TILT: THE BATTLE TO SAVE PINBALL

There's a new Documentary coming to dvd about the last days of the pinball company WILLIAMS and their last ditch effort to keep up with video games. What's really cool is I helped pick up Jason's own REVENGE FROM MARS Pinball a few weeks ago! It really does kick ass and its a shame they didn't make more of these kinds of pin. You lucky bastard!!

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"IN 1998, Coin-Operated games were in dire straits. Arcades were extinct, having long ceded their popularity to home video games. Yet pinball remained an experience you couldn’t get at home. The pinball designers at Williams of Chicago, Illinois—the world's largest manufacturer of pinball—realized this; they knew that with a little rethinking, pinball could once again succeed.

In a short eighteen months, management planned to abandon pinball in favor of the booming video slot machine business...but not before granting their designers just one last shot at saving the game they loved. And Williams' designers did come up with something amazing: a brand new kind of pinball machine that fused new video technology with classic pinball gameplay, preserving what was great about pinball, yet opening up a whole new world of game possibilities.

TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball is a documentary that tells the story of the extraordinary Pinball 2000(tm) machines built by Williams in an effort to save not just the company, but the product that had defined coin-operated entertainment for eighty years.

Though at its heart a human story, TILT showcases the near-lost art of pinball design like nothing before it. Here's a scene from the movie with designers George Gomez and Pat Lawlor describing how the new Pinball 2000 machine Revenge From Mars differed from its predecessor, the "conventional" Attack From Mars."

(more info)