Random Thoughts & Pictures
I acquired this game on Monday, January 22, 2018 after catching a lead on Pinside. The game came from a private seller around Gaithersburg, MD. So it was pretty easy to go get. I was looking to add another System 11 to my collection. I wasn't necessarily looking for any specific title, but Taxi was probably at or near the top of my wish list.
The game came to me in clean working condition. There's some wear in the non-Mylared areas of the playfield. Otherwise there's not much to complain about. Cosmetically, the game is comfortably above average.
GO FOR THE DRIVE -- OF YOUR LIFE -- PLAY TAXI
The cabinet exterior is great. Not perfect, but no gouges or missing chunks. No structural issues or lockdown holes. The paint and graphics are bright. It's a sharp looking package. I can't think of many yellow pinball machines. As an afterthought Williams added a bunch of trademark decals to the cabinet wherever the word "Taxi" appears. They're not carefully applied and haven't aged well.
Cabinet detail.
Cabinet detail.
Cabinet detail.
One of the silly trademark decals.
The translite is in good shape. Someone pulled the mirror off the insert panel and glued it right to the translite. The mirror could have been cleaner before it was glued on, but it still achieves the proper effect. Note that the game's name does not appear on the translite. The game has what looks to be an original topper with just a bit of yellowing. I think it's just the right shade of "character" so I can't see pursuing a new reproduction. One of the accent decals is missing which I may try to replace.
Taxi topper.
Mirror glued to the translite.
Translite detail.
Translite detail.
Translite detail.
The playfield is reasonable. The areas under the original Mylar look great. Otherwise there's a bit of noticeable wear at the Santa and Gorbie inserts and around the jet bumpers and a few other places. And this is one of those games where the color shades in the non-Mylared areas have become significantly different from the same colors in the Mylared areas. The plastics and ramps look good. I believe they're all original. You have to stop and look to find any cracks or imperfections. The game had been "LEDed". My first order of business was to restore the game to incandescent bulbs. The pictures on this page are from after most of the LEDs were removed. I kept many of the insert LEDs. Everything else is incandescent.
Gorbie is the low point of the playfield's condition.
Note the color difference between the Mylared and non-Mylared areas of the playfield.
The Spinout skill shot ramp.
I bought my Pin*bot way back in 2006. It's still one of my favorite games. The Pin*bot references on Taxi are great!
Pin*bot playfield detail.
Pin*bot playfiled detail.
Pin*bot playfield detail.
Playfield detail.
All the boards are matched throughout except that I believe the bonus display has been replaced. All connectors are bright and unhacked. The batteries have been remotely located. This is a system 11b. The insides of the head and cabinet are quite clean. Taxi is equipped with a bell which is a neat feature. Taxi was the one of only a few games (the other may be Swards of Fury) to move the lane change switches from the flipper mechs to the flipper buttons. They're implemented with micro switches. Later System 11 games dispensed with physical lane change switches and instead used optocoupler circuits on the backbox interconnect board. I also believe Taxi was the first system 11 pin to implement a pair of 16 character alphanumeric displays.
A look inside the head.
Clean under the hood.
The bell on the left inside wall of the cabinet.
Lane change switch at the flipper button.
Taxi was my second game with a bell. The first was Grand Lizard. Bell rings on Grand Lizard are not easy to come by. I used to play Grand Lizard just to try for a ring of the bell. On the other hand, Taxi rings quite a bit. So now I can go to Taxi for my bell fix and focus on other aspects of Grand Lizard.
If you've looked around my website you've seen that I'm a big fan of System 11 games. My only complaint with System 11 is that there's usually little to no integrated strategy. Many System 11 games comprise a collection of unrelated features. The features might be thematically related, but not really related from a playability point of view. Once the most lucrative shots are discovered, there's little scoring motivation to tour the rest of the playfield. Taxi is a bit different. The strategy involves collecting (or picking up) five passengers. Each of the five passengers is collected from a different area of the playfield by way of a variety of mechanisms. There's little that can be ignored. One must explore most of the playfield in order to have a shot at the jackpot. This in of itself makes Taxi a great game.
This particular Taxi is a Lola. Given the choice I would have picked a Marilyn because it seems a bit more "iconic". But it's not something I was much concerned about. People like to say that there were only about 200 Marilyns built as a sample run. That seems to be some sort Williams-backed rumor. Maybe they were trying to downplay their liability for using Marilyn in the first place. It's more likely that there were thousands of Marilyns produced. Many folks insist that the Marilyns are no less common than the Lolas. There are also a few examples of "transition" Taxis with both Marilyn and Lola components on the same game.
Shown above is the two page promotional flyer for Taxi. Click image for larger picture.
Promotional plastics.
Promotional plastic.
Promotional plastic (spearker cutout).
Check out the website www.pinballclicks.com. You'll find pictures from a 1988 Williams factory tour when Taxi was on the production line.
Issue #4 of Pinball Magazine features game designer Mark Ritchie and includes several pages (74-81) of information about the development of Taxi.
Around 2014 the people at Pinball Magazine produced a set of postcards to promote their book "Pinball" by Santiaga Ciuffo.
A Taxi appeared in the 1992 Madonna book "Sex".
Here's a schematic anomaly between the game manual and my bell circuit. This all started when I noticed that Q4 was missing from my aux driver board. Q4 is for the Sol 13 circuit, which is the bell on Taxi. But my bell worked just fine. Turns out that the aux driver board was altogether bypassed for the bell circuit. There's a little one-pin connector in the backbox that routes the Sol 13 circuit from the bell directly to the MPU board. This routing is inconsistent with that shown on the Solenoid Table. I suspect that the game designers ran out of controlled 25 volt circuits and improvised. Q8 on my aux driver board had been replaced. I suspect that some previous repair person recognized that Q4 was unused and salvaged Q4 to fix Q8.
Missing Q4 and missing Sol 13 wires (brn/grn).
One-pin connector routes the bell directly to the MPU board.
Game manual incorrectly shows the bell routed through the aux driver board.