Birth of Profibase

[Hönkki]

Tarinaa profibasen historiasta, jos sattuu kiinnostamaan. Pitkähkö juttu.



The creation of the concept of "professional base" and of the product Profibase by myself arises between 1993 and 1995. My first Profibase stand, and its first official presentation to the public of agonistic table football players, took place at the Club European Cup at Wuppertal (Germany) in October 1995. This show can be considered like the beginning of the use of professional bases. Before that the general public was not aware of such concept nor such a product existed.
The concept of "professional base" means fundamentally a base whose dimensions, and therefore characteristics, are not unique and established, therefore imposed from the manufacturer to the player but can be freely chosen by the latter based on his own playing style. Both, the manufacturer and the player, naturally operate within the measures dictated by the rules.
Until the beginning of the nineties it was always up to the manufactures to determine what base model to play with. Players had no voice. Both Sir Peter Adolph, the "Subbuteo" inventor, game and brand at the same time, and the manufacturers that bought the brand starting from the late seventies (first Waddingtons then Hasbro) produced commercially time and again one sole miniature model, the same that was used at agonistic level.
The situation didn't even change when a really good player, the Swiss Willy Hofmann, who had the financial possibilities and the necessary knowledge to do it, produced himself miniatures to play (first the Sports Playing Figures, then the Toccer). In fact, even those produced by the company Global Sports Games (GSG), who he belonged together with a Swiss colleague of Italian origins, were not produced in different measures but were miniatures of standard dimensions, the same sold and "imposed" by the producer, that the agonist player had to take the way it was.
To tell the truth Hofmann had conceived the various dimensions and possibilities for the bases of his miniatures, like his patent deposited in the United States goes to show and his various tests prove, preserved in those years in FISTF(Federation of International Sports Table Football) archives (today lost?). Nevertheless he had then opted for an industrial production of large scale and on a single shape and not for the handicraft production or semi-industrial on small scale, one though which would have allowed him to produce smaller shapes and dimensions.
This was the market situation when I, then in my thirties, came back to the game, like the great majority of players of our generations (the one, to be precise, that had luck to "grow" with Subbuteo in the seventies), who, after having played Subbuteo as a kids' game, abandoned it in their adolescence and post adolescence to then rediscover it, as a hobby and small sport, as adults.
Then FISTF tournaments, was founded in 1992, were dominated by players, at time mediocre ones, that though used new Swiss materials and beat players, often of superior level, but had remained faithful to the old traditional Subbuteo materials. Amongst those worth remembering for ex. is "Sucy en Brie" (France), surely the most beautiful Subbuteo tournament in the history of table football , today unfortunately reduced by quality and dimensions, and "Mons" (Belgium), that still takes place and is still an excellent tournament, like obviously the World Cup and Champions Cup.
The difference between Swiss bases and the traditional Subbuteo bases was huge. The first allowed lobs that the latter could only dream of, were far more stable, even the Toccers, miniatures completely out of proportion compared to the others, were so massive that they never fell over and were nearly impossible to beat in defence, therefore once the Toccer players went ahead, they shut down in defence and it was really difficult to beat them.
The fight between Traditionalist and so called Progressionist, was in fact uneven, one in which the first were destined to succumb and, in fact, they almost always succumbed.
The swiss miniatures, that from an agonistic and technical point of view were very strong, had though a big fault: an aesthetic one. In many ways this concerned both the Sports Playing Figures and the Toccers. The first, infatc, mounted and still mount on the base a type of polystyrene stem that rappresented very vaguely a footballer, so much so that they are still called today , not with their real name but with other, not exactly generous nicknames ("tombstones" in Italy and Germany, "robots" in France and Belgium). I think, that shows well the concept of what they represent. One must be careful though not to judge it simply negatively. In fact, it existed, and still exist nowadays, a "philosophy" amongst the table football fans by which the figure mounted on the base shouldn't represent the footballer, in a clear or precise way but should just stylize it. For this way of thinking table football does not represent the game association football in miniature at all but instead a sport or an agonistic activity in his own right, therefore there's no necessity for the figure mounted on the base to represent a footballer. The miniature (figure + base) in this philosophy is a sport tool like any other.
This philosophy was preceded by Hofmann creation and it can be found, in fact, even in the FISTF rules., that he himself, then Sport Director of such federation, created at the time, partly helped by the other members of the Board in those years, but, as is well know by those active at the time, he practically did it on his own (I was the FISTF Sport Director immediately after Hofmann, I worked in close collaboration with Laurent Garnier, president and creative mind and founder of FISTF, and came to know rather directly about the astonishing way the federation came to be). Such rules are still standing, nearly unmodified, therefore that bottom line philosophy is held by the whole actual International table football movement, even if very few are aware of this.
Nevertheless, how it often happens in men social life, especially at International Institutions level, that which happens casually, is successful once, and it becomes written law, and therefore it allows a social institution to work, doesn't always reflect what human beings want in their hearts and minds. Those rules, then like now, were able to unify, sometimes forcefully, the national table football movements, but didn't fully correspond to what players truly wanted.
My main difficulty then as a table football player, common to others, was to find good material to be competitive in tournaments, without betraying my philosophy, which wasn't at all the one just expressed.
I belonged and, still do, to the other current, the one for which table football, even being or aspiring to being an autonomous agonistic activity and a sport of its own, still remains the miniature application of football. This was surely Sir Peter Adolph inspiring principle and of those who, even preceding him, invented that game in England, the Newfooty, which he then gave the lucky name "Subbuteo". FISTF did nothing else but to extend such Subbuteo, intended as a game and not as a brand (an essential difference!) at world level, unifying the rules an creating a proper sport structure, but the principle of the game just like the fundamentals rules still remained those set once and for all by Sir Peter Adolph.
Starting from this principle then some of the original aspect of the game cannot be modified, i.e. the use of the finger without the thumb, the shape of balls, goals and pitch, the shooting range etc., because if we do it, we move away from that principle and create a different game (there are other table football games in the world with decisive aspects different from subbuteo and therefore from football). Such games I believe for this very reason are destined to disappear while Subbuteo, intended as game and not as a brand, exactly because it follows football step by step, it will always be "the" game of table football, and it will never die.
Amongst those aspects, that cannot be modified without betraying the inspiring principle of the game, is surely the principle that the figure should represent a footballer not in a stylized way but in a faithful way. What was in Sir Peter Adolph mind, as it is possible to see from all the figures produced by him, such as the flat figures and the 00-scale, which unequivocally represent, the human figure of a footballer.
For this reason at the time, even though I did buy and played with the Sports Playing Figures, I didn't want to move to this type of miniature, simply because didn't correspond to the concept I had and still have of table football.
So, discarded the Sport Playing Figures, I was left with the choice to use the Toccers or the traditional miniatures, which though, as I said, was no longer suitable to reach an agonistic level.
I discarded the Toccers for an opposite reason to that lead me to discard the "tombstones". The Toccer man, in fact, even though it was out of proportion compared to the traditional figure, fully represented a footballer, and to be precise is even more in better proportion next to the balls than a traditional Subbuteo figure..
In the Toccers case I was not satisfied with their bases. It's too cylindrical and doesn't "spin", I mean it doesn't allow that circular movement that allows the miniature to overtake another miniature, which in football is known as dribbling. This is one of the fundamental characteristics of a good miniature, in the original Subbuteo thought by Sir Peter Adolph, this was the characteristic element of the game. It was no coincidence that all Subbuteo miniatures produced by him or even by others after him, had such fundamental characteristic to the cost of others, they were not stable, the touch was not soft and precise, but they all, spin perfectly!
Starting from the flat of the very early releases in the fifties, until the Subbuteo miniatures produced by Parodi in 2003-04 or even the very latest Hasbro 2005 (not to mention the game Zeugo, produced today by Genoese family that used to import Subbuteo in Italy) going through sixties and seventies miniatures, the 00-Scale (known as Heavy Weights or HW), those that made the game famous, and entered the heart of all the fans of our generations, like even the disappointing miniatures of the eighties, the Light Weight or LW, that substantially ruined the game, until the Hasbro produced miniatures of the nineties, probably the best traditional Subbuteo bases of all, all the traditional commercial Subbuteo bases, even with great differences that marks them out, have a common characteristic: they spin, which Sir Peter Adolph had identified as the essence of Subbuteo.
Today the situation is different, the game is much faster, there's less spinning, nevertheless there's still spinning, above the really good players do it. Anyway, the fact remains that dribbling is an essential component - even if not the only one - of football, and therefore, for those who support the philosophy of table football as a miniature form of football, such characteristic, no matter how easy it is to put in practice, must always be possible. A cylindrical base, or its support base compared to the main base diameter that present too small a difference and therefore not offer the necessary space to let the nail underneath and produce a spin, cannot be suitable to table football as it doesn't allow the miniature to perform a dribbling, essential element of football and therefore of table football.
So, basically, having no intention at the time to use the Sports Playing Figures, for aesthetic and playability reasons, nor the Toccers, for technical and similar playability reasons, I had no choice left than to use the traditional subbuteo miniatures, accepting the evident disadvantage compared to those that used the Swiss material, or , which is what I did, create new agonistic material that it wasn't in contradiction with those game principals with which I identified and I didn't want to give up.
My job as a researcher put the intellectual tools at my disposal to do it. I did not have other tools, because at the time I had no technical knowledge, coming from Humanistic studies, nor did I have the economic resources, being a teacher, part-time, a job which at the time in Germany served to finance my doctorate in philosophy research.
To this aim, I started first of all to manually modify the best bases of traditional Subbuteo, the HW of the years '60-'70. It wasn't difficult to find them at the time as there were players going around tournaments (i.e. the Austrian Rober Lenz and the Scottish Dave Baxter) who used to bring along a case full of miniature that they use to sell at prices even superior to those of a professional good team today, even the those miniatures were also modified the prices would hit the roof.
In fact, to make the HW competitive against the swiss miniatures, one needed to modify them in a particular way: first of all, with a common nail-file, creating a bevel instead of an edge on the base upper part, to play a lob. Generally one was able to do it, the difficulty was in creating 10 miniatures with the same bevel. Let's say that if it all went well, they were similar, but never identical. Then it was enough to lower the dept of the base to make it more stable and to favour the control. Even the lob improved by lowering the base. This was possible by passing the lower part of the base on very fine abrasive paper(1000-1500). Then it was necessary to polish them with abrasive paste. At the end each base took an hour since the HW plastic was rather hard, and one had a base that could compete with the Swiss miniatures, even though, considering the team as a whole, there still was the disadvantage that the Swiss team was composed by identical miniatures, therefore in the fast movement typical of table football the player already knew how to hit the miniature to obtain a given result, while the modified Subbuteo figures at the end always produced some differences, therefore the movement had to be different from miniature to miniature, something which was impossible to put in practice at the speed of a match.
However, even in this way my level as a player suddenly raised considerably. The next step was though to render such a process from casual and handicraft to semi-industrial. Instead of spending money to purchase HWs, themselves all different as during the years many versions of Subbuteo were produced, even in quality, I had the idea to let plastic manufacturing companies produce the fundamental raw material (corresponding to the HWs that I used to buy) to then work it according the processes of grinding and polishing that I had learned from Robert Lenz, that at the time used to belong to the same German club as me, the USC Wuppertal. So, I thought, not only I didn't have to pay anymore for expensive old HWs but also I had the base just like I wanted it right from the start, whose bevel, for example, was done by machine and not by hand, which meant that the base resulted to be all equal. This was already a huge progress compared to what had been done until then.
I'll never forget when I had the first prototypes from the German company that offered to this job (and given that it was only a few bases it wasn't easy to find company that took my projects seriously) Such prototypes is true still had the edge and not the bevel but the plastic, the pvc, was way superior to any plastic used till then by Subbuteo products or even the Swiss miniatures. In fact it's resistant and strong for shooting but also elastic and soft for approach and control. I did the bevel to those prototypes used a nail-file, as I was used to it, and I showed up to training in Wuppertal and to the tournaments of Sucy en Brie and Mons (it was February-March 1995) with some handmade teams to play on pvc bases made on with drawings by a German company.
I had an enormous success as a player, in fact as an over thirties beginner, who generally wouldn't go past the first round at such tournaments, I was able to reach the quarter finals and the last sixteen of some of the biggest tournaments which at time were the equivalent of a World Cup ( Mons still has this status), due to the fact the best players in the world use to participate to it.
My adversaries notices right away that something had changed in me, jokingly the Dutch said I had taken performance enhancing drugs, instead it was Italian creativity that, mixed with a lot of passion and great German material, had allowed the birth of something new: Profibase was born, the professional base for traditional three-dimensional miniatures.
Soon, the good "traditionalist" players begin to contact me to have the same bases as me, I was now doing the bevelling by machine, therefore I just had to (just a say, it still was a rather tough job) grind and polish the bases and I therefore could produce several to then sell on. In this activity of mine I soon had to face the question about which type of base to produce, with what shape and dimension. The first ones I commissioned had a shape resembling a particular kind of Subbuteo HW, modified by the expert Robert Lenz, which, given my way to shot , was the absolute best amongst the hundreds that I bought already modified or modified by myself. It was my "number one", the original prototype from which I started, that I still jealously hold in my possession( see here). It was a white base (besides all "old" players know that the best HW Subbuteo were the white ones) very low and with a well pronounced bevel, nearly round.
But why, I thought, should I produce just a shape and therefore repeat the mistake of the Subbuteo product and Swiss product, in other words the manufacturer chooses the sport tool that then the athletes have to use? In every sport there's various tool o different dimension and shape, with the parameters dictated by the federation. So, following the FISTF parameters, which lowers the minimum and maximum height and diameter of the base, I elaborated all the different possible shapes and the different dimensions that were theoretically imaginable, that I summed up on a table, which is still today the reference for sport table football (see here). It's an exhaustive table because it fixes it sets the three fundamental shape that a professional base is allowed and the different measures that are possible by combining the height and the lower surface, which are the two fundamental parameters in the construction of a base. Naturally there's also other parameters (thickness of the plastic, the bevel, internal height, the curvature ray and so on that make a base different from another with the same fundamental measures - so other sub models are possible ie the C3s within those fixed measures that characterise the model). On this "secondary" parameters the manufacturer can act according to the level of performance that he wants to achieve. They remain, so to speak, a secret of the manufacturer, the primary parameters instead are only needed to identify the base model and are also known by the player who can select the base of his choice.
For each identified model on the table I commissioned the production a couple of teams and for every available colour, even at the time, I already had 27 models multiplied by the only three colours which I had in pvc at the time - orange, black and grey plus ice for pom, a plastic harder than pvc but less elastic, therefore doing the sums (27 x 4) I already had 108 possibilities, different amongst them for colour, size and plastic. There had never been such a choice, scientifically and technically motivated, in the history of Subbuteo and Table Football. !
I would like to underline scientific aspect of the Profibase table and the principle that underlines it. What I did at the time was to think radically and scientifically all the different possibility to produce a base within the FISTF rules and put them in practice in a technological level then economical. I had to absolutely work out the costs and prices well because, even if I wasn't going to make a profit, I had to definitely cover the costs because, as a part-time teacher, I certainly couldn't afford the luxury to have a loss.
The decision to produce all possible models - even though it wasn't obviously economically viable, creating me all sort of producing problems as it was certainly not easy to persuade the manufacturing companies to produce 50xC3, 50xA6, 50xB7 and so on, even with different colours -, it proved to be a winning solution for the sport development of Table Football: for the first time in the history of our beloved little sport, in fact, it wasn't the manufacturer to decide which shape the base had to be, therefore the sport tool, instead that choice was left to the player !
At the beginning I practically sold bases in all shapes and models. Then slowly the demand for some models offset others. So we reach the situation we find ourselves in today were only five or six models sell well, the more popular ones while the others are out of circulation. This means that in the last ten years a sort natural selection has taken place were some type of bases sold well, as the players who used them achieved success, and are now the standard, which will surely continue to exist in the future, while other models, which have not brought success, have completely disappeared.
At then end of this selective process the smaller choice of models will render the manufacturing process and the cost all the more attractive.
And the most important aspect of all of this is that the players themselves have lead this selection not myself. This is an essential aspect of the history of the professional base, to which the contribute of Profibase can certainly not be denied.
But coming back to the story, and those main moments in the Spring and Autumn of 1995. February-March 1995: I have great success, suddenly from beginner I reach the top placements at the most important tournaments in the world, the traditional players started to contact me and I took the advise of Gil Delogne, who I respected as a player and as a person, very young at the time but already a champion, coming from the schooling of Dominique Demarco and Belgian club Cornesse, at the time the number one in the world.
Gil was enthusiast of my project right away. I gave Gil one of my prototypes, a whole team, with a smaller diameter than the standard one (20 instead of 21mm) as a trial. I only had two types of such teams, from my point of view they were the best, one I had in use while I gave him the other (see here) . The bevel of those bases was worked by hand with a nail-file, so the bases were all different But after working on it for several house they were as perfect as if they were machine made. I had tried every base until it could do a lob , I tried and grinded, retried and regrind. Evening, whole nights went by, to obtain the "perfect" base for the lob, dominated by a passion without limits.
To cut it short, Gil still plays with that team today, the one with which he has become World Champion in 1998 and 2000 and has won numerous tournament plus he has uninterruptedly been, I think in the last 7-8 years) Belgian champion (and Belgium, after Italy, has the best players in the world). There were two seasons in 1997 and 1998 with Gil playing in the Open category and me in the Veterans, where we literally took the world by storm with our semi-industrial, hand finished, bases. We practically won every European tournament leaping to the number one spot of the respective World Ranking.
But Gil was determinant above all at the European Cup in Wuppertal in October 1995 where Profibase had their first stand. At the time two stands were facing each other, the one by Hofmann, who sold his Swiss miniatures, dominant at the time, and mine, an absolute novelty. For the occasion I had patiently prepared at least one team for each of the 27 possible models.
In fact from the very beginning the Profibase stand represented a meeting point for enthusiasts of this sport. Sale, so to speak, comes in second place, players, above all, come to try, discuss and reflect on the game
There was a lot of curiosity on that occasion for my creation, and players really appreciated my idea to have created bases in various measures to fit traditional Subbuteo figures. Like Gil and myself many other players wanted to preserve the traditional aspect of Subbuteo and definitive affirmation of professional bases and therefore of the traditional Subbuteo even in agonistic Table Football reflects this general desire then like today, the difference being that only after 1995 good bases came in existence. But the true success of that tournament was not Profibase, that to tell the truth sill needed about 2-3 years before successfully establishing itself with the World Cup won by Gil in 1998, but an individual match played within the Switzerland-Belgium team match. The match was Hofmann-Delogne, which meant Swiss miniatures vs Profibase, therefore Subbuteo bases, just professional. As a player I would never have been able to compete with Hofmann, who enjoyed a past as a champion but Gil could. The bases prepared by me but hit by Gil's golden finger scored 4 goals. The final result was 4-0. At the time Hofmann used Toccers, which paradoxically lost against not just small miniatures but also smaller bases than normal (20instead of 21mm). A case of Giants vs Dwarfs (and the dwarfs won) ! I'll never forget Gil's sparkling eye returning to my stand. It wasn't just him beating Hofmann or Profibase defeating Toccers but also a victory for the traditional Subbuteo, in professional form, against the ugliness of the Swiss product. That match will remain a symbol forever, the symbol of a change in Table Football: the traditional aspect of Subbuteo, the philosophy of Table Football as miniaturised form of association football, had reacted to the establishment of the opposite concept and had proved how it was possible to have great playing materials without betraying the traditional game and its original spirit. Sir Peter Adolph, our teacher, would be proud.
After that tournament and that match Willy Hofmann, who the world of Table Football owes a big debt in any case as he was the first to conceive in a scientific and technical way a really good base, has all but disappeared completely from the world of Table Football. His stand has not been seen anymore and his miniatures were sold by mail. Today Toccers are rarely seen in tournaments and, like the Sport Playing Figures, only few players still use them. What is left is the professional base, yes Profibase, because even if produced by others under different names, any base in the future can be fitted with traditional Subbuteo like figures and being categorised, in form and dimensions, by the table produced by me will always be, in principle if not in its production, a Profibase ! Called them as you wish, fantasy has gone awol since 1996 (the year of the first imitations, does born under the beating sun of Malta) to this day, searching various names for less or more fortunate imitation of my bases, but all professional bases going around are, in its principle, Profibase.
The rest is today's story. Who tries to manufacture and sell today has an easy life, because they find an already seeded field and, in any case, already free from obstacles. Today is enough to take a successful Profibase ( there's many around the world, keeping in mind that in the last 8 years the World Championship has been firmly in the hands of Profibase and that numerous Opens, Grand Prixs and Majors are continuously being won by players who use those bases), to go straight to a plastic manufacturer and ask them to produce an equal specimen, maybe modifying slightly the bevel or the curvature ray, give such a product a new name and pretend to have created something new that in reality is not new. If you take some of my initial discarded bases, models no longer produced, you will find a lot that is produced today under false name passed as new. This, beginners do not know and buy it! Naturally there are also good imitations, but all those bases refer more or less explicitly to the Profibase table and are therefore Profibase in their principle, in other words professional bases for traditional Subbuteo miniatures (years '60-'90).
So, to clear things up, what has been fundamental in the history of table football is the imprint given by Sir Peter Adolph, for the game in its general form, summed up in the concept of Subbuteo, and by me for the base shape, summed up in the concept of Profibase, professional base. The rest, as regard to the manufacturing of the bases, is irrelevant from an historical point of view, only Willy Hofmann has a decisive role in history of Table Football for his intuition to create a proper base, created by a player, therefore by someone who knows what is needed. To Laurent Garnier has to be attribute a fundamental role in the history of Table Football, both for having had the idea of creating a world federation with a serious structure and for serving as an example to all on how to professionally organise a table football tournament. Those four people and their respective contributes I feel have been the pillars of the history of Table Football.
A note is needed as regard to the concepts of "Subbuteo" and "Profibase" . Table football enthusiasts often make a mistake that I will try here to rectify. "Subbuteo" is often referred to as just a brand, concluding therefore that we don't play Subbuteo, as you obviously cannot play a brand, but table football. Point is, it is true "Subbuteo" is one hand a brand, owned at present by Hasbro, therefore merchandise, on the other hand though is an expression, a term that is nowadays "popular culture", that represent a particular type of table football, the one with the flick, to distinguish it from "football table" and others. So "Subbuteo" has been such a strong brand that in time has transformed itself into a general value that could easily be entered in the dictionary. In other words the term "Subbuteo" juridically belongs to a company, who bought it, but lexically belongs to the people, like any other word. Besides the term "Subbuteo" wasn't originally a brand at all, but a latin term, to identify a type of hawk, which has then been chosen by Sir Peter Adolph to identify a brand. Naturally Profibase is not like this, and maybe it will never be, because behind Profibase there is not the economic power found behind Subbuteo giving the name such a popular level and reach. But the principle is the same: Profibase is the byword for the professional base, not just a brand, just like Subbuteo is byword for table football.
To say "professional base" or "Profibase" is the same thing just like saying "Subbuteo" or "table football by flick", it the same thing !
Today the problems we had getting hold of good agonistic material 10-15 years ago don't exist anymore, the quantity of the offer surely is superior to the demand, there's bases of all colours and dimensions, some even contributed some good ideas to concept of professional base even improving it, so that there is a lot to be satisfied of the improvements made in this field of our beloved sport. For the future I hope we don't make the same mistake of the past (the Toccers for example) where cylindrical or semi-cylindrical bases are produced, the professional base must be able to spin. It is that extra that can sometimes resolve matches( like winning the world cup with a pirouette as Massimo Bolognino goes to show, the modern Maradona of Subbuteo, who certainly does not give spinning-dribbling). Besides cylindrical base make the log an automatic affair without the need to impress that characteristic movement necessary to incline the base enough to scoop the ball. It's easy to produce bases that lift the ball, to produce them in a way that they can lift the ball, spin and control well is a lot more difficult. I wish the manufacturers and the players in the future will keep in the production of the bases that minimum of skill needed to lift a ball and not something that can be easily bought with a few tens of euro, because the lob, should be a sporting conquest, as it was before and not a form of merchandise.
If we will keep to the few principles illustrated in those pages, I think that Subbuteo - Table Football, will never cease to exist and instead with time, even if it will take generation after generation, it will succeed, at least as a small sport activity with its own specificity, the one to be the miniaturised form of football.
Marco de Angelis

[Hönkki]

Onko muuten kellään näitä profibasen äijiä, kun kerran näin maasta taivaaseen niitä kehuvat ? Lähinnä kiinnostaa onko profibasen ja astrobasen äijillä eroa. Kilpailu taitaa olla aika kovaa näiden kahden kesken.

[Epis]

Nopeestikko noita profibasen pohjia tilaa, jos niitä haluaa testata. Kaikista paras ostotilanne varmasti olisi tuo tekstissä mainittu tapa, jossa 1-2 henkilöä esitteli vajaata 30 erilaista pohjamallia/jengiä mm-kisojen ym turnausten aikana. Tällöin ostaja pääsee käytännössä testaamaan figuureja eikä ylläty vasta paketin avaamisen jälkeen.

de Angelis myös mainitsi itse tehneensä tuota testausta ja kehitystä pohjan muodon kanssa ja halunneensa pohjan säilyttävän mahdollisuuden kierteisiin. Mietin, että olisiko mahdollista kehittää omalla suunnittelulla ja testauksella (joko itse tai jonkun toisen toimesta) paranneltu versio figuurista, jonka (erikois)ominaisuudet painottuvat hitaan peliin? Tosin de Angelis myös muistutti, että haluaa tehdä figureista hyviä mutta niin että varsinainen näpäytystaito ja muut avut ratkaisevat voittajan, joten tämän kaltaisessa tilanteessa ollaan tällä hetkellä aikas pitkälti. Tosin mikään ei pakota kulkemaan edellä mainitun näkemyksen mukaisesti...

[Zinga]

Onko muuten kellään näitä profibasen äijiä, kun kerran näin maasta taivaaseen niitä kehuvat ? Lähinnä kiinnostaa onko profibasen ja astrobasen äijillä eroa. Kilpailu taitaa olla aika kovaa näiden kahden kesken.

Mä kokeilin noita Profibaseja MM-skaboissa pikaisesti. Ei niissä mitään ihmeellistä ahaa-elämystä tullut joten sanoisin niiden olevan käytännössä vastaavia kuin Astrobasen peruspohjat.