- credit
- Doug Watson — Art
- ipdb_id
- 6457
- ipdb.image_urls
- ["https://www.ipdb.org/images/6457/image-1.jpg"]
- ipdb.notes
- This was pinball artwork that never became a game. The artist, Doug Watson, tells us how it came about:During my first year as a pinball artist, I was working at Advertising Posters in Chicago. I'm sure you remember that Ad Posters was the original silkscreen printer for all of pinball since the 1940's up until Bally bought Lenc-Smith in the early '70's. Ad Posters had their own in-house art department whose artists served whatever needs any client wanted to have silkscreened onto glass, wood, or plastic. In the mid 1970s, Paul Faris, over at Bally's new in-house art department came up with the idea that a single artist should create the entire art package for a game instead of the piecemeal approach Ad Posters had often done. Paul also introduced the idea that the artist could work in conjunction with the designer as the game was being created. This approach reached its peak during the golden age of pinball in the 1990s at Williams Bally/Midway.
Oftentimes at Ad Posters, I was lucky enough to do the entire art package but sometimes more than one artist was put on the project. To Tom Grant Jr, president of Ad Posters, artwork was superfluous to the game; merely decoration as opposed to integral to the game experience. All we Ad Posters artists got was a blank whitewood with plastic light inserts already placed in it. We never even met the game designers, much less talked to them about themes, features, storylines, etc. More often than not the whitewood, from Gottlieb or Stern, arrived without even a title to call it. We artists could just make up whatever we wanted to put on it.
Unlike any other artist at Ad Posters, I used every minute of time when I wasn't working on an assigned project to crank out potential game/title/art ideas in pencil and design markers. I hung them all over my cubicle in the distant hope that some creative person from one of our clients might pass through the art department, notice one of them, and go 'hey, great idea for a game.'
This never happened. But I was young and idealistic and churning with creativity. I produced drawing after drawing of ideas I thought would be fun to make into pinball games. In 1980, one of the most popular items in pinball play were features that timed down, providing the player with a sense of urgency and drama to accomplish something thematic before it timed out. Time Trap was an idea I drew up at that time. It was a departure from the strong Frank Frazetta influence that was a part of much of my earlier work. I just drew some hot babes inside giant hourglasses in need of rescue.
- player_count
- 4
- technology_generation
- solid-state
- theme
- Fantasy
- theme
- Time Travel