The Development of Stern Pinball's 2007 Spider-Man
By knapparcade
I did some more digging through my archives this weekend and I found a really cool article about the creation of the original Spider-Man pin by Stern Pinball in the June 2007 issue of Game Room magazine. It was an interview with the King himself, the recently retired Steve Ritchie. The first original Stern Spider-Man game shipped on May 4th, 2007 - the exact day that Spider-Man 3 hit movie theaters. Impressive timing. We all know about the game as it exists today, so I want the focus of this to be post on what changed on it during development. The biggest change Ritchie described was to the Green Goblin. Early on, the Goblin was a motorized toy that swung left to right on his glider over a bank of five targets, with the target lights synced to his movement. Ritchie said five moving targets made the Goblin "disproportionately hard to get” and threw off the rest of the game. The mechanism used the same motor as the ship in Pirates of the Caribbean. He said it was constantly noisy and rattled even with the glass on. The production version mounts the Goblin on a spring instead. A solenoid underneath strikes a plate attached to the toy and makes him shake, while the flashers fire and he grunts and laughs. Ritchie said they kept “a little” of the moving-target scoring in software. Other features that were cut from the final version of the game include: - Venom used to move. Venom originally rose and fell like Sandman and Doc Ock. Ritchie said he sits so far back on the playfield that players wouldn’t notice. The team moved him forward about an inch, and that didn’t help either. In production he’s stationary, with lights and flashers. - A ball-stacking post. Ritchie added an up-post, like the one on Lord of the Rings, to stack three balls in the left wireform tube for multiball. He said it held up play the way the lock did on World Poker Tour, and it isn’t in his description of the final game. - Steel ramps. Asked about the steel ramps on Terminator 3 and Elvis, Ritchie said he likes them but “they’re expensive.” He said he was pleased with how the Spider-Man ramps turned out after work from many people. At the time of the interview, Ritchie said that he was worried about center drains and planned to try a post between the flippers like the one on Terminator 2 the next morning. The mini-post eventually went in and worked. The motorized three-target bank in front of Sandman comes from Black Knight 2000 and Attack From Mars. Ritchie said he normally avoids borrowing from other designs, but made an exception because Lyman Sheats and Brian Eddy did Attack From Mars, calling it a tribute and “a better version.” Ritchie also said the two ramps sit on the inside of the playfield, flanking the center target bank, which is not where ramps normally go. That placement gives players easy flipper power on the ramps. Ritchie said the code was 100% Lyman Sheats, who “won’t accept anyone else’s work in the game.” He said Sheats came in at 6:30 every morning. Ritchie compared the partnership to working with Eugene Jarvis on F-14 Tomcat. As hard as it is to believe, I have tons of pictures of the later Comic Edition of Spider-Man and the "Black Edition" but not the OG game. Below are my pics of the Black LE from the Pintastic New England show earlier this year. 2007 Stern Pinball Spider-Man 🕷️ Black Suited Limited Edition. 500 units produced. Designed by Steve Ritchie with art by Kevin O’Connor, Mark Galvez, Margaret Hudson and Marc Schoenberg, sound by David Thiel and code by Lyman Sheats. This limited version of the game came with upgrades like a mirrored backglass, chrome trim and a shaker motor.
