My 2024 deep-dive on Arcadia for the Commodore VIC-20 more or less established it was the first game I ever bought. I think! But while I still can’t be 100% sure it wasn’t Crazy Kong instead, a photo from a few months later, in early 1985, definitely confirms a pinball game wasn’t far behind! Pinball Wizard, which was also the very first game I ever covered here and, without spoiling too much, we might come back to later, is clearly slotted between the two cassette boxes, together with Tornado, a simple take on Scramble that I think I’d borrowed from a friend, all in a little plastic basket with a couple of blank tapes, and representing the sum total of my entire fledgling collection at the time… If only 12-year old me could see what it had turned into forty years later! While there’s little denying I was probably more attracted by the Gandalf-style wizard on the front of the box than the “realistic gravity” promised on the back, I’ve loved a pinball game ever since, and although I’ve also spent plenty of time with the real thing over the years, there’s just something about slightly expanding the possibilities (not to mention not having to keep shoving money into it) that means I’m never more than a few days away from playing some video game version or another on something!

Aside from being the original arcade entertainment, I think there’s also an inherent link between traditional pinball games and video games beyond the genre itself – pinging (or Ponging!) a ball around takes us right back to the beginnings of the video game, then there’s the principle of easy to learn but hard to master, the translation of precision and timing from fingers to screen, the thrill of chasing the high-score, the introduction of complex scoring mechanics, multiplayer games, mini-games, the fancy user interface, evolving a narrative through gameplay alone and, of course, we mustn’t forget it’s where the “1-up” prompt came from too! I’m sure there’s more but you get the picture – all sounding like a pretty good pinball game too, assuming you’ve got the ball physics right… Doesn’t necessarily mean totally realistic either, but just right, which I realise is as intangible as having that bad day at the office every pinball fan knows so well, but they also know that just one more game might be their best game ever regardless! These are the fundamentals of a decent game of pinball for me, and why the top ten I promise we’ll get to right now isn’t just about the most bells and whistles, or best special effects, or the wildest mini-games, but the best experience, realistic or not, with a bit of luck and plenty of fun on the side. In my humble opinion, of course! Okay, with that established, let’s get into the games, from ten down to one, a quick paragraph on each, followed by a few honourable mentions…

10. Pinball (NES) 

There’s a lot of Game & Watch systems I wish I had but the one from 1983 that this is based on is near the top of the list! Developed by Nintendo and HAL Laboratory the following year, the table is made up of two flip-screens, top and bottom, plus a bonus mode, which is like a game of Breakout and features a little guy named Mario trying to rescue the hapless Pauline all over again by clearing all the blocks beneath her, causing her to fall through the resulting gap, so just be ready to catch her as well if you want your full bonus! The pinball itself is relatively simple, although two-screens would have been a bit of a novelty at the time, but there’s plenty of bumpers, targets, hole kickers, stuff to light up, blockers, sequential rollover mini-games and so on, as well as plenty of hazards and cute little secrets to uncover. It’s hardly a stunner to look at but it’s jolly enough and there’s plenty going on, which also goes for the sound. The ball moves well, the flippers are responsive, there’s two difficulty and one or two player modes, and apart from missing a nudge and a tilt, you couldn’t ask for much more.

9. Psycho Pinball (Mega Drive / Genesis)

At some point I’m going to have to address multi-table pinball games but while this one from 1994 does indeed contain four tables, the last of them ingeniously combines the rest for a huge, multi-stage affair, so I reckon I’ve got a brief reprieve! Although my brother got a Mega Drive the same year this came out, I’d never even heard of it until its inclusion on Codemasters Collection 1 for Evercade, which I think I got in 2022, a year or so after it first appeared. Anyway, the first three tables include the Wild West-themed, er, Wild West, the Halloween-themed Trick or Treat, and the deep sea-themed The Abyss. The fourth table is Psycho, which has an amusement park theme and is fully-featured in its own right, but certain triggers will also launch you into tents containing the other three tables. It’s a really neat concept, offering loads of variety and plenty of reason to get good on all the tables, but I think what I like most is the variety in the tables beyond their theming, from densely populated to fast and open to multi-level, with so much going on in all of them. Some really elaborate mini-games too, some of which are virtually full-on, standalone arcade games! Presentation is very vibrant and very nineties, with sights and sounds straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon, and it’s as fast-paced as one too, albeit still with a decent heft to the ball. This one alone will keep you in fun for a very long time!

8. Sonic Spinball (Mega Drive / Genesis)

Now here’s a Mega Drive or Genesis title I definitely did know existed! I’ve no doubt it’s also the game I own in more different places and on more different systems than anything else here by a long shot! After dabbling with pinball in Sonic The Hedgehog 2’s Casino Night Zone, his standalone pinball debut arrived in 1993, and was developed as a bit of a stop-gap when Sega realised the third game proper wasn’t releasing in time for Christmas that year. I guess elements of pinball have always been an intrinsic part of Sonic’s fast-paced platforming though, but here we’ve got the reverse, with a bit of the latter influencing the former, while the whole thing is unmistakably Sonic the Hedgehog… It’s just been spun around into a huge, Dr Eggman’s latest lair-shaped multi-level table to explore and get to grips with! It’s very unforgiving though, even before you think about some really cool boss fights, and you’ll need to put the time in to get the precision it demands down, not to mention what’s where! But it’s very rewarding when you do, with some really gorgeous environments to discover, and there’s so much character and so much going on… Which unfortunately includes some terrible music! It’s not a great pinball game in the traditional sense, and I don’t suppose many consider it Sonic’s finest hour either, but slap it all together and Christmas 1993 is saved after all!

7. Pinball: Revenge of the ‘Gator (Game Boy)

I didn’t know anything about this game until the start of 2022, when I reviewed Game Boy: The Box Art Collection from Bitmap Books! And not for the last time today, I got sucked in by the cover, bought the cartridge, got sucked in by the game, wrote a deep-dive, and it’s barely left my Game Boy since! Also known as Pinball: 66 Piki no Wani Daikoushin in Japan, this is another one from HAL Laboratory in 1989, and while they still didn’t like nudging, they certainly knew how to make a handheld pinball game! It’s a single table made up of eight screens total, with four that flip (not scroll like the back of the box implies), making up the main play area, plus a bunch of madcap and surprisingly deep bonus mini-games, and the wonderful bottom drain where a ‘gator is waiting to swallow up your ball if it ends up down there! Before you get there though, there’s just so much depth and variety to the gameplay in a large but deceptively simple table layout, to the point I’ve played it to death and I’m still not sure I’ve seen it all! There’s a really nice weight to the ball too. And from the title screen onwards, it’s crammed full of so much character, movement, light, shadow and detail, expertly using the monochrome screen to enhance rather than hinder the visuals, and likewise the console’s little speaker is doing a great job with some perfectly-set little tunes. Everything you could wish for from a handheld game of pinball and more besides.

6. Pro Pinball: Timeshock! (PlayStation)

This one’s fascinating to me because around the time it first came out was when I was playing more proper pinball than I ever have at any other time, and I distinctly remember thinking this was as close as a video game would ever get to the real thing! Nowadays though, while it still plays a very fine game of pinball, more than anything it takes me back to the pub that was virtually home in 1997, which I’m sure might also have influenced its inclusion here! It was the second in the Pro Pinball series from Empire Interactive, and had a single table that looked so realistic it was like you were standing in front on it – you can even feel the thickness of the glass on the top! Those colours and the lights too though, and you’ve got four camera angles, and several gameplay modes, and while it does take a few video game liberties with things like dynamic graphical overlays, they’re more in the interests of keeping everything on the table in front of you than adding fanciness, and still look the part regardless. Which reminds me, it sounds the part too, and those flipper noises are the best you’ll ever hear! The game itself revolves around time travel, completing themed objectives across different periods of time for big points, and there’s a crazy amount of variety in there for something so tightly packed onto a single screen! And I mentioned the thickness of the glass before but everything has a real weight here – you can almost feel doing a real-life nudge every time! Perhaps not the most sophisticated thing here but I reckon it’s as proper as it gets!

5. Video Pinball (Atari 2600)

From one extreme to the other now… Get beyond the ball being a square though, and I reckon it’s still proper pinball all the same! But while it can’t quite compete on quantity with how many times I own Sonic Spinball, I do have the original cartridge for this one from 1980, so it wins that contest on quality at least… And I must have it on at ten different compilations and dedicated consoles on top! Right, this is about as primitive as pinball gets, to the point you might wonder why you’d buy this at the time over one of the tabletop games like Tomy’s Atomic Pinball, which probably cost about the same amount. As I write, I am planning a deep-dive on the latter though, so I’ll see if I can find out! In the meantime, primitive it might be, but it’s got all the plungers, spinners, bumpers and drains, and you can even add a couple more if you change one of the difficulty switches on the back of the console! Flippers are left and right on the joystick, or up for both at once, and while their interaction with the ball can sometimes be less sensitive than you might like, surprisingly robust ball physics and an impressively early nudge feature more than compensate, with the latter controlled by holding down fire and pushing in the direction you want to nudge the table, but not too much because it’s got tilt as well – not so primitive now, eh, HAL Laboratory! Also some nuance to scoring, with progressive rollovers and drop targets, and a special lit target to discover. For all of that though, the main thing here is fun, and it was that at the time and still is that, and that’s the very essence of pinball for me!

4. Pinball FX3: Monster Bash (Nintendo Switch)

Right, multi-table games… While I’m fully aware that fewer people would have batted an eyelid if I’d just included ten Pinball FX tables here rather than some ancient Atari relic, or just stuck Pinball FX or Zen Pinball or whatever at number one instead, but where’s the fun in that? I’m also currently more hung-up on my one game per series rule to keep things interesting here… Anyway, my list, my decision, and I’ve decided to pick my favourite table on Pinball FX3, despite some really cool stuff like Jaws and a couple of the Star Wars tables subsequently missing out. The Monster Bash table from Williams in 1998 is based on the classic black and white Universal Monsters like Dracula and The Creature From The Black Lagoon, whose instruments you’re trying to collect here so they can form their own Monsters of Rock band! Each of the six monsters featured have their own mode to unlock and complete to get at their instrument, accompanied by what were originally little mechanical figures coming (back) to life as you progressed, and you’ve also got three multiball modes and loads of other stuff to discover. It’s total fan service, it’s got loads of variety, and both visuals and sound are superb, with non-stop colour, light and speech, as well as suitably creepy sampled music. And as always with Zen Studios’ pinball games, the ball physics, flipper controls and tilt mechanisms are as spot-on as they can be. It’s fast-paced too, so however well you get to know the table, you always need some serious reactions constantly at the ready! Such a pleasure.

3. Devil’s Crush (PC-Engine)

And now we come to that painful choice of only including one game from a series here, although it does solve the problem of what to put in the big picture at the top of the page without giving too much away! I’ll come back to Alien Crush later, but there was another choice to make here too – as my deep-dive on Devil Crash MD will attest, on any given day, either one or the other might by my preference, and today it’s PC-Engine over Mega Drive! The differences are subtle though, and whatever your preference, it’s three screens deep of occult pinball action from 1990, scrolling seamlessly with three sets of flippers directing the ball around a procession of sinister monks, oozing skulls, and the big vampire-snake lady, as well as a bunch of fiendish bonus stages with some truly terrifying backdrops! There’s diabolical detail everywhere, with every possible space consumed by something squelchy and horrible for your ball to interact with, to the sound of suitably squelchy and horrible effects accompanying the atmospheric haunted house soundtrack. By the way, for the best possible experience, make sure you go for the Japanese version of this, without the silly religious censorship! Of everything we’ve seen so far, this is as far into video game territory as we’ve been, with no artistic license spared as your ball gets involved in all kinds of chaos, but that’s not to say there’s not a very good physics model at play here too, making for some absolutely epic action that’s always just about under your control! I know we’ve got two games left but now I really wish this was at number one!

2. Pinball Wizard (Commodore VIC-20)

You know I said earlier that Atari’s Video Pinball was primitive? Actually, there’s not a lot in it, and at least the ball is more or less round here! Okay, I mentioned this one at the start, and there’s clearly nostalgia at play, but how can there not be with this “wonder of simulation that makes unsurpassed use of the VIC’s graphics specifically written for the unexpanded VIC 20” from 1983? I’m not even sure what that means, but, together with the wizard from earlier on the front cover, it was obviously more than enough to justify not having a screenshot on the back of the box! Instead, it goes on, detailing more black arts like hi-res, full colour, flicker free and 100% machine code! None of that really matters though, just like the reality of a black screen populated by three big diamond shapes that the ball bounces off, and some smaller ones in three channels that change colour as it passes through them. But as also promised by the box, the “gravity simulation” seems remarkably fine considering, and it’s got three perfectly responsive flippers, and it was real pinball on my own computer in my bedroom rather than on my best friend’s Atari 2600, and to me that’s all that’s ever mattered. Which is lucky because this game sounds just like it looks! But joking aside, it’s got everything else, and however primitive and unsophisticated that might all be, fundamentally it still knows how to dish up a very good game of pinball, and one that’s still just as hard to put down now as it was four decades ago. Magical!

1. Demon’s Tilt (Xbox Series X / Nintendo Switch / PC)

This game isn’t just a pinball masterpiece but also one of my top fifteen favourite games ever full-stop. Period! I came across it whenever it first appeared on Game Pass after it originally launched in 2019 – I was just idly browsing the catalog on my son’s Xbox and it jumped out at me, then it became my Xbox at every possible opportunity after that! Incredibly, it was created by a solo developer called Adam Ferrando (“WIZNWAR”) after an email discussion with a guy at eventual publisher FLARB, when it turned out they shared a passion for early nineties pinball games, and in particular a couple of games we’ve already encountered… There’s no denying the spiritual lineage from Alien Crush and Devil’s Crush on the PC-Engine either, but as much as I love those games and that machine, Demon’s Tilt is a whole other level of turbo-charged, bullet-hell, hack and slash occult pinball entirely! It’s spread across a sprawling, scrolling, three-tiered gothic cathedral of a table, full of secrets and hidden depths, ramps and traps and all kinds of hellish bosses! The scoring mechanics are wild, with huge multipliers, chain-combos, a magic system that converts enemy bullets into homing magic or Ultra Jackpots, and mysterious rituals for bonuses, jackpots and special modes. Then there’s a load of multiball modes, special events to trigger on each level of the table, and a stack of bonus rooms. All kinds of modes and options outside the game too for maximum (or otherwise) intensity and features, however you want to play. Coming back to presentation, it’s off the charts, with massive, colourful sprites, relentless special effects, and scaling, rotating and zooming with total abandon! The soundtrack is suitably heavy and matches the game itself for energy, while a disembodied commentary and a chaotic mix of dense pinball sounds and supernatural noises never let up. And the pinball itself is sublime, perfectly balanced, perfectly cruel, and pretty much perfect in general. I’ve been playing pinball games for well over forty years now, and an awful lot more of them on an awful lot more systems than we’ve covered here, but this one is something else entirely!

Demon’s Tilt has a sequel too but here’s a strange thing – as I write, it’s been out of early access on Steam for a little while, having been in early access for a lot longer, but I just don’t have the PC to do it justice, so as excited as I was about Xenotilt when it was first announced, I’m yet to play it, and unfortunately won’t until it hopefully gets a console release some day so I can see it at its best! That said, occult will always win out over sci-fi for me, so while the rest looks like even more of the same, I reckon my choice here will be safe for a while. And if not, I’ll gladly put another of these together in future so we’re up to date again! I want to close this list with a few honourable mentions if that’s alright though… I’ve got to start with the several times aforementioned Alien Crush, the flip-screen, Geiger-inspired alien (or Alien) sci-fi horror classic on the PC-Engine that I really should have included regardless of my silly rules! Next (but in no particular order now) is Pokémon Pinball on Game Boy Color, and another from HAL, which is so polished and goes way beyond simple fan service, making all your favourite Pokémon and familiar mechanics central to the gameplay. 

Intellivision Pinball is a bit of a missing link from 1983 that kind of bridges some of the really primitive stuff we’ve seen and something like the NES game we began with, and I also want to mention Midnight Magic, which did similar on the Atari 2600. In fact, I’ve just picked up an original cart of that one too, and it’s very quickly growing on me to the point I might need to come back and re-evaluate it as well at some point! Then there’s Pinball Jam on the Atari Lynx, which does its own thing well but is mainly mentioned here because it’s got an an Elvira table! Finally, another multi-table epic, Gottlieb Pinball Classics on the PlayStation Portable, which features a ton of classic and historic tables (and other arcade curios), and loads of modes to get them all unlocked. And because I’ll no doubt be in for some flack for not including it, I suppose I should mention Pinball Dreams and its offshoots on the Amiga (and elsewhere) too, but only to say I find them way too floaty so, try as I might, and as much as I enjoy the table designs themselves, I’ve just never got into any of them as much as everyone else seems to have! And on that bombshell, I think we’re done here, so I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this because I’ve really enjoyed putting it together!

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