Silver Ball Century - Season 2, episode 1
Starting in 2022 and going until early 2024, I did a Twitch stream series called Silver Ball Century, where I found every pinball table I could play virtually (over 600 of them) and played them in chronological order (spanning 80 episodes). I learned a lot about pinball during that time.
The software that makes most of this possible is Visual Pinball 10, which I'll be abbreviating "VPX" from now on. I wrote a cohost post series, How to Install VPX, that I should update and put here. I also posted episode notes on cohost for all but the first 9 episodes.
For a while, I did much better in classics pinball tournaments than in tournaments on modern tables. I had a blind spot in my understanding of pinball, spanning from whatever year I'd reached in Silver Ball Century to 2021 when I got into pinball. But it was really exciting to see each new pinball feature being developed, and I was ready for the complexity of '90s pinball rules and then of 2010s pinball rules when we got there.
I want to do it again! This time I know a lot more about pinball, and I know how to tell when it's being emulated realistically enough, and there are new virtual recreations of pinball machines that weren't available two years ago.
As pinball machines have said for decades: it's more fun to compete! I'm enthusiastic about stream viewers installing VPX themselves and playing along so we can compare scores.
The new series begins tomorrow, October 1st, at 8pm Eastern time. We're going back a literal century, to play the 1920s game that was almost pinball, followed by several other flipperless machines from pinball's first boom in the 1930s. If you insist that pinball needs to have flippers, you'll have to wait until episode 2, but these include the literal best-selling pinball machines of all time.
Silver Ball Century will continue on Tuesdays for the near future. I'm so excited for it.
Tables in this episode
- Corinthian Master Bagatelle VPX by JamieP. They list the machine as being from 1951 but the layout has existed since at least the '20s.
- Baffle Ball, via Microsoft Pinball Arcade for the Game Boy Color. Not accurate: they changed the rules and the mechanism of the top hole.
- Ballyhoo VPX by CactusDude
- World's Fair Jig-Saw VPX by Randr
- Major League VPX by CactusDude. Not accurate: the ball has far too little weight. The rules also seem incorrect in a way that makes replays nearly impossible. I suggest pressing "B" at the start of the game to at least get a batter up.
- Big Game VPX by CactusDude
- Hunter VPX by Warbler33
- Cavalcade VPX by Mfuegemann
Sources for this episode
- Episode 27: A Brief History of Pinball from Silverball Chronicles
- Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball by Jon Chad
- Bagatelle: The Common Ancestor of Pinball and Pachinko by donkeypong
- History from PachinkoBoy.com