Silver Ball Century ep. 70 - Mid-1994 - Welcome to the Rumble
In this episode we're going to see possibly my favorite Data East game, Guns N' Roses, which I would also say is the first band-themed pinball game that convincingly plays their actual music. (Cactus Jack's and Al's Garage Band don't count.) Unlike most of Data East's previous games, we won't see a "Coming Attraction" attract-mode ad for it on a previous table.
The recurring feature where Data East games would advertise an upcoming game, with a light show and DMD animation, was on the way out when we played Tommy last episode. We never saw the promo for WWF Royal Rumble, even after sitting through the entire credits of the touring musical.
Orin Day, who designed code for Data East and Sega's pinball games, posted on rec.games.pinball (as quoted here on Pinside) that the "coming attractions" screens were causing problems with licensors and operators. For one thing, operators would see the next game advertised and decide "maybe I'll wait for that one instead". Data East's coders changed the feature to only show the next-game preview after 1000 plays, which is probably why we never saw it on Tommy.
Instead of advertising the next game (which would be GnR), Royal Rumble instead hypes up what had become a Data East inside joke: "Deathball 2000", the fictional deadly pinball game from a Weekly World News article.
So here is the list of Data East promos as I know it:
The beginning
- Checkpoint, the first DMD game, advertises "Play Caveman Ninja". Caveman Ninja is the Data East arcade game that became "Joe & Mac" in home versions.
The big almost-chain
- Batman has a preview of Star Trek, where the Enterprise glides across the display while the Star Trek theme briefly plays, in a much more familiar form than the over-the-top remix on the actual table.
- Star Trek has a preview of Hook. It flashes "COMING ATTRACTION", then a movie-rating-like box with a rating of "GF" for "Great Fun", then shows a sparkly Hook movie logo as it plays a snippet of its music.
- Hook does the same movie-style preview, rated GF for Great Fun, for Lethal Weapon 3.
- Lethal Weapon 3 jumps way forward and has a preview of Tales from the Crypt, a table that would not come out until a year and a half later. I wonder if they originally had one for Star Wars and then Lucasarts yelled at them for using their IP wrong?
- Star Wars has a preview of Rocky and Bullwinkle. The Star Wars table playing the Rocky and Bullwinkle theme, while flashing playfield inserts make a spotlight effect that waves over R2-D2 and the Death Star, is maybe the most incongruous example of a Data East preview.
- Rocky and Bullwinkle briefly puts up the Jurassic Park logo, with no music, which makes me suspect even more that they got in licensing trouble earlier for a Star Wars preview.
- Jurassic Park announces "ARNOLD'S BACK!" to begin the preview of The Last Action Hero.
- Last Action Hero has nearly the same preview of Tales from the Crypt that appeared on LW3.
- Tales from the Crypt previews Tommy with the musical logo and the motif from "See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me".
- Tommy reportedly shows a preview for WWF Royal Rumble, but we never saw it. It might require 1000 plays or it might be entirely disabled in the default code.
The late games
- WWF Royal Rumble has a preview for the fictitious pinball game Deathball 2000, "the game people are dying to play!"
- Guns N Roses has a preview for the novelty ticket game Carousel, which Orin Day put there as a sort of gag.
- Scout_Pilgrim informs me that Tattoo Assassins, which is not a pinball game but an arcade fighting game made by Data East Pinball, contains another reference to "Deathball 3000" in this hard-to-explain post-game image that also breaks the news of Data East Pinball being bought by Sega:
Data East kept the Deathball 2000 inside joke going to the point where they displayed a backglass for it on a covered-up machine, during their public factory tour at Pinball Expo 1994.
I've spent this whole time talking about Data East games, both because of these fun historical details and because they are kind of at their peak at this moment. We also have games from three other pinball companies this episode. They're okay.
Silver Ball Century will go live on Thursday, September 24, at 8:30pm Eastern time, on twitch.tv/arborelia.
Tables in this episode
- WWF Royal Rumble (Data East) - VPX by HauntFreaks
- Rescue 911 (Premier Gottlieb) - VPX by Antisect
- Sir Lancelot (Peyper) - VPX by Goldchicco
- Guns N' Roses (Data East) - VPX by VPin Workshop
- The Flintstones (Bally/Williams) - VPX by G5k