I first played pinball at a magazine store in Durango, Colorado in the late 1960s. Then in the early 1970s I played pinball at an arcade in Missoula, Montana. They were old mechanical games like Jackpot and 8-Ball.

Then in the mid-80s I bought two pinball games at a yard sale for only a hundred dollars or so. They needed fixing up to get them working right, but some friends helped me get them fine tuned, and we played them for several years at our bookstore and warehouse in Kempton, Illinois. One of the games was Wizard, based on the rock opera Tommy by The Who that includes their hit Pinball Wizard. It was an okay game for a mid-1970s specimen, but it lacked the digital counters and multiball features the games made in the 1980s had. This game is one of the few older games that still has much value; another one from the same time period, Captain Fantastic, has also retained some value to the collector.

Eventually, I purchased the pinball game Strange Science as a used game from a local game vendor in Kankakee, Illinois. Strange Science had three flippers and a cage that held five balls that were loaded by the third flipper. When the cage was loaded with five balls they would all be released at once and you had a five-ball multiball until you lost them all, or loaded them back into the cage.

This was one of the first multiball games and the avid pinball player was always keen to play as many balls at one time as possible. I purchased a few other used games in the mid 1990s including Road Kings and The Simpsons. I also picked up Lethal Weapon 3, the first game with a dot-matrix display that also display crude animations and pictures as well the various scores. There were over 10,000 Lethal Weapon 3 games made in 1992.

The record for the most games built is actually The Addams Family, another 1992 game, with 20,000 having been produced. This is one of the most popular games of all time and it is the oldest game on our top 40 list. Our list of Top 40 and Top 20 begins with this year as all games built before 1992 are more mechanical and primitive and are considered to be of an older era of pinball that is very collectible, but not for serious pinball play.

Such games as Indiana Jones the Pinball Adventure and Twilight Zone came out in 1993 and both are on our Top 10 List. With a 7-ball multiball and three different video modes, Indiana Jones the Pinball Adventure is one of the greatest pinball games of all time. Both games are wide-body games of which only seven models were built in 1993 and 1994. The other games are Star Trek, Judge Dredd, Popeye Saves the Earth, Road Show, and Demolition Man.

At our bookstore in Auckland, New Zealand in the late 1990s we had several pinball games, including Apollo 13 (the largest multiball of any game, a quickly lost 13 balls) and Indiana Jones the Pinball Adventure. In Arizona I purchased this game from a local vendor plus some other great games from the 1990s, The Shadow, White Water and Twilight Zone.

With the demise of Williams Pinball in the year 2000 the only company making pinball games was Stern Pinball in Chicago. They continued bringing out several games a year including Monopoly, Spiderman, Lord of the Rings, Iron Man, AC-DC, Pirates of the Caribbean and many more. I found all these games to be enjoyable and I always look forward to playing a new game. Some of the latest games are very good and Ghostbusters has made it to our Top 20. This is a terrific game that is very reliable. You can pick one up from us!

You will find additional comments on some of the games listed here at Pinball Trader. Drop us a line and tell us what your Top 10 pinball games are, and if any of them are for sale.