John A. Popadiuk Jr. is a Canadian pinball machine designer. He started work in the business at 19 for Bally in 1980, and later at WMS Gaming from 1989 to 2000. He now works for deeproot Tech as Exclusive Game Designer.
He is credited as principal designer for many popular pinball machines in the 1990s including Theatre of Magic, Tales of the Arabian Nights, World Cup Soccer, Star Wars Episode I, and Cirqus Voltaire.
Background
Early on, Popadiuk read Roger Sharpe's pinball book, and saw the name Norm Clarke, who was currently working at Bally at the time. Popadiuk wrote Clarke a letter, to which Clarke responded, "If you're ever in Chicago, drop me a line and we'll give you a tour." Two weeks later, Popadiuk flew to Chicago and got a tour of the new Bally factory in Bensenville. Clarke offered to drive Popadiuk back to the airport, but instead hired Popadiuk after he demanded a job. They hired him as a technician in engineering because he had experience troubleshooting games with a pinball router in Toronto that had about 350 games. One of the designs Popadiuk had come up with on his own while still in Toronto was Alice in Wonderland, which would later become a theme he would revisit.
In 1989, Popadiuk arrived at the new office. His first project was Ice Castle, which never got produced. He shared an office with another designer, and was eventually assigned to work on a pinball based on the 1994 FIFA World Cup, which became World Cup Soccer.
He would go on to working on four other titles before Williams shut down the pinball division. Theatre of Magic was originally going to be licensed as David Copperfield but they never finalized the license.
Cirqus Voltaire originally started as Circus Pirates, then Circus Maximus, but eventually became Voltaire because the market in France wanted it. It was a very unsuccessful title on test, earning only $47 the first week in Waukesha, Wisconsin compared to $350–400 for some of the other titles.
In March 1998, Williams management told every engineer to build their dream game because they had to impress the board of directors. Brian Eddy worked on a game, George Gomez was working on a ping pong game. They told Popadiuk to work on that game with the video display in the backbox. He worked for two weeks with Lyman Sheats to throw together a layout. They liked the game, but decided that they didn't like the screen in the backbox. At the same time, Pat and George were working on a reflective display that would become Pinball 2000, and the entire team focused on that for 14 months to finish the project. Star Wars was designed to only have 7–8 shots (similar to Captain Fantastic) to keep it simple for kids to easily catch on and draw them in.
After Williams exited the pinball business in 2000; Popadiuk started a short-lived neon sign business named "Duke's Neon" in the Northwest Chicago suburbs. He also designed a line of toy pinball machines for a now-defunct company named Zizzle between 2006 and 2007.
Between 2009 and 2010, Popadiuk developed two iOS apps: Pinball Scrapbook and Pinball Wizard.
In 2011 he started a company Zidware, where he designed and collected pre-orders for three pinball themes: Magic Girl (loosely based on Theatre of Magic), Retro Atomic Zombie Adventure (formerly known as Ben Heck Zombie Adventure), and Alice in Wonderland. He also worked on a foam board prototype of a Kiss pinball machine in 2014 with the intention of obtaining a license to produce a Kiss-themed game. Other project ideas that he claimed to be working on during all this was a MakerBot pinball project, a bowling-themed pinball, and an apparent electro-mechanical project. Individuals who had paid for pre-orders for Popadiuk's other three games that were under development criticized Popadiuk for focusing on the Kiss project and other concepts, rather than on the other machines he was already contracted to build. A year later in mid-2015, Stern Pinball released a new version of a Kiss pinball machine, which appeared to make Popadiuk's Kiss project irrelevant.