Silver Ball Century ep. 7 - 1964-1965
It's the time of Beatlemania, the Cold War going hot in Vietnam, and momentous civil rights demonstrations. Less world-shakingly, it's also a good moment for pinball, despite that it's banned in many cities. Bally is ramping up pinball production, and it's time for Ted Zale to make his mark on pinball.
Some context we could have had last episode: Bally's founder Ray Moloney died in 1958, and the company limped along until it was taken over by a group of its own investors in 1963. The investors focused a lot on the gambling business, but happily, they kept the pinball division and structured the company so that pinball was more separate from the gambling division. Now Ted Zale was in charge of pinball design at Bally and had the freedom to design what he wanted.
Pinball News' The Renegade of Pinball's Golden Age: The Ted Zale Story has more details about the innovations Ted Zale brought to pinball as Bally's pinball division got serious about competing with Gottlieb. We saw one last episode: the concept of "locking a ball" for a later multiball. We'll see a couple more in this episode.
A lot less is written about Norm Clark, the new designer at Williams (alongside Steve Kordek) whose designs we're seeing for the first time this episode.
This episode will be live on twitch.tv/arborelia at 8pm on December 3.
Tables in this episode
I could have done a full episode for each of 1964 and 1965, but I want to be selective, making sure we see good virtual recreations of tables that have something new to offer, so I chose 9 tables across both years.
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.)
Some of these also have links to the game rules and strategy guides on Pinball Primer.
- Soccer (Williams, 1964) - VPX by loserman76 - Pinball Primer
- San Francisco (Williams, 1964) - VPX by loserman76 - Pinball Primer. The last pinball machine with a gobble hole!
- Grand Tour (Bally, 1964) - VPX by Scottacus. Introduces the free ball gate and a new kind of rollovers. Note: This table uses the "difficulty" setting in VPX to control the table angle. I suggest setting it to 50%. Most of the shots seem impossible at 100%.
- Heat Wave (Williams, 1964) - VPX by bord - Pinball Primer
- North Star (Gottlieb, 1964) - VPX by RusstyT
- Sky-Line (Gottlieb, 1965) - VPX by JPSalas - Pinball Primer
- Kings and Queens (Gottlieb, 1965) - VPX by Okobojimusky - Pinball Primer. The machine that appears in the film version of "Tommy", where Tommy scores "a trillion" points to defeat Elton John.
- Moulin Rouge (Williams, 1965) - VPX by JPSalas
- Aces High (Bally, 1965) - VPX by Kees