Galactic Girl (Dominique, 2010)

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According to Pinball News, the coming out party for Seattle artist Dominique Johns' custom pinball table, Galactic Girl, (aka "Dominique's Galactic Girl") took place at the Tiger Lounge in Seattle's Georgetown district in early 2010. The last update on Johns' silverAge silverBall pinball operator site, from October 2011, notes that Girl was at that time in the Seattle Pinball Museum, in the city's international district. But the other day, while idly thumbing through the latest "Skill Shot" ("Seattle's Pinball Zine") that I'd picked up at the Ballard Full Tilt ice cream / pinball parlor, I noticed a surprising entry: Galactic Girl was listed as one of three tables at the little "Sureshot Espresso" student hang out lounge coffee place on University Ave in the U-District.

I last hit the Sureshot in maybe 2009 or '10, when Space Mission (still listed as being there as of 2011 on Dominique's site) was there, although it was badly out of balance. Re-scrutinizing the location on Google Maps, I was somewhat fascinated to find you can access two distinct time periods in their Street View photos of the block: the sunny, contemporary one, with the bizarre "Crepe Cravers" on its right and the ugly Chase Bank on the corner to its left, accessed by clicking the wide thumbnail photo on the left-hand column of the Google Maps view, and an overcast one from some years back, when the storefront to Sureshot's north was vacant (previously this had been an awesome build-your-own ice cream place, with a cool old '70s pinball table of its own), and the corner was still graced by the Twice Sold Tales used bookstore--you get to this one by clicking the smaller thumbnail photo on the pop-up description of Sureshot that appears over the street map itself. Wouldn't it be neat if some day Google made it so you could just scroll the timeline back and forth through time as you navigate street view, so you could travel through it in space AND time?

But I digress. I had to visit Sureshot on the chance that Galactic Girl was still there--and it was, in the small back room next to the rest rooms, along with an Aladdin's Castle (Bally, 1975) and a Monaco (Segasa, 1977), all provided by Johns, according to the cards fastened to them--oh and a Street Fighter II Championship Edition arcade machine. Johns and I evidently share similar tastes in pinball machines--the late '70s is my favorite pinball era--so it was with extra excitement that I stepped up to his custom-built machine:

 

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The retro cast-iron and black rubber inlane-free construction of the lower playfield, anchored by two massively powerful flippers, gives Galactic Girl the strong, smooth feeling of a steam locomotive, or of the oiled bolt-action .22 rifles that I was inexplicably allowed to use at summer camp as a kid. The playfield has been left unfinished to the extent that the ball, if falling slowly down the length of the playfield, will have its course gently guided by the grain of the wood. Some of the mechanisms on the playfield, such as the Playboy-logo pop bumper, were obviously scavenged from other machines, but others, such as the dark drop targets, have a distinctively unique hand-crafted look. There are a couple surprising mechanical tricks at the top of the playfield: the ball enters from a long swinging-in horizontal gate that snaps shut behind it, sealing off the plunger lane, and sometimes the wire gate along the left side of the top orbit opens, allowing the ball to zing all the way around the field very quickly, which can really take you by surprise if you aren't on your toes. The game is low-scoring, but even so I can't say I really got a grasp of the rules as the deadly lower playfield made for very quick ball times; I tried to study the notes painted on the playfield while my friend was playing, but the writing is a bit hard to make out, and the cryptic references to a "red saucer" (neither saucer I could see was the slightest bit red) had me feeling as though I was trapped in that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy chapter about "a blue button, marked 'red.'"

The credit handling was also unique to my experience: the card says "one quarter one ball," altered by pen to say "one quarter TWO ballS," and both are in fact correct: the first quarter gets you one ball, and the next quarter after that gets you two; I had wanted to purchase just two balls, one for me and one for my friend, but that is, in fact, impossible in the world of Galactic Girl, at least as presently configured. Also, sometimes the "Balls to Play" reel does not update when you put in the first quarter, and remains blank; if you then put in a second quarter, it may advance to "2," but you actually have three balls.