We’re very excited to be launching the Pinball Arcade on the Sony Entertainment Network. We have four great tables running on the most accurate pinball physics engine ever developed. What’s more, The Pinball Arcade will offer players the ability to buy our game (and any DLC tables) once and own it on both the PS3 and PS Vita versions! The PS Vita version supports the front and rear touchscreen and will be a great way for people to play our game while they’re on the go. We can’t wait for the game to be launched on April 10th. We can confirm that the game will run at a smooth 60 frames per second, and the lighting effects and real-time reflections make the graphics look stunning. This is the best pinball simulation we’ve created so far!
If you’re a fan of either real pinball or video pinball, we’re pretty confident that you’re going to love our game. FarSight has been making digital pinball games for years! We have received overwhelming support by the mechanical pinball community – and these are the people who insist on realism in their pinball games. We have acquired licenses from Bally, Williams, Stern, Sega, Data East, Gottlieb, and obtained other ancillary rights like Monster Bash and Creature from the Black Lagoon from Universal to name just a couple. We are focused on building the greatest possible collection of classic tables that we could distribute digitally ourselves.
A couple of weeks ago, we attended the Texas Pinball Festival, where a lot of people asked us how FarSight got involved in pinball simulations. People also thought it was interesting that we decided to transition from being a console game developer (with millions of retail unit sales over the past 20 years) to self-publishing our own games digitally. The fact is – we’ve been waiting for the age of digital distribution to get to where it is today for quite awhile.
If it would’ve been possible, FarSight would have made this transition 10 years ago when we created an original puzzle game called Mojo which featured a rolling ball. We saw a lot of potential in the game (and we still do!), but we had a difficult time finding a publisher whose sales department believe that our puzzle game could be successful in the retail space. Crave Entertainment saw a place for the game as a value title. After it shipped, FarSight and Crave together thought that making a pinball game from the engine created for Mojo would be relatively easy. Looking back – wow, we were pretty naïve about all of the nuances needed for pinball physics back then!
We loved pinball and were very excited to make a pinball game; however we knew that great pinball design is a skill that takes years of experience so we looked into what manufacturer license/s would be feasible to obtain ourselves. Our first pinball game, Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection was successful. We followed this up with a game that had much better physics and a better collection of tables in our opinion, PHOF: The Williams Collection. However, despite great reviews, the sales were not nearly as good. We weren’t about to give up, though.
We knew that we had a great game. We just needed more people to get their hands on it – and this was the perfect opportunity to get into digital publishing!
You guys will be getting my 10$. I love the idea of getting it for both ps3 and Vita with one purchase. I hope other developers follow your lead.
Ill finally have another table to play besides the Uncharted table for psp that came with my Uncharted 2 GOTY disk.
the previously released tables (Tales of Arabian Nights, etc.) will be recreated or just “repackaged” as they were in this new collection? the graphics suggest some sort of new engine, but I just want to be sure.
New physics and new graphics. A lot of work goes into our re-released tables.