A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about about how American Pinball has been through four different teams of people designing games for it over the years, calling the latest iteration of the company American Pinball 4.0.
I stumbled across an interesting video yesterday of American Pinball 1.0, the origin of the company. Flashing back to 2016, over eight years ago Aimtron Corporation had been in discussions with the famed Williams Bally pinball designer John Popadiuk about making their first game. They came to an agreement that Popadiuk would design Houdini for AP in exchange for their help building the outstanding Magic Girl pinball machines that people had ordered and paid his company Zidware for, but he was never able to deliver.
American Pinball brought a vaporware mockup of Popadiuk's Houdini to that year's Chicago Pinball Expo. I have seen and I believe even shared pictures of that iteration of AP's Houdini, which featured amazing art by Matt Andrews, but I have never seen the images of it that I came across last night on a Vimeo channel called "PinNin.de."
Below are those images and a brief video of the "game" (more like non-working prototype playfield) from the show.
It will be interesting to see if American Pinball can rise from the ashes once again and successfully become a contract arcade machine manufacturer and bring out the two designed games that is has waiting in the wings.
I love this sort of pinball history. If you're interested in this sort of thing, make sure to follow the Knapp Arcade social media pages on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads and Facebook, where I share pictures of of arcade and pinball machines with bits of historical information about them daily:
I can't embed Vimeo videos here, so click on the link below to check it out:
