The Lost Temple of DOHO

Demolition Man:Demolition Car Crash

Demolition Man left the team with an interesting question: how to turn a kind of blah movie into a fun pinball machine. In the final edit of the movie, we found out that they had cut a huge chunk of the action sequences down to make more room for the personal interaction between the characters that Stallone and Bullock were playing. Unfortunately, pinballs are about action and not character development. So, the game became centered around the four action scenes in the movie (each one getting its own multiball).

The animation above is a pretty good example of what happens with a lot of movie tie-in display effects. A game has an area of the playfield with a little toy car on it that you are to hit with the ball. So you search through various tapes that the film company sends you for inspiration, and you find a really cool explosion with a car. You decide to digitize and spend (in this case) about four days cleaning it up, making it look nice, trying to get the motion of the angle of the car and explosion right. So the playfield gets built, and people start whacking the cars with the ball, and then you realize that the animation you're working will last about 1.5 seconds on the screen, and the ball action takes about, say, 1/4 of a second. Plus, the animation is getting to be a bit big memory wise. What do you do? You save it for the Temple of DOHO.

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