"Some designers have sworn off pulling the levers of luck at all. For a long time Larry DeMar, a noted pinball-game designer who worked with Williams, avoided using the ball-saver in the company’s designs, believing it undermined the purity of the game. If you lose, you lose—tough luck for you."
Having worked with Mr. DeMar, I can also say that he engineered other things to make you feel lucky without being so obvious.
It was only recently discovered that in Robotron:2084 (a video title he designed with Eugene Jarvis), the game's difficulty would ratchet down dramatically if your game started out badly (i.e. you were getting killed over and over before making it out of the first wave).
There were also some clever things Larry put into stuff like pinball match routines. This is the "random" number that would come up at the end and if your last two score digits matched, you won a free game. Cleverly, if you were playing a multiple-player game, the odds of one person winning a free game would suddenly increase - thereby increasing the real-world chances that the rest of the players would insert more money for another round.
Wow, I've played Robotron a ton at a freeplay arcade and I noticed it seemed to feel a little different in difficulty some games compared to others. I didn't quite put my finger on why, but it was probably the games where I lost a couple of lives in the first wave. Thanks for sharing that.
Having worked with Mr. DeMar, I can also say that he engineered other things to make you feel lucky without being so obvious.
It was only recently discovered that in Robotron:2084 (a video title he designed with Eugene Jarvis), the game's difficulty would ratchet down dramatically if your game started out badly (i.e. you were getting killed over and over before making it out of the first wave).
There were also some clever things Larry put into stuff like pinball match routines. This is the "random" number that would come up at the end and if your last two score digits matched, you won a free game. Cleverly, if you were playing a multiple-player game, the odds of one person winning a free game would suddenly increase - thereby increasing the real-world chances that the rest of the players would insert more money for another round.