Ep. 8 — Twilight Zone (Bally, 1993)

After designing pinball’s all-time bestseller, Williams handed Pat Lawlor a blank check and asked what he wanted to build next. His answer, after a 16-month development cycle, was Twilight Zone. This episode of The Skill Shot steps up to Bally’s 1993 widebody SuperPin — a working mechanical clock, a real gumball machine, a non-magnetic ceramic Powerball, and a pair of invisible magnet-powered flippers on the Powerfield mini-playfield, all wrapped in John Youssi art hiding references to dozens of the show’s episodes.

The verdict: A 91 is the best score on this list so far, and it’s earned — the shots are excellent, the code is the deepest of any machine here, and the theme execution is unmatched, right down to Golden Earring’s title track remixed straight into the soundtrack. The catch is build quality: this is a mechanically dense machine, and something is almost always due for a tune-up. Clean players trade in the $5,000 to $8,000 range, with restored examples pushing past $10,000 — steep, but for a machine still argued to be the best pinball ever made, worth the maintenance headache.

← Back to all episodes

← Newer: Ep. 9 — The Mandalorian (Stern, 2021)  |  Older: Ep. 7 — The Hobbit (Jersey Jack, 2016) →