TILT

TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball, a documentary about a last-ditch effort to save the pinball industry.

In 1998 pinball was dying, thanks to a saturated market and shrinking player base. Williams, the world's largest pinball manufacturer, planned to abandon the game in favor of the more lucrative video slot machine business. 'The Future of Pinball' is a 60-minute documentary that tells the story of 'Pinball 2000,' a clever attempt at resuscitating pinball that failed just at the moment a lot of people thought it might succeed. A 'Soul of a New Machine' for the pinball world, 'The Future of Pinball' is a compendium of interviews with legends of the pinball industry, photos, and films of the best games the industry has produced. It's a story about personality and passion, of bold success dizzyingly followed by a stunning failure.

Tilt - The Battle to Save Pinball (from web.archive.org, site is now down)

The creators of the movie have uploaded the DVD to the Internet Archive. You can download it Disk 1 - Disk 2

From the creators:

“THE SITUATION facing the pinball designers at Williams Electronic Games in 1998: come up with something new, or see the world's largest pinball manufacturer be shut down forever.

And Williams' designers did come up with something amazing: a brand new kind of pinball machine—"Pinball 2000"—that fused video with classic pinball gameplay, preserving what was great about pinball yet opening up all-new possibilities for a product thought to be on its last legs.

Yet soon after its successful and highly-profitable launch, Williams pulled the plug, leaving behind unanswered questions and abandoning one of the world's great design organizations. TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball is a documentary that tells the story behind one of entertainment's most mysterious failures.

Not just for pinball fanatics, TILT tells an account that any follower of technology, design, or business will find fascinating. Seen from the perspective of the designers that created Pinball 2000, TILT is a story about personality and passion, of bold success dizzyingly followed by stunning failure.”