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Atomic Arcade Pinball (1979)
First written July 9, 2024Tomy's Atomic Arcade Pinball, first released in 1979, is one of the more advanced and fun "portable" pinball tables, a category of toy that saw some popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. Tomy's offering has a single motor that drives a complicated system of gears and levers that powers active bumpers and scoring reels as well as a flashing strobe and dinging tone generator.
An American design patent dates to January 1980 with some design patents dating to 1978.
Atomic Arcade Pin Ball (1979)
The first Atomic Arcade Pinball in the United States was released in 1979 in a creamy-whitish color. These "tables" were made in Japan and sold as Atomic Arcade Pin Ball.
These earlier versions used five D batteries, with later releases using only four.
The main table has an encapsulated ball with the two flipper buttons and plunger as well as the ball counter exposed at the bottom of the machine. The top of the back display has a button to reset the counter and the power switch. Two plastic feet are included to tilt the table forward. There is even a little compartment to hold the ball in for transit so it is not flying around the table, with a plastic tab that can be pushed and pulled into and out of the upper chamber to trap the ball in the left of the drain.
The feet fit into slots on the bottom, with the battery compartment also being accessed from the bottom. The battery contacts on my example were corroded, so I had to pull the table apart to polish and reattach them.
On these earlier versions, nuts are used on the other end of long bolts, but on later releases screws are screwed directly into the plastic case. The counter and speaker cover remove and the plastic playing field cover and playfield can be removed. The main driving electronics are all located up behind the speaker above the battery compartment.
The contacts needed to be replaced, with one of the double-contact sets being broken off of its plastic stems.
The score counter is a relatively simple unit with the right three digits being connected together, so the game really counts from 000 to 999 points. Its kind of funny that the display is emulating the style of a seven-segment display when it is physically a reel counter like most real pinball tables of the time and the actual digits are made up of different "segment" shapes - the 0 is only four segments.
The plastic cover can also be removed with the score counter open. This plastic cover holds some rubber components - they do not really offer that much "bounce". The flippers lift out and a single screw holds the playing field over the mechanism. Removing it reveals the complicated drive shaft that pulls the bumpers down when triggered as well as driving the score counter and the flashing light.
Over on the right of the mechanism is the motor that drives the whole operation. Under the motor is a gear that opens and closes two contacts which turn on and off the strobe. Two more contacts to the left trigger the dinging noise from the speaker. The speaker should ding with every bumper hit, but mine is only triggering on the central pop bumper - this is a nice medium between it ringing every time it hits a bumper and disconnecting the speaker entirely, which is what I have seen some other people do.
A complicated driveshaft travels down the center of the machine and ties into the three pop bumpers and the two "slingshots". The two rollover lanes at the top of the playfield trigger the top left pop bumper to fire when rolled over. The five "active" bumpers are made up of a black trigger section and an orange plunger section. When the black section of a target is held down by the pinball, it releases a drum on the spinning shaft that has a gear attached that runs against a gear on the spinning shaft. The gear revolves around the central shaft and eventually rapidly pulls down the plunger of the bumper as it spins around.
Here is the process in slow motion - click the GIFs for the video version. When the black plastic releases the drum, the little gear comes whirring around very quickly to run along the rack in the plunger arm's tooling and fire the ball away - in these two shots, the bumpers actually fire twice as I did not move my finger away before the drum spun all the way around and started another cycle, dragging the bumper down again. The score counter also advances every time a drum is allowed to spin around and pop a bumper.
Click for longer video with sound!
This game is pretty fun to be honest. Perhaps the most glowing review I could offer is that I had the later table shown below sitting out and my partner was immediately attracted to the box and wanted to play it, which we did back and forth for several rounds seeing how high a score we could get - and they asked if we could play it again a few days later! I have not tried that many of these "portable" home pinball tables but the bumpers in this table end up firing the ball away with decent speed and force, and although the table is certainly basic I do think this is probably one of the nicer home pinball tables of the era - good enough that several manufacturers copied the mechanism over the years! Some more info about these tables (and their copycats) as well as 3D printable versions of the support feet can be found on this webpage.
Atomic Arcade Action Pinball (European import box) (1980s Thailand production)
In 1987 Tomy opened their first Thailand manufacturing facility and began producing new versions of many of their existing toys there. This later darker grey Atomic Pinball was sold in this multilingual box in Europe as Atomic Arcade Action Pinball or Atomic Arcade Action Flipper which was originally used for older Japanese-production white tables in Europe. This particular example has Tomy America Inc. stickers, dating it to the period in the late 1980s where dark grey Thailand-made units would have come in this box and when the new Tomy America, established in 1988, would have been importing European-market Tomy toys instead before being able to get America-specific boxes printed for American sale.
The sides of this box are marked for French and German sale as well as the English cover. A safety warning sticker is added to the front because of the small ball in this American import.
This newer version of the table has different table art and some other updated graphics but has the same layout and main mechanism as the others. This version cut out the additional fifth D battery that was used for the tone generator in the original games. The tones do sound different in this version of the game.
I think that these two variations of the table fit their time periods well - the off-white and table graphics of the 1979 release certainly fits the 1970s while this later black and grey case and more "actiony" graphics fit the period it was released in better.
The bumpers on this version seem a little less powerful than the Japan-made example above, and the tone sounds with any target instead of just the central one as intended.
Atomic Arcade Pinball was rereleased as Atomic Pinball with new graphics in 2006.