Trivia / The Pinball Arcade

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• Colbert Bump: A minor one: thanks to being included in this game, Frank Thomas' Big Hurt would receive a Wikipedia article about a month after it was added to this game. Up until that point, the pinball machine was only mentioned briefly on the article for the baseball player himself.
• Christmas Rushed: Stern Pinball Arcade released on Steam well near Christmas in 2016, filled with all kinds of issues. These include no DLC for the new games, no keyboard support, and the password being shown upon logging into a FarSight account, among many others that were found later on. The "Mostly Negative" reviews on Steam support this.
• Development Hell:
  • Stern Pinball Arcade. The last update this game has seen on Steam was early January 2017. No new games have released since then, despite a new Stern Pack that was released on Pinball Arcade in October 2018.
  • The Pinball Arcade overall. The last pack released was in October 2018, and no new tables were made ever since.
• Dueling Works: Against Zen Studios' Pinball FX, especially after losing the Williams and Bally tables.
• Hey, It's That Sound!: Pinball Hall of Fame: The Gottlieb Collection borrows sounds from other games for ambience, as if one is in an arcade. Some sounds include those from Galaga, Gorgar, and Qbert.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: All Williams and Bally games were removed from The Pinball Arcade on June 30, 2018 as Scientific Games, the current holder of the Williams and Bally's pinball properties, declined to renew their licensing agreement with FarSight Studios. FarSight still continues to provide support and fixes for existing owners. While those tables are slowly resurfacing on Pinball FX3/Pinball FX, there's currently no digital means for playing the licensed tables in particular if you didn't buy them before they were pulled out.
  • AC/DC's license expiration followed a year later.
• No Port For You: Stern Pack #3, containing Whoa Nellie and Big Buck Hunter Pro, never released on the Switch. Furthermore, this pack also didn't make it into Stern Pinball Arcade despite Whoa Nellie being mentioned on its own website.
• Similarly Named Works: The PAL version of The Williams Collection, titled Williams Pinball Classics, shares its title with a CD-ROM game made by Encore Software and Redoubt in 2001. Both games have Tales of the Arabian Nights, and while TPA also has Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Black Rose, only Encore has recreated Lost World. Oddly enough, Encore's collection mostly consists of Bally tables, but with the logo Adapted Out and/or replaced by Williams.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Williams Collection was unveiled at E3 in 2007, and was slated to be released that summer. The trailer revealed most of the UI and some art styles that were similar to the Gottlieb Collection back in 2004. That date fell through until February 2008, when the game got released with massive improvements that it has now.
  • Monster Bash was intended to be included in The Williams Collection for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but likely due to licensing, No Good Gofers took its place.
  • Plans for a pinball collection called Pinball After Dark had been tossed around, which would've included more mature-themed tables like the Playboy trilogy or South Park, but nothing ultimately ever came of it.

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