The Last Time the World Cup Came to America, We Got a Pinball Machine

Bally’s 1994 World Cup Soccer has a robot goalie, a hidden Mortal Kombat god, and the wrong champion — and it might be the best sports pin ever built.

This week on the channel I reviewed Bally’s World Cup Soccer (1994) — the robot goalie, the spinning ball, the hidden Mortal Kombat god, and the FlipScore verdict. If you haven’t watched it yet, start there:

This newsletter isn’t a recap. It’s the stuff that got cut — the strange world that machine was born into, and a few details that never made the script.

America hosted the World Cup before it had a soccer league

Here’s the fact that reframes the whole machine: when the United States hosted the 1994 World Cup, there was no Major League Soccer. It didn’t exist yet. MLS wouldn’t play its first match until 1996 — launching a pro league was literally one of the conditions FIFA attached to giving America the tournament.

So Bally wasn’t building a pinball machine for a soccer country. They were building one for a country that was about to become a soccer country, maybe, if everything went right. That’s a genuinely strange bet: a licensed FIFA machine for a sport most of the machine’s players had never watched. It’s why the design is so approachable — one goal, one keeper, one obvious shot. The machine had to teach Americans soccer and pinball at the same time.

The tournament was chaos from the opening ceremony

The machine crowning Germany as champion (while actual champion Brazil isn’t even in the game — see the video) fits the 1994 tournament perfectly, because nothing that summer went to script.

At the opening ceremony in Chicago, Diana Ross was supposed to cap her performance by kicking a penalty into an open goal, at which point the goal would split apart in celebration. She dragged the shot wide from about ten feet. The goal exploded apart anyway, right on cue, celebrating a miss. Thirty years later it’s still the most pinball thing to ever happen in real soccer: the theatrical hardware doing its routine regardless of where the ball went.

The final at the Rose Bowl was scoreless — the first World Cup final ever decided on penalties — and ended with Roberto Baggio, the best player in the world that year, sending the deciding kick over the crossbar. Even the trophy was won on a miss.

And yet: USA ‘94 set the all-time World Cup attendance record — nearly 3.6 million people, averaging about 69,000 a match. Despite every tournament since having more games, that record still stands. This summer’s 48-team edition on North American soil is the first one with a real shot at breaking it.

Fine print from the credits

A couple of details that never made the video’s script:

The music and sound package — the thing that makes this machine feel like a sports broadcast — was done by Vince Pontarelli, with Tim Kitzrow (yes, the NBA Jam announcer) on the mic. Kitzrow gets the fame, but the reason his callouts land is the stadium-broadcast bed underneath them.

And about that Raiden cameo: it made more corporate sense than you’d think. By 1994 the Bally pinball name was living inside the Williams/Midway family — the same building of people shipping Mortal Kombat to arcades. The lightning god in the soccer machine wasn’t a licensing stunt; it was coworkers sneaking each other’s characters through the wall.

A Game For Beginners

My favorite part of this video is when I play a few balls and get absolutely killed. Moments before in the video I had described the game as being designed for beginners.

Yeah sure really fun for beginners.

The full review, with the complete FlipScore breakdown, is here:

One machine every Thursday. Quit talkin’ and start chalkin’.

— Ryan