TiltLab · Machine 11 · On the floor
THE KHUFU KEY
A pinball machine that is the missing key to the Great Pyramid, and it goes down with you. Every chamber is a lock. Open one and the whole cabinet moves on, from the sand below the north face to the bottom of everything.
The idea
What if the pinball machine were the key, and the room went down with it?
Khufu: Beneath the Stone is an exhibit in GameLab: the Giza plateau over its real terrain, the three pyramids built to their measured courses, the chambers and passages inside the Great Pyramid as Petrie surveyed them, the voids the muon surveys found, and, clearly labelled, the chambers a disputed radar reading puts under the plateau. This machine stands in it.
It plays like an adventure film. You are the expedition, the Consortium are digging beside you, and the pinball machine is the thing every wall in the pyramid is waiting for. Each chamber is a lock: your shots turn the key, and when it opens the cabinet goes down to the next place, with its own trouble and its own light.
The pyramids change as you go. Halfway down, the expedition comes out onto the plateau again on the night Orion lines up, and the Great Pyramid stands whole: the exhibit’s own restored casing, white under the stars, waiting for its capstone.
The descent
Nine places, and the cabinet goes to each.
| Place | Where it is | Its trouble |
|---|---|---|
| I. The Plateau | The sand below the north face, at sundown | A sandstorm. Gusts lean the table and pile sand on three drifts that slow the ball. The Solar Boat sweeps them clean. |
| II. The Pit | The unfinished chamber cut in the bedrock | The pit in the floor opens now and then. A ball that rolls near it is held, then thrown back up the table. |
| III. The Queen’s Chamber | The gabled chamber, the niche, the two air shafts | A stone door with copper pins across each ramp. Two hits break one, and that shaft counts triple after. |
| IV. The Grand Gallery | The foot of the corbelled slope | A boulder comes down the middle. The line on the table is the warning; a ball in its way is thrown. |
| V. The King’s Chamber | Red granite, and the coffer | The mummy. The coffin rides the middle track, portcullises drop over both ramps, and halfway a hand comes up out of the floor. |
| VI. The Big Void | The space above the Gallery that the muon surveys found | A wall of glyphs that plays a combination: three glyphs, three more, then four. Shoot each set in order. A glyph out of turn costs time; when the time runs out, the wall plays the combination again. |
| VII. The Restoration | The plateau again, in 2560 BC, at night | The capstone multiball. Every jackpot carries the capstone higher up the north face; the Burial Shaft sets it, and a beam goes up to Orion. |
| VIII. The ZED | The proposed colonnade under the pyramid | Six pairs of columns to wake, one pair a shot. Arcs jump across the table between them. |
| IX. The Lower Room | The deepest proposed chamber | The key. Every two shots open a ring of the core; with all three open, the Burial Shaft turns it. Then the next expedition starts on the plateau, worth twice as much. |
On the playfield
Every part, and what it does.
| Part | On the map | What it does | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| The expedition map | A survey sheet of Giza | The playfield is a surveyor’s sheet pinned on the sand: the plateau in plan on its true bearings, and the Great Pyramid in section with the chambers below it in red ink. | – |
| The Seal | The middle | A shot up the middle turns the key. The Consortium’s man walks the track across it: knock him back to set their dig back. In the King’s Chamber the coffin rides it. | 4,000 · knock 30,000 |
| The Causeway | The left orbit | Lets the Light of Ra in when the mirror is full. A sun disc on its rail spins as the ball goes by. | 6,000 · Ra 250,000 and up |
| The Ascending Passage | The loop ramp | The biggest turn of the key. | 20,000 |
| The Air Shaft | The right ramp | With a lock lit it turns off into the Burial Shaft. | 12,000 |
| The Burial Shaft | The scoop | Locks, the way down, and the end of every mode. A ball sealed here carries out a relic that changes the rules: the bullwhip, the lantern, the star map, the bronze mirror, the ankh. | 7,500 · sealed 50,000 |
| The Solar Boat | The right alley | All the way round and down the right wall. Sweeps the sand off the table. | 8,000 · swept 20,000 and up |
| The three pyramids | The bumpers | Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, coursed stone on lapis, their capstones flashing gold. | 1,000 |
| A-N-K-H | The top lanes | The flippers move the lit lanes. All four raise the bonus multiplier and light the breath of life (kickbacks) in both outlanes. | 2,500 · all 15,000 |
| Orion’s belt | Three stars | Drop targets in front of the Burial Shaft: Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. Down all three to light a lock. Two locked and a third start the Scarab Swarm. | 3,000 · all 15,000 |
| The glyph | A turquoise sign | One shot at a time carries a lit glyph. Make it for a big turn of the key. | 25,000 and up |
| Flippers, slingshots, plunger | – | Chrome Orbit’s lower playfield, unchanged for an eleventh table, in lapis and gold. Plunge into the flashing lane for the skill shot. | skill shot 30,000 |
The rules
Turn the key, and go down.
- The seal. Every shot turns the key a little; the eight teeth on the backglass are the seal. Fill it and the chamber opens. The Burial Shaft then takes you down, holding the ball while the cabinet moves; wait twenty-five seconds and the floor gives way by itself.
- The Consortium. In most chambers a rival dig keeps pace with you. Get in first for 250,000. Their man walks the middle track now and then; knock him back and their dig loses ground.
- The Light of Ra. Ramps, orbits, drops and the middle fill the bronze mirror. Full, it lights the Causeway for fifteen seconds. Make it and for nine seconds every shot turns the key twice as far.
- The mummy. Eight wrappings. Lift both portcullises (two hits each) and every hit on the coffin tears two; with a gate down, one. At five the hand comes up out of the pit; at two it gets quicker. Break the curse for 2,500,000 and an extra ball.
- The three modes. The capstone (six jackpots, then the Burial Shaft), the ZED (one pair of columns for each shot you have not made yet) and the key (every two shots a ring; three rings, then the Burial Shaft). A multiball mode that loses its balls waits: the Burial Shaft brings them back.
- The Scarab Swarm. Two balls sealed and a third start a three-ball multiball. Every shot is a jackpot, and three jackpots light a super jackpot at the Burial Shaft.
The room
Giza, from the plateau down.
Almost everything around the cabinet is the Khufu exhibit itself, imported from GameLab when the machine starts. Nothing in the exhibit’s folder is changed.
The exhibit’s
- The plateau is the exhibit’s terrain over the SRTM survey, with its sky dome, its temples, causeways and the Sphinx, and its world-space stone, sand and granite shaders.
- The pyramids are the exhibit’s, course by course, with its photo-calibrated north face from Blender. On the night of the Restoration they wear the exhibit’s heyday casing.
- The chambers are the exhibit’s too: the Subterranean Chamber, the Queen’s and King’s Chambers, the Grand Gallery, the Big Void, and the disputed ZED and Lower Room.
This machine’s
- The relics are modelled in Blender from code: the capstone with its alien circuit, the coffin with its lid and eyes, the jackal on his shrine, the boulder, the scarab, the core with its three rings, the djed and the braziers. The stone ones wear the exhibit’s stone.
- The light is set for each place: sundown and blown sand on the plateau, torchlight in the chambers, a cold glow in the voids, moonlight and Orion on the night of the Restoration.
- The cabinet is a reliquary in lapis and gold, with the capstone itself on the backbox, its circuit lighting up as the key turns.
- The voices: your guide, the Consortium and the thing in the coffin, typed out as they speak.
Under the glass
What makes it run.
- Physics
- The shared TiltLab table rig: Rapier 0.21 at 120 steps a second. The sand is Margin Aces’ drag zones; the Consortium’s man and the coffin are one mover across the middle; the doors and portcullises are the walls in front of the ramps; the vortex is FIELDWORK’s turntable and the pit a magnet. The boulder and the ZED’s arcs are blast lines that throw a ball in their way.
- A room that travels
- The exhibit is in metres and so is the cabinet, so each place is just a spot in the exhibit’s world and a direction to face. The world is drawn first with its own camera standing where you stand, the cabinet over it. Moving on is a fade through black: the exhibit’s layers are switched (outside, the known chambers, the scan voids), its era set, and the place relit.
- One three.js
- The exhibit’s modules import their own copy of three.js by path. The machine’s import map points that path at TiltLab’s copy, the same release, so the exhibit and the table share one renderer and one set of loaders.
- The props
- source/blender/build_props.py builds every relic in Blender from code and exports one GLB. It runs in Blender or with Blender as a Python module.
- Testing
- A headless bot plays whole games in Node, each starting a chamber or two deeper, to catch stuck balls in the sand, behind the doors and in the pit. A script plays one whole expedition through the rules, from the plateau to the key turning and back up to the plateau.
- Sound
- All made in code with the TiltLab sound kit: a lyre in the Phrygian dominant, a sistrum, a frame drum, horns for the descent, stone grinding on stone, the boulder, the coffin breathing, the arcs and the core. Wind, fire and a drone in the stone are the beds, deeper the further down you go.
- Music
- Lazarus Array’s I Swear I Had a Pulse from MusicLab, a track for each chamber. The lamps flash on each track’s measured beat.
- Controls
- A / ← and D / → (or Shift) for the flippers (the right one works both right flippers), Space to plunge, Z and / to nudge, Esc to pause. A gamepad works. On a phone, use the pads at the bottom of the screen. Drag to look round, pinch or scroll to zoom, and reset the view with the button that appears.
In the lineage
Machine 11, after MUD TRUCK ’99.
THE KHUFU KEY starts from MUD TRUCK ’99: its playfield and parts, and its two-pass room inside the world it comes from. From Margin Aces it takes the drag zones, now sand. From FIREHAWK it keeps the moving target across the middle and the walls in front of the ramps. From Black Budget Bird it borrows the typewriter for its field notes. From Chrome Orbit it keeps the lower playfield, the sound kit and the start-up loader.
Its new idea is a room that travels. The cabinet does not stay where it was put: it goes down nine times, and the pyramid itself changes on the way.