Random Thoughts & Pictures
Cyclone was the first modern game I acquired. It was the beginning of the "collection". Cyclone was near the top of my want list. It was an instant favorite of mine. It's a game that I had run across on several occasions and always liked it. One of those occasions was during a Vermont ski vacation with my parents. It was March 1992. I know it was March 1992 because we witnessed the big Montpelier flood. Heavy rains and ice flows backed up against local bridges and the Winooski River overflowed into the capitol. We spent more time watching rain and being bored than we did snow skiing. Cyclone was in a sandwich shop down the road from our motel. My other memorable encounter was at an old mountain resort in Capon Springs, West Virginia. Capon was a premier 19th century resort until the main hotel building burned in 1911. Enough peripheral buildings remained for the operation to limp along until a new family took over in 1932. The same family still runs the resort today. This place was a quiet little time capsule that few people knew about. My wife was the third generation of her family to regularly vacation at Capon. Life moved slow at Capon. There was still a gameroom and that gameroom still had pinball. Cyclone occupied this gameroom around 2002 or 2003.
This picture was taken in 2007 when Capon's gameroom hosted Bad Cats, another classic system 11 and another game that was on my want list (since acquired).
I bought my Cyclone in the flee market area at the 2006 Pinball Wizards convention in Allentown. My game was there next to the Galaxy, but I loaded it up the evening before this picture was taken. This was one of the few flee market stalls with electric. That was good for me because I was way too green to consider buying a game without trying it out first. The name of this operation was Mike Tolley's "Bigfoot Unlimited".
Mike Tolley's flee market spot at the 2006 Pinball Wizards convention.
Loaded up for home.
Set up in the basement (future gameroom).
Ron and Nancy.
TAKE A CHANCE -- AND RIDE -- THE CYCLONE
This game appears to have been maintained by reasonably competent people. The game was moderately worn, but cared for. Yet there were no signs of the kind of TLC that a home use game might receive. A few incorrect parts were used where incorrect parts would work. But there weren't any wacky do-it-yourself hacks. Perhaps I was the game's fist home use owner. All in all it was solid starting point.
The good news about the playfield was that there were only two small spots of wood showing where the ball drops from the ramps to the inlanes. There was also some minor insert wear along the top arch and by the Cyclone ramp. But the paint was mostly good. The bad news was that the paint was nice because of the several layers of Mylar covering the majority of the playfield. Some Mylar was applied over a less than clean playfield. And there was some unevenness and bubbling where inserts had risen. As nice as the paint may have been, the Mylar was pretty ugly. Compared to other Cyclones I've seen, the ramps were great. The right side of the Comet ramp entrance was broke, but had a decent looking metal guard covering the damage. The right side of the Cyclone ramp also had some cracks, but they were not visible from any normal viewing angle. Most of boards were original with matching serial numbers. The MPU board was from a Cyclone, but not this Cyclone. And the display board was from an F-14. The power supply board had some connector hacks.
The game's biggest detraction was the cabinet. While structurally sound, the paint on both sides was cracked and chipped and a lot of paint is gone from the front. The translite was nice.
Ferris Wheel decals.
An upper playfield shot with ramps removed.
Ball view from outhole.
Promotional bumper sticker for Cyclone.
Promotional plastics for Cyclone. The clown holding the sign is a decal. The orange clown with the long tongue belongs with Hurricane. Also shown is a plastic for Comet.
Display panel speaker cutouts for Cyclone.
The two-page promotional flyer for Cyclone is shown below. The flyer shows a green and white Jackpot decal inside the Cyclone ramp whereas the production games had an orange and yellow decal. The flyer also shows an F-14 speaker panel, a Space Station drop target and no decals on the duck targets. Most of the flags were dropped for the production games.
Click picture for larger image.
Shown below is a four-page German flyer. This flyer appears to have been made from a production game since the pictures include none of the discrepancies noted above. Note the addition of a German flag by the Comet ramp entrance.
Click picture for larger image.
Shown below are patent drawings for Cyclone. The patent does not reference any specific game. And Fig. 1 oddly shows a Banzai Run cabinet. Nevertheless, this is clearly Cyclone's Shuttle Ramp.
Click thumbnails for larger images.
Service Bulletins for Cyclone. Click thumbnails for larger images.
Most Cyclones came with a translite, but there were a limited number of real backglasses produced. I acquired one of these backglasses for my game. But then I decided I was content with the existing translite. So I just used the backglass for a wall hanging. If your translite is in good shape I'd recommend passing on the backglass unless you just like collecting backglasses.
Cyclone backglass.
I made a topper from some CPR promo parts. Check my Cyclone Repair and Maintenance Log page for build details.
Homemade topper.
An animated gif showing the blinking nose.
In 1991 a band called Mr. Bungle released a self-titled album including a song called Carousel. The lyrics included references to Cyclone and the song used many sound bites from the game. Not my kind of music, but an interesting bit of trivia. The song could be found on YouTube.
Time for a change...
Having read this page you probably have the idea that Cyclone was one of my sentimental favorite games. But the game got a lot of criticism for being shallow and repetitive. After owning the game for a year and a half, I was beginning to agree.
There were a few things about this game that bothered me. First, the scoring was not very balanced. The Comet and Cyclone shots were so lucrative that there was no motivation to shoot at anything else. And most every feature on the game was a timed feature. I don't mind a few timed features, but Cyclone got carried away. Worst was that all the timers reset when the ball was lost. In other words, the player was starting from scratch with each new ball. There was no sense of game progression. The last ball was exactly like the first. The game provided the same frustration you'd get from an old multi-player EM game. It was time to take a look at the factory settings and see what could be done.
First I adjusted the Comet and Cyclone ramps to not be lit at the beginning of the game. This forced the player's focus on the Cat and Duck targets to get the ramps lit. I turned off the Comet timer, but required six ramp shots to get the Million points. So there was no timer to worry about, but it took nine shots (three target shots and six ramp shots) to get the Million. The lit targets and the lit ramps carried from ball to ball so there was some sense of progression if a ball was lost. The Cyclone ramp timer remained as is so the Gate Jackpot was still the most challenging and most lucrative objective. I turned off the Ferris wheel timer and increased the Ferris wheel bonus to 5,000 points per bumper hit. This was meant to make the Ferris Wheel shot more attractive and diminish the relative importance of the Comet ramp. I also went from three to five balls per game. This allowed for a satisfying game even when a ball or two was sucked down the dreaded outlanes. By the way, that fifth ball skill shot was worth 500,000 points. Again, this added balance to the scoring and diminished the importance of the ramps. Of course all these changes required the replay thresholds to be adjusted up.
Years later... I actually became less hardcore about game rules and strategies. I reprogrammed all my games back to three-balls and mostly factory settings. It just seemed more authentic that way. I did disable all the automatic adjustments for items like replay scores and the Boomerang multiplier. I'm not really that good of a player and I didn't like when game play became more difficult from one game to the next.
Pinball Expo 2006 and my Cyclone ramp story...
Cyclone had four clear plastic ball ramps. It's important to buy a machine with good ramps because most of these plastic ramps were hard or impossible to replace. I was able to find a Cyclone machine that had all good ramps. They were far from perfect, but respectable. Not ten minutes after I bought my Cyclone machine I discovered a vendor selling new reproduction Comet ramps for Cyclone. I immediately bought a new Comet ramp. That's one. A few weeks later I was phone ordering some parts and asked about ramps for Cyclone. I wasn't expecting anything, but in fact they had just found an NOS Spook House ramp. I bought it. That's two.
At the beginning of November 2006 I flew to Chicago for the big annual Pinball Expo show (my first Expo). Late Saturday afternoon (my last day there) I was roaming around the exhibit hall and noticed what appeared to be the Cyclone ramp for Cyclone. It was on top of a pile of other junk at the back of a vendor's booth. I had already been there for four days, but didn't notice the ramp until late Saturday. I had even bought some other stuff from this guy and didn't notice the ramp back there. It was solid black with grime from sitting on a shelf somewhere for the last 18 years. I was only able to recognize it by its shape. First thing I noticed is that none of the ramp mounting holes had been threaded through. It was NOS. Next I tried smearing off some of the grime and could find no chips or cracks. So I asked the guy "how much?" "Ten bucks." Hell yeah!
I immediately took my new find back to the hotel room. I filled up the bathtub and dumped in a few of those mini-bottles of shampoo and started cleaning my ramp. Then I carefully went over all the metal parts with a towel and hair dryer. Nice. I saw only two problems. There was a washboard-like ripple in the plastic over about an inch of the ramp's length. No big deal. Perhaps the ramp was a factory second. Also the finish on the spring-steel entrance flap was gone. But that could be easily refinished or replaced.
So I'm happy. I now had three out of four new ramps for my machine. I didn't have a new Ferris Wheel ramp, but my existing ramp was near perfect and it never takes any direct ball hits so I don't expect it to ever break. Then I ran into a snag...
My new Cyclone ramp didn't fit in my damn suitcase. It looked like it should fit but it didn't. I considered taking the ramp as a carry-on, but the ramp had a few metal parts including an integral micro-switch and wiring harness. I was afraid the airport x-ray guy would freak and call the terror police on me. I had thrown my pocketknife in the suitcase so I grabbed the knife and started hacking away at the suitcase lid to see if I could get it to open further. After a lot of squeezing and twisting I got the ramp inside. I was not happy. The ramp was tweaked way more than what I was comfortable with. I carefully packed in magazines, cardboard and clothing and figured I did the best I could.
When I checked in at the airport I declared my suitcase as a fragile item. The guy slapped a "Fragile" sticker on the suitcase and frisbeed it onto the conveyor belt like all the other bags. Great. Next I became concerned about the cold temperatures in the plane's cargo bay. The ramp was under pressure. Would it crack it the cold? Fortunately the flight was only 80 minutes. When I finally made it back to Virginia it seemed to take forever to get my suitcase. But then it rolled out and I quickly opened it up to check my ramp. It survived!
My only remaining concern was getting the ramp back out of the suitcase. I was prepared to cut the suitcase in half rather then twist and bend the ramp again. But the ramp popped right out and lived happily ever after.
Epilogue... All Cyclone ramps have since been reproduced which renders the above story completely irrelevant.
Not so fast... I did eventually use the NOS Cyclone ramp on my game.