Some nights the silver ball gets a whole bank of machines to spread the drama around. This wasn’t one of them. When Space City Pinball ran Week 4 of its SCPL TGP NASA Supplemental Training series at The Game Preserve in Webster, Texas, every score that mattered — qualifying through the final — was posted on a single playfield: Williams’ 1995 jungle-adventure machine, Congo. Marc Gammons, Troy Witherspoon, Lisa Shore and Dawn Freedkin didn’t get to pick their poison. They got the volcano, the gorilla, and the diamonds, over and over, until the order shook out.
That makes for a rare kind of night — a one-arena shootout, where you can’t hide a weak game on a forgiving table or pad your total on a gimme. Either you solve Congo or it solves you. So instead of a machine playing backdrop to a tournament, let’s flip the camera: here’s the table itself, and what it asked of the four players grinding it on a rainy Gulf Coast evening.
The Last Pin Off the Old Williams Line
Congo arrived in November 1995, late in the celebrated WPC-95 run, built around the Frank Marshall film of Michael Crichton’s novel. The design came from John Trudeau — “Dr. Flash” to longtime fans — with art by Kevin O’Connor, and it carries a piece of pinball history heavier than its modest reputation suggests: it was the last machine produced at Williams’ longtime Chicago plant on California Avenue, the company’s home since the 1960s, before production moved on. Only 2,129 units were built, which is part of why a working one in the wild has become a quietly coveted find.
The headline toy is the Gray Gorilla on the lower mini-playfield, sculpted by Stan Winston himself — the same effects legend behind the film’s apes. Down there, the flipper buttons stop steering flippers and start swinging the gorilla’s arms, a little sideshow that becomes a wizard-mode battleground. Up top, a sculpted volcano guards the right ramp, ready to erupt into multiball. For a field of Houston-area regulars, none of them ranked inside the Texas top 100, this thirty-year-old Williams was both the great equalizer and the entire exam.
Diamonds, the Volcano, and the Multiball That Won It
If you want to win a tournament game on Congo, you learn the machine’s central loop early: collect diamonds off the lit shots, feed the volcano to lock, and let the eruption put extra balls in play — because the ramps turn into the money shots once multiball is live. It’s a clean, repeatable engine, and it’s exactly the rhythm that decides who’s standing when the last ball drains.
It decided this one. In the four-player final, Marc Gammons played that loop with the composure of a man 380 tournaments into his career, posting the top game for the full seven points. Witherspoon answered with five and the runner-up slot — no small feat, given he’d been the sharpest qualifier in the room. The Best Game format that opened the night rewards a single peak performance, and it was Troy who’d posted the best Congo number of the day to take the top seed, riding a hot stretch that included the first tournament win of his career just a week earlier. The machine gave the riser his qualifying crown and the veteran his trophy, and both were earned on the same shots.
There’s a tournament wrinkle worth knowing, too. On Congo, the first Zinj mystery award in competition mode hands you Diamond Hunt multiball — but only if you grab it before triggering an ordinary multiball. Sequence your night wrong and you leave a free multiball on the table. In a one-machine event where every player faces identical rules, that kind of routing knowledge is the difference between a podium and an early flight home.
Amy, Zinj, and the Modes That Reward a Cool Head
Congo rewards patience over flailing, which suits a tournament floor. Spell A-M-Y in the top lanes and the ball feeds the upper flipper for a hurry-up — bag up to three of them by looping back around — and you’ve got a steady points stream that doesn’t require living dangerously near the drain. The mystery saucer, a tempting target, is actually safer backhanded than hammered with the left flipper; the kind of detail that separates players who’ve studied the machine from players who are just hoping. Even the skill shot has a tournament-friendly trick: plunge into the kickback for a super skill shot and the kickback simply regenerates, free insurance on ball one.
The HIPPO video mode hides a sly competitive tell. Its path stays identical for every player until somebody finally completes it — so a savvy competitor watches a rival run the gauntlet and quietly memorizes the route for their own turn. In a four-handed group game like this final, with Shore and Freedkin trading the lower podium spots, that’s the sort of edge that gets passed around the bank of one. Shore took third on the night, nudging ahead of a Witherspoon rivalry that had been dead level across sixteen meetings and holding her usual edge over Freedkin; Freedkin closed out fourth, the latest chapter in a remarkable 39-tournament back-and-forth with Witherspoon that nobody has ever really won.
And then there’s the part of Congo that doesn’t care how good you are: the wide gap between its lower flippers, the notorious “Trudeau gap” that the designer left on so many of his tables. It turns a clean center shot into a coin flip and ends promising balls without warning. On a single-machine night, that gap is the great leveler — it threatened the veteran and the newcomer alike, and made sure nobody coasted.
What Congo Asked of the Field
A one-machine tournament is, in the end, a referendum on how well you read one playfield. Congo asked everybody the same questions — can you build diamonds without draining, can you turn the volcano into a real multiball, can you survive that gap on the bad bounces — and it sorted the room honestly. Gammons answered best, and the win keeps the nine-year veteran on a heater heading into Space City’s next stops, an Interstellar Training round and a Meteor Strikes bounty night at the Little Dipper just days away. Witherspoon walks away with a qualifying crown over the man who beat him and a rating still climbing. Not a bad night’s work on a thirty-year-old jungle machine that, for one rainy evening, was the only game in town.
Final order on Congo:
- 1st — Marc Gammons
- 2nd — Troy Witherspoon
- 3rd — Lisa Shore
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