Me and Mine!
I am not a perfectionist and I accept that wear marks, breaks and scratches are inevitable for 25 year old pinballs. If I only had a couple of games I could've concentrated on geting a couple of perfect games but instead my goal slowly became owning all the Gottlieb System 80 games and a select few 80A games. In time the idea came to make them available to others to play and enjoy. |
 Spidey was my first pin and the reasons for choosing it were simple: I liked the theme and it worked! I paid too much money for it but I loved playing it. A few dead lamps bugged me and I scratched around for help and through the internet I found that there was not too much info to be had, so I started to contact other Spidey owners through Mr. Pinball ads. I slowly learned - my first real fix was replacing the dead transistors that drove those lamps. I didn't know that Gottlieb System 80 pinballs had such a bad reputation but when I found out I was surprised: what, my faithful Spidey a loser? No way. I decided to put the information I had on a website, which has expanded with my pinball collection and knowledge since then.  Another strenuous year of working and travelling later (including 3 months in Greece), in January 1998, I was back where I bought Spidey as a colleague was vaguely interested in a pinball. In the store was a Black Hole with the main playfield up, revealing the lower playfield...wowee, it looked complex. Right then I didn't know that it was a System 80 game but anyway I wasn't going to buy a second pin: no room, no need, no interest. By the time the summer came, I had learnt that Black Hole was an unreliable System 80 pig, and Brigitte and I were looking for a bigger apartment to live in.....and there would be room for a second pin. The Black Hole was still there and the guy still hadn't fixed it but he said he would. I got the still unfixed BH (dead up-kicker) delivered when we moved in that October. By then I had found 2 key allies: Clay Harrell's website and a French guy who was a System 80 fan too and knew what he was talking about: Pascal Janin is my teacher and mentor in all things electronic and pinball. I had that nasty BH System 80 beast kicking again very quickly. I made an ad looking for a cheap game just to do up for fun and incredibly I ended up with a second BH, bought for 300 francs. I put all the best parts onto my first BH, but fixed up and cleaned the second then looked to trade it for something else. I avoided a Bally Campus Queens EM from down the road and instead ended up with another BH from Yves Muck in Freiburg, Germany: dead but with a double-mirrored backglass - a rare find in Europe. Initially I just swapped heads but when we founded RePlay (see below), the rightful heads and bodies reunited. I bought another BH without a backglass in October 2002 for peanuts and for parts!  I'm on my second! My first Devil's Dare came through an ad on the now dormant Swiss Pinball website, bought on 15th April 1999, from a guy whose name translates as "Strangler". It was cheap, in good condition and a doddle to fix but it stood in our cellar until 24th October when my former boss persuaded me to sell it to him. In October 2000, I took another DD in better condition for the same price from Lucas Wyss's collection.  Christian H�berli mailed me when I was working in Sevilla for 5 weeks, offering me a Panthera for a nice price and we met up on 18.September'99 in Lyss, near the Swiss capital, Berne. I didn't have space for it except in the cellar but it was very cheap. According to licensing stickers on the cabinet, this game spent some time at the Joker Spielsalon in Oberentfelden in rural Aargau in 1982 and was still being operated in the canton in 1986! Panthera gave me my first chance to remove torn and peeling Mylar: it came off quite easily and naphtha lifted the glue nicely. Christian helped me get a second Panthera for free almost a year later. The owner had tried and failed to fix it and given it up. I eventually used its cabinet to house an Eclipse playfield.  I had to have Haunted House but finding one took more than 18 months. Finally I bought one from Yves Muck in Freiburg, Germany. The backglass was not great but Pascal Janin traded with me and I got a much nicer one. The playfield though was good and a set of NOS plastics from TNT Amusements made it great. This was the last game to go into our cellar though: there were 5 of them stacked up in there and it was hard to get in even. It was time to find a pinball room.
That same August, I had also made contact by chance with Lucas Wyss near Basel. Lucas had years earlier collected a lot of pinball machines including numerous System 80 games. After meeting and a lot of negotiations, we struck a deal on the following pins: James Bond 007, Mars god of war, Time Line, Volcano and 2 Spirit games. We collected these 6 on September 3rd (as well as a freebie Panthera, and a Nitro Ground Shaker on the way home that Kaspar had bought from another guy.  I never thought that I would even see a Spirit, never mind 2 for sale. Both were complete but unrestored and stood side by side in our pinball room: indeed a rare and wonderful sight! This only lasted a few months though as the second was collected by my friend Pascal Janin, to take back to France on 13 November. Both games' playfields were worn in places, the result of the excessive "super" flipper coils. The Spirit that I kept is a sample game sent to Novomat AG, the Swiss importers at the time. A lot of touch-up work was needed for the worn areas on the playfield. I replaced the super flipper coils with regular coils to reduce impact damage and wear. The restoration required replacement drop-targets from the Pinball Resource. and I splashed out on NOS plastics from TNT Amusements. Gorgeous game!  Time Line was unrestored and came with a populated but worn out playfield which provided the necessary parts to complete the renovation of the otherwise mint playfield. The artwork on Time Line has to be the raciest of all the System 80 games: it's overt sexual posing! Time Line is one of my favourite games to play....it's tough to remember what has to be shot to get the third X required to win a game of X's & O's but I just love to hear that gong ringing out for a replay!  Mars God of War was already restored by Lucas and in really pristine condition when I collected it. Mars has perhaps the most outstanding backglass of all the System 80 games through its use of the double-mirrored "infinity" glasses. I feel that Gottlieb also got it right on the gameplay and lighting and sound effects - proof that copying others was a good idea! Only the means of inserting the inner backglass is bad: really bad!  Volcano's shuddering eruption in attract mode and prior to what is inevitably always a short bout of multiball play, can scare the living daylights out of anyone if you crank up the volume a little. Gottlieb really put some effort into this game and the "subway" is a real marvel of design that is sadly hidden away beneath the playfield. I have to admit that I religiously make a point of showing the neanderthal men and babes on the backglass. which I just find incredibly funny!  Like Mars, James Bond was in fantastic condition when I received it. Perhaps this is a reflection of how little play it had as it's considered a dog of a game because of its time unit based play and the annoying double in-line flippers. I use the original time-based software and I've never even thought to try the 3/5-ball version as I like the time limit! With the James Bond tie-in, one thing's for sure, this unsuccesful game's value will appreciate with time.  Counterforce arrived on 13 November 2000, an alien invader from France, a gift from my friend, Pascal Janin. The game minus some boards was dirty, had broken plastics, worn playfield spots, a rat-chewed cabinet base and oak leaves inside it...a country boy then. Nice plastics were obtained in a trade with John Janas in Canada. After some careful renovation, including the removal of the poorest quality mylar ever applied to a playfield, it's really not too bad for a freebie!  Lucas Wyss offered me an incomplete Caveman for free when I'd collected the 6 pins from him in September, but there was no space in the van then. Even though it was missing every PCB, I did not turn it down though and there was room for it when I joined Kaspar to collect his 3 electromechanical Ballys. This oddball pinball is now complete. I was never much of a video-games player so maybe this will be the one!  Finding a Pink Panther had seemed unlikely but in October 2000 I got to see 2 that were the expendable spares of Switzerland's biggest pinball hoarder. Both were in poor condition and would have been the worst pin in my collection. He told us that after 2 days of renovation it would be worth 2500 Swiss Francs (then US$1500) but that he would take 350 for it.....even my wife laughed! Another offer came through Lucas Wyss: a friend of his would sell his. Fabian Fust was a giant and immensely likeable guy. I happily paid him twice what the other guy wanted for his wreck. It was money well spent as it's my daughter's favourite game, thanks to the Pink Panther.  Star Race came to me in a trade for my Bally Eight Ball, made in December 2002 with Ralf Thelen (website) in Bonn, Germany. Finding this rare game in such good condition was fantastic and thanks to a contact who knows a good German freight company it was realistic for me to extend my search for the games missing from my collection beyond Switzerland. As I looked to complete my collection, crossing the Swiss border was clearly inevitable as man of the missing games were apparently never imported here, or had already been gobbled up by the country's biggest Gottlieb pin hoarder.  Placing a wanted ad on a French website I bought a kit version of Eclipse in a James Bond cabinet from a dealer at the French collectors fair in Vierzon in May 2003. The backglass has some flaking, the playfield is a little worn and it had some broken plastics but it came at a good price and it was better than no Eclipse at all. It's slowly being restored and I got the plastics I needed from Jean-Ren� Karr in France! One day I plan to recreate the cabinet artwork of the rare Eclipse game on at least one side of the cabinet.  I collected my filthy Force II at the same Vierzon fair as Eclipse, from a pre-arranged trade with a French friend, Pierre Maciet, having failed to find this game in Switzerland. This is one of those games that was on either location in a coal-mine or else it was the miraculous survivor of a warehouse fire. Underneath the grime though the playfield and the rest of the game was still in good shape. I think Force II is an under-rated game that's quite fun to play but its artwork certainly isn't pretty.  The deal on this pair was a real double whammy! Switzerland's biggest Gottlieb hoarder came to see my growing collection in early 2003. Surprisingly he didn't have a Counterforce and I did, so he offered to trade a Rocky and a Striker, which he had doubles of in his enormous stockpile, for my humble purple pin. A great deal, but I really didn't want to lose my Counterforce so I decided that I would first find another one.
Rocky and Striker besides being rare finds are both very unusual games from John Trudeau, which feature a pair of flippers in regular formation on the left and right sides of the playfield. These arrangements respectively reflect the right and left fists of a boxer and the wings of a football pitch. Both games actually worked from the off but both needed a thorough cleaning.  So, there were just 2 left on the wanted list. I would flick through my System 80 flyers with my daughter and she'd tell me which games I had and the 2 I didn't: Q*Bert's Quest and Circus. Both games with themes that were very appealing to her. No matter how much stick a man gets from his wife, he cannot disappoint his daughter!
In August 2003, Brigitte and I moved into a new apartment we had bought and we also rented out the building's air-raid shelter (don't ask: Swiss law!). This became the new home of RePlay where Kaspar and I set up our best (working games). The old room became an infrequently visited storage room until Kaspar moved away from Luzern a year later, by which time I was working away from home and short on time for pinball. Kaspar's departure gave me the space to set up all my games in one room: finally! |
Contacts are everything and I obtained a second Counterforce from a guy in Geneva in a trade for my freebie Super Orbit pin. I first drove with him up to his weekend chalet in the French Alps to see it, then on 28.June 2003 we did the trade and a day later I offloaded it for these 2 rather rare games! Wahoo! Beat that deal!
Well Q*Bert was there for me to take as Jean Ren� Karr in Paris was having a warehouse clear-out prior to moving but I had to remove it quickly.....but how? My friend, Pierre Maciet came to the rescue and collected it for me and also agreed to sell me his Circus. Pierre brought both games from west of Paris to my friend Pascal Janin near Grenoble and I collected them on 17th March 2004. The collection is complete......but they still need some work to get them all up and running! Circus looked to be in good shape but everything below the playfield was rusted solid: I replaced everything!Finally, some other non-System 80 pins and even non-Gottlieb pins (shock, horror) seem to have come into and out of my hands along the way. Here are the ones still taking up space in my room:
 STAR TREK (Gottlieb, 1971) - My last game and my first electro-mechanical pin which I bought because it was very cheap and only 15 minutes� drive away. Actually I was the only bidder in an on-line auction and the seller didn�t take my 1 Swiss franc ($0.80!) winning bid, so I gave him a bottle of wine instead. He gave me 2 old 100 Lira coins that he found in the game � proof that this game crossed the Alps into Switzerland from our Italian neighbours! The game had been stored in a neighbour�s barn for years, which the seller was clearing out after his neighbour�s untimely death. The game was partially disassembled at some point as there were lots of pieces missing: legs, backbox door panel, lockdown bar, start button, ball shooter and the side-rails. The cabinet had also been painted blue. The backglass had some flaking so I mylared it. The playfield was dirty of course, thanks especially to the missing playfield glass but it's decent enough for its age. There are 2 broken plastics to repro. All in all a serious restoration project and that�s just the cosmetics � heaven help me on sorting out the electromechanical side! I used parts from my stock so it's almost complete again and my friend Dani has helped my to get her running. Star Trek is a single-player add-a-ball game that was made exclusively for the Italian market where laws prohibited the awarding of replays. The game was released in March 1971, with a production run of 1�450 games. The game shares exactly the same playfield design and artwork as ASTRO, another add-a-ball game released in October 1971, with a more modest production run of 500. The backglasses of the 2 games were similar. Both games featured Gordon Morison artwork and were designed by Ed Krinski. Despite the name, Gottlieb�s STAR TREK has no relation to the famous TV series other than the space theme. The symmetrical playfield features are limited to 3 pop-bumpers and a number of rollovers and spot targets which the player has to make to spell out S-T-A-R T-R-E-K. This is the way to earn an extra ball, or rather a �Wow�, as it wasn�t permitted even to call it an extra ball! |
(Gottlieb, 1979) - Bought on ebay.de from Yves Muck, who I knew, just to write the game rules for Pascal's Pi-1 CPU (which now runs the game full-time). It was cheap as it had no PCBs or plastics and was also supposed to be without the backglass. When I collected it though on 29.December 2001, Yves let me keep the backglass after a trade for another. The playfield was in good shape, and to my surprise it worked with a set of boards installed....GULP! In writing down the rules, I discovered that Joker Poker is a brilliant Krinski drop-target game. I started looking for the hard-to-find plastics and in May 2002, Joker Poker was rescued by a great set of repro-plastics from Pinball Rescue in Australia.
And the other games that have been and gone:Zaccaria TIME MACHINE (1983) - I was given this by the guy that sold me Spidey and BH. He was moving in March 2000 and didn't want to move it. The game had no CPU or driver boards (found in the UK for peanuts) and broken flippers (found in the US). It was in nice shape and I finally sold it in 2005 to my friend Dani, so I won back some space and some cash. Bally EIGHT BALL (1978) - This came with the Zaccaria Time Machine and had no backglass (replacement found in Germany) - I restored it and happily traded this boring game for my Star Race. Good deal! Bally SKATEBALL (1981) - Another freebie, this time from a private home. It was dead and no-one would buy it so they gave it away for free. I cleaned and fixed it up and traded it in May 2003 with a French colleague for a Gottlieb Force II!
The unwanted! In February 2001, our local dabbler in pinball/jukebox dealing was a bit strapped for cash and we were after some parts. Who else would buy all this old crap from him in his hour of debt? Where else would we find a lifetime of pinball parts? There was only one snag, he would only sell all the parts with the 8 pins he had and he wanted more for the cupboard full of manuals and schematics. The price was low though and we got the paperwork included in the price. Kaspar took the Bally Elektra, and I got 7 pins I didn't really need but figured I could sell off and get my money back - it took a while but I did! DataEast TIME MACHINE (1988) - Not a bad game with great music effects but happily SOLD! Playmatic SPACE GAMBLER (1978) - This early Spanish electronic game was a sad case: tough to repair, no chance to sell it and no space to keep it: parted out : ( Williams BLACK KNIGHT 2000 (1989) - The remake of a classic but I never thought the disco music was in keeping with the theme. Traded for Genie! Williams POLICE FORCE (1989) - A fun but very simple game - not my cup tea at all. SOLD! Williams DISCO FEVER (1978) - A dull game in every respect, made worse by the ridiculous banana flippers. SOLD to a grateful Swiss guy who played it to death as a young man! Williams STAR LIGHT (1984) - A rare game but not so interesting to play...which is probably why only 100 were made. SOLD!
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(Gottlieb, 1978) This was in the sort of shape that gets many a pin parted out. A dirt-engrained playfield, no chimes, a bent door that didn't close, and a thoroughly rotten cabinet. I restencilled an empty cabinet with a decent door that I was given, cleaned the playfield with Novus and then found a complete playfield in even nicer shape and did the swap. Sinbad was supposed to be a good player so I planned it to keep it, but to me it is a flawed game. I disliked the double in-line flippers in such proximity to the banks of drop-targets, and worse, the non-resetting of the drop-targets until all 10 are hit, and the bonus multiplier going nowehere until the single white drop-target is hit. I traded it but kept the spare playfield, and bought a backglass in the original backbox door-frame in January 2008, so in I can drop them into my CEOT3K and play Sinbad anytime I like.
Return to STORK's NEST PINSLast updated: 25.February 2008
