Coupled with the garish aesthetics I mentioned previously, it’s really, really difficult to care about any of the tables in Zaccaria’s entire range. These are generic, nondescript titles that hardly do much to excite the imagination. Zaccaria Pinball’s machines? Magic Castle.
Licensing has always been important to the appeal of pinball whether you’re a fan of Star Trek, Dr Who, Lord of the Rings, AC/DC or KISS, many of the best and most beloved tables are based on popular culture, films, music, or other instantly recognisable properties. Licensing is another issue for the Zaccaria Pinball line. I could stick a picture of Hatsune Miku over the space-themed table base and it would be as representative of Hatsune Miku as it was of the space theme. While the other, better pinball manufacturers were working really hard to make the actual design and play style of their tables match the themes they were working with, Zaccaria’s tables are very cookie-cutter in approach. Ramps and other decorative elements are always kept to a minimum, and really, for the most part the only part of these tables that carries the theme is the artwork painted on to the base. I find that the Zaccaria tables rely too heavily on bumpers, which are the most unengaging mechanics you can find on a table. That’s the standard of design we’re talking about here. As a kid I had a space-themed cheap tabletop pinball machine that my parents gave me as a Christmas gift, and it’s telling that one of the Zaccaria Pinball space-themed pinball table gave me a rush of nostalgia for that machine. As a result, the simply didn’t play as well. Zaccaria’s tables were frequently aesthetically garish, and lacked the embellishments and slick design of their peers.
Zaccaria was an Italian manufacturer that claimed to be the third-ranked pinball manufacturer in the world when pinball was at its peak, but in the context of the world of pinball that means it was very much the B-tier.
If that name isn’t familiar to you, there’s probably a good reason. By that I mean that it’s problem is that it gives players exact replicas of Zaccaria pinball tables. Zaccaria Pinball deserves to be a third name in that small group of elite pinball collections, and is certainly built to the same standards as its peers, but its namesake really lets it down. The Pinball Arcade, meanwhile, gave players exact replicas of classic tables from the likes of Gottlieb and Stern. Zen Pinball/ Pinball FX gave players original digital pinball tables, most of which wouldn’t be possible as physical, real-world pinball experiences. Previously, digital pinball fans only had two real choices for deep pinball experiences. Zaccaria Pinball has a fascinating story, in a way that I’m still not sure why it got made at all. I’d like to think it’s something I can do.īut then I played Zaccaria Pinball, and while I wouldn’t say that it has killed my dream, it has reminded me that pinball design is actually incredibly hard to do well, and my grand dream idea may well not work out the way I thought. I’ve got this great idea for a Hatsune Miku-themed one, and while a pinball table is a complex thing to build, people get up to more intricate homemade projects than that. One of my goals, somewhere down the track if I ever find the time to do it, is to design and build my own pinball table.
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