Game Gallery Amusements

He doesn't hit home runs. He doesn't throw touchdown passes. He doesn't soar through the air and slam-dunk basketballs.

But Pat Lawlor is a superstar in his own right, one of the most acclaimed pinball designers left in the twilight years of a colorful game industry that got its start in the Great Depression.

Lawlor's most famous design was The Addam's Family game. Anyone who's ever dropped a quarter down a chute and used flippers to swat an elusive silver ball in the past quarter of a century has likely come across at least one of his creations.
His other notables include Monopoly, Twilight Zone, Whirlwind (the first pinball game to blow breezes on the player), Earthshaker (the first pinball game to replicate earthquake-like vibrations), Fun House (a game with a playing field that features a talking carnival barker with moving eyes and mouth), Safe Cracker, Rollercoaster Tycoon, No Good Gofers, Banzai Run, and Ripley's Believe It or Not!

Lawlor lives in the Chicago area, where the pinball industry was born and where almost all games were made. He was out of state and unavailable for comment this week. But in a past interview with a trade journal, he said he takes a serious view of his profession, knowing he could well be one of the last active pinball designers. He hopes pinball makes a comeback and that others will try to learn from him.

"Pinball will suffer if the really creative people are all gone and there is no one to teach what they know," he was quoted as saying in Pinball News.
Once scorned by conservative church leaders and politicians who likened games to gambling devices, pinball was banned in several major cities, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, from the early 1940s until the 1970s.

No games were produced from 1941 to 1945, because factories were retooled to assist the military during World War II.

The industry had its ups and downs, but continued to thrive even after Pong - the world's first successful video game - was introduced in 1972. A generation of other video games for both homes and arcades followed, growing more sophisticated over the years. But pinball weathered the competition up until the end of the 1990s, going more high-tech itself. Then, it faced stiff competition from the advent of Internet games and the high-tech graphics of modern home video games.

In the fall of 1999, the industry crashed. The venerable Williams Electronics of Chicago pulled the plug on its pinball division, leaving Stern Pinball, Inc., as the world's only major manufacturer.

Stern has continued to produce games. But Williams Electronics had commanded 65 percent of the global market for new games as recently as 1998. In the eyes of industry observers, its announcement to pull out would be like General Motors abruptly getting out of the car business.
"I'm really happy that we could go back to doing pinball and help bring it back from the abyss," Lawlor said in PlayMeter Magazine, in reference to the number of employees from the Williams talent pool who wound up at Stern.

In that same interview, he held out optimism for a pinball comeback. "Our business is a cyclical industry. What is old becomes new again."