Steve Ritchie

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Steve Ritchie
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Steve Ritchie

Steven S. Ritchie is an acclaimed pinball and video game designer. He has been called "The Master of Flow" by pinball aficionados due to how his designs emphasized ball speed, loops, and the like.

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[edit] The Atari Years

After serving a stint in Vietnam and Alaska in the United States Coast Guard from 1968-1972, Ritchie joined Atari and first worked on the assembly line as an electro-mechanical technician. Two years later, he was promoted to work at their fledgling pinball division, where he worked on his first game, Airborne Avenger. Ritchie earned the license to make a pinball based on the Superman comic book, but in the final stages of production of the table, he received an offer from Williams Electronics, a major pinball company that Ritchie couldn't refuse.

[edit] The Williams Years

Ritchie moved to Chicago, Illinois, the home of Williams' headquarters. His first game for the company, Flash (released in 1979), was noted for its revolutionary figure-8 design and the first pinball game to feature bright Flash Lamps. It would go on to be his best-selling pinball game, having sold 19,505 units. 1980 would be the year for Ritchie, when he designed Firepower (the first electronic pinball to feature multi-ball, as well as Lane Change), and eight months later, he designed Black Knight, which was noted for having the first two-level playfield and the patented "Magna-Save" feature (in which magnets help prevent outlane drains).

After 1981's Hyperball, Ritchie took a break from designing pinball games to work on a short-lived video games venture. After that, he returned to pinball with 1986's High Speed, which was based on a true story about him being chased by the police in his Porsche. High Speed's bill of materials was higher than other games, and some rival Williams designers nicknamed it "High Cost". Despite this, the game sold 17,080 units, and was one of the major titles (along with Pin*Bot) that helped revitalize the pinball market. After that, he released F-14 Tomcat in 1987, and in 1989, he released the sequel to 1980's Black Knight, Black Knight 2000, which was acclaimed for having perhaps one of the best musical soundtracks ever for a pinball game (composed by himself, Brian Schmidt, and Dan Forden). It was also one of the first games to feature a "Wizard Mode", called "The King's Ransom".

After his mild setback with 1990's Rollergames (based on the TV show of the same name which was cancelled well before game production; he later admitted in an interview that it was not his best game), Ritchie designed Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and featured the voice and likeness of Arnold Schwarzenegger. T2 was the first game by Williams to use a dot-matrix display (although Bally's Gilligan's Island beat it to the market, because T2 had a longer production schedule). After T2, he designed The Getaway: High Speed II in 1992, a sequel to 1986's High Speed. In 1993, Ritchie released a widebody game, Star Trek: The Next Generation, which many pinball fans consider to be Ritchie's best game. For the game, Ritchie enlisted the entire cast of TNG, including Patrick Stewart, Michael Dorn, and Jonathan Frakes to reprise their roles. The game would sell 11,728 units. It was the last pinball machine to sell in the 5-digits. After he was finished with 1995's No Fear: Dangerous Sports, Ritchie left Williams, feeling that he could better serve Williams/Bally/Midway by producing video games at the newly-acquired Atari Games. 1996 was the beginning of the decline of pinball with gradually diminishing sales, eventually leading to the extinction of all pinball manufacturers except Stern Pinball.

[edit] Outside of pinball

Ritchie returned to Atari Games in 1996. There, he would design the racing game, California Speed, which sold 7,856 units for total sales of about $40 million, not including revenues from the Nintendo 64 port.

He is also known to be an avid fan of motocross racing, and a dedicated dirt and street motorcyclist as well.

He is also a voice actor for Williams and Midway's video games. He is best known for playing the voice of Shao Kahn in the Mortal Kombat series (MKII, MK3, UMK3, MKT).

[edit] Ritchie Returns: The Stern Years

Ritchie came out of retirement when he formed Steve Ritchie Productions in 2002, and he made a deal with Stern Pinball to distribute his games. For his first game for Stern, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, he once again enlisted Arnold Schwarzenegger to lend his voice and likeness to the game, and also brought back the same team who worked with him on the T2 pinball, including software programmer Dwight Sullivan and music composer Chris Granner. After T3, Ritchie released Elvis, which was released in time for Elvis Presley's 50th anniversary of his first song that he recorded in his career.

Currently, Ritchie has just completed his third game for Stern, World Poker Tour. World Poker Tour is the first game to use Stern's new hardware, SAM, which is the successor to their older Whitestar platform. "World Poker Tour" is in production and available for purchase.

[edit] Steve Ritchie's games

[edit] Atari

  • Airborne Avenger (1977)
  • Superman (1979)

[edit] Williams

[edit] Midway (Bally)

  • Elvira and the Party Monsters (1989; co-designed with Dennis Nordman and Jim Patla)
    • Ritchie did parts of the game, after original designer Nordman was severely injured in a motorcycle accident.

[edit] Stern / Steve Ritchie Productions

[edit] Trivia

  • Mark Ritchie (who designed Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure, Taxi, and Fish Tales for Williams, and Kingpin for Capcom) is Steve's younger brother. He is currently working at Incredible Technologies.
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