TiltLab · Machine 02 · On the floor

Midnight Ride

RevereBike, rebuilt as a pinball machine. Two lanterns in the steeple, a cannon you aim, a horse that gallops faster the better you play, and nineteen rides painted in oils.

Play Midnight Ride See the lineage

The Midnight Ride cabinet: Delft-blue wood with gold trim, a backglass painted with the Old North Church at night, and a playfield made from Lantern Run's oil-painted map of the ride.

The idea

Can a pinball table carry a whole game inside it?

Chrome Orbit asked whether a browser tab could make a steel ball feel heavy. Midnight Ride takes that answer and asks for more: can one table hold everything a full game has? A story, stages, a stable of characters, things to unlock, and a reason to come back tomorrow.

The game it holds is RevereBike, my 8-bit horse racer, and its sequel Lantern Run, where every stage was painted in oils on a robotic easel. Every beat of the ride has a job on the playfield. The lanterns in the Old North Church are the lock. Rousing the countryside lights a ride. The Regulars are the pop bumpers and the dragoons are drop targets. The cannon at Bunker Hill is a toy you aim. Lean-to-land becomes the nudge, and a wipeout is a tilt.

Nothing on the table was made from scratch. The playfield, the backglass and the room are Lantern Run's easel paintings. The church, cannon, farmhouses, bell and lanterns are its Blender colony kit, and Revere and the Redcoats are its rigged cast, all shrunk to pinball scale and shaded with its oil-paint material. The music is RevereBike's own soundtrack.

On the playfield

Every part, and what it does.

Part	From the ride	What it does	Points
Old North Church	One if by land, two if by sea	A scoop behind the dragoons. Lock a ball here and a lantern lights in the steeple. Two lanterns start multiball. It also starts rides and pays the super jackpot.	7,500 · lock 25,000
Dragoon drop targets	The patrol on the road	Three Redcoats on drop targets guard the church. Knock all three down to light the lock.	2,500 · all 15,000
Midnight Road	The ride out of Charlestown	The left ramp. It climbs behind the bumpers and comes back down a steel wireform to the left flipper.	10,000
Concord Bridge	The North Bridge	The right ramp, a plank bridge. When the lock is lit, a diverter at the top drops the ball straight into the church.	10,000
Charlestown Road	The long way round	The left orbit. The ball runs round the top arch and rings the belfry spinner on the way.	5,000
Belfry spinner	The Lexington bell	Spins as the ball goes through. A bell over the lane swings and rings with every turn. Forty turns on one shot earns a golden horseshoe.	300 a turn
Bunker Hill cannon	Breed's Hill	A saucer in the middle of the table. A slow ball loads the cannon, which swings back and forth until you flip. Fire it into the church, over the bumpers into the lanes, or anywhere in between.	5,000 · eagle 30,000
Farmhouses	The Call	Three farmhouses on the right wall. Knock on each and its windows light. All three light a ride.	3,000 · all 20,000
The Regulars	Volleys in the lanes	Three pop bumpers, scarlet caps with a white star. Each plays a different drum.	1,000
Lantern lanes	One · If By · Land	Three rollovers over the bumpers. The flippers move the lit lanes. All three raise the bonus multiplier and light the kickback.	2,500 · all 10,000
Prescott's kickback	Prescott jumps the wall	When lit, a ball heading down the left outlane is kicked back into play.	2,500
Revere's ride	The horse and rider	Revere on horseback at the back of the table, galloping in front of the current ride's painting. The better you play, the faster he rides.	–
Flippers, slingshots, plunger	–	Two flippers with stronger coils than Chrome Orbit's, two Delft-blue slingshots, and a spring plunger. Plunge into the flashing lane for a skill shot.	skill shot 25,000
Lamps	The ride map	Arrows at every shot, thirteen colony lanterns, and a lamp at each stage's place on the painted map in the middle of the table. They breathe with the music.	–

The rules

Hang the lanterns. Rouse the countryside. Ride.

The Regulars Are Coming. Break the dragoon patrol to light the lock, then lock two balls in the church. Multiball puts three balls on the table, with growing jackpots on both ramps and the orbit. Three jackpots light the super jackpot at the church.
Rides. Rouse all three farmhouses, then shoot the church to pick a ride. Each is one of Lantern Run's stages, from Old North Church to Yorktown, with its own lit shots, timer, painting and music. Finish it and its colony's lantern lights.
Rainbow Road. Light all thirteen colony lanterns and the next ride is Rainbow Road: a unicorn, every shot lit, and thirteen of them to make.
Combos and Turbo. Shots back to back are a combo. Three in a row is Turbo, double scoring for fifteen seconds.
Lantern Burst. The bumpers and the bell fill your spirit. Full spirit is twenty seconds of double scoring.
Saves and nudges. Every ball gets a launch save. Nudge with Z and /, but three nudges in a row is a wipeout: the flippers die and you lose the bonus.
Three balls. Finish three rides in one game for an extra ball.

Things to unlock

The ride keeps going between games.

Chrome Orbit forgets everything but your best score. Midnight Ride remembers where you are on the ride. Everything here is saved on your device.

The stable · six horses from RevereBike

Brown Beauty: Revere's own. Open from the start.
Nelson: ramps pay half again. Score 250,000 in one game.
Old Glory: the cannon throws farther and pays double. Fire the cannon five times.
Liberty: a twelve-second ball save. Start a multiball.
Minuteman: the kickback starts every ball lit. Finish four rides.
Yankee Doodle: longer combos and an earlier Turbo. Rouse thirty farmhouses.

The ride · lanterns and horseshoes

Thirteen colony lanterns: one for each of the thirteen historical rides. They stay lit between games and open Rainbow Road.
Five golden horseshoes: for firing the cannon into the church, the eagle bonus, forty turns of the bell, the super jackpot and a five-shot combo.
Bonus rides: each horseshoe opens one of RevereBike's spectacle stages: Main Street Parade, Iron Horse Express, Moon Map (the table goes light), The Sun and Dinosaur Dash (asteroids shake the table).
The golden saddle: all five horseshoes put gold on your horse and on your flippers.

What you hear

A fife and drum corps in the backbox.

The parts sound the way every TiltLab machine's parts sound, from the shared kit. The speaker is Midnight Ride's own, and none of it is a recording: it is all built in your browser while the machine loads. Behind it plays RevereBike's soundtrack, and the lamps pulse with its beat.

The speaker · Midnight Ride only

The Regulars: each pop bumper is a field drum, so a busy cluster plays a cadence.
The lantern lanes: three fife notes, climbing.
The church: a low bell for each lock, and a bugle call for multiball.
The cannon: a ratchet as it loads, a boom when it fires, an eagle's cry over a long shot.
The countryside: a knock on the door, and the first phrase of Yankee Doodle when all three are up.
Unlocks: a whinny for a new horse, the ring of a horseshoe on an anvil.

The music · RevereBike's eleven tracks

Every ride has its track, the same eleven RevereBike tracks Lantern Run plays, streamed from the GameLab rather than copied.
The lamps keep time: Lantern Run's offline beat map of those tracks drives the lamps, the bumper caps and the gold of the backglass, so the playfield breathes with the music.
Multiball changes the track, and the music ducks under the big moments so the bells come through.
Turn it off with the ♪ button. The sound effects stay.

Under the glass

What makes it run.

Physics: The TiltLab table rig, grown out of Chrome Orbit's: Rapier 0.21 at 120 steps a second with eight solver substeps. New for this machine: three balls at once, drop targets that switch off, scoops that catch and kick, a one-way gate on the shooter lane, a spinner, a kickback and nudging.
Ramps: A ball that enters a ramp leaves the physics and rides a smoothed curve, rolling uphill against gravity. Too slow and it stops on the climb and rolls back out. Fast enough and it comes down the wireform and back into the physics at the flipper.
Playfield: One layout file holds every wall, post and switch, so the physics, the art, the lamps and the rules can never disagree. The lower playfield is Chrome Orbit's, unchanged.
Art: Three of Lantern Run's easel paintings, blended into one playfield with the easel's own brush strokes. The nineteen stage panoramas hang behind the horse, fill the backglass and wrap the room.
Models: Lantern Run's Blender kit and rigged cast, with its oil-paint shading: light in three soft bands, broken by a brush-stroke texture, with a Kuwahara filter over the frame.
Camera: A play view that fits any screen, upright or sideways, and short letterboxed cuts for the lock, multiball, the cannon and the start of each ride. Turn them off in the pause menu.
Controls: A / ← and D / → (or Shift) for the flippers, Space to plunge and to fire the cannon, Z and / to nudge, Esc to pause. A gamepad works. On a phone, use the three pads at the bottom of the screen.
Loading: All 64 files, about 9 MB, arrive before the first ball. Then every shader is compiled and every camera cut drawn once, so nothing stalls mid-game.

In the lineage

Machine 02, after Chrome Orbit.

Midnight Ride starts from Chrome Orbit. It keeps that table's lower playfield as it was, along with the shared sound kit and the start-up loader, which now also racks the artwork.

It was the second table to need Chrome Orbit's physics, so the rig moved to TiltLab's shared folder and grew: multiball, locks, scoops, ramps the ball rides, spinners and kickbacks. One shared copy of Three.js and Rapier now sits beside it for every machine after this one.

Its new idea is depth. Chrome Orbit has one goal. Midnight Ride has a lock, a mode, a wizard mode and a reason to come back. The next table starts from both.

Follow the TiltLab lineage.

Play Midnight Ride · Read the Advisory Hour build story · Back to TiltLab · The original: RevereBike and Lantern Run in the GameLab.