Cirqus Voltaire Pinball Machine by Bally was manufactured in 1997. Cirqus Voltaire Pinball Machine is a circus themed pinball game.
It was the first Williams/Bally pinball machine missing a real replay-knocker, a device driven by a coil to produce a loud bang when hammering against the wood of the cabinet or backbox. Instead this sound effect was pre-recorded and played via the regular speakers.
It was also the second machine (after Capcom’s Flipper Football, released in 1996) to move the dot-matrix display (DMD) from the backbox right into the cabinet, so the player isn’t distracted from gameplay when watching the DMD (an idea that was taken to the maximum with the Pinball 2000 architecture two years later).
“Electrifying Excitement!”
Objective:
- Battle the crazed ringmaster as he pops up from the playfield and captures your ball.
- Perform many different marvels in order to join the circus.
Game Features:
- Flippers (2)
- Pop bumpers (3) – One called the “Boom Balloon” pop bumper “disappears” by dropping down until its flat plastic top is level with the playfield.
- Slingshots (2)
- Stop magnets (3)
- Standup targets (9)
- Kick-out holes (2)
- Spinning targets (2)
- A neon light running along the right-hand ramp
- Speech
- Playfield-mounted dot matrix display
- The menagerie ball is a large plastic ball trapped within a cage above the left slingshot. It can be hit by the ball in play and disrupts ball direction.
- The Ringmaster is an animated head that elevates from the underside of the playfield. It makes wise cracks at the player, who tries to defeat him by hitting him with the pinball in various modes.
- A stop magnet is on the top of the Ringmaster’s head, which holds the ball there when the head rises up.
- The backbox animation simulates a cannonball fired to ring a “bell,” although the bell is a piece of plastic with a bell drawn on it. This animation is mostly activated automatically by the game, but one feature allows the player to continuously fire the cannonball using the flipper buttons in a timed mini-game. Points are given if the ball takes a certain path in the fall (this path having a switch).