# Master Class in Pinball Playfield Art - Pinball Expo 2024 - Doug Watson **Source:** Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2024) **Type:** video **Published:** 2024-10-18 **Duration:** 63m 21s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWVP4khhW5I --- ## Analysis Doug Watson, legendary pinball artist with 17 years of industry experience, delivers a master class on playfield art design at Pinball Expo 2024. He covers core design principles including visual unity through dominance of color, shape, line, and font; the importance of clarity in communicating game rules to players; and the critical distinction between functional art that aids gameplay versus decorative art that merely fills space. Watson emphasizes that effective pinball art must serve the player's understanding of how to play, not the artist's ego. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] The primary intention of pinball art is to help the player understand how to play the game — _Watson's core thesis throughout the lecture, exemplified by Terminator 2 design philosophy_ - [HIGH] Europeans were the primary purchasers of pinball games when Watson started his career — _Watson states he researched buyer demographics and found Hans Rosenzweig was the biggest buyer in the world at the time_ - [HIGH] Steve Ritchie initially had inserts laid out 'in a god-awful terrible way' vertically before Watson redesigned the Terminator 2 playfield — _Watson recounts confrontation with Ritchie over insert layout; Watson was allowed to redo the entire playfield design_ - [HIGH] Indiana Jones pinball featured twelve modes, not three or six — _Watson explains the design decision to create three four-mode clusters, one for each Indiana Jones movie licensed_ - [HIGH] Terminator 2 used only five colors (not counting black and white) — _Watson states this directly and credits John Yausey with commenting on his courage using gray on a playfield_ - [HIGH] Gordon Morrison's artwork was soft, friendly, and inoffensive by design due to Gottlieb's directives — _Watson contrasts Morrison's style with Paul Ferris and Kevin O'Connor, noting Gottlieb was threatened by the latter two_ - [HIGH] Watson intentionally studied James Cameron's color palette from Terminator, Aliens, and The Abyss films for T2 design — _Watson explains his color script methodology: blue-tinted interiors with hot red accents matching Cameron's visual style_ - [HIGH] Modern artists using licensed photography and pre-supplied studio artwork create games 'as artistically unique as a McDonald's Big Gulp Cup' — _Watson's critique of contemporary digital art practices in pinball_ ### Notable Quotes > "The primary ingredient of good pinball art, of effective pinball art, is to have a clear idea of what your intention is." > — **Doug Watson**, early in lecture > _Core thesis statement establishing the foundation of Watson's design philosophy_ > "You cannot possibly make it too obvious how to play it... to remove all the mystery, to remove all the esoteric, secret, hidden rules that the high-end players like to share amongst themselves." > — **Doug Watson**, mid-lecture > _Direct critique of esoteric pinball design; advocates for accessibility over elite gatekeeping_ > "I spent one night reading the script for Terminator 2, and I went, holy shit, this has got blockbuster written all over it." > — **Doug Watson**, T2 anecdote section > _Watson's visceral reaction to T2 IP; illustrates his intuition about gameable narratives_ > "Steve, why don't you let me take a shot? And I laid out exactly what you see on Terminator 2." > — **Doug Watson**, T2 design conflict section > _Demonstrates Watson's confident advocacy for his design vision over established designer's approach_ > "My face didn't melt off. So lucky." > — **Doug Watson**, Indiana Jones reference anecdote > _Humorous aside about seeing the Ark of the Covenant at Skywalker Ranch during research_ > "Draw something. If you have an opportunity to be a pinball artist and you're going, oh, well, I can just insert some of the photography shot by the studio... No. Use your talent. Make that game yours." > — **Doug Watson**, late lecture criticism of digital art > _Direct exhortation to contemporary artists; core disagreement with modern Photoshop-based workflows_ > "I already made a pile of shitty artwork. I did enough bad play field artwork to last this entire lecture right on through." > — **Doug Watson**, mid-lecture reflection > _Watson's humility about his own failures; refuses to critique other artists' work_ > "Five colors. Two blues, very close together. Three grays. That's all I used in Terminator 2." > — **Doug Watson**, color theory section > _Demonstrates constraint and intentionality in color palette; influenced by James Cameron's cinematography_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Doug Watson | person | Legendary pinball artist with 17 years of industry experience; designer of Terminator 2, Indiana Jones, and other classic playfields; former college professor | | Steve Ritchie | person | Pinball designer who worked with Watson on multiple games; initially laid out Terminator 2 inserts in a way Watson disagreed with before Watson redesigned them | | Paul Ferris | person | Williams pinball artist whose work Gottlieb found threatening; influenced by Frank Frazetta; created four-color process backglass art for Lost World and Paragon | | Kevin O'Connor | person | Williams pinball artist known for classic brushwork on playfields; work also threatened Gottlieb management | | Gordon Morrison | person | Gottlieb pinball artist known for soft, friendly, inoffensive artwork; specialized in key line brushwork; Watson initially underappreciated his style | | John Yausey | person | Pinball artist on Terminator 2 under Watson; commented on Watson's courage using gray on playfield; needed saturated jelly bean colors for visual impact | | Mark Ritchie | person | Pinball designer credited with creating gameplay features that complemented Watson's twelve-mode Indiana Jones design | | Frank Frazetta | person | Legendary fantasy artist whose cover art style influenced Watson and Paul Ferris; Watson studied his aesthetic rather than imitating directly | | Jean Girard (Moebius) | person | European graphic artist featured in Heavy Metal magazine; influenced Watson's understanding of cutting-edge European graphics | | Constantino Mitchell | person | Williams pinball artist whose work Watson initially found incomprehensible; credited as stunting Watson artistically in early career | | Python Angelo | person | Pinball artist known for unique, strange drawing style on games like Taxi, Dracula, and Gorbachev | | Hans Rosenzweig | person | Identified as the biggest buyer of pinball games in the world during Watson's early career; European based | | Chris Achilleos | person | Artist featured in Heavy Metal magazine; represented cutting-edge European graphics Watson studied | | James Cameron | person | Film director whose visual style and color palettes (Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, James Cameron movies) Watson studied and replicated for T2 pinball design | | Gottlieb | company | Pinball manufacturer that employed Watson; restricted artwork to be whitewashed and inoffensive; threatened by Paul Ferris and Kevin O'Connor's bold styles | | Williams Electronics | company | Pinball manufacturer employing artists like Paul Ferris, Kevin O'Connor, and Dennis Nordman; competitor to Gottlieb | | Terminator 2 | game | Watson's signature game achieving visual unity through five-color palette; represents his breakthrough in controlling insert layouts, art direction, and overall design package | | Indiana Jones | game | Watson-designed pinball with twelve modes covering three movies; required comprehensive playfield layout clarity to communicate complex rule structure | | Heavy Metal Magazine | publication | French graphic novel publication (Metal Erland) featuring cutting-edge European art that influenced Watson's understanding of aesthetics that appealed to young European audiences | | Skywalker Ranch | location | Location where Watson conducted reference research for Indiana Jones pinball; where he viewed the Ark of the Covenant prop | ### Topics - **Primary:** Playfield art design theory and principles, Visual unity through color, shape, line, and font dominance, Player-centric design: clarity over mystery in communicating game rules, Historical evolution of pinball art from 1970s to 1990s, Tension between artistic ego and functional design, Contemporary digital art practices and critique of licensed imagery usage - **Secondary:** Color theory and palette selection methodology, Influence of film directors' visual styles on game aesthetics ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.78) — Watson is constructive, enthusiastic about sharing knowledge, and celebrates other artists' work while being honest about his own failures. He expresses frustration with contemporary practices (overuse of licensed imagery, lack of original art) but frames it as a call to action rather than condemnation. His tone is mentoring and generous despite strong opinions. ### Signals - **[sentiment_shift]** Legacy documentation concern: Watson explicitly framing this masterclass as leaving behind institutional knowledge from 17 years of industry experience for current and future artists. (confidence: high) — I wanted to leave a legacy behind me of what I learned in 17 years of making pinball art... share it for people working in pinball today, people working in pinball in the future. - **[design_philosophy]** Critique of modern Photoshop-based pinball art practices: Watson advocates for original hand-drawn artwork over collaged licensed imagery, positioning contemporary digital workflows as creatively compromised. (confidence: high) — Draw something... what you end up with is a pinball game that's just as artistically unique as a McDonald's Big Gulp Cup. Fight with all your power to draw your own artwork on the game, especially on the play field. - **[design_philosophy]** Functional hierarchy principle: successful playfield design establishes clear informational hierarchy about game goals (extra ball, multiball, special) visible at a glance, enabling casual players to engage with return-on-investment psychology. (confidence: high) — The entire game rule system is laid out right there in the mid playfield. Anybody can walk up to a T2, take one look at that playfield and they know exactly where the extra ball is... where the special is... all the awards and perks. - **[design_philosophy]** Focal point methodology: Watson uses sight lines (characters looking at shots) and implied lines (insert rows pointing to targets) as design tools to direct player attention and comprehension. (confidence: high) — A sight line is when you have a character on the playfield looking at something... you naturally psychologically will follow that gaze. Implied lines: anytime you have three objects lined up in a row you have created a line psychologically in the mind of the player. - **[design_philosophy]** Dominance principle: effective pinball art requires deliberate constraint in color palette, shape repetition, and typography rather than maximalist feature accumulation. (confidence: high) — Watson demonstrates Terminator 2 used only five colors (two blues, three grays), and emphasizes that more colors do not make better games. Applies to shape and line theory similarly. - **[design_philosophy]** Watson's design philosophy emphasizes clarity and player accessibility over esoteric hidden rules, directly contrasting with competitive player culture that values secrets and discovery. (confidence: high) — You cannot possibly make it too obvious how to play it... to remove all the mystery, to remove all the esoteric, secret, hidden rules that the high-end players like to share amongst themselves. - **[community_signal]** Watson's design process involves studying source material visually (film directors' cinematography, magazine artwork) and extracting color scripts and aesthetic principles rather than literal copying. (confidence: high) — I studied his movies visually [James Cameron] and then used his own work to come up with my color palette. I didn't want to make every game look like that, but if I'm going to do a James Cameron game, I'm going to make it look like a Cameron game. --- ## Transcript Thank you for coming. Just to let you know what the intention of my talk here is today. I don't mind a little audience participation. Like, why do we put artwork on a pinball playfield? Like, why bother? What's that there for? Stir the emotion of the player? Do I really need to talk into this thing to ruin the sign? Sorry, okay. And, uh, how do you tell good pinball art from bad? What's the difference? the difference okay it makes you feel an emotion it sure does I'm not gonna completely read everything here but I have this I brought along to make sure I didn't miss anything the intention of my talk it really is for people working in pinball today, artists. That's who I meant this to be for, but other people are interested. I wanted to leave a legacy behind me of what I learned in 17 years of making pinball art. I wanted to bring what I learned in that process and then share it for people working in pinball today, people working in pinball in the future, about what did I learn how to do? And how did I learn it? And what difference does it make? I have to keep referring here. The primary ingredient of good pinball art, of effective pinball art, is to have a clear idea of what your intention is. What are you trying to do with the artwork on the pinball game? When I started out at advertising posters, the way pinball art was done there for playfields is we had artists sitting in cubicles and they would bring in a white wood, just a bare wood with the inserts already in it, and go, here you go. The designer, usually in a little pen or marker, sketched the copy that he wanted to have on the thing, which were the directions for the game. That was it. My first game, I was like, what do you put on a pinball game? What goes there? So like many artists I have seen over the past 20 years who are new at doing this, the first idea you come up with as an artist is go, well, there's blank space that I got to fill up. And I just got to fill up space. Doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter what I put there. I knew that for a fact because when I first started advertising posters, they had artwork that the company had printed on or printed up for years going back. And what I recognized is an artist that stunned me with his talent was a Williams artist named Constantino Mitchell. because to my way of thinking, Constantino's artwork on a pinball game looked like it was done by a sixth grader as opposed to somebody with an actual art degree. It was incomprehensible. It didn't mean anything when you looked at play field. It was just shots and inserts. I was completely baffled as what the inserts were supposed to do because I wasn't a pinball player. didn't know how to play pinball. And thanks to the quality of artwork done on a lot of games in the 70s, you weren't going to figure out how to play pinball based on what was printed on the playfield. I had to write paragraphs of copy on a playfield back in those days. It looked to me like the way the inserts were laid out by the designer that was then handed off to me in the Whitewood, It looked like they had shaken up inserts like dice and gone floosh across the playfield. Completely scattered. What do I do with that? How do I make anything coherent? Roger, hi. I keep putting my glasses down. Pardon me for being clumsy with this. what I began to do over the course of about the next six or seven years as a pinball artist is continually strive to figure out what on earth is the artwork I'm putting on this game supposed to do what's its purpose what's its intention be decorative, be colorful be attractive, be interesting give me an opportunity to draw sexy women I never failed to take advantage of that excuse when the opportunity came up. Anybody who's filling with my career work knows I did more naked ladies on pinball games than any other artist in history. Because I like them. It's an entertaining product. I was a primarily male audience at the time. When I'm trying to get to here is I began to establish my own values of what I personally thought was more important to put on a game. And this was about intention. And there's always, when you're working with intentions, a hierarchy. There's something more important and then less important and less important, less important. And you establish what that hierarchy is. That hierarchy will guide you in your creative decisions about what you're doing. Because if you have your intention clear, then you know what the artwork is supposed to do. What I figured out after I began to finally go out to arcades and play games, and I realized as I'm playing them, I had no idea how to figure out how to play the game. I can keep the ball in play, I can hit some targets, I can get the game to respond, I can make cool sounds come out of it, but how do you beat the game? How do you play pinball? If you look at the playfields coming out of the 70s, it's like, I don't know, you just kind of scatter stuff around. You just hit stuff. And I thought, I would find experienced players, high-end players. They always figured out how to play a pinball game pretty quickly. They realized that the rules were esoteric. They had the intelligence and the experience to be able to figure out the puzzle of how do we get extra ball lit? How do you collect it? How do you get multiball to start if it's a multiball game? Where does that happen? How do you get a special? How do you get the next game for free? To me, those are the aspects that you're aiming for when you put your money into a pinball game and you want to beat the game. Getting a special is you winning. You defeat the game with a special. Extra balls help along the way. But that's the whole purpose of why you're playing pinball is to beat it, hopefully, along with enjoying the story along the way. So the primary intention of pinball art is to help the player understand how to play it. And you cannot possibly make that too obvious. You can't. because I did my research and I found out, okay, who buys them? Primarily Europe at the time when I was starting out, not the U.S. Europeans were the primary purchasers. Hans Rosenzweig, the biggest buyer of pinball games in the world back in his time, and I was like, okay, I need to understand what Germans are into. And then I need to understand what are Europeans into? what are they keying on as opposed to the American audience? And I went, what's the cutting edge in terms of Europeans' graphics? Where do you find that? How could I do that? Well, here's what I found out from my research. Cutting edge music that the Europeans appreciated, and there was a graphic novel, very popular amongst European young people at the time, which was a magazine called Metal Erland, which is French for heavy metal. Some of your older folks might remember Heavy Metal magazine. They actually made a movie based on that license, and that featured marvelous cover art by artists like Chris Achilleos, Frank Frazetta, and other talented people. And the stories inside were from legendary artists that the Americans hadn't even found out about yet, like Jean Girard, whose pen name was Mobius, and artists like Casa, Philippe Druyer. There was a bunch of them, and they had lots of sex and lots of naked ladies and lots of violence and lots of action, lots of adventure, and lots of fantasy adventure like crazy. And I went, well, do I want to make the kind of artwork that Gottlieb was asking me to do, which was as whitewashed and inoffensive as I could possibly make it? Or did I want to do something that would draw new audiences to play pinball? That was my goal. That was my desire. The people who already knew how to play pinball were already playing it. They didn't need to be seduced in. I wanted young people my age to start playing pinball. And I knew that if they walked up to a game, put in some money, and never figured out what they were trying to do, they were unlikely to come back and put a lot more money into it. my goal was to serve the needs of the person who bought the game which was coin box back in that era and it's like how do i get young people who haven't played pinball before to be interested in playing it tournaments were one way to do it but also coming up with artwork and themes that they resonated with which were aggressive at the time sexy violent dark um not cozy and i had the misfortune of being assigned exclusively to gotlieb when i was at advertising posters where i started out they came in they reviewed all the artists in the entire art department because they had grown a little weary of what gordon morrison's artwork looked like and they were threatened huge by what paul ferris's artwork looked like and kevin o'connor's because they had developed four color process printing so that you could do paintings on the back glasses games like lost world in paragon because paul ferris was another frisetta fan like i was you know from my earliest works that i was not imitating frisetta but trying to capture the same appeal of what Frazetta's work was about. If that name is unfamiliar to you, google it. So to be helpful in the process of understanding how to play a game, to do something other than showing off how well I can draw with a rapidograph, because that's pretty much where I started. I didn't know what a game art was supposed to do, but I knew I could draw. So I went, okay, just draw stuff. And a lot of artists have come by in the last 40 years or so starting out, did the same thing. There's a blank white wood. It's full of space. Fill it. And fill it with stuff you like to draw. Whether it meant anything to the theme of the game or how the rules of the game were supposed to operate, that's just what you did because we didn't know. I can't touch the screen. What am I doing? Oh, down. Thank you. This is going to sound a little academic. For those of people who don't know, the latter part of my career after working in the video game industry, then working in motion picture special effects, then I went back to school for more college degrees, and I ended up as a college professor out in California for a couple of different schools. So if this lecture I'm about to give, this presentation, comes across a little academic, that's on purpose. And if I begin to bore the crap out of you, you might have something else you want to go look at instead of putting it with me for the next 45 minutes. Basic design theory. My goal of what I think makes for a good pinball game is achieving visual unity. through the use of focal point, shape, line, color, contrast, rhythm, and repetition all working together to make a package. And therefore, I included one of my masterpieces right there, which is T2. I came up with T2 because I got to lay the inserts out. I wanted to convince designers to let me do the insert layouts for years, and they wouldn't let me until finally Steve Ritchie, who I had done two games with previously, who I had famously butted heads with hard to the point I thought he would never work with me again. I spent one night reading the script for Terminator 2, and I went, holy shit, this has got blockbuster written all over it. and the story was one of the most gameable movie stories I'd ever read or come across. And I went, I got to do it. It was midnight. I'm in my office. I finished the script, and in my head, I had the whole game in my mind. What it was going to look like, what the color scheme was, how I was going to go about doing it. I was like, done. And I went to see Steve the next day, and he goes, well, John Yowsey is already my artist on this thing, which was a good choice. John's excellent. and Steve was in the process of having the blueprint on his table in his office and he had little plastic inserts that he was busy laying out himself and he did it in a god-awful terrible way. He was lining them up vertically of shots and it was like, and I simply kept my cool and said, Steve, why don't you let me take a shot? this and I laid out exactly what you see on Terminator 2. I chose the shape of the inserts, I chose the color of the inserts, I chose the position of the inserts, and I did the whole damn game. And I explained as I was doing it, here's what you'll be able to understand as a player, because I going to write on those inserts because if you have a rectangular insert that you mount sideways you can actually say something legible on it as opposed to the triangular inserts or those crazy chevron inserts he used on f tomcat you couldn't write anything on those things they didn't serve any other purpose other than light show and i went what a waste and i said the entire game rule system is laid out right there in the the mid play field. Anybody can walk up to a T2, take one look at that play field in EO, exactly where the extra ball is, you know, exactly where multiball is, you don't know exactly where to start it, you know, where the special is, you know, where all the awards and perks in that game are just sitting there playing as the nose on the end of your face, which was my goal to achieve in pinball in all the years I worked up until that point is to make it overwhelmingly obvious how to play it, to remove all the mystery, to remove all the esoteric, secret, hidden rules that the high-end players like to share amongst themselves. Did you know about this secret feature hiding inside this game that if you get this, it does this amazing thing? And they love that. And I was like, how in the world does that make a game make money? It doesn't. Want a pinball game to make money? You want to spend thousands of dollars buying one? then you want the public to walk up to that game in two seconds, understand what their intention is as they're playing it once they put their money in it. And then because I arranged them in these rows, you can always tell by the time your third ball drains how close did you get. Because that's one of the draws that brings you back into putting more money into the game is how close to a goalie. I was one shot away from an extra ball. I know I can get it now. I'm used to the left-right shots. I'm now capable of climbing the ramps. I can see the features. Okay. Put more money in that game because now I can get the extra ball. And then he can go, look how close I got to multiball start. Okay. Let's see if I can get multiball going. Look how close I got to getting a special. All right. I bet if I just simply practice a little bit more, I can get a free game out of this game. That was the psychological process I was aiming at. And once you get a player engaged in that process of understanding that he got very close to what the goals of the game were, he's going to put a lot of money in it. Which was my goal, creating artwork for pinball games, is to have the person who invested all that money to buy it in the first place to get a return on his investment. And I used the most striking imagery I could on back glasses to see if I could draw them over. Because like today, back then, you're still living in a world full of distractions, full of things that are trying to draw your attention here and draw your attention there. Pinball games tend to go in arcades and locations and bars, and they're competing with other games. How can you make you play mine? How can I create back glass art that says, oh, of all these choices, I would like to walk up and play that one. What kind of artwork makes you want to do that? How do I compel the player to want to play my game? So that was reflected in the choices I made in Backlass art. And then once the purpose of the Backlass was done, because all the Backlass is is a point-of-purchase display. That's it. all the animation you put it in, all the stuff you got, all its purposes to get you walk up to the game and get you to go, oh, yeah. And then you go. And you look at the play field. Is the play field incomprehensible? Is it mysterious? Have you had any idea what you're trying to do? That can be intimidating enough to go, I think I'll try another game or I think I'll go do something else. I think I have another beer. I'll do anything else other than play this game because I don't understand what I'm trying to do. And finally, after all the games I had done before this one, T2 allowed me to build a play field and build an artwork package that meant somebody who was only like maybe so-so at playing pinball could walk up to it and go, oh, I see. Extra ball is right there. And the sheet is right here. And this is how you do multiball here. It's just in one look. No mystery. It became entirely about the challenge is can you physically control the ball with your flippers to climb those ramps to go for payback time when every shot on the game was worth 5 million points. What a marvelous idea. And then get payback time during multiball and holy cow, watch the scores go crazy. That's what I wanted the game to do. And as long as I can finally find a designer to get out of my way and let me do that, that became my signature style all through the 1990s. You know, it wasn't just on T2, but this is the package I kind of first got that goal going with. Let me cruise along here because I'm going to run out of time. Unity. What holds that entire package together into a unified whole? In terms of design, dominances. That's the lesson I have for you guys today, among others. Dominance of color. One dominant color in maybe one or two secondary colors, and that's all you need. Is a pinball game better because you cram more colors into the play field? little artistic details onto the play field? I don't think so. How do you make the whole thing coherent? Second, dominance of shape. Pick a thematic shape and repeat it. You see that in my work all throughout the 90s. I would do it in the graphics I would surround an insert with and then made it consistent. And when you do that, you end up with rhythm in terms of your design. Dominance of line, one kind of line over another, how you execute with a brush or with a repenograph the quality of line in your drawing. Dominance of font choice, which is the copy you put on the play field. Is more variety of fonts a good idea? Not necessarily, but I'm saying that if you're going to fuss around with a variety of different fonts, make sure you have a good reason for doing it. I did that on Indiana Jones, where I had font and illustration combined on every insert on that lower play field, and each one of them was unique, because that was part of the appeal of the game, is the fact that, okay, mode play in pinball came on strong in the early 90s, so that the same play field was actually several different games at once. More often, you get about three modes, so that every shot on the game changes meaning, changes reward during that mode until it times out. Well, when we got the Indiana Jones license, holy cow, after I flew out to the Skywalker Ranch and got to see all this cool stuff, as for reference, to shoot the Ark of the Covenant, they pulled it out for me and I had to peek. My face didn't melt off. So lucky. Anyway, focal point. What that means is, unlike a painting, the point of that is to direct the player's eye with the artwork. It makes a huge difference when you're playing it if the artwork tells you what to look at. There's several different ways of pulling that off. I would use the artwork to emphasize what are the big shots you want to aim at and what not. What rewards do you want now and what not? That's part of that hierarchy I was talking about before of information. Let me pass down all this stuff. Okay, in Indiana Jones, I didn't do three modes in that game because we managed to get the license for all three of the movies at the time. They hadn't made the fourth one yet. So I had Indiana Jones 1, 2, and 3 as license available, and I went, I could make Raiders of the Lost Ark game. No problem. How about we do all three? How do I do a game about all three blockbuster Indiana Jones, Steven Spielberg movies in one game? Twelve modes. not three, not six, not eight, twelve. Then look at the play field for Indiana Jones and go, how in the world can you make it comprehensible to the player that there's actually twelve modes in that game? And every grouping of four modes that I clustered together was the story of that movie. So you got to play Raiders. You got to play Temple of Doom, Crystal Skull, you get to play all three movies through the themes of what I put on those inserts on that playfield, and then Mark Ritchie came up with the features that allowed for you finding the entire rest of the game in each mode interesting to play. Kudos to Mark. Okay. Skip that, skip that. Shape theory. We're designing here. We're artists. Our brains imbue different shapes with different emotional qualities. Put this knowledge to good use in your artwork. In Pixar movies, what shapes are the nice, good characters? They're all round. What shapes are all the evil bad characters? They're pointy. They're angular. What shapes do you want to include in your game to understand and convey to the player what the meaning of characters are? What the meaning of the environment of the game is? Is it sharp edged and pointy? Is it round and friendly? Is it something in between? And then where? Are there moments of the game when you want them to be pointy? rounded and soft-looking emotional characters? Line quality, I talked about that a little bit before. It took me years to fully appreciate Gordon Morrison's key line brushwork. Because when I first started out, I just didn't think Gordon's artwork was appealing to me at all. It was just old-fashioned and cartoony, and it had no drama to it. It was just soft, friendly, slide off your eyeballs, offend absolutely nobody, which is exactly what Gottlieb had asked him to do. Then when Gottlieb got a hold of me as another dedicated artist, I went, I'm going to convince Gottlieb that they shouldn't actually use me anymore. So I went out of my way to sort of like offend Gottlieb, and it didn't work. They kept up with me. Kevin O'Connor's classic brushwork. on his playfields going way back to the 70s. I paid attention to that. The wonderful, unique strangeness of Python Angelo's drawing. Anybody remember Python? His artwork was as interesting as he was. What an interesting character that guy was. You look at his games like, you know, Taxi. You look at the kind of characters he would come up with to put on playfields. With Dracula and Gorbachev. Gorbachev, and it was just Python's imagination doing what it did, and he had a very unique drawing style. You know, a Python game is like nothing else that you look at because it's his unique art style dominating it. Line quality is where you can really showcase everything that makes you unique and special as a playfield artist. My battle cry to artists of today and in the future, now that we live in an era where Photoshop creates the artwork. You don't have to draw it. You can use pre-existing images from the license holder. Some motion picture marketing department will send you all kinds of digital files, and what artists tend to do today, all too often they go, look at all this cornucopia of artwork that's so much better than anything I could draw, so I might as well use the studio's artwork and put it on different layers and just sort of like kludge together all the previously existing artwork that the studio supplied to me. And what you end up with is a pinball game that's just as artistically unique as a McDonald's Big Gulp Cup. Draw something. If you have an opportunity to be a pinball artist and you're going, oh, well, I can just insert some of the photography shot by the studio and I can make the movie star here and I can put that mark over here. No. Use your talent. Make that game yours. Because if you use somebody else's supplied artwork, then that's exactly what that game looks like. No one can tell you had anything to do with it. Fight with all your power, with whoever company you're working for, to draw your own artwork on the game, especially on the play field. Go ahead and make mistakes. You will. I did. To do this talk today, I was tempted. Well, do I show some other artists work as examples of how not to do play felt art? Don't need to have no desire to offend anybody else doing the best job they can making pinball artwork, because in my career, I already made a pile of shitty artwork. I did enough bad play field artwork to last this entire lecture right on through. So I don't need anybody else's artwork to demonstrate how to not do it right. Sight lines and implied lines as a design feature to take advantage of. A sight line is when you have a character on the play field looking at something as opposed to looking at you. Sight lines are what happens when I put characters, features, faces, heads on a play field. they're looking somewhere and you naturally psychologically will follow that gaze you can use sight lines of characters to help the player understand where a shot is where they should go what they're trying to achieve what that intention is implied lines it's not the same thing as a sight line that means directional information anytime you have three objects lined up in a row you have created a line psychologically in the mind of the player or the viewer. You're going to follow that line to see where that line leads. Inserts do this all the time now. Inserts are now lined up in rows. I had some influence over that in my career how that done oftentimes today about finding where the shot You just put a bunch of inserts in a nice row like I did with T2 Those inserts are nothing but implied lines pointing out where the shots are to help you play it. Color theory. It helps to start out having a language. How do you talk about color? Well, it's brighter or it's not. it's light or it's dark oh there's a whole science behind color and how the human mind perceives it emotionally and perceptually you need a language to describe it hue value and intensity or saturation intensity is something that's a feature of let's say computer game artwork where the light is shining into your eyes and then saturation is a quality of ink of printing processes of how saturated with the color is that you're using hue is red green blue primary colors everything secondary that's what the hue is what's better to use on a play field bright saturated colors what if everything on the play field is super bright and saturated how do you know what's important if everything is screaming bright dull colors is it better to use light value colors is it better to use dark value colors is a wider variety of colors can you put more and more colors on a play field does that make it a better game. No. Just confusing. But with the full color spectrum dynamic range of color available through four color process printing available today, there's an unlimited amount of colors you can put on a game without it costing any more money. Back in my era, every color was an individual silkscreen hit. And the more colors I used on a play field, the more expensive it was to print it. So, there was some motivation to go, how can I be more economical in how I use color in the game, and how many colors do I need? And then, how can I use the colors in a way that help unify the entire package? So the same colors are on the cabinet, the same colors are in the back glass, the same colors on the play field, the same colors are on the plastics. Taken as a whole, that thing works as a unit. That's why I keep coming back to Terminator 2 because that was finally my opportunity to just control all that. Do you know how many colors I used in Terminator 2? Five, not counting black and white. What were those colors? Two blues, very close together. Three grays. Gray. John Yauze has come up to me in the past and said, I can't believe the courage you had to put gray on a play field, because John never did it. John needed to have those jelly bean, pretty saturated colors, because that's what Pimlart was to John. And he made it work by and large, because John is amazing. But all I did was I used five colors to make T2. Those colors that I used were chosen because I went and I looked at James Cameron's work. What color palette did he use? to make the first Terminator movie, to make The Abyss, to make Aliens. It was identical. He uses these yellow-orange filters, particularly on night shots, to make everything tinted blue, not gray. So the Terminator movies are blue. The Abyss was blue. Aliens was blue. Interiors, he used those filters consistently time and time again. and he has a color script he works with. And then on top of all those blues, you throw in one kind of hot, glowy, bright red to contrast with all those blues. It's exactly what I did. I studied his movies visually and then used his own work to come up with my color palette. I didn't want to make every game look like that, but if I'm going to do a James Cameron game, I'm going to make it look like a Cameron game in using his color palette. To me, it's just like, well, what else would you do? Oh, that's interesting. It changed the font size. Well, I don't want to bore you guys with going through all that copy there, but contrast is where do you want the viewer's eye to go? You can do it with color. When I primarily use analogous colors, colors that go well together and are harmonious in their effect on the mind and the eye, that makes for a good unity in a package. You pick a color palette that's a bunch of analogous colors that go together real well, and you pick one that's a complement. Does anybody here not know what a complementary color is? It's okay if you don't. Great, you guys are all art educated. Complementary colors vibrate off each other when you put them in juxtaposition. I use complementary colors in areas where I wanted the viewer, the play er of the game, to go notice me. Because you can make that happen with directions like I talked about. You can do it with eye lines and eye sides. You can have all these techniques to sort of guide the perspective of the player around that play field from moment to moment telling them what's important to notice and what's not. I use gray on more than one game to say, there's nothing important here. There's no point in paying attention to great big vast areas of gray. Look where the color is. Not only that, but where's the saturated colors? Well, how do I use color to emphasize where I want the viewer to look, where I want them to notice where the shot is at moment to moment? You use fairly analogous grayed-out colors and then one super bright one. And you use the super bright one to tell the player, this is what's important. This is where you need to look to play the game well, to play the game successfully. Don't you hate getting old with glasses? Wow. Another way of doing contrast is with value. What's value? Value is how light or dark something is. Particularly colors. There are colors like yellows that are really bright. There are colors like deep dark ultramarine blue. Is lighter colors better on a playfield? Are darker colors better on a playfield? Is a mix, is middle range value colors better on a a playfield. I experimented. I wanted to find out, because it's important to me to do the best artwork I can on a pinball game. I ended up having practiced and experimented with what the use of light color palettes and dark color palettes actually was. When you're in a bright environment, black, fields of black, can make the glinting specularity of a speeding steel pinball stand out really cool against a black ground? If you're in a brightly lit place, such as in the office of the designer who's making the game, he has no problem seeing how the game plays in bright light. Where do pinball games end up? Dark arcades, they end up in bars, they end up where the light is ambient and compromised. You have a black playfield? I made some dark playfield games. And I noticed that when I went out and tried to play them in the dark, I was like, holy crap, I can't see anything. So I lightened up my playfields like that. I also became aware by talking to operators, what colors do you like? And what are the effects of that? If you own a game, which is what I'm making games for, is for those owners, for those operators. Not the distributor so much, but the operator. The operator's got to clean it. he's got to maintain it. He's got to replace the posts that break. He's got to replace the plastics. Keeping a pinball game operational that's out there earning money is a lot of work. You know what I found out? They hated great big light areas of like yellows. They hated areas where it showed the dirt of the pinball game. They look dirty fast when you use light colors. And I wanted to make my games owner-friendly. Guess what doesn't show up dirt? Gray. Neutral gray. You can't tell. It can show up and look dirty on dark playfields. light playfields. And all of a sudden my whole palette started to become mid-range in value colors. Because it worked well. It still showed off the key line. It still showed off the line work, the characteristics that are uniquely you when you draw. Mid-range colors can do that when you surround your key lines in your drawing. with mid-range color values. If you've got a special reason for a callout color, use it, but use it sparingly, such as the use of red on Terminator. Let me cruise on through here. This is a game called Pool Sharks I did back in my Valley days, and what, instead of just packing in all the illustration I could possibly I was like, wow, let me show the world that I can draw cool stuff, which was my intention for the first five years I made pinball art. Games like Barracora. I wanted to just dazzle people with how well I could draw and how dramatically I could light figures. Did that have anything to do with making the game easier to play? No. Did it have anything to do with creating unity in the game? Well, some. But basically, it was me basically stroking myself with how well I can draw. Does that make a game better? I don't think so. The purpose of my artwork on the game is to make the game playable, not to showcase to the world, oh, aren't I hot shit with how I can draw naked ladies, cool. Anyway, Pool Sharks was an opportunity to have minimal artwork. If you're going to make a play field and you're making shots and it's a pool game, then I I made the play field into a pool table with a rack of balls right there in the middle. So I don't need to fill up all that space with illustration. I made basically my game into a fern bar with these red and yellow awnings to sort of be a pool hall that looked like something you might want to go hang out in. Rhythm and repetition. I'm including a backlash illustration here because I thought it conveyed the idea really, really well when I did Grand Slam. I've got these flowing lines of action as if the baseball player existed in a world where you could see the movement, the movement of his bat swing, the sort of shapes that I put trailing off his body. It had this momentum and this direction and this force. those shapes are repeating themes it sets up a visual rhythm at least hopefully there's different kinds of rhythms that was shape rhythm attack from mars one of my masterpieces I have all kinds of rhythm happening I have all kinds of repeating shapes in this game. Oh my God. I can't believe I got this late start in what I'm doing here. All right, I want to explain the reason why I came up with those bracket shapes in my artwork around inserts. Once I got the inserts lined up in rows so you could tell where the shots are, you tell what the shots mean. I would surround them with my own little interesting graphics that often dealt with hard-edged shapes like it did on Mars. Specific reason for doing that. Here's why I developed that. I watched good players play. At Williams, we had some pretty good shooters. I was one of them. I grew into a really high-powered pinball player in my time at Williams. And I used to play, let's say, Roger Sharp. who was also a famously super talented pinball player. I watched how excellent players like Roger played. Like Lyman Sheets, the 1993 world pinball champion, who was a programmer I worked with. I played pinball with Lyman. What an exercise in torture that was. If you've ever seen Lyman Sheets play, it's something to see. Because he was super human. But what I observed is how good players play pinball. They don't stand up here and go flip, flip. This is how an expert plays. They're down here. What are they doing? They're trying to use depth and peripheral vision to see from their flipper all the way to the shot that's way up the play field. and I went that's how you make the killer shots you've got to be able to see them and they were down here low like this what I recognize is I began playing like that too and then I realized you can really really help a player play a game with artwork on that play field if you give them visual markers because I didn't have the capacity to see from my flipper all the way to the top of the playfield in the same look. I've got to fire from here and hit something way up there. What I ended up doing that I noticed from my own experimentation and observation is that I didn't actually shoot for the target. I shot for a piece of artwork along the way. Something in the middle playfield became a marker, like the end of a point of a piece of graphic that I would draw around one of those inserts. And I wanted to have as many of those visual cues in the mid-playfield so the good players could go, I know that if I aim for that in the artwork, I'm going to hit that shot. Over and over. And I would intentionally place graphics on my playfield artwork to help the high-end players have those visual markers to be able to make the hard shots. To do them the favor of doing that and still make a nice package. oh i already talked about that story theory here my very kind of pinball game tells a story None of that happened back in the 70s when I started Began to kind of creep in in the 1980s, but I love a game that tells a story. What makes up a story? Characters. Interesting characters. Good characters, bad characters, drama between characters. And when speech came along in pinball, really talented people like Steve Ritchie recognized right away that if a game can talk, the game can have a personality. If a game has a personality, it can challenge you. It can tease you. It can insult you. Black Knight. Gorgar. Those games first talked. And I realized when I was finally working on T2, what was going to bring this game together, more than anything else I could possibly add to that game sound-wise, was Arnold's voice. Because I had nothing but Arnold's great big face this high on that back glass staring right at you. Arnold's addressing you as the Terminator in Terminator 2. His voice coming out of that face is taunting you. It's teasing you. It's telling you what to shoot for now. It's possibly arguing with you, and it's rewarding you with attaboys. Even though he's using his Terminator voice to do it, but his was the personality of the game. My favorite games were the ones that had an adversary, and it had a personality to that adversary that would tease you, provoke you, emotionally engage you. that's why I encourage pinball artists out there today is to give the games characters give the games story give the games drama between characters root for somebody when I'm playing a game that's got great character and great storyline in it I end up talking back to it I talk back to Arnold I talk back to a lot of characters in the games I talk back to the Martians in Attack from Mars. I'm busy playing the game. I just missed a shot, and I'm going to curse out an imaginary character because it engages you more than just shots and features and ramps and ball guides and all that stuff. You create that kind of emotional attachment of the game, emotional identity of the game, so you literally, when you have been away from the game for a while and you want to go back and play it, it's like you're playing an old friend. You're playing someone you know. You're playing someone whose personality is familiar to you that is so appealing that you want to go back and spend some time with that character again. I'm thinking of like Rudy in Funhaus. People who, designers who put great interesting characters into the design of the game. And if they haven't done that enough or to add on to that, you do it in the art. There were some artists out there who were terrific at coming up with interesting characters. I talked about Python Angelo. I could talk about Greg Freres. I could talk about Pat McMahon, who came up with these marvelously strange, interesting characters that he'd fill the art of goodness games with. They're so precious, and they're so valuable, and they're so much more lasting in your memory culturally than if you simply have studio-supplied actors' artwork that they sent to you for the marketing purposes that you just Photoshopped in. All right. I can skip that. I can skip that because I'm out of time. My storytelling style. Okay. My favorite style, and it's not the best. It's not the right one. It's just my favorite. It's what aligned me with Steve Richie as a designer because we had exactly the same intention. Sometimes you design a pinball game that's intended to be a party, like what Greg Frayers and Dennis Nordman did time after time is they made party games. Party animal. Whitewater. That kind of thing. Then there was games that had different reasons because they're based on a sports theme. You're playing a baseball game. You're playing a poker game. You're playing all the things of that tried and true real world sports that you can translate into a pinball game that I recognize that when I first came to pinball, it's like, holy cow. I look back at the history of artwork in pinball games and saying, you know how many poker games have been done? How many baseball games have been done? How many pool games? How many golf games? How many bowling games have been done in pinball? How in the world can I do something original that all those veteran artists haven't already done? That was my challenge, is how in the world can I make a poker game look unique? How can I make a pool game look unique? Well, how about pool sharks that are actually sharks in suits playing pool with each other, surrounded by the most luscious, sexy women you'd ever saw in your life? Pool sharks. Grand Slam was a baseball game I did but holy cow you want to talk about lousy play field art I'm going to skip ahead here because I know I'm out of time because I added a bunch of stuff at the end anyone who wants to have the full speech I'm giving today all you have to do is invite me to your next show and I'll be happy to fill in everything I'm skipping today Ah, storytelling. Let me just, since I know I'm out of time and there's people coming after me. I decided to show some work about how not to do it. Here's my first game. I'm out of college. I've never played pinball before. I don't know what I'm doing. Here's a white wood. Put some artwork on it. And I went full Frazetta and I did Panthera and the play field artwork has absolutely nothing to do with anything. It's like, I can draw cool looking women. Here's a great big one in the middle of the game. What does she mean? Nothing. Look at the color scheme I used. All that bright color, nothing makes any sense. No idea what I was doing. Yeah, yeah, I did that. Here's one even worse. My second game. Gottlieb's James Bond 007. If you don't remember it, for good reason. Don't work too hard at it. I think the job I did on this game was absolutely god-awful terrible. I've been embarrassed about it for years. I even say that. This is how not to do it. The whole upper part of the play field, nothing relates to anything else. It has absolutely no visual unity, no thematic unity, no color unity, nothing. Don't do that. Here's some pretty terrible artwork. This is a game I got from Joe Juice with a designer back at Stern. All I got was a white wood. What do I do with it? Well, the reason that motivated this game, I've told this at some conventions before, is I'm working, trying to figure out how to do this artwork, and I'm in a cubicle next to the late, great Gordon Morrison, who was the king of Gottlieb artwork during his career. And he was the wise old man, and I'm the fresh out of college kid, and he says, Doug, I gotta tell you, there's some rules in pinball you gotta follow. And one of those rules is that you can't use the color green on a play field. You can't. It's like a superstition. He didn't use it. If you're going to do it at all, then pick a color that's like no one's going to notice and use it in a subtle way. And I'm like, I'm fresh out of art school and I'm going, you're telling me there's a color I can't use? What? And I went, oh, I can't use green. So I made the greenest game in the history of pinball in response to what Gordon Morrison's advice to me was, and that was Quicksilver. It's entirely green. Was it good artwork? No. Did it help you learn how to play the game? No. Did those sort of like naked alien ladies flying through green Quicksilver goop have anything to do with anything as a theme? Nope. But then I wasn't around long enough to recognize how bad this stuff was because I didn't know what I was doing. This is a game called Dragon Fist, which is sort of my Bruce Lee martial arts-type themed game. And I'm just beginning to get a feel in that lower and mid-play field about cohesive graphic design. This is like my first attempt at even trying to put any kind of design into it that had any kind of visual coherency to it at all. I got, you know, Bruce down there at the bottom with the theme with his fist out, and I've got this sort of like environment with all this texture and crinkly stuff I threw in there that I thought would be interesting and fun. Did that help you play the game? No. But I'm finally, by game four, starting to figure out, well, actually, what do I want to do in pinball art on the play field? Somebody's striving for a unified design. There is some cool artwork on that play field, even if the artist himself says so, because that color scheme of contrasting the complements between that cerulean blue and all that orange and yellow, they are complementary colors. again I'm striving for a sense of unity and design and I'm getting closer here. And the introduction of a limited color palette. Now I showed you what that Grand Slam backglass looked like earlier to convey the idea of rhythm and shape design. But this was the playfield for it and utterly useless. This is abysmal pinball art. It's an abysmal design package. I didn't have any idea how to make a baseball game artwork and the colors and where I used them, terrible. Here's one of my big challenges along, this is Greg Kmic, Kings of Steel. I was lucky enough to go, oh, with all those poker games that have been done a million times before, how can I come up with something interesting, entertaining, and adventurous? I looked at a deck of cards. I noticed that the kings in a deck are wearing medieval armor and have swords, if not battle axes. So on the back last, I decided to have the kings coming to life right off the cards and dueling each other and having a face-off. But what Greg gave me for a play field was exactly this pattern. Toss. His insert layout, all over the bottom of the playfield, completely incoherent in terms of its placement in the design. I had no idea what to do with it. Therefore, the sense of unity coming through with this, absent, lousy playfield art. Thank you very much. My first story-based themed game. We had a white wood come into Williams that had no designer attached to it. Steve Kirk, a designer on the outside, had brought in a white wood. A friend of mine who was an engineer named Tony Kraemer decided to take his white wood and actually finish building the game. Tony and I collaborated on what the features and the shots would be. And this is my first attempt at laying out the inserts and forming a dungeon and dragons game without the license. This is an RPG. Way back in 1985, and I have channels and dungeons and Balrogs and magic swords and Lion Man and a bunch of elements that I knew that RPG gamers would, you know, find cool. Just stop? Oh. One minute, thank you. How much I can get through this? F14 Tomcat with Steve laying out all those inserts in a row like that. Jackbot. Based on Pinbot and then the machine, John Yowsey and I collaborated on this game. He did the back last in the cabinet. I did the play field. Jelly bean colored artwork. But I got naked ladies in there again. They're robots. Then my Clarity Masterpiece, because that's what I'm trying to aim at as your goal when you play a pinball game and you're creating graphics as an artist, clarity. Understanding what you're looking at. If you've got extraneous textures in there, get rid of them. If you've got extraneous graphics in there, what purpose are they serving? Throw them away. don't put anything on a play field that isn't serving the purpose of the entire unity and the theme of the game as a whole be a purist about it indiana jones this is what i'm talking about analogous colors it's all yellows and oranges little touches of green and that blue that just makes you notice where it is. And that was like, how do I lay out a dozen inserts on the middle of a play field and make it coherent at all? That was my challenge. And finally, my masterpiece, in my own opinion, absolute shot clarity, gray backgrounds, storytelling, rhythmic insert graphics, dedicated insert illustration, sight lines, complimentary and split complimentary color palette, drama and humor and character. I'm the character of the Martians. I recorded all those voices because that was my chance to be the main character of the game. Thank you, everybody, for coming today. Appreciate it. _(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v4)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: e74f5ce3-e7c1-42da-b135-909c0bb609e8*