Quoted from chuckwurt:In 1992 Williams agreement with its distributors gave them exclusive sales right to a territory. They did not have the right to sell outside of their territory. But some were doing just that. In order to track the games origin from a distributor into the wild, the blacklight number was added. Williams knew where the game was originally shipped. If the game turned up outside of that territory, it was assumed that the distributor had "Bootlegged" the game outside of his territory. Then it was up to management to decide what penalty to incur on the offender. Remember, this was during a time when it was PROFITABLE to sell and operate pinball machines. This practice would be laughable today because ANY sale of a pinball machine is a good sale.
Thanks for the answer, that is a really interesting background story! Are there any known published lists or database of these numbers and what distributors they corresponded to? It would be very interesting to see where my machine started its life.
For the record the black lamp is indeed for scorpions, nothing else.
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Ft Lupton, CO
