Bally’s Twilight Zone, released in 1993, is one of the most ambitious and beloved machines ever built — a sprawling, gadget-stuffed tribute to Rod Serling’s classic series from the dream team of Pat Lawlor, Larry DeMar, and Ted Estes. Its signature innovation is the Powerball, a lightweight ceramic pinball that behaves differently from steel — faster, lighter, and unpredictable — feeding a gumball machine and a hidden “powerfield” that no other table has ever matched. Four flippers and a maze of ramps round out a famously deep layout.
The depth here is the stuff of legend. GUM and BALL ramps qualify locks for multiball, while saving up gumball shots releases the Powerball for the high-risk, high-reward Powerball Mania. The ultimate goal is Lost in the Zone, the wizard mode players simply call “LITZ” — a frantic, all-out scoring blitz that’s become a rite of passage. There are extra balls hidden everywhere, from Dead End shots to the door panel to lit spirals, and the famous warning among players is simple: do not tilt this game, because so much of its scoring pays off in the end-of-ball bonus.
Clever tricks reward the obsessive, like shooting the slot machine right after the piano to trick the game into a double jackpot. Vast, brilliant, and unlike anything before or since, Twilight Zone is a machine that players study for years — a true monument to early-90s design ambition that has never lost its grip on the hobby.