My Uber-Nerdy Pinball Rulesheets
The newsgroup rec.games.pinball was a very different place back in the early 90s, for the simple fact that nearly all of the discussion was about game-play. Some might make snarky comments about about "the death of the internet community" etc, but the main reason is simply because a new game was released almost every month. I miss those times! I remember being envious of the "Beta Boys" in Chicago (Greg, Louis, Keith, Kevin, etc), who'd always get to play new games a long time (usually many months) before the rest of the world. These guys would always come back from exotic sounding places like Just For Fun, Gala North, and Dennis's, with tails of magnetic flippers, bigfoot, and the Borg.It was about this time that I started working at Timezone, which was then a great Australia-wide chain of Family Entertainment Centers (we weren't allowed to call them Arcades anymore!). I worked there as a pinball tech part-time while I was (apparently) working hard in College, but I don't think I've ever laughed as much as I did with some of my fellow techs there. I didn't initially realize that Timezone was actually the retail outlet of the Australian distributor for Williams, so we would get early test games in advance of the the rest of the world (no where near as early as Chicago, but still).
Suddenly I was able make everyone else envious as I got early looks at some of the greatest games of all time (Star Trek Next Generation, World Cup, etc). It also gave me a chance to join what some considered a pretty elite group: Rulesheet Writers!
Presented here are the few rulesheets I have authored (although I don't know if I should really use that word - apologies to any real authors out there). The rulesheets, as presented here, represent the actual RGP posts - complete with text formatting and spelling mistakes. The Pinball Archive has all these rulesheets (and many more) all reformatted to take advantage of HTML (which was a novelty back then). I chose to use these text versions as I feel they capture some of the feel from that time (or maybe I'm full of shit - whatever! It makes me nostalgic, so that's how they are!).
Looking over these again, there are many "What the hell what I thinking?!" moments - but again it goes back to what RGP was like back then. People seemed to be genuinely enthusiastic about pinball, and would talk about the positives a lot more than negatives. I can't believe it was all over 10 years ago!
So here they are, in order of game release:
- Judge Dredd [ Game released September 1993 ]
- Star Trek: The Next Generation [ Game released November 1993 ]
- The Flintstones [ Game released July 1994 ]
- Corvette [ Game released August 1994 ]
- The Shadow [ Game released November 1994 ]
- Indianapolis 500 [ Game released June 1995 ]
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