Mata Hari (Bally, 1978) was the first pinball machine I played over and over, back in the late '80s. My friend had constructed a little room underneath his house where all of us gathered to do whatever bored, unsupervised teenagers did before the advent of smartphones. He had Mata Hari and we would razz each other relentlessly while we played it over and over. Usually we tried to jinx the current player by yelling lines from The Exorcist at him. We simply couldn't get enough of the backglass and the beautiful Mata Hari. Hours of fun were had while playing that machine.
The next game I became addicted to was located at an arcade called Gameland North in Pullman, Washington: Elvira and the Party Monsters (Bally, 1989). As with Mata Hari, the backglass was easy on the eyes of a teenage boy, and the game included a lot of funny banter. I don't know how many quarters I dropped into that machine during my junior and senior years of high school. I liked Scared Stiff (Bally, 1996) even better. Whenever my best friend and I get together, we play Elvira and the Party Monsters, even though we have to drive an hour to the arcade where she "lives".
