Silver Ball Century ep. 38 - Early 1982 - The Video Monster
The pinball boom is ending, and video games are taking over. Greg Freres at Bally describes what the environment was like in 1982 that led to the weird design decisions in Vector: "We were in the midst of trying to save pinball from the video monster."
In this episode, we see some new gimmicks that try to compete with video games, play Stern Electronics' last "serious" design for a pinball machine, get pranked by the only "Subtract-A-Ball" random award I've ever seen, play a video mode on a 5x5 pixel dot matrix, and welcome in the spooky season with Gottlieb's ambitious Haunted House.
Silver Ball Century is live tonight (Thursday, October 2) at 8pm Eastern, on twitch.tv/arborelia.
Tables in this episode
- Iron Maiden (Stern) - VPX by JPSalas. The theme is ostensibly nothing to do with the band that released a hit album that year.
- Vector (Bally) - VPX by Mustang1961
- Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man (Bally) - VPX by Ext2k
- Locomotion (Zaccaria, 1981), in the Zaccaria Pinball app (carried over from last episode when I couldn't figure out the new app)
- Pinball Champ '82 (Zaccaria), in the Zaccaria Pinball app
- Haunted House (Gottlieb) - VPX by VPin Workshop
- Spectrum (Bally) - VPX by VPin Workshop
- Cosmic Gunfight (Williams) - VPX by Goldchicco
- Speakeasy (Bally) - VPX by DarthVito