Silver Ball Century ep. 6 - 1963
(Correction: in the image above, Big Deal is misattributed to Gottlieb. It's a Williams table.)
It's 1963 and the times, they are a-changin'. One of the exciting things about playing pinball chronologically is that we get to see each new feature added to pinball, and this episode brings a few of them:
- Swing-Along has the first spinners
- Star-Jet has the first ball lock that you release for multiball
- Big Deal is not the actual first table with drop targets, where the target you hit drops into the table -- the singular first drop target was on Vagabond (Williams, 1962) -- but it's got the first ones we'll see recreated in VPX.
Drop targets are going to be a rare sight for a while - they're expensive and tricky to make work right. Even today, drop targets are a premium feature on pinball machines.
This episode will be live on twitch.tv/arborelia at 8pm Eastern on Tuesday, November 26.
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.)
- Gaucho (Gottlieb, 1963) - VPX by Loserman76
- Big Deal (Williams, 1963) - VPX by Loserman76
- Swing-Along (Gottlieb, 1963) - VPX by JamieP
- Sweet Hearts (Gottlieb, 1963) - VPX by Loserman76
- Gigi (Gottlieb, 1963) - VPX by EMUnderdogs. Hope you like pop bumpers!
- Star-Jet (Bally, 1963) - VPX by bord