I bought this game from my friend Joel Walentuk at Upstate Distributing in Watertown NY. I was going to school at Clarkson University and wanted to build my own pinball machine from scratch. Well, that didn't work out so I decided to buy an old machine for parts. Driving down to Watertown in my 1978 Grand Prix with my schoolmate Joe Caswell I bought the machine for like $100.

Joel said I could only buy it if he rip off the coin door to keep me from operating it. Well, when we asked Lloyd the tech to re-wire it so we could still play it, he decided to just let us keep the door (much to Joel's chagrin when I told him when I eventually worked for him in his arcade...)

However we didn't get any coin mechs...

So, shoehorned in trunk and backseat we brought the beast home and put it in Joe's room. We soon learned there wasn't much wrong with it (thanks to Joe's ingenuity). By installing a paper chute, we got around not needing a coin mech (but, anything flat and round would give you a credit!).

Under the front of wanting to do "game design research" I got permission from the residence hall manager to put it in the basement - under condition it was set to free. But of course I only could put on so many credits at once... Soon I was raking in a whopping $2 a day. There is intense pleasure in finding gleaming coins in a box of wood plugged in the wall that it earned all by itself. And no one ever tried anything but quarters! (well except some Canadian ones; popular in upstate NY)

Eventually I got a coin mech from begging another operator in town. Man, it was as if they were as rare as hen's teeth. Now of course I have dozens of them laying around...

There were downsides too; the disgruntled, angry janitors would report back that the game wasn't really free and so take the game and hide it in a clost. When I first saw my game missing I was horrified - thinking it was stolen! But it helped me learn to negotiate, that was for sure. After the 3rd confiscation, I finally asked the official game operator for the campus if he cared that I ran my 1970's EM pinball. Not at all, he said. Thinking I was free and clear (and having purchased my second pinball (Space Invaders) I proudly shared my news with the resident manager - who rained on my parade by saying I could only do this for the rest of the semester...

Well, not feeling like arguing I explored other options. I tried to have a little old barber shop be a location for Target Alpha (laugh! what expectations I had!). He initially agreed, then changed his mind. I ended up selling Target Alpha over the newsgroup rec.games.arts.pinball and moved Space Invaders into the Zeta Nu frat house (famous for Dead-Head parties and a beer vending machine), and promply doubled my earnings...at the end of the year I left the battered Space Invaders machine behind having made my money back and then some (and not wanting to rent a trailer to haul the beleaguered machine back to dad's house in New Jersey).

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Oh yeah, what about the game?!? Well turns out I got lucky. Target Alpha is one of my favorite EM's ever. It's got a wide open playfield and gobs of drop targets. Getting all 15 targets down plus double bonus was one of the great moments in flipper playing. I miss this game. I still play its sister game, El Dorado (1 player, slightly different rules) on the Visual Pinball emulator often.

Coincidentally, the game's designer Ed Krynsky also designed the next two games I bought, Spirit of '76 and Drop a Card

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pictures taken from the Internet Pinball Database Sadly, these aren't pictures of my machine

-- MattWalsh - 06 Apr 2002