Recently, Katie traveled to Asbury Park, New Jersey and found herself at the Silver Ball Retro Arcade & Museum, right on the boardwalk. I’ve been to Silver Ball too, and I can tell you – the place is an amazing bit of fun, especially for all of us who remember actual arcades in the 80s and enjoy old school nachos.
From Silver Ball Museum, photography by Joseph Murphy
In between rolling skee-balls and attempting Donkey Kong, Katie spotted a Hobbit pinball machine. Later, that got us wondering. Exactly how many pinball machines HAVE derived from literature? As it turns out, quite a few!
From Elite Home Gamerooms
If there’s a Hobbit pinball game, there has to be a Lord of the Rings game as well. In fact, there are many book-to-screen pinball machines. Harry Potter, Dracula, Jurassic Park, Frankenstein, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Jaws, Starship Troopers, Game of Thrones, an abundance of 007, and even graphic novel The Walking Dead. The Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory pinball game features graphics from the 1971 film (you were the greatest Gene Wilder), an Oompa-Loompa figurine, and an interactive Wonkavator!
From Lermods
Digging a little deeper, Katie and I turned up some more unexpected literary-themed machines. Like The Three Musketeers from 1949…
From Pinrepair
And this super saucy Peter Pan from 1955…
From Finside
Though technically not a book, this 1987 Dungeons & Dragons pinball game included graphics gleaned directly from the cover of the 1983 Player’s Manual. Which is awesome.
From Reddit
The Close Encounters of the Third Kind pinball game was based on the 1977 film. But there was a Close Encounters book! It was a novelization of the film published in tandem with the theatrical release. We believe this makes it eligible for the pinball literacy list. Plus, spaceships are cool.
While this next machine might not represent a specific book or literary character, it gets 100+ bonus points for being an amalgamation of several novels. May we present Verne’s World pinball from 1996 (with a depiction of the author, quill in hand!):
We found only one picture book turned pinball (unless you count this or this):
From Joystix Games
But the grand finale, voted hands-down winner of “Least Expected Literary Pinball” is this 2023 Godfather 50-year anniversary collectors edition, complete with a sculpted bust of Don Vito Corleone in his signature tux:
From Reddit
Which pinball game would YOU like to play?
It’s a merry chase! Use your motor skills to navigate a yellow pom-pom hen around the barnyard. But beware the red pom-pom fox, who’s also on a roll!
As you can see in the above photo, we used a copy paper box lid as the base of our barnyard. Then we glued a number of elements in place. The bee hive was a paper cup with an arched door. The haystack was a construction paper tunnel. The ramp was a paper towel tube, cut in half length-wise and elevated with a snippet of the remaining tube. The hen house was a small box with the lid positioned as a ramp, also elevated with a snippet of paper towel tube. We added a pond, fabric flowers, and tissue paper shrubs as well.