George A. Gomez (Born: Jorge Alfredo Gomez Marth) is a veteran industrial designer and game designer, a longtime creator of arcade and console Video Games, toys and pinball tables.
Born on June 1, 1955 in Havana, Cuba, Gomez emigrated to the Unided States at the age of 7, when his family fled the Castro regime in The '60s. Growing up in Chicago, he studied architecture at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and graduated as an industrial designer. He began working at Bally/Midway in October of 1978; his earliest tasks involved designing game controls, most notably the iconic joystick for Gorf and game concepts and the cabinet for TRON. One of his earliest original designs was Spy Hunter with game programmer Tom Leon, who was also coincidentally Cuban-American. He collaborated on Satans Hollow with Bill Adams, the lead programmer on TRON. Satan's Hollow was conceived and mostly designed by Bill Adams.
However, Gomez became dissatisfied with Bally's management issues and staff layoffs in The '80s, and left the company for Marvin Glass and Associates, a toy design firm where he invented toys such as Galloob's Crash-N-Bash truck action game, Tonka's Splash Darts, Coleco Rambo toy gadgets, and vehicles for the Voltron toy line. After Marvin Glass was dissolved, Gomez worked as Creative Director for the contract manufacturer Grand Products, where he helped develop several video games for Sega, the electro-mechanical helicopter game, Hawk Avenger for Bromley and video game cabinets for Jaleco and Taito, as well collaborating on the design of the Battletech Game Centers.
In 1993, Gomez joined Williams Electronics to work on novelty games but shortly after starting he was reassigned to design pinball games, creating notable tables such as Johnny Mnemonic, Monster Bash, and Revenge from Mars. After Williams exited the pinball industry, he rejoined Midway Games, then owned by Williams Electronics, as an executive producer, where for the next 9 years he collaborated with Mark Turmell on the console game franchise NBA Ballers for XBOX and Playstation. During this time he started moonlighting as a consultant for Stern Pinball, designing tables like The Lord of the Rings, Batman,The Sopranos Transformers, and The Avengers. In July 2011, he joined Stern full time as EVP/Chief Creative Officer.
Video games designed by or engineered by George Gomez include:
- Satan's Hollow (Bally/Midway, 1982)
- TRON (Bally/Midway, 1982)
- Spy Hunter (Bally/Midway, 1983)
- Slick Shot (Incredible Technologies, 1990)
Pinball tables designed by George Gomez include:
- Corvette (Bally, 1994)
- Johnny Mnemonic (Williams, 1995)
- NBA Fastbreak (Bally, 1997)
- Monster Bash (Williams, 1998)
- Revenge from Mars (Williams, 1999)
- Playboy (Stern, 2002)
- The Lord of the Rings (Stern, 2003)
- The Sopranos (Stern, 2005)
- Batman (Stern, 2008)
- Transformers (Stern, 2011)
- The Avengers (Stern, 2012)
- Spider-Man home edition (Stern, 2016)
- Batman '66 (Stern, 2016)
- Supreme (Stern, 2017; reuses Spider-Man's layout)
- Deadpool (Stern, 2018)
- The Beatlesnote (Stern, 2018)
- Star Wars home edition (Stern, 2019; reuses Spider-Man's layout)
- James Bond 007 (Stern, 2022; cornerstone models only)
George Gomez's games demonstrate the following tropes:
- Signature Style: Gomez's pinball tables tend to have:
- Two flippers, no more.
- A "fan" design, with long shots from the flippers up the board, to a variety of ramps.
- A saucer on the middle-left side of the playfield.
- Very precise shots.
- A design aesthetic focusing on smooth combinations and ball interactive toys.
