David's Midnight Magic
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David's Midnight Magic is an early computer pinball simulation written by David Snider and released by Brøderbund in 1982. (The game was published in Europe by Ariolasoft). The game was originally released for the Apple II computer platform and was later released for the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit platforms. Along with Raster Blaster and Night Mission, David's Midnight Magic represented the first wave of home computer pinball simulations available with relatively realistic pinball features. In a review by Computer Gaming World, Midnight Magic was flatly stated as a better game than Raster Blaster. However, the review also lamented the requirement of removing write protection from the floppy, thus voiding the warranty, in order to save high scores.[1]
David's Midnight Magic is closely modeled after the popular real-life pinball table Black Knight, released by Williams in 1980. The computer simulation, unlike Black Knight, contains bright colors such as green, pink, and blue (depending somewhat on the version of the game) in contrast to Black Knight's darker medieval theme. Atari released a pinball game called Midnight Magic for the Atari 2600 that plays much differently to the similarly-named David's Midnight Magic. This version displays a 1984 copyright on-screen, but was not released until 1987, most likely due to the video game crash of 1983.
David Snider's brother Eric later used his first name in the title of Eric's Ultimate Solitaire.
In 2005, a Visual Pinball recreation of David's Midnight Magic was created called David's Midnight Magic 2005 which is rendered with modern 3D graphics.
[edit] References
- ^ Greenlaw, Stanley (Mar-Apr 1982), “Pinball Mania”, Computer Gaming World: 35, 38
