mail to: info@pcpinball.com
Let me know if you would like to participate, if you have any suggestions for the competition, your experince in programming and so on...
The only thing we miss is the country -sign behind the highscore owners name. We would like to know from which country these really good Pinball players come, who have the scores on your side. Like Per Haegglund (somewhere in Skandinavia, but where) or Erik Mooney (GB or USA?). You could ask your Club-members and then do it. You can use the same signs like the cars, so give us a D for Deutschland (Germany). And where do you come from?
<snip>
Well ok, I'll ask then. :) Is there anyone else who wants that too. Let me know, just send a mail to info@pcpinball.com . You don't need to write much more than "that sounds like a good idea".
Just thought I'd say that there is a msg board on the site. Things related to pinball simulations can be discussed here. Hope you like it, it is just meant to be a place where visitors to the site can ask a question and hopefully get a answer.
