New pinball: Johnny Mnemonic
A 1995 Williams Johnny Mnemonic, my second machine, acquired May 2011 and later traded away.
Johnny Mnemonic (Williams, 1995) was the second machine I ever owned. It came home in May 2011, and like the Star Wars before it, it went straight into my parents’ basement laundry room, which by that point was getting very full.
I still have a fond spot in my heart for this one. I loved the sounds and I loved the theme. It is based on the 1995 Keanu Reeves film, itself from a William Gibson cyberpunk story, so the whole thing has a sort of John Wick 1.0 energy to it, years before John Wick ever existed. The one I got had some cabinet fade and needed a good cleaning when it arrived, but it came together nicely.
You really do not see these very often. Williams only made about 2,756 of them, and I personally have not laid eyes on another one in a long time. The signature feature is a magnetic glove: a strong magnet yanks the ball off the playfield up to a hand you steer with the flipper buttons, and then you drop it into a slot on the Cyber Matrix grid for a random award. It is a genuinely cool idea.
It is also, honestly, the reason I eventually let it go. The glove interrupts the flow of the game a little too much for me, and it took some of the fun out of an otherwise fast, great-sounding table. When the dot-matrix display started acting up on top of that, and I was ready for something new, I traded it away in November 2013 for another machine. I do not regret the trade, but I think about this one fondly all the same.