Famed pinball designer Dennis Nordman has joined Palatine-based pinball company American Pinball as their new Senior Game Designer.
Dennis Nordman
Dennis has been working in pinball since he joined Bally in the early ’80s to develop new cabinet designs. He created the cabinet and tank moulds for the Rapid Fire ball shooter game before getting his first solo pinball design in 1986 with the game Special Force.
Since then he has either created or been involved with nearly two dozen pinball titles including classics such as Scared Stiff, Pirates of the Caribbean, Alien, Lexy Lightspeed: Escape from Earth, Elvira’s House of Horrors and The Wizard of Oz for which Dennis designed the spinning house and the original melting witch mechanism.
Dennis’s prototype for the spinning house on The Wizard of Oz
Dennis has designed or contributed to games from Bally Midway, Williams, Stern Pinball, IGT, Jersey Jack Pinball, Whizbang Pinball, Multimorphic, Heighway Pinball, Spooky Pinball, Silver Castle Pinball, Valley Dynamo, Deeproot Pinball, Chicago Gaming, and is now, from 4th January 2021, employed full-time at American Pinball. In addition, he will still be able to complete his work on the in-development licensed game he was designing for Chicago Gaming prior to joining American Pinball.
While Dennis contributed to it, the main designer on The Wizard of Oz was Joe Balcer who subsequently signed for American Pinball and designed their first three releases – Houdini, Oktoberfest and Hot Wheels. Joe now becomes a contract designer who is no longer directly employed by American Pinball but is free to pitch his future game designs to them as well as other manufacturers.
Apart from creating new game designs of his own for American Pinball, Dennis will also be responsible for the development and training of several up-and-coming game designers at the company. American Pinball has ambitious plans to produce multiple new titles each year and has employed a number of game designers to work with Dennis to create a pipeline of future releases.
To find out more about his new position, Pinball News asked Dennis how the job offer happened.
He told us, “I’m working as a contractor for Chicago Gaming (CGC), designing
