New Motorola Mobility badge: Too late for this pinball machine lover Motorola, or at least the Mobility bit of it owned by Google, has a new logo with a different font and a rainbow circle: but it's too late to help some distressed pinball machine fanatics who've been crying inside for many years. I should explain that I have a very personal relationship with the Motorola logo - and with …
With the passing of years I go out less and less. But the few times I do I still miss dropping a few coins into one of those wonderful machines. The very few pinballs I've spotted since 2005 or so are so poorly designed and built that you don't want to play on them.
One of the things I respect about my former employer Motorola for is how little they messed with the logo over the last 75 years. When I was there around 2002 there was a big push to appeal to the teen market. To move away from the brand that made car and police radios.
The mantra was "not my father's Motorola". The marketing genius, Geoffrey Frost identified much on mobile as the Next Big Thing (shame the software teams let him down), and initiated "Hello Moto".
He offered Jony Ive whatever he wanted to move to Motorola.
And through all this he didn't change the logo or font. I've met lots of very smart marketing people and Frost was head and shoulders above the lot.
Whenever a new 'hot-shot' marketing person starts at a company they do two things - mess with the logo and fire the advertising agency.
Soon after that they get fired.
I think the best thing that came out of Motorola around that time was look of the RZR. However, I know someone who had a SLVR, which I believe was the same as the RAZR but in candybar form and it was just horrible to use and had an awful screen. I believe Mike Z was to thank for that monstrosity. He of later Nortel fame.
Ben Heck is known to many of us as the man who creates game controllers for people with only one hand, or making XBOX 360 laptops... however, he was making his own pinball machine a while back.
If you have a love of hardware hacking, take a look:
http://benheck.com/
His latest projects include a 3D-printed Spam-saver lid (the luncheon meat, not the unwanted email) and a PC keyboard with analogue WASD keys for gaming...
I still play Timeshock! - it was a pretty reasonable sim, and it wouldn't take much ingenuity (a few tilt switches, if you'll pardon the pun) to create a custom controller that responded to body language.
When I was a student, my addiction to Pinball made it to our Freshers welcome book, where they were advised to find me at the Pinball tables, if they needed help.
Also pinball has been in decline for years now, it's really hard to find the real thing in pubs any more. Searching BITE for pubs with pinball in london returns just 18 results, 2 of which are listed as CLOSED, I know the hole in the wall has had medieval madness for years but its completely knackered and unplayable.
http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/results.shtml?tc=london&pb=on
When I first started working my housemates and I bought a twilight zone pin between us, god I love that machine!
Not sure about the PC, but Atari (Coin-op) made a pair of Video Pinball machines with a decently-simulated "shooter" (IMHO) and a "nudge" switch in the (very slightly) movable control-panel. The first (Disco-themed, based on the Middle Earth playfield) was called simply "Video Pinball", and sold decently but not spectacularly. The second, "Solar War" (based on the Superman playfield) was ready for production at about the time as Asteroids, so was never sold (although I heard a rumor that 300+ "kits" of electronics were sold to a Greek distributor). Having played both, I can say that the "feel", while not really up to the full mechanical experience, is miles ahead of a console or PC game, and the one I have (sadly, with broken nudge switch) is still running. Unlike my two previous "real" pinball machines.
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