Advanced Pinball Simulator
A home-computer pinball game with an original table, bringing fast ball movement and score chasing to the 8-bit machines.
Image credits and source
Original cover / promotional artwork
Credit: Codemasters — artwork belongs to its respective rights holders
Source: The Oliver Twins archive
Game at a glance
- Status
- Classic
- Released
- 1988
- Platforms
- Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64
- Genres
- Pinball
- Developer
- The Oliver Twins (original development)
- Publisher
- Codemasters
Development and publication
Development: The Oliver Twins (original development). Publication: Codemasters.
The named development credit refers to the original or specifically identified version. Other ports and later re-releases may have different development teams.
Making the game
Having created a great system for being able to produce side on platformers and also a series of Simulators we wondered if we could start another series of games this time based on Pinball tables. The idea was to create one great high-quality generic Pinball table engine and editor and then be able to re-skin it quickly with different themes as a series of games. Ideally making each new Pinball game in a week.
Unfortunately, the reality was that we found the maths required on an 8-bit computer was beyond our skill base. The ball movement wasn’t perfect and that’s probably because we tackled it in completely the wrong way. The ball reads low-resolution screen pixels for collisions and angles rather than using a table of vectors to describe the visuals. As a result, half-way through production, we decided to cut our losses, and tidy this one up as much as possible and ship it as a stand-alone game that was added to the Simulator series.
Critically and commercially it did fairly well and people enjoyed the game, but several reviewers noticed the ball movement problems.
Original documents
Archived Advanced Pinball Simulator article (PDF)