The Addams Family (pinball) - Reasons For Popularity

Reasons For Popularity

A number of simultaneous factors came together to give The Addams Family its record-setting sales figures.

Around the time of the game's release, video arcade games were declining in popularity, due largely to the technological ascent of home systems. Meanwhile, pinball in the recent years prior had witnessed a strong wave of technological innovation. The dot-matrix display, for example, had just been added to the first pinball machine (Data East's Checkpoint) about a year before, and CPU advances allowed machines to perform simultaneous video, audio and gameplay functions more smoothly.

The Addams Family added to this a number of game-specific "toys" that proved popular with players:

• Thing: A hand that comes out of a box and uses a magnet to pick up and store the ball when it lands in the appropriate spot.
• The Power: a triangle of under-playfield electromagnets in the middle of the board that, when during certain times in the game, activated in a generally random manner, causing the ball to move in unpredictable directions.
• Thing Flips: Above the top left flipper was an optical sensor that at certain points in the game let the machine attempt to read the speed of the ball, and taking control of the flipper from the player hit a shot on the opposite side of the field, the first CPU controlled flipper in pinball history. The game's ability to use missed shots to calibrate future attempts resulted in an automatic flip that was impressively accurate.

The game also made extensive use of the film it was based upon, arguably the most of any game at that time. Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston both contributed many re-recordings of quotes from the film, along with a number of extra quotes exclusive to the machine ("Jackpot!", "Extra Ball!", etc.). Much of the game's humor was also well-received, such as the mode "Hit Cousin It", where successful hits to the Cousin It target resulted in display animations of It getting hit with a large pinball, Gomez's (Julia's) response to the player upon tilting, "Hee hee hee, you're a funny guy!," and the machine occasionally flipping both of its lower flippers in tune to the finger snapping in the Addams Family theme song. A lesser known activity for players is to attempt activating a hidden function which allows the player to hear an audio clip of Nat Perrin telling a short pun. This function is said to exist only in ~100 first-release machines and was subsequently removed in later CPU revisions.

From a player's perspective the game received positive reviews for its good use of the playfield, its audio and video effects, "flow" (the way the game's shots and objectives lead naturally from one to another) appeal to both beginner and expert players, and general replayability.