Fire the broadside and prepare to be boarded — Bally’s 1992 Black Rose is a swashbuckling pirate epic, and its showstopper is an oscillating below-the-playfield cannon you load and then fire with a button on the lockdown bar, blasting the ball across the playfield in a way that still delights players decades on. Designed by John Trudeau and a young Brian Eddy with Pat McMahon art, this confirmed run of 3,746 turned the high-seas fantasy into one of the more characterful early-DMD Bally machines, complete with a chatty parrot named Polly.
The plundering strategy is rich. The Double Broadside mode — your first cannon-shot award — is enormously valuable, with broadside shots starting at a million and doubling each hit up to thirty-two million over thirty seconds. Sinking ships is the primary goal: light and stack SINK SHIP from multiball or cannon shots onto the lit shots, load the cannon under the ramp, and fire. Spot L-O-C-K from the inlanes or the left Pirate Cove shot, then drive the Cove for multiball, locking both balls there for the three-ball version. There are wonderful little secrets too — a Polly Killed bonus for mashing the flippers during “Polly says,” and a free-ball-save trick where the ball draining without hitting a single switch hands you a save, repeatable with no limit. Five Whirlpool ramps in a row even pays an extra ball.
Black Rose is dense, theatrical, and bursting with personality — a pirate’s chest of strategy and secrets wrapped around one of pinball’s most satisfying cannon mechanisms. Load up, sink the fleet, and let Polly cheer you on. The plunder belongs to the bold gunner.