mecha
Well-known member
I throw up in my mouth every time I see "MIDWAY CLASSIC ARCADE". after Williams bought Midway in 1988 though, they resurrected the brand as a Delaware company and made money off it. someone at the top in WMS decided that Midway's brand had more recognition than Williams, which made zero sense to me, and that's why they rebranded the video game division to Midway and they rolled out the Bally name (under Midway Manufacturing) as an alternate brand in pinball. (sidenote: there's serious pinball people that don't realize that Bally = Williams). about like 1996-1997 or so though I think, WMS had Williams pinball, Midway video games, Bally pinball, and Atari under their umbrella and they started shuffling the IPs between pinball and video... Midway wound up with all the Williams video games (see: Defender, Robotron) and Williams got all the pinball. I don't remember when they spun Midway off as its own thing, but it may have been in 2001 when Happ bought out the coin-op division and Midway became focused entirely on console games. WMS of course went into gaming exclusively by that point with pinball and video gone.
old Midway caught lightning in a bottle twice with Space Invaders and Pac-Man. they repaid Taito and Namco with Gorf, which ripped off both of their IPs, and prostituted Pac-Man out an absurd amount just to cash in on something that didn't even belong to them. that was Midway's entire model, Pac-Man. once Pac-Man stopped being a thing they hit on like Rampage... and what else really? anyone that's sad Midway went under either worked for them or completely missed the point they had nothing outside Pac-Man. Williams had the foresight to drop out and retool video in 1986 once they obliterated the rest of the pinball industry with System 11 and they came back with NARC. Midway in their dying days were still using MCR derivatives. it's honestly sad.
as for Eugene Jarvis, I went to his seminar about Raw Thrills at MGC 2019 and it's pretty epic how they started that company from nothing and have grown it as big as they have. he proceeded to hang out with me and we drank beer the rest of the day. I haven't talked to him in months, I should do so soon.
), there's a good deal of friendly banter between players who prefer one game over the other (the inclusion of Robotron on the group's cover image is the continuation of a running joke) - though to be fair, most people in the group love everything 'Williams', anyway!
