Set sail with the sailor of legend — Gottlieb’s 1978 Sinbad is a beautiful electromechanical-style four-player from the brilliant team of designer Ed Krynski and artist Gordon Morison, the duo behind so many of Gottlieb’s most cherished classics. With reels for scoring, four flippers, and a confirmed run of just 952, this is a graceful relic of the moment pinball stood between its mechanical past and its solid-state future. A lovely detail sits at the spinning target: each face depicts a sword oriented differently, so when it spins the two appear to cross blades — pure Krynski-Morison craftsmanship.
The whole game is built around the time-honored art of the bonus build, and it’s a disciplined climb. The drop-target banks raise your bonus multiplier, but with a catch that rewards careful sequencing: a completed bank only advances your multiplier if the previous ones are already down, so you can’t collect four-times until three-times and two-times have fallen first. Bonus tops out at fifteen thousand and is collected only when all the drops are down, at which point everything resets and you start the whole satisfying process anew. The spinner and star rollovers nudge your bonus along, while completing banks lights a top lane for an award — and dropping the purple bank lights the coveted extra-ball lane, an enormously valuable prize when enabled.
Sinbad is a treasure for the player who appreciates pinball’s elegant early grammar: no ramps, no dot displays, just the pure tension of building and protecting a bonus against a hungry drain. It’s a voyage worth taking, a reminder of how much fun lived in these clean, uncluttered playfields. Drop the banks, ride the spinner, and claim your fifteen thousand.