My family was spending the day at the Electromagnetic Pinball Museum in Pawtucket, RI, and stumbled across an Atari Pinball Machine. Yes, Atari made pinball machines for a brief, unsuccessful spell. Atari launched the career of the most prolific pinball game designer, Steve Ritchie. Steve is still designing pinball machines 50 years later, with his most recent game, Sonic the Hedgehog from Jersey Jack Pinball. One of the people working there took me around and showed me all of the things that have been donated to the museum… just rooms and rooms of arcade machines, CRTs, and pinball parts. The Superman pinball machine was not in great shape, but looking at the classic art got me thinking about my yesteryear and sparked an idea… what if I turned it into some wall art for my game room? The guys said if I made a donation, the pinball playfield for Atari Superman is mine. That night I started my research. I actually didn’t find too much detail on Atari pinball machines, so I posted on the pinball forums and quickly got connected to people who knew something about it. The main thing was figuring out how far I needed to go to give this a second life, and I am glad that I didn’t know how much work it was going to be. I just took little steps, learned, shared, engaged with lots of new people, and plodded along. It took a month, but George and I got it done.
The results are gorgeous! I learned a lot and will share more of the details when I get time. You can follow the live build here: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/atari-superman-playfield-wall-art
Inserts and Plastics
When I got the playfield home, I realized that I didn’t have the complete playfield. I only had the wood and the printed art. Every insert, plastic piece, and post was removed. The original owner was planning a playfield restoration and had stopped at some point. The artwork was touched up and looked beautiful, but probably would not work for playing pinball on it. The inserts were going to be important since my goal was to place an LED behind them to make them glow.
I put out a post on Pinside looking for any old parts for the Atari Superman Pinball and got a few bites.
Soon enough, I got the original parts for this exact playfield. I got to meet up with the pinhead that donated the playfield to the museum. We chatted for hours about 70s and 80s pinball, swapped stories, and made a community connection. It was surreal to find the original owner, but the pinball community is a small niche hobby.
I also found the original Superman plafield plastic pieces. They shined right up with Novus Plastic Polish. The Novus cleaning products are a must if you work on pinball machines.
To mount the plastic pieces on the playfield, you need post mounts and post stud screws. The mounts were easy to find, but the stud screws were a challenge. New ones were about a dollar each. So, this didn’t scale well. I needed like 60 of them, so if my math is right, that’s $60. I turned to eBay and found someone selling “pounds of old pinball parts”. This came in at $90! Look at the savings. Somehow, I felt better about buying old used parts than buying new ones at a lower price… and in the process, I got a bunch of rusty parts I didn’t even need.
My old screw bucket was not happy that I bought someone else’s old screw bucket and didn’t even consult it.
Mounting all of the playfield parts took a lot of time, but you just do one at a time. I have a new respect for anyone who designs these things. 70s pinball was so much simpler than modern pinball machines, and it was still a lot of parts to track.
Flippers
I wanted to complete the top side of the playfield with flippers. So, I took old flippers from my Strikes and Spares pinball machine and cut them down for this build. Again, this will be wall-mounted, so you can’t have things sticking out too far in the back. They needed to be modded, and Dremel came to the rescue. Shooting a 6-foot stream of sparks across the room.
LED Control and CheerLights
Of course, it is connected to the CheerLights project. This was going to happen 100% of the time whenever I connected 150 LEDs to something. I used WS2811 bullet-style LEDs that you can control one at a time. They fit perfectly in the 12.5mm general illumination holes in the playfield. I used a WLED controller and a 3A power supply to control the colors, animations, and synchronization with the CheerLights MQTT server.
The insert near the flippers stays in sync with the latest CheerLights color while the rest of the inserts can have their own color or visual effects.
Out of the box, the best animation effect was Stream 2. This very much looks like an attract mode on a pinball machine.
3D Models
Part of the project was making my first 3D model to have the original pop bumpers mounted above the playfield but not connected to the original mechanism. Since this is wall art, I can’t have a mechanism sticking out 7 inches on the back. I also could not find the old-style pop bumpers on Maker World, so I designed my own… ish. Meaning it is not a pop bumper for function, it is a pop bumper to take light from an LED and let it shine through. I just published my first model!
For other parts needed, I found a person on Pinside who created a system called PinGlow. They were way ahead of me and had thought through the kind of stuff you are going to need for a wall art project like mine. They offer drop targets, stand-up targets, wall mounting kits, and even LEDs. I reached out to them on Pinside, and they offered to make a custom version of their drop targets specifically for the Atari Pinball machine. These drop targets had the Superman logo on them.
