Visual History: A Story of Pinball Innovation in the Early Solid State Days
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Editors note: this piece was originally created by author John Smout on 12/02/2004. It's been edited for publishing and shared with us following John Smout's recent passing. John was a pinball aficionado from the UK and we're happy to give this piece some new visibility.
Atari pinball machines were always an oddity. Certain pinball collectors find them desirable. They were prone to problems as a result of the circuitry being directly underneath the playfield. If pieces of metal from the underside of the playfield worked loose and fell off they shorted out the game boards. Not many people in the field knew how to fix them, so many games got junked quite early on. Relatively few Atari pinballs now survive in working condition.
The game Atarians, was only the third micro-processor pinball game ever mass-produced and was actually made by Mirco games. Mirco games had made the first ever solid state pinball game, Spirit of 76, an ugly and boring game made in a very small quantity.
Atarians was the first ever wide-bodied pinball machine and the first ever pinball machine with electronic sound. So a milestone game.
These games were unusual in that the score displays were not in the backglass, but in the metal apron at the front left of the playfield, hence them all being on the one board like that.
The story behind these displays were originally inspired by a digital clock. Do one of those wavy effects like in the films please and go back in time to about 1974...
Camera pans to Dave Nutting of Phoenix Arizona, who is searching for an alternative to electro-mechanical scoring reels, something that will give his prototype pinball game a new look. LEDs are not yet available in a large enough format and he needs something about an inch high so it will be easily visible to the player. He sees a digital clock in a shopping mall, takes it back to the lab and mods it to work as a score display.
Nutting converts an existing Bally game called 'Flicker' to demonstrate his electronic system to Bally in September of 1974. Bally then starts work on their own electronic system. Meanwhile Nutting enters into an agreement with Mirco who produce Spirit of 76, thus making it the first commercial electronic pinball in 1975.
Bally eventually purchased Dave Nutting Associates, including the rights to Nutting's patents. Bally's first commercial microprocessor-based game, Freedom of 1976, was based on Nutting's Flicker prototype system. By an odd quirk of fate, the Flicker prototype itself resurfaced recently. Someone bought a junk Flicker and found all these wires and circuit boards inside...
Gottlieb and Williams decided to copy the Nutting design. This led to Bally suing Gottlieb and Williams for patent infringement in 1980. Damages were estimated at over $20 million.
-John Smout
