talking pinball machines. gorgar

Prices going up while quality is going down. Very impressive to convince people that's acceptable...

Love the T2 cannon....love the lane changers to get x2,x3 etc...love physical locks...........Joey

I love magnets.

Color DMDs and Color Screens took pinball to another level for me.

It modernized 20 year old technology.

Marcus

My first pinball OMG:

MULTI - BALLLLLL!!!!!

yep, I old and was easy to impress.

The Shadow lock is pretty magical.

The lighting in WoZ still blows me away.

The fact that Stern seriously licensed a Wrestlemania themed pinball.

Great topic.

For me it would be:

1) multi-color led's and the resulting light show. Games like AMH, to Aerosmith and Scott Danesi's Total Annihilation really seem to use these well.

2) the lcd display. Even though the game is played under the glass, these displays feel like an evolution that defines a modern pin.

3) magnets. Tons of fun and uses. BSD mistball is still a marvel.

4) Rules. Modern games can be incredibly deep; that adds a lot of variety and value.

Along the same lines, I think it will be interesting to see what new innovations move from gimmicks to core features. Dialed In is chuck full of concepts, it will be neat to see over time if any of them carry over and become standardized.

Thing coming out of the box on TAF, or Thing "being on the ball". Very cool.

T-Rex eating the ball on JP.

Strobe MB on AFM. Holy shit, is that awesome.

Sanctum on The Shadow.

Nearly everything on Capcom's Pinball Magic. What a boatload of toys that game showcases.

Pinball 2000, RFM will always be cool for me.

shaker motors - the one thing RFM is missing.

seeing Rotation VIII in action. I'll be darn.

Magnets. Honestly, it's my favorite thing in a pinball machine.

First time I saw the JM hand grab that ball @ Kev's house....that gave me a WoW factor...!!!........Joey

Thinking back, it was probably the changeover from EM to Solid State. I still remember watching an operator cart off an EM EK with a promise to bring back another game that we were really going to like. A few days later, we feast our eyes on EK again, this time it was a solid state game. People were lined up to play the game. Just watching the numbers roll over on the score displays was cool. That was at Skylark Bowl, place is gone now, nothing but an open field last time I drove by there.

Seeing Color DMDs on old games that I had grown used to seeing in red/organge. The first time I saw the animations that I'm used to, now in color, was pretty cool for me.

The price doubling from $3600 during years of record low inflation blew my mind. YMBMV

The AFM aliens with their wiggly rubber arms blew my mind!

Lane change is a simple feature I love and miss like hell on older machines that do not have it.

Rudy! I still think his interactions while playing is awesome. Really draws you in to believing he is real.

The overall experience of playing Black Knight when it first hit my local arcade.

the way WOZ uses color-changing LEDs.

Stern is like "this insert can be blue! and then it can be red!" meanwhile, JJP fades and sweeps and gradients and pinwheels color patterns across the full playfield, and skittle-bombs itself during Munchkin Modes. the lighting effects on that game are just gorgeous.

TZ gumball machine, Power ball and subways are all very great.

I want RFID technology to get integrated!!!! So we can stop using switches for everything and enhance the rules even more.

Escalating background sound - simple but was very effective
Black Hole lower playfield
Getaway supercharger

The jumping frog targets on Scared Stiff hitting the playfield glass are still a really cool effect!

The mech for mist multiball was sooo cool the first time (and maybe the last time) I saw it

Walking into Concord Bowl in St. Louis (still there) and seeing that the price for playing a game (Sing Along) had doubled in price from 5 cents to 10 cents. Three games for a quarter softened the blow a little. But gee, sometimes all you needed was a nickel to play for quite a while.

Not a single feature but I think ACDC was really a game changer as it was really the first game with a great risk/reward ruleset and color changing LEDs. It really felt different than all games before it. Since then games like TWD and Met have improved upon those features but at the time ACDC really impressed me.

I can honestly so about the only thing that REALLY did was the magnet lock in Shadow.

John

Just about everything on Multimorphic's P3 / Lexy Lightspeed - Escape From Earth machine blows my mind.

I like the idea of Stern's Mag Slings... but haven't really played a game with it yet so don't know if I really like it.
It's that kind of out-of-the-box thinking I like... take something like magnets and making them replace a "standard" Pinball Mech.

Magna save
being able to use a magnet to stop a ball from going down the outlane, awesome

The new way to update code.

No doubt the most radical change in pinball history. EM's were king, then the SS pins came & suddenly, the EM's vanished on location.