Early Installment Weirdness / Pinball

• A meta-example: Early pinball machines didn't have spring launchers, bumpers and flippers. Spring launchers came in 1869, bumpers in 1933, and flippers in 1947.
  • In addition, when flippers first came about, designers put them pretty much anywhere where they could fit them. Sometimes, there was a single tiny one two-thirds up. Sometimes, there were eight of them in two columns facing away from each other. Sometimes, they were aimed down and meant to send the ball down towards the player. Sometimes, there would be a bunch of flippers on one side and none on the other. It was not until the late 50's that the now iconic layout of two flippers at the bottom center, facing each other, became the standard.
• Corvette was George Gomez's first pinball machine he designed and also the only one to have an upper flipper. Subsequently, he made sure all of his designs had only the two flippers on the bottom and no more.
• The earliest machines from Stern had more pronounced Pinball Scoring, with experienced players scoring into the hundreds of millions of points or even billions, a holdover from Sega's way of doing things (as Stern began with Sega Pinball's staff). Over time, scoring on Stern's tables scaled down; with most games in the tens of millions of points for many of Stern's later games. The trend seems to be reversing again with their latest games, particularly Ghost Busters and Game of Thrones. In addition, Stern's earliest machines had loose rules, with modes running all at once and no obvious objective other than to keep playing. It wasn't until The Simpsons Pinball Party that Stern's games had clearly defined modes and goals.
• America's Most Haunted is Spooky Pinball's first table. It's the only one to have a standard dot-matrix display, with all subsequent tables having full-color monitors that simulate a pixelated dot-matrix display. It's also Spooky's only table not based on a licensed theme and the only one whose artwork is done solely in-house.
• Charles Martinet's first performance as Mario was for a Gottlieb pinball game. His voice was lower-pitched and more rough-sounding than gamers who grew up on such classics as Super Mario 64 and later are used to.
• A company-wide example: Stern started putting out different editions for their games in The New '10s, but initially made a number of thematically-different versions (i.e. Transformers having an Autobot, Decepticon, and "Combo" Limited Edition). It would take a few years for their now-standard Pro, Premium, and Limited labels to solidify. Even then, there were a few oddities: Avatar had a regular and "Premium Limited Edition", while games like AC/DC and Metallica had two separate Premium or Limited editions.