Multiball: The Story of Pinball

S2E5: The History of Scoring

My score was four billion, seven hundred million points. In the context of that particular machine, it was slightly below average. Episode 5 asks the question nobody thinks to ask: how did we get here? From bumpers worth ten points on five-reel displays that maxed out in the hundreds of thousands, to multiball modes that generate half a billion points and scores that need ten digits to express — the history of pinball scoring is one of the strangest and most revealing stories in the design history of the game. We trace score inflation from its physical constraints in the EM era through solid state's liberation of the numbers, the DMD era's sophisticated use of scoring differentials as design tools, and the billion-point present where the numbers have lost their human scale entirely.

S2E4: The Ramp

There is a particular shot in pinball that feels better than almost any other. The ball finds the ramp entrance, starts to climb, and does something that still feels slightly miraculous no matter how many times you've seen it: it goes up. Episode 4 is the history of the ramp — the inclined plane that became pinball's most satisfying shot type and one of its most consequential design innovations. We trace the pre-ramp playfield, the High Speed moment of 1986 when Steve Ritchie proved that a ramp could express a theme rather than just route a ball, the distinct personalities of solid versus wire form ramps, and a tour through the canon of great ramp machines from The Addams Family to Godzilla. The ramp, it turns out, is not just a feature. It's a feeling.

S2E3: A History of Pinball Sound

Close your eyes. I'm going to describe some sounds, and I want you to tell me where you are. Episode 3 is a complete history of how pinball learned to speak — from the physical bells and chimes of the EM era, sounds produced by real objects striking real objects with no amplifier in sight, through the primitive bleeps of early solid state machines, the synthesizer era's first genuine music, Gorgar's revolutionary speech, and the full cinematic audio environments of the modern game. It's a story about feedback, personality, and the specific irreplaceable honesty of a sound that is caused by the thing you can hear rather than played back from a recording.

S2E2: The Evolution of the Backglass

Before you play a pinball machine, you look at it. And the thing it shows you — most prominently, most insistently, from the greatest distance — is the backglass. Episode 2 tells the complete visual history of pinball's most prominent surface. From the hand-painted reverse glass panels of the EM era — a unique American folk art that glowed rather than merely reflected — through the silk-screened solid state period, the licensed celebrity portraits of the 1970s and 80s, the uneasy integration of the dot matrix display, and into the fully digital LCD screens of the modern boutique machine. It's a history of commercial art in America, told through the face of the pinball cabinet.

S2E1: A History of the Upper Playfield

Every pinball machine ever made was flat — one inclined surface, one plane of play — until 1980, when Steve Ritchie looked at a playfield and asked: what if the ball could go up? In our Season 2 opener we trace the full history of the upper playfield, from the pre-ramp single-level machines of the EM era to Black Knight's landmark two-level design, through the DMD era's networked spatial systems and into the multi-level architecture of modern machines. Along the way we examine what makes a great upper playfield work — the five design principles that separate the machines that got it right from the ones that didn't. It's a story about space, ambition, and the moment pinball stopped being flat.