Amiga

Pinball Dreams

Trivia

The developers were members of the Amiga demoscene group The Silents and the game was originally not planned to be released as a commercial game.

The idea to make Pinball Dreams came up in 1988 when Mikael Balle, another member of The Silents, had drawn some pinball tables (assumedly on the Amiga). However, his tables were not used for the game, but his ideas of having tables larger than the actual screen size (scrolling) remained.

Bitmap Brothers and their publisher Renegade turned down Pinball Dreams, stating that pinball games do not sell well. Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies became one of the biggest hits ever released for Amiga computers.

Tools used for developing Pinball Dreams on Amiga: DevPak (assembler), Deluxe Paint III (graphics), ProTracker 1.1b (music), PowerPacker 2.0b (cruncher).

There were rumors that Digital Illusions made a special HD-installed version of Pinball Dreams for their friends in the scene. Many Amiga games couldn't be installed on a hard drive as a copy protection measure.

When Pinball Dreams was released many cracking groups made a pact not to crack and spread the game because of the game maker’s strong roots in the scene. This pact didn’t last for long and the game was later illegally released and spread.

The developers once met a handicapped kid with only one hand, and made a special version of the game for him where you can control the flippers with the two mouse buttons. This feature does also appear in the sequel, Pinball Fantasies.

Contributed by Grov (637) on Mar 14, 2002.

The game also featured an absolutely stupid "copy protection" which required write access on the original floppy - not a good idea those days with all the virii floating around and no-one caring about getting a virus scanner. Besides, the "copy protection" didn't protect the game at all.

Contributed by phlux (4164) on Dec 06, 2001.

Pinball Dreams which was originally appeared on the Amiga was the very first game of Digital Illusions to be released.

* The game disk included a registered version of PKUnzip - someone must have made a mistake putting it together!

* You had to select the sound card / PC speaker every time you started the game!