RIP - Steve Kordek
Steve Kordek? Who he? From the
New York Times:
Steve Kordek, a Pinball Innovator, Dies at 100
Steve Kordek, who revolutionized the game of pinball in the 1940s by designing what became the standard two-flipper machine found in bars and penny arcades around the world, died on Sunday at a hospice in Park Ridge, Ill. He was 100.
His daughter Catherine Petrash confirmed his death.
Mr. Kordek actually revised a revision of what until the 1930s had been called the pin game. In that version a player would pull a plunger to release the ball, then shake the table in an often frustrating attempt to redirect the ball toward a scoring target � a cup or a hole.
In 1947, two designers at the D. Gottlieb & Company pinball factory in Chicago, Harry Mabs and Wayne Neyens, transformed that rudimentary game into one called Humpty Dumpty, adding six electromechanical flippers, three on each side from the top to the bottom of the field.
It was an instant hit � until, at a trade show in Chicago 1948, Mr. Kordek introduced Triple Action, a game that featured just two flippers, both controlled by buttons at the bottom of the table. Mr. Kordek was a designer for Genco, one of more than two dozen pinball manufacturers in Chicago at the time.
Not only was Mr. Kordek�s two-flipper game less expensive to produce; it also gave players greater control. For someone concentrating on keeping a chrome-plated ball from dropping into the �drain,� two flippers, one for each hand, were better than six.
�It really was revolutionary, and pretty much everyone else followed suit,� David Silverman, executive director of the National Pinball Museum in Baltimore, said in an interview. �And it�s stayed the standard for 60 years.�
Quite the career -- a bit more:
Mr. Kordek�s career spanned more than six decades and the industry�s evolution from battery power to computers. While the two-flipper standard is perhaps his most significant contribution, he would go on to lead design teams that created more than 100 games � at Genco and later for Bally Manufacturing and Williams Manufacturing � many of which were hits. Among them are Space Mission, which was inspired by the Apollo and Soyuz satellite missions; Grand Prix, with a car-racing theme; Contact, in which humans and space aliens meet; and Pokerino, based on poker.
The last game to which Mr. Kordek contributed was Vacation America, a computerized game released in 2003 that was inspired by the National Lampoon �Vacation� movies.
�Steve�s impact would be comparable to D. W. Griffith moving from silent films through talkies and color and CinemaScope and 3-D with computer-generated graphics,� Mr. Sharpe said. �He moved through each era seamlessly.�
Spent quite a lot of time with Mr. Kordek�s machines as a kid -- used to love the game...
Posted by DaveH at February 25, 2012 12:37 PM