Most used pinball buyers end up choosing between two groups of games. One is the 1990s Bally and Williams catalog, built on the WPC system. The other is Stern, the company that kept pinball going after the others left. They feel different to own, mostly because of what's in the backbox and who still supports it, and those differences show up in the first year you own one.
Who made what
WMS, the parent of Williams and Midway's Bally line, closed its pinball division on October 25, 1999, after Pinball 2000 failed to meet sales expectations. Sega left the same year by selling its pinball business, the old Data East division, to Gary Stern, and Stern Pinball was born. For a while Stern was the only commercial pinball maker left, and it struggled through the 2000s, building around 10,000 machines a year and selling most of them overseas.
The designers carried over. Steve Ritchie designed Terminator 2 for Williams and AC/DC for Stern. John Borg designed Data East's Star Wars and Stern's Iron Man. George Gomez designed Monster Bash and co-designed Stern's The Lord of the Rings. So the gap in design talent is smaller than the logos suggest.
Boards and batteries
Every Bally and Williams game from these years runs WPC, which Williams introduced in 1990. All three WPC board generations use AA batteries on or right beside the CPU board, and repair guides rate the WPC-95 location, used on games like Medieval Madness, as the worst of them. The battery guide goes through each one.
Stern's games split into three systems. The early ones, including The Lord of the Rings (December 2003, on a modified White Star board) and The Sopranos, run White Star, which began with Sega's Apollo 13. White Star still uses three AA batteries on the board, and repair is hard because the traces are so fine. S.A.M. came next, from World Poker Tour in 2006 to The Walking Dead in 2014, which covers Iron Man and AC/DC. S.A.M. uses a lithium coin cell that isn't prone to leaking. SPIKE has been Stern's system since Wrestlemania in 2015. It's built around a CPU board and node boards connected by network-style cables on a 48 volt bus, and it also uses a coin cell.
Code updates
Updating a WPC game means swapping chips. You remove the old ROMs and install new ones, taking care to match the notch. S.A.M. games update from a USB stick. Stern keeps a game code page on its site for downloads, and its title list includes Iron Man, The Lord of the Rings and The Sopranos.
Newer Sterns also connect to Stern's online service, Insider Connected, which offers leaderboards, achievements and home machine registration. A replacement SPIKE 2 CPU board can break Insider Connected until the board goes back to Stern for programming. Stern's software license also forbids unauthorized software and says using it may stop the machine from working or cut off online access. If a listing mentions custom code, ask what's installed.
The classic side has its own late chapter. Cactus Canyon shipped in 1998 with incomplete code when production stopped at 903 units. For its remake, Chicago Gaming brought in Lyman Sheats to help complete the software, and a later Complete Upgrade builds on the larger plans he left unfinished.
Displays
The WPC games use a high-voltage plasma dot-matrix display. The glass can outgas and go dim or patchy, and a failing display can drag down the power supply voltages. A good one is bright and fully lit, with no dark or blurry spots. Data East used a smaller 128 by 16 display on five games, Checkpoint, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Batman, Star Trek and Hook, rather than the standard 128 by 32. Chicago Gaming's remakes offer full-color displays on some versions, and the one on its Cactus Canyon has twice the viewing area of the original.
Models and versions
Bally and Williams mostly built one version of each game. Stern often builds several. AC/DC came in Pro, Premium and Limited Edition models, and Stern lists an Iron Man Vault Edition beside the original. The Lord of the Rings was built again after its first run, which reportedly totaled 4,017 units, and later runs came in smaller batches. Check a Stern listing for the model name as well as the title, and ask for the serial plate if it isn't clear.
Parts, manuals and support
Stern is still in business, which helps. It posts game manuals on each game's page and publishes service bulletins. Since April 2014 its site no longer archives schematics as PDFs, though, and since Avatar Pro, Stern's Pro models have shipped without full printed manuals. Williams support comes from elsewhere, since Planetary Pinball holds the rights to make Williams machines and parts.
Build
Both groups are commercial machines built for arcade abuse, and most have long outlived their original service life of 2 to 5 years. There are a few known weak spots on each side. Stern cabinets from about 2016 to 2018, starting with Ghostbusters, can separate at the corners because of a thin leg bolt plate, and the fix is the larger Williams-style bracket. Chicago Gaming built its Attack from Mars remake with a melamine-clad plywood cabinet and swapped the original fiberboard cabinet bottom for plywood.
Remakes sit in between
If you love the 90s games but not the 90s boards, the Chicago Gaming remakes are the middle ground. CGC has remade Medieval Madness, Attack from Mars, Monster Bash and Cactus Canyon with modern electronics and LED lighting, all licensed through Planetary Pinball.
How to choose
Choose a 90s Bally or Williams game if the game itself is the point and you're happy to deal with an old board set, or buy one that's already been sorted. Choose a Stern if you want factory support, code downloads and the online features, and read the model name carefully. Either way, the playfield guide applies. You can browse modern Stern, the DMD golden era or every Stern game we cover.