"Thrilling Pinball Adventures from Beyond the Stars! Save the Day and Save the Ice Cream!"
Is a pinball machine released in 2023 by American Pinball and is notable in that it's one of the few pinball machines in current year that isn't a licenced property based on capeshit or dad rock. In fact it's not a licenced property at all. David Fix and the team at American saw fit to actually come up with something original, and it appears to be working.
To put this into perspective, the received wisdom in pinball circles is that you must have a licence for your pinball machine. Otherwise people will ignore it or not be interested. This was allegedly borne out by the fact that Stern's one foray into unlicenced games, Black Knight: Sword of Rage, a sequel to the wonderful, amazing, glorious Black Knight 2000 from the alphanumeric era, flopped. As did niche manufacturer Spooky Pinball's retrofuturistic Total Nuclear Annihilation despite being basically a synthwave album come to life. The reason is because until the glory days of the 1960s to 1990s, pinball just doesn't "work" on locations any more, or so people claim. Your average arcade will be full of ticket games and with a few light guns and maybe sit down arcade racers, but not pinball. As such, your market for new machines is the collectors market, and they are all well off Generation X types with basements where they can hide from the wife. And they like dad rock and capeshit because Metallica and X-Men were big in the late 1980s when they were hanging around arcades.
Now American Pinball's output has all, with one exception, been unlicenced stuff. That one exception being Hotwheels, which is based on the toy car line. And I think I get what they are aiming at. They're aiming at getting their machines into arcades and what they call Family Entertainment Centres while not having to fork over royalties and so forth to a licence holder, which is probably part of the reason why a NIB Stern costs you five figures these days. So their machines tend to be aimed at something that a kid seeing it would think "that's cool" while at the same time having enough parental appeal to do so as well. And this is where Galactic Tank Force seems to be aimed.
Now firstly, please note that this is based on literally a handful of games with this machine. I'm told there's less than five of these machines in the UK which is where I live because of some drama between American Pinball and their distributor. And none of them are on location. However when I went to UK Pinfest in August of 2024, I got the opportunity to play one. And I thought it was mega. The art is brilliant. The theme is wonderfully off the wall. And the playfield is pretty tasty and has some cool ideas and surprises in it. There's also a Limited Edition where there's side panels that strap to the legs and the backbox flops down and has a turret on the back so the whole machine resembles a tank, but I didn't play that one, and it doesn't really change the playfield either. American Pinball, unlike Stern, don't do nerfed and cut down and costed down "Pro" editions to shame you for being a poor. The theme is sort of based on a fictional 1960s science fiction type TV show. The idea is that in the raygun gothic future (i.e. fishbowl space helmets and cigar shaped rockets and suchlike), the evil Empress Annoia has kidnapped all the cows from Earth, and it is up to the Galactic Tank Force, being Captain Kyan, the raygun toting pinup style tank commander, Duke Moonwalker, her sidekick, and a fez-wearing Professor Plotnik (who of course inhabits a lab containing purely aesthetic retorts, Jacob's Ladders, and curly rubber tubing going into flasks), to defeat Empress Annoia's tanks, robots, UFOs, and melanges of all the above, and save the cows, so that they can have the galaxy's greatest ever ice cream social. The game takes advantage of having a proper LCD screen in the backbox to display clips and comedy skits filmed directly for it which are actually pretty funny really. The playfield itself is a standard two flipper affair but has a lot of things going on and also player controlled diverters on some of the ramps using a third flipper button to allow you to more efficiently chain the next shot. The centrepiece of the playfield is a tank, of course, with a bank of targets at the front of it, and whose function and role changes according to the mode currently active. The objective is, in classic 1990s pinball style, to get to the wizard mode that is the Galactic Ice Cream Social but to do that you have to collect and fill all the sundae recipes (by making specific combo shots against the clock), destroy all of Annoia's forces (by knocking down all the tank targets, though sometimes there are other wrinkles like a forcefield which must be deactivated by doing bank shots off the side target banks), and also getting enough jackpots during multiball. There's also a moving UFO target which must be hit while it is in motion to save the cows as well. The ball lock is shaped like a space station and yes, I believe you can get sneaky locks by only just hard enough ramp shots, a bit like in Theatre of Magic or Cirqus Voltaire. And all the while you're doing this, the screen is showing Annoia's tanks rolling inexorably towards you while the tank model on the playfield flashes and whirrs and has its robot pilot pop out the lid. Or there's comedic clips in dead ball situations. The mechanics are very swish as well; I believe that they got Zofia Bil who did the Time Expander in the Doctor Who pinball to do the mechanical engineering and it shows. The tank does tend to clonk a lot of shots but if you can start chaining ramp shots properly it gets a nice flow to it.
I have to say, I really liked it. And apparently it's been a success on location as well. I remember that I was at a talk by David Fix of American Pinball and he said that the first machine they built they put in an arcade near his office and within the first month it had 12,000 credits put on it. That is frankly astonishing for a pinball machine in current year. At UK Pinfest there were always people queuing up to have a go on it, hence why I only got a few thrashes at it. He also claimed that he's had people coming up to him and asking when the TV series it was based on (which it wasn't) was shown. And to be fair, I think the concept of a camply comedic, pseudo-retro raygun gothic TV series is something that is very saleable nowadays. It would have both the kid appeal with cool things like tanks and UFOs while having the parent appeal of both member berries for older and sillier science fiction and also, let's be honest, fanservice, because Captain Kyan looks like WWII nose art with a fishbowl on her head. And That's A Good Thing.
Sadly, American Pinball's output hasn't quite been this consistent all the way though. They followed up Galactic Tank Force with Barry O's Barbecue Challenge. Which is about competitive grilling, and I also managed to get a few goes on, and apparently that one was the only one present in the UK, and I'm afraid it was extremely dull and generic and literally the centrist dads meme given flippers.
(IN24/1)