Like vinyl and neon shellsuits, pinball once held the world’s attention but became more of a niche in the modern era, half a century after its heyday in the 1970s and 80s. Some pinball-themed video games have helped keep its legacy alive. However, the expense and footprint of real-life machines (like arcade cabinets) mean that the pinball industry still remains mostly in the hands of aficionados and collectors.
Nevertheless, the core mechanics of pinball have been kept alive through other means. Developers have, over the years, been ‘borrowing’ elements of pinball to integrate into various creative offshoots, including the casino variant live pinball roulette, as well as the game show classic Plinko. We explore a couple of these developments in this article.
Live Pinball Roulette
Live Pinball Roulette otherwise plays exactly like the game’s standard version on roulette online real money sites. It even has the betting grid on the felt. Players simply make a bet by placing their chips (black/red, even/odd, etc.) and hitting the Play button.
From there, the iconic ball launcher makes its triumphant appearance. The game really starts when the ball is fired along a rail on the right-hand side of the screen. A results chart and the ‘racetrack’, allowing call bets, are also included as a reminder of Live Pinball Roulette’s split origins.
Through the crossover with pinball, Live Pinball Roulette is actually one of the few versions of roulette that change fundamentally how the ball reaches the pockets. Generally, variants focus on bigger, smaller, or faster wheels, as in Speed Roulette. Fireball Roulette from Evolution adds a bonus game with multipliers up to 2,500x.
Here, the core mechanic keeps the ‘tumbling’ through the pegs of pinball, but replaces the pit at the bottom with numbers from a roulette wheel. These move across the screen until a ball collides with either a pocket or one of the barriers between them.
Of course, the hallmark of live gaming is the presenter, who guides players through each round and announces the outcome of each turn of the wheel. Sometimes, they’re advertised as the highlight, with their names added to the lobby.
Plinko
Let’s step back a bit for this next one. It’ll come as no surprise to fans that designers got creative with the live casino format during the last decade or so. Game shows like Crazy Time Live, Adventures Beyond Wonderland Live, and Lightning Storm Live are arguably the most prominent outcome of this experimentation.
Plinko, the minigame from The Price is Right, popped up as a variant of pinball and similar games like pachinko. Plinko and pachinko are not typically skill-based like traditional pinball as these games lack flippers or other ways for players to interact with the balls once they’re released. Players simply watch the ball tumble through the pegs to the bottom, where prize pockets can be landed on, and in this way they are similar to the live roulette variant.
Museum ‘Phase’
As for pinball, the venerable game entered its museum ‘phase’ back in 2009. A tribute to the game’s history opened in Ramsgate with 30 machines from the 1950s onwards. It combines video games and Live Pinball Roulette, keeping pinball accessible to generations who may have never encountered it before.
Pinball is such a conceptually simple game that it’s proved irresistable for developers to experiment with its core gameplay in unique ways, long after the major zeitgeist of the original game had started to fade. Crossovers with roulette and other casino games continue, as various game developers and publishers delve into various ways of paying tribute to this timeless passtime.
