Has Anybody Seen Video Game-Themed Pinball Machines?

[racketboy]

List the ones you've seen.
Include pictures if available!

Here's a cool Super Mario Bros. one to get us started:
http://www.racketboy.com/roomplay/2006/ ... chine.html

[durkada]

Well, being a pinball afficianado -- over 14 in my collection -- I can say that most of the video game-cum-pinball machines are garbage. Rather than link any individually, I'd rather recommend that people go to http://www.ipdb.org and browse around. Some of the ones I can name off the top of my head are:

Defender -- decent, but dull.
Space Invaders -- nice artwork -- very ominous! Beautifully headbox.
Roller Coaster Tycoon -- drab, one of Lawlor's least impressive designs -- but recent!
Baby Pac Man -- not horrible, not quite good.
Q-Bert -- one of the more bizarre and interesting desgins. The board consists, primarily, of a giant loop. Extremely rare, and from one of the last impressive breaths of manufacturer Gottlieb.
Joust -- one in my personal collection. Single player affords no fun, but this is a head-to-head pinball machine which shines for two. Extremely rare, with only 420 made.

I'm sure there are several others, but they escape me at present.

You can add some more games, if you wish to include those which added video game elements -- such as Caveman and the Pinball 2000 games (Revenge from Mars, Star Wars Ep 1)...

And off the direct shot, you have a weird game everyone should see and revile: Atari's Hercules. As the name implies, the game is huge -- so huge, in fact, that it eschews ball bearing pinballs for pool cue balls! Oddly, Atari did not make a single pin based off of a successful video game franchise.

And on one more fringe note, was manufacturer Capcom's foray into pinball making. They began ramping up as Williams was falling apart, culling many of their best designers to build Capcom games. Capcom showed great promise, and delivered a few phenomenal machines -- Pinball Magic being one of the best. But what drove Williams to ruin, is the same thing which caused Capcom to abort the manufacturer of Big Bang Bar. Pinball was dying -- profit margins were shrinking, and more and more operators refused to maintain the machines in favor of the relatively simple video game.

Check out Pinmame to play recreations of your favorite games on recreated virtually playfields, utilizing authentic roms for machine accuracy

[racketboy]

Well, being a pinball afficianado -- over 14 in my collection -- I can say that most of the video game-cum-pinball machines are garbage. Rather than link any individually, I'd rather recommend that people go to http://www.ipdb.org and browse around. Some of the ones I can name off the top of my head are:

Defender -- decent, but dull.
Space Invaders -- nice artwork -- very ominous! Beautifully headbox.
Roller Coaster Tycoon -- drab, one of Lawlor's least impressive designs -- but recent!
Baby Pac Man -- not horrible, not quite good.
Q-Bert -- one of the more bizarre and interesting desgins. The board consists, primarily, of a giant loop. Extremely rare, and from one of the last impressive breaths of manufacturer Gottlieb.
Joust -- one in my personal collection. Single player affords no fun, but this is a head-to-head pinball machine which shines for two. Extremely rare, with only 420 made.

I'm sure there are several others, but they escape me at present.

You can add some more games, if you wish to include those which added video game elements -- such as Caveman and the Pinball 2000 games (Revenge from Mars, Star Wars Ep 1)...

And off the direct shot, you have a weird game everyone should see and revile: Atari's Hercules. As the name implies, the game is huge -- so huge, in fact, that it eschews ball bearing pinballs for pool cue balls! Oddly, Atari did not make a single pin based off of a successful video game franchise.

And on one more fringe note, was manufacturer Capcom's foray into pinball making. They began ramping up as Williams was falling apart, culling many of their best designers to build Capcom games. Capcom showed great promise, and delivered a few phenomenal machines -- Pinball Magic being one of the best. But what drove Williams to ruin, is the same thing which caused Capcom to abort the manufacturer of Big Bang Bar. Pinball was dying -- profit margins were shrinking, and more and more operators refused to maintain the machines in favor of the relatively simple video game.

Check out Pinmame to play recreations of your favorite games on recreated virtually playfields, utilizing authentic roms for machine accuracy

Wow -- you really know your stuff!
Thanks for the info!

[grittykitty]

i used to love that mario pinball game as a kid! i think it must have been in 3rd grade when it first came out (i think nintendo power did a feature on it, which is where i found out about it). i used to get sad that i couldn't play it all the time, so i'd make my own pinball games out of mini cereal boxes, popsicle sticks, and marbles

[mcampellone]

I have seen Gottlieb's Street Fighter Pinball - kinda cool, but like the prior poster said, most pin games based on videogames are really not the greatest. I also collect pingames - I have 4 in my collection (and I will have to STAY at 4 - space is NO MORE! LOL)... I have

Star Trek The Next Generation
Doctor Who
The Machine - Bride Of Pinbot
High Speed II

I have personally found that collecting pinball is a very difficult chore - its so hard to find machines that have not been abused. The upkeep can be very expensive, and of course the space issue is always a tough one to tackle. But they are indeed fun!

Have a great day,

Mike

[durkada]

I have seen Gottlieb's Street Fighter Pinball - kinda cool, but like the prior poster said, most pin games based on videogames are really not the greatest. I also collect pingames - I have 4 in my collection (and I will have to STAY at 4 - space is NO MORE! LOL)... I have

Star Trek The Next Generation
Doctor Who
The Machine - Bride Of Pinbot
High Speed II

I have personally found that collecting pinball is a very difficult chore - its so hard to find machines that have not been abused. The upkeep can be very expensive, and of course the space issue is always a tough one to tackle. But they are indeed fun!

Have a great day,

Mike

Ha! Yes, I forgot about Street Fighter. Garbage! And its not by Capcom, but licensed by Gottlieb who were cranking out shiat after shiat by that time.

But I do envy your Bride of Pinbot -- an absolute blast of a machine. Certainly it is the kinkiest ever made, with some of the most blatantly freudian images ever to be found.

I built up my collection by buying machines which had solid playfields, but were otherwise inoperable. This was, even back in the day when a Theater of Magic went for a little over a grand, an effort to save money. Now, good luck buying even a piece of crap at a decent price! If I started collecting today, I doubt I would have a single machine due to the prohibitive Ebay influenced pricing.

For giggles:

Attack from Mars
Monster Bash
Medieval Madness
Joust
Indiana Jones
Funhouse
Theater of Magic
Pinball Magic
Haunted House
Black Hole
Volcano
Cirqus Voltaire
Twilight Zone
Pinbot
Jokerz

I think thats all I'm really hoping to snag the recent Simpson's game.

[vysethebold]

I was also going to mention Pinbot. It is my favorite pinball table ever. It is kinda a video game pinball table but in the reverse of what you had in mind, Racket. The table was so popular that they made an NES version of it, made by RARE nonetheless! The NES version has some really unique features including a four-player mode (pass the controller style), differently shaped balls (pyramids + cubes which look really good for an 8-bit 3D object), a monster that will eat your ball, and voice clips (on an NES!!!). The physical table though is awesome in its own right. I think it is also one of the most involved to progress through the missions with many steps to complete. The trick is to find a table that completely works, though, because the table had so many moving parts that they tended to short often.

[c0wb0y]

Designer Steve Ritchie joined the Stern team recently and there are rumors circulating about a Tron pinball in the works. That's a pretty solid Game/Movie theme if true.

[girlracer]

I just bought my 1st pinball a couple weeks ago and its a Street Fighter 2

over the weekend it got stripped down for a cleaning and wax treatment with a new rubber bumper kit and pinballs. also all the lights on the playfield got replaced as most of them were burnt out.

sure its not twilight zone machine but its not bad for a 1st machine

[Erik_Twice]

There's a Spy Hunter pinball that people said is good. Should not be too hard to find pictures of it.