Word: wizard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...seminal force of Le Sacre lies in Stravinsky's instructions to the ten French horns, playing triple-forte at the piece's climax, to aim their bells up in the air. That was a magnificent gesture, but--and the same is true of the bold, star-spangled nipples on Wizard--it was only a refinement. There is no revolution to be found here, only a bit of new polish on a dull surface...
...makers of Wizard, the Bally Company, have carried pinball over the threshold of a new age. In pinball's infancy, the game's mechanisms were exceedingly simple, even one dimensional. For most machines the surface was the only reality. A given bumper, a given roll-over had a certain, fixed value, and one's score was no more or less than the sum of those values. It was not long, however, before a second dimension was introduced, utterly transforming a phenomenon that had been purely linear: certain targets or combinations of targets were designed to change the schedule of reward...
...opening or closing a gate. There was a short-lived trend toward multiball games, with certain holes shooting a second or third ball into play while the first was still active. But these were no better than tail fins on a design moving steadily toward obsolescence. Until Bally created Wizard, the essentially two-dimensional character of pinball remained...
Like nearly all of its predecessors, Wizard has a set of features, switched by a series of roll-overs, that mean the difference between assured victory and inevitable defeat: Thumper Bumper, Center Target, Double Bonus and Spinner. But to send a ball rolling over the roll-overs, at the upper right of the machine, is not enough to trigger the features--first, a set of flags associated with the roll-overs must themselves be triggered, by a set of targets spread across the surface of the machine...
...twin figures of Love and Evil, gyrating in painted ecstacy on Wizard's backboard, could not preside over a scene of more nearly apocalyptic import. It will never again be possible to construct a pinball machine with the relatively simple patterns we are familiar with--one bumper, regardless of sequence, predictably changing the value of another. In Wizard, only after the Thumper Bumper target is hit, or the Center Target target, are the appropriate flags flipped and roll-overs activated. And only then can the roll-overs activate their respective functions. The relationships of the many elements of the pinball...