Bally's Gilligan's Island

As a child of the 1980's if you wanted to play video games the TV had to be on channel 3. Growing up channel 3 was TBS Superstation so I got in a lot of classic TV reruns like The Brady Bunch, The Munsters, The Addams Family and Gilligan's Island. I had no idea this game even existed up to a few years ago. I never saw this game when it was originally released, only here at the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.

Gilligan's Island from Bally was released in 1991 and it was the first game developed by Bally/Williams that used a Dot Matrix display. However since this game took longer to create Terminator 2 came out first with Gilligan coming out a few months later. Some folks confuse this thinking this was the first ever Dot Matrix display game but Data East's Checkpoint has the honor of being the very first game released with the display. Although Data East used much smaller displays then Bally/Williams was using. They later went up to the normal sized displays but of course in the 90's everything had to be bigger and better so games like Frankenstein, Baywatch and Batman Forever used the super sized displays and also touted off having six player games,

Now you think I'm delaying the review...well I am. Other then the game being Bally's first DMD game the whole game is pretty boring and lackluster. It tries to play out like an episode of the show, you the player are Gilligan and you have to help The Professor to create a Lava Seltzer to give to the volcano god, Kona. The game has a cool little rotating wheel on the left ramp that will divert the ball around, but other then that the game is just very slow and other then collecting the stuff to make Lava Seltzer there's not much to do.

I had a chance to play this game shortly after Tim and the crew at the museum cleaned the game up and put it back in the lineup. Even with the game all cleaned, polished and with new flippers the game still played VERY slowly. The game you watch me play is actually my second time trying to get a video of and I just decided the heck with it and went with what I had. Many people consider this game Bally/Williams worst game of the era and I tend to agree with them. It's hard to believe that they where making this and T2 at the same time. Even without the T2 theme that game is still WAY more fun to play with trying to get the multiball, trying to re-lock the balls and shooting for the game's Super Jackpot. What do you do in this? Collect all the stuff and keep shooting the ramp for millions.

Not the worst, I'd still rather play this then a lot of the 90's era Gottlieb machines.