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Crazy find!! There was a Caleb Calloway who was a judge at the tournaments I went to in the early 2000s. Maybe one of the passionate Pinheads I met in that era, just like on a technical level. Dude could diagnose a loose paddle from the next room just from the sound of its coin drop lol. If it's true that only a few years before he "[didn't] do pinball", that's a crazy turn-around. Not a crazy uncommon name but I'm pretty sure he said he came up from Aurora or Elgin or something like that.

Anyway, a '96 spotting is really interesting because obviously Sega put out Twister that year. Partial prototype? Spirals, twisters... kind of a stretch, but-- maybe worth figuring out if we can find an ideation timeline on the Twister machine to see where that leads?

Oh man, my mom would tell this story about me sobbing after I played the '95 Sega Frankenstein cabinet at a laundromat when I was four or five. She thought I was scared of the monster (which is a pretty good guess, those stitches could be pretty visceral for a kid!) but eventually she pieced together though my sniffles that I was upset about "not actually being able to control the ball." She tried to soothe me about it for ages but I just refused to calm down or agree with anything she was saying. Baby's first existential crisis lol. I'd completely forgotten about it until I got a job at an arcade as a teen & started to get really into pinball & she was like... are you sure you're ok with this? Like, no mom, I'm freaking out about the inconsequential nature of humanity at all times at my part time after school job!!! Lol. Anyway, just really loved how you put that. Totally agree it's powerful stuff especially for a developing mind

The new /r/pinball mods literally only care about trick videos and unlabelled sponcon for people who will overcharge you to put bowling alley carpet in your garage/basement 🤷‍♂️ Doesn't surprise me they'd delete something that doesn't have an influencer attached. Sorry to be so cynical but it's been a really obvious & disappointing turn since they took over

Wasn't Mr. Gray one of the aliases that arcade scam group used to book appointments? 👀 I can't remember their name. You know what I mean; the ones who "upgraded" units in like two hundred different arcades with trick coin collectors lol. I know there's not a lot of evidence of them after the early 90s, but still... maybe OP misremembered the timing & they were experimenting with just manufacturing whole machines? Harder to get caught if you're just delivering a cabinet rather than spending a couple hours tinkering...

ETA: I might be mixing them up with Grey Horizon who did the weighted ball grift. Can you tell I've been mainlining the Bumper Bumbles podcast on my commute lol

i love this game!! the prompts & inspiration tables are incredibly juicy. so many vibes packed into two pages!!! i somehow never played yahtzee or games like it, so the dice mechanics were totally novel to me hahaha. i adore the feeling of how that little extra chanciness & "win/lose" edge entwines with the narrative mechanics & everything is so evocatively written  🖤

i make a podcast where i have multiple people play the same solo game, then i edit the playthroughs together to show off different playstyles & the like. i played this game on a bonus stream earlier this year & ended up loving it so much that i also wanted it to be a mainline series. the first episode just came out & there will be three episodes in total. i'm super excited by the very different stories that developed lmao & it's very much a credit to your design. thanks for such a cool simple effective fun snappy little game!!!!!

i really love this game. i'm so impressed by how much replayability is packed into a single page of text thanks to careful prompt crafting. the starting points are all so so evocative & the four d6-length tables create a really wonderful balance of stumbling on fresh & generative combinations of prompts while also helping to build throughlines in the story with repeats.

i make a podcast where i have multiple people play the same solo game so i can show different experiences of it. i played farsickness landing on a livestream last year & loved it so much that i brought it back for the main feed. that's the first time i've double-dipped on a game for the show, so clearly it really brought something special to the table for me.

creating something effective while keeping it compact is often considerably harder than doing so with a more expansive wordcount & you did a great job here-- thanks!! 🖤