1981 Stern Freefall pinball machine

Here's a gameplay demonstration of a 1981 Stern Freefall pinball machine.

This game was designed by the late, great Harry Williams for Stern as the company struggled to stay afloat amid diminishing pinball sales and fierce competition with video arcade machines.

This is a widebody game and features multiball, speech, some fairly decent rules and a "ramp" to a raised "playfield" where balls are locked prior to multiball. It's not a bad game, but there are some features that could have been better exploited and some rules that just don't quite measure up to the more notable Stern games from the period like Lightning, Cheetah and Star Gazer.

The spinner shot is pretty good and a well adjusted spinner can spin forever (fast forward to 1:49 of the video for an example). The kicker to the upper ramp is also a neat feature, but I wish there was a way to shoot for it (or at least a reliable bank shot) rather than just relying on luck to get the ball in there. The speech, of course, simply oozes cool and the start of multiball is climactic enough to be worth the effort.

The backglass is nice too look at and the rest of the art package is pretty good also. The sounds are on par with most other 1980/1981 Sterns, but I find them to be a tad repetitive on this game and not as "cool" as the sounds on several games that came before it, like, say, Quicksilver or Star Gazer.

At any rate, a decent effort by Stern that falls a little short of measuring up to some of their better-known classics.

Sorry for the extra-long video. It starts out slow but gets better as it goes on. Take note of the multiball that starts around the 7-minute mark and results in all 3 balls resting in the kicker -- never seen that before. It turned out to be an epic game and I actually beat my previous high score.

More info on Freefall can be found here: http://ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=953

Enjoy!

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Stern
• Pinball
• freefall
• cheetah
• lightning
• star
• gazer
• widebody
• machine
• Harry
• Williams
• quicksilver
• speech
• multiball
• 1981
• Bally
• Gottlieb

[GandSAfan]

You played that superbly! I used to love playing this machine. (And I could make a quarter go pretty far on it!)

And DON'T apologize, you've succeeded in bringing back many a fun memory. Keep up the good work! :)

[Mycoinop]

Great job Corey. I really appreciate the hard work. Paul

[Paulywint]

I played this game at an ice cream parlor in the mid 1980s. I really liked the game, but I didn't like the talking on the game for some reaosn.

[seymourshabow]

Interesting game, I never liked the change matrix lane with double flipper hit myself, makes it too easy to complete the matrix. Mine left last May to make room for more games ;)