Godzilla (Premium), Stern, 2021
Godzilla is a name that, depending on who you ask, conjures up either the image of a guy in a rubber suit stomping papier-mâché cityscapes, or the distant but constant rumble of your neighbor’s subwoofer on Saturday nights. But in 2021, Stern Pinball made what can only be described as a love letter to the atomic age’s favorite lizard—a pinball machine so ambitious, you half expect it to shed its wiring and rampage through the suburbs of Chicago. Stern’s Godzilla (Premium) isn’t just a game; it’s a neon cathedral to kaiju excess, a clattering, buzzing shrine where fandom and flipper skill fuse into three glorious steel balls.
Let’s start with the visuals: the cabinet artwork is the kind of eye-searing pop-art fever dream that would make Andy Warhol drop his soup can in awe. Over there, Godzilla snarls, tail as big as your monthly rent, locked in a technicolor smackdown with Mothra, King Ghidorah, and the rest of the rubber suit mafia. The backglass lights up like a Tokyo skyline having a bad day; LED animation flickers in time with your sense of diminishing self-worth, every multiball one more reason to ignore adulthood for a few precious minutes.
This machine is the brainchild of designer Keith Elwin—known to pinheads as the kind of guy who probably dreams in wireform ramps and high-score tables instead of faces. Elwin, with the precision of a kaiju surgeon, managed to stuff so many toys and gimmicks into this table that it feels less like playing pinball and more like orchestrating a kaiju disaster-movie marathon. There’s a motorized, building-dividing skyscraper that gobbles balls with the hunger of a stressed-out city council. And then there’s Mechagodzilla, who’s on a swiveling turntable and armed with a magnetic save you’ll swear is cheating, but only because you aren’t good enough.
The soundscape is pure Saturday morning cartoon apocalypse—sirens, roars, vintage Toho music that ambushes you like a nostalgia mugging. It’s the only machine where you can headbang to a surf-guitar remix while being yelled at in Japanese by a guy who sounds like he moonlights as a sumo wrestler. Clips from classic Showa-era Godzilla films stutter across the LCD, and unlike your memory of those 1960s dub jobs, here it all somehow feels like poetry.
Gameplay? Calling it “deep” is like calling Mount Fuji “a nice sloping hill.” Novices might bash the flippers and light a few modes, but the real meat—the ridiculous, labyrinthine stack of multiballs, city battles, and secret objectives—will have veterans crafting spreadsheets, their necks bathed in the cool, electric blue of the playfield. Shooting the ramps is less pinball and more a test of patience and muscle memory, like training for a three-minute mile or a karaoke marathon of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla.” Even the ball save feels like a mercy handed down from the lizard god himself, only to be swiftly withdrawn at your next careless brick.
But really, Godzilla (Premium) isn’t just about points. It’s about spectacle—the atomic-age pageantry of watching your ball get ping-ponged up a skyscraper, ricochet off Mechagodzilla’s smug chrome snout, and somehow survive the chaos just long enough to tempt fate again. It’s a game designed to make you feel alive, and slightly unworthy, every time the chaos sirens wail and your quarter disappears into the void forever.
If you played this in public, I guarantee there was a kid behind you pretending not to watch but quietly rooting for your ball to drain—either out of spite or awe, you’d never know. This machine isn’t for the faint of heart or weak of flipper. But for those of us who remember watching Godzilla stomp cardboard cities on cathode-ray TVs at 2 AM, chasing that last multiball feels like paying your respects to a noble, scaly ancestor. And if you finally topple that last monstrous high score, you’ll leave the arcade as a legend—or at least with the hands of a man who’s been fighting monsters all his life.
