1980 Stern Big Game Pinball Machine - Customized - Sold

Months ago I put a bunch of work into a cool wide body machine by Stern, Big Game.This machine came in pieces as the previous owner was planning to get it up and running again, but never did. The playfield had quite a bit of wear. I knew I would need to venture into some painting to make this game look and play the way it should. It also needed extensive board work to get up and running. I know I worked on the MPU and power supply board. I also replaced the rectifier board.

Here is a teaser finished pic. No video for this post because the machine sold before I could film one.

Here are some examples of the extensive damage to the center of the playfield. I wasn't a big fan of the bingo cards in the center. The design is by Harry Williams of Williams Pinball. He had been designing playfields for 30+ years. The machines before pinball machines were gambling devices known as bingo machines. Commonly you would need the ball to roll into certain holes (no flippers) and fill cards to win prizes (often cash). The cards in this game are reminiscent of those days. However, what do bingo or gambling have to do with safari hunting?

I decided that trophy cards made more sense. Since I was going to have to repaint anyway, I redesigned the cards into a sightseeing card (Binoculars), a photographer card (camera), and a shooter card (safari hunter). Seemed to make a lot more sense to me then x, y, z.

If I was going to repaint the center cards, I would either have to match the off white (old and dirty) of the other spots on the machine, or repaint all of the white sections. Color matching turned out to be harder than I anticipated, so I decided to repaint all of the white with my airbrush.

Here was my first attempt. You can see that the center card white doesn't match the other off white on the playfield. Time to suck it up and do it right.

It looks much better with the white redone. I would now need to replace the lettering as well. Matching fonts was a bit tedious, but I thing things turned out well. The other issue I had at this point is that the animal decals were hard to match to their drop target groups. Before, when they were numbers, they were in order. 1-3 were one bank, 4-6 were another, and 7-9 were the third bank. I needed to make some changes so that hunting down these animals on the drop targets would be easier and make more sense.

You can see here how I replaced the text, flattened the plastics and color coded the animals with their drop target bank. Put back together the machine played great and made a lot more sense. Unfortunately, I really wanted another machine, so I sold this one. Stay tuned to see what I found. This may be one I need to purchase again someday.