Panthera feautred on the front cover of Hartman Huff's 1987 book "Shoot Again!", published by Bastei-L�bbe Verlag of Germany. Designer Allen Edwall teamed up with artist Doug Watson for Panthera, and this is as good a reason for its prominent positioning. Edwall and Watson also paired for another System 80 game: James Bond 007. For Watson, 1980 was a busy year, as besides these 2 Gottlieb pins, he also did Big Game, Flight 2000 and Quicksilver at Stern, and Black Knight for Williams. Unlike most other System 80 pins Panthera only has 2 flippers, but many drop-targets: 3 banks of 4. Although the game play is simple it's not so easy to complete the objective: completing rollovers to light the correspondingly coloured drop-targets, and dropping those to advance the bonus multiplier. This keeps the game reasonably interesting at least. The game has a memory feature to reset the drop-targets from player-to-player, recreating the situation from the player's last ball. This is done by a tiny coil under each drop-target, which when activated flips the target down; a feature shared by James Bond 007 and Counterforce. Panthera was the first Gottlieb game with continuous background sound, but if you've ever heard it you'll know that it's nothing worth hearing: "a bear farting in the woods", to quote System 80 guru, Steve Charland. With such a reccomendation, one might think that Panthera would be unloved but in fact, the game was (and apparently still is) very popular in some of the former French colonies of North Africa, where its appeal is the suitablitly of the gameplay for gambling! |
