Sequel Games, Pt 2
Jack*Bot
The third in the Pin*Bot series.
(For ease of typing I will mostly omit the asterix).
When Pinbot was released in 1986 it was considered a great tournament game. But as far as I knew, tournaments weren’t really a thing back then. The IFPA had not been established and the world pinball championships did not take place until the 1st event in 1991, but I guess for localised tournaments...they might have been occuring somewhere.
The reason it was considered a tournament game, was for it’s strategy in making certain shots with both timing and accuracy. On game start, the visor targets will light up in sequence. If a well placed shot hits the corresponding target when it is lit, then the visor comes down, eliminating the need to grind away at completing the bank of targets, and gets the player straight in to ball locks, and multiball.
Pinbot 2 (The Bride of Pinbot) reprised the theme in 1991 with a radically different layout (will discuss at another time), but Jackbot was a return in style to that 1986 original.
Released in 1995, and contrary to popular thought, Larry deMar led the design team for Jackbot, not Barry Oursler. Barry had designed it’s predecessor and was consulted, but the re-imagining is all Larry deMar.
The reason this game came about at all, is because the Williams factory could foresee a gap in the production schedule, and wanted a title that could fill the spot.
They dismantled two Pinbot machines and re-wired them to play on the WPC board architecture. They did not change anything in the playfield design, apart from the inserts and their placement.
On the theme, Larry explained: “We find Pinbot and the Bride Of Pinbot in the casino. It has been every gambler’s dream to beat the odds and even cheat a little to win big. This game provides the opportunity for the player to do just that.”
Larry was known as one of the top programmers in pinball, wth many industry firsts under his belt.
Jackbot was his swan song game, as after this project he was promoted within Williams to be Director of Engineering.
Jackbot had a working title of Pinbot DeLuxe and after an hour long brainstorm session they decided on “Lucky Star”. However, later no one could remember the title, so they went back to the drawing board on what it should be called. Larry had hoped that it might be “Honeymoon in Vegas”, but everyone said it was too long. During the design process the team just kept referring to it as Jackbot and the name stuck. There was some resistance to that from the sales group as they felt it was too similar to Pinbot, but ultimately they managed to be persuaded.
Jackbot is intended for the casual player to enjoy. The shots are quite easy. Wide open playfield. Simple to start multiball. The wizard mode being Casino Run and relatively easy to achieve. A very good player might get it two or three times in a game. Casino Run brings in to play that risk vs reward element where a player may push their luck to maximise the payoff. It can be quite exciting, by seeing just how far you can get before a bomb destroys all your dividends.
If one wants to understand the multi-ball stategy though, it is a bit more elaborate - the different scoring potential to the many jackpots, and building to Mega Visor. That is quite difficult to get to.
Larry mentioned that a player can “cheat the casino”. How so? Well if the player wants to rapidly push the buy-in button while the dice is thrown, or a keno card is played...Pinbot might just be able to bump the craps table, and swing it in your favour.
Once in Copenhagen in 2017 I was lucky enough to play Jackbot with the then Italian #1 player Daniele Acciari. He professed at the time to it being his favourite game. I watched as he blew it up, and his knowledge of the rules was very intriguing to me.
Certainly when the game came out, and up until that point in 2017 I had not shown much interest in the game. I was never terribly big on rules, but I knew enough to know it was quite shallow, and seemingly to me, an obvious game.
It did not sell very well for Williams. Larry states that if Jackbot had done better, we would probably have seen a return to more simpler games in the years following.
It also has a unique anomaly which not many people know about, called switch validation; this is not just unique to Jackbot, as many games require 3 minor switch hits before the ball saver is even started. This is unique to games that can plunge to a flipper, without activating any switches (think Game Of Thrones, Spiderman, Metallica, Iron Man). So potentially a short plunge on Jackbot can bring about a multiball without ever being in danger of draining out. I saw this technique used by Daniele in my game against him.
One thing I really do admire on Jackbot is the playfield art package. It is understated but rich in colour. While Python Anghelo did the art on Pinbot, he collaborated with John Youssi on Bride of Pinbot, so it’s a nice continuity that John Youssi should do all the art on Jackbot.
I used to marvel over a collector friend’s Jackbot machine in Auckland and for many years told him that if he ever sold it, I would be keen. It was the nicest condition Jackbot that I knew of. And since my game with Daniele in 2017, I was dead keen to get one myself.
Eventually yes, he did sell, and it did come my way.
It now resides in the line-up at Ye Olde Pinball Shoppe.
Go try it out.
