Steve Ritchie

Steve Ritchie
Steve Ritchie speaks during the Atari panel at California Extreme 2009.
Born	(1950-02-13) February 13, 1950 (age 67) San Francisco, CA
Occupation	Pinball designer
Employer	Stern Pinball, Steve Ritchie Productions
Known for	Black Knight, Flash, Firepower, High Speed
Website	Steve Ritchie Productions

Steven Scott Ritchie (born February 13, 1950) is an acclaimed pinball and video game designer. He has been called "The Master of Flow" by pinball aficionados due to the emphasis in his designs on ball speed, loops, and the like. As of 2010, Ritchie suffered from tinnitus and was predicted that he would be deaf by 2013. Steve is the older brother of fellow pinball designer Mark Ritchie.

After serving a stint in Vietnam and Alaska in the United States Coast Guard from 1968-1972, Ritchie joined Atari Inc. in 1974 and was employee number fifty and first worked on the assembly line as an electro-mechanical technician. Two years later, he was promoted to work at their fledgling pinball division, where he worked on his first game, Airborne Avenger. Ritchie earned the license to make a Superman pinball based on the Superman comic book, but in the final stages of production of the table, he received an offer from Williams Electronics, a major pinball company, that Ritchie could not refuse.

Ritchie moved to Chicago, Illinois, the home of Williams' headquarters. His first game for the company, Flash (released in 1979), was noted for its revolutionary figure-8 design and the first pinball game to feature bright Flash Lamps. It would go on to be his best-selling pinball game, having sold 19,505 units. 1980 would be the year for Ritchie, when he designed Firepower (the first electronic pinball to feature multi-ball, as well as Lane Change), and eight months later, he designed Black Knight, which was noted for having the first two-level playfield and the patented "Magna-Save" feature (in which magnets help prevent outlane drains).

After 1981's Hyperball, Ritchie took a break from designing pinball games to design a video games at his newly formed company, King Video Design. Devastator was the first 68000 microprocessor video game and it was a spectacular 3D flying-shooting game with remarkable graphics. Ritchie pioneered automated conversion of video-taped color images into objects in the video game system. After that, he returned to pinball with 1986's High Speed, which was based on a true story about him being chased by the police in his Porsche. High Speed's bill of materials was higher than other games, and some rival Williams designers nicknamed it "High Cost". The cost increase was minimal, and the game sold 17,080 units. It was the major title that revitalized the entire pinball market. After that, he released F-14 Tomcat in 1987, and in 1989, he released the sequel to 1980's Black Knight, Black Knight 2000, which was acclaimed for having perhaps one of the best musical soundtracks ever for a pinball game (composed by himself, Brian L. Schmidt, and Dan Forden). It was also one of the first games to feature a "Wizard Mode", called "The King's Ransom".