Pinball: From Electromechanical Machines to Solid State Tables

So in the last episode, we learned that pinball's origins trace back to lawn games that eventually were moving indoors because not everyone had a lawn and there is disagreement over what game constitutes the first true pinball table. But we learned how a gradual evolution brought us from simple machines outfitted only with like a spring loaded plunger up to the early days of electro mechanical pinball tables, and some of the things that were added were really a

big deal. I would argue probably the most important was the addition of a coin slot. One early title Bally, who reportedly sold around fifty thousand units to various shop owners and other proprietors. Fifty thousand units, that's no small shakes. Remember this is in the nineteen thirties when this happened. That really helped put the company Bally on the map, and Bally would play a huge role in the development

of pinball here in the United States. But yeah, these coin operated machines like it became a new source of revenue for shop owners and bar owners and such. They would buy a machine for a large amount of money, but then they would get to keep the proceeds the coins made up. And so you know, if you had a really popular machine, you could earn back what you spent on it within a relatively short amount of time.

And then everything on top of that is profit, apart from whatever you have to spend to keep the machine working. But these early machine, because they really had very few moving parts, they were relatively easy to maintain. But let's talk about some of the electro mechanical components in later pinball machines and how those components work. Now, as I mentioned in the last episode, the earliest electrified pinball machines

didn't really have much going for them. Usually there was some sort of noise making element that would signify scoring and help draw attention to the table so that more people would want to play, but there were few components that actually used electricity to create mechanical motion. But it

didn't take long for that to change. Harry Williams of Williams Manufacturing Williams is another important pinball company, came up with an idea to set up a game that would make it stand apart from the competition that was on the market. So this was way back in nineteen thirty three, and his idea was a relatively simple one, which was the inclusion of solenoids. Solinoid is an electro mechanical component that works through electromagnetism. In many ways, it's similar to

your basic electromagnet. So if you think of a standard electromagnet, you have a coil of conductive wire, typically copper wire, and it's wrapped around a core of some sort like sometimes it's just iron, right, And when you run electricity through the coil of wire, it creates an electromagnet, and you can interact with ferromagnetic stuff using this electromagnet, and with a solenoid it's pretty similar. You've got your coil

of conductive wire. When you pass a current through this coil, it creates a magnetic field, and you have a sleeve inside this coil. Nestled in the sleeve is a movable plunger, so the plunger can slide in or out of this coil. Sometimes it's called the armature. When the magnetic field is on, it pulls the plunger into the coil. There's a stop on either end so that the plunger doesn't just shoot through the coil or or fall out of the coil, so that it can come to a stop where it's

partially inside the coil. But when you run electricity through the coil, it pulls the plunger in entirely. So when the magnetic field is on, the plunger is inside the coil. When the magnetic field goes off, like when the current stops flowing through this coil, the plunger moves back out of the coil and mounting a post at the end of the plunger, like extending the plunger so that it can punch through something. You have a little device capable

of giving a quick push. Whenever the electric current flows through the wire, the plunger moves in. It pushes this arm out and it's pretty fast. It's a pretty simple electro mechanical device, and effectively it turns electric current into mechanical work. That's its main purpose. Solenoids would in up being kind of the heartbeat, the lifeblood of pinball machines. They power so much like a lot of the elements

in your basic pinball machine are worked with solenoids. So Williams pinball machine had this name called Contact, which is very clever because contact is what we would say was made within the circuit to activate the solenoid in the first place. So the playfield of Contact had holes with little barriers around them. So the ball you know, your goal is to get the ball into the highest scoring

holes in the playfield. Those were closer to the bottom of the playfield, which meant that the ball needed to pass over or around the holes that were higher up, because otherwise you would get a lower score. Well, at the very top of the playfield was this solenoid, so it's facing downward like toward you. It's at the top of the play you're playing at the bottom of the playfield.

If you were to fire a ball up so that it would activate a switch, a contact at the top of this playfield, the solenoid would activate and it would hit the ball, and if you were lucky, it would propel the ball so that it would roll over the lower scoring holes and the ball would settle into one of the ones that had a higher score if you

were pretty lucky. Contact relied on a dry cell battery to provide this electrical current, and according to Williams, the battery would hold a sufficient charge to provide three months of play. After that, I assume you would swap the battery out. I mean possible that you could recharge it, but you would definitely have to swap it out if you wanted to be able to play after that time and to have the electro mechanical elements work. Contact was

a game that went through some changes. This is something that still happens with the pinball machines now, where manufacturers will make changes to a machine and later versions will be slightly different, or they will these days because things are running on microcomputers. They will update the firmware of a machine and it will include new modes and such.

We'll talk about modes later. So the company, William's Company would incorporate a door bell into the machine so that when the ball made contact with this switch, that would activate the solenoid, it would also ring the bell, and Williams also included his anti tilt measure. I talked about this in the last episode. So his anti tilt design

was there was inside the machine was a post. On top of this post was a ball, and if the player were to shake the machine in an attempt to cheat, the ball could roll off this post and it would then signal a tilt, which would invalidate the accumulated score at that point. Back to solenoids, These would become incredibly important components for pinball machines. They are pretty darn simple, which is good right. Simple means they're fewer points of failure.

They can fail if you run electricity through wire. One of the byproducts you get is heat, and if electricity is running through wire for a long time, a lot of heat can build up and that can cause damage to the components. So there are points of failure, but there are few of them. Solenoids are used not just to knock a pinball around. They can also be used as noise makers, they can strike a bell, or they

can be used as knockers. So if you're really good at pinball, you have probably experienced a replay or you know, if you've ever matched. Matching is when you know modern pinball machines, they'll take the last two digits of your score and then they'll display kind of a random selection of other scores, and if you end up matching, then you get a replay. Well, a lot of pinball machines include a knocker to signal that a player has managed to get a replay and they have a free game.

The pinball machine lets out this very loud knocking sound. Well, a solenoid is what is actually making that sound. There's a dedicated knocker or solenoid mounted in the machine to do this, and there are a couple of different types that you could find in various machines. One would be

a spring mounted solenoid. So the spring would typically keep the plunger out of the coil, but when an electric current runs through the coil, the magnetic pole is strong enough to compress the spring, pull the plunger in quickly, and mounted on the top of the plunger as a

post that's capped in plastic. This post strikes a plate typically mounted near the pinball machine's back box, and the current only passes through the wire for a fraction of a second, so the spring decompresses, the plunger is pulled into the coil, and the cap strikes the plate and boom, you get your old knocking noise, which could be quite loud.

Usually there's like a fifty volt current that's being put through the device order to make this happen, and if you have a lower power supply, the knock's going to be less impressive. Many knocker solenoids actually are simpler than this design. They don't have the spring loaded piston at all. Instead, they rely on gravity. So these solenoids have to be

mounted vertically so that the plunger naturally slides down. Like if there's no current running through the coil, the plunger is going to be resting on a rest plate, so it's only partly inside the coil. Then when current runs through the coil, it pulls the plunger up right because magnetic attraction and the plunger the post mounted on the end of the plunger will strike the striking plate and make

the knocking noise. And then when the current is shut off, the plunger will naturally slide back down the sleeve inside the coil and rest against the resting plate, so you have to have it mounted vertically so that gravity will pull the plunger back down. But this does simple things quite a bit. But what about other elements inside a pinball machine? What about flippers? These are pretty common today,

I mean, they're almost universal in modern pinball machines. Again, it wasn't until nineteen forty seven that we got the first pinball machine that had flippers. And even then they were oriented opposite, like they were facing outward on the machine rather than inward, and they were along the sides and there were six of them, so it was very different from the way flippers are today. But yeah, it wasn't until nineteen forty seven that we even got flippers,

and now they're pretty much standard on pinball machines. How do they work, well, no, big surprise. They also use solenoids, which are mounted below the playfield where they're out of sight. But a solenoid works, you know, like a piston. Right, The plunger moves linearly, it moves in and out, so

you need to have something that translates this action. Because a flipper acts like a bat, It swings, it rotates, So mounted on the solenoid plunger is a little piece typically called a linkage, and the linkage connects to a rotating element that in turn is mounted on a spindle. The spindle is connected to the flipper, so the rotating element translates the linear action into a rotational action and then transmits that through the spindle to the flipper. So

the flipper can swing and there's a stop. Typically that all may mean the flipper can only rotate so far. It's not gonna make the flipper go all the way around. It'll just rise up when you're looking down from the position of a player. So when the solenoid activates, the mechanical motion causes the flipper to swing, and a spring on the spindle will return the flipper to its resting position afterwards, so it's not just relying on gravity to

return the flipper to its downward position. There is a spring there so that it adds resistance and pushes back against the flipper so it returns to its normal downward state. When you connect this assembly to a power supply and a flipper button, the flipper button serves as a switch.

You have your classic pinball flipper as long as you're holding the switch down the flipper will remain up, but it does get a little more complicated, and in my opinion, this is a really cool element for flippers because it's engineering a solution to a real problem. So again, pinball machines typically have balls that are made out of solid steel, which allows for some other fun gimmicks that we'll talk

about a bit later. These balls weigh in and around eighty grams, which is significant, so the flipper bats have to be strong enough to whack an eighty gram steel ball around a playfield. Anyone who has played a machine that has really weak flippers can tell you it's a

very frustrating experience. So the solidoids powering these flippers need to be sufficiently strong to generate the mechanical force necessary to give the ball a good whack across the playfield, and that means having a fairly significant coil to generate a strong enough magnetic field to pull the plunger with force.

But this also creates an issue if someone is holding the flipper button down to keep the flipper raised up, and players will often do this, like you might want to pause so that you can prepare for a specific shot. Maybe you're lining up a shot so you can shoot a ball up a ramp, for example, and you kind of have a feel for where on the flipper that needs to happen, but you need to get control of the ball first in order to be able to do it reliably. So you've trapped the ball and you're holding

it in place before you make your shot. You could be holding the ball the button down for a bit. Maybe you've also decided, Hey, I'm going to take a swig of my frosty beverage that I have next to me, and I'm going to pause gameplay a little bit by holding the ball in place while I do this. The issue here is that a high powered solnoid's going to generate a lot of heat as that electric current runs through that coil, which it will keep doing while you're

holding the button down, right, because that button's a switch. This, as I said, can damage the machine over time. Specifically, can damage the solenoids and melt them so that they become less effective, and eventually they become ineffective and you're going to have to replace the solenoids in the pinball machine.

So what was needed was a way to switch from the high powered coil to perhaps a secondary coil that was just strong enough to keep the plunger in position once it already had been pulled into the coil itself. It takes a lot of energy to move the plunger into place, but once it's there, it doesn't take as much energy to hold it there. So flippers solenoids often have two coils, one essentially kind of nested inside the other.

One coil is the high powered one that pulls the plunger in the other one requires much less power and is just there to hold the plunger once it's in place. The rotating element of the flipper's spindle actually breaks a contact that is for the heavy duty coil, so once the flipper is in full upright position, it is no longer under the power of the main coil. It is swapped to the secondary coil, which requires much less power

to operate. It also generates much less heat, so the power coil does the heavy lifting of pulling the plunger in the later coil just holds it in place once it's there. All because a mechanical element physically changes the circuit underneath by breaking this one contact and making another. And I think that's really super cool, Okay, I've got a lot more to talk about with pinball machines, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors.

So before the break, I was talking about flippers and solenoids and how a pair of different coils can allow you to hold a flipper an upright position without burning out your solenoids. Well, we are starting to get into why some pinball machines have really weak flippers, and there can be a few different things that contribute to this. One is that the power supply that's going to the solenoids, that power of the flippers is in turn weak. That

could be an issue. And you know, a lot of these pinball machines get pretty janky over time, with people replacing components with stuff that wasn't necessarily designed to go in a pinball machine, or wasn't the same sort of power supply that was used in a previous version of the machine, which means that some of these solenoids might be receiving far less power than they typically would, and that means when you push the button, you get a kind of weak flipper and you're not really able to

play the game very effectively. Other times, it can be an issue where there's a problem with the actual mechanical components where they're not able to turn or move as freely as they usually would. They might need some cleaning or replacing in order to do that, and sometimes it's because the solenoids themselves have become damage due to overheating.

This is a good point to remind y'all that if you do ever play a pinball machine, or if you happen to be rolling in the bucks and you own a pinball machine, because these things are expensive, y'all, don't push a flipper button a whole bunch of times in quick succession. When you do that, you're activating that primary coil. Each time you push the button and release it and then push it again, they're activating that primary coil and

you're building up heat. So if you hold the button down, that's less damaging because you're using that secondary coil that consumes less energy and doesn't generate as much heat. But if you press the button really quickly over and over and over and over and over again, that can make the coil heat up, and the coil can actually melt

and the flippers will stop working. Eventually, you'll have to replace the solenoid underneath, and that could be that's a bit of a thing, like it's not impossible, people do it all the time, but it is a bit complicated. Another common feature in pinball machines are bumpers. So in the previous episode I talked about a game called Bollow Bolo and it had passive bumpers that has had these little obstacles. So in Bollow they were the shape of bowling pins and they were mounted on rods that in

turn were attached to springs. They otherwise had no other mechanism attached to them, so they were what you would call passive bumpers. So a ball could hit them and bounce off of them, and they would wiggle around in stuff. But that was pretty much it. Well, I say that was it, But there were also passive bumpers that could actually send a signal for the purposes of scorekeeping. Ballow as far as I can determine, wasn't this way, but

others were. And sometimes these bumpers are called mushroom bumpers because they look kind of like mushrooms. So these bumpers are also passive. They don't bounce back, but they can register when they've been hit and that can then go toward the progressive scorekeeping part of the pinball machine. And the way that this typically works is that these bumpers have a diss sitting near the top of the post

of the bumper. So if you think of the bumper, you got the post that's the centralized stand, the pedestal kind of that makes up the bumper. Then you've got a disc on top, and then maybe you've got like a cap on the very top that shows how many points the bumper is worth. So when a ball makes contact with the pedestal, the rod the post of this bumper, there's this little disc that the ball impacts and it lifts the disc up slightly. Now the disc, in turn

is connected to a stem. That stem is ultimately connected to a leaf switch, and when the disc lifts up, the leaf switch is activated and it sends a signal to indicate scoring. These simple bumpers date back to the nineteen forties, but they would get much more attention in the sixties and seventies. They would become kind of emblematic

of pinball machines of that era. Just as flippers were really important for pinball machines to take off, these bumpers would become something that people just associate with pinball machines. There are also active bumpers, however, they have different names. Some people call them pop bumpers, or jet bumpers or thumper bumpers, among other things. So these react when they're struck. They strike back, so they propel the ball in the process.

These are electro mechanical bumpers, and the basic pop bumper is a pretty clever design. So typically at the very base of the bumper's post or pedestal on the playfield side, there's a little plastic disc that's raised up just to touch off the playfield itself. Now, it's low enough that a ball can roll onto this plastic disc, and when that happens, the weight of the ball tilts the disc slightly so. Connected to this disc, underneath the playfield is a stem, and that stem rests inside a kind of

a shallow bowl or spoon under this playfield. Now, when the disc is in its resting position, the stem's not really making content with the bowl. It's almost but not quite touching, or if it's touching, it's touching so lightly as to not displace the bowl. When the disc tilts, the stem is deflected, and it starts to push against the rising sides of this bowl, and it makes the whole bowl push downward. This is what completes a switch.

That switch does a couple of things. It sends a signal to the progressive score keeping system, so it increases the score to the appropriate amount depending on how much the bumper is worth. And it completes a command that ultimately sends a signal to a solenoid that's attached to this bumper. That's a separate circuit typically, but that circuit is what gives the bumper the bump. The solenoid in turn connects to a metal ring that is also around the bumper's post. So you have a disc at the

base of the ring. On the playfield side, you've got the post that extends up and at the top of the post typically you have this metal ring that connects down through the playfield to the solemn So the solenoid, when it activates, it pulls the plunger in. This pulls the ring downward, and the ring acts as a bumper.

It hits the ball and knocks it away. So once again, solenoids are the work courses of the pinball world, and Typically you would find pinball machines that would group a bunch of these active bumpers in a configuration, often in like a triangle where you have one bumper at the top and two bumpers below, and with a good trajectory, the ball could start bouncing in between these like crazy as they activate one bumper after another and get knocked around.

We're also not done with solenoids yet, and we still have another classic element to talk about that uses solenoids for the purposes of transferring electrical energy and turning it into mechanical energy, and that would be the sling shots. I've seen Gottleib's Double Feature pinball machine credited as the first pinball machine to have a playfield with sling shots like these active shots, But then, considering how loosey goosey pinball history is, I can't swear that Gottleib's Double Feature

was the very first pinball machine to have slingshots. It's often credited that way, but I'm not sure if that's true. Anyway, a slingshot is typically triangular in shape. You will often see these at the base of the playfield in a pinball machine, usually just above where the flippers are and the slingshot has a rubber cord or band wrapped around it and it kicks a ball if the ball comes in contact with a slingshot. So how does this work? Well,

it's not passive, it is active. And if you were to take a cover off of a slingshot, you would see that this rubber cord stretches around three posts. They provide the points of the triangle, and a solenoid is what gives the the slingshots their kicking power. No surprise there, right, because solenoids are used everywhere in pinball machines. The solenoid connects to a mechanism that allows for this quick punch

of power. But what triggers the solenoid? While behind this rubber chord making contact with the rubber chord typically on either side of where the solenoid's post is, you have a pair of switches. So if a ball hits the rubber band or rubber chord hard enough to trigger one of these switches, it completes the electric current needed to activate the solenoid, and the solenoid activates pulls the plunger

inside the coil. This movement also powers the little post that punches out through this rubber chord and boom, the ball gets propelled somewhere else on the playfield, often down one of the outlanes, and down the ball drained. Gosh

darn it. Many bimbo machines also have kickout holes, so these are holes in the playfield that the ball can fall into, very similar in many ways to the holes that were used in the old Bagatelle games way back in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, and these are part of play right. This is a hole that's purposefully put there so that you can have it as

an element of the game. So shooting a ball into such a hole typically accomplishes something like maybe you get certain number of points, maybe there's a bonus, maybe you earn an extra ball, or something along those lines. It might be part of a mode in later games. And once again, a ball falling into such a hole activates a switch. This in turn activates a solenoid to knock the ball back out of the hole and onto the playfield.

And if the ball were to fall right back into the hole, then it'll happen again, and often the ball will drain straight away. A lot of the game designers make these holes where that often the trajectory of the ball is one that is darn close to draining, like close to ninety percent of the time, and it is mad frustrating. One last common element in pinball machines are ramps, and I think it's pretty obvious what a ramp is. It's an inclined surface that brings the ball somewhere else

on the playfield. It might be a raised playfield, so you have a secondary playfield that's separate from the main playfield of the game. Maybe the ramp will just guide the ball down to one of the in lanes that lead to the flippers. Usually hitting a ramp activates a switch of some sort that does something at bare minimum increases the score, but it might be part of a mode or some other more advanced game feature. There are other basic components as well, like spinners. For example. I

also mentioned drop targets in the previous episode. These little targets typically made out of hard plastic that, when the ball strikes them, drops down into the playfield. And there are countless gimmicks that are usually called toys in pinball, lingo. Toys you can find in lots of different pinball machines. Some are unique to a specific table where it's a really innovative design and there's not really anything else like

it in pinball. One of them are based off a very similar concept, and it's just that the iterations you see looked and act a little different. But these are all sorts of stuff and they can do anything from shooting a ball elsewhere on the playfield to moving it with magnets. Like I think of Adam's Family, which is

one of my favorite tables of all time. There is a toy of thing the hand, and it comes out of a box and it's got a little magnet on the end of it, so it can pick up a pinball and pull it in for a ball lock for a multi ball further down the game. That's a simple example of a toy in a pinball machine. And magnets are really important in pinball. Not only do they activate solenoids, not only are they important for all that physical action. Remember that the balls themselves are made out of steel

and thus are affected by magnets. So some games have electromagnetic elements mounted under the playfield in order to change the direction of the ball's path as it's zooming around it might make it suddenly swerve and go a totally different way. Some use magnets to pick up a ball put it somewhere else on the playfield. Some pinball machines also have special balls that aren't made of steel, that are made of ceramic like usually mixed in along with

the steel balls. Twilight Zone is an example of this. Twilight Zone has a power ball that's made out of ceramic. It is lighter in weight, they don't weigh as much as the steel ball, so they go a lot faster. And they also aren't affected by magnetic fields, so the electromagnet stuff doesn't work on the ceramics, so they change the nature of the game as it's being played. So yeah, there are versions as well. You can have elements of a game work because the balls are mostly made out

of steel. You can also have elements of the game for balls that are specifically not made out of steel. To be the exception, It gives a lot of versatility when you become a game designer. All right, we've got more to say about pinball, but before we get into that, let's take another quick break. Now. In my last episode about pinball, I talked about how various communities across the United States had identified pinball as being a great social evil,

and pinball machines were associated with gambling and delinquency. And since early pinball machines didn't have flippers, they were seen as games of chance. And I think that was a more than fair assertion, Like, yes, you could use some skill to be able to plunge a ball in a particular way, but there was way more chance at play than skill, I would say, And since proprietors would often award prizes for people who achieved top scores, these games

a chance were essentially seen as gambling. And thus the authorities eventually came down hard as moral panic drove them to do something that would says by their constituents. But it's important to do something that's not too hard, something that's achievable. You know. It's one thing to say you're going up against like organized crime and the mob. It's another thing to actually do that. So why not just smash a few pinball machines and make pimball illegal? And

that'll make you look tough on crime. So folks were seeing pimball as a corrupting influence on the youth, of the day, partly because pinball machines were also often found in places that were a little unseemly, you know, like bars and that kind of thing. And so cities like Atlanta, New York, Chicago, and several more would pass laws making pinball illegal. And then we get up to an event that is famous in the history of pinball, at least

for pimball enthusiasts. So, if you'll recall, in the nineteen forties, New York Mayor LaGuardia would outlaw pinball and famously pose for publicity photos sledgehammer in hand, smash pinball machines at his feet. And it wouldn't be into till nineteen seventy six that this band would get overturned. The New York City Council was called upon to review the ban, and a man named Roger Sharp successfully convinced the council that the ban was not appropriate. Sharp wrote for GQ magazine,

and he really really wanted to play pinball. He had played pinball in college and he wanted to be able to play pinball day to day. He wrote an article and later a book about pinball. But you know, he worked in New York City and there was no pinball to be played there, it was against the law. So his writings would eventually lead to this council meeting and he was called upon to provide expert testimony about the game.

And here's where we get into the myth and legend segment of the episode, not to say that this stuff isn't true, just that it's become kind of a central, really important moment in pinball history here in the United States. So Sharp was pulled in to talk to the council about pinball, and he was arguing that modern pinball was a game of skill, not chance, and that the reasons for banning the machines were based off outdated devices that were really more like slot machines than they were like

pinball games. And he said, well, that's not the case anymore. That's not what pinball is anymore, and the band shouldn't stand. And you know, modern machines were games of skill in which a player who was actually good at the game could achieve specific outcomes. You know, you could aim for and make a particular shot. It wasn't just random chance. Otherwise the ball would just bounce around and eventually drain, and players would not really be able to affect the

score in any meaningful way. So Sharp was put to the test. The Council had Sharp play a pinball machine and asked him to make several specific shots, which Sharp managed to do, which is great, he must perform fantastic under pressure. I hear he's legit a phenomenal pinball. But the thing that I think was interesting is that even great pinball players don't make every shot right like It's just like any great athlete never doesn't make every shot.

They might make most, but not all. So he made it when it counted, And the council saw that it was possible to actually play pinball as a game, and that it was a game of skills. So they lifted the ban, and the war on pinball, at least in New York City, was over. I'm sure the extremely moral guardians of the nineteen thirties and forties were beside themselves with horror and sadness to see the evil pinball machines return to corrupt the youth. The nineteen seventy saw a

real boom in pinball. Not only were various cities lifting or ignoring earlier bands on the game, but game designers were coming up with new gimmicks and themes to entice people to play. The rise of video games would also give rise to the video game arcade. And it used to be that, like video games, and pinball machines could only be found in random spots like movie theater lobbies

or bowling alleys, or pizza joints and bars. But over time the possibility of a video game and pinball arcade arose, and for a short amount of time it was a darn good business. Here in the United States, you would find such arcade galleries in pretty much every shopping mall you came across. These days, they're far more rare because over time the home market would change things. Lots of things would kind of converge to make the classic video

game arcade a less viable business. Pinball machines didn't tend to be as popular with these arcades as video game cabinets were. Pinball machines took up a lot of space.

For one thing, the mechanical components also meant that parts could and would need replacing on a regular basis, so sometimes a proprietor would even have to stop what they were doing in order to come over and open up a machine, slide the glass pane out of the way and remove a ball manually, because balls would sometimes get stuck.

And even a machine that had a ball clearing routine where all the solenoids would go off in sequence or in series, sometimes that wasn't enough and you would have to open a machine up to remove a ball that got lodged somewhere so that games could continue. So pinball machines were seen as kind of a hassle for some folks, and the question was would they be worth the hassle of operating them. Now there were still enough people thinking they were worth the hassle that there were lots of

companies making pinball machines. Licensing had become a really big deal as well. These companies would strike deals with various IP holders to make machines themed after known commodities. These could be television shows or movies, or magazines or comic books like you know, I keep mentioning Adam's Family that was actually based off the film version of Adam's Family with ral Julia as Gomez Adams and Angelica Houston as Mortsia.

That is still one of my favorite tables to the stay that's a licensed property obviously, there are lots of examples, ranging from things like Marvel Comics to Playboy to Jaws, to musicians, famous musicians and rock acts, Guns n' Roses, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Elton John. They all have dedicated pinball machines. Well.

In nineteen seventy five, a company called Micro released an electronic pinball machine called the Spirit of seventy six, which was really notable because it was a solid state pinball machine, meaning that instead of having a mass of wires and physical circuitry underneath the playfield, this one had integrated circuit

boards that were connected to one another. You still had wires running to stuff and everything, but you had these integrated circuit boards, which drastically simplified the layout underneath, at least from a wire's perspective. The invention of the transistor and then lay the integrated circuit revolutionized electronics across the board. It became possible to build much smaller circuits, which in

turn led to the miniaturization of various devices. So stuff like radios and computers and televisions and much more would transform thanks to miniaturization, and again that was due to transistors and integrated circuits. Now, in pinball, miniaturization wasn't really a big concern, but transistors meant that you could create these mechanical systems that could be controlled by digital inputs rather than analog circuits wired to physical buttons and whatnot.

Integrated circuits allowed for more accurate score keeping and control, and they would also pave the way for more advanced effects such as sound cues and voices speech. In other words, I'm told that the first table to have speech was the nineteen seventy nine pinball machine called Gorgar gor Gar. It had seven whole words to its vocabulary, and it could make simple sentences is like you beat me, or gorgr speaks. Another change in pinball would be how scores

would be displayed. So you might remember in our first episode I talked about a pinball machine that featured a dial and it had a needle that would point to score increments, so as your score would go out, the needle would move and show you what your score was. Later on you would get the famous digit counters mentioned in the whose song Pinball Wizard, and these were essentially reels, and the reels had numbers printed on the circumference of

the reel. And the reel would turn to show whatever the score was, and you would have a sequence of reels right so that you'd have one that would be the single digits, one that would be the tens, the hundreds, et cetera, and they would rotate to show whatever current score was in place. These gave way to digital displays. You would get like digital then LCD, THN LED and so on, and that would really allow for a lot other opportunities to use the BackBox display as part of

the game. You could incorporate video game elements into your pinball game. The solid state era would lead to computer micro controllers handling the operations of the game, which also allowed game designers to create increasingly sophisticated modes. So a mode is typically a series of tasks that the player has to complete in order to finish that mode, and then you win points or earn an extra ball or some other outcome is dependent upon completing that mode. So

maybe hit these two ramps like five times each. That would be a pretty crappy mode, but it could exist. Or it might be hit these outer lanes a certain number of times, or hit them in this order right ramp, left ramp, and then the pop bumpers, it could be

something along those lines now. Eventually, game designers got the idea of including several different modes within a single game, and if a player were able to complete all the modes listed, then a new bonus mode could pop up, and in the pinball community this is referenced as a wizard mode. Many newer games feature some sort of wizard mode. One of the ones I'm again most familiar with is

Adam's Family. If you complete all the different modes, you get a tour of the mansion, which allows you to really rack up points if you're a really good player. I've actually done it a few times back when I was in college. These days, I doubt I could ever get that far. But back when I was playing it pretty regularly, I got really good at it and it was a lot of fun. And people who are really good at pinball machines and playing pinball, they can really

show off with getting to wizard modes. It often is a bit of a chore. Some games have so many different modes you have to complete first before you can unlock Wizard mode that I think I would be exhausted before I could ever get there. My wrists give out from playing with the buttons too much. But this was also in an era in which we would see some important companies actually get out of pinball design and manufacturing. Some companies would shut down important companies that really led

the way in pinball development. So Gottlieb was the first to go. Bally and Williams would also get out of pinball after having an amazing run in the eighties and nineties, which left a single pinball manufacturer active at that time. It was Stern Pinball. Stern Pinball was founded in nineteen ninety nine. It actually traces its history back to an earlier company called Data East Pinball, which kind of produced pinball machines for Sega, But Stern Pinball would establish itself

in the late nineties and it stuck around. It's still making pinball machines today. They made the Jaws machine that I mentioned in the last episode, the Jaws machine that I desperately would love to own because it's such a great machine. Now, the two saw a lot of companies get out of pinball, but some companies actually got their start later in the two thousands. In twenty eleven, a

company called Jersey Jack Pinball came into business. Their tables often include much more advanced technology, including stuff like Bluetooth connectivity so that you can be part of like worldwide leader boards and stuff. I got to play one of their tables at the Southern Fried Gaming Expo too. That was their Elton John table. I mentioned that earlier. Elton John. That's another fantastic table. I really love the table design, plus has an amazing soundtrack. I think they did a

fantastic job with that game. It always had a big line waiting for it. There were three Elton John tables there, I want to say, and all three had a line and yeah, great machine. Other companies currently making pinball machines include Spooky Pinball, American Pinball, Chicago Gaming Company. They're several more.

There's even a DIY home building pinball community. You have people who are designing and building their own customized machine because you can get the various components off different markets, and if you have knowledge on how to program, you can program a machine. And if you've got really you need to have access to some precision machinery to machine the playfield properly. But if you have access to that stuff, you can design and build a pinball machine. That's just

based off your own ideas, which is really cool. So I feel like pinball had a massive setback in the early two thousands, like it was in danger of going extinct. But since it's seen a resurgence. You can find pinball machines in lots of different places. You have these expos, you have various museums that have set up around the United States that have collections of pinball machines. So, if you are a pinball enthusiast, I think the future looks bright.

I think that the hobby has got a lot of new life to it over the last decade or so. If you are not a pinball enthusiast, well, there's no better time than the present to go and check out a pinball machine. Give it a whirl. There are a lot of great ones out there. There are also some real stinkers. It helps to kind of go and look at what games are generally agreed upon to be good versus those that people think are bad. Now, there's a

lot of disagreement in the space. You've got people who will passionately defend one title and say that another beloved title is the worst thing to ever happen to pinball. That happens too, because gamers, as we know, are a passionate group. Sometimes they don't agree with each other, but I think you'll find general consensus around certain games, and if you play those, you'll know whether or not this is something that appeals to you. As for me, yeah,

I'm gonna keep playing. I love my pinball, and I had a lot of fun going into talking about these machines and what makes them work. Obviously, when we get to the modern ones, there are a lot of components that are pretty advanced stuff that you would find in

things like computer displays and beyond. But it's hard to talk about that because it tends to get very game dependent, and then you're doing just an episode where you're talking about, you know, four or five specific games, and I felt that that was less important than a more broad approach. I hope all of you out there are doing well. I hope you earn all the extra balls and get all the replays and set all the high scores, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is

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