arborelia

Silver Ball Century ep. 13 - 1971

Table list for 1971: 2001, Bristol Hills, Time Tunnel, Solids N Stripes, Doodle Bug, Now, Four Million B.C., Klondike, Sea Ray, Astro, and Spanish Eyes

Listen: pinball has come unstuck in time.

That's the best explanation I have for the year of pinball that contains Now, 2001, and Four Million B.C.. Maybe we fell through a Time Tunnel. And so did the dinosaurs that ended up in 4 million BC somehow.

The thing that makes Gottlieb feel like "Now" instead of "Then" is that they have finally adopted 3-inch flippers, like their rivals Bally and Williams did in 1969. They've replaced their iconic component (flippers that say "FLIPPER") but they continue to hold their reputation for quality components. Many people have a particular fondness for '70s Gottlieb machines.

Pinball manufacturers are starting to get the idea of theming their machines after popular media, but haven't yet gotten the idea of actually licensing them. Time Tunnel evokes a TV show on ABC named "The Time Tunnel", so they only made 70 copies before ABC's lawyers stopped its production. Meanwhile, Gottlieb's Astro says "STAR TREK" on the playfield and got away with it. There wouldn't be a real Star Trek machine until the end of the '70s. And 2001, of course, evokes the groundbreaking Kubrick film about humanity being transformed by giant drop targets.

Speaking of legality: Bristol Hills is one of many variations of Gottlieb's Snow Derby, but made specifically for New York State, whose strict pinball laws necessitated custom designs just like Italy. Gottlieb made this game specifically for one distributor.

One of the legends of pinball, Jim Patla, is starting to design tables at Bally. As any lead designer would, Patla brings new concepts for what a pinball playfield can be, and gets the credit for some of my favorite playfield designs (Viking, Centaur) and some of my least favorites (KISS, Space Invaders). He is still alive and active in pinball. Fellow vpin enthusiast GameClubCentral Marty has made a video celebrating Jim Patla's work.

Silver Ball Century is live on twitch.tv/arborelia at 8:30 PM Eastern tonight (Tuesday, January 28).

Tables in this stream

Here are the downloads for the tables we see recreated in VPX this episode.

As usual, you need free accounts on VPForums and VPUniverse to be able to download most of these. Two of these tables (Now and Spanish Eyes) are instead downloaded from FSS-Pinball, which specializes in beautiful and visually-accurate recreations, and puts all its download links on one page.

#pinball #silver ball century