#7: Marvellous Marble Machines
Bonjour, marble friends!
Robert here from The Ball is Wild pinball culture newsletter 🪩 I always wanted to report on marble machines. It has to be one of the most amazing contraptions that is quite obviously pinball related when you think of it. The steel marbles may be smaller than within pinball machines, but other than that, a marble machine sure seems similar. It’s such a joy seeing hundreds of little silverballs rolling, bumping and jumping around without end.
Aside from pinball’s ultimate Rube Goldberg machine, in this issue we also dive into other astonishing and fun news from the wider world of analogue and digital pinball and pinball-likes. There is a post-Halloween spooky machine announcement, silverball videogame tips (including a brand new virtual reality game), or an approachable academic article on public pinball in different contexts. We even have news about (I think) the very first pinball culture action figure ever made!
IN THIS SEVENTH EDITION:
Editorial: Marvellous Marble Machines
Mini-Interview: Collaborative Marble Machine
News from the physical pinball world: Evil Dead
Silverball Academics: Public Pinball by Ryan Banfi
Pinball goes Pop: Roger Sharpe action figure
Videoballs: Xenotilt 1.0
Videoballs: Bounce Arcade
Videoballs Classic: Smash Hit
EDITORIAL:
Marvellous Marble Machines
The modern marble machine madness started in the mid 2010s, when Martin Molin of Swedish experimental pop band Wintergatan built and eventually finished a humongous handmade DIY-instrument simply called Marble Machine. The end result was anything but simple though, and so it’s no wonder that the respective video which shows Molin playing his 2000 marble heavy device has racked up over 257 million views by now.
Throughout the next decade and going into the future, Martin Molin made a career out of his maker and engineering skills and marble contraptions. He experiments with little steel balls in every conceivable way, builds strange new toy-like instruments, likes to perform songs with his selfmade devices, talks about his creation processes in detail, and, of course, also still iterates on the marble machine project(s) and ponders about the implications behind it and his creations.
His channel is vast, with so many videos full of ideas, thoughts, concepts, devices, music, and much more. It’s hard to imagine how just one person can come up with all this.
After Molin’s first big marble machine video went viral in 2016, the concept was picked up elsewhere many times ever since. You can find a couple of other marble machine accounts on Instagram, for instance, like this one, or that one, or this other one over here. There are also a lot of build-it-yourself marble machine kits with wooden elements that can be bought off the shelf.
In 2017, the long-established German board game and jigsaw puzzle company Ravensburger came up with its own marble machine brand called Gravitrax. Due to its modular system and the constant introduction of new elements, one can come up with quite impressive Gravitrax designs by now. There is also a dedicated community that emerged around this system where hobbyists like to show off their own constructions on social media.
MINI-INTERVIEW:
Collaborative Marble Machine
Amazed by all the marble rolling goodness throughout the last months, I recently stumbled upon an Austrian school project called Collaborative Marble Machine. Taking inspiration from digital art influencer pwnisher, the animation class at Technical College Spengergasse in Vienna came up with its own project: Here, each participating student develops her or his upright animation which is usually about five seconds long.
The catch is that all those creations are then tied together vertically. In addition, everything is narratively connected by a ball that falls and rolls through the animations, step by step going down all the way and thereby finding surprising routes through all the different terrain and design that is presented here. Truly a wonderful project!
I took the opportunity to visit Reinhard, the animation teacher, and two students, Hanna and Sem, who talked me through the project. You can find the Reel about the Collaborative Marble Machine at the new The Ball is Wild 🪩 Instagram account. While you’re here, why not take a minute to look around and leave a follow?
HEAVY MACHINES:
News from the physical pinball world: Evil Dead
Admittedly, I am not the biggest horror fan, but I have to give it to boutique pinball manufacturer Spooky Pinball: They really live up to their name. A company born out of two pinball fans doing passionate silverball hobby projects in the early 2010s, they kind of stumbled into becoming a proper manufacturer and thus growing into an important part of the pinball renaissance.
Spooky started off with small editions of horror themed machines: America’s Most Haunted, Rob Zombie’s Spookshow International, Alice Cooper’s Nightmare Castle. Some of the themes are non-spooky, too, but can compensate with their strong IPs like Rick & Morty or Scooby Doo. The newest announcement goes back to Spooky Pinball’s roots though: a game on the cult horror film series Evil Dead from the 80s.
From the looks of it, the game seems pretty convincing, with well-made toys and playfield elements like the infamous cabin or a small basement room in form of a tiny lowered play area. The films’ protagonist, Ash Williams, portrayed by Bruce Campell, is also on the project and delivers the callouts.
As it is the case with most of Spooky Pinball games, Evil Dead’s production run is limited — in this case capped at 888 machines. I’ve already heard from pinheads selling off some of their older machines in order to be able to preorder and pay up for this game. It sure seems like Evil Dead pinball would become a cult machine rather quickly.
SILVERBALL ACADEMICS:
Public Pinball by Ryan Banfi
While doing my own academic research on various aspects on pinball last Spring and Summer (that led to my own paper about which I will reveal more within one of the next issues of this newsletter), I found a researcher who digs deep into pinball: PhD candidate Ryan Banfi already published articles about narration in pinball and the hidden pinball machines in the anticapitalist role playing videogame Disco Elysium. He also gave a talk about pinball and gambling at Pintastic 2023.
Very recently, Banfi published another piece called Public Pinball which tackles the different public places and contexts where machines are put in, and what this tells us about the importance of the game and pinball’s relevance in pop culture and shared nostalgia. This text is not really an academic paper but rather a shorter magazine piece featuring a bunch of photos from different and sometimes uncommon pinball locations. (Avid readers of The Ball is Wild 🪩 will remember this topic from Issue #3 with an editorial about pinball in the wilds.)
Following up on pinball studies, Ryan Banfi plans to finish and release his dissertation Pinball: A Social History of an American Amusement probably next year. Publications on pinball are rare within game studies and academica as a whole, so having a young researcher taking on this focus is great news for everyone who also likes to ponder a little bit about media theory, history, psychology, philosophy, etc. between action-packed sessions of pinball play. Again, I will weigh into this myself soon and can then hopefully add a little more discourse about pinball as a unique game artefact.
PINBALL GOES POP:
Roger Sharpe action figure
This is at the same time a little silly but also quite awesome: Roger Sharpe, without a doubt pinball’s most famous contemporary personality (“the man who saved the game”, as he is often referred to, for instance in this 2022 movie) is getting his own action figure. Initiated and project-led by pinball website and newsletter Kineticist,
this figure is modeled after the famous image of Roger Sharpe demonstrating to the New York City Council that pinball is a game of skill, helping overturn long-standing bans and paving the way for the pinball community we have today.
Developed with the help and support of Roger Sharpe himself and limited to only 100 figures in the first edition, the item is already sold out, but will most likely be available again in the forseeable future. It might be too late for a Christmas present for this year though, especially if you live outside the US. Still, it’s definitely something to keep tabs on and probably one of the best collective presents for a pinhead who celebrates a significant birthday.
You can read about all the details and see a bunch of images (also from the creation of the action figure) in this blog post.
VIDEOBALLS:
Xenotilt 1.0
Xenotilt is one of the most frantic, audiovisually groundbreaking retro-styled sensory overflow video pinball games of all time. Originally released as Early Access in Summer of 2023 (and being the sequel to 2019’s Demon’s Tilt), it is a three table stacked digital silverball extravaganza with unending futuristic demonic metal and alien pixel body horror at its best. The game’s aesthetics pay hommage to the Crush series from the late 80s and early 90s (with Alien Crush from 1988 being the OG).
After over a year of iterating, bug fixing and content additions, Xenotilt finally released in the 1.0 version in mid November. Aside from a more stable code base, the game now features some new play modes, most notably Ex-Mode which adds three bonus tables and some new mechanics. Also new in are human characters called Survivors who function as even more perks (there have been some already) which you can collect to be able to gain more progress and points faster. There is also a time attack challenge called Crisis Mode.
I had a blast jumping into this crazy game again and getting swept away by all the colors, animations, callouts, sound effects and, of course, the retro score. The ball is truly wild here, although — as with all pinball — there is much nuance to it and controlled moves are coming naturally the more you play.
VIDEOBALLS:
Bounce Arcade
Recently, I took to my two virtual reality headsets again which I hadn’t used in months. The older one, Oculus Go, I didn’t even touch in years. And the newer device, a Quest 2, also first needed a major update so that it could be used again. As a casual VR player, I mostly collect recommendations for a while in preparation for the big day when I finally jump into a session with my headset again.
When it was VR time at my place last week, I checked out the games I wanted to try and also looked around the Meta store for news. That I would stumble upon a major pinball game wasn’t something I could hope for. And with Bounce Arcade, I surely was in for a surprise as it is quite unusual. It’s a first person paddle game that puts you inside a virtual pinball machine. Except this “machine” doesn’t feature a playfield but rather a 3D world where the ball bounces around in all directions. With your round-shaped paddle-hands, you can choose to reach into the world or stay back to block the ball when it comes towards you.
The modes in Bounce Arcade are mostly shoot-out mini games where your hands then become revolvers or phasers. Players can choose between four different worlds: a pirate, space, western and monster themed level, respectively. It would have been a shame if I hadn’t discovered this gem by accident. Which makes me wonder how much visibility Bounce Arcade has in the first place. So, if you already own a VR headset and are interested in pinball games (which you have already proven, fancy reader, by subscribing to and reading The Ball is Wild 🪩), don’t hesitate to play this.
VIDEOBALLS CLASSIC:
Smash Hit
Let’s stay with virtual reality for a bit longer. Remember me just now writing about my older headset, the Oculus Go? I had to completely reinitialize this device to be able to properly use it again. But before that, one app was still playable: Smash Hit, originally a smartphone game developed in the early/mid 2010s, the golden era of cool mobile indie titles.
In Smash Hit, you are viewing a strange world from the first person perspective, and are being automatically transported inside some kind of tunnel, through a surreal but often brightly colored underground terrain. At times, you are confronted with glass panels which would hit and eventually kill you, were it not for pinballs that you can throw into this world and onto those glass plates that then break into many pieces, accompanied by satisfyingly destructive sounding glass shatter effects.
Playing it with the Oculus Go, you are moving the camera/view by tilting your head. Balls are being thrown by trigger presses on the controller. It is such a joy to play this game this way, but it is great no matter which device. Alas, it isn’t available on newer VR headsets anymore. The company behind Smash Hit, Swedish indie studio Mediocre, also closed shop in 2017 already. (One year earlier though, they made another great mobile video pinball game called PinOut. I wrote about it in an older The Ball is Wild blog post.)
Still, the game continues to be available for both Android and mobile Apple devices. The game subscription Apple Arcade even re-relased Smash Hit+ just last October. Here there are new modes available, including ones where you can play in local multiplayer. This is achieved through split-screen display on the same device. Just like in the good old couch coop days!
You’ve just read issue #7 of The Ball is Wild 🪩
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Back issues:
Issue #6: Spooky Silverballs (30 October 2024)
Issue #5: Balancing balls (30 September 2024)
Issue #4: Pinball in the public (31 August 2024)
Issue #3: Machine manipulation (29 July 2024)
Issue #2: Examining the pinball (1 July 2024)
Issue #1: Let’s get this ball rolling (10 June 2024)
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