The Pinball Circus

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

2 Likes

Have you seen those gumball machines with a Rube Goldberg looking series of habitrails, spinning propellers, and such that the gumball goes through before it reaches the bottom? There’s one such machine at a Norms diner near where I live, and it’s always quite popular.

2 Likes

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

2 Likes

Have you also seen those gumball machines that look like really rudimentary pinball machines, with flippers and all? There is no drain at the bottom (and it’s impossible to drain out the bottom), and you’re supposed to use the flippers to get the gumball into holes near the top? No Rube Goldberg mechanisms, sadly. So there’s nothing that incorporates them both.

They’re absurdly common where I live. I think there are more of them than normal pinball machines around here. I see them at supermarkets, drug stores, strip malls, and every Fry’s Electronics I’ve been in, and there’s even one at Frank & Son Collectible Show.

2 Likes

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

Somebody make a mod for Stern lockdown bar buttons so I can “Punch It” with a pelvic thrust!

Not really!

3 Likes

Folks with a bit of a gut can already paunch it. :wink:

3 Likes

Okay, I went to El Super (a Hispanic-themed supermarket) in San Fernando and took a few pictures of it. They look like this:

Here’s a photo I took of the playfield:

The “Replay Button” is a rod at the front that basically pushes the ball back in play. Also, despite how dilapidated and dirty this thing looks, it has a QR code (middle sticker on the top-left corner of the window displaying the bouncy balls).

Definitely the opposite of The Pinball Circus in complexity. I think these are also completely mechanical, using no electrical power source at all (and the only energy source being the person at the machine). They’re basically the pinball counterpart to those bootleg-looking Neo-Geo machines that often accompany these. They seem to be pretty popular though. When I was at the checkout line, there was a little boy who was playing it for a few seconds. Instead of gumballs, of course, this one dispenses bouncy balls, though I am pretty certain the one at Frank & Son actually dispenses gumballs (though I assume for sanitary reasons, that machine’s playfield is actually wood, rather than the metal that this one is made of).

Considering how many of these I find, I find it a bit sad that wherever they’re located, they’re probably shaping the local perception of what pinball is more than anything else.

1 Like

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

3 Likes

The industry jargon is “grey-area games,” though I would argue there’s nothing particularly grey about that machine. :zipper_mouth:

The most typical grey area games are 8 liners that are basically slot machines with a 3x3 grid (hence 8 winning lines). If you manage to actually win (I can’t even imagine what the payback % is on those things - Vegas lowest allowed is 86% and it can go up to 99%+ especially on progressives depending on how much the progressive is at that moment), then, if the bartender or whoever knows you, you can get your credits paid off and they’ll hit a “knockoff switch” that resets them to 0.

Some games even have a kill switch that basically erases the entire game and memory in case of raids, etc. Not to be used lightly!

2 Likes

I have never seen a machine quite as blatant as that gum-winning one. What does the asterisk stand for where it says “FREE FUN”? (And I can see where it’s grey. That’d be the color of the casing around the pushing mechanism and of the duller coins.)

The bouncy ball dispensers, by the way, always guarantee at least one ball, which is what happens if it falls in the hole that reads “Sorry You Lose!” The holes that say “Winners Circle” get you two bouncy balls.

I have never seen those slot machines as described, or if I did, I didn’t recognize them as such. What kind of venues most commonly have them?

You can zoom into the pic pretty well if you download it. It basically gives a way to mail in for a free play voucher, max 1 per household per day. I’m sure the market will be happy to honor it. :expressionless:

Edit to add: I did some searching, too. The company has no website anywhere I can see. I did find one site (McGregor something) that had the model of game on a website full of nothing but grey area games.

Oh, I see it now! (I should’ve known Tilt Forums has a means of shrinking down large pictures, so I don’t have to scale them down myself.)

I WOULD say that the address mailed to is reasonably close by that I can travel there myself in an hour, but then I realized that P.O. boxes don’t necessarily have to even be in the same state where the company exists.

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

1 Like