Silver Ball Century has been a stream series about experiencing pinball history through virtual pinball. But we can't experience real pinball machines from 2019-2020 through virtual pinball. We won't be seeing The Munsters, Black Knight: Sword of Rage, Oktoberfest, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Jurassic Park, Elvira's House of Horrors, Stranger Things, Rick and Morty, hey I wonder why there's this 4-month gap in 2020 with no new tables being produced, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Avengers Infinity Quest, or Guns N' Roses: Not In This Lifetime.
If we did virtualize these pinball tables, it's likely that someone with "Esq." in their name would show up with a firm opinion on whether we should be doing that. This, as I understand it, is what happened to a half-finished VPX of Black Knight: Sword of Rage.
I'm particularly unqualified to talk about pinball in 2019-2020 as if it's history. It was 2021 when I started going to arcades once in a while to play pinball, and 2022 when it really grabbed my attention. Many of my viewers were there in 2019-2020, and I wasn't.
But one thing I've heard from people who were there is that, when COVID hit, virtual pinball was the reality of pinball for a moment. Players of real pinball who wouldn't usually play the virtual kind held their noses and tried it, including in online gatherings with people they used to play pinball with in person. And players of virtual pinball had lots and lots of time to work on their setups and try new tables.
So this stream is about the original virtual pinball tables that were created around that time. Descriptions and links to the tables are below the fold.
Silver Ball Century starts around 8pm Eastern (@083) on https://twitch.tv/arborelia.
I'm playing a few more of Magic Pixel's original "Zaccaria remake" tables tonight. These tables are available for $3 each as part of the Zaccaria Pinball PC game. Strike Deluxe in particular is a table that was popular when @FlannelKat did virtual pinball request streams.
OrbitalPin is a collective that makes original tables for VPX. One of their tables, The Leprechaun King, is used as a pack-in table for "PinUP Popper", the all-in-one VPX installer that sprays obsolete versions of things all over your filesystem, which I don't recommend touching with a ten-foot pole. Anyway, Leprechaun King is good at showing off the features of VPX.
An OrbitalPin table that I find more fun that goes really hard on its theme is Pizza Time, the table that tells you: any pizza is a personal pizza if you believe in yourself.
Stream regular DonkeyKlonk appears again with his very polished Watchmen table.
OneVox made a retro-pinball-themed Cuphead table, and big names in VPX development Scottacus and Bord came along to make improvements. That gives us Cuphead Pro: Perdition Edition, which claims to be manufactured by "D. Goblett & Co."
JPSalas made an original VPX table layout for "Serious Sam", and gave people permission to reuse it for their own tables, and many VPX creators did. One of the more high-effort results was The Dark Crystal by WPilot.