Sudden Withdrawal

Sudden Withdrawal is a Williams System 11 solid-state pinball prototype that was never put into production. Conceived and designed by Matt Walsh, it centers on a bank-robbery and crime theme, with toys including a getaway car and an opening safe.

The surviving prototype playfield was originally designed with four flippers, with two upper flippers meant to feed a pair of overlapping ramps, but Walsh found the arrangement impractical -- there wasn't enough clearance under the glass, and one ramp would have been too steep -- so he removed one flipper and replaced the corresponding ramp with a safe, conceptually similar to the safe later used in Theatre of Magic. The finished design called for three flippers, two slingshots, six standup targets, two kick-out holes, and a left outlane kickback, with the plunger doubling as a detonator handle: pulling it to "blow open" the safe was meant to start a multiball mode, with jackpots for getting a ball into the safe and then into a getaway car that lowered over the right orbit shot.

Walsh and artist Paul Faris never got far enough into the project to produce final artwork before it was cancelled, and the prototype -- built inside a borrowed Black Knight 2000 cabinet -- had no autofire mechanism. As an unrealized design, Sudden Withdrawal offers a rare look at the creative process behind an unproduced Williams game from the System 11 era.