New pinball: Road Show
A 1994 Williams Red & Ted's Road Show, the machine that started it all for me as a kid, finally mine and fully restored, December 2016.
Road Show has been on my list for as long as I can possibly remember. If you read my Star Wars post, you might be a little confused, because I talked there about falling for pinball at my friend Michael’s house in middle and high school. But I already loved pinball before that, and Road Show is the reason why.
The night I snuck off to play it
Back in the 90s, my dad worked for the grocery company where I would later land my own first job, the one that gave me an internship. They treated their employees incredibly well. Maybe it was just the times, but that was the kind of company culture I grew up in, and honestly the kind I assumed would still be around by the time I became a working adult.
One year they rented out an entire baseball stadium for a company-wide bash. I am from the St. Louis area, and back then we had the old Busch Stadium, the round one with the little arches around the roof that echoed the Gateway Arch. The company invited employees from all over, corporate and store alike, opened up the field, ran concert-style stuff out on the grass, and set up arcades in both dugouts. We were there with Jerry, a good friend of my dad’s from work.
I cannot pin down the exact year. I think it was around 1996, since we moved from St. John to Lake St. Louis in 1997, and Road Show came out in 1994, so the game would still have been fairly new. The left-field dugout had a video arcade, Donkey Kong and Pac-Man and Tron and the like. The right dugout had pinball, and the one I remember is Road Show.
I got to play a game or two with my dad supervising, then we headed back up to the grandstand where there was free food. I ate as fast as I could, because I had a plan. I asked my dad if I could go play games, and he said yes, but only the left dugout, the close one he could “sort of see” from our seats. He could not actually see it. It was miles away. But I said sure.
And then I did not do that. I had already decided I was going straight for the right dugout and Road Show, because it was the first real pinball machine I had ever gotten my hands on, and it was set to free play, meaning unlimited games. This is genuinely the first time I can remember consciously lying to my dad.
I was eight years old. I lost all track of time over there, just mindlessly flipping and plunging and shooting at everything, for what felt like an absolute eternity. Then, without warning, Jerry grabbed my arm and yanked me off the machine. “Where the heck have you been? We have been looking for you for ages.” And as he dragged me away, I kept looking back at the machine, thinking: I do not care how much trouble I am in, that was worth it. Someday I am going to have a pinball machine of my own.
Finally getting one
Years later it clicked what that machine had been, and Road Show stayed on my list from then on. By the time I was ready, I had just gotten my Shadow back from Troy’s team at Top Score Game Rooms, and I had completely fallen in love with how that restoration turned out. As much as I enjoy doing this work myself, it eats up time I did not have, and I wanted this one done right, as close to perfect as a Road Show can get. So I asked Troy if his crew would restore one for me. He found a copy, said yes, and did the work. It became the second machine to arrive in my freshly refurbished basement, and I have loved it ever since.
Why I love it
It is a widebody, which I love, and it is a Pat Lawlor design, the same person behind my Funhouse. The two talking dummy heads, Red and Ted, are basically Rudy’s cousins, and I find them genuinely hilarious. A fun fact I like to pull out for guests: I am not a country music person, but Red is voiced by Carlene Carter, who is part of the Johnny Cash family, June Carter Cash’s daughter. (Ted, for what it is worth, is voiced by Tim Kitzrow, the NBA Jam “boomshakalaka” announcer.)
A lot of people are genuinely unnerved by the heads. When friends and family come over, Funhouse and Road Show often go completely unplayed because the talking faces creep everyone out. I think they are the best part.
These days I run the randomized-city mod on it. By default, Road Show always sends you from the East Coast to the West Coast in the same order, which a lot of people find repetitive. The mod picks random cities along the way and just ends on a West Coast one, which keeps it feeling fresh and unpredictable.
My copy plays fantastically, with no wear anywhere on the playfield, not even the little fish-eye spots collectors call fish wear. And because I love this game so much, I put a color DMD in it, which most of my machines do not have. Those screens are expensive, and by the time I got Road Show I was already at six or seven machines, so outfitting all of them would have run something like $4,000 in displays alone. This is the one that earned it.