Well deserved of its shitty reputation, but it does have some of those famous 90s Williams charms. The sound is fantastic, the art isn’t bad, and it certainly doesn’t look or feel cheap.

It also feels half baked and over baked at the same time, and you just the feeling the whole project was a bit of a disaster. I’m sure the old timers who worked there have some stories.

It has several massive but useless “toys,” and probably the worst upper playfield in pinball history with impossible to understand goals and no apparent reward. The rattly left ramp contraption and the finger slicing roulette wheel thing are both not fun, most shots are obscured, and the game just feels like a mess.

When these were $900 I was “hey buy one for the hell of it all day” but at current 90s pin pricing I could never justify bringing this thing in even on a lark. You don’t see them cheap enough anymore to make it worth the trouble.

Yeah “Popeye is better than LZ” is a searing hot take but I have a hunch it’s not going to age very well.

Those Williams old timers are always bitching about each other but I’m gonna take Steve’s side on this. Popeye was a terrible game driven by a creative lunatic who had clearly lost his touch that Williams forced down distributors’ throats - no Popeye? No mortal kombat 3. Tough titty.

That’s the only reason they made so many of those Popeye shit piles - it’s a truly awful game nobody wanted then and nobody wants now.

And the playfield still looks like a toilet seat.

At the point you are trying to come up with the handful of games that may be worse than the one being discussed, the battle is already lost.

I think it’s tim Arnold who said 5 percent of pinball machines are great, 5 percent are awful, and 90 percent are good.

I roughly subscribe to this theory. Wherever it may fall in the shame 100 listing, Popeye clearly resides in that awful 5 percent.

Tough but fair.

The flat one is just sad. Both the Popeyes I ended up with had the 3d version.

By the way, 30 posts and nobody has called it Poop-eye yet?

Yep...I used to have a rule. If a WPC game comes up for sale - any WPC game - in good shape for $1100 or less, I'm buying it. I probably bought 20 games with that ethos. I was able to ride that all the way up till around 2011!