Jersey Jack Pinball’s Dialed In!, released in 2017, is a modern masterpiece from the legendary Pat Lawlor — a witty, gadget-obsessed disaster comedy set in the fictional town of Quantum Explosives Disposal. You play a QED technician fielding emergencies on a smartphone, and the machine leans hard into that conceit with a backbox camera that snaps your photo and flashes it onto a 27-inch LCD, plus genuine Bluetooth so you can flip the flippers from your own phone. It’s playful, deep, and unmistakably the work of the man behind Twilight Zone and The Addams Family.
The scoring revolves around your phone and the disasters threatening the town. You charge the phone by hitting the “Mick on a Stick” mascot, and once it’s lit you shoot the scoop to start a mode — the flipper buttons even let you scroll the disaster selection on the phone screen to pick which to tackle. The signature feature is the Big Bang: build it up before starting modes, and hitting it mid-mode instantly completes whatever’s running, from multiballs to disasters to drone attacks. The deep play centers on the SIM cards, which are tough to collect but grant permanent mode multipliers — three of them push your modes to a lucrative 4X.
There’s a wealth of clever strategy for the dedicated, from “overcharging” the phone past 100% by hammering the QED target, to a slick trick where a clean shot up the middle Theatre, with the upper-right flipper held out, rolls the ball right into the Light Big Bang target nearly every time. You can even postpone a multiball start by double-flipping while the phone rings. Funny, inventive, and bursting with personality, Dialed In! is Lawlor proving his genius translates beautifully to the modern boutique era — a brilliant machine that rewards a thinking player from the first call to the last.