Silver Ball Century ep. 23 - Summer 1977 - Finally, Pinball
Silver Ball Century is back after being off for a week, and what we're covering has been described by my collaborator solar_espeon as "a bunch of great tables and also Airborne Avenger".
One of the tables is audaciously named "Pinball", which makes it nearly ungoogleable. Even calling it "Stern Pinball" doesn't help, of course. But you can find it on IPDB if you search for "Stern/Pinball".
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Well played, Bally! You're really on the ball.
This episode includes Bally's Eight Ball, which I believe is the second-best-selling flipper pinball machine in history, after The Addams Family. (I put the word "flipper" in there, because otherwise the best-selling pinball machines are Baffle Ball and Ballyhoo, from the '30s.)
It must have been a perfect convergence of factors - the tried-and-true pool theme, a fun layout, the fact that it was solid state and Williams and Gottlieb weren't making solid-state machines yet, and importantly the fact that they got away with backglass art that looks remarkably like the cast of "Happy Days":
(Image from John Detwiler on IPDB)
The machine sold over 20,000 copies. Bally's relatively early investment in solid state development allowed them to dominate the pinball market in 1977.
Tables in this episode
These are downloads for VPX (Visual Pinball 10). Here are some setup instructions for the current newest version, Visual Pinball 10.8. You'll need free accounts on VPForums and VPUniverse to download the VPX files.
The last three tables are solid state, so you'll need the ROMs to emulate them. Fortunately, most historical pinball ROMs are easily and legally obtainable (we'll start to see the big exception next episode, unfortunately) so I've included the links here.
- Centigrade 37 (Gottlieb) - VPX by arconovum, available on fss-pinball.com
- Mars Trek (Sonic) - VPX by Klodo81
- Jungle Princess (Gottlieb) - VPX by FrankEnstein
- Pinball (Stern) - VPX by Armyaviation. You also need this ROM.
- Airborne Avenger (Atari) - VPX by Balater. There are several broken ROMs out there but this ROM is said to work.
- Eight Ball (Bally) - VPX by JPSalas. You also need this ROM.
For extra "excitement", Mars Trek and Eight Ball both use JPSalas's older implementation of pinball physics, which means they are very bouncy but in return they let you nudge very hard. Try a death save while you won't get yelled at for it!