Hurricane (1991, Williams Electronics) isn’t so much a pinball table as it is a swirling fever dream brought to life with steel and light—the kind of game that could only be born out of the madcap optimism of Chicago’s late-stage pinball golden age. By ‘91, Williams was a battered heavyweight, still standing in a ring slowly emptying of spectators as the world tipped ever more toward Street Fighter and Super NES and away from that sweet analog dance of flippers and fate. Did that scare them off? Absolutely not. In Hurricane, you can practically hear the designers (the infamous Pat Lawlor and crew, architects of so many fevered quarter-eating spires) cackling as they loaded the playfield with more flourishes, more neon, and more sideshow barkers than a Coney Island riot.
Let’s start from the top—the cabinet artwork. Oh, it’s unsubtle. Gaudy, even. A garish, eye-popping soap opera of roller coasters twisting around each other, cartoon clowns mugging maniacally, the whole tableau as if someone chugged three cans of Surge and then illustrated their childhood trauma with every marker in the box. The glass backbox is all carnival at dusk, hinting at both the ecstasy and the stomach-churning unease that happens when you realize you’re about to hurl up corn dogs in front of your crush.
Mechanically, Hurricane is the capstone to Williams’ unofficial “Cyclone trilogy” (preceded by Comet and Cyclone, if you want the family tree—no relation to fast food menus, despite what the artwork might imply). You plunge a ball and it rockets through the whirling guts of the Funhouse-influenced playfield, your fate announced by a digitized carny who sounds like he’s been smoking since Eisenhower. Every time you start a game, you expect to catch tetanus.
And God, the callouts. “Do you want to ride the Hurricane?” the machine asks, every time, with slightly more lechery than you’re comfortable admitting you enjoy. It’s got a working Ferris wheel that grabs your ball and spins it away—because why not?—and the centerpiece, a looping, plastic ramp called the Hurricane. This thing chews up your ball and spits it out like the world’s cruelest roller coaster operator: sometimes for jackpots, sometimes just to remind you that physics hates you.
The rule set is an overloaded tilt-a-whirl of “shoot this, then that, then hurry—do it backwards, but now there’s a clown.” Points rain down in confused, glorious avalanches. There’s no zen discipline here, just pinball as you remember it from the suburban bowling alley: loud, kinetic, and always at risk of being kicked by a teenager named Travis whose mom’s waiting in the parking lot.
But what really gets me about Hurricane is how it marks the end of a certain innocence. By ‘91, this kind of sensory-overload carnival was feeling retro, even then—a nod to a bygone fairground Americana at the very moment America was swapping roller coasters for cyberspace. It’s equal parts nostalgia and last-ditch resistance, a machine that winks at you and says, “One more ride, kid. Remember what it felt like to be dizzy and hopeful?”
I’ve spent hours on Hurricane, chasing that jackpot, cursing out that digitized barker, my fingers slick with a patina of existential panic and nacho cheese. I can say this: It’s not the best pinball table in the pantheon—not by a long shot. But it’s a loud, bravura, cotton-candy funeral for the heyday of pinball, and if you squint through the playfield glass, you can almost see your 12-year-old self reflected, grinning like a maniac, convinced summer will never end.
