New pinball: Star Wars (Data East)

Star Wars (Data East, 1992) was the machine that started my collection. It came home in August 2010.

I wanted this one specifically. My friend Mike had it at his house, and I played it every chance I got. I genuinely loved it, so when I was finally able to get one of my own, this was the game I went looking for.

The one I found had been sitting in a warehouse for a long time, wearing a thick layer of black, unidentifiable dust. It needed help. I cleaned it up, sorted it out, and got it back to as good as new. This was back when I was still living with my parents, and their old house was honestly too small for a pinball machine, so it ended up in the laundry room down in the basement. Not glamorous, but it was mine.

A little about the machine itself: Data East’s Star Wars was the company’s best-selling pinball game ever, with somewhere around 10,400 made. It has the voice of Darth Vader, a rotating silver Death Star you batter into multiball, an R2-D2 that moves around up by the bumpers, and a video mode where you fly a TIE fighter dogfight right on the dot-matrix display.

It is still in my collection, and it always will be. I find it genuinely fun and challenging, especially now that it is running the unofficial anniversary ROM, which quiets down the old middle-shot repeating-score bug. I have still never cracked a billion points on it. I have gotten close, though, and one of these days I will get there.