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I can see why Gottlieb declined


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I love EMs and Gottliebs have always been my favourite. But when solid states like Flash, Nugent, Kiss and Playboy came along I found myself playing and enjoying Bally, Stern and Williams machines. My first pin was a Gottlieb Aquarius that was designed by Ed Krynsky - one of the greats. Often the artwork on his machines was done by Gordon Morison. Always viewed this duo as legends. But I can see why Gottlieb lost its prime position in the industry in the mid to late 70s. A lot has been written about Gottlieb missing the boat on moving from EM to SS but I think it is more than that.

On a visit to the Budapest Pinball Museum I got to play a Gottlieb Circus. This was manufactured in 1980, a SS, wide body and a Krynsky / Morison creation. To me, the game showed Gottleib had run out of ideas. The playfield included a rototarget and looked like the space available on the wide body was just filled with standard stuff. Nothing innovative. Compared to other SS machines around this time - Time Warp, Meteor, Black Knight , Gorgar - Gottleib was archaic. Such a sad way to end a glorious era.

https://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=515

Any thoughts on this?

 

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I don't think it was the em to ss change. Although sys1 wasn't the best as setup thee were some great titles- Genie 1979 and joker poker 1978 were great original layouts. But around 1980 onwards something changed and I think smart playfield layout and good rules is the key to a great game. System 1 didn't have much capacity for deep rulesets and I agree something changed. Can't put my finger on it but layout was lacking.

 

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A badly designed circuit board.

 

Early solid states (sys1) were good but prone to breakdown.

 

Sys80 were great too in the early games.

 

Played them all as they were released, along with Williams and Bally releases.

 

Whereas B&W pushed ahead innovation wise, I think Gottlieb had some good designs but didn’t want to change too much.

After all, when going to SS, all the EM operators and buyers complained heavily, not liking change, which probably drove them not changing much moving forward.

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
System 1 was basic compared to what Bally had at the time but your forgetting the real issue, Video games. It was a disaster for the pinball industry, nothing they tried could compete with these new games coming on faster than they could create a new pinball lay-out. Video games took almost all the money back then.
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