arborelia

Silver Ball Century ep. 28 - Early 1979 - The Last EM

In this episode: Dracula, Mr. Doom, Voltan Escapes Cosmic Doom, Solar Ride, Superman, TKO, Supersonic, Space Walk, and Stellar Wars. In upcoming episodes: Star Trek, Star Trip, Hercules, Hot Hand, Paragon, KISS, Tri-Zone, Magic, Hot Wheels, Harlem Globetrotters, Time Warp, Meteor, The Incredible Hulk, Genie, Road Runner, Dolly Parton, Future Spa, Laser Ball, Old Coney Island, Gorgar.

We've got space, we've got doom, and we've got doom in space, but most relevantly for the chronology of pinball, this episode contains the last EM pinball machine to be manufactured: Gottlieb's Space Walk.

Usually when you make a statement about the first or last pinball machine to do something, you have to hedge it, because there's always some weird exception, like an ahead-of-its-time 1930s game or a retro throwback game made in the 21st century. But to say that Space Walk is the last EM, I just have to exclude non-pinball games, and hobby projects and prototypes that never saw a production line. Gottlieb was the last company to keep their EM pinball production line going, and once they stopped in 1979, there were no more.

Some retro-styled games try to use their microchips to look and act like EMs, but they're not EMs inside. EMs were complicated and expensive, and it was a manufacturing miracle that they worked at all. Once solid state microchips made it cheaper and easier to make a pinball machine, there was no more need for the miracle of EMs.

So enjoy the new era of pinball and the final emulated dings and clicks, at 8 PM Thursday on twitch.tv/arborelia.

Tables in this episode

As usual, you'll need free accounts on VPForums and VPUniverse to download these Visual Pinball X recreations of the pinball tables.

#pinball #silver ball century