Tag in your partner and hit the ring — Gottlieb’s 1985 Tag-Team Pinball is a wrestling-themed machine with a genuinely novel social twist: a Team Mode that pits players one and three against two and four, totaling each duo’s scores to crown a winning tag team. John Trudeau designed it with Larry Day art, and a constant drum-beat soundtrack and 1,220-unit run give this three-flipper, three-ball-multiball machine a rowdy arena atmosphere all its own.
The grappling strategy is built around the locks. The TAG drops light the upper lock and the TEAM drops light the lower, with the drops needing to fall in order, and once you reach multiball the entire playfield scores at three-times — a huge swing worth setting up carefully. The spinner is the points engine to watch: ordinarily worth a thousand, it jumps to ten thousand when lit by the left inlane rollover, and during multiball a lit spinner pays a juicy thirty thousand, so hammering it while the playfield multiplier is hot is the move that wins matches. The right inlane feeding the upper lane left of the TAG drops advances toward an extra ball or 500k depending on settings, and that upper lock can be backhanded cleanly from the upper flipper.
Tag-Team Pinball is a delightful oddity — a machine that turned a four-player game into a team sport years before “co-op” was a buzzword, all wrapped in spandex-and-folding-chair wrestling theater. It’s a fun, slightly obscure Gottlieb that plays great with a crowd and rewards a player who knows when to set up that three-times multiball. Drop the banks in order, light that spinner, and tag your way to the title. The crowd’s on its feet.