Pinball Memories IV
This is Wizard, a pinball machine manufactured by Bally in 1975 and released to coincide with the opening of
Tommy, the movie. It was one of the first licensed games of the 1970s, starting a trend that continues to this day. That's supposed to be Tina Turner on the left, while Roger Daltrey appears to be taking excessive liberties with Ann-Margret, who was, after all, playing his mother in the movie.
As is perhaps true with all licensed games, the greater the amount of money spent on the license, the less spent on the game. Wizard was mildly entertaining but nothing extraordinary, although I'm sure it outsold all other pinball machines that year.
One interesting feature was the flipping flags. If you flipped them over by hitting one of four targets, then got the ball to travel down the right ramp, you could pick up different advances; one might light the double bonus, while another lit the spinner.
I seem to recall that if you got the ball down the right ramp with all of the targets flipped you'd light the special, which was a fairly straightforward shot, although risky. Other than that, there was little to shoot for with the left flipper, and folks quickly learned that by dead flippering when the ball came down the right ramp, you could get it to bounce back over to the right flipper, which had all the shots.
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