Circus Voltaire Reimagined Topper Production; Free Castlevania; Flashback 40 Years Ago This Month
By knapparcade
Well, it's Monday again. The good news is that it's almost October - the month of Pinball Expo! I'm counting down the days until the Grandaddy of them All (to borrow a phrase from college football's Rose Bowl), the biggest pinball event of the year. This should be a good week for articles here on the Knapp Arcade website. I've got a couple of things cooking, including an update on a manufacturer and a trip to see the first Barrels of Fun Bon Jovi pinball machine in the home state of the band...New Jersey. Let's start things off today with a quick look at the topper for American Pinball's recently announced remake aka reimagine of the beautiful 1997 Bally pinball machine Cirqus Voltaire. The distributor Mad Pinball recently shared an image of tops of Cirqus Voltaire toppers, which are being made by The Electric Playground. Pretty cool to see.
Here's an interesting piece of classic video game news. Konami recently created a FREE iPhone / Android app to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its iconic video game Castlevania. Through October 24th anyone can download the app, which enables people to play a direct port of the original 1986 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) / Famicom classic on their phone. The game includes touch controls and save states. Konami is also running digital sales with up to 80% off other Castlevania games on other platforms.
The section in my article last week looking back at what was happening in the arcade and pinball industries 30 years ago this month seemed to be pretty well received. So I decided to go further back, this time 40 years ago this month. Interestingly, there was a lot less major news in September 1986 than there was in September 1996. It's still interesting to see the charts and ads from the time. Probably the biggest news story of the month happened in the courts. On July 30th, Universal City Studios was ordered to pay Nintendo of America $1.6 million as a penalty for "bad faith" litigation — the closing chapter of Universal's long-running claim that Donkey Kong infringed its King Kong copyright. Universal had sued for $100 million, lost, appealed, and lost again; the July ruling settled the last appeal in Nintendo's favor. Looking at the charts, Steve Ritchie's Williams game, High Speed sat at the top. In RePlay's Players' Choice poll — an operator earnings survey scored on a 1-to-10 scale — the Steve Ritchie–designed police-chase game topped the pinball chart at a commanding 9.26, on location with 85% of surveyed operators. Williams dominated the rest of the September 1986 chart as well, with games like Comet (8.36), Space Shuttle (7.94), Sorcerer (7.00), and Grand Lizard (6.89). Gottlieb Premier's Hollywood Heat took the number two spot. On the vid side Tradewest's Ikari Warriors came in first place at 8.97, followed by Cinematronics' World Series and Sega's Hang-On, with Atari's Gauntlet (four-player) and Super Sprint right behind — and Pole Position, Spy Hunter, and Data East's Kung-Fu Master still earning. The "best new uprights" list pointed to what was coming: Bally Midway's Rampage debuted at a chart-topping 9.43, with Sega's Quartet and Enduro Racer close behind. Sega's "super scaler" motion games were in such demand that the company told RePlay it couldn't fill orders for Enduro Racer fast enough. And Nintendo's arcade push was everywhere at once — PlayChoice-10 charted among new uprights, VS. Super Mario Bros. sat near the top of the conversion-kit poll, and a VS. UniSystem skiing game, Slalom, was due in October. The kit chart also carried Rygar, Ring King, Arkanoid, 1942, Paperboy, Road Runner, and Indiana Jones, among others. I want to know what this game is...Grand Products' Velocity Ball. I don't think that I've ever seen one in person and there doesn't appear to be any video of one in the Internet, at least not that I can find. Is anyone familiar with it?
