Silver Ball Century ep. 5 - 1960-1962
I'm back from traveling, and Silver Ball Century is back as well, with a longer than usual episode as we enter the 1960s. My collaborator solar_espeon says that 1960 is when you can actually start to be serious when you call pinball a game of skill.
Like in last episode, it's largely Wayne Neyens at Gottlieb defining what pinball is, as a competitive game. In this episode we also start to see designs by Steve Kordek at Williams, who also had a long and illustrious pinball career - his last design was in 2003.
Steve Kordek's foundational contribution to pinball (when he worked at Genco in the '40s) was that flippers should be at the bottom of the playfield. His designs are credited as having the first DC-powered flippers that could get the ball all the way up the table.
Silver Ball Century goes live at 8pm Eastern, on twitch.tv/arborelia.
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, which is a bit of a pain, but it's the only community-approved way to get tables for VPX.)
- Spot-A-Card (Gottlieb, 1960) - VPX by Loserman76. The first we'll see from Gottlieb's "Verb-A-Card" series.
- Big Casino (Gottlieb, 1961) - VPX by Teisen. I believe these are the farthest-apart flippers you will ever see in pinball.
- Egg Head (Gottlieb, 1961) - VPX by Teisen. This game sucks to play, and it's not the VPX's fault, but we might as well see it because it's technically impressive that a pile of electromechanical relays lets you play tic-tac-toe to earn a replay and play the bad game again.
- Aloha (Gottlieb, 1961) - VPX by Teisen
- Flipper Fair (Gottlieb, 1961) - VPX by Teisen
- Fashion Show (Gottlieb, 1962) - VPX by bord. Bord is known for going the extra mile for physical accuracy in his VPX recreations.
- Trade Winds (Williams, 1962) - VPX by Wrd1972
- 4 Roses (Williams, 1962) - VPX by Balater
- Rack-A-Ball (Gottlieb, 1962) - VPX by Teisen. A hit game that got re-released twice, as "Bowling Queen" (1964) and "Mibs" (1969).