The Addams Family
First Released March, 1992
Zen Build Released February 16, 2023
Main Platform: Pinball FX
Switch Platform: Pinball FX
Coin-Op Designed by Pat Lawlor
Conversion by Zoltan ’Pazo’ Pataki
Stand Alone Release ($9.99)
I’ve almost run out of things to say about Addams Family. It’s the biggest seller of all-time and the dream table of most novice pinball collectors. What I find fascinating is all of these accolades and achievements are earned despite Addams Family being, frankly, one of the most unfair pinball machines of the 1990s. There are so many ways where the table’s mechanics can override perfect play and still kill you, and this on a table already crowded in a way that’s tailor-made to punish you for bricks. Specifically, it’s those damn magnets that push the ball down the drain or an outlane. We’ve all experienced the pleasure of starting the Seance and having the magnet immediately guide the ball straight down the drain a half-second into the mode. Seriously, Seance is the most maddening mode in the history of pinball. Pat Lawlor could have built a compressed airbag that blows up in the player’s face, and that act wouldn’t make him as big a jerk as Seance does.
And of course, when the Thing Flip bricks so badly you die from it? That’s one of those moments where taking a sledgehammer to a $10,000 pinball machine becomes oddly tempting. So, why is this table beloved? Perhaps it’s because Addams Family integrates its theme better than any pinball table of the arcade era, producing exactly the type of pinball-based gameplay that celebrates a macabre family who doesn’t follow society’s rules. It’s not fair, but it doesn’t pretend to be, either. It revels its unfairness with a wink and a hug that’s endearing, even if the table is plunging a knife in your back as you embrace it. I can’t say enough about Raul Julia’s historically amazing call-outs. Sometimes real life movie stars phone-in their pinball voice work. Not Julia. He belts his call-outs with gusto. Cheers to the great Raul Julia, performer of the greatest pinball voice over in history! 🍻
Zen’s take on Addams is an imperfect port. Yes, Thing Flips misses on a real table, but, it’s a woefully bad shot in Pinball FX. Oddly, the first few builds of Addams on PRO difficulty had the ball moving so fast that Thing Flips didn’t even work in that setting. Now, it not only works, but the PRO difficulty is the best-shooting Thing Flips in all of Zen’s builds. All other variations? If this were the NBA, Zen’s Addams is the table you want to foul in a close game with only seconds on the clock, because that auto-shot is a bricklayer. The magnets for the start of the Seance or when you’ve lit multiball are also much more lethal on Pinball FX than they are in real life, with about a quarter of our games being an instant kill when the magnets carry the ball from the VUK to the drain in literally less than a second. Many purists would have it no other way, but part of me wishes Zen would create a second, idealized version of Addams that isn’t engineered like a cabinet that has to earn a living two quarters at a time.
One last note on the Thing Flips shot: in a real life table, when you or the auto-shot misses the cross-table Swamp shot, it’s fairly common for the ball to ricochet in a way where you get a second chance to convert the shot. That almost never happens in the Zen Studios build. In my opinion, Pinball FX in general doesn’t have enough PING off solid surfaces. You can tell that their engine is built for their original works more than for the Williams/Bally pins because ricochets and rebounding matter a lot less in their newly-created tables, most of which aren’t defensive-minded. Coin-op pinball during the 80s and 90s, by its very “earning quarters, one player at a time” nature, requires pinball to be played defensively, with a heavy emphasis on rebounding and conversion shots. It speaks volumes to how strong Addams Family is as a table that I’m still going MASTERPIECE, even though I prefer the Arcooda build.
The gap is closer than ever before, and if Zen Studios can improve their physics, especially their problems with balls going limp when they should be ricocheting, they move head-and-shoulders above Arcooda. For now, Arcooda’s Addams is #1, by a slim margin. Of course, that’s a minimum $150 buy AND you must already own the tables on Pinball Arcade. Otherwise, it’s a $500 buy-in (and it requires two monitors) for a marginal upgrade. Or, maybe it’s not so small of a margin. One thing that bugs the hell out of me about Zen Studios is their refusal to include the options real tables have. I’ll get into that more in Vice Versus underneath the body of this review, but I’ll take this moment to note that Williams/Bally tables were loaded with fun options, and Pinball FX offers exactly none of it outside the “pro” difficulty, where the slope of the table is increased, the outlanes are widened, and the table’s internal toggles are set to “extra hard.” That isn’t very fun because of the steeper slope. I wouldn’t even mention this stuff except I know these guys making these tables and I know they’re better than no options at all.
On Nintendo Switch Addams has a fairly significant problem, albeit one that I am HOPING to delete (along with this entire section) later this Summer. If you take a dead flip from the Electric Chair, the ball will bounce across from the left flipper to the right flipper, then roll-up the right inlane’s switch, activating the temporary light of the electric chair, which you can then reshoot. This almost never happens on the coin-op. If your aim is true, you can use this to quickly run through the different modes and reach TOUR THE MANSION in record time. Now granted, you won’t be scoring as many points as you’d think if you begin this cycle right off the bat, since if you cheese the game, you’re not scoring points on Cousin It, Raise the Dead, Thing Multiball, and the Mamushka. But you can start cheesing the table at any time, making the final push towards TOUR THE MANSION trivial. For this reason, everyone but Elias discussed this and we decided to drop our ratings by one rank on Switch until this is fixed.
NINTENDO SWITCH UPDATE: The Big Update everyone’s been waiting for has dropped on Nintendo Switch, and with that, an improved Addams experience. Thing Flips are much more accurate, and manually shooting is much easier. Since Angela’s strategy is to charge-up the value of the Swamp Shot and tee it up till her heart’s content, she appreciates the much more true-to-life angles. The magnets are also much more accurate than they were before. Unfortunately, it’s still too easy to use the electric chair exploit mentioned above. For that reason, Angela, Oscar, and Dave have decided to keep their Switch scores in place. I’m not. I think that if a person wants to burn through the doors without utilizing their value, that’s on them. It’s a risk/reward calculation that makes sense. True to life? Not in the case of the electric chair’s drop. Everything else? This is a much improved experience. Make sure to read our Addams Family on Switch feature, which also includes a look at the ultra-rare (delisted in under two hours) Pinball Arcade version of Addams on Switch!
Cathy: MASTERPIECE
Angela: MASTERPIECE – GREAT on Nintendo Switch
Oscar: GREAT – GOOD on Nintendo Switch
Jordi: MASTERPIECE
Dash: GOOD
Dave: MASTERPIECE – GREAT on Nintendo Switch
Elias: GREAT – Played on Nintendo Switch
Sasha: MASTERPIECE – GREAT on Nintendo Switch
Standard Pinball FX Scoring Average: 4.5 – GREAT
Nintendo Switch Scoring Average: 4.0 – GREAT
📜Awarded a Certificate of Excellence📜
VICE VERSUS
Addams Family makes for a great competitive table, which is why we’re so disheartened that hot seat’s modes don’t allow for scores to the online leaderboard, when there’s no real competitive advantage for using hot seat mode. It’s also frustrating that there’s no options beyond the seven main gameplay modes. We like to play “Galactic Rules” which is 10 Balls + 10 Potential Extra Balls, or “Iron Ball” which is 10 Balls, no Extra Balls, and we’ll tinker with the rules like extending the hurry-up time, or the ball save time, etc. We’re certainly not arguing those should count towards online leaderboards, but we’d have a LOT more fun with Pinball FX if not for the lack of options. This ability was up-sold on Pinball Arcade as the “Pro Mode” which, if Zen were to do that, yea, we’d pay for the upgrade. Zen wastes too much time on fancy “enhanced” graphics when the best upgrades are right there, built into the pinball’s software itself. Still, Addams is one table we never get sick of competing against each-other in my house.
GAME ONE – CLASSIC
Sasha: 157,922,100
Cathy: 217,160,880 – Toured
Angela: 169,511,430
Oscar: 208,727,270
WINNER: Cathy (1)
GAME TWO – PRO
Cathy: 60,519,390
Angela: 114,712,130 (24th All-Time)
Oscar: 50,239,100
Sasha: 56,579,540
WINNER: Angela (1)
GAME THREE – ARCADE
Angela: 236,139,300 – Toured
Oscar: 242,113,290 – Toured
Sasha: 190,444,270
Cathy: 162,871,540
WINNER: Oscar (1)
GAME FOUR – 200 FLIP CHALLENGE
Oscar: 273,896,180 – Toured (#13 All-Time)
Sasha: 219,255,320 – Toured
Cathy: 365,014,030 – Toured (#6 All-Time)
Angela: 175,645,620 – Toured
WINNER: Cathy (2)
GAME FIVE – ONE BALL CHALLENGE
Sasha: 50,543,940
Cathy: 87,197,950 (#22 All-Time)
Angela: 87,779,430 (#21 All-Time)
Oscar: 41,610,620
WINNER: Angela (2)
GAME SIX – FIVE MINUTE TIME CHALLENGE
Cathy: 115,861,870
Angela: 102,849,350
Oscar: 146,568,420 – Toured (#15 All-Time)
Sasha: 112,528,890
WINNER: Oscar (2)
GAME SEVEN – DISTANCE CHALLENGE
Angela: 174,440,950 – Toured
Oscar: 220,258,300 – Toured (#10 All-Time)
Sasha: 138,220,420
Cathy: 291,323,480 – Toured (#3 All-Time)
SERIES WINNER: Cathy 3 – 2 – 2 – 0
The Pinball Chick 
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