Cameron Silver is an Australian pinball software engineer who worked at Williams during the 1990s, contributing to several notable pinball machines including Scared Stiff, Circus Voltaire, Star Wars Episode I, and Ticket Tactic. Based in Melbourne, he is recognized as one of the most successful Australian pinball exports and was interviewed on TOPCast in 2007.
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The pinball industry is structurally tiny and would remain tiny even if it quadrupled in size
The under-glass display on Cirqus Voltaire was inspired by Capcom's Flipper Football from 1996
A 'Digital Multiball' mode was designed for Cirqus Voltaire but cut due to cost of implementing a three-ball lockup with additional optics and metal
Star Wars pinball sold at least three times more units than Cirqus Voltaire and remained in top-10 charts for close to a decade
Legendary pinball designer who worked at Bally/Williams in the 1990s, collaborated on Scared Stiff and Cirqus Voltaire, designed Star Wars pinball, and currently works in coin-op video games at Raw Thrills
Co-host of Wild Dog Arcade, provides technical analysis and industry commentary on pinball games and code updates
Pinball player/community member referenced during gameplay
Original Pinball 2000 developer; participated in Nucore presentation and seminar at Pinball Expo
Programmer at Williams; co-developed Pinball 2000 tournament networking system with Lyman Sheets in spare time; colleague of Greg.
Co-designer and software programmer on Circus Voltaire (1997)
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The design isolation experienced during Star Wars development negatively impacted the game's balance despite its commercial success
WPC programming fundamentals remained largely unchanged through the entire WPC era and could be ported between different WPC titles
Pinball 2000 represented a major shift to C++ and PC motherboards in pinball development
Cassandra Peterson improvised much of her speech for Scared Stiff and was an excellent collaborator on the project
Cameron Silver prefers WPC-era development constraints over more powerful modern platforms like Pinball 2000
On Cirqus Voltaire, Cameron Silver and John Popadiuk sat down together to lay out the playfield, but Popadiuk did the real engineering work to make it buildable
Williams software was extremely well-documented compared to subsequent employers Cameron worked for
Ticket Tactic was a successful redemption game that earned 3-4x more revenue than standard pinball games at locations
Williams produced only approximately 100 units of Ticket Tactic due to business model incompatibility with the redemption market
Scared Stiff development took approximately 3-4 months from whitewood delivery to March trade show completion
Williams experienced a 50% layoff of the software department during Scared Stiff development in 1996
Mike Boone worked early shifts (around 7 AM to 6-7 PM) while Cameron Silver worked later shifts (9 AM-10 PM) during Scared Stiff development
Cameron Silver used Larry DeMarcus's old computer (previously used for Fun House OS development) when assigned to the Demolished Man training project
Cameron Silver created the 'infamous home-rom' modification for Circus Voltaire that made it highly desirable among collectors
Software programmer for Star Wars Episode I
Williams Pinball software engineer from Melbourne, Australia; worked on Scared Stiff, Circus Voltaire, Star Wars Episode 1, Ticket Tactic
Tech at TimeZone Melbourne, worked on Scared Stiff, credited Rhodes as fault finder
Australian pinball designer/entrepreneur who worked for Williams; described as 'most successful Aussie pinball export ever' (not interviewed; reference only)