Space Invaders

Meanwhile - Back at the Arcade

In the Winter Gardens I found a Bally Space Invaders. It stood next to a Williams Pharaoh and a couple of more recent machines: Raven and Genesis. Now, Space Invaders was one of my all-time favourite pinballs. I remember the days around 1980 when we would go out onto the Golden Mile almost every night playing five balls for 10p on these machines.

It used to be fairly easy to take the score around the clock upon which, if you were lucky, three replays would be given. These were days when arcade mechanics were a little more knowledgable - dare I say capable of reading the instructions? Often the default settings of games would be altered. This Space Invaders played, just about, but one of the four flippers was dead and several features refused to work. There was no chance of taking this game around the clock! A disinterested cashier took my address to pass onto the owner but whether or not it ever reached him I've no idea as no one ever contacted me. First Leisure own the Winter Gardens but the arcades were held on a concession basis. The other Winter Gardens arcade held a 1982 Black Knight and a Centaur.

The Black Knight had suffered a broken playfield glass at some time which had been replaced by a wierd framed affair. This gave the player an impression more akin to peering into a goldfish bowl than playing a pinball machine. The Centaur seemed to be in excellent condition though.

Finding my favourite game, Space Invaders in a Blackpool arcade and being unable to do anything about it set me off looking. In one Pleasure Beach arcade I found a row of old pins including, Elektra, Spectrum, Nitro Groundshaker and Silverball Mania. The last was almost a normal-sized copy of the wide-bodied Space Invaders and I had made my mind up to try for a purchase when, near the Ghost Train, in the back of an arcade, switched on but apparently terminally ill, were not only Space Invaders but a Xenon and a 1982 Black Knight.

Now the story of the acquisition is a long one and not of technical interest but in the end - that is the end of the summer season - the pins were eventually brought by my brother Frank. He had, after all, the earmarks of a pinball fanatic: a collection of classic cars (mostly in the same sort of state as I had brought Gorgar in). The interests seemed to go together, for some reason I don’t understand.

Anyway, the arcade owner actually delivered them to Frank’s house in a box van. Still on legs and with top box attached. Now Frank’s front ‘‘garden’’ is what you might describe as small. Space Invaders filled it. There was no chance of carrying them through the front door without taking them to bits and I’m afraid that pedestrians had to manoeuvre around two pinball machines that had to be left standing on the pavement until we could dismantle them in turn. At least it was a nice night weather wise! I’d had enough dealings with waterlogged pinball cabinets!

Taking Space Invaders to bits revealed two things, one: a certain amount of sand. Yes, Blackpool can be a breezy place and the beach is regularly and freely distributed around those parts of the town adjacent to it. The Pleasure Beach is so called because it was originally built on the beach. Even half a mile or a mile from the sea at Blackpool’s South Shore you can find sand by digging down a foot or so.

The second thing we found was the original mylar playfield covering, supplied with the machine when new and still attached to it’s backing paper. Agh! Despite it never having been used the playfield was in pretty good condition, but a bare patch had been gouged out of the paintwork in front of the right kicker.

The playfield of Black Knight was better than my Williams playfields, but drop target stickers were peeling and the bumper cap was broken. There was some damage to playfield plastics as well. The plunger lane of Black Knight goes in a straight line up the right hand side of the playfield right up the top end where it hits a ramp which causes the ball to loop up and enter the top playfield, travelling back down towards the top flipper.

In multiball play all playfield scores are multiplied by the number of balls in play i.e. 2 or 3. Because of the broken playfield plastic it is sometimes possible to jump one ball back down the loop and to the plunger. The player can then concentrate on fielding the remaining ball or balls, having an easier task with every score doubled or trebled. Once the playfield balls have drained the one in the plunger lane can be brought back into play. Cheating? It’s man against machine - you play every machine to make the best use of the way it is set up.

Whilst I’m on that subject, here’s a message to any arcade operators who may read this drivel - I mean ‘article’... Do you check your games regularly? I’ve seen people in arcades really abusing machines simply because the tilt mechanism is so lenient it may as well not be there. I’m not talking about nudging, I’m talking about picking up and dropping or yanking so forcefully that they bang against the next machine, spoiling someone else’s play. If players are doing damage to your machines it’s no one’s fault but yours, when setting the tilt correctly would mean they lose their game (and therefore their money) and take away the point of doing it.

Mind you it’s not only players who can abuse machines. We were in Morecambe one day, playing on the then-new Simpsons pinball. The ball got stuck in the saucer which refused to kick it up into the right hand tube. The arcade mechanic’s way of dealing with this problem was to pick up the right side of the machine, tilting the whole game to an angle of 45 degrees and then simply let it go to drop back with a hell of a crash. Would you treat a Personal Computer that way? What’s the difference? Except that PC’s are a lot cheaper!

Meanwhile back at Bispham Flippers South Shore branch we were "oohing" and "aahing" at the boards inside the two Bally games. Neither worked at all although by pressing the test button on Xenon’s sound board we - and the rest of Blackpool - knew that there were no problems with that particular PCB! It was set rather loud and to make things worse, delivered the words: ‘‘Try me again!’’ in a sexy female voice, immediately boosting Frank’s reputation with his neighbours.

The arcade manager who had sold the machines also had a Harlem Globetrotters pinball in another arcade on the Pleasure Beach. This was up a long flight of stairs near the Space Tower and Log Flume and was having to be emptied so that the park could start to build what will be the world’s highest roller coaster. Harlem Globetrotters was a mess. Almost half the playfield was just bare wood, the paint totally worn away. He had stripped out two of the computer boards, but offered what remained of the machine to Frank for free, so it could be used for spares. The only problem? "The only way I can get it down those stairs is to throw it down..."

In the end he must have found someone to help as Globetrotters arrived intact but for the aforementioned playfield paint and two boards. With the two Bally machines we entered a new phase in our fettling technique. We started swapping chips from one CPU board to the other, a delicate operation described in previous articles. Doing this identified some decidedly duff chips and we ordered some replacements. This, combined with our usual test meter, soldering iron and wet-finger-in-the-air-to-check-wind-direction procedures got Space Invaders working beautifully. Space Invaders is a wide-bodied, four-flippered game with a horseshoe loop, captive ball and a re-entry gate to the plunger lane protected by a drop target. It’s my favourite game of all time and once we had got it working, Fran (Frances, my wife not Frank, my brother) bought it for my Christmas present. It used to sit in my living room, getting played to death on Friday nights when my parents come round. Now it is in the spare bedroom and unfortunately is disguised as a shelf... But I have hopes!!! The score displays go up to 999999 and current high score for a three ball game is three times round the clock and back up to 750,000, scored by me!

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