Pinball 2000 custom kits
Pinball 2000 was the last pinball platform produced by Williams, Its notable for two reasons. The first being that it used a computer monitor to create a peppers ghost style effect on the play field, allowing for interesting game play and visuals. The second interesting thing about pinball 2000 is that it used conversion kits. Since pinball 2000 included a full computer the system was expensive. To make the platform more attractive to arcade owners who would purchase the system Williams made the cabinet in such a way that you could replace the play field. That way arcades could purchase new play fields at prices lower than that of a new cabinet. Only two games were released for the pinball 2000 systems, Revenge From Mars and Star Wars Episode 1. Three more games were planned, Wizard blocks, Playboy and Monopoly, though these games were canceled mid production.
Source Link
After learning about the pinball 2000 conversion kits the first question that popped into my head was, “Has anyone made their own custom conversion kits?”. It took more Google searches than I thought it would but I did find a total of three projects made by two separate people as well as some other information about the system. The computers in the original pinball 2000 kits are now old and a big problem is replacing the parts. Since the parts in the original system are hard to find a third party company has developed software called Nucore to emulate the old system that pinball 2000 used. Posts and interview from the creators of the custom projects make it sound like they have developed their own systems for working with the cabinets. The custom projects I found are a port of Demolition man to the Pinball 2000 system, a recreation of Wizard blocks and an original project called Haunted cruise. The creator of the Demolition man port and Wizard blocks remake has video of working versions of each on his youtube channel, this also lead me to a Reddit post were Louis Koziarz (one of the members of the team who worked on wizard blocks) comments on the video and has a small back and forth with the guy who made the recreation. The creator of Haunted Cruise posted development videos on his youtube channel though in later form posts he stated that he was going to create a new system rather than continue to develop for the pinball 2000 system.
links to some of the custom p2k projects I found
Attempts to mix arcade and pinball
On our first trip to the strong museum one of the games that was singled out in the tour was Hyperball. Hyperball was Williams attempt to make a game that was more of an arcade game than a pinball cabinet. Executives had high expectations for the game, predicting it to sell 50,000 units. The game flopped and only sold 4,444, they used the remaining cabinets to produce other games. Bally attempted to copy Hyperball with the game Rapid fire, which produced the same number of units and also used left over cabinets to produce other games. Most people do not consider Hyper ball and Rapid fire to be pinball cabinets. Hyperball notably creates a noise of 90 decibels which is very loud.
These games and there failure are interesting. The goal of hyper ball is to hit targets to prevent lightning bolts from hitting you, these targets also correspond to letters and you get points for spelling out certain words. Its hard to do both at once and the noise from the game drowns everything out. Since William and Bally had reused the cabinets in other games I was curious to see if the games had any unique mechanical parts that were reused in other games though I couldn’t find anything.
Since I couldn’t find enough on Hyperball and Rapid fire to fill out a section I thought it would be interesting to look at Baby Pac Man since that was Midways attempt to mix pinball and arcade games.