Game of the Week – September 16, 2009

Ah, it’s Wednesday, so everyone is surely slavering for the next PAPA Game of the Week feature. Right? Hey, who let that cricket in here?

Whitewater came out in early 1993, while I was halfheartedly meandering through a Master’s program at Virginia Tech. I spent lots of my time in the student union arcade, where I met Keefer (today known as a programmer/designer for games such as Lord of the Rings and Simpsons Pinball Party). And when Whitewater arrived, bright and shiny one cold winter morning, I started to spend a lot more time there.

In fact, I don’t think I attended a single class for the first week after Whitewater arrived. I know I played the game for more than ten hours straight on at least one occasion. More diligent students, such as the aforementioned Keefer, would stop by and find me parked in front of the game, at pretty much any hour. Hardee’s was right next door so there was really no reason to leave the building.

Whitewater is one of the few pinball games that I have played to the point of contempt through familiarity – and I will still readily play it, despite that. I have seen or done everything the game has to offer, as far as I can tell, over and over again. I even wrote one of my ridiculously long and thorough rulesheets.

It’s not just that the game was new, or that I was putting up obscene scores, because I wasn’t, although I eventually did. It’s that the gameplay was intriguing and different enough from other games to keep my attention for that long. You collect Hazards to Advance Rafts, which determine your Jackpot value, and eventually take you to Wet Willie’s, which combines with other goals to offer the Vacation Jackpot. When I write it out like that, it doesn’t exactly sound like nuclear engineering, but at least it wasn’t another “here’s a bunch of modes to complete” type of game.

Missing my classes didn’t turn out to be a problem. In fact, I was already starting to feel that I didn’t really want to be in grad school, that I had just picked it as a “holding maneuver” after graduating prematurely with my Bachelor’s. Sure enough, by the end of that same year, I had packed everything I owned into my Maxima and driven it to snowy Chicago, where I started working for Data East Pinball just a few days before Christmas. But that’s another, very long, story.