Remember me
A modern pinball machine is still built around the same wonderfully physical idea it always was: keep a steel ball alive with two flippers and try to hit everything that lights up – and, when you miss it, belt the table in fury as hard as possible.
How the early cartoons were chosenRobots for the playfieldUnique emphasis on storyWhat got left out?What has changed is almost everything happening around it, encased in that familiar looking flat box enclosure.
Behind Stern Pinball’s new Transformers machine sits an increasingly complicated mix of mechanical engineering, software development, animation, lighting, audio, online connectivity and game balancing. The machine may celebrate the Generation 1 Transformers that many of us grew up with, but the process of making it is closer to modern video game development than it is to the halcyon days of the pinball industry of the 1980s and 1990s.
We have covered the development of older pinball tables before here on The Escapist when interviewing Tim Kitzrow, NBA Jams’ Mr Boomshakala, who initially got his break doing voice-overs for tables in the 90s, but as Stern Lead Game Designer Elliot Eismin puts it, the team is no longer only building a pinball table.
“The biggest difference is the development got a lot more complex and longer,” Eismin told me. “Back in the day, you were limited on what you can show on a dot-matrix display, and just limited to the playfield and artwork for gameplay. Now we are making a pinball machine, a video game, and connecting it all over the internet. It’s just more!”
That complexity begins with choosing a licence capable of surviving the noise and unpredictability of pinball.
“It’s helpful when there’s action,” Eismin said. “Exciting or tense moments translate well to the chaotic nature of pinball.”
Comedy can work just as well, partly because a pinball game rarely allows a scene or piece of dialogue to play out without interruption.
“Pinball has a lot of interrupted moments, and licences that have humour or comedy work well with that,” he explained. “I haven’t had to work on a property that was a bad fit for pinball. The choice of licence is determined long before the designers start actually working on it.”
How the early cartoons were chosenFor Transformers, the version of the franchise Stern wanted to explore was fairly straightforward. The Michael Bay films had already inspired Stern’s 2011 Transformers table, leaving the original cartoon era as the obvious choice.
“The Bay movies had already been made into a pinball machine back in 2011, so that was out,” Lead Software Engineer Elizabeth Gieske said. “G1 was something fans have been asking for ever since.”
Once the licence is in place, the team has to immerse itself in the property before deciding how its characters, battles and memorable moments can become an actual game.
“The licence comes first,” Gieske said. “Gotta watch the material, embrace the fandom.”
The physical and digital sides of the table then begin taking shape together. The software team is not simply handed a completed playfield and asked to make something fit around it. Gameplay rules can determine which physical components the table needs in the first place.
“The mechanical features were in the works in parallel to the story and gameplay features,” Gieske explained. “My rulesheet helped guide Elliot on the playfield design. Things like drop targets and spinners and the number of stand-up targets. These were hinged on gameplay rules that required them to exist.”
That relationship between code and machinery is one of the biggest differences between modern pinball and its illustrious predecessors. I couldn’t tell you the amount of money I shoveled into the games such as Lethal Weapon and The Adams Family in the 1990s, but those were the tables that were just starting to come alive. Older tables were shaped by far tighter technical limitations, although Gieske points out that some familiar problems have not gone away.
“I wasn’t designing in the ’90s, so I’m unsure how it’s exactly changed,” she said. “I imagine that they were restricted in how much complexity the game could handle. The capacity of the hardware simply could not support it. However, things like time constraints and cost are still obstacles to consider when designing a game.”
Transformers presented its own set of problems. For Gieske, the most difficult was balancing One Shall Fall, a battle between Optimus Prime and Megatron that does not use a traditional countdown timer.
Instead, both characters have their own health. Purple shots damage Megatron, while red shots hurt Optimus.
“I wanted it to always feel close,” she said. “I wanted it to feel like Optimus always comes back from behind to win the day, just like in the show. It took a lot of tweaking to get that feeling right.”
Robots for the playfieldEismin faced a more physical challenge. Transformers demands large, recognisable robots on the playfield, but oversized toys can quickly get in the way of the game beneath them.
“For the layout, it was the hardest to make the scale right,” he said. “We wanted a big toy presence, but you don’t want them to dominate the layout or look too goofy and out of place. Striking the right balance was the trick.”
There is another balancing act at the centre of every Stern machine. A new table has to immediately entertain somebody playing their first game in an arcade while remaining interesting to someone who might own it and play it for years.
Gieske approached that problem by giving the main modes three difficulty settings, while carefully controlling when the hardest versions become available.
“In the beginning, I only offer the ‘easy’ and ‘medium’ difficulties,” she said. “If the player beats a ‘medium’ mode, their following options will be ‘medium’ and ‘hard.’ In this way, I shield newcomers from accidentally playing a mode that is too difficult for them. At the same time, I give tournament players a chance to earn their high-risk, high-reward modes.”
The complexity of the rules also increases as the player progresses.
“In general, we write easy rulesets for modes that are more accessible,” Gieske explained. “The harder the mode is to reach, the more complicated the ruleset. If the player is good enough to reach one of these modes, I can trust that they can take on a more nuanced ruleset.”
Eismin attempts to make the physical layout perform the same trick “We tried to make the layout accessible, with the main features of the game ‘right up the middle’ and obvious,” he said. “New players love to ‘bash’ things, and being able to hit drop targets then hit Megatron to start a mode makes sense to new players.”
More experienced players still need difficult shots and opportunities to create their own strategies, but the machine cannot hide all of its best moments behind advanced play.
The same thinking applies when Stern considers the difference between a casual arcade player and a collector who may put thousands of games on the table.
“First, I consider the casual player,” Gieske said. “I ask myself, ‘What shots are they going to accidentally hit?’ ‘What shots look interesting that they might aim for?’ And I place cool things on these shots.”
That is why interacting with Optimus can lead to a multiball, while attacking Megatron begins a timed mode. The major characters naturally attract attention, so the game rewards players for shooting towards them.
“For the experienced player, it’s all about game pacing,” she continued. “You don’t want to make things too easy, or they’ll burn through the entire game. It’s about strategically placing modes that have varying qualification difficulty.”
Her aim is for players of every ability to finish with the same nagging thought.
“My goal is to pace the game so that every player, regardless of skill level, ends their game by saying, ‘But I was so close!’”
Modern tables also give Stern far more room to tell stories. That is particularly clear in games such as Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye, where Insider Connected can preserve progress between sessions.
Unique emphasis on story“Stern has a unique emphasis on story,” Gieske said. “Especially on a game like D&D: The Tyrant’s Eye, where progress in the story is almost more important than the score. The game is very reliant on the game-save feature through Insider Connected.”
That kind of persistent progression would have been almost unthinkable in an arcade table several decades ago. Modern players now arrive expecting deeper software, more modes and several viable routes through a game.
“Modern players expect Insider Connected integration,” Gieske said. “And they expect more code in the game. More modes. More viable strategies. More points, if compared to a game from the ’80s.”
Fitting all of that into one table inevitably means ideas are changed or abandoned. Gieske said almost every mode in Transformers went through significant iteration.
Transformers Multiball originally used a wider selection of coloured scoring values, but lighting too many colours at once made the table difficult to read. Solar Needle once featured roving targets, but they slowed the game down. The energon selection screen initially offered three choices before the team decided that was one too many.
“Whether it was how a mode was qualified or how the mode worked, every part of the game acted differently at some point,” she said.
What got left out?Several physical mechanisms also failed to survive development.
“We messed around with a few devices that didn’t make the cut,” Eismin said. “At one point we had a shooter-lane diverter, and we messed around with a transforming Optimus.”
Those decisions can be difficult, particularly after the team has spent time developing a feature, but Eismin said every mechanism has to succeed in the areas that matter most.
“It comes down to timing, reliability and fun,” he said. “If it doesn’t have all three, the mech doesn’t make the cut.”
Stern’s Insider Connected platform is likely to become an even larger part of this process. Online leaderboards, achievements and persistent progression give players reasons to approach a table differently without changing the physical fundamentals of pinball.
“Connected leaderboards can push players to reach higher scores,” Gieske said. “Achievements provide objectives that aren’t just points-related. And other IC features introduce completely brand-new ways to play.”
For those concerned that all of this connectivity risks moving pinball too far from its roots, her view is simple.
“None of these takes away from classic pinball. It just enhances it.”
Asked what would most surprise a Stern designer from the 1990s, Gieske joked that she could simply ask veteran designer George Gomez. Her own answer was the LCD display and RGB lighting, particularly the expression and speaker lights.
Eismin believes it would be the combination of machinery and software.
“I think the mechanisms and the code would surprise them the most,” he said. “We can do a lot more with the code and visuals than we could in the past.”
That is the real story behind Stern’s Transformers machine. Its characters and artwork are drawn from a cartoon that helped define the 1980s, while everything underneath them shows just how far modern pinball has travelled since then.
It remains a game of flippers, targets and (predominately) one steel ball. The good guys at Stern are simply using considerably more technology to decide what happens when you hit them, before you ever get to kick the table in anger.
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