Suddenly, fifty years passed like they were nothing. One moment it's 1975 and movies are just a thing you do now and then, and the next Jaws invents the summer blockbuster. Fast forward fifty years, past E.T, all the Marvel movies, Disney switching from hand-drawn animation to CGI and current the abomination of live-action remakes, Alien/s, Terminator, Star Wars, and more franchises than anyone should try to count, and Jaws is still fondly remembered even if the pacing and tone now seem like relics of a different era. That fifty years also encompassed almost all of modern videogaming history (Pong is 1972 but arcades didn't really get going until Space Invaders in 1978) but pinball has been around much longer than that. Somehow, though, Jaws never got an official pinball until last year.
The Jaws pinball turned out to be fantastic, with great shots lining up to create a strong flow and a theme that feels perfectly expressed in the table design and its toys. The dangling chum bucket, boat deck upper playfield, pop-up fin target that moved back and forth on a track, and especially the boat table toy with the shark popping up from underneath it...
