The game has had something of a renaissance recently, with the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Economist, and other outlets declaring a full-on pinball boom. Some of them credit nostalgia for it, others the rise of bars that double as arcades, and others still, the post-pandemic desire to be anywhere but home. Each of these theories, however, undersells the creativity of modern pinball machines, which conceal whole universes of deeply layered gameplay beneath the familiar façade of balls and bumpers. That so many of them play off of movies and TV shows makes the assembly of each game a complicated feat of licensing, technology, and storytelling.

“In today’s LCD era, the games are more story-based than ever before,” says Keith Elwin, the designer behind Stern Pinball’s recent Jaws adaptation. “A lot of my design work is in how we tell the story of what the player is doing on the playfield and tie it together on the screen.”

Based in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, Stern Pinball is the largest manufacturer of pinball machines in the world, employing hundreds of people and regarded for its innovation in the industry. Although bar arcades may be on the rise, some 70% of pinball machines are now sold directly for players’ homes—as long as they can afford a price tag of between $7,000 and $12,000. Although the company doesn’t release sales figures, Stern claimed in 2023 that the business has been growing at 20% to 30% a year.

As the world’s current leader for most Major Championship victories, Elwin is considered one of the greatest pinball players of all time. In 2017, he became lead game designer for Stern, joining a small and exclusive group of pinball champions who went on to apply their talents to designing. In fact, it was former pinball champ Pat Lawlor who coauthored 1992’s iconic Addams Family game, a huge leap forward for pinball sophistication, most famous for Thing emerging from beneath the playfield to snatch players’ balls away.

Pinball remained fairly straightforward for decades after its 1930s’ invention, until designers in the ’70s introduced features like extra balls and multiball play, and the ’80s brought more complex challenges, hidden objectives, and dynamic scoring systems. It was the ’90s, though, and games like Addams Family, that introduced the concept of a “wizard mode,” a master level of gameplay unlocked by finishing other objectives. In the case of Addams Family, the wizard mode was called “Tour the Mansion” and required players to hit a series of targets like an electric chair and Cousin Itt, while a light show glittered and a timer ticked away.

According to Elwin, however, the modern “rule sets”—that is, the rules and objectives dictating how a game is played—are currently the best they have ever been.

Take 2019’s Jurassic Park, which Elwin designed alongside his team. The game is structured with three main modes—T. Rex, Triceratops, and Raptor—in which players have to contain rampaging dinosaurs, rescue park staff, and make a getaway. Guided by video scenes on the LCD screen—a technology that only came to pinball in the last decade—players shoot and flip their way through different parts of the park and side challenges. Only the truly gifted will make it to the final wizard mode, Escape Nublar, in which all hell finally breaks loose in Jurassic Park, and hitting various targets—right now—is the only possible means of escape.

It was the third Jurassic Park game in the franchise’s history, and its modern features make it arguably the best. But how does a pinball adaptation even come about?

Major studios are often proactive in trying to license their intellectual property, and pinball companies tend to be just as eager to have a crack at certain characters or storylines. Sometimes, the licensors approach the pinball company; sometimes, it’s the other way around.

“It’s very important that the development teams work on IP that they are passionate about because it really shines through on the finished product,” says George Gomez, chief creative officer at Stern.

For instance, Stern’s director of licensing felt compelled to reach out to Iron Maiden about making a game based on the band’s music. It was Elwin’s first at bat as lead designer, and with lifelong Maidenhead Harrison Drake as lead engineer, Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast became a hit.

It doesn’t always go so smoothly.

Film studios may not get quite as involved in pinball machines based on their IP as they do with video games, but they certainly do get involved. Licensors have complete right of approval over the eventual game, and some of them like to exercise that right more than others. All of the animation and video art, sound effects, and three-dimensional toys in the mix—a studio can squash any of it that doesn’t mesh with their vision. Although some of them frequently reject design elements, according to Elwin, most suggested changes tend to turn out for the best.

The biggest challenge of designing a story for a game based on a film, according to Elwin, is that it limits some of the directions he can steer it in. Whereas Legacy of the Beast offers players a narrative that spans multiple worlds and dimensions, weaving Maiden lore throughout, the recent Jaws adaptation has to follow more conventional story beats. Elwin’s hands are tied.

“No matter how bad I want to save that swimmer from the shark,” he says, “their fate is already sealed when the mode begins!”

One of the other challenges in designing a game centers around how to represent memorable parts of a movie with a physical mechanism. Some of the most memorable parts of Jaws are when the shark pops out of the water, turning Amity Island residents into fish food. (These scenes traumatized an entire generation.) Should one of those moments be recreated in the game? Apparently not. To Elwin’s thinking, one of the most memorable aspects of Jaws is that, for most of the movie, all viewers see of the shark is an enormous dorsal fin. He designed the game so that a menacing fin juts out from time to time and splashes around the playfield.

While some players will love the game for its wizard-mode Final Battle, in which they have a chance to defeat the shark, everyone will remember that peekaboo shark fin and the LED bloodshed. That’s the ultimate challenge of designing a pinball machine—adding in challenging objectives for the hardcore, while keeping it accessible for the masses.

Judging by the popularity of Stern’s games, and pinball in general lately, it seems to be working.  

Fast Company