Iain works at 21st Century Ltd., at least he did when the interview was done (he will soon leave the company to move on). He has been with the company almost since the start and have therefore more or less taken part in all the pinballs released by the company. The company 21st Century is really one I hope you know about!! They have released most pinballs in the world! This interview asks questions about the companies history and relation to pinballs. I also took the opportunity to ask a little about their upcoming and planned pinballs.


Q Who is answering? Introduce yourself a little.

A Okay, my name is Iain G. Howe and, for the last three and a half years I've been working as a Producer for 21st Century. With the departure of Barry Simpson I was the sole Producer, and I also found time to do Tech Support as well! This was my first actual job in the games industry, although I've been playing games since the early 80's, and I'm soon to move away to Bristol based games developers, Wayward Design, where I'll be working on Product Management of more mainstream titles. I'm 23 and married to Sarah, who has no idea why I find computer games so interesting. :-)

Q What is your role in 21st Century?

A Well for the time being I'm *still* (for the next three days, anyhow) the sole Producer and Tech Support contact at 21st Century. I've been responsible for liasing with Developers like Digital Illusions and Spidersoft, and quality testing their work, as well as helping them to achieve their deadlines through the use of bribery and threats! ;-> I also help present products to the press, find new titles to publish and all sorts of other little jobs that need doing. I don't sleep much, and I have a nasty caffeine addiction. :-)

Q Could you introduce the company 21st Century a little? How long has 21st Century been in business, how come the company was founded, etc?

A 21st Century has been around a fairly long time, and is the brainchild of Andrew Hewson, someone who's been in the industry almost 15 years! 21st Century rose from the ashes of old software house, Hewson Consultants which, despite being one of the oldest houses in existence, lost its way somewhat and was forced to close down. Hewson did some excellent games like Paradroid and Uridium which set the standards for arcade gaming on platforms like the CMB 64 and Spectrum 48. After 21st Century started up again they did a few middle ranking releases, until they happened upon a group of Swedish students known as Digital Illusions, with a Pinball Game that nobody else seemed to want to publish. Barry Simpson, then Lead Producer for 21st Century, recognised the potential of the game and this kicked off the Pinball Phenomenon!

Q What is the type of business 21st Century deal with, do you only publish games or do you also develop?

AWe publish, but we have a more "hands-on" method of publishing which is the trademark of the smaller company. Publishing involves testing, advertising and marketing, duplication, distribution, sales and support. Each one of these tasks involves tens and sometimes hundreds of man hours of work in order to ensure that a quality product does well.

Q Which companies do you usually work with (which companies games do you publish?)

A We generally work with Spidersoft, whom we partly own, although we've done a lot of work with external developers in the past. A list of the companies we've worked with includes: Digital Illusions (of course), Frontline Design, UDS, Liquid Dezigns, Vicarious Visions, Anguillasoft, The Software Labs, Megamedia, Florian Sauer, Magic Bytes and Synetic.

Q The reason, which isn't that hard to guess, I'm doing this interview is that 21st Century is the company that has published most pinballs in the world! It has sort of become the thing the company is most known for. Could you tell me a little about the first pinball 21st published?

A The first pinball game which 21st Century published was Pinball Dreams, which was before my time with the company, unfortunately. As far as I remember, from anecdotes that Barry Simpson used to tell me, Pinball Dreams was a difficult project. The developers were a crazy bunch of young Swedish demo coders (sorry Axl, when you read this!) and nobody had *ever* seen a pinball game done properly before, which made it kind of difficult to know *how* to do one properly. Nonetheless the Amiga version was finished in due time, to huge acclaim, and the PC version was soon converted by Spidersoft.

Q I'm also curious about this pinball fever 21st seem to have. How come 21st Century has got such an interest in pinballs, you took on to publish Pinball Dreams, you have published a big number of pinballs including a editor, is the "big boss" a big pinball fanatic or what? :)

A Andrew Hewson has always been interested in good, family, gameplay orientated games. 21st Century represents that I suppose. We don't always have everything we'd like to work with, but this helps us to concentrate on getting the playability right. Pinball and Pinball Fans have done us proud over the last 5 years, and we have every intention of supporting them! Pinball is a great niche for a company our size because it's small enough that we've been able to devote 5 years towards developing our software and technology in the quest to make our pinball better and better.

Q Since the first pinball 21st have published the whole trilogy that Pinball Dreams is included in and many more. How many pinballs is it totally that 21st have been involved in somehow (totally! :))? Which are they?

A Okay Sam, here's the list.

Pinball Dreams (Amiga, PC, Gameboy and SNES )
Pinball Fantasies (Amiga, PC, CD32, Gameboy, SNES and Jaguar)
Pinball Dreams 2
Pinball Dreams Deluxe
Pinball Mania (Amiga and PC)
Pinball Mania for Windows
Pinball Fantasies Deluxe (PC and Playstation)
Pinball World
Pinball 3DVCR
Pinball Illusions (Amiga and PC)
Absolute Pinball
SlamTilt (Amiga and PC)
Pinball Construction Kit
Electronic Pinball

So, counting all the versions, that's 26 different Pinball projects in total. I have had the privilege to be involved in everything from Pinball Dreams 2 onwards. Whew!!!

Q Among the pinballs 21st have published is Pinball Dreams 2. Digital Illusions made the first and classic Pinball Dreams, but I have understood they weren't involved at all with the development of PD2. How come?

A We were looking for our first PC CDROM release, and we decided that we were unhappy with simply putting one floppy's worth of Pinball onto 600+MB of storage space, so we were looking for something to add some value to the pack. DI were too busy working on something else (I think it might have been Illusions) so Spidersoft did something for us, as well as doing all the installer, Cut sequence and interface coding, and the history of Pinball. At that time DI were much smaller than they are today. Later we released Dreams 2 as an add on for Dreams 1, because not everyone had CD drives at the time.

Q Which pinballs have so far been the most successful ones, the ones that has sold most?

A Without a doubt that would be Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies. Between them they've sold hundreds of thousands of units. Pinball Fantasies has, I think, over half a million units to its name !

Q Which of the pinball is your favourite? :)

A The product which I really managed on my own, SlamTilt, is definitely my favourite. Barry was tied up on about three other projects whilst SlamTilt was going down and, after I'd done a whole table of Illusions virtually by myself (it was the Viking one, by the way), he figured I was ready to take the brunt of the SlamTilt work. I really enjoyed working on that product, and I get good memories every time I play it. The two young coders who we worked on are now employed in the industry with good companies, Daniel works with UDS, part of the Virgin family, and Klaus now works in California for Shiny. Talk about luck....

Q Electronic Pinball, one of your new pinball's that is on the way, what will it be like?

A Basically it represents the farthest stretch of Spidersoft's Pinball technology to date. It's going to be four tables of 2D Pinball, and the whole thing is integrated really nicely with Windows '95. The installer, especially, is a real treat if you're used to Spidersoft's DOS stuff. The product itself is, probably, the closest in behaviour to a real table that I've played to date, although I think it lacks some of the "flash" of Slam Tilt's cartoons graphics. It's definitely a simulator product, and not an Arcade Pinball game, which should really turn some people on, without turning too many people off. It's a nice product, and it's almost ready !!

Q The 21st Century page says EP will get out during this last quarter of the year, it seems like most of the awaited big pinballs (Addiction=Pinball, Balls of Steel) will get out then, how do you think EP will stand up against them?

A I had the opportunity to grab a review copy of Balls of Steel over ECTS, and I can tell you that people with a really flash PC, who are expecting another Timeshock! are in for a bit of a disappointment (even though the Duke Nukem table is pretty cool !!). I can't talk about the other product, as I haven't seen it, but our releases really sell despite what the other companies are doing. We had fewer orders whilst Timeshock! was this rave product, but you can't sustain that sort of hype for long and, sooner or later, TimeShock! starts to disappear and our orders pick up again. It's swings and roundabouts, but we've been going for so long that we don't start cutting our wrists if a product doesn't fly out of the door on day 1, when you've got hundreds of thousands sunk in advertising and point of sale you get a *lot* more twitchy about day 1 sales, so we don't do that.

Q You are also on the way with a Pinball Construction Kit 2. Could you tell me a little more about it.

A Well, Conkit was a much bigger project than we anticipated, and it proved impossible to get everything we wanted into the product. I'm not sure what's planned for ConKit 2, but I know that an upgrade is planned which will *double* the number of table beds involved, hugely increase the size of the sound libraries and also allow you to import your own sounds. To me this represents an opportunity to finish what we started with ConKit. Price hasn't really been discussed in detail yet, but one thing we've agreed on is that people owning the original Construction Kit will be able to upgrade for a lower fee.

Q I read in a post on usenet that the first Pinball Construction Kit was a beginners version and that the next version would be a PRO version, is this true? If so, how is it true?

A I'm much less enamoured of Construction Kits as a product for Pinball, personally, as it is impossible to please all of the people who would like to use it. There have been two products released in recent history, of this type. One is a German product called Pinball Wizard 2000, and the other is ConKit. Construction Kit was too basic, but Pinball Wizard was so "flexible" that you needed to be a coder to use the Construction aspect of it. It's *very* difficult to devise an easy way for a 3D change to the detection map of a Pinball Table, without opening it up to the same problems that plague *us* during development of a game. It takes a professional company a good few weeks to check out the detection maps of just four tables, and even then some problems are still in existence on release. Bad situation.

The answer to the question is that I believe that the Upgrade will not be a "PRO" version of ConKit, but that ConKit 2 would have to solve the problem I highlighted above to be worth releasing. Check the press releases carefully, and wait for a demo....

Q What other pinball plans we don't know about has 21st Century got for the future?

A Well, Sam, I've already told you that I'm leaving the company soon, so I don't have too much of an idea about 21st Centuries plans for the far future. I can tell you, from the Strategy meetings I attended earlier this year, that Pinball will star in our lineups for the future, so don't worry about that. As for 3D pinball well, see below.....

Q Almost all pinballs released by 21st has been in 2D (with the exception for Total Pinball 3D/3D Pinball VCR), is there any plans to really go for 3D? I mean, if you look at pinballs such as timeshock! don't you think it's there the secret behind true pinball simulations is?

A 3D is, without a doubt, the next generation of Pinball technology. You know that we were really one of the first companies with a 3D release but, concentrating on the European market as we do, our minimum spec for a product is *much* lower than Empires. For that reason we put our ideas of a mass scale move to 3D on the back burner until we thought that the standard European machine had caught up, technologically, with the requirements for that sort of standard. Well, we think they have now, and in the early part of '98 you'll see that 21st Century haven't been sat on their laurels whilst Empire have been producing TimeShock!

Q What do you think of the pinball market today? Is it something more companies should go for?

A More companies !!!?? No thanks, life's already hard enough!! ;-) Seriously, Pinball has always been a niche market in the wider games industry, you've read what Axl had to say about developing Pinball and, the truth is, that there ain't all that much money in it compared, say, to the Flight Sim or Strategy game market. That's one of the reasons why we're doing so well in it, as bigger companies haven't been able, generally, to actually develop a Pinball strategy. They have bigger fish to fry. It is generally said that the more competition the better for product quality, but in the case of Pinball I think you'll find that much more competition will result in a flurry of mediocre product, followed by the sudden withdrawal of most/all of the companies currently doing pinball. There's only so many people in the world who'll buy pinball, and most of you are a pretty dedicated bunch. Even so you only have so much money...

Q Hmm, can't think of a last question... oh yeah, who is the biggest pinball fanatic at 21st Century? :)

A Hmm. Probably me, as I play the most. I even have a high score on your site !! I'd probably be able to bury a good few of the other scores, but I play so much of our stuff that I'd never remember a score that I didn't have written down and I'd never post one I didn't have witnessed, and I lost most of those. The truth is that even I don't play much pinball outside of work, as you get pretty burnt out.....

Thanks for answering!!

No problemo. If I can make a final statement I'd just like to say thanks to all the people who bought our games, and who like Pinball. Just remember that if the Games Industry is about weaving dreams into a product which you can put into a box, it's *YOUR* dreams that we weave. Send in criticisms and comments to the companies who have a presence on the Net, that presence is an investment to find out about what YOU want, make it worthwhile...

As it's that part of the interview where I get to make a personal statement I'd like to direct this statement at those of you out there who come into contact with Pirated games. There are almost as many reasons for using pirated games as there are people who use them but, please remember that what you are doing is theft. I'm not going to talk about the legal issues because we both know that there are things that are legal that are wrong and things that are right that are against the law. However Piracy has been portrayed (mostly by the pirates themselves) as being "clever" and a way of "hitting back at the money grabbing software houses".

It isn't.

In recent times Piracy has become a profit motivated crime. These guys are making a killing for the "duplication and materials" fee that they put on each CD. Games don't cost ú50 each anymore so, if you've only got ú15 or so, buy a budget game. You still contribute that way, even if it's less. Just to hurt the pirates a little bit, I'll let you in on a little secret. Gold Disks cost only ú1.99 and disk duplicators can cost as little as ú400. Don't pay any more than its worth.........

Regards,

        Iain