Eric's Arcana and RiderX

You may or may not know that I’m a pinball afficianado. Yes, yes, “ever since I was a young boy, I played the silver ball…”

During the arcade boom of the early 1980s, arcades were everywhere, and while they generally focused on video games, there were always a few pins. I spent lots of time and money on both, but pinball had more of a fascination, for three very important reasons:

1. If you are decent on one pinball machine, you are decent on all of them. This is very much not the case on arcade machines; your skills on Defender help you when you play Tron, but you aren’t automatically decent.
2. The physicality is much better. You get to shake the machine. No, you are *required* to subtly nudge and shake the machine while you play if you are going to be a good player. You work on your advanced moves. And you enter a society of players who know how to play the right way. It’s a bit of a craft.
3. You can win free games. Plus, the difficulty level on a pin is mostly linear; yes, it becomes a *little* harder on most games as your points go up, but it’s not a lot harder. What that means is that once you are good, it becomes easier to get high scores. And, every once in a while, probability and skill will align, you will walk into an arcade, put one quarter into the pin, and play for half an hour, with the game knocking to announce your skill when you win a free game. And then, after that time, you will turn to the 12-year-old kid who has been watching you play and say, “I have to leave. Do you want my games?”

So, anyway, I played a bunch of pinball in my young days, but it tapered off when I got older because pins and vids became much harder to find. You could find them in bars, but I don’t do well with cigarette smoke, so I didn’t play as much as I used to.

Then, sometime in my 30s, I realized that a) it was possible to own a pinball machine, and b) I could afford to do so. So, I craftily bought a Williams Bad Cats:

The reason it was crafty is that I bought it because a) it was a relatively inexpensive machine (I think I paid $800 + shipping), and b) it was my wife’s favorite machine.

I reconditioned it, played it for a while, but there was still a problem.

I wanted a Twilight Zone…

Twilight zone is complex machine. A really complex machine, with ramps, ramp diverters, a working pinball machine, a magnetic mini-playfield, and a impressively complex ruleset. Oh, and it has a lightweight ceramic “powerball” that moves really fast, two different 3-ball multiballs, and – if you are worthy – “Lost in the Zone”, a 6-ball timed multiball mode.

In fact, it was so complex that it didn’t really do well commercially; novice players found it too challenging and confusing.

But skilled players loved it, and made it a hot commodity in the resale market. I was lucky/smart enough to buy mine around 10 years ago, when machines are a bit more plentiful, and paid around $3500 + shipping to get it. These days you will probably play twice that.