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Silver Ball Century ep. 71 - Late 1994 - Who Knows

In this episode: Corvette, Maverick, Road Show, Freddy, The Shadow. Next episode: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Shaq Attaq, Baywatch, Stargate, Dirty Harry.

I said a lot about Data East Pinball in the last episode, and soon there won't be anything else to say about Data East Pinball, because this episode contains Maverick, their final game before they're bought by Sega.

Except: maybe their final game is Tattoo Assassins. Which is not a pinball game. It's a rushed, low-budget imitation of Mortal Kombat, because this was a world where Mortal Kombat was suddenly everywhere, and Data East leadership decided it was important to develop a competitor. So they put the pinball division on it. Not the arcade division. The pinball division, in Chicago.

I'm not playing this non-pinball game on Silver Ball Century, but I think you should watch the extremely entertaining run of it on Big Bad Game-A-Thon, by pinball legend ScoutPilgrim, with commentary by the lead developer, Kevin Martin.

Bally/Williams didn't have to worry about their parent company ordering them to make Mortal Kombat, because their parent company (Midway) already made Mortal Kombat, so they're still cranking out the pinball games. One of the games they bring us is Road Show, sometimes called Red and Ted's Road Show, named for the two talking puppet heads on the playfield, following up on the popularity of FunHouse (1990) which had just one. Red is, in fact, a repainted Rudy from FunHouse. Congratulations on her transition!

The Shadow shows us that sometimes the greatest pinball games come from movies that flop, and includes an appearance (in voice and dot animations) of the dear departed Tim Curry. In contrast, what kind of pinball game do you think a proven success like "A Nightmare on Elm Street" leads to? Gottlieb's Freddy awaits.

Silver Ball Century goes live on Thursday, October 1, at 8:30pm Eastern, on twitch.tv/arborelia.

Tables in this episode

#pinball #silver ball century