Play Meter

PLA Y METER: What is the most important
consideration when you set out to manufacture a
flipper game?
STERN: I've always likened a pinball machine to a
movie. You've got to have action in it. So the first
thing you want is good action, and the second thing
is a good theme. And then you try to put those two
together. That's what "play appeal" is. It's a
combination of action and theme. Stars had it. Mata
Han and Eight Baa from Bally had it, and so did
Gottlieb's Sinbad.
PLAY METER: To what extend does play appeal
determine the success or failure of a particular
game?
STERN: I think play appeal is the most important
thing in the game. Without play appeal you don't
have a game. To get a good game you have to have
play appeal, which is the action of the game. If you
don't you just sit with that game.
PLA Y METER: What qualities make for a
well-designed game?
STERN: There have to be good action shots for
certain areas to build up the score or the free play
value. And there have to be places that need good
shots, areas in the game where you shoot for
certain things to increase the scoring or the
features for the free play.
PLA Y METER: Do you do any designing yourself?
STERN: Yes, recently, for instance, I had a lot to
do with Memory Lane. Stars was only partly mine,
but Pinbaa and Starfire were all mine.
PLAY METER: How long does it take as far as the
designing process?
STERN: It takes anywhere from five to eight
months. You start off by making a layout on paper
first. After that, you put it on a playing board we
call a whitewood, then you experiment with it and
make any necessary changes. Then if you're
satisfied with the action, you put in the features and
tie them in with the action. But first you shoot, not
for the features, but rather to see if the action is
good. Of course, when you make your initial
drawing, you put your features in with it, but you
always have to change some of them, according to
whether or not they can be made. Sometimes when
you first lay it out, you have features that you can't
even make, or maybe you have features that make
the game too easy. So you have to go back and make
adjustments.
PLA Y METER: When you start off designing a
game, is there a certain theme or play characteris-
tic you want to get into the game?
STERN: Yes, in Memory Lane, for example, we
wanted to get memory, and we wanted to get the
bowling theme with the rollover buttons. So we had
to figure out a way to get the bonus. The bonus was
1,000 for each rollover that was made. And then
you had the strike so that when you got all ten
down, or you got ten down some other way, you got
10,000 points. So the idea there was to try and get a
bowling theme that played well and still gave the
PLAY METER , September, 1978
player an opportunity to make strikes.
PLAY METER: As far as your own company is
concerned, do you design pinball machines for a
high skill level or for a low skill level?
STERN: We design them for the good player. But
then we percentage it for the bad player as well. So
it's a combination of the good and the bad player
that we design our games for.
PLAY METER: We often hear the comment that
pinball is about seventy percent skill and about
thirty percent luck. As a designer, would you agree
with that assessment about the games you make?
STERN: No, I see a little more skill in them than
that. Even now I think there's about an eighty or
ninety percent skill level in pinball, and about ten to
twenty percent of the game is luck.
PLA Y METER: What qualities do you think are
necessary for a good game designer?
STERN: Good ideas. Different ideas. You have to
have ideas that are a little different, that make a
playfield look a little djfferent from your
competitors. And you must have an ability to put
those in and get good shots at them.
PLAY METER: Who do you feel are among the top
pinball designers in the country today?
STERN: Harry Williams is one of the best. Then
there's Norman Clark at Bally, and Gottlieb has a
good man in Wayne Neyen. Also, Williams has a
couple of new fellows who seem to be very good.
PLA Y METER: Do you foresee some innovations 'in
the future, such things as multi-level playfield
which a guest editorialist in PLAY METER
recently suggested?
STERN: Multi-level playfields? I doubt it. The cost
is a big disadvantage for something like that. And
besides, it's very hard to get a multi-level playfield.
I worked on one some time ago, but I found that
they just don't work right. It's too hard to get the
ball to roll correctly.
PLAY METER: Are there any new features which
we can look forward to seeing in the games in the
near future?
STERN: There will be new features coming out.
Electronics has given us the ability to do many
things that we weren't able to do before with
electro-mechanical games. That's the advantage of
electronic games. But I can't see something like a
multi-level pinball machine. I think you'll find the
new features will appear on conventional-sized
pinball machines. Now, there's still a lot we have to
do to improve the games mechanically, to make
them work better so that the operators have less
trouble with them. Other than that, though, I think
you'll find that because of solid state there's a lot of
things we'll be able to do with pinball machines,
feature wise , memorywise, that we couldn't do
before with electro-mechanical machines. That's
because the electro-mechanicals took too much
equipment. We'll be able to do more things with
targets, for instance. In fact, in our next game,
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