S1E9: The Solid State Revolution

In 1977, pinball stopped being a machine and started becoming a computer that happened to have a ball in it.Episode 9 is the story of the transition from electromechanical relay logic to solid-state microprocessors — the most complete technological transformation in pinball's history since the invention of the flipper. We dig into why the change was inevitable, what the first generation of solid-state machines got wrong, and how the microprocessor unlocked a design vocabulary that the EM era could never have imagined: multiball, modes, digitized speech, dot matrix displays. We also meet the designers who understood what the new technology made possible and built careers out of pushing it as far as it would go.The ceiling that EM machines had reached was gone. What replaced it was human imagination.