The True Pinball Wizards - WMS Traditional Cache
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The True Pinball Wizards - WMS
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A Pill Bottle
Gorgar, the first-ever talking pinball machine
Black Knight, which introduced "Magna-Save" and Bonus Ball
Space Shuttle, which took the pinball industry by storm in 1984
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Hot Tip, First Solid-State Pinball
Until the 1970s, no pinball machine had any sort of computerization. Instead, the electromechanical games ran on a precarious balance of moving parts, with their guts resembling giant Rube Goldberg machines.
But beginning in 1977, manufacturers began running their games off of computer chips, and the machines became far less prone to mechanical failure. (Engineers could also take advantage of the chips to put in more intelligent and complex features.) Oddly, when the first so-called solid-state pinball machines came out, Williams was worried that customers used to the familiar feel of churning gears and ringing bells would be scared away by the high-tech new machines. To protect against this, the company filled the games with spinning gears that did nothing except make familiar noise.
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Williams Electronics was perhaps history's most legendary pinball manufacturer. By the late 1990s, it had gobbled up the pinball operations of Bally and Midway to make itself one of only two pinball companies left on the planet (and by far the larger of the two, accounting for more than 80 percent of the market). But Williams's pinball operation was also just one small division of what was then a large, publicly traded corporation, WMS Gaming, that saw greater profits from slot-machine sales than from complex, low-volume pinball games. The company had made moves to shut down the pinball operation, but not before giving its engineers one last-ditch effort to redefine the game for a new millennium--and save their jobs.
The result: Pinball 2000, a high-tech pinball/video-game hybrid in which players would aim the ball at projected holographic targets (click here to see the game in action). Because much of the playing field was built from projected video, the games for Pinball 2000 were designed to be easily converted between themes as future games were released. But that never happened. Only two Pinball 2000 games were ever produced: Revenge From Mars and the not-quite-as-fun Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. Although the new games sold moderately well, it wasn't enough for WMS, which closed the door on its entire pinball operation in 1999, leaving the much-smaller Stern Pinball as the world's sole manufacturer of pinball machines.
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