Atlantis

Same playfield layout as Gottlieb's 1971 'Lawman' but without the free ball gate, bonus ladder, and other inserts. Designer Jeff Brenner left Gottlieb before this game was produced, and he was unaware that any examples were made having the half-moon credit window until we contacted him about it. He shares with us other information about this game: I designed this game at the request of Wayne Neyens and Judd Weinberg, who wanted me to design a single-player version of Sheriff. The playfield design was basically Eddie Krynski's Sheriff / Lawman. I removed the "paper clip" free ball gate. The game also featured the newer style mini-posts which had much more bounce than their predecessors used on Sheriff. Wayne Neyens introduced two changes to the right return lane. He placed a pin above the flipper to help block balls from rolling up the lane and draining on the right. He also extended the playfield plastic to its weird shape to help stop balls from lofting over the return lane wireform and draining. Apparently he felt that the left side not having a return lane handicapped the player enough. I designed the ruleset for Atlantis in its entirety. When I designed it, I had the top three advance lights moving from right to left. When the production schematic designer / draftsman, Robert Moravec, redid the circuit schematic, he reversed the lane light direction to left to right. I asked to have it changed back to right to left, but it remained as left to right when it went into production. Noteworthy on this game was my concept of awarding a scoring premium for hitting two adjacent drop targets simultaneously. I always had wished it had been used again, as it was very rewarding to the player, whenever it occurred. To emphasize the feature, I wanted it produced with bullseye circles which spanned each pair of adjacent targets as I had done on the whitewood original prototype, but Judd Weinberg decided that the blue and white fish design fit the theme of the game better so they went with that. I have read the comments of some of the other players on IPDB as well as players I talked to on location, and all agreed that this was a rewarding feature. Pictured in this listing is an Early Production game with serial number 01110 and which has the half-moon credit window and green bumper caps that are found on the game in the manufacturer's flyer. It does not have the extended right slingshot plastic as found in games made later in the production run. We do not have a picture of the lower cabinet serial number to know if it had the "S" suffix to signify a Sample game. At least one Sample game for Atlantis had different flipper assemblies installed than the ones used on production games. The Sample game mechs were shorter, the base was a bit different and without a removable coil stop bracket, and the EOSS was angled. Production games used longer ones that were, for example, common on Gottlieb's 1976 'Surf Champ'. Pictured in this listing are two comparison pictures of these two styles of flipper mechanisms used on Atlantis. One picture is annotated by us to explain differences in the two examples that are incidental and not part of our comparison, such as a replaced coil and a replaced bushing.