Silver Ball Century ep. 48 - Late 1986 - Mad Engineering
They say most "mad science" is actually mad engineering, and that includes the act of creating a robot woman in Gottlieb's Genesis, which is one of my favorite pinball machines. Genesis ran so that Bride of Pin-Bot (1991) could walk. Speaking of that, this is also the episode where we see the original, influential Pin-Bot, and the mad engineering continues in the appropriately bizarre Strange Science. These machines and more appear at the end of 1986 in pinball history.
Unrelatedly to that, Gottlieb's Gold Wings introduces us to the Danger Zone. Yes, it sounds like I'm talking about either the hit song from Top Gun or a part of Jack Danger's The Uncanny X-Men (2024), and I kind of am, in both cases.
A lot of 1986 pinball machines have thematic elements in common, and it inspired me to make this mad taxonomy of 1986 pinball themes, including all the machines we saw in these three episodes plus a few more we skipped:
Silver Ball Century starts late this week, at 9 pm Eastern on Thursday, January 29, on twitch.tv/arborelia.
Tables in this episode
As usual, you need Visual Pinball 10.8 to play most of these, and free accounts on VPForums and VPUniverse to download them.
The Zaccaria tables are instead played in the Zaccaria Pinball app by Magic Pixel, and I hope I figure out how to turn off the insipid loot-box mechanic they added to it.
- Mexico '86 (Zaccaria) - played in Zaccaria Pinball
- Special Force (Bally Midway) - VPX by VPin Workshop
- Genesis (Premier Gottlieb) - VPX by SG1bson
- Pin-Bot (Williams) - VPX by Bord
- Gold Wings (Premier Gottlieb) - VPX by Versins77
- Strange Science (Bally Midway) - VPX by AgentEighty6
- Zankor (Zaccaria) - played in Zaccaria Pinball