Jurassic Park (Premium)—Stern, 2019. Picture this: it’s three beers deep on a Thursday, the kind of night that hums with the electricity of missed opportunities and echoing Mortal Kombat shrieks from the back of the bar. And sitting there, backlit in radioactive-green floodlights, is Jurassic Park (Premium): not a pinball machine, but a plastic-and-steel shrine to every single time Steven Spielberg gave a child an anxiety disorder about theme parks in the ‘90s.
2019. Stern Pinball, bless its greasy, flipper-obsessed heart, is in the throes of a resurgence: like vinyl records and “artisanal” ramen, pinball is making its nerdy, unapologetic comeback. This isn’t the first time Jurassic Park has been wheeled into an arcade—Data East took a swing in 1993—but Stern’s Premium edition is the T-Rex skeleton in the room. Keith Elwin, the designer, is to pinball what David Attenborough is to animal documentaries: everyone else is reading notecards, and this guy is reading the Book of Genesis.
Let’s talk cabinet art. It’s a fever dream of airbrushed dino-mayhem—Alan Grant in that forever-just-got-off-an-international-flight pose, mullet fluttering, Laura Dern glancing sidelong at safety protocols fast disintegrating under the weight of a rampaging 3D T. rex head protruding right out of the playfield. Seriously, reach in, and that T. rex will chomp on your pride, your quarters, and maybe your thumb. It’s animatronic—yes, as in “robot dinosaur jaw that can literally swallow your pinball”—because apparently we’re living in the future where the machines have learned how to taunt you personally.
Gameplay? Forget it—this isn’t the pinball of your youth, where half the fun was just slamming the flippers until you set off a tilt warning and watched the operator, some combination of dungeon master and barista, shuffle over with a stern look (pun intended). Jurassic Park (Premium) is a full-contact, Rube Goldberg fever dream, designed for those twerpy kids who color-coded their sticker sheets and now spend weekends arguing about rule sets online. There’s the wild, looping raptor pen; the tension of that left shooter lane, an anxiety treadmill disguised as fun. There’s the Jeep: it spins, it rotates, it questions your masculinity, your tax bracket, and your actual ability to wrangle a pack of velociraptors in multiball fury.
You’re not saving the park, let’s be honest. The narrative gussies it up—“capture the dinosaurs, rescue the humans, evacuate by helicopter,” sure—but the truth is each quarter you drop is another offering to the heartless dinosaur gods inside this thing. The sound package is a swaggering, Michael Giacchino-style symphony cut with roaring lizard-profanity and a callout guy who sounds like he just found out his insurance doesn’t cover dino-related injuries.
Let’s talk difficulty curves: imagine playing billiards while actual dinosaurs chase you. That’s Elwin for you. This game will humble you faster than trying to explain NFTs to your grandma. The ramp shots ask more of you than your high school geometry teacher ever did. Miss a key shot, watch your ball rattle around in chaos, and just as you start to feel competent—the game triggers a ‘T-Rex multiball’ and the machine lights up like a Vegas slot rigged by an actual velociraptor.
And yet, you keep coming back, like Ian Malcolm stumbling out of another failed marriage. Because deep down, you crave the existential crisis of staring down a T. rex jaw, flashing lights, and the kind of late-night adrenaline rush you can only get from knowing failure is imminent and spectacular.
Jurassic Park (Premium) is more than a nostalgia trap—it’s a greasy time machine, swallowing quarters and dignity, serving up cold slices of childhood fear and feverish dino-destruction under glass. For one more go, you’ll press start, ignore all warnings, and try—futilely, gloriously—to save the park. Or at least, get your initials on the scoreboard before the next guy named “DUDE” comes along and knocks you down.
