Right from the very beginnings of pinball, players realized that since the game used gravity to direct the ball, that it could be physically affected by shaking and tilting the machine. Because this disrupted the game, and made them vunerable to damage, the tilt mechanism was quickly added - within merely a few years of pinball's introduction.

The standard tilt mechanism in a pinball machine is rather simple. A cone-shaped weight, or pendulum, hanging on the inside of the machine. It hangs through the center of a ring, and the whole thing is set up so that the machine can detect when the pendulum comes in contact with the ring. When that occurs, the machine usually registers it as a "tilt", then immediately ceases play of the current ball. This is to penalize the player for shaking the machine too much.

The pendulum is carefully weighted so that some shaking of the machine can be done safely. After all, a player who puts some force into pressing the flipper buttons can shake the machine, and if that registered as a tilt, it would drive customers away. This also allows players to intentionally do a little shaking to direct the ball, though they must be careful doing it.

Because of the inertia in the pendulum, very sharp and quick pushes and hits on the machine can often go undetected - this is the basis behind the bangback. To prevent such actions from being too violent, machines also have sensors to detect a slam tilt.

There are a few other miscellaneous mechanisms that have been used to detect a tilt - I believe at least one machine has a pinball sitting in a special spot inside, and if it rolls too far in one direction, it counts as a tilt.

There are usually two ways for a tilt mechanism to break. The first involves either there being no current to the mechanism or the pendulum completely breaking. This prevents the machine from detecting a tilt at all, and players can abuse the machine to their heart's desire. I saw this happen to a Rollergames machine in my dorm freshman year - people could lift up the machine to send the ball back into play after it went through an outlane.

The other way is for the ring to be off, or the weight to have broken off, but the metal rod it's hanging from is still connected. This makes it very, very easy to tilt the game, and is sometimes unplayable because the impact from pressing on a flipper button can set it off.

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