There’s even this, which is just about as recent as you can get;
Oh yeah, I remember that one at the latest expo as well. Somehow didn’t manage a picture of it. There were also some new/old Star Wars machines. I.e., a new design, the “old” Star Wars with Vader, etc., but also clearly existing because Star Wars is still a pretty hot property.
A few others: TRON Legacy, Transformers, Spider-Man (Maguire version), Lord of the Rings, Iron Man, Game of Thrones, Avengers. There was also a “World Poker Tour” one, clearly driven by the rise in popularity of poker in the last two decades.
Of course, some of these actually are new versions of older properties, but that’s on Hollywood, not the pinball industry.
That’s my hope. As you noted, few older machines had licensed themes.The theme was built from scratch with the machine. There have only been a few like that in recent years (Dialed In, Total Nuclear Annihilation). The last time Stern, the most prolific manufacturer, made a non-licensed machine was 2012 with a throw back EM lookalike called Whoa Nellie! Which was definitely not for kids.
I encountered Dialed In at a barcade in Portland this January. It’s an interesting machine that snaps pictures of you as you play and displays them at the end of the game, and (though I didn’t experiment with this feature myself) you can apparently connect your phone to it via bluetooth and use your phone to control the game without physically touching the cabinet.
Thanks, @Elmer_J.Fudd . “Whoa Nellie” looks like it would be fun to play. I certainly agree that it might not be for the under-18 set, and definitely not for the under-12 set, but I do appreciate the four-digit EM scoring, the “ten points when lit” bumpers, and so on. Additionally, it looks like the table is on a gentle slope—perfect for beginners!
Give it different artwork, and it would be suitable for players of all ages. If only pinball manufacturers would go to non-licensed and original themes, we might see a resurgence of pinball. But as long as they continue to license and promote bands and movies and TV shows, that appeal to those who are in their 40s to 60s, I don’t think they’re going to capture the 12-year-olds, like I was captured by Bally’s “Trail Drive” when I was 12 years old.
Who makes the best pinball machines, older and current? I was familiar with Bally and Williams but I’ve never heard of Gottlieb or Data East or Stern or Jersey Jack or any other…
Creature from the Black Lagoon is about 31 years old at this point and was one of my favorite pinball games from when I was in high school. I was good enough at it to get 2-3 games out of it for .50 cents. The other game I loved was The Addams Family from around the same time.
Gottlieb was one of the old-school Chicago-based pinball companies, along with Bally and Williams, but went out of business (after several ownership changes) in the 1990s.
Williams always had the best machines, IMHO.
The others had some decent ones, but Williams always had the most innovative play and technology - they had the first talking machine, Magna-save, and Multiball play.
For older machines I’m fond of the Williams pins from the 1990s; Monster Bash, Tales of the Arabian Nights, Comet, Hurricane, Bride of Pinbot (I own one). For newer machines, Stern is ahead of all the rest in sales, reliability, and consistency. Jersey Jack makes beautiful big machines with lots of whistles and bells but they are kind of clunky and overbuilt and very expensive; kinda the Italian sports cars of pinball machines. The other current companies are lucky to put out one machine a year.
Thanks! I didn’t know that. The “Creature” machine at the sports bar looks rather well-used, but I had no idea that it was that old.
I think the really big thing preventing pinball from taking of with younger generations is that, much like chess or super-hardcore console games, it takes lots and lots and lots of exhausting practice to get even modestly competent. Seriously, the supercomputer-level timing required is the most insane out of any pursuit I’ve seen outside of drag racing. And that’s a real problem, because unlike chess or console games, the player has to 1. go to a noisy public space and 2. spend and keep spending. From everything I’ve observed and read for years, that’s just not something that appeals to today’s kids. Realistically you’d have to start with video pinball or maybe a simpler variant like pachinko, and there’s no guarantee even that would ever become very popular.
Today’s arcades seem to be that you pay a certain amount for the day or by the hour.
Thanks for the responses.
I just bought a new house and there may be room for pinball machine. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
I have three machines and have watched numerous first timers (children and adults) just dominate after only a few balls. Keeping the ball alive is just hand/eye coordination which for many is an innate skill. Learning the rule set and where the big points are on the playfield takes longer but not draining is simply the best way to win at pinball and to many kids that just comes natural.
I loved the older games with a ‘game’ theme instead of a popular movie theme that has little or nothing to do with the game play. I played a machine called Jumping Jack approximately 1 million times. It had a row of around knock down targets that would rack up extra games or balls, can’t remember which though it’s been so long. Some very old machines were much simpler in nature, nothing but simple bumpers, all about racking up points. Moving into the 60s and 70s the machines picked up a lot of special features like ball traps, multi-ball modes, spinning roulette wheel bonuses, etc.
Also, there may be recommended slopes for the game but the operator can adjust those, and the sensitivity of the tilt mechanism as well. I think they’ll just make any machine harder to play if it seems popular but the quarter box isn’t filling up quickly.
ETA: One of my favorite arcade games wasn’t pinball at all, it was this Bally World Cup Soccer game. At 1:30 in the video they lift up the top to show the crazy mechanism, two counter rotating shafts at each end provide all the power to move the players. The controls push a pulley against one shaft or the other to move the players forward and back.
That’s a fun game. The row of ten drop targets and the four flippers make it a real shooters game. Those mid-70s EMs are some of my favorites; they’re still very mechanical but the flippers are modern and the coils are stronger.
I remember Jumping Jack. My stepdad used to get his haircut and an old school barber shop and I’d go along with him. They had Playboys and that pinball game for free.
I fondly remember playing “Pinball Constructor Set” on my old Atari. Is there a more modern or table version of this? Because that was awesome.