NFL

NFL, designed by Joe Balcer and released by Stern Pinball in November 2001, is a football-themed re-working of an earlier Stern title: 'Striker Xtreme', a soccer-themed machine. To create NFL, Stern put the game back into production with all-new football-oriented graphics, replacing the soccer goalie with a linebacker and the soccer goal with a football goalpost. Operators could also order the game with a custom backglass featuring the helmet and logo of a specific NFL team.

Running on the Sega/Stern Whitestar platform, NFL carries over its underlying rules and layout from Striker Xtreme while re-skinning the presentation for American football fans -- an efficient way for Stern to extend a design's production life by adapting it to a different sport and audience.

With dot animation by Kurt Andersen and software by Lonnie D. Ropp and Orin Day, NFL is a good example of how manufacturers in the early 2000s sometimes re-purposed existing hardware and rule sets under new licensed themes rather than designing an entirely new game from scratch.