Thank you very much. everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. My name is Alan. I am one half owner of the Portland Pinball Bar Wedgehead and your host of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. I am joined by my co-host who's not affiliated with the Bar Wedgehead in any way, but he's one half. Yeah, proud patron and one half of this podcast. I'm Alex. Alan likes to call me the water boy. He worked in water. If anyone's wondering why he has that nickname, He works in water. But more importantly than us today is our guest, the esteemed, the one and only Ty Palmer. Oh, thanks for having me. I want to do my fractions, too. I am one quarter of the bartending staff at Wedgehead, and I'm one quarter of Boy Ride. Boy Ride, the illustrious Boy Ride, yeah. It's a secret society. It's an adventure team, and I'm also one half of the previous Cobras podcast. And yeah, I am one whole Ty Palmer. yeah if you if you've been keeping up with ads up to one to one it does we check the math beforehand yep two quarters one half one so today we're going to be talking about bally games solid state manufacturer um and specifically the era from is this 1979 to 1981 kind of uh curtained by the susan b anthony coin ty what is a susan b anthony coin it was a dollar coin that was minted between 1979 to 1981 like you said and they produced about 1 billion of these coins they minted a lot of them and it was meant to kind of take the place of a dollar bill or be more of like an international standard for currency kind of like more of a european or canadian thing where they have loonies and toonies for one dollar two dollar you know thing yeah it's supposed to be a big thing with coin up um not just you know pinball but vending all over the place that makes sense i didn't really think about how big like yeah i guess that's why you would do coins right and that's probably why other countries kind of held on to them yeah i don't know i'm always surprised but americans didn't like them and they killed it quick yeah killed it real quick so it just lives in this small little brief period where like bally machines were insanely good and uh yeah you'd pop one into a bally machine or any other pinball machine from that era and you'd get five plays for one dollar right like what you'd see now when you put two bucks into a stern instead of one or whatever and they give you three plays it was kind of their way to incentivize you to try to play games with your friends or just play more games in general oh totally yeah give you a volume discount for putting a full dollar in yeah bally leaned into it hard though put it right in the middle so usually in the two coin slots on the coin door the susan b anthony or the sba you'll see it labeled would be right in the middle of the two yeah it's kind of trippy how they'd have it advertised they'd have a sticker on top of the coin door with like the image of the coin next to the branding and like this arrow design surrounding the coin and then a playfield topper like you said alex yeah i just like how are why were they so invested in it just it's funny that they're just promoting it it's like they really wanted to get those coins hyped up and so it's kind of just this funny little era of i don't know them trying to sell us on these coins i guess but really it just happens to coincide with some of the best valley pinball machines of all time which is really what we're here to talk about yeah we got some bangers on the list and we could just start with a year 1979 yeah so the first on the list of the SBA games from Bali would have been Star Trek designed by what is that who did that Gary Gaten Gary Gaten that's not a name I remember very often and that's not a game that I think about very often despite them making 16,000 of them yeah it's pretty fun I don't play it as much as I play other solid states from that era but you know it has some quirks to it and plays pretty well you know art's okay the art's hilarious to me because they've got like the super buff captain kirk yeah like they just like really win it all in i wonder if shatner wanted that like i wonder if he's like make me buff dude well the game we're going to talk about immediately after this that's definitely the case on oh yeah with star trek i just think that's funny because it's like the first time i saw that i don't know anything about star trek our friend uh shout out to johnny demonic here in portland he's a big trekkie and he'd probably die if i said this but i had no idea the game was from a different era than the tv show the tv show was already old as hell when this game came out it was already like a whatever 15 year old show yeah yeah and so it's kind of funny it's like the art is intentionally retro the colors are kind of retro but now the game itself is so much older than the show was when it released so it has this very weird old school vibe it's kind of a timeless looking machine to me it's not my favorite but it is cool yeah it's a good start you know good start the run it looks like they sold almost 17,000 units on this game yeah that's a nutty amount yeah i mean that's that's massive that already He puts it in one of the highest selling games of all time list, which we're going to see a lot here. It looks like Bally, at this point in time, had caught all the way up. They were the first people to adopt solid state into pinball, and they hit the ground running. I think Stern Electronics, who we'll talk about in a different episode, when we talk about solid state games, they basically copied the Bally board system for this first, you know, kind of a slap on the wrist. they were in some hot water with Bally and they came to some sort of gentlemanly agreement. I know other people have dived into that more and it was kind of just like a gentleman's thing. I think they like let them use some mechs they had developed or something. It was just back in the day. I don't think they necessarily saw it as so much competition as just, you know, they definitely saw it as competition. It's just there was more of I heard an interview and hopefully we'll get him on the show soon with Roger Sharp, where he was talking about being in an in an office with one of the pinball manufacturers and the phone rings as roger's there to interview him and the guy picks up the phone and he's just like he's like oh yeah what do you need oh okay yeah well i can get you yeah i can get you a box of those or whatever he hangs up the phone roger's like i was like who is that and he was like oh that was dave gottlieb over at gottlieb or it was you know whoever over at genco or it was you know williams and he's just like oh so you guys just sort of he's like yeah i mean it's like it was more like fraternal then yeah there was definitely competition they were definitely trying to outsell each other they're not it's not like it was all kumbaya they collaborated more and they definitely you'll see this with pinball why there's so many mechanisms in pinball from like pop bumpers to spinners to drop targets to these things that are like all could be their own patents and like enforced like they could enforce them and be like hey you can't do a target that drops down you can't do this or whatever but instead they just sort of like yeah this is part of pinball we're just we're gonna take some of your stuff and you're gonna take some of our stuff and then we'll just kind of you know yeah look the other way and you won't sue us and we won't sue you type of thing right yeah it's good to see them play nice when they're like the titans of industry and like not really looking at each other like they're like death you know rivals very different than i feel like you would expect i don't know how the industry all is now i guess pinball but that's definitely not how most businesses run not at all yeah i wouldn't imagine so how do you follow up a monster seller licensed theme uh like star trek you put in a monster themed men in a rock and roll band called kiss yeah and this is the original kiss game the first yeah 1979 they did sell full 17 000 units designed by the legendary jim patla who will mention again on this list as well as probably in the future on his own episode yeah one of the rare machines that actually have a symmetrical play field uh both left and right have um same shots same areas drops same area targets and um jim patla did that a lot i'm gonna ask him about that if we can ever talk to him on this show but he did that quite a bit like the symmetrical stuff he did and even his games because like we're gonna get down the list until like biking and something that's not symmetrical but at first glance it kind of is it's like the shots do different stuff but they're in the same place it's kind of interesting yeah i did do that totally from there get into something real good yeah yeah aragon first wide body first wide body on this list not first wide body of any pinball but first susan b anthony wide body yeah i thought it was the first uh wide body the belly did that makes sense i think atari atari was the one doing wide bodies first and everybody scrambled because they thought wide bodies were going to take over the whole thing that's interesting they didn't but i'm pretty sure atari was the first two wide bodies this one sold over 9 000 units designed by greg kamek and this is a super wide body i mean we're talking about wide bodies but this is like mega wide oh yeah the bally wide bodies are real big it's a cadillac yeah there's a lot to do paragon's so sick it's disappointing it sold like half as many as kiss or something but it doesn't have the theme and it was probably more expensive I don't know. That's my guess. Yeah, I wonder. That game's cool, man. Paragon's the best of the ones we've discussed so far. Yeah. By a wide margin. The art package by Paul Faris is unbelievable. Like, legendary. This is firmly in what I also would call, we're calling this the Susan B. Anthony era where we're talking about these games. but this is the artistic style, which is the Valley Nipple era, where you're seeing, like, erect nipples under very skimpy clothing. Yeah, everyone jokes it must have just been cold as hell in the 70s, man. It's cold in Chicago. You ever been there? Yeah. Like, you ever wear a t-shirt in the winter in Chicago? Yeah. But also, too, yeah, swords and tits. Yeah, it's the era of swords and tits. Yeah, they knew what the kids wanted in the arcades. I guess not as much as they wanted Muscley Man and Kiss, though, because it sold half. Well, Kiss was a huge band, though. Kiss was just as naked. They were a current massive band at that time. Yeah. There's still, to be fair to Kiss, there's still a Monster license. Yes. Like, they can still sell, and this is like, yeah, 40 years later. So, I suppose. But Paragon's a fucking kick-ass game. It is. Paragon rules. We have Ty on the show because Ty is sort of our solid-state guru. this is all type plays are games from like a four-year period in the 70s early 80s anything else everything else is kind of a waste of time or money and it's just simple economics if i see a jersey jack i'm walking the other way if you give me the option i'm not gonna do it's just why so this is why we wanted ty on the podcast because we love solid state games we talk about on the podcast but ty is ty's on a different level like that is he doesn't just love solid state games it's like that's pretty much all he wants to play yeah there's kind of a reason and it's a shame that we don't get modern games like this and we're kind of starting to see some push for that tna i think was kind of a little taste of that you know doesn't really have the solid state flavor beatles got there a little bit and then the bond limited edition gets there i play that out you know fiction come in is the first one that like that i mean it's because they went all in they actually committed to the bit the whole thing it's like down to the coin door you know this like the sba team at bally would be proud they would be and they even like stenciled the art on the side like they would spray paint the bodies of these machines instead of doing airbrush or even decal so yeah i feel like they got that right for pulp fiction i wonder if we can get a susan b anthony coin door installed on uh pulp fiction when your shows up alan i think it's just a little slot you know yeah we're trying to run it back yeah yeah bring in your sbas kids you get five for four before we go on i mean why do you think that the susan b anthony coin didn't stick in america i think a lot of coin operators when it came down time to like use these things it just wasn't as practical people probably still stuck on the dollar um you know like it just i don't know the main reason they look like quarters they look like quarters yeah that's a huge problem yeah they look so much like imagine like soldering just a little bit of weight on a quarter and making it a dollar yeah because that's the shit head tactics my dad did when he was playing uh you know ems back in the day he would take pennies and clip them till they weigh the same as dimes and he would just go to his local five and dime play sky jump all day for pennies on the dime but he got genius yeah it is so like they looked apart i mean i even like we were playing firepower one time a wedge head when you guys were open in the first year and i accidentally put a quarter in where the sba slot was and it was programmed for sba and it went through and i got three plays and i'm like alan i pulled you aside why isn't this this gave me more than i should have got so imagine you know if something was a little bent or broken on the coin door that you probably could just you know one quarter through for sba value i bet it was probably annoying to also like fish sbas out of your quarter like out of your quarters dude from an operator you're trying to like do your tally like yeah and it's kind of funny i never thought about that trying to get so if you've not seen if you're listening to this and you've never seen an SBA coin they're slightly bigger than a quarter like very slight yeah and they're the same color and everything so just from like a management perspective they're confusing but trying to shove a quarter into the thing how how do they know is it based you try to calibrate the switch it's usually size that's funny so it's the coin mechs are the size they're made to it's supposed to be an exact size which is why you'll see with like tokens or any other coins or Canadian quarters Canadian quarters look a lot like american quarters yeah i see them but they'll they'll usually get rejected or they'll just get jammed in a coin mech right and you go to fish them out and you have these canadian quarters it's usually calibrated to the size of a coin so each coin mech on the inside that you don't see behind the coin door as the player is a different size and it's only meant to take one very specific diameter size of coin so i think the older ones like ty was talking about with his dad was they were a little bit less sophisticated and oh yeah right and so it like you could trick those a little bit more easily the new ones hopefully best case scenario just rolls right through the bottom and rejects out but a lot of times they just fucking jam and it just pisses everybody off yeah that's like every operator's nightmare is coin jams it's just like the one thing you're gonna have to fix more than anything in pinball is fucking coin oh yeah i mean if you have an arcade you just every day people are just like hey this game and you just gotta do it all the time and how like how players deal with coin jams you're like let me shove a knife in there and hit the machine several times it makes it worse so they'll probably like just i slept this shit out of the doors always which i feel like if you haven't seen clear a jam people will be like what are you doing yeah but it's like when you've had to clear them you kind of just you got this motion you know you really just kind of jab it and half the time they're clear and so you're like i know what i'm doing i look i just look crazy yeah the fawns dude he did it famously on happy days over and over again i've never watched it i've never watched that you've never seen that i know i'm not over here watching happy days oh man i'm missing out so following up paragon eventually we're gonna have to start skipping games we don't run out of time but we gotta talk about the next one or the next couple but the next game to come out was harlem globe trotters 1979 still another big licensed game big production number 14 and a half thousand made and that game's a banger oh yeah it's basically like paragon jr they took kind of all the you know the rights of paragon kind of shrunk it down a little bit because you have in-lane drops you know you have your spinner for value go top to collect you have all these wonderful things that they took from paragon be like you know what how do we make this better and they did and i love that machine we have it right now a wedge head and i will be really bummed when roads pulls it it's gonna get pulled at some point like all games do they all do well good things must pass we're bringing us stars in soon so it's gonna be good oh i'm not gonna complain about that that's sick and then from there we get to our first george christian game of the night oh yeah future spa another wide body uh somebody else described the theme oh yeah so it's basically if you like lonnie anderson ambo derrick you're fucking stoked you have five lonnie anderson's on the play field all like diving around water There's some future shit like a guy's curling a laser bar for exercise in a pond that's flowing from a woman's hair. And there's lots of mirrors, lots of neon. Like it's it's a shiny, awesome view of the future. I would call it horny space gym. Yeah, totally. Like it's just like horny future people working out. The main like the main centerpiece of the back glass is like a guy kind of chasing after a girl, which is just so it's it's maybe not in the best. taste but it's awesome the art is i don't think any of this art this is the bally nipple era like i said you look it up go on ipdb and look at these photos or yeah it's all a product of its time oh yeah it is the one thing i will say about art and design for this period is the typography for most these games is absolutely fantastic like that is polished and that you can actually like look at with pride and be like you know what they did killer custom typography for all these back classes they're like you know xenon stands out um apol the luck stands out and they just look amazing but yeah a lot of the Paul Faris like tits and swords art yeah uh it can be you know whatever well and they all they all did it like dave christianson and all the all the guys that were doing art for these games it had to come from the top i mean oh they knew what would sell they knew what would get they knew what would earn i guess they knew what they would sell they knew would earn and you see the numbers and they did fucking earn this is where they went from like maybe third place i don't i don't even know it's hard to know but in the early 70s they were behind they were behind gottlieb was number one by a lot i think williams was number two and then bally this is where they jumped i think from number three to number one is this era they went the first to go to solid state and they started licensing games yep two things you still see today yep like we're never going to go back to em games obviously so we're still in the solid state era and every game's got to be licensed now and i think a big difference with bally at the time too was that they invested in art when other companies were not like if you go to stern electronics stern electronics like we said we'll talk about a different episode they had some sick games their stuff was cool their art for the most part was pretty phoned in some packages were really good but a lot of them went out the door looking like ass and bally pretty much every game on this list had a sick art package that was well polished they had good people doing every piece of it it's not like they forgot about the plastics they would have a different person doing the plastics as their full assignment and it was just like everything kicked ass on yeah illustrated beautiful art yeah yeah really well done and like when they're screening the playfields you know they pushed the limit for amount of colors they could get on there and use unique color too to their advantage and use like awesome teals amazing magentas and made these things pop and actually had really good color theory that you know balanced the way these art packages look yeah yeah they're gorgeous games i think it's also cool that the colors everything about them they look they all you know you see a lineup of valleys they all kind of fit in with each other but each one has its own vibe and not to knock on like modern pins but a lot of like the time when you see modern games they kind of all blend together you know they're a bunch of bright greens bright reds bright blues or whatever and it's like the the games of this era just they really knew how to like do a lot with the art yeah you look at newer sterns i feel like they use every crayon in the box and just run the full spectrum of colors you like squint your eyes you look at godzilla you're like oh my god it looks like the exact other game that's right next to it in newer sternfield yeah exactly so yeah after future spot our boy george christian he got a couple more games dolly parton and a nitro ground shaker um i'm gonna just kind of kind of skip ahead a little bit sure you guys specifically wanted to talk on those nitro ground shaker is sick it was i love the theme love the art it's not my favorite game i don't want to do george dirty you know talk about too much it's one of those ones that's like really i don't know yeah i think nitro ground shaker is better than dolly parton dolly parton's i agree jolly parton's the george christian game that i wish was so much better than it is i love dolly parton she's america's sweetheart it's really truly a treasure to this country yeah and to the and to the world and it's rad that she has a pinball machine i wouldn't have picked any other designer other than george to do it it's not his best and the layout's not bad it's the rule set it's just not great it's also we'd compare it to some of our absolute favorite games of all time some of which we'll get into still down here yeah and that's why like i was just like let's just save the george christian talk maybe for i'll still play it whenever i see it because it's dolly yeah and it's a beautiful game both of these are still fun unlike the next game on silver ball mania oh my god i've had fun playing it it's got an insane art package they sold over 10 000 of them which is the most on this list so far that wasn't a licensed theme and it's sold more than paragon absolutely batshit crazy art package yeah and you mean that in the most literal way like it's insane you have it's pinball themed yeah that's all good pinball machines are themed yeah the theme is pinball just pull it up on your phone and look at just look at the back glass you yeah it's got like chrome dudes it's very like this late 70s psychedelic era very cool use of colors and that one specifically because it's really kind of like blues and chromes and silver and it's insane game not not uh not the best from jim patluck no no and the next one that follows this up is space invaders another very very cool looking game kind of one note gameplay another jim patluck symmetrical play field it's actually now that i say this that's kind of like the wide body because it has a u-turn right in the middle it does there's some similarities coming right off of silver ball mania we've seen a couple of those already yeah this one has more of an interesting story that does have gameplay you know because there is a lawsuit involved with this interesting yeah uh they got sued by uh 20th century fox uh because they ripped off the xenomorphs from alien and like all of like hr geiger's designs are like used for the back glass um the play field actually mimics more space invaders than the back glass but the black ass looks really cool and has that mirrored fact where it has like that kind of infinity mirror but a big xenomorph in the middle of it looking at you head on and they did not license that they're just like this movie rules this what does that do with space invaders like there's so much shit in space like aliens you're like like the movie aliens you're like yeah dude let's fucking rip this shit off and they got sued It's funny because it's like you'd think having the like the license or name of Space Invaders, which is like a very iconic popular arcade game, especially in the era. You'd think that would be enough. And they're like, no, man, they're like, we got to take some art from a cool movie, too. Yeah, I think that the art package sold this game, though. Oh, yeah. Also, though, it's probably this again, another Jim Patla game that sold over 10,000, this 11,400 units. Jim's just moving units, dude. so i bet at this point if you're an operator and you have some of his previous games yeah you're like cool sign me up sign me up dude i'm getting this 100 i'm getting this we're also looking at this at the lens of like 40 years later whereas at the time i don't know maybe people liked seeing the symmetrical stuff maybe people liked some of the different things you know there's it's hard to put yourself in the shoes of a 13 year old kid in 1980 i think there's something to say about patla games i think there's they do there's something there he's i mean you're looking at the list of them he's selling the crap out of games he's a pinball legend i think we need to look at the psychology of what this game does too because this is a first theme based off a video game and during this time like they're going up against the like first era of mass arcade games and so the arcade became a battleground for both video games and pinball and so this is kind of you know, they're taking a knee a little bit to video games. They're like, no, we'll theme it after a video game, try to pull those kids over there, pump some coins in our machine, and we're going to make, you know, 11,000 of them. Yep. It's kind of a trippy thing. Yeah, and then from there we go to another Jim Patlaw game, his third in a row, Rolling Stones. He's a busy man. Yeah, Rolling Stones is fun, easy. Rhodes is like, it's too easy, it's boring, don't do it. I'm like, ah. We're talking about classic Rolling Stones here, obviously. You're on the podcast. You're following along, I hope. Yeah, I'm talking about the Stern one. Still in 1980, folks. Yeah. Yeah, I don't have too much to say on that. I want to get into the next one. Yeah. One of the best pinball machines of all time. It's just an amazing classic from George Christian. It didn't sell very many, so don't let that sway your opinions on it. It's a 1980s mystic. Yeah, I don't know. Someone take it away. Brilliantly brutal. Every shot puts you in danger. and just even where your orbits are, it's weird. The trajectory is weird. Like you have to nail these shots perfectly and the captive ball to increase your bonus multiplier. Tough shot, really tough shot. And like your front drops to get all those in a row without touching a pop bumper or a side sling to change your value from a pyramid to an eye. And because it's basically a... Filling out a tic-tac-toe. Exactly, thank you. Tic-tac-toe, bingo cards, but there are two currencies. There's like the all-seeing eye or there's like these little pyramids. Yeah, which alternates with the photorealistic, like there's a light that changes, whichever one's illuminated on the playfield, it'll change what's displayed on the back glass. It's got a sick art package, too. The art package is unbelievable. I think it's like, I love the cabinet stencil that they used on it. Cobras and skulls. Skeleton, but it's got like an Egyptian motif, so it's like skeleton with like one of those Egyptian pharaoh headdresses on. It's just, and some snakes. It's sick, man. sick the back glass it's kind of yeah because it's kind of like a like a carnival like fortune teller kind of all these magicians and then there's satan like whispering yeah there's literally satan on the back glass is fucking sick it's good go ahead stick your dick in the mashed potatoes yeah and it's got three banks of drops like on the left the right and the center they're all very dangerous but you need them to complete your boards like we're saying yeah this is like the george christian like this is one of those games that when you play these you're just like fuck yeah this game is awesome every pinball machine would be like that and that's why i think we we hold them to a high standard when like when we like uh talk about dolly and nitro ground shaker and stuff because it's like this is good shit yeah this is his first which sold so much less which is strange um yeah that's why we're like those numbers they don't mean shit now george christian is an amazing designer one who we're trying to build a whole episode on for y'all in the future since he's a lot of our favorite designers from this era. True, yeah. Oh, yeah. Right up there with the Richies. Yeah, he doesn't get enough attention now. He sold absolutely – this game didn't sell particularly well, but some of the best-selling games of all time were George Pristons. Yeah. It's basically him, Pat Lawler, Steve Ritchie. Those are the guys that ever broke $20,000. Yeah, well, look at Jim Patla's games, dude. Yeah, insane. Dude, Jim Patla's a monster. I mean, dude, look what – his output in 1980 is the same. Yeah. It is insane. It is insane. That's a lot of work. He did. Yeah. We're looking at Four Machines. Yeah, Four Machines in 1980. That's a busy, busy year. So after Mystic, we get into another one of the Ballywide Bodies, Hot Doggin', which is like freestyle skiing themed. It's kind of a unique outlier, this one, because I don't think anyone's too... There's not a lot. I mean, I'm sure people will like it. I haven't spent any time on it, so I don't want to dog on it too hard. It's the only one on this list I haven't played. Yeah And they did speak to it I know I played all of these That wow They didn sell a lot of them It an oddball theme It funny It like the same way I like No Fear I like the theme and art package and everything. It's a guy jumping on his skis. It has to be. I agree with that. I like the name. I like that it's called Hot Dog and... Hot Dog themed skiing pinball machine. You want to marry two things that are awesome? Hot Dogs and skiing. And then we get into Jim Powell. as I think this is his least uh least successful game the lowest production number and it's also probably my favorite on this list Viking which is Viking themed and it's cool as hell it's so sick the theme is like the the art package is awesome it's got this uh saucer that it falls into in the middle a lot that will kick it right down the middle and fuck you it's so good it's got this shot it's like what I was saying it feels like it's symmetrical but it's not as symmetrical as his other games. He's got a shot that kind of wraps around. So it's got some fun, cool shit in it. Lots of spinners, which I think you love, Ron. Yeah, oh yeah. And those spinners put that value in and they collect and that saucer. So you get kind of that double hit. The inlanes are also very unique. It's got really cool. Yeah, they kind of copied that to keep this topical. Jaws coming out soon from Stern or it's already out when you're listening to this. They kind of copied that for that where there's a post in the out lane and you can bounce it off of that through a one-way gate into the in lane. So it's friendlier than other games of this era in that way but it also throws it down the middle on you so much in my experience anyway that it doesn't really feel overly friendly it's a cool game i think viking is a kick-ass game it is yeah it's just it's worth a lot because it's rare and it's cool but uh it is fun if you ever see one make sure you play it very unique yeah only two thousand of those made and um yeah it took me up until like this last year that i've got an opportunity to play it yeah not very comment after that we see skateball hell yeah skateboarding california van roller skating themed masterpiece it's a look into spicoli's dreams oh dude it's so another man this is just a i'm like getting hyped the further we go down this list right now i'm like you think it's better and better skateball is sick if you love drops you love skateball if you love unique shots you love skateball if you love shake yeah it's got that great plunge shot that you can plunge all the way up and around to the top i think it's that was ted zale who was a long time bally designer before this era so like 10 years before he was like in the 60s he was like the main designer there he started doing this he started with this like cross playfield plunge shot process old playfield and whips back around to the top so that's sort of like an homage to him it's interesting because Skateball, if you look at it, it's a good example of like things are more than the sum of their parts. Because if you look at it, it has a very similar layout to Williams Flash designed by Steve Ritchie. A lot of the stuff's in the same places. You could like say Skateball's kind of a ripoff because Flash came out the year before. But Skateball plays so much different and so much better. Yeah, I agree. It's also got a great switch, reverse, outlane, inlane thing on the left side. It's got a unique... Even on the right side, it's got a unique outlane thing on the right side. Yeah, the whole thing is sick. There's lots of nudging on the outlanes, very unique gameplay. And it's another one that's kind of friendlier for this era. So if you're new to Solid States, I think it's one that kind of sucks you in right away. It really has a big scoring moment. It does, yeah. If you can max out your bonus collect hole, and then you can just, if you can hit it and then survive, and then hit it again, you can blow this machine up. It's hard to do, but you can do it. A skilled player can do it. I will say the last thing about this game is, this is the first time you see Greg Freres on art. Yeah. Legendary Greg Freres, who is still working. He's working at Stern now, right now. I think he's the head of the art department still to this day. but you'll see him through the merger later on when williams buys bally through all the 90s games kind of famously did a lot of work with like he did like the elvira games he did like the doctor dude games did a lot of work with dennis nordman i mean did no fear the game you have that we talked about oh yeah there's the good one rick ferris is a fucking legend so yes yeah and this is the first Claude Fernandez game on the list as well. Yeah, which is interesting. I don't know much about Claude. I know that he did another game that we're going to talk about shortly, which was my first game, so I'll just hold my piece until then. Hold your tongue. So after Skateball, how do you follow up a masterpiece like Skateball with what is 100% my wife's favorite game of all time? It's probably up there for me personally. It's another George Christian masterpiece. Zero faults. perfect game sold like shit frontier 1980 amazing game we all love this game perfect game perfect game it's like perfect game perfect theme it's ridiculous and campy and cool as hell at the same time this is basically the movie jeremiah johnson as a game it's a guy there's a guy on the back glass or on the play field in the back i was like shirt off holding a knife at like attacking fighting a bear yeah um got some wolves you got some wolves you know they're just looming about you know if this game kicks your ass you will spend so much money in quarters in the machine you don't like quarters give them a frontier they'll take them really fast and but it will you know it made me a better player 100 just being able to save the ball from these crazy situations you're put in where the pop bumpers throw the ball like your targets like if you want to hit the targets to advance your animals through the den instead of going up through the top like yeah good luck you're gonna need to be good at saving the game you know the ball it's funny because it's one of those games that you play it and the safest shot is ripping the spinner and sending it back up which feeds into exposed pop and that's when you realize you're like no shot safe you're fighting for yeah you're fighting for control all the time and it's just great it's like a huge like black bonus cash-in kind of game yeah you're trying to fill your den of predators There's three columns to your den. You can get them just by the lanes up at top, so you get them off the plunge. Or if you hit the spinner, like Alex is saying, you can advance up that way. And there's also three corresponding ABC stand-up targets on the lower play field. But again, every shot's dangerous on the game. You get so close so many times. A bunch of in-line drops on the left-hand side. Yeah, your bear drops. Your bear drops. Oh, yes. Or your bonus multiplier, yeah. Or bear hunt. God, and that's so much fun. It's so much fun. And those bear drops. so george christian likes doing inline drops like that but those bear drops are they're all kind of i guess do the same thing but it's like the shot gets progressively more dangerous the more drops you have down just because the way they roll back yeah it just gains more momentum the further up you go yeah and so yeah it'll hit like the little donut of rubber and just kick out just a little bit so cocky because it's like yeah you smash the first drop you get it right back on the flipper you're like oh yeah easy yeah i can just go through that you're like if you're if you're not feeling good on the spinner shaw on the left flipper you're like well i'm gonna just go for bears and then you get fucked on the third drop second drop or whatever and you're like i'm an idiot why did i ever do that i suck at pinball and you put another quarter in and it's just so yeah you have to adapt with the game because it is changing on you no matter where the shots are and yeah it'll make you better at saving the game or saving ball i should say it's one of those games that just feels perfect it feels really does it i mean it just feels like everything's in the perfect spot there's variety and what you shoot for at any given time especially for a game of this era people think these games are simple they are if you're comparing them to a modern rule set damn they are hard to do yeah hard to do the whole thing you got to be skilled that's the thing you know skilled you know you could have a massive rule set and be a simpleton on the flippers but you have to be fucking skilled if you want points on this game yeah it's so good and the sound so good on it sounds so good yeah the crickets start intensifying throughout the gameplay wolves i mean how many times we oh it's so good everything about the game is perfect from there we get back into a game that actually sold some numbers uh xenon by greg mech is that how you pronounce his last name i never know i believe it's good and yeah this is a really unique game because it's got full like digital sound it was composed by a woman whose name i'm blanking on right now Suzanne Ciani yeah yeah she's suzanne like uh five grammys and was known for like one of the first divas or queens of synth uh yeah so like badass composer badass musician badass producer she's a legend outside of pinball and it just sort of like nicely yeah dabbled in pinball and we benefited from it as pinball fans yeah because she kind of raised the bar here on like integrated sounds and what you could do with it and it was also unique because as far as i'm thinking this was the first game from bally with a ramp on it and multiball oh i didn't know it was the first multiball valley first but it had both oh gotcha gotcha had both yeah and the first ramp it's got like a single tube ramp yeah so if you're a ramp guy you got one right there if you're a multiball guy you got it it's the first valley game with speech right yep yep yeah sorry that's what i Yeah, it's the first ballet game with speech, and it's got a ramp. I think the first ramp. It's got like a little tube. Yep, it has a little, it has like a 90 degree little metal ramp, and then it goes up into a transparent plastic tube. It's called the Tube Shot. You know that because Suzanne says over and over, try a tube shot. Yeah. It's awesome. The game's very cool. It can be a little one note because you want to throw it up top over and over, but it's a really fun game. It's grown on me a lot. Damn, and the art package, so good. So good. So good. It's nice to see that it actually sold 11,000 units because it's an oddball one. You know they put a lot of love and work into it, and it's cool. Yeah, very cool. It's just good all around. After that, you want to talk ramps. Oh, boy. We got better than one ramp. We got, like, three up to an upper level. And our first elevated play field. Yeah, with Flash Gordon from Claude Fernandez, 10,000 produced, 1981. So right after a famous game by Steve Ritchie called Black Knight. Oh, I've never heard of that one. Never heard of it? Oh, huh. Yeah. So this is after Black Knight set the world on fire. We're not talking about Williams games here too much. It's not like Claude copied Steve Ritchie's last big game with Skateball, and now he's maybe copying Steve Ritchie's next big game with Black Knight. Hey, if you're going to draw inspiration, draw it from the king, dude. It's true. It's got an upper playfield, famously. That's what we're drawing parallels with Black Knight here. Black Knight was the first game with an upper playfield. Flash Gordon has an upper play field, which you plunge into. There's a flipper up top that you can hit some different drops. It's the first game I owned. It's the first game I bought, because I bought a pretty roached out one for about $700. It was the first pinball machine I ever owned. Rosie and I went to go pick it up. And he helped me load it in and bring it down to my basement. And the game is famously brutally difficult. Like, unbelievably brutally difficult. Unrelenting. unrelenting it's got some inline drops on the lower play field on the right hand side that's my favorite feature is just going for those to get extra ball right off the bat because you need it yeah you need it on that game it's another game that every shot puts you in danger and if you can control it in that situation the control of that game is just getting it up to the upper play field it's just like that's what you want to do that's true most upper play field games but man it's it's it's a good time and it's based on a famous movie that came out around this time i have never seen the movie from the art package i know queen did the soundtrack for it yes from the art package it looks fucking bat shit like it's amazing it's great it's amazing it's campy campy sci-fi space opera yeah it's wonderful before he was flash gordon he was quarterback for the new york jets oh wow that's like in the movie or yeah that's the character yeah then he gets on a plane and everything goes astray yeah okay this seems no it's great and emperor ming who's the bad the villain and it's just fantastic it's a fantastic movie and it's a really good bimbo machine another one of those but then once again claude claude's good work is followed up with another masterpiece from george christian and one that could finally fucking sell because it was themed after something everybody loves pool pool this is eight ball deluxe 1981 they did 13 000 of them or so and they re-ran it a couple times because it was so popular yeah and it's a sequel to his previous game eight ball which best-selling pinball machine of all time when it came yes and at this time was still the best-selling promotion of all time so this was the sequel to that game and it's sort of famously uh one of ty's favorite games yeah this is one this is the first machine i bought um i love this thing so much all the action around the entire play field you don't go for just one strategy you take what it gives you because it is a motherfucker you have three naked pop bumpers that can throw the ball absolutely anywhere and you have to really just catch the ball and you're like okay cool i'm gonna go for the orbit and get extra balls so we can survive longer or you know what i'm going to be ambitious knock down all my ball drops get that 56 000 and then start going for my bonus multiplier you have to stick to those and just keep it rolling and just hang on for dear life because there's so much chaos within the layout of that game the ball goes fucking everywhere it's so much fun it's just like one of those ones i just love every time like trying to go for the eight ball or whatever and it also got phenomenal call outs yeah it kind of got like the same it recycles the speech but it changes yeah it a second squawk and talk uh board uh the first one was in flash gordon and so yeah you get these you get more call-outs than you did in previous games it had more memory yep it would still you know dinosaur yeah but it tells you what to do but you're like no i don't want to do that like it's also another very good art package it's all around and it just like very much has that 80s smoking inside pool hall vibes yeah it's uh margaret hudson's first uh art pack yeah which kind of like encompassing art package i think yeah i think she had done some plastics or something i know she has yeah but this i think might have been her first back glass that's kind of sick so it's like they were working i don't know it's kind of cool ballet to actually be like working with uh women artists and like women sound designers and stuff yeah in the early 80s yeah not something you would have seen prior to this era for sure man that thing is eight ball the blocks is genuinely one of the best games of all time it's a fantastic game everyone loves it i mean if you were playing pinball at this era people will ask you about this game like this is a famous game and yeah margaret hudson did the full art package here and she deserves her own episode in the future which will do for sure and she's won awards for this you know back to what you're saying alan too like like everybody has played this like have like creative directors that have worked with them past like oh you were like pinball yeah yeah totally like you played eight ball blocks i'm like yeah you're gonna call i've played it buddy oh i played it yeah fucking known one uh yeah and it's yeah when you go on location and there's quite a few people out it's the one like the old timers really gravitate to and i've seen like an old like couple of dudes that will like uh they have a little notebook where they keep score of how many times they get free play not who has the better score how many like credits they won that's how you know they've been playing pinball for a while yeah and they only play that is kind of charming to see. Yeah, that's great. After that, we go back to another widebody. It's from Claude Fernandez, Embryon. It's a really cool game. It's got Comic Sans-inspired text. It's got one of the most questionable typeface choices on this list. Yeah, it's... But other than that, it's kind of this bizarre sci-fi theme, and it's a cool game. I like that one. Just a dude holding a giant space egg, you know, harvesting other space eggs. Very creepy art by Tony Ramuni. Yeah. Very cool, very creepy, weird art. You build the story around this thing, and it's just bizarre. You're like, oh, you've been in your own space shuttle for a while? He's like, yeah. You want to see my egg collection? You're like, what made those eggs, buddy? Oh, yeah, it's bizarre. It's good. After that, another game that's known probably mostly for its art is Fathom. Ward Pemberton in 1981, they made 3,500 of those things, and it's gorgeous. I think this is Ward's first game. I believe this is Ward's first game. First on this list, for sure. I think he came into being a designer around this time at Bally. So I believe this is his first game. It's a very collectible game. An Australian company just remade this. Made some new fathoms, added some new code. It's famous for its art package by Greg Freras, who we talked about earlier. The art package is unbelievable. It's so cool. the layout is the layout is very cool very interesting but alan you have like an interesting story about having this at wedgehead when we first opened we had a fathom i don't know how interesting the story is but we had a fathom and it's one of those games where being a fan of solid state games my business partner rodsey he he finally got a nice one and we had it and we were so excited we were playing it we were playing it we're playing it and it was almost like we were kind of looking at each other like who's gonna say it and then we're just sort of like there's something about this game and it's probably just us it's a well-loved game it's one of the famous from this era and one of the most expensive from this era yeah we're both kind of like like there's something about it that leaves me flat like i want it to be better i think it is as a game to play because it does have multiball it does it's got a bunch of drop targets including inline drops um it's kind of like a choose your own adventure game you like either go blue or green and that corresponds with the multiball you want to get but other than that yeah it does fall flat for me too i just kind of lose it interest um i think it's one of those ones it's just hyped up so much more and it's worth three times as much as a lot of really good games on this list and to us it's like you try not to let that affect your opinions of games but it's like when you know that and you're like boy you could have had three eight ball deluxes or frontiers for the price of this fathom and you're like it's pretty but it ain't like as good as those other games nice piece of furniture if it was the same price if it was the same price as everything else i think we would kind of judge it differently but all of us i feel like went into it with high hopes because it's such a hyped game and that kind of hurts it it is gorgeous though and i think it's fun it's got some unique stuff on it it's got that huge like gate at the top of the ball kind of falls through it's it's got some cool stuff but it's just uh yeah it doesn't it like i wanted it no it doesn't slap as much from there what do we got medusa another mid game that's just medusa's another very cool art package though yeah and medusa's got like the translucent flippers and stuff right translucent red flippers got it's not a true upper play field like it's not a different level it's just partitioned it's partitioned off uh but it's got the coolest like little between your lower flippers like as your center train on a gimmick episode we talked about extra button gimmicks yeah this is a good one it's a good one because it it's got like a little post that kind of like if you drain down the center you can press the extra button on the side of the cabinet it'll kind of punch it like it'll punch it back up into the center of the field it's so sick it's like yeah only get five of those punches and uh jason had this for a while and we got kind of bored of playing and you're like okay you can't hit the ball with the flippers you can only punch it with center so you get the highest score that entertained us a little bit more than playing it regularly from there we have another gorgeous game that does not land for me again it's centaur 1981 still and how many did they sell of this not enough i love it uh i'm on the opposite side of the spectrum i have a lot of fun playing it there's some bizarre moments for sure that's in this is another one haggis is remaking because there's a huge demand they're valuable and yeah because they They make a lot, again, like Fathom. They only made 3,700. This is a Jim Patla game. It's probably, if you asked a lot of people to look at this list, they would say this is his best game that he ever designed, which is strange that they made so few of them. But I think, like Ty was saying, Pac-Man was released in November of 1980. Yeah. So video games were directly competing with pinball. Yeah. The games that he was selling in 79, in 1980, now when he's Centaur in 1981, Pac-Man's already broke. You have a lot of other games like Space Invaders, and you have these big games, Robotron. You have all these games that are eating up quarters. So you're starting to sell less pinball. Yep. The market's saturated. Everyone wants to play video games. You need a gimmick, too. And this game provides it in an interesting way. You can have up to eight balls in play for multiball. Yeah, which is wild. It's insane. It's like we're in the era where multi-balls at all are still a novelty, and it has an auto-launcher, right? Yeah, it's up to the upper right-hand portion of the game. It's got great, again, in-lanes where you can bounce the ball from an out-lane off of a post back into the in-lane through a gate. You've got to spell orbs in order to get your first multiball, and then you're off. And the art package is black and white, chromatic. Yeah, the philosophy was they wanted the lights to do the coloring, and they have, like, lots of colored inserts, and so that was provided. Yeah, it's like red and green. Yeah, and some blues, so, yeah, your orange or blue. Lots of red, but, yeah. Another gorgeous art package. It's got a half-motorcycle, half-man guy on the back glass. Really sick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bug lady riding his back. Yeah, it's just, like, everyone's dream to be half-motorcycle, half-human. It's so metal. The art package is so metal. Did you know the art package was lifted? I don't know if you guys have ever seen the album cover for Lady Gaga's Born This Way. And it's straight up like she's half motorcycle and it's black and white. Oh, no shit. 100%. There's no confirmation because how would you confirm something like that? But you see it. Like if you guys saw it out of context, you'd be like, well, that's knockoff. Like Centaur. I'll call her and ask her. It's 100% stolen, Centaur. Lady Gaga's an easy get. We should just bring her. Yeah, don't worry. I'll have her on the podcast. Yeah, we'll get her on the podcast. We'll talk about it. We took her on speed dial a while ago, but she always picks up. Yeah. And then after this, we get to our last game of this before the U.S. government rudely canceled the Susan B. Anthony coins on us. And it's Electra. Yeah. How many of that one were made? 2,950 of them. And that's from Claude Fernandez again. And do you guys have much to say about Electra? I just mesmerized by like the backlash. That's about it. I play it and I'll get a little lost. There's a lot going on. Yeah. Yeah. I just, like, only opportunity I have to play this is at next level, and it's next to a bunch of other amazing games, so I just kind of fade it. That's been my experience, too. I've played it to play it, and it hasn't stuck with me. It's a game that I probably should put some more time on, because looking at this list, I like Claude Jose Fernandez other games a lot. Yeah. And so... Who did he rip off for Elektra? Yeah, we've got to find what Williams looks exactly like this play field. But, yeah, that's kind of it. It's a really unique era for Bally because it's like we said, these games are gorgeous. They're some of the best games ever made. They're some of the biggest selling games ever made. They're really iconic. If you ask a lot of older guys that have been in the hobby for a long time, they're best games. Chances are this SBA era would capture at least one of them. It does, yeah. And yeah, production really drops off in 1982. They go from producing like 10 games to 8 games and then in 1982 drops to 5 unique properties. Well, yeah, man, if they stop producing the Susebi Anthony coin and everything goes to shit. Arcade profits plummeted once they took that. Dude, the economy took a dump. You know, this has me really curious, and I know we've got some Canadian operator friends that you've talked to in the past, Alan, but if we ever get a chance, we should ask them about loonies and toonies and how they handle them up there. Yeah, I will. We're trying to get a couple Canadian operators on the show here shortly in the future. Dude, I would love to install a Looney or Toonie coin acceptor in a rush or something in the States. Yeah, that'd be fucking cool. And make it be like, you drop a Toonie in and you get 10 games. Yeah, it has to be metric, for sure. Or something just be like absurd, because it would just be funny to see if anyone brought a Toonie in. Yeah. And you'd be like, put them here, bud. Oh, it's for the nice price, eh? So one Toonie will get you 10, and it's the metric system, so it's 10. So it's extra nice for you. A Looney, on the other hand, only five. but still nice you just use one of those eh so yeah i think that kind of wraps it up do you guys got anything you wanted to say before we uh you know close out this golden era of valleys this truly is the golden era of valleys this is their rocket shot from kind of last place in the pinball industry in the pinball minds to first place it's a very short period that we covered what two years yeah two years and we they made that many games they made 23 games it's insane man yeah and just a weird confluence of events where you do have the uprise of video games and arcades and then they really have to come to bat with these heavy hitting solid state beauties and they did they delivered on every expectation of making sick games jim patla rick comek george christian you know ward pemberton bob fernandez like these guys showed up yeah they're like they're fighting for their lives and you see that throughout pinball again and again every time the industries in peril people put some of their best work forward and uh i think we'll talk about that sometime when we get into like system 11 eras because i know that was another crash and it's it's just cool this will be a familiar refrain of the pinball rise and fall in popularity over its different eras but this is the golden era this is the susan b anthony years of valley pinball 1979 to 1981 uh and i'm your host alan from the wedgehead pinball podcast i want to thank my guest ty palmer yeah thanks for having me on great friends you can see him at wedgehead behind the bar and he'll kick your ass on skateball or harlem or any one of these fucking games if you get the wrong idea let's play some dollar games ty will kick your ass on any of these solid state games he's an assassin uh thanks alex once again for hosting us in your basement studio for everyone listening i'm gonna end this like i always end these episodes i'm gonna implore you try to find some of these Bally games. You've heard the stories. Try to go find some of these games. Use the pinball map. Support operators that put some of these really cool old games out there. A lot of these games are just in collections now. They're in private collections. Dude's got them cheap, and they're just stored away in some basement. Go out and play them on location. They're incredible games. Some of the best games Bally ever made in their entire history are right here in these two years, and I hope you go out and enjoy them. Until next time, good luck. Don't suck. Flash! Flash, I love you! But we only have 14 hours to save the Earth! Flash!