Star Wars Pachinko Machine

I love Star Wars and Japan as much as Jurassic Park, so when this Star Wars Sankyo pachinko machine popped up for sale in my area, I jumped at the chance to have this desirable machine.

Pachinko is form of gambling in Japan where metal balls are fired up to the top of the playfield and bounce down through a field of pins, hopefully landing in targets, which awards additional balls. It’s a similar concept to “Plinko”. While there’s a pretense of skill in that you can control how hard the balls are fired up to the top, it’s really just luck of beating the (low) odds. In modern machines like this one, landing balls in the targets grants “spins” on the LCD display, and you hope to make a matching set of numbers for a major jackpot. The screen also displays various clips from the original trilogy and there are a few fully-virtual minigames where you shoot down tie fighters and such using the red button on the front of the machine. There’s no real skill, but the animations, lights, sounds, and animatronic R2D2 that moves around all add to the fun.

I installed it in custom cabinet I built with my dad years ago for my older mechanical pachinko machine from the 1970s. This Star Wars machine required designing and printing a new ball catch tray to collect the non-winning balls as they drop out the bottom of the machine and send them into a drawer at the bottom of the cabinet. In a real pachinko parlor, these balls would go back to the house, but in my case, players at home can refill the play tray from this drawer.