Silver Ball Century is my chronological playthrough of virtual pinball tables, and I've spent the last couple of months going through the 1970s, the decade when everything changed in pinball.
Here's the previous recap with the VODs from the first 9 episodes, covering 1932 to 1970. From 1970 on, I'll highlight a table or two each stream (with clips) that stood out for being particularly good or particularly unusual tables.
Here's the first part of the decade:
1970
Tables played: 4 Queens, Aces & Kings, Big Valley, Crescendo, Dipsy Doodle, Gay 90's, Jive Time, Mini Cycle, Snow Derby, Stock Car, Zip-A-Doo
Big Valley has multiball and an interesting layout of gates and kickers. Dipsy Doodle (a.k.a. Doodle Bug) has a ball you can activate under the playfield, which bounces around scoring points as long as you can keep the real ball in play, which is really cool but seems not to be a good path to a high score.
1971
Tables played: 2001, Time Tunnel, Now, Four Million B.C., Skyrocket (broken), Stardust, Klondike, 4 Square, Astro, Drop-A-Card, Mariner, Spanish Eyes
Spanish Eyes is an excellent table. The flipper layout, where the flippers are raised up the table, far apart, and have a big pop bumper in the gap between them, is unusual but a lot of fun.
1972
Tables played: Flying Carpet, Fireball, Super Star, King Rock, World Series, Jungle, Fun-Fest
Fireball is too fun to ignore, even though the VPX implementation of it is extremely jank. The playfield has a constantly-spinning circle in the middle of it, but it should not be able to yoink the ball's velocity in a completely different direction the way it does. I don't think they've got the physics right, but you know what, that doesn't stop it from being chaotic fun.
Super Star is centered around hitting an entire line of rollovers with the correct angle of shot from either flipper, which is very satisfying.
1973
Tables played: Pro Football, Jack in the Box, Darling, Nip It, OXO, Triple Action, Dealers Choice, Seven Winner
Nip It is a very good VPX implementation. And in addition to the flippers there's an alligator button, which makes a plastic alligator on the playfield reach out a metal bar and eat the ball, sending it into an alley where you get more points. Nom!
Seven Winner made me realize that Inder, a lesser-known Spanish pinball manufacturer, comes up with fun rule sets.
1974
Tables played: Amigo, Dolphin, Far Out, Fifteen, Free Fall, Magnotron, Wheel, Granada, Top Hand, Tropical
Free Fall rewards accuracy and planning with a mechanic where drop targets have two different ways of multiplying their score by 10, so you want to make them line up and get 100x the drop target points.
Zaccaria shows up on the scene and Tropical is a good one. Zaccaria has done wonders for preserving the gameplay of '70s and '80s pinball: first-party virtual versions of all their tables are available for PC and Switch.
1975
Tables played: Atlantis, Big Horse, El Dorado, Flicker, Satin Doll, Spirit of '76, 300, Wizard, Lucky Fruit, Red Show
Wizard might be the most complex EM table and it's worth learning. El Dorado is a very satisfying table focused on hitting the right drop targets at the right time. People like it and that's why Gottlieb kept remaking it for a decade.
1976
1976 was the start of where there were enough tables I wanted to play that I had to break them into multiple streams:
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Part 1: Torpedo!!, Blue Chip, Space Odyssey, Aztec, Sure Shot, Old Chicago, Moon Flight, Wood's Queen
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Part 2: Aladdin's Castle, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, Grand Prix, Ship Ahoy, Card Whiz, Canada Dry, Space Odyssey
Some of the best EM table designs happened in 1976, at the end of the EM era, which makes sense. Aztec and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy are both tables that I'm excited when I see them, with shots that feel good and interesting risks and rewards in deciding what to shoot for. But perhaps my favorite EM table now is Hang Glider. It feels really good, it looks pretty, and there's a lot going on without unwieldy complexity. This is one of the pinball tables they have in heaven. [1]
1977
- Part 1: Evel Knievel, Night Rider, Hot Tip, Wild Card, Centigrade 37, Airborne Avenger, Aerobatics, Nautilus, Supersonic
- Part 2: Eight Ball, Pinball, Fire Queen, Dragon, Check Mate, Cleopatra, Circus, Combat, Universe
The big names in pinball are figuring out how to shift to solid state and they've got some reasonable tables to do it with. But out of nowhere there's Atari, and they have no EM baggage. They're designing solid state tables right away and they're bold and weird and exciting, and they've got Steve Ritchie designing tables.
That gets us Airborne Avenger, which is certainly bold and weird and exciting. It also makes good use of the widebody table shape (rarely seen before 1977, or after 1984) so it's got so much room for activities.
[1] Meanwhile, the pinball tables they have in hell are Band Wagon (1965), The Wizard of Oz (2013) in a dark corner, and The Walking Dead (2014).
I mean, I'm more of a fan of the Wizard of Oz table than most, but you have to play it in the early afternoon on a bright sunny day in an establishment with large windows. Otherwise it's impossible. For all the flashiness of the video display, they really skimped on the playfield lighting.
hey I meant to finish this thread!
1978
Part 1: Bobby Orr's Power Play, Middle Earth, Sinbad, Stars, World Cup, Neptune, Contact, Disco Fever, Joker Poker, Winter Sports, House of Diamonds
Part 2: Memory Lane, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Lost World, Phoenix, Flash, The Six Million Dollar Man, Wild Fyre, Charlie's Angels, Blue Note, Strike, Future World
Atari kept weirdifying pinball with Middle Earth, which is not actually about Lord of the Rings unless I've forgotten the part about dinosaurs. It's too bad people aren't into bizarre asymmetrical flipper layouts because Atari really wanted people to be into them, and I wish there was still a machine like that once in a while. Disco Fever and its banana flippers just can't compete with Atari's audacity.
But the actual best table of the year is Stern's Stars, kind of their namesake table if you think about it. Just a fun layout with lots of satisfying shots that doesn't get repetitive. This clip is just some representative gameplay of it:
1979
Part 1: Dracula, Mr Doom, TKO, Supersonic, Space Walk, Stellar Wars, Star Trek, Hercules, Hot Wheels, Hot Hand, KISS, Paragon, Tri-Zone
Part 2: Cosmic Princess, Magic, Harlem Globetrotters On Tour, Time Warp, Genie, The Incredible Hulk, Meteor, Dolly Parton, Road Runner, Lady Luck (the Taito do Brasil clone of Mata Hari), Future Spa, Gorgar, Laser Ball, Old Coney Island
There's so many amazing tables in 1979, like Stern's Dracula and Bally's widebody epic Paragon. Meteor is fantastic and I almost forgot it.
Instead of playing the real Mata Hari I played the Brazilian knockoff Lady Luck, not to be confused with the Bally table of that name. Lady Luck adds an innovation, magna-flippers, that we wouldn't get from an American company until The Twilight Zone. I actually love it. I also love that it breaks one of the sacred conventions of pinball, with slings that give you 3 points. Three points. That's not any number of tens!
But I get one clip before Twitch's clip functionality falls over for the night, I think, and it's going to be the intro I did for Williams' Stellar Wars. I put some work into this video shitpost.