The Flash Machine

Now that we're waiting for the clearcoat to dry and cure, it is a good time to talk about the machine that we're currently working on. Williams developed Flash in 1979, and made a ton of them, nearly 20,000. Flash was an early pinball design by Steve Ritchie, considered a giant in the field. It's game design is considered one of the best of that era, and many collectors still refuse to part with their Flash. It was the first game to incorporate continuous background sound, and was also the first to feature flash lamps, meant to simulate lightning, a thematic element of the game. Flash was also unusual at the time for the way the pinball entered the playfield. Instead of traveling all the way to the top first, this machine sends the ball out across the middle of the playfield, keeping you on your toes from the beginning.

The Flash character isn't the comic-book hero, but instead just some sort of generic lightning god. He strikes me a bit as a David Lee Roth clone, in green leather pants, surrounded by female groupies whose purpose is otherwise unclear. Some people hate the artwork on this machine, but the chaos of the design has grown on me, and I think it looks pretty slick. Because the theme of the machine is lightning, some restorers have played around with installing different colored LED lamps in the unit; I'm not sure if we're going that route or not, but more more on that in a later post.

We picked this machine up cheaply, and the playfield was dirty, gritty and dull to begin with. Now that the clearcoating is underway, the playfield looks vibrant, smooth, and shiny, a huge difference. This point in the process is always inspiring, because you can start to see how the finished game might look. I placed an order yesterday for all of the mechanical and electrical components that appear to require replacement, so the circuit board repairs can get underway soon.

Hmmm. I just noticed that somehow a cat hair managed to find its way onto the playfield, and has now been ensconced permanently in polyurethane. It's not super noticeable, it looks mainly like a minor scratch, but now it will bother me. However, I'm not stripping the coating and starting over. So in the interest of not letting the perfect be an enemy of the good, I will consider this cat hair a sophisticated identification device, unique to my machine. It's the Family Arcade, and the cat's part of the family, too.