Hot Hand

Hot Hand, designed by pinball pioneer Harry Williams and produced by Stern Electronics in May 1979, is a four-player solid-state game built on Stern's M-100 MPU. Its cards-and-gambling theme was a well-worn pinball tradition, but Hot Hand backs it up with genuinely novel mechanics.

The playfield features two flippers, three pop bumpers, a 5-bank of drop targets, a spinning target, and an upper left kicker lane. The machine's signature feature is a large flipper at the top of the playfield that slowly rotates throughout game play: a ball resting in any of the ten nearby rollover pockets scores points continuously until dislodged by the rotating flipper, a mechanism that rewards - and then interrupts - lucky ball placement.

Stern produced 3,793 full games between May and July of 1979, and the game was also manufactured under license in Australia as LAI's 1979 'Hot Hand,' with an additional 324 knock-down games bringing the total to 4,117 units. With its rotating top flipper and continuous-scoring pockets, Hot Hand remains a distinctive entry in Stern Electronics' early solid-state catalog.