Airborne Avenger (pinball)

While working as a technician at Atari, Steve Ritchie learned from Bob Jonesi who designed Atari's first pinball game, Atarians and began to design a game himself. After a rejection from his supervisor he took his idea to the head of Atari, Nolan Bushnell who gave him a space to work on the game.^[1]

The prototype for the game was then built in four weeks.^[2] Working as an engineer, Claude Fernandez assisted with the detailed layout and precise location of mechanical components.^[3]

Eugene Jarvis worked on the software for the game, including getting the lights to flash in sequence.^[4] When the game is not being played it has an attract mode where the lights give a show to attract potential players.^[5] The speaker plays different tones when various scores are collected by the player.^[5]

The backglass image was designed by George Opperman,^[6] who also created the Atari logo.^[7] Starlog described this image as a chisel faced man wearing sunglasses against a bald villain.^[8]

The score display is on the lower left of the playfield,^[9] and the boards controlling the game are contained in the main cabinet.^[10]

In common with other early Atari pinball machines, a Motorola 6800 processor was used, and the playfield was larger than other manufacturers.^[11]

There are two main objectives for players: to hit various targets to advance the bonus score awarded at the end of a ball, and to spell AIRBORNE AVENGER by hitting various other targets.^[5][12]

In a review for Play Meter Roger Sharpe awarded the game 3/4, finding it an improvement on Atari's two previous games, suggesting it would do better as a 5 ball game rather than a 3 ball game.^[12]

RePlay said it offered "target variety for every level of player expertise".^[13]

In 2014, Steve Ritchie described it as his worst game.^[14]