It's the early nineties, and a demoscene group called The Silents has a pinball game up their sleeve. They've shopped it around to a few publishers, Bitmap Brothers among them, but the general consensus is that pinball games don't sell enough to make it worth publishing their game.
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A fledgling company called 21st Century Entertainment, Inc., then known for publishing Amiga action titles like Rubicon and Deliverance, steps in and publishes the pinball title. I would imagine Bitmap Brothers was envious of the results, if not furious. That little pinball game was none other than Pinball Dreams, which not only sold millions worldwide, but also ended up being packed in with many Commodore Amiga computers and ported to many other platforms.
The demoscene group, now formed into a company called Digital Illusions CE (to later become more famous for their Battlefield series for Electronic Arts), put 21st Century on the map. After they finished their last pinball title, 21st passed the pinball duties off to another company, Spidersoft. More and more pinballs were released, many memorable tables were brought forth, and a great lifetime was had before 21st Century finally went kaput around 1999 - a whole two years before their namesake.
21st had four companies working for them throughout their existence. DICE, as mentioned above, worked on three major titles that are widely considered the best ones released. Spidersoft was brought in later to aid in porting the DICE games and was also eventually given the task of making original titles after DICE moved on. Unique Development was picked up for the purposes of remaking Obsession Pinball, and Liquid Dezign - comprised mainly of ex-DICE and UDS staff - was responsible for SlamTilt. In addition to this, 21st Century had an American publishing arm, confusingly named 21st Century Entertainment, Ltd. (as opposed to Inc.) - reputedly, neither branch was aware of what the other was doing. The US branch did no development of its own and existed solely to publish pinball games, and beyond that, would exclusively handle US publishing for games developed by the European branch. They continued existing at least a year after the European branch died.
DICE's first pinball title began when their lead artist started drawing pinball tables in Deluxe Paint on his Amiga. The idea was, a better pinball simulator could be made by making the table several screens tall and simply scrolling up and down the table, as opposed to earlier Amiga pinball games which simply showed the entire table at once, or NES Pinball which would cut between screens without even scrolling. None of the original tables ever saw the light of day, but the concept lived on, and four tables came from DICE to form Pinball Dreams. The Silents didn't originally intend for Pinball Dreams to be a commercial title, but once 21st Century came into the picture, things quickly changed.
Pinball Dreams plays from an overhead perspective, with the table view scrolling to follow the ball. The perspective may not be realistic (like, say, KAZe's Super Pinball series for SNES), but this way, DICE was able to put more processing into the ball physics. A wise decision: the ball physics in Pinball Dreams are stellar, to say the least - most tricks employed by real pinball experts will actually work here, including holding the ball with the flippers, juggling, and ricocheting off the side bumpers to make those tricky shots. Each table is lovingly crafted, well painted, and has plenty of features and opportunities to make skillful scores.
Probably my least favorite of the bunch. Beat Box is themed after the rap/hip-hop music industry, with a primary-colors scheme that makes it stand out. Gameplay, in my opinion, is rather weak, and the multi-level structure at the top tends to make it confusing where your ball is actually going. The music is nice, I suppose, but I just can't get used to this table, on account of not knowing how to get a good score on it. The game doesn't really make it that easy to figure out, considering half of the ramps are unlabeled and only make sound effects as you roll through them under normal circumstances (as opposed to displaying prompts on the scoreboard). Some of the ramps don't even give you points at all, unless you've set up the combo for them first. To put things bluntly, you have to be pretty good at pinball in the first place if you want to do well on this table.
Interestingly, because of DICE's origins in the demoscene, many crack groups and pirates swore a pact to not crack or release Pinball Dreams through their respective services, out of respect for the developers. While the pact didn't last long (it was eventually released by Fairlight, though with the message "A GAME WORTH PLAYING IS A GAME WORTH BUYING!" on their cracktro screen), it's things like this that show that there is honor even among software pirates. To an extent, anyway. The boys at DICE probably weren't too happy, considering that they previously collaborated with Fairlight for an Assembly demo.
Pinball Dreams got a few good ports, with versions for DOS, the Super Nintendo, Game Boy, and Game Gear. The DOS version is reasonably accurate to the Amiga original, even including the original MOD-based music tracks, as well as an alternative MIDI soundtrack for use with Roland MT-32. Sadly, as awesome as the idea is of Gustaffsen's music being remixed for what was at the time considered the best music device around, the MIDI conversions of the songs just don't quite have the same feel as their MOD versions, with wrong notes, misplaced instruments, and no regard for overall volume, causing horrible clipping unless you turn down the MT-32 itself. This port was actually released in three different versions - the original stand-alone release (and more common) only included the low-res 320x200 mode and required you to select your sound card every time the game was started, but was still a good conversion of the Amiga original. The second version was nearly identical except for the fact that it has a slightly different sound setup menu, lacking the Roland support but still offering Adlib as an option, and also the addition of the high-res 320x350 screen mode, which looks smushed on most screens unless the monitor is adjusted. This second port was bundled with Pinball Dreams 2 on a single CD-ROM and included a new options menu that lets you specify the number of balls per game (3, 5, or 7) and the tilt angle of the table (affects how fast the ball falls and how easy it is to make shots with the flippers). The ports both had a few other oddities in the ball physics such as occasionally getting the ball stuck on the side bumpers and triggering them rapidly. The PC ports were handled by Spidersoft, who would go on to make pinball games of their own.
There was also a Game Boy port from GameTek and Spidersoft, which is extremely bizarre. The Beat Box table was entirely cut (aside from its attract mode music, which is now used in the main menu), the Nightmare table was renamed to Graveyard (which is more consistent with what it says on the table), and given the Game Boy's lack of color and detail, much of the graphics had to be cut down and removed. The music especially suffers, with it not only having been essentially ripped to shreds to even work in the Game Boy, but tracks even seem to be switched around - a purist like me can't stand it when the attract song is played while your playing the table. The worst part is the ball physics: since the Game Boy doesn't really have a lot of processing power, the ball's movements have been vastly simplified, and it's very hard to get the flippers to nudge the ball lightly as opposed to catapulting it everywhere. That makes it kind of hard to pull off some of the trickier shots, or advanced tricks like juggling the ball between the flippers. This port is best avoided. There are far better Game Boy pinball titles out there.
Pinball Fantasies also had its share of ports, and probably holds the title for the most ported pinball game ever, gracing not only the Amiga, but also (inhales) the PC, the Super Nintendo, the original Game Boy, the Atari Jaguar, the Amiga CD32, and the PlayStation (with later ports of varying "official" status for GBA, iOS, PSP, PS3, and the free pinball sims Visual Pinball and Future Pinball). The PC version is fairly accurate to the AGA Amiga version, but does all kinds of strange tricks with the video modes that cause the colors in the menu to look strange on more modern systems (or DOSBox). Reputedly, the original Amiga release was riddled with bugs due to 21st rushing the game for Christmas (which is reflected by music composer Olof Gustaffsen in the notes of one of the game's music files). Most of the bugs were fixed up for the other releases, including the AGA-enhanced 256 color version, which was released at about the same time as the CD32 version. The AGA version looks a hell of a lot nicer than the original, given the extra colors and effects. This version pretty much served as the basis for all the ports. It should be noted that the CD32 version is pretty much exactly the same as the AGA Amiga version; the CD32 pretty much is an Amiga, down to everything but the KickStart ROM (hell, you can supposedly even install Workbench on it and treat it like any other Amiga). The PC port was done by Frontline Design, who also handled the Illusions port.
Pinball Dreams is the name for a series of digital pinball games originally written for the Commodore Amiga. Published by 21st Century Entertainment, they were developed by DICE (Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment), an Amiga Demoscene team who later went on to create Mirror's Edge and the Battlefield series.
Unlike many digital pinball games, the tables in the series avoided Video Game-only features, striving instead to create games that could conceivably be built in Real Life. This illusion was maintained down to the playfield, which included screws and plates where appropriate. The games utilized a vertical-scrolling screen to follow the action, since the screen could not show the entire playfield at once. The games were praised for their fast action, realistic physics, and memorable music, and helped establish Digital Interactive as a serious software firm. 2ff7e9595c
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