How licensing changed the pinball industry
Roger Sharpe, Ken Fedesna, Pat Lawlor, and others discuss how licensed games took over pinball around the time that The Addams Family released.
The Addams Family pinball machine, based on the 1991 Barry Sonnenfeld movie, was then and still is now the bestselling pinball game of all time. You can, and should, attribute this to the design of Pat Lawlor and Larry DeMar, who balanced accessible, multilayered gameplay with ridiculous novelty: What other game had a hand slither out of its underbelly to steal the ball?
But that's only half the story. The game wouldn't have been made at all if not for the licensing opportunity, and convincing the manufacturer Williams to engage with licensing had been an uphill battle for years. Licensing was expensive, licensors were onerous: why bother?
When Roger Sharpe, a journalist and freelance pinball designer (played by Challengers' Mike Faist in a 2022 biopic!) joined Williams as its director of marketing in 1988, he was dead set on bringing licensing to the table.
Below, Sharpe explains why he saw licensing as not just a profit opportunity, but existentially important for the health of the company and the industry at large — and reflects on the world he helped create.