i miss playing real pinball

Pinball Table Digital Reconstructions

There exists a program called Visual Pinball. With it one may create digital pinball tables, simulating either analog or digital systems. The tool is robust enough to allow for the creation of original concepts or recreations of tables from years gone by. I was once terribly addicted to playing Visual Pinball and wanted to make a contribution to the scene.

One of the tables being worked on at the time was Magic City, an analog table with some funky artwork. However, the age of the table and its relative scarcity made it difficult to obtain clean artwork for use within a digital reconstruction. The gameplay could be approximated, because the forces of pinball physics are well known, the layout of the table is known, the scoring system is known... In short, it was possible to create an estimation of the game without any graphics whatsoever. Of course, such a project would have been incomplete without said graphics.

I took what few reference photos could be found of the table art and redrew it all from scratch, making up things as I went along to fill in visual gaps that were difficult to make out in the low-resolution photos found online. Suddenly a classic pinball table, once lost, was brought back to life by a small team of independent artists and programmers through sheer force of will. I was proud to be a part of that endeavour.

The art for Magic City was done in Photoshop, but I quickly realized that all future work would need to be done in Illustrator. One day we'll have the ability to render these tables at much higher resolutions and this artwork is ready for that day. After Magic City, I did the art for Jack in the Box, Queen of Hearts and Seawolf.

Below you will find the before and afters of the tables I worked on. Just click on the pictures to get enlarged views.