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 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 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 Ferris 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 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 ferris 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 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 play fields 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.