| Fish Tales | |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Williams |
| Release date | October 1992 |
| System | Williams WPC (Fliptronics II) |
| Design | Designer: Mark Ritchie Programmer: Mark Penacho Artwork: Pat McMahon Mechanics: Jack Skalon Music and sounds: Chris Granner |
| Production Run | 13,640 units |
Fish Tales is a 1992 pinball game released by Williams. It is one of the top 20 most produced pinball machines of all time, selling more than 13,000 units.
Contents |
The game's theme is fishing, with a general goal of catching as many fish and telling the biggest lies about their size possible. The machine's backglass is topped with a plastic fish that thrashes its tail when the player achieves certain goals, and the players launches balls with an autoplunger shaped like a fishing rod.
Fish Tales introduced flippers with lightning bolts on them that were believed to be 1/8 inch shorter than other Williams flippers of the time. While seemingly minor, an extra 1/4 inch gap creates a far greater ball control challenge for the player. As such, this enhancement was only added to a few pinball titles before being abandoned.
The machine's rules present the player with three main objectives:
Other lesser objectives include:
Scoring levels on Fish Tales are more geometric than on most games, meaning that the difference in scores between beginner and expert players is greater than it is on other machines. Replay levels on most machines tend to be in the mid 8-digit range, and most early awards in the game tend to award between 1 and 20 million. High scores found on publicly playable machines are usually 200-500 million.
However, the game's multiball gives the player potential for far greater scores. If the player achieves three jackpots, the captive ball is lit for a Super Jackpot worth 100 million points. Once scored, future multiballs start the sequence again with all scores multiplied by the number of times the player had completed sequence, up to six. Moreover, when the super jackpot is lit, it stays lit for the rest of the multiball. This means that, potentially, a player can light the captive ball for endless repeated shots of up to 600 million points. As a result, scores in the billions are not uncommon among expert players. At the Pinburgh 2001 tournament Glenn Wilson achieved a score of 12,724,506,740, and this was on a machine set to much harder "tournament settings" (most importantly meaning that extra balls are disabled).
As of December 5, 2010, Fish Tales had an 8.0 rating at the Internet Pinball Database, one of the highest ratings of any machine.