Pinball Help

The adventures of a pinball enthusiast (all original content)

A quick look at three 70s era classic EM pinball games

Posted on 2011-12-14 by admin

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Here’s a look at playing the vintage 1976 Williams EM pinball game, “Space Odyssey”. This is a classic Williams electro-mechanical game that featured a sweeping stationary target across the middle, and ball kickers on each side of the flipper. It’s especially exciting when you can get the timing just right so the kicker fires the ball into the moving target. This is the 2-player version of the same game, “Space Mission”. There were 4,300 of these produced.

And as a bonus here’s a quick look at a vintage 1975 Gottlieb “Fast Draw”, the 2-player version of “Quick Draw” – another classic EM:

But Wait! There’s more… here’s a look at the 1977 Gottlieb classic “wedgehead” EM game, “Centigrade 37”:

The art of pinball (part 1)

Posted on 2011-12-01 by admin

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Pinball is many things: Commerce, gambling, history, reflections on social times, science and technology as well as art. In this episode, we take a look at some of the art. These are pictures I’ve taken of various games featured at the Lone Star Pinball Museum near Houston. Special thanks to Dan Ferguson for his hospitality. I hope you enjoy them!

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First Look: A vintage 1940 flipperless woodrail pinball

Posted on 2011-11-28 by admin

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For more than a year, I’ve been drooling over a particular pinball backglass I’d seen in a private collection. I finally managed to pick up the machine and am pretty excited. This is another daunting project: A pre-flipper, pre-WWII vintage woodrail pinball game from Genco. “Big Town” was produced in 1940, and as you can see from the backglass, it’s got a beautiful vintage art-deco look. To me a perfect example of how glorious pinball art can be.

Here are some still images of the machine:

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A quick peek at a very cool pinball collection in Texas [pbh10]

Posted on 2011-11-15 by admin

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Just north of Houston, there’s a very cool guy named Dan who has been collecting pinball machines for many, many years. We came out to visit him this year while in town for the Houston Arcade Expo and I took a moment to grab the video camera and make quick walk-through of his museum, which houses hundreds of games from the earlier pinball eras.

I know it would look better if all the machines were fired up, but we weren’t staying long and I didn’t want to trouble him to flip everything on. But you can get a feel for how many old games are in the museum, covering the earliest of eras in the 1800s and early 1900s to pre-flipper woodrails, bingo machines, EM woodrails and lots of classic 60s and 70s electro-mechanical games. Distinctions in the collection include all four versions of Bally’s classic “Fireball” game, Atari’s gargantuan game “Hercules”, rarities like “Spectrum”, “Asteroid Annie” and “Solar Fire”, and many very early games for which there’s very little information on how many were made. There are also lots of vintage EM baseball, shooting and aviation games. I plan to post more details in the future including some high-quality pictures. Once again, a huge thanks to Dan for his hospitality!

Pinball Porn: 1977 Bally Mata Hari

Posted on 2011-10-17 by admin

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Every once in awhile you find something in the wild that’s pretty neat. In my case, I stumbled upon an amazing example of a nearly 40 year old pinball machine that looked like the day it rolled off the assembly line. Allow me to introduce the first in our series of “Pinball Porn”: Pictures of a vintage 1977 Classic Bally game, “Mata Hari!”

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Bally’s Mata Hari features a historical WWII spy-based theme. It was one of the most popular and prolific pinball games of all time, with over 16,000 made. There is also an electro-mechanical version of which less than 200 were made.