Night Rider Plays No Favorites: Hyper Beer Co.

Dennis Eichhorn Edges a Two-Way Tie

On paper it wasn’t close: Dennis Eichhorn walked into Hyper Beer Co. on July 8 as the only top-500 player in a 40-strong field and walked out the winner. On the playfield it was closer than the seedings let on — the Irvine veteran dropped two of his six games and still finished two points clear of everyone else, a margin thin enough that a single machine could have erased it.

Anaheim’s Hyper Beer Co. is the kind of taproom that earns its near-perfect rating one clean, well-kept machine at a time; the beer list draws the reviews, but the games keep the regulars coming back. Forty players packed in under a clear 76-degree sky for the season’s second stop — a standard weekly turnout of 21 IFPA-ranked entrants and 19 unranked, with Eichhorn (#366 nationally) towering over a field whose average rank sat near #7,942. Here’s how the favorite made it hold up.

Eichhorn’s Six-Game Path to 38

Group match play splits the room into fours, and Eichhorn drew Tony Sorrentino, Jerod Bennett and Forrest Gaddis. He opened exactly as the ratings promised, taking King Kong: Myth of Terror Island and Star Wars: Fall of the Empire back to back.

The first crack showed on World Cup Soccer, where Sorrentino grabbed the top spot and pushed Eichhorn to second. Eichhorn answered on Jurassic Park with another win, then got clipped a second time — Forrest Gaddis, who would end the night in a tie for 32nd, out-scored him on the old Night Rider. That left the group’s closing game, Mousin’ Around!, to settle things, and Eichhorn took it to bank 38 points: four wins, two runner-up finishes, and nothing worse than second all night.

Two Roads to 36

Behind him, two very different nights ended on the same number. Jack Wasserman, an Anaheim local whose recent finishes have been trending upward, was the most dominant player in the building for five machines running — he posted the top score on Pokémon, Night Rider, King of Diamonds, Monster Bash and Jaws. Then came Mousin’ Around!, the one machine he couldn’t crack, and he finished last on it. Those were the two points that separated a share of second from sole possession of first: anything but a fourth on the 1989 Bally, and the trophy is his outright.

Jessyca Boatright reached 36 the steady way. She won four of her six games outright — Pulp Fiction, John Wick, The Walking Dead and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — settled for second on King of Diamonds and third on Austin Powers, and never once finished bottom of a group. Same total as Wasserman, opposite shape: one player who soared and then bottomed out, one who simply never fell.

The 1976 Night Rider Plays No Favorites

Night Rider is the senior citizen of this lineup — a 1976 Bally designed by Greg Kmiec with art by Paul Faris, one of roughly 7,000 built in an age before ramps and talking playfields. On a machine this old the scoring hides up top: the ten-point switches rotate both the lit spinner and the top-saucer value, so the points go to whoever is patient enough to live up there all game. Across five plays, it turned into the great equalizer.

The clearest case was the flagged upset of the night. In one group, Lisa Gaddis — who would finish 38th — put up the best score on Night Rider ahead of Mark Celis and tournament organizer Fran Irwin, a result the ratings pegged at roughly a one-in-seven long shot. Irwin recovered to place sixth on the day, landing just ahead of his longtime measuring stick Eichhorn; the two have now traded positions across 17 shared events and remain about as evenly matched as two players can be, with this one tilting Eichhorn’s way. The old Bally clipped the favorites elsewhere, too: Forrest Gaddis’s win over Eichhorn came here, and Joshua Kuhlmann topped Jonathan Soon, the highest-ranked player in his group, on the same machine.

A 148-Minute Grind on Total Nuclear Annihilation

If Night Rider was the leveler, Total Nuclear Annihilation was the marathon. Scott Danesi built the 2017 Spooky release almost single-handedly — concept, design, mechanics, code and the pulsing synth score all his — around a three-in-line drop-target bank that physically locks balls until a hit on the third target springs a three-ball multiball. That multiball is where the machine pays, since it multiplies playfield values by the number of balls in play, and chasing it can stretch one game past all reason.

It did exactly that here. Evan Malanosky’s group ran their Total Nuclear Annihilation to worrying long 148 minutes — the longest game of the entire tournament — with Malanosky finishing on top of Andy Thorne, Stephanie Setmire and Jimmy Goetz. It was the last, longest note in a night that spanned a 1976 electromechanical on one end and a machine still inventing ways to keep four players standing at the same cabinet for two and a half hours on the other.

The Favorite Made It Stand

Strip away the marathons and the upsets and you’re left with the simple story the seedings predicted: the best-rated player in the room played like it and closed the door. Eichhorn didn’t sweep — Sorrentino and Forrest Gaddis each took a game off him, and his 38 was never more than two points ahead of trouble — but across six machines he never handed the field the opening it needed. On a night when a 1976 Bally kept humbling favorites, the favorite who mattered most refused to be humbled.

Final podium, Hyper Beer Co. Season IV #2:

• 1st — Dennis Eichhorn (38 pts)
• 2nd (tie) — Jack Wasserman (36 pts)
• 2nd (tie) — Jessyca Boatright (36 pts)