You just crossed over... Into pinball! 10 years later.

It's 1998 - The very early stages of my pinball madness, I remember going online to look for my next pin to buy. I had just gotten a Doctor Who on loan from a friend and now I was ready to buy my own pin. I wanted a game that had all the features. A pin with at least four flippers! Ramps! Magnets! Six ball multiball! The more flyers I looked at, the more features my next pin had to have. Along came Dirty Harry, The Shadow, Flintstones.. Nicely priced, but they just didn't cut it on my must-have-features list. After some weeks I figured that maybe I wanted too much, until my eye fell on a 1993 Bally machine: The Twilight Zone. I vaguely remembered the television show, some real freaky stories and that eerie tune: "tada dada tada dada". Yep, this could be it, I thought!

After a short drive, to a nearby place called Delft, the TZ and I first met. I had never seen the game in real life and boy was it an exciting moment! The game was in excellent shape (although I wouldn't really know, it was my first machine, remember?) and the dude selling it looked pretty trustworthy to me. So after a few games, I felt a burning sensation in my pants: it was the money in my pocket, begging for a permanent holiday. And so there I bought my first pinball machine and now the pinball madness could really begin.

When I got home and put up the machine I remember wondering wether it would be Y2K-compliant. Haha. First I cleaned the whole darn machine before even playing one game to check wether it had survived the trip home. Fortunately it had and it was from that moment on until this very day (10 years now) that I spent every Friday Night playing pinball. Sometimes alone, more often with my friend Niels. Pretty soon we started to get really good at the game. Scores went up from 100M to 500M and then Niels went over 1 Billion, a memorable moment. We had a whole set of gestures we would do when the other would start a certain mode. Defeat the power: we would both bang on the glass. Extra ball: We would mimic talky Tina's voice sounding hilarious. The beers would kick in and we would have a night of fun under the watchfull eye of Rod Serling.

Another exclusive belonged to Niels'. The first Lost in the Zone wizard mode game was started and we both almost went crazy as the ultra cool animations were shown: "You have come to the end of your journey. Survival is everything."... Followed by 40 seconds of 6-ball multiball, absolute madness!

About three years after we got the machine I set my personal record on it: 3.7 Billion with just three balls. By then more machines had joined the collection and the solo-nights on the TZ were kind of over. My skills on the TZ went down, but my love of the game didn't and to this very day, 10 years later, it's still there. "tada dada tada dada! You have just crossed over... Into the Twilight Zone".