Given my love of all things horror/Halloween, it should come as absolutely no surprise that I’m a big fan of The Walking Dead. I’ve been watching the show on AMC since day one, and have read the entire comic book series on which the show is based. When I heard that Stern was going to release a pinball machine based on the TV series, with John Borg designing it and Lyman Sheets handling the code, adding this one to my collection was the proverbial “no brainer.” The only downside was that in order to come up with the funds, I had to give some of my games the Lucille treatment. Eenie… meenie… miney… mo.
As soon as I got it out of the box, I immediately started customizing it with mods. I changed out the stock, cool white LEDs with warm whites and various colors, in order to give it a more ominous feel. I also added Stern’s fish tank topper, an electroluminescent “electric” fence, inner art decals, a prison light mod, and a Woodbury light mod from Pinball Refinery, a Woodbury sign and an in-game fish tank mod from Laseriffic, a zombie shooter from Pinball Customs, light-up Rick and zombie speaker grills from pinballlightkits.com, a prison door roof and a flashing tower mod from MezelMods, boney flippers with red superbands from Pinball Life, a Red Tremor shaker motor from CoinTaker, and weathered railroad tracks from billsfanmd.
I also installed a translite from a Premium model (you can see the original, Pro model version in some of the older pics below), which I’ve since had signed my many of the actors from the show, and an LCD Color DMD.
In September of 2017, I met Steven Yeun (Glenn, from the TV show) at Son of Monsterpalooza, and he signed my bloodied up Lucille bat, which now hangs above the machine (some of the other pics in here have my old, crappy, foam bat in them):
One common complaint of this game is that it doesn’t feature any voice work from the actors on the TV show. Fortunately, some very talented and dedicated guys on Pinside rectified that by using Pinball Browser to add tons of soundbites from the show, as well as change up some of the music. In my opinion, this has completely changed the game, making it one of the most immersive and intense pins out there. There are several different versions, and you can read all about them here. If you have young ones, be warned: most of the versions contain profanity (the version I’m running even features f-bombs from the Blu-ray releases). In addition to featuring the actual actors’ voices, my machine is running a version that has replaced the mode music with various songs by Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead.
Another thing that dogged The Walking Dead early on was incomplete code, but thankfully, not only has it been finished, but Lyman Sheets has perfected and polished it to the point that it is now one of Stern’s deepest and most complete games.
This is hands-down one of my favorite games in my collection.
Zombies Ate My Arcade 