The Martians are back, and they’re as gleefully ridiculous as ever — Bally’s 1999 Revenge From Mars is George Gomez’s pinball-meets-video hybrid, a sequel to the beloved Attack From Mars built on the Pinball 2000 platform that projected animated invaders right onto the playfield glass. Wobbling Martians, a sci-fi B-movie spirit, and a confirmed run of 6,878 make this one of the more genuinely novel machines ever to hit a route — a true swing-for-the-fences experiment from the dying days of the old Bally/Williams empire.
For all its high-tech presentation, the winning strategy is wonderfully grounded. Working the capture shot relentlessly is a completely valid line: it ferries you into multiball, pays jackpots and supers, and offers a safe return, making it the steady heartbeat of a strong game. During Bonus Wave Multiball, collecting forty items triggers Mothership Multiball, the big-points feature worth building toward. On some machines the return from the left orbit dead-bounces nicely to the right flipper, taming the game considerably, and you select your modes with the larger buttons beside the flipper buttons — a clever bit of interface that puts you in the cockpit of the invasion.
There’s even a charming practice-room trick the community swears by: rest a phone with its flashlight on the glass to better see the upper half during the projected sequences. Revenge From Mars is a fascinating fork in pinball’s road, a machine that tried to fuse two worlds and very nearly pulled it off. Loop the capture shot, ride the multiballs to that Mothership, and savor one of the medium’s boldest, weirdest experiments. They really don’t make them like this anymore.