Stern’s The Simpsons Pinball Party, released in 2003, is a riotous love letter to Springfield and one of the most feature-stuffed machines of its time. With five flippers, an upper mini-playfield, nuclear-cooling-tower bumper caps, and a barrage of references to the long-running show, it captures the chaotic comedy of the Simpson family — and hides one of the deepest, most stack-friendly rulesets pinball has ever produced.
The defining trait is stacking. Almost everything on this table can be layered together, and the expert wisdom is that poorly playing several modes at once usually out-scores playing a single mode well. The right orbit lights TV modes you’ll want to combine for faster scoring, the garage feeds the upper playfield, the horseshoe starts modes, and the couch locks balls toward multiball. The Otto shot doubles scoring until the on-screen timer runs out, and with clever play, most of the playfield can be running at 2X simultaneously.
The long game funnels toward Alien Invasion, the wizard mode reached by completing TV modes — and the more you complete, the more time you get to tackle it. There’s even a Mystery Spot multiball lurking behind eleven shots to Otto. Manic, dense, and endlessly re-playable, The Simpsons Pinball Party is a connoisseur’s machine disguised as a cartoon — a table that rewards players who learn to juggle its dozens of overlapping threads.