This evening I came across a great Game Informer interview with the voice of Rudy from Williams FunHouse…gaming industry legend Ed Boon.
The article provided a fantastic look at arcade and pinball history, but one particular passage really stood out to me:
”You said you are feeling nostalgic. Any thoughts of making a new pinball game?
I have friends who are still programming pinball machines. I stopped programming at least 15 to 20 years ago. There’s no way I would be able to keep up with them. To give you an idea of the timing, I did all my games in Assembly. The one I’m hoping will happen someday – and it’s come close a few times – is a Mortal Kombat pinball machine. I think that would be really cool. I would love to have one of those in my basement.
You know, Ed Fries [former vice president of game publishing at Microsoft] went and made a Halo game on Atari 2600. He did it the old-school way. You could do the same thing for a Mortal Kombat pinball machine! I was talking to Matt Booty [head of Microsoft Studios] the other day and he was telling me about this group that is still making Atari 2600 games. He was telling me all about them and sent me links and everything. As great as it is to make video games now, when it was a two- to three-person team, the turnaround of idea to on-screen could be as short as two hours. Now it’s months. The hands-on experience and working with a close, small team, there was nothing like those really special days.”
A Mortal Kombat pinball machine was almost produced and one of the creators of the game would still like to see one happen? Cool! There was a Street Fighter pinball machine, so why not MK?
Another story that I found interesting was the origin story of Williams FunHouse, which is particularly timely given the 2.0 Kit that just released for the pinball machine:
”Give me the big one that people would recognize.
That was probably FunHouse. It had a talking puppet. There was a movie called Magic that had an evil puppet in it. That puppet made its owner do bad things. FunHouse is kind of loosely based on that. There’s this puppet who is taunting the player. I’m the voice of that puppet.”
Ed Boon On His AIAS Hall Of Fame Induction And Career In Video Games And Pinball
https://www.gameinformer.com/2022/02/24/ed-boon-on-his-aias-hall-of-fame-induction-and-career-in-vid
The only physical Mortal Kombat pinball machine that has ever been made lol
Someone did produce a virtual Mortal Kombat table in VPX