1981 Gottlieb BLACK HOLE pinball machine

And the latest machine in the shop is a 1981 Black Hole by Gottlieb. This here is both a classic and an infamous machine. It's a classic because it's a really cool game with tons of interesting shots and features. It's infamous because it's known to be a maintenance nightmare and operators had significant trouble keeping the game in operation in the arcade due to its myriad electronic issues.

Black Hole is a widebody machine with multiball, drop targets, a spinner, captive holes, a spinning "black hole" disk in the backbox and more. It also has some of the coolest speech in pinball with the Gottlieb sound and speech board rocking the electronic/robot-esque calls and phrases. "Do you dare to enter the Black Hole?" "No-one escapes the Black Hole."

The spinner shot to the lower playfield is very cool and satisfying and the way the ball travels to the lower playfield and then back up to the main playfield has got to be one of the coolest designs in pinball. Managing to get multiball going is challenging and keeping 3 balls in play on two separate playfields takes effort and skill.

Big problems with this game include the crappy Gottlieb board connectors, electronic grounding issues and coils that lock-on and burn up (especially the kicker from the lower to the upper playfield) due to bad board grounding.

The game was designed by John Buras and Adolf Seitz Jr. and the artwork was done by Terry Doerzaph.

More information on this game can be found here:
http://ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=307

I ran out of space on the SD card during taping. Sorry for the abrupt finish. And it's a bit out of focus. Ugh.

Also worth noting, the black plastics on the left and right side of the playfield are homemade/non-original and the 3 pop bumper caps on the upper part of the playfield are also non-original to Black Hole. This is how the game came to me.