A brief history of pinball

At the beginning of Steven L. Kent's 'Ultimate History of Video Games' there is this quote by former CNN Computer Connection producer, Steven Baxter, which says:

"You can't say that video games grew out of pinball, but you can assume that video games wouldn't have happened without it. It's like bicycles and automobiles. One industry leads to the other and they exist side by side. But you had to have bicycles to one day have motor cars."

So when people point at Pong or even the oscilloscope game Tennis for Two, way back in 1958, as the origins of video games, they are missing out on this simple truth. With that in mind here is Arcade Throwback's brief history of pinball, the true origin of arcade gaming and the huge home and mobile gaming industry we know today.

Bagatelle and the beginning of pinball

Being essentially mechanical in nature, pin games have been around for centuries, all the way back to Bagatelle tables in the 15th century, like the one below.

An example of a Bagatelle table.

Even without flippers, flashing lights, ramps or digitised score[board]s, it's easy to see how this could be the origin of pinball, although it's actually a form of billiards. Some versions of Bagatelle also included wooden pins, which  had to be avoided in order to get the balls into the cups. A few centuries later, a variant called billiard Japonais (Japanese billiards) replaced the cues with a plunger and the free-standing wooden pins with fixed, metal pins (basically nails). Billiard Japonais went on to inspire a few other games, including pachinko and something that got us a whole lot closer to the pinball we know today, but for that we need to fast forward to the 1930s.

Baffle Ball and Ballyhoo

In 1931 David Gottlieb invented a variation of billiard Japonais which he called Baffle Ball. In this new game players had to rock the table to get the balls into the desired hole — a technique that would later become known as nudging. Compare the photo of Baffle Ball (below) to the photo of the Bagatelle table above and the resemblance is undeniable.

Gottlieb's first pin game.

The success of Gottlieb's game meant it wasn't long before others started to create their own pin games. Among them was Ray Moloney, owner of Lion Manufacturing and creator of Ballyhoo. Moloney's game was so successful, he decided to change his company name to Bally and a future legend of pinball was born.

By all accounts, Gottlieb had a knack for balancing skill and challenge to make fun games, but around the same time another big name for pinball emerged. His name was Harry Williams and he was a Standford-educated engineer, which meant he knew how to create complex mechanisms for his games. In 1933 he created Contact, the world's first electric pinball game. Previously, once a ball landed in a scoring pocket, it had to be retrieved by hand (either by picking it out of the pocket or from a collection tray at the bottom). Contact's scoring pockets had electrically-powered contacts (hence the name) that knocked the ball back into play, allowing the game to continue uninterrupted. Unfortunately, it is around this time that problems started to occur for pinball and pin games, all of which linked back to early gambling machines called pay-outs, which looked a little like pinball machines. It seemed some people in authority couldn't (or wouldn't) see the difference.

Pinball outlawed

A pinball machine being demolished after a raid

By the 1940s, pinball was outlawed in many parts of America, as it was thought to be a form of gambling with links to organised crime. It was also thought to be a bad influence on America's impressionable youth, who would waste their time and money on the games. In 1942, New York Mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, authorised raids on pinball establishments and issued arrest warrants for their owners. And what happens when the authorities try to ban something? It goes underground, develops an almost mythical reputation and becomes more popular than ever. The manufacturing, innovation and popularity of pinball continued unabated, with Chicago becoming the capital of pinball production, despite it also being illegal there. It was in the windy city that Gottlieb, Bally and Williams were all based. Gottlieb in particular battled to legitimise his games. He knew the key would be to prove pinball was more than a game of chance, which meant his games needed to demonstrate the need for skill.

Putting the flip into pinball

In 1947, Harry Mabs, one of Gottlieb's engineers, added spring-powered "flipper bumpers" to a game called Humpty Dumpty. The flipper bumpers were used to knock the ball back into play, in exactly the same way as modern pinball, which added weight to Gottlieb's argument that pinball needed skill to play. As the video below shows, Mabs' flipper bumpers were not located at the bottom and there were more than two of them - in fact, there were six:

Flippers revolutionised pinball, to the point that in France, pinball tables are known as le flipper. Gottlieb's competitors got in on the act and for the next few years all pin games had six flippers in a similar arrangement to Humpty Dumpty. Eventually having two flippers at the bottom of the table became the norm, but it was actually for reasons of thrift, rather than design choice. The man to thank for that was Steve Kordek, a designer at a company called Genco. He was under instructions to save money in his designs, so he reduced the number of flippers to two and in order to make them as useful as possible, he put them at the very bottom of the table. The result was a table called Triple Action. It's still not quite the pinball we know today, as the flippers still pivoted from the middle of the table, rather than the outside edges (a la Humpty Dumpty), but it was still a major step forwards.

Two flippers at the bottom. The start of something big.

The introduction of flippers proved pinball needed skill to play and by the mid-70s most US cities lifted the ban. This is what Gizomodo has to say about the day the ban on pinball was lifted in New York:

"In May of 1976 in New York City, Roger Sharpe watched nervously as city council members piled into a Manhattan courtroom. Reporters and camera operators had already begun setting up, eagerly anticipating the proceedings ahead. Roger, a young magazine writer for GQ and the New York Times among others, did not expect this kind of attention. He knew lots of people, from bowling-alley-hanging teens to the Music & Amusement Association, were depending on him, but didn’t realize the whole country would be watching. Roger had been selected for this particular task not only for his knowledge and expertise, but for his legendary hand-eye coordination. He was there to prove that this was a game of skill, not chance. He was there to overturn the ban. He was there to save the game of pinball."

Despite this, bans on under 18s playing pinball remained in various parts of the US up until the 2000s and pinball was still illegal in the town of Beacon, NY, up until 2010 (and may still be). I cannot find anything to suggest pinball was banned in the UK, but our laws did influence the industry. In 1991, UK laws on chance games saw the introduction of the ball saver feature. This is why modern pinball tables will often give you a free ball if, straight after being launched, it drops out the bottom without the player hitting it.

Dark heart of the arcade

For decades, the pinball machine was a symbol of delinquency and rebellion, like rock 'n' roll and motorcycles. Even up until the 1980s, antagonists in movies were sometimes seen playing pinball, as if to imply that was part of their dangerous personalities. YouTuber Bumper McBaulogh (I believe that's his actual real name) has made a series of videos called Pinball in the Movies, which shows clips of films that feature pinball, with no voice over or any other narrative about the nature of the machines' representation. In each case, the machines are in some way linked to immoral, unscrupulous or outright illegal activities. You can check out Bumper's channel here. Perhaps the most graphic example of a pinball table being associated with dangerous, even evil people, was in the 1988 Jonathan Kaplan film, The Accused. If you haven't heard of the film, it features a grotesque sequence in which a drunk Jodie Foster is held down and gang raped on a re-branded Bally Space Invaders table (called Slamdunk in the film, which feels like some kind of tasteless pun, given the context).

From my memories as a child, pinball tables seemed to attract a more sinister crowd than the likes of Frogger or even Mortal Kombat. In the arcades I visited, pinball machines were separate from the video games and were often located with the one-armed bandits and fruit machines (that link to gambling still rearing its ugly head again). Many of the tables I encountered in smoky city centre arcades were based on horror movies or some other Gothic theme. Tables such as Tales from the Crypt, Centaur, Freddy: A Nightmare on Elm Street, Haunted House, Gorgar and Spooky all instantly spring to mind.

But that's enough about the negative side of pinball.

Innovations and the golden age of pinball

Harry Williams' electric contacts began the steady technological progress of pinball. From the 40s up to the 70s electromechanical (EM for short) machines ruled pinball. As the name suggests, these used electrically-powered mechanisms, such as relays, to control things like sink hole returns, slingshots, bumpers and even scoreboards. These machines had very limited sound, usually nothing more than a bell and the clatter of the relays, which even today are synonymous with pinball.

An EM scoreboard from a Williams Go Go Pinball machine

In the 70s, consumer electronics blew up in a big way, with the first wave of electronic record players, video cameras and home computers emerging from America and Japan. It was in 1976 that Micro Games released the first solid state pinball machine, Spirit of '76. Gone were the relays, now the gameplay and scoring was controlled by electronic circuits. Along with the circuit boards came LED scoreboards, sound effects, synthesized music and eventually voices, which could issue instructions (or sometimes taunts) to the player. It was the beginning of the golden age of pinball.

Spirit of '76, apparently the first electronic pinball machine.

From 1977 onwards solid state machines ruled the pinball scene and by the end of the 80s, pinball was more popular than ever, but there was another, even bigger change on the horizon.

In 1991, Data East introduced a new kind of score board into a machine called Checkpoint. This new technology used an array of orange LEDs to create a dot matrix display (or DMD for short). It was the biggest innovation in pinball since Harry Mabs added flippers to Humpty Dumpty. Not only did DMDs allow pinball manufacturers to display graphics in their games, they could also give the player detailed instructions and even provide stories for the player to follow. This elevated the gameplay above simply hitting targets, bumpers and ramps in order to get high scores, now players could aim to trigger the next chapter in an interactive blend of story, skill game and puzzle.

Decline of the industry

Sadly, as arcades diminished, so too did the demand for pinball tables. Despite new innovations and attempts to attract new players, pinball machines were dragged under with the fall in popularity of video arcade games. Below is Bally's promotional video the classic Cirqus Voltaire from 1997. This video includes a company briefing with a sales chart clearly showing the decline in pinball's popularity over the past few years.

This decline was not just a bump in the road, but the edge of a cliff for pinball. By the end of the millennium, most of the great manufacturers had gone out of business.

Here's a list of casualties:

• Italian manufacturer, Zaccaria, stopped making pin games in 1988.
• Data East was bought by Sega in 1994 and renamed "Sega Pinball".
• Midway sold Bally to the Hilton Hotel group in 1995, but made no more pin games.
• 1996 saw the end of Gottlieb, Alvin G & Co. and Capcom's pinball division.
• Williams went under in 1999, despite their attempts to revitalise interest in pin games with their hybrid "Pinball 2000" machines.
• In 1999 Sega sold their pinball division (which was formerly Data East's) to the then President of Sega Pinball, Gary Stern who called his new company "Stern Pinball".

For around a decade, Stern was the only major pinball manufacturer left in the world. They survived by making machines based on bands, films and TV shows; Pirates of the Caribbean, AC/DC, Lord of the Rings, Sopranos, CSI, Terminator 3, Spider-man, Metallica, Avatar, Tron Legacy, The Simpsons, Batman, Indiana Jones and Iron Man all got a pinball machine, thanks to Stern.

The power of nostalgia

Thankfully, a deep-rooted love for pinball means there are plenty of people who will fight tooth and nail to see the industry commemorated and survive. As well as countless websites celebrating pinball, in 2009 the Las Vegas Pinball Collectors Club got together and opened the Pinball Hall of Fame. You can even do a Google Street View tour of the inside of the museum here. It is, quite frankly, incredible.

Inside the Pinball Hall of Fame, Las Vegas

Video pinball and emulation

For generations of pinball fans, they've only been able to enjoy the hobby because of a combination of original video pinball games and pinball emulators. Unlike arcade ROMs, which just need be ripped from the chips and emulated on MAME, Kayaks or whatever, digitising a pinball table accurately is an expensive and painstaking process. There is a community of people out there trying to do just that, with emulators such as PinMAME, Visual Pinball and Future Pinball, but like all emulation it is illegal - the scarcity of actual pinball machines does not get you out of that.


Thank God then for the mayor of Big Bear Lake, Jay Obernolte, whose video game company Farsight Studios, has been creating digital versions of classic tables from Gottlieb, Williams, Bally and Stern for the past decade. Initially they launched manufacturer-specific games with a dozen or so tables in them, but in 2012 they launched The Pinball Arcade. This all-encompassing, ever expanding pinball emulator features almost 50 classic tables and is available on pretty much every platform going.

Following in Farsight's footsteps, there is also Zaccaria Pinball by ASK Homework, which, as the name suggests, emulates Zaccaria tables (around two dozen of them). Unlike The Pinball Arcade, Zaccaria Pinball is only available on iOS and by all accounts it's a little buggy in comparison). But Zaccaria's machines are even harder to find in the real world than those from Bally, Williams, Gottlieb, Data East or any of the other big manufacturers, so let's hope it improves and becomes available on other platforms.

If you're willing to look outside of the classic tables, there is also Pinball FX 2 (known as Zen Pinball on some platforms), by Zen Studios. Also available on every platform going, Zen started out making original tables, such as Nightmare Mansion, Secrets of the Deep and Tesla. For the past couple of years they have gone the way of Stern and started making licenced tables, based on Marvel comics, Star Wars, the FIFA football association and other video games (the Plants Vs Zombies table is a riot).



One of many Star Wars-themed tables in Pinball FX 2/Zen Pinball



Sony also got in on the video pinball scene, with not one, but two games, both featuring licenced tables. For the original PSP there was Pinball Heroes. Released in 2010, it featured tables based on PlayStation 3 games such as Uncharted, Fat Princess, Pain and Everybody's Golf. More recently they released Pinball Rocks for iOS and Android. This rock and metal themed game features tables based bands such as AC/DC, Slayer, Alice in Chains and Bullet for my Valentine. Even movie studio MGM have produced a video pinball game - War Pinball, which features tables from based on movies such as Navy Seals, Missing in Action and (somewhat bizarrely) Platoon.

Pinball purists tend to scoff at video pinball, emulated or otherwise, criticising their physics and unrealistic features. Zen's games in particular include features that could not be done mechanically, such as figures that jump into the playfield to strike the ball and space ships flying around the table. While this annoys me a little, Zen's tables are still fun and challenging. More importantly, for the past decade these video pinball games are all most of us have had to slake our thirst for the silver ball.

The future of pin games

Despite the grim state of the industry a few years ago, things are starting to look up. In 2010, New Jersey-born business man Jack Guarnieri started up a new pinball manufacturer called Jersey Jack. Their début table is based on the MGM classic Wizard of Oz from 1939 and set pinball forums alight when they first announced the game. As this video shows, Jersey Jack have put their heart and soul into this table. It takes classic pinball elements and combines it with modern technology, like a 3D LCD back glass.

Then, in 2012, Andrew Heighway started up the UK's first major pinball manufacturer, Heighway Pinball. Seemingly coming out of nowhere, Heighway has some major industry names on-board, including artist Doug Watson (Attack from Mars, The Getaway: High Speed II, Terminator 2, Black Knight and Black Knight 2000) and designer Dennis Nordman (Elvira and the Party Monsters, Scared Stiff, Dr Dude, White Water (a person favourite). In an interview with the BBC, Andrew Heighway said, "There's been a huge boom in pinball smartphone and console games over the last few years. ...thanks to these video games, there are plenty of kids that have been primed for the real thing."  That is a very interesting quote indeed.

Full Throttle's playfield with an LCD display in the middle

Jersey Jack and Heighway Pinball may have grabbed the headlines in recent years, but they aren't the only ones making new machines. Nordman (again) teamed up with pinball artist Greg Freres (Monster Bash, Strange Science, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Revenge from Mars and Medieval Madness) to create WhizBang Pinball. Together they made a limited number of bespoke pinball machines from other donor machines.

Nordman also teamed up with a new company called Multimorphic to help them create Lexy Lightspeed - Galaxy Girl, a brand new machine built on Multimorphic's P3 platform and due for release at the end of the year. Here's Lexy in action:

The beauty of the P3 system is that its designed to play more than one game on a single table, thanks to its large LCD play field. So as well as Lexy Lightspeed, the table will also play Cosmic Cart Racing when it's finished. I like the idea, but I can't help feeling it falls between two stools, being neither a fully mechanical pinball table, nor a "skies the limit" video pinball, like the sort of thing Zen Studios have been delivering. Rather than being the best of both worlds, it seems like a dilution of both technologies - but hey, at least they're trying.

I'm particularly excited to see what comes out of Heighway, not least because they are the UK's first major pinball manufacturer, but also because more than any other company out there, Heighway are trying to push the industry forward and take advantage of new technology, without compromising the spirit of traditional pinball. Not only that, but they are trying to build pinball machines smarter, replacing unreliable mechanical parts with sensors and other, most robust devices. They are also offering modular tables, making it easier for operators to swap and change faulty parts. The video below shows an early prototype for Heighway's upcoming Circe's Animal House. On the right you can see a blank "white board" version of the table playing, but on the left, you can see what at first appears to be graphics projected on to the surface of another blank table, but which is in fact a transparent LCD display. This allows Heighway to display effects, scores, characters, anything they like, whilst maintaining an entirely traditional playfield.

So with Stern providing the backbone of the industry, The Pinball Arcade reminding a new generation what's so great about pinball, and Jersey Jack and Heighway leading the charge for new developments, it appears pinball is in a better state now than it was 15 years ago. All we need now is for pubs, bowling alleys, seaside arcades and restaurants to start stocking these new machines and we're in business.

MTW

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Sources:

BBC New - Flipping heck
BMI Gaming - The History of Pinball Machines and Pintables
Fun with Bonus - Circe's Animal House Preview
Gawker - Pinball Machines: Film's Omnipresent Villain
Gizmodo - How One Perfect Shot Saved Pinball From Being Illegal
Home Leisure Direct - Pinball buying advice
IMDB - The Accused
Pinball Fun - History of Pinball
Pinball Life
Pinball News - FULL THROTTLE: New team members, artwork and interview
Pinside
Slate - Can this man save pinball?
The Internet Pinball Database
The Ultimate History of Video Games [book]
Wikipedia - Pinball

Top 10 pinball tables

In celebration of The Pinball Arcade's first anniversary, here are our top 10 pin games, many of which I've only been able to play because of Far Sight's simulator.

Star Wars Episode 1

I'm going to start with one one of the few in this list I can remember playing and it's mainly because of the special tricks it pulls, such as the light sabre that lights up during the game and the holographic back screen, which allows you to blast droids with the ball. This technology was coined "Pinball 2000" by Williams and was an attempt to re-vitalise the floundering company. The objective of the game was to become a Jedi spirit (whatever that is), which means ascending the ranks of the Jedi and eventually battling Darth Maul. It says a lot about a film when the pinball table is a more memory experience.

Black Hole

Gottlieb's Black Hole is former classic of the month, so it's hardly surprising it also made it to my top 10. Like video games, atmosphere can carry pinball tables a long way and Black Hole's gaunt sound effects and simple layout are very atmospheric. It's tough to get the multi-ball mode to activate on this one, but when you do it's actually possible to have balls on both the main playfield and the inverted lower table; managing balls on both playfields, especially when the balls drop out of the top on the lower field, is only for the true pros.

White Water

If you like tables with lots of ramps, you'll love White Water. In fact, when I saw this table in a bowling alley back in the 90s, it was precisely because of its rapids-themed ramps that I started to play it. The object of the table was to make your way down the river rapids to Wet Willy's shack, encountering dangerous ravines, dark caves and even a yeti along the way.

Taxi

For me, personality also goes a long way when it comes to pinball tables and William's Taxi has personality in spades. The object of the table is to pick up and drop off its colourful cast of passengers, which includes Mikhail Gorbachev, Marilyn Monroe, Santa Claus, Dracula and Pin*Bot (although I have no idea how a planet-sized robot is supposed to get into a Crown Victoria). It still makes  me smile hearing Pin*Bot saying, "Taxi, taxi, taxi" in his robotic voice. The looping ramps, which cross over in the middle also help to give this table a real sense of pace.

The Machine: Bride of Pin*Bot

Talking of Pin*Bot, William's trilogy are true legends of pinball, but when I decided to only include one of the series in this list I had to go with the first lady of pinball, The Machine. Not only did The Machine feature the pinball eyes of its predecessor, players also had to shoot their ball into her mouth to give her speech (which is a little counter intuitive). With each stage of The Machine's unique ball-locking mechanism her whole face rotates. Once she has balls in her mouth (ahem) and eyes, the multi-ball mode kicks in and you can rack up a serious score. I don't have any tattoos, but if I got one, I reckon it would be of this giant, sexy metallic lady.

Big Shot

Originally released in 1973 (when pinball was actually still illegal in New York City), Big Shot is the oldest table in our list. It's also the only electro-magnetic (EM) table in this list, but I love how deceptively challenging this table is. At first glance is looks pretty basic, but lighting all 14 of its drop targets with a single ball is surprisingly tough. There are few purer tests of pinball skill than to light them in order. I certainly can't do it.

Space Shuttle

A lot of the tables in this list are historically significant because of features they introduced to pin games, but Williams' Space Shuttle from 1984 is significant because it not only rescued the struggling Williams company, it also helped with the pinball resurgence that lead to so many great tables in the 1990s. As much as anything, for me it's the sounds this table makes that sends me into a nostalgic swoon. This is before digitised background music, so there's no rousing patriotic score or epic sci-fi theme, just a whole lot of awesome buzzes and beeps that wouldn't be out of place in Defender.

Theatre of Magic

Harking back to the days when magicians like David Copperfield, Siegfried and Roy and Lance Burton were master entertainers, Theatre of Magic really captures the feel of those big, complicated and above all extravagant tricks. As your score goes up the sense of the stakes also escalating is palpable. Among this table's many tricks are the rotating magic trunk, which can make balls disappear, the spirit ring and deadly tiger saw. All of which would look perfectly at home in a Las Vegas stage show.

Attack from Mars

This is one of my absolute favourites. Pinball games are famous for their crazy highscores, but Attack from Mars takes it to the extreme. Within seconds of playing even a newbie can rack a score of a few hundred million. As an experiment, I once played a game where I did not press a single flipper, I just launched the ball and let it drop and I still scored 192,000,000! It's a really good beginners table, because of its relatively simple rule set and its open playfield, which helps players to keep track of the action. Just don't be too disappointed when you go back to a different table and find you can only score a tenth of the score you got on this.

Tales of Arabian Nights

Based on the classic saga 'One Thousand and One Nights', this is another table with bags of personality. The objective is to rescue the princess from the demonic genie. Along the way players will be collecting gems, visiting a bazaar, flying a magic carpet and spinning Aladdin's lamp in the middle. I also love tables with great lighting and this table certainly has that. After each ball out, the gems you've collected disappear in time to the music, then with a final flourish from the oud, the whole table briefly illuminates. It looks beautiful. Also, if you haven't tried The Pinball Arcade on your Android or iPhone, this table is free with the basic version.

Choosing the first nine tables for this list was fairly easy, but choosing my final table was tough. The Pinball Arcade really showcases the best the pin games have to offer from the last 50 years and narrowing it down to 10 has been as hard, if not harder, than any of my other top 10s. In the end it was down to Tales of Arabian Nights, Cirqus Voltaire, Black Knight, Centaur and Funhouse. In the end, I had to go with the tables I played the most, which is why three of Pinball Arcade's launch tables are in this list.

Join us again next month for another top 10.

MTW

Classic of the Month: Tapper

Manufacturer:	Bally Midway
Developer:	Marvin Glass and Associates
Genre:	Puzzle/Platform
Board:	Unknown
Year:	1983

Video games are awesome and beer is awesome, so surely the combination of the two would be even awesomerer? You'd be bang on with that one and if you really need proof (of what is essentially a universal law) look no further than Bally Midway's Tapper.

The game puts the player in control of a bar tender, who has to supply his demanding and increasingly bizarre-looking patrons with Budweiser (or generic root beer in a later, child friendly version called Root Beer Tapper). Tapper's pub has four bars, each with a door at one end and keg at the other. As the patrons appear you have to move to their bar, draw a pint of beer, then slide it down the bar to them, before they get to the end of the bar. When they catch the glass, they are pushed back a few feet. To finish the level you have to push each patron all the way back through the doors and out of the pub. But it's not as easy as just bombarding them with drinks. If they are still drinking, any subsequent glasses will fall to the floor and when a glass breaks in Tapper, you lose a life (well, a chance). To add more danger to the game, when a patron drains their glass they slide it back to you; fail to catch the glass and there goes another life. So you have to balance serving patrons with catching their empties. If a patron makes their way to the end of the bar, they will grab Tapper and carry him off and out of the pub — for some reason.

So the game has three ways in which the player can lose a life and if that wasn't enough, collecting the tips patrons leave (at various points along any one of the four bars) puts you at more risk of all three of them. So what on the face of it sounds like quite a cute and fun little game soon becomes as challenging and oppressively difficult as any other arcade game of the era. At the end of the day, Tapper wants your 10ps, so don't expect this to be a push over.

Tapper was released in 1983 and I think it's a pretty amazing looking game. The bar tender and patrons are detailed, colourful and brimming over with character — especially in later levels, when setting for the bar changes and the cowboys are replaced with sports fans, then punks and finally aliens (again, I don't know the reason for this). I can't help thinking that the bar tender looks like some distant cousin of Mario, but that's probably just a coincidence. As for the Budweiser tie-in, back then, here in the UK, Budweiser seemed like some exotic Yank beer, which must be refreshing and delicious, since it was always popping up in cool American culture, from action movies to rock videos. It wasn't until about a decade after the release of Tapper did I get to find out for myself that it was actually bland-tasting, overly carbonated piss. Give me a pint of Guinness any day! Tapper's still great though.

Usually, the videos I include in these posts just show someone playing the game on MAME, but every so often I find a video of the machine itself. In the video below you can see that as well as being a classic game, it's a classic cabinet. As well as a tap for a fire button for that authentic bar tender feels, it also has a bar at the bottom, which confusingly is something for patrons, not bar tenders. Oh well, it's a nice touch and a beautiful cabinet.

Root Beer Tapper was available on Xbox Live Arcade for a few years, until Midway went under and Microsoft had to pull all of their games. A nice touch on the Xbox version was the option to flick the right analogue stick down, a la the tap on the original cabinet. But it's gone now and even if you had the trial on your HDD (as I do), you can't buy the full version any more. Bummer.

MTW

Classic of the Month - Black Hole

Manufacturer:	Gottlieb
Genre:	Pinball
Board:	Gottlieb System 80
Year:	1981

Following last month's release of The Pinball Arcade for home consoles and smart phones, I thought it was about time I did another pinball Classic of the Month. This month's pin game of choice is the game I played the most in the video port, Gottlieb's 1981 classic Black Hole.

Black Hole's inverted lower playfield

Almost everything about this table is non-standard, from the asymmetrical layout at the bottom of the table to the lack of specific goals and of course the lane on the top-left that takes the ball (and the player) into the "Black Hole" itself.

Instead of the usual two flippers, with inlanes and outlanes surrounding triangular bumpers, on the right-hand side there are two flippers, one directly above the first, with no outlane; on the left-hand side there is mushroom bumper (or "pop bumper", as Gottlieb refer to them), with not so much an outlane, but a gap that leads to the drain. The middle of the playfield is one of the most barren you'll see for a relatively modern table. This is because in there middle there is the Black Hole — an inverted, lower playfield which has its own separate scoring system, that adds on to your main score from one ball to the next. And because this playfield is inverted the flippers are at the top  and the the ball falls "up" (see right). The first time you end up in the black hole you are guaranteed to lose the ball, even if you know about the inverted playfield, because it's a mind-bending feature. In fact, Black Hole was the first table to have an inverted lower playfield, which along with its 50¢ price point, which helped make it one of the most popular tables in the States in its day.

Playing Black Hole is a constant cycle of hitting the BLACK HOLE drop targets in sequence, then getting the ball into the Black Hole for the bonus. Getting a good score is almost like an endurance challenge, because there are not really any short cuts and the multi-ball is pretty tough to unlock. Don't expect Black Hole to keep chucking high scores your way though; even a score of a few million is a feat.

For me, Black Hole evokes as strong a sense of nostalgia as any arcade game and for one simple reason: the sound. There's no music to speak of, instead there's a rhythmic and near-hypnotic electronic beeping that loops constantly while you play, which sounds like some kind of sci-fi sonar. I can remember hearing it in arcades in my childhood, even though I didn't play it until much later.

Getting to play any pinball table is neigh-on impossible, so I urge people check out Pinball Arcade, especially as it's available on every gaming platform that matters.

It's always tricky to get decent videos of pinball machines, but nonetheless, here's the original Black Hole in action. This video includes a brief look at the spinning black hole motif on the top of the table, which is curiously inanimate in Far Sight Studio's conversion.

Finally, this table was not affiliated to the 1979 Disney movie, which you might guess from the lack of V.I.N.CENT, B.O.B or Maximilian (boy, that thing was scary as a kid) robots in the art work. Just in case you were confused.

MTW

Classic pinball collection now available

If you love pin games then you'll want to check out The Pinball Arcade from Far Sight Studios, which effectively emulates loads of real, classic tables from Williams, Gottlieb, Bally and Stern. The game is available on XBLA, PSN (PS3 and Vita), iOS, 3DS, PC and Mac. The basic released with Tales of the Arabian Nights®, Ripley's Believe It or Not®, Theatre of Magic®, and a personal favourite Black Hole™.

Over the coming months Far Site are promising additional tables will be made available for download, including Black Knight®, Monster Bash®, Medieval Madness®, Creature from the Black Lagoon®, Funhouse®, Attack from Mars®, Space Shuttle®, Pin•Bot®, Circus Voltaire® and Big Shot®.

I've tried the demo on XBLA and it's pretty good. While the interface lacks some of the bells and whistles of say Pinball FX (AKA Zen Pinball on PS3), there's just something about the tables that's better than the vast majority of video pin games. The models look authentic and hearing the sounds of these classic tables is enough to send any pinball wizard into a day dream. I particularly like the camera modes. There's only three (high, medium and low angles), but each one can be set to follow the ball or stay locked with the flippers, which is a welcome features, because I find losing track of the flippers can make the difference between getting the shot you want and just bouncing the ball around the table.

For more information check out http://www.pinballarcade.com/