Pinball, at least since the advent of fully-
electronic games but probably before that as well, has always been
subtly about
sex.
One of my favorite exchanges occurs in The Machine: Bride of Pinbot when you lock two balls in the eye sockets of the Bride, as a major step toward starting multiball. The Bride speaks in a sexy female voice, while Pinbot, a character from an earlier pinball machine when they used crude speech synthesizers instead of digitally recorded samples, speaks in a robotic monotone.
The first two times you accomplish this, you are rewarded with the following dialogue:
- Bride:
- Now I see you.
- Pinbot:
- How do I look?
If you manage to play two multiballs and get to this step a third time within a single game, you instead get:
- Pinbot:
- How do I look?
- Bride:
- You look good.
(It's not easy to do this, so this certainly is intended to imply something about your pinball skills, though the context certainly seems to imply something else. This also reminds me of the time I played a doubles 5-ball game of The Machine with a friend, on a machine with apparently no tilt sensor at all, and he was doing bangbacks and death saves like mad. The game lasted 2 hours.)