Some long-lost animations from the development of the near-mythical "Pinball Circus" from 1994
Some of the following are in the game with slight variations, but most of them seem to have been left on the cutting room floor.
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Most of these, or ones very much like them, are actually in the game. The different colors of dots are simply due to personal preference of each artist. Obviously they all get displayed as shades of orange on the actual dot matrix display.
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Lawyers on trapezes? I'm not sure I get the joke... |
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A single frame of art; not sure what it's for. |
There is an emcee/ringmaster character body molded in front of the dot display; his head and right hand are animated on the display, though the overall effect doesn't work very well...
You can see how it's set up in this picture (though it doesn't show a head/hand animation, sorry!)
Most of these seem to have been abandoned, while only a couple were used in the game. I'm guessing this guy would have creeped out even more people than Rudy did.
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Some character studies of the ringmaster guy. |
Another single frame of art. |
"Flippy" was a character at the very top of the playfield. Just a couple of animations of him. I think maybe the first two were going to be for some sort of knock-out-Flippy's-teeth wizard mode.
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A Pat McMahon cameo! |
Some match animations, done before they decided not to have a match feature in the game!
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The rest of this art is from very very early versions of things, some of which was hacked together by the programmers before the artists had started working on the game with them. (In a few cases, it really shows!)
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Some random bits and pieces...
I'm not sure what the story is behind this, but it's pretty funny! |
Same as the previous one, but sized and colored for dot display use. |
The lore is that on a day that there were layoffs, the programmer left this running on his PC screen... |
Before the Pinball Circus project got off the ground, some of the team had been working on a horse-race themed game, and this is some of the art left hanging around from that.
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