Tidal Wave

Tidal Wave is a solid-state electronic (SS) whitewood prototype designed by John Trudeau for D. Gottlieb & Company in the late 1970s -- one of many prototypes Trudeau built that, for various reasons, never reached production. The playfield was ultimately stripped and no longer exists today.

By Trudeau's own account, Tidal Wave was his first attempt at a fully operational game and an ambitious one: a two-level widebody playfield with a large moving section of ball guides and a vertical loop up the center. It featured four flippers, a pop bumper, two slingshots, two 4-bank drop-target banks, four standup targets, two kicking targets, two roll-under spinners, and a kick-out hole, plus a right-side kickback lane and a left-side ball kicker that propelled the ball to the upper playfield.

One especially elaborate mechanism captured the ball at the left rear of the main playfield, where a gate would swing in to redirect a shot that normally reached the bottom flippers toward the ball kicker instead, sending it back up to the top playfield. A second kick-out hole near the main flippers could similarly redirect the ball up the left return lane toward the right slingshot area. Despite this inventive engineering, Tidal Wave never made it past the prototype stage.