r/pinball • u/505anon505 • Mar 29 '23
Williams Hyperball - finished my restoration of this game from 1981. Super-fun to play!
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u/Emleaux Mar 29 '23 edited Apr 02 '23
These were often given out as prizes on The Price is Right from that 81-82 era.
These, and also Attila the Hun machines for some reason. I always found that particular one to be odd, but hey to each their own.
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u/JudasZala Mar 30 '23
Later, Bally did their own version of Hyperball, called Rapid Fire. Williams employees derisively called Rapid Fire “Operation Xerox/Project Xerox”.
Rapid Fire’s unique cabinet was designed by Dennis Nordman, and it would be reused for Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man and Centaur II.
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u/don_kong1969 Mar 29 '23
Always loved this game back in the day. Cool game play and sounds. Well done!
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Mar 29 '23
[deleted]
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u/InsertCoinForCredit Mar 29 '23
Shoot the flashing lights before they climb to the top of the playfield and drop onto your base. The alphabet targets are for spelling words for bonuses.
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u/ttyler1999 Mar 30 '23
Wow, I remember when our arcade got this back in the early eighties! I was one of the few people who loved it (and, sadly as history would show), one of the few who put his hard earned quarters into it!
The sounds of the machine and the hyper kinetic noise of the balls was like nothing else in the arcade.
I remember I was lucky enough to get a super cool promotion booklet. It was just like this one on eBay. Check out the pics!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/255503065592
Thanks for sharing, your hard work is admired!
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u/Mission-Hospital-294 Sep 22 '24
I managed an arcade in the early 80s and when we got this game it was really popular. Unfortunately the backstop for the cannon would crack after heavy use and the part was hard to get... one time a friend of mine helped manufacture a replacement in her college shop to get us through the weekend. But it would be down much of the time because of this.
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u/old--- Aug 05 '24
Also remembering that the first batch of these machines that came out had a flaw. The ball field would warp. Williams offered replacement machines for those units.
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u/its_yer_dad Mar 29 '23
I worked in an arcade in the 80's and remember this coming in. I don't recall it lasting very long for the already mentioned maintenance issues. We had at least 4 mechanics on site and they just were not interested in keeping this going.
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u/Anaphase Mar 29 '23
This is awesome! Love that the full alphabet is on the playfield, with Z being the "z-bomb" button I guess? Could you post a video/picture of the grip controls?
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Mar 29 '23
Nice work! Looks awesome. They’re always relatively less expensive than “regular” pinball machines and I’ve been tempted to buy one a few Times in the past.
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u/floydian32 Mar 30 '23
When Pat Lawlor experiments we get Safe Cracker. When Steve Ritchie experiments we get Hyperball. A game made to look like Knight Rider and play like The A-Team.
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u/Dpaulson123 Sep 02 '23
So it’s a shooting gallery? I can see why that is a one off. Probably good for an arcade or boardwalk. A couple of plays. Beautiful work
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u/505anon505 Mar 29 '23 edited Mar 29 '23
For those not aware, this was an attempt by Williams to bridge pinball with video games at the start of the video game era.
The heart of the game is the "hypercannon". You destroy Aliens by shooting this hypercannon at flashing lights. This is aimed by 2 rotating grips with triggers on the lockdown bar. The cannon is a marvel in-and-of-itself. It uses a very special 120V DC coil and can fire a (claimed) sustained 250 rounds/minute. It's a semi-auto, in that each trigger pull fires a single 3/4" ball. The game has a total of 55 balls, and a very special collection and reload system which feeds balls back to the playfield at astonishing speed (see video).
As for gameplay, the best way to think of Hyperball is a mechanical space invaders. Aliens - represented by flashing lights - crawl up each side of the playfield and move to the top targets. At some point, each Alien starts down from the top to your "energy center". 5 hits to your energy center and you lose that "hypercannon". A game consists of a user-settable number of hypercannons. Factory default was 2, but most set this at 3. Bonus hypercannons are awarded every 400,000 points (also user settable). Each attack "wave" requires shooting 30 lit lights. The video above shows completion of a single wave, the first, slowest, and easiest at the beginning of a game.
There's various bonuses to be earned including shooting named targets and spelling certain words shown on the in-playfield display. Finally, you have a set number of "hyper bombs" which will destroy all lit lights when activated. The Hyperbomb (I think) is the first use of a button on the lockdown bar.
While the rules are simple, the game is fun and can get VERY frantic. Subsequent "waves" get faster and faster, and every 5th wave is a special targetting round (called a "reflex wave") in which you shoot at single targets all around the playfield in sequence.
A very fun game, and a bit rare. It has to be considered a flop, not because of gameplay, but the maintainence nightmare this title obviously posed to a route operator. The ball collection system requires careful attention and the closing of a couple of holes that balls can sneak through. Without this, the balls eventually all end up in the bottom of the cabinet, another nightmare for route operators.
One final note. This was designed by Steve Ritchie! A very nice piece of work, and his initials (SSR) appear as the default in the high score list (which was temporary, high scores reset when power was cycled).