High Speed (pinball)
1986 pinball machine
High Speed is a pinball game designed by Steve Ritchie and released by Williams Electronics in 1986. It is based on Ritchie's real-life police chase inside a 1979 Porsche 928. He was caught in Lodi, California on Interstate 5 and accused of speeding at 146 miles per hour (235 km/h).
It was the first Williams game to feature a jackpot to be collected within the multiball.
A sequel was released in 1992 called The Getaway: High Speed II.
Design
The machine went through several iterations of design.
This is the first Williams pinball machine to use an alpha-numeric display; but due to the high cost of these displays they were only used for the top two displays, with the two lower displays numeric-only displays. An alphanumeric display had previously been used in Hyperball, a 1981 Williams arcade machine. Python Anghelo designed the backglass so the score display is in the dashboard of the radar unit in the police car. The police are shown chasing a red Lamborghini Countach with a blonde woman as a passenger; this car has the license plate KINGPIN, a nickname of Steve Ritchie. The speed 146mph is used in the backglass artwork.
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This entry incorporates text from “High Speed (pinball)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.