Pinball Memories, Part III
This is Flip-a-Card.
Flip-a-Card was one of the classic Gottlieb games. It was the oldest game in the UC when I started college and for some reason (probably because it kept sucking down quarters) it stayed there for a couple years, where most games went in and out in the course of a semester or two.
The object of the game was to get all the cards in the clubs suit from deuce to ace. Once that happened, the ace and the right flipper ramp would light up for the special (a free game). The tough cards to get were the 7 and 8, which could not be shot directly from the flippers but required you to bounce the ball off the right and center bumpers, respectively.
The savior was the kick-out hole, which would spin a random card from the five to the ace. If the ace was the last card and it spun it, the game would give you a special, too.
Here's the cool story about this game. My friends Doug & Christine were big fans of the game back in college, and would almost only play that machine after dinner. A few years college, they married (I was an usher at the wedding). A couple years after that they got a hankering to play Flip-a-Card again.
But there was one problem. It was an old machine, and difficult to find. So they kept looking in the classifieds and even recruited me in Phoenix to try to find a copy, but they could never locate one. Even after I became internet-savvy, I'd post requests, and never get a response.
Then one day about 4 years ago, Doug was reading the paper. There had been some floods in Central New Jersey, and the story on the front page was about how business was coming back to the towns that had been flooded. In the background of the picture was a store advertising pinball machines for sale, and he could just make out the phone number. So he called and asked if they had a copy of Flip-a-Card and the guy said yes. Doug and Chris went down that night to check out the machine, and quickly made the purchase.
But the story doesn't end there. When they got the machine home there was a sticker with a price on the glass, so they peeled it off. And underneath was a license from the town of Madison, NJ, the town where we had gone to college. Yep, in an amazing coincidence, they had come across the exact same machine we used to pump quarters into for several years.
One minor note: The picture at the top is from a Virtual Pinball recreation of the game. Whoever did the table messed up on the flippers which were the older, small kind as you can see here:
Prior entry in this series.
