The Muppets Haunted House Adventure

The Muppets Haunted House Adventure is a pinball-style machine proposed, but unproduced, for circulation in 2002.

The game was designed by Roger Sharpe for Bromley Inc, with art by Paul Faris who has illustrated pinball machines for Batman, Back to the Future, Goldeneye, Playboy, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, among others.

Unlike a typical pinball machine where plungers are used to score points upon impact with bumpers, three balls are issued per game which are meant to be dropped into sinkholes on the board marked by stand-ups of Muppet characters. Spelling out M-U-P-P-E-T-S generates a "Super Jackpot Bonus." Character voices were used as "call outs" during gameplay.

The Muppet characters appear as monsters from classic Hollywood movies including Kermit the Frog as the Frankenstein monster, Miss Piggy as Frankenstein's Bride, Gonzo as Dracula, Fozzie Bear as The Wolf Man, and Rizzo the Rat as Igor. Other characters include Robin the Frog, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Beaker, and Pepe the King Prawn, with the stereotypical angry mob of villagers represented by Sam the Eagle, Animal, The Swedish Chef, Statler and Waldorf, Lew Zealand, and Clifford.

In 2010, Sharpe's son Josh explained the game's failure to launch in the newsgroup rec.games.pinball:

“Originally the game was a 3 ball game, and before each ball one of the characters would blink. If you landed in the blinking character's hole for that ball, you would add a letter in M-U-P-P-E-T-S towards the Jackpot, which was a progressive ticket payout. Throughout the testing process, we found a lot of people didn't understand that pinball was a 3-ball game. A TON of kids would start a game, plunge a ball, see that no tickets came out, and walked away.

After seeing how often that happened, the game was changed quite a bit. It became a 1-ball game, with the scoring of holes replaced as pure ticket values. The jackpot was now moved to the hole on the bottom. They also added in skill-posts via a button on the lockdown bar. Press the button and 6 skill posts would pop up at various positions around the playfield, stopping a ball from falling in a hole closer to the top...

The game ended up being a mechanical nightmare. The ball lift to serve the ball into the plunger lane malfunctioned all the time. The skill posts required a certain amount of time to reset and be fired again, so there was alot of button pounding that didn't correspond to when the posts shot up. The game choreography (speech call outs, music progression for each ball, etc) were all designed around this 3 ball game that had a start/middle/end, based on the characters saying certain things when they were lit for the MUPPET letter versus not...

We all weren't thrilled with the design changes, because it sort of took the 'pinball' feel out of the game. Eventually the test game was pulled, and it slowly got cannibalized for parts.”

See also

• The Muppets' Haunted House
• Muppet Monster Adventure

Sources

• Pinball News
• The Internet Pinball Database