Gridiron

'Gridiron' is a reworking of the 1-player game Gottlieb's 1973 'Pro-Football' and with different artwork. John Osborne explains that he did not design Pro-Football but did design Gridiron:The single-player Pro Football was just going into production when I started at Gottlieb. Pro Football was the only game that ever injured me. The story: Since the game was in early production, there was one or two set up in the showroom at Gottlieb. Sometimes after lunch we'd go play these games. What I hated about Pro Football was that the ball could go out the side rollover while the motor was still running because of other scoring. The outlane rollover was very important --- it completed the football "run" across the playfield and gave a touchdown score. I am not much of a game pusher or tilter, but I got so frustrated from losing the outlane rollover score that I actually kicked the game. Being an amateur at this, all I did was cause an enormous bruise on my shin. At the same time I vowed that I would never design a feature like that, such a cheat for the player. Of all games for Wayne [Neyens] to ask me to remake! This was my chance to fix this unjust feature. I made no change in the playfield but rather added a delay relay so that the rollover was "remembered" until the motor finished. I didn't tell Wayne I was doing it because I was afraid he might veto it on the grounds of adding expense. When he saw the result he was glad I had done it. We have increased our confirmed production run quantity to include 135 Sample games produced in 1977 that were not part of the former quantity per handwritten documentation identified by Wayne Neyens as coming from Bob Malvasio, a draftsman for Gottlieb whose initials RHM can be found on schematics.