yea alex, you are reading my mind...
short digression on pinball scoring...
first we had woodrails, which scored in the millions...
then we went to 3 reel machines, and they were hard to rollover and get the "magic 1"...
then we went to 4 reels, scoring inflated somewaht, but was still rather low, and machines were really really hard to roll over (i'm thinking of my royal guard, and other machines of that era)... replays usually started in the 2000's...
4 reel scoring then inflated somewhat (4 square, for example), where you could roll it a bit more often, and replays started in the 5-6000 range...
the we went to the "dummy 0" machines (pro football) with 4 reels... scoring was basically the same as the 4 square era games, but you got the psychological satisfaction of "higher scores" (even though they were really the same), and replays started in the 50-60000 range... these machines scored a max of 99,999, with no love for the 100,000...
scoring then inflated again (jacks open), where you could roll the machine a lot easier, but replays often started in 110-120000 range... these games gave you the 100,000 love, either via a "light up 1" or "light up 100,000"...
i'm not familiar enough with the williams/bally games that had a reel for the 100,000's to comment on those... did those have 2 dummy zeros?
"new games" score in the zillions, but really, scoring isn't any different from the way it has always been... basically, scoring has always been 4 significant digits, with the extra zeros added on the end as a psychological factor... the "real differences" in how machines scored are the "inflations" noted...
and it makes sense... it's pointless to score "1 point" on a game that requires 120,000 to get a replay...