THE MAKING OF FULL TILT! PINBALL

In 1994, having licensed his Quantum compressor to Microsoft, developer David Stafford decided to use the funds to start a videogame company, Cinematronics, with his friends Mike Sandige and Kevin Gliner. “The whole premise of the company was that gaming was going to shift to Windows. As a developer, I knew Windows and its internals very well, and my partner Mike was a very experienced game developer.”

Setting up increasingly demanding games for DOS, David says, was becoming a challenge for average users, requiring them to make boot disks – and return rates were reaching 50%. Windows, he believed, was going to make DOS’s driver and memory issues disappear. Sooner or later, all developers would be forced to embrace the shift – and he wanted to lead the charge. “Mike was a great engineer,” David recalls. “Kevin was a game designer, and he handled sales, and I filled in all the other pieces.” Kevin would go on to prove his sales chops by securing a remarkable $200,000 publishing deal for a puzzle game demo Mike had developed – four times