Favorite Pinball machines: Earthshaker

This became a favorite of mine not because it was particularly special but because our local minimart always had a single pinball machine in the store and for a few months this was the one they had. There were probably a lot of better ones out there but I simply didn't have much exposure to them.

It was pretty damn great though and I'll attempt to explain why

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For one thing, this was one of the first pinball games that I played that had two really awesome aspects of it that would be and likely still are incorporated into all future pinball games: Ramps and also multi-ball that resulted in chaotic play with 3 balls at once.

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If you look at the area I have circled there, that was a relatively easy part to land the ball with a well timed or accidental left flipper action. When you hit that area, the ball would get "locked" and you would get another one without affecting your overall ball count. Once you got a certain number of them up there you would get a chance to release them all at once and that is where the chaos began. I wouldn't say that I was terribly good at managing 3 balls at once and only someone with autism probably would be, but it was loads of fun and resulted in a lot of points.

The machine would also have minor tremors that shook the entire machine and if you did the correct sequence of events an EARTHSHAKER!!!! would occur and the game just went mental, releasing all of your locked balls as well as 2 additional ones that would auto-launch from the normal ball entry area. 3 balls in play at once doesn't do it for you? How about 5?

When this would happen for me I would just wildly press the flippers hoping for something good to happen and i think in that situation that is really the best you can hope for.

If you watch just a few minutes into this vid you can see that this person, who is much more talented than I am at pinball hits the center ramp over and over and over again like it is nothing to them. I'm pretty impressed with that and was nowhere near that good at it.

On a side note a guy that I went to high school with had a job after high school where he became a pinball machine repair technician and he regaled me with the immensely complex the interior workings of a pinball machine actually is. The good news was that the parts were relatively universal, and provided it was the same company's machines, he would almost always have the necessary parts with him to repair said machine, no matter what the theme of the machine was.

Sadly, pinball machines are a rarity these days but I do think they would be more likely to see a resurgence than arcade video games would because since they are physical in nature, they aren't very easy to replicate digitally.

I haven't seen a pinball machine in some random place like a minimart or convenience store in over a decade and they probably only exist at places like Dave and Buster's or some sort of pinball museum.

We still have our memories though and for me Earthshaker is the one that stands out in my mind.