Pinball Fantasies

About Pinball Fantasies

Pinball Fantasies (1992) is Digital Illusions' acclaimed Amiga sequel to Pinball Dreams, with four themed tables from an amusement park to a haunted house.

Pinball Fantasies in Depth

Like Pinball Dreams, it is an arcade-style pinball game with four tables, each with its own theme, objectives and mechanics, plus difficulty levels and options such as the number of balls. Party Land, the table in the shareware release, is set in an amusement park where lighting PARTY or CRAZY starts a high-scoring event. Speed Devils is about car racing, with players overtaking cars to take the lead. Billion Dollar Gameshow has players win prizes through combinations of ramp shots, and Stones 'N Bones is a haunted house where players light eight increasingly valuable modes by completing a bank of STONE-BONE targets, then cycle through them.

Every table awards an extra ball the moment the top score on the list is beaten, and another on a successful match at the end. Each has a special ramp, two on Speed Devils, that keeps a running total of Cyclones, Miles, Skills or Screams, with the first shot counting double and each worth 100,000 points in the bonus. Apart from Party Land, the tables award specials at set totals, and each has one or two high-scoring rounds started by meeting certain objectives, whose points are added to the bonus but lost if the player tilts. Some cartridge versions save high scores and settings to EEPROM.

Making Pinball Fantasies

The Pinball Dreams team made it, with producer Barry Simpson leading development, Fredrik Liljegren as manager and Andreas Axelsson and Ulf Mandorff programming. 21st Century Entertainment released it for the Amiga in Europe in October 1992, followed by a CD32 version based on the enhanced AGA release in 1993 and an MS-DOS port by FrontLine Design. It was a major commercial success and one of the best-selling games of its time, acclaimed for its presentation, visuals, audio and improvements over its predecessor. Console versions fared less well: GamePro found the SNES version's scrolling so jerky it was almost unplayable, and Next Generation complained that its partial view left players "shooting blind".