This particular 22-minute video is special for a few reasons. First, it’s made by Bowen of PAPA, the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association, which means you’re gonna see some really good play. Second, it’s two nice games in a row, despite the game being set to tournament settings, meaning, game rules are at their hardest or nearly so, and there are no extra balls. And third, both games achieve a respectable score, but they do so by completely different strategies. The first one goes for multiballs exclusively, and gets to over 200M mostly through jackpots. The second pursues Mansion Rooms, which is slower and a little riskier, but gets to over 300M.

Addams Family is, as the video mentions, the best-selling pinball machine of all time. It’s got several unique features to it. In many pinball games the modes mostly differ by the available shots, but Addams Family has a mode, Seance, that turns on spinning magnets beneath the playfield (“FEEL the POWER!”), so the game actually plays differently, physically, while it’s running. It’s worth a lot of points, but it’s also very easy to lose control of the ball during it.

Multiball on Addams Family, as shown, can also be worth tons of points. The Power magnets also run during it, but shots to the side ramp during it are worth a minimum of 20 million. Addams Family is from an age where ball savers are rare, if there’s any at all, so there is a very strong possibility you’ll just immediately fail out of multiball with nothing to show for it. The game does let you try to restart multiball if you earn no jackpots, but you’ll only have to balls and could well just fail out again.

High-level pinball play is about both quick reactions and careful strategy. Don’t take shots on the fly if you can help it, but try to dampen the ball’s momentum, trap the ball on the flippers, and make as many controlled shots as possible. During multiball, try to get all but one ball on the flipper you want to use the least, and use the other one to make the important shots. If the ball is on the wrong flipper, try to get it to the other flipper safely, using techniques like “post transfers.”

Good pinball takes lots of practice, and sometimes unlearning habits, but it’s a kind of play that not many real-time video games can match. For pinball’s a very honest game, there is rarely anything the game can do to covertly sabotage you (if the machine is maintained well), but its skill ceiling is infinite. You can always play better.

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It’s another trick that involves the machine being bumped forcefully from the front in a specific way, this time to save balls going down the right outlane. I’ve never done one myself (even if I could muster the force, I don’t really want to). There are tables, including Rocky & Bullwinkle and The Last Action Hero, that are even set up to recognize when they’ve happened and reward it, or at least inform the player: I saw what you did there.

It prioritizes players with sufficient strength to shove the machine hard enough, and risks damaging it, so it’s illegal in tournament play. Due to the nature of tilt sensors, which are typically plum bobs with a conductive ring around them, depending on the details of the table it need not even incur a tilt warning, although it could run afoul of the slam tilt sensor, a separate device. Tilt sensors exist to allow some nudging but punish excessive use, and tilting results in the loss of a ball and any bonus. Slam tilt sensors are designed to protect the hardware itself, and immediately end the current game, which forfeits even the chance to enter initials. Essentially it resets the game’s computer. So, be careful with that.

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But this is not actually true.

There are a small number of what we might call “dark arts” in pinball, techniques to save balls that otherwise would not be saveable. This is one of the things that’s interesting about pinball. It’s not like video games where everything that happens is the result of processors moving bits around. There is room for things to happen on a pinball table that the game software has no control over.

One might even make a case, if they were feeling argumentative, that the scoring and the rules have an at-best incidental influence over the real game, which takes place purely in the physical realm. This isn’t completely true: the software awards extra balls, controls playfield toys, enforces tilts, and otherwise manipulates the game’s Newtonian world, but it is true that, if the machine is in working order, and the player never misses their shots, that they can play indefinitely, and even score popcorn points for hitting low-value targets. Pull that off long enough and you can earn arbitrarily high scores, but I hope you’re good enough to hit the same shot over and over thousands of times, though, not to mention have the spare time to do it in.

A consequence of this is, lost balls can be rescued, in a number of ways. One of them is the bang back.

When the ball goes down the left outlane, along the side and bottom of the playfield, if the left flipper is raised and the right flipper left down, a sudden forceful blow by the player’s hand against the lockdown bar at the right spot can impart enough force to the ball to cause it to leap up onto the right flipper, and back into play. Even though the machine “knows” the ball went down the outlane, due to triggering its switch, it generally won’t penalize the player for doing this. The ball-ending event is it coming to rest in the trough, the receptacle for out-of-play pinballs beneath the playfield. Until the ball reaches it, it’s live.

Bang backs are a dark art because they enable extra-long turns, and also the force required to execute them risks damaging both the machine and the player’s hand, and so are illegal in tournament play. But they can be pulled off pretty consistently, as this video from the PAPApinball channel (1 minute) demonstrates:

Another dark art of pinball is the deathsave, but let’s save that for later….

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