1978 Sinbad Pinball Machine - Gottlieb System 1 Review, How To Play Badly!

ladies and gentlemen this is joe's classic video games back with another really cool arcade game video for you this evening this is actually a pinball machine goblin sinbad this was a scotland system one game so this was shortly after they went from uh electromechanical games to solid state games their famous system one first system get it um and we've talked on i think we've done another system one before but everybody kind of knows the story or if you don't i'll go through it real quick basically uh gottlib was reluctant to make uh solid state digital games because they were doing so well with their electro-mechanical games so for instance we've got this jetspin right here which is one of their em games and they were rocking and rolling and this would have been check this out 1977 well shortly after this they switched over to the solid state stuff and they were kind of reluctant to do it so they kind of got a late start on that i don't think they're that i don't think they made any solid state games till uh 78 when bali had already done it stern had already done it and williams had already done it so they were kind of last of the major pinball manufacturers to go digital and they hired rockwell to design the board set which was a company that had contracts with nasa etc so they thought that that would be a really good way to quickly get a board set done that was uh integrated circuit based you know cpu based instead of the old uh relay technology that the electromechanical games had and rockwell didn't do them right basically they they used these strange chips and on the board called spider chips and there was a problem where they didn't really protect the uh the inputs from the driver board etc etc so anyway what happened was the boards easily got damaged over the years they were damaged by a battery there was a battery mounted on the bottom of the board so over the years they were damaged by that battery but even before that back in the day they would have problems where a coil would lock on and or a short to the switch matrix or something like that and it would burn up this one of these spider chips on the main board well when it did that those things were really expensive hard to find even hard to change because they have so many legs on them just kind of kind of weird looking um so that just had a lot of problems and then the other thing that was going on was the system one games really looked a lot like an em so they were kind of simple um the actual architecture of the system didn't have all that many lights that it could use didn't have all that many switches that it could use and more importantly didn't have that many solenoids that it could use so like for instance on this game this is sinbad well in this game there's only you've got two pop bumpers notice you don't even have any kicking rubbers down above the flippers so you've got two pop bumpers um that now that i think of it aren't even computer controlled uh the pop bumper the way it works is you hit the switch underneath it and it just immediately i may be wrong about that i don't know but i don't think they're computer controlled i think the switch itself actually makes the pop bumper work but they've got one set of drop targets over here one set over here and one set over here and that's your only three coils that they're using on the play field um which kind of hurt them because uh the valleys were more complex the williams games were certainly more complex and even the stern games were more complex so they did not do that well with system one now time has moved on and it's now decades later and people some people are finding a newfound respect for these games because while they may not be as complex as some of the other systems the the electronic part of it they have designed a new game board for them so basically you can get one of these repair the power supply repair the driver board repair the play field and put a brand new cpu in it which is what we've done in this one so you don't have to worry about the the unreliability of the original one things like the displays those are the original displays they run at a low voltage so they don't really mess up that often whereas on the valleys and the stearns and the williams those displays burn up after a while so you have to buy new displays etc on these usually you can get away with even using the old displays you can usually get away with using the old driver board you can usually get away with using the old sound card this particular one has chimes in it so it was a one of the early ones but with that new cpu in it they're pretty reliable and uh they're they're neat you know i mean they're a goblin goblets are you know they had a long run there of making some really cool games so a game like this once you get that new board in there and you've worked through it like we have them on this one usually they're fairly reliable so this will probably be a pretty pretty good game for somebody's collection um home game room but it's a it's cool getting into system ones and just uh working through them because it's really a product of the of the late 70s for sure so i just noticed a couple lights aren't lighting up it's bugging me do you see them let's see if maybe i'm just seeing things it's just that one that one's not lighting up what's up with that folks so i have to get on there and see what that is but um but it's a cool older game 1970 i would assume it doesn't say there um let's find it here usually it says somewhere on the play field it's the manufacturer's certificate but no date on it i believe it's 78. i don't know that for sure but i believe it is but anyway check out the back glass they certainly did a great job on that the cool blue futura i believe they call them displays it's just a uh it's a display and then they've got a blue piece kind of silk screened onto the back glass so it makes everything look blue um got this big rams head up here and i called her no fire you get sinbad swords above each player oh above and below each player's score down here you've got this large serpent you've got this lady i don't know who she is a sorceress i suppose we put a little uh flashing bulb behind her finger because it just looks so cool sometimes you have to do things folks because it looks so cool and then you've got this bull minotaur i guess that would be is that what it's called minotaur got this minotaur creature here more swords around that player score you've got sinbad himself here the artwork on the got lives in my opinion was always strong up until the 80s and it got a little crazy but uh 50 60 70 is all i got let's look good got this lady here who has a little leprosy going on there sometimes these back glasses whenever they start flaking for whatever reason they always flake the women's skin tones first so you always get the ladies looking like they've got some kind of skin disease going on but other than that it's a fairly good back glass so we kind of left it goblet sinbad check it out all right so let's read over the rules and then we'll play it a little bit and you can judge for yourself if this game's a dog or if it's good this was i believe the best selling system one game send bad instructions one two three or four players there are three balls per player insert coin and or press credit button to reset machine repeat for additional players there you go drop target score 3000 points lights corresponding rollovers and targets and increases bonus volume so all right so you got drop targets everywhere on this game if you like drop targets here's a good one for you and gotlub was famous for their nice drop targets they worked really well which was a problem the williams ones didn't always work all that great the ballet ones were pretty good and the stern ones were kind of a copy of the ballet ones um uh but the got lip drop targets were considered you know the standard so they they had a patent on them so you couldn't make it just like the gottlieb ones so the williams ones for instance were made differently and didn't work very well so um i don't know how they worked when they were new because i didn't play them when they were new and you can rebuild them now and make them work pretty good but they had issues but these god loved ones no issues folks so you've got these four drop targets over here you've got this one over here that's white you've got these two here and then you've got these three here so i guess every time you go through this is a spinner here i guess every time you go through that it advances the bonus add bonus all right so drop target score 3 000 points lights corresponding rollovers and targets and increases bonus value so i don't know which particular ones that it likes we'll see whenever we uh we go through it hitting with a white drop oh they're telling you right here i'm an idiot hitting the white drop target lights the two times bonus hitting the white and yellow drop targets lights the three-time bonus value hitting the white yellow and purple drop targets lights to four times bonus value very nice and so those bonus multipliers are right here bonus multipliers so basically if you thin your ball you're you're up to 5000 on the bonus it'll give you 5 000 and then if you've got two times lit up it'll give you it'll count five thousand twice blah blah blah blah blah blah if you've got five thousand lit five times lit up it'll count five thousand five times at the end of the mall completing all drop targets lights five times bonus resets all drop targets and scores the bonus as indicated ooh very nice so if you get all the drop targets it goes ahead and gives you the bonus and the five times the bonus and you keep your ball very nice and it resets the drop target so you can do it again so this is essentially definitely a drop target game swinging target swinging target that's an interesting way of putting it and rollover buttons score 100 points and add an ad advance five advances adds one bonus and one thousand points all right so this is what they're calling the swinging target which everybody else called a spinner but you notice it's a real thick one and everything so i guess maybe what they're saying is that if you hit it you don't necessarily get a ton of points because it it'll go around a few times but it doesn't go crazy like a regular uh like a regular spinner and like all companies i don't know if the camera will catch it but like all companies they put an image on the front and the back so that whenever it spins around you see both at the same time the old flip book trick that uh it's really cool so on that one it crosses swash block buckling swords like sinbad might use all right bonus is scored and features reset after each ball in play tilt does not disqualify a player making special scores one extra ball maximum one ball per ball in play so there we go so that said swinging target and rollover button score 100 points and add an advance five advanced ads one bonus and one thousand points so basically every time that target goes around five times you walk up to here and it adds a bonus up the ladder and you've got the same thing over here these four roll over buttons going up to the top this thing has nice art on the play field oh another thing about the playfield the god live ones held up pretty decent they did they uh if this was a williams it would be worn slap out but it's still in pretty decent shape they use some kind of different finish on it but the got lube system ones usually whenever you get them they're in pretty decent shape like this one is not perfect but decent so there he is nice art so i will get the tripod and i'll fix that one light bulb before it drives me crazy and we'll set it up and we'll try it out be back in a few all right folks what a cool game so basically you're trying to get as many of the drop targets as you can as often as you can now this is a uh this is a brand new board like we mentioned so a couple things there is a ball save on this you probably won't be able to see it it's just barely out of the camera but there's a ball save right here it says a player same player shoots again since we have that new game board that's built in so for the first six or seven seconds you can't lose the ball if you lose it you get another ball and check it out i fixed the light bulb and then also uh up here at the top there's these four roll rollovers see the lights that just lit up when you start the ball since this is a brand new game board with new software whenever you start one of those will be lit up that's your skill shot so they actually added a skill shot to the gotlam system ones the original system one board which we get in from time to time but usually if it's a system one we go ahead and put the brand new board in anyway even if the old board's working because if you have any problems they're very hard to fix because you can't find the spider chips for them but uh all of these lights lighting up in the attract mode like this that's something that they added in in that new board the original system one games with the original board didn't do all of this attract stuff where the lights do their thing and everything it would just have like one light on it would just stay there until you put a quarter in which is kind of sad but anyway we'll try it out a little bit see what kind of score i can get oh i forgot about the skill shot i missed it so as you can see the light's still blinking at the bottom ball save is on oh let's let it right past me all right skill shot time again come on oh i missed it big time nope maybe not oh yep missed it so i'm trying to shoot for the drop targets how about those chimes man chimes are awesome sounds like one of them slightly loose that's why you're hearing that kind of plate sound oh popcorn okay oh all right so that time i got 141 000 that's my first game we can beat that same player shoots again all right it's saving my ball very cool oh man that's one problem with four player with four flipper games look it creates a hole so you can lose the ball by scissoring it through the flipper but that's not a flaw of the game that's a design of the game they did that to make it different each each game has ways to lose the ball you'll notice that it's a harder a lot harder on this one to lose the ball through the out hole i mean through the uh the out lanes okay oh man i gotta stop doing that that's pretty good little ball though um sometimes whenever i play i try to like kind of catch the ball a little bit but on this one you can't really do that because as soon as you do that it goes through the hole oh missed my skill shot all right that time it was even worse i got a hundred and three thousand nice action on the pot bumpers really nice little nice little uh bank shot that just slid by that first drop target there a second ago that was awesome oh come on bounce over and get that red one come on now all right that's pretty good i got 83 000 on my first ball that's my best first ball yet i need to start getting that skill shot a little more i'm gonna try i might actually try next time did it save it yeah it saved it just in the nick of the time oh i forgot to try the skill shot though all right come on oh no no skill shot i loop the loop right down the middle folks all right i did a little better that time i got 171 000 all right we'll try one more time hmm tough tough tough well those goblet drop targets work great though look how quick they like just reset and perfect and they look good love those goblet drop targets hmm i keep forgetting about the skill shot i finally got it though all right so that was 133 that's gonna be the last game i'm gonna do really well this time power of positive thinking all right so there's my skill shot nope yeah that's good oh no thought i had a good one going there but it didn't work out that way skill shot that helps basically you got to be careful with that right flipper because that hole between the two the two right flippers is vicious you got to make sure that ball is all the way on there before you hit that button all right i gotta make this one count folks oh missed it if you missed the skill shot does that mean you have no skill saved i love those chimes man the goblin chimes are awesome oh 171 000. i thought i'd do better than that but there you go that is goblins sinbad 1978 fun game in my opinion but i like all the system ones i don't think i played one yet that i didn't like um they just look cool i like the they look very 70s ish so they're kind of like uh slightly more flashy em games and i liked all of the eem games so why wouldn't i like it you can't play one thinking that you know comparing it to a game with ramps and all that stuff it's a different game it's like you know checkers is fun it's not as complicated as chess but checkers is still fun right same thing with this it's a fun game especially if you read the rules and try to do what you're supposed to do in the rules so now by the time you see gottlieb sinbad he may have uh ran off to somebody else's house this thing may not be available anymore but you can see all the games that we do have available right now usually arcade games but we keep in a couple pinball machines usually on our website go to lionsarcade.com check out the selection we've got prices pictures descriptions of everything on there and that's even if you're watching years from now go check it out it'll still be there you can see what we've got in now now if you're local you can stop by and see us in person we're in downtown rock hill south carolina which is about 15 minutes south of charlotte north carolina and we've got a whole building full of games for sale at all times now if you're not local and you you're not looking to buy an arcade game and you don't like our website well that's fine just subscribe to us here on 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