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Gerry Stellenberg is the Founder of Multimorphic, Inc., the P3 Pinball Platform, and the P-Roc Control System.
It was in my junior year of college at the student center. A bunch of friends and I played pool there almost every night, and some of them were also into pinball. I thought they were wasting their money playing what I thought were luck-based games, but then a friend left me three free credits on Theatre of Magic. I played all three games in probably a minute per game and was left wondering how my friends would play for so long, and I lost all three games so quickly. As somebody who loves challenges and self-improvement, I was hooked. Within a year I was getting to wizard modes on most of the machines at the student center (ToM, AFM, WD, CV, JY, ), and I already had plans to build a custom machine.
I bought ToM and AFM together two years after college. I guess I never quite left the college student center emotionally.
Double dirty pool on AFM! I’ve never heard of anybody else doing it. During multiball, I had two balls cradled on the right flipper and one ball on the left. I used the left flipper to finish off the saucer, and with one flip, I got both balls from the right flipper trapped behind the rising shield of the saucer. Two shots into the shield raised later, I’d destroyed 3 saucers in 4 shots.
To this day, I still love AFM. My next favorite is probably The Getaway. I love the feeling of hitting a long sequence of repeated upper flipper loop shots, shifting gears, and lighting red line mania.
I don’t have a single least favorite machine. I’m just generally a fan of high-speed flowing games.
Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one in community who feels this way, but I love gameplay, regardless of theme. If they layout and rules appeal to me, and if the sound effects, callouts, and lightshows combine to create an immersive and exciting experience, the theme doesn’t make a difference to me at all.
That said, if I had to choose one, I think The Incredibles could be a great game.
That would either be starting a pinball company in this industry where opinions and interests vary so widely or not starting a pinball company sooner. Luckily I tend to thrive on challenges, and it’s a huge (and fun) challenge to bring new technology to an industry that’s based on some very traditional concepts.
Diverse.
Honestly, I can’t wait to find out. With so many new people making new machines and introducing new ideas, I’m excited to see what sticks. I expect some attrition and perhaps some consolidation with pinball manufacturers, but I also expect our platform model to grow strong roots. When the P3 customer base and game library hit critical mass, the ecosystem will snowball, and the true value of a pinball platform will be realized. People will likely continue buying whatever theme speaks to them the most; so single-themed machines will always have a market, but we’ll also see more big name designers developing new P3 games with popular themes.
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