arborelia

Silver Ball Century ep. 14 - 1972

Table list for this episode, also described in the next section

I get to take a breath. There's a relatively small 9 distinct tables to show this week -- a lot of designs I see from 1972 are variants of the same playfield.

I think the defining pinball design of 1972 is Bally's Fireball, with Ted Zale's signature chaotic multiball on top of the additional chaos of a spinning disc in the middle of the playfield. (This would go on to be used in several more pinball tables.)

Fireball is the first table we're seeing with art by Dave Christensen, who I'm going to say up front was an edgy piece of shit, but he was the defining look of Bally's golden age. If you look at a '70s table and say "damn that is some kickass playfield art" it was probably him. If you look at it and say "what is Hitler doing there" it was probably also him, unfortunately.

Travel Time also introduces something new, the timed gameplay mechanism, which is a tricky design to pull off. It would be seen again in later decades in James Bond 007, Beat the Clock, Safe Cracker, and more. It addresses the common problem with pinball -- that a new player barely gets to play -- at the cost of game depth for experienced players.

Finally, with Pop-A-Card, we are verbing a card for the last time.

Tables in this episode

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 these.

#pinball #silver ball century