Before Pac-Man, before Space Invaders, before Pong, before Computer Space… there was pinball.

A staple of gaming houses for almost eighty years, pinball today is something of an endangered species; there is currently only one company manufacturing tables (Stern), and they are mostly limited to about two or three movie/TV-licensed pins per year.  Worse yet, the years of wear and tear on the many mechanical parts of even the most basic pinball machine makes it increasingly unlikely that a fully-functional Addams Family or Twilight Zone table will be found anywhere outside private collections as time marches on.

And yet, for all its impracticalities and upkeeping issues, and quite in spite of the fact all pinballs are essentially the same when it comes right down to it - keep a ball in play as long as possible, hitting targets and building a jackpot score - there is still something captivating about the game.  Maybe it’s the hypnotic flashing lights that usually denote which targets to shoot for.  Maybe it’s the unashamedly “lo-tech” mechanical operation, far more satisfyingly tactile than merely pushing pixels on a phosphor screen with a joystick.  Maybe it’s the fact that actual skill, as opposed to reflex speed or simple perseverance (and an ungodly amount of tokens) is required to get those elusive Super Jackpots and other high scores.  Or maybe it’s the knowledge that, every time you drop tokens into a pinball machine, you’re carrying on a gaming tradition that literally predates even the invention of radio, let alone a TV screen!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there have been many attempts over the years to try and capture the appeal of pinball in “virtual,” traditional video form.  Also perhaps unsurprisingly, very few of them have actually succeeded in this goal, mostly because it’s all but impossible for computer chips, especially the ones in older systems, to accurately compute the physics of the game.  It’s also not possible to tilt a computer or console, which removes one of the most crucial abilities of expert pinball players; if you can’t feel the machine, it becomes much more difficult to accurately aim your shots (and The Who’s Tommy would never have existed, of course).

Despite this, there have been a few worthy efforts over the years.  And of those, none is perhaps more celebrated in retrogaming circles than Pinball Construction Set, a 1983 offering from Electronic Arts that set new standards… not only in video pinball, but in game design overall.  It effectively proved that video games were capable of being more than arcade blast-a-thons, musty dungeon crawls, and type-till-you-bleed text adventures with brain-bruising logic problems.  It also demonstrated that, given proper tools, anyone could be a game designer.  There has, quite simply, never been a product quite like this before or since.

Pinball Construction Set (Various/C64 version shown, 1983): A little background.  In the early ’80s, a guy by the name of Bill Budge became one of that early breed of “celebrity” game programmer, along the lines of Richard Garriott, Anne Westfall, or Gary Kitchen.  The game that made Budge famous was a pinball simulation called Raster Blaster on the Apple II, which garnered rave reviews for its realistic physics engine - far more accurately depicting the many unpredictabilities of pinball than any video-game effort before it (perhaps best exemplified by Atari’s creatively-titled Video Pinball).  After creating this, Budge became inspired to further develop the Raster Blaster engine, ultimately having the masterstroke idea of giving the gamer the power to create his or her own pinball tables with just a few simple point-and-click tools.

Pinball Construction Set starts you off with a plan-view of an empty pinball table filling the left half of the screen.  The right half consists of a “toolbox” containing all the essential elements of pinball - flippers, bumpers, launchers, rollovers, spinners, drop targets, and kickers.  There are even some “advanced” toys to play with here, including a magnet that will pull the ball towards it during play and a ball holder for a multiball mode.  All you have to do is drag and drop each element onto the table to add it to your game.  It couldn’t be any simpler.

It’s impossible to overstate just how revolutionary a concept this sort of interface was.  In 1983, the pinnacle of user-friendliness was having the BASIC programming language burned into ROM and present when you turned the computer on, as on the Commodore 64 or Apple II.  The now-standard WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer) interface didn’t yet exist in the consumer market unless one counts the Apple Lisa… and even at that, Lisa’s steep price tag ($10,000 in 1983 dollars!) kept her securely out of the reach of the Joe and Jane Endusers of the world.  The three computers that formally introduced “Windows-style” computing to the masses - the original Macintosh, the Amiga 1000, and the Atari 520ST - were still about two years away.  PCS was nothing if not a glimpse into the future, demonstrating that - contrary to popular opinion at the time - you didn’t have to be a programmer or a genius to create something of substance with a computer.

The fun didn’t stop at just placing objects on a table, either.  With an included (albeit very basic) paint program, you could change the look of anything you wanted.  Don’t like the standard bumper you find in the toolbox? Make it look like a boot, or a Pac-Man, or your favorite logo.  Want to add decorative arrows or text to the table?  Go right ahead.  Want to create chaos?  Stick a dropout hole in the game, then paint over it in all black to make it invisible; it’s still there, and still lethal, but the player won’t know it’s there until it’s too late.  You can even create a “backglass” logo, as simple or as detailed as you like.  The possibilities are only as limited as your imagination.

There’s still more.  By clicking the “AND/OR gate” icon at the far right, you can get “under the hood” of your creation and wire different targets together for the purposes of creating jackpots and super bonuses.  Or, with the “globe” icon, you can rub Newton’s nose in it by rewriting the laws of physics - make the ball light as a feather or as heavy as a printout of the Windows Vista source code, give the table more slant than cable news, or change the elasticity of targets that bounce the ball wherever.

If you’re not in the mood to create a table and just want to kick back with some pinball, PCS does come with five example tables (including Raster Blaster itself); this is done mostly to demonstrate the different types of table effects you can do with the tools at hand, but each of the five tables is a fun and eminently playable game in its own right, and pinball fanatics can have hours of fun just playing these.

Is it perfect?  Of course not.  Due to the graphical limitations of computers at the time, you’re limited to just three colors (not including black) for your creations; plus, on the C64 and Atari 800 versions, the phenomenon known as “color artifacting” becomes an issue, making it very difficult to accurately color your creations.  By 2008 standards, the tables you can create with PCS tend toward the “basic” side, with no provisions for multi-layer ball tracks or special scoring modes.  (Still, with enough ingenuity you can probably find your way around most of these limitations and get away with most of the effects you like.)  I also have to take some slight issue with game control; because the game had to be controlled on a single Atari CX40-style joystick (to take into account what was at the time the “default” controller type on many computers), flipper control was a bit awkward, with left and right controlling the respective flippers, up hitting both, down drawing back the launch plunger, and Fire releasing the ball into play.  I see no reason why a two-controller mode couldn’t have been implemented, with the Fire buttons on each ’stick controlling the flippers and one of the sticks acting as the plunger (pull back and release to launch the ball).  It’s a minor nitpick, really, but one of those things that tends to get in the way of proper enjoyment of the game… especially when you’re playing it through emulation with a modern gamepad.  Selecting a table to play is also less than intuitive, as you have to know the exact filename; there isn’t a menu system to choose the table from a list of disk contents.

But despite any quibbles with its mechanics, which were mostly imposed due to the state of the art in 1983, Pinball Construction Set remains a very significant, influential development in the history of video games.  It was the first popular game that put the power of creation into the hands of the non-programmer, and paved the way for other games of that ilk in later years; Adventure Construction Set, Lode Runner, Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit, and right on up into the ’90s with level editors for games like DOOM, Quake, and Warcraft II.  As I noted in my review for Wizard, we take the concept of user-created content for commercial games almost for granted today, but games like PCS are largely to thank for that.

The legacy of PCS is carried on today in projects such as Visual Pinball and Future Pinball, both of which allow users to re-create their favorite real-life tables, and unlike PCS you can create modern effects (including “Dot-Mation” displays) with these tools, which often include a full scripting language.  However, for all their power, they can be a tad overwhelming for the novice user.  PCS is still a solid, workmanlike program that truly allows anyone, regardless of computer skill or programming acumen, to make a fully-playable, fun pinball machine.

The sad part is that this game is twenty-five years old, yet it’s still as unique today as it was in 1983.  That’s really a sad commentary on the state of the art in game design these days.

If you liked that, try...

1. Retro-Active: Top 10 Retro Puzzle Games NOT Called “Tetris”
2. Retro-Active: Consoles That Never Made It
3. Retro-Active, Part II: Temple of Apshai
4. Retro-Active: Starcade / The Video Game
5. Retro-Active: Impossible Mission

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