Haunted House Pinball Machine Curiosities

dan33birdman

New member

Donor 2013
Joined
Feb 7, 2013
Messages
209
Reaction score
1
Location
Stellarton, Nova Scotia, Canada
In the attic of the warehouse of machines my uncle has there is a Haunted House broken pinball machine. I came to discover that it was the first 3 floor machine in the pinball industry, which when I found out I didn't know even existed, I'm 26 :p .I've read that it is a machine that is well known for breaking down. So I have a few questions:

Have people figured out a way to prevent common issues with that machine from reoccurring yet?

And typically how hard is it to find working parts for it and at what cost?

Is it a fun game or one that loses it's fun within the first few hours of owning it?
 
It's a Gottlieb System 80, and yes they are generally considered to be "problematic."

Yes, there are fairly well-known fixes for the most common issues. Find a copy of the old pinrepair guide for Sys 80, or check out the new wiki (forget the url) for details.

For parts, check out The Pinball Resource... http://www.pbresource.com/ He bought a lot of Gottlieb parts when they were liquidated.

While it's generally not regarded as one of the best pins of the era with regard to gameplay (Most of the love for HH is due to its music and artwork), I wouldn't say it loses it's appeal in a few hours by any means.
 
It's a Gottlieb System 80, and yes they are generally considered to be "problematic."

Yes, there are fairly well-known fixes for the most common issues. Find a copy of the old pinrepair guide for Sys 80, or check out the new wiki (forget the url) for details.

For parts, check out The Pinball Resource... http://www.pbresource.com/ He bought a lot of Gottlieb parts when they were liquidated.

While it's generally not regarded as one of the best pins of the era with regard to gameplay (Most of the love for HH is due to its music and artwork), I wouldn't say it loses it's appeal in a few hours by any means.
DarrenF gets a gold sticker. You sir are a gem.
 
its a fun game i love the theme.most of the boards are availble aftermarket.i just sold mine and come to find out this company http://www.flippp.fr/special.php?lg=en is making a board to change the game to have speech and multiball.i wish i knew this before i wouldnt have sold it.
Wow that's fantastic that someone has taken that on. Thank you very much for that information. Greatly appreciated.
 
System 80's are most known for a few issues, but they are pretty well documented in the pinrepair guides, and on pinwiki.com.

There are connector issues, and this is the #1 issue with these pins from everything I have read. I am going to be repinning the connectors on my Black Hole really soon because it's been doing some weird stuff lately. Repinning is really easy, you should even be able to use the old plastic connector housings, just pull the pins, cut them off, crimp new pins on and put them back in the connector.

There are documented ground modifications that are recommended to do. Mine were already done when I picked up my BH, so I really don't have a clue how tough these are to do.

Also the MPU has a battery that can leak and take out the traces on the board. If this is the case there are brand new MPU's out there for about $200.

Haunted House, working, is probably worth in the $1500-$1700 range, and is pretty sought after, so even if you don't like the game, you should be able to flip it pretty easily.
 
Nice! I'm working on going out to Alberta to work in the next few weeks. So if that works out I'm hoping to pile up some money and hopefully get a bunch of machines off of my uncles and fix them up. Fixing them up seems like it's not as hard a I thought based off of the amount of information and help available on this site I've seen in two days.
 
Nice glad to see one of these things going to be fixed up. :) My uncle has a broken Haunted House that I really need to figure out a way to get out of his basement and into my garage. :D Great memories though of playing it while it was working.
 
Tell him it's haunted.

hahaha I'm sorry guys I couldn't resist hahaha :) Oh man I found that way too funny.

Haha that's a good one. I'll have to do that next time I see him. The sounds used to freak me out when I was a kit, but man, that game is so awesome.
 
Is it a fun game or one that loses it's fun within the first few hours of owning it?

Fun? I personally like the game. I had all the multi-level SYS80 Gottlieb pins at one time. I only one I kept was Black Hole. Haunted House is not a bad game but it is not multi-ball like Black Hole is.
 
Getting a Haunted House "alive" again, is not a project for a first timer dealing with pinball. I have one and bought it DOA. I have been working/restoring them for over 20 years. It took me a week to get it up and running. I just wanted to level set woth you that it is not an easy machine to start on. It's worth paying someone to get it running again if you get stuck. Lots here will be willing to help.
 
Getting a Haunted House "alive" again, is not a project for a first timer dealing with pinball. I have one and bought it DOA. I have been working/restoring them for over 20 years. It took me a week to get it up and running. I just wanted to level set woth you that it is not an easy machine to start on. It's worth paying someone to get it running again if you get stuck. Lots here will be willing to help.
Thanks for the tip. I expected that. It won't be happening soon anyway.
 
DarrenF gets a gold sticker. You sir are a gem.

Yes, he is, and not only that but he has a Haunted House in his gameroom;)

Id definitely repin any Gottlieb Im working on, but its not worth the trouble to me to reuse the plugs. They're available at Great plains for a buck or so apiece
 
Thanks for the tip. I expected that. It won't be happening soon anyway.

Does that mean getting this ended up a no-go? That would be a shame; Haunted House may well be my favorite solid state pin. My former roomie had one, and though it had its issues, it was the most fun pin he ever brought into the house.
 
Does that mean getting this ended up a no-go? That would be a shame; Haunted House may well be my favorite solid state pin. My former roomie had one, and though it had its issues, it was the most fun pin he ever brought into the house.
It just means that it's been in the attic tucked away from the aisle where no one can see it behind other 70's and 80's pinballs which are all broken upstairs that the few ppl that get in the warehouse don't have any interest in fixing up and has probably been sitting there broken since the late 80's to mid 90's in all likelihood. And it's not going anywhere without the retired uncle's blessing. I wish that the warehouse wasn't so full so I could move stuff around and look at it all. Heating would be nice as well lol. Either frozen or humid as hell. It's like an old damn barn in there.
 
If this comes to fruition, this might just change the appeal to this game. The music and artwork are killer, but multiball alone would improve this pin

Yeah, but it's a fairly involved mod. A lot of little things need to be changed (mechanically) in order to handle more than 1 ball in the game (i.e addition of gates in the outlanes of both playfields). And that's on top of swapping out the boards for that "P1-80" system.

As for the addition of speech, while cool technically... I'm not sure it "fits". The robotic-sounding voice is right at home in the space-theme Black Hole, but I'm not so sure about the fit with Haunted House.

The ruleset on HH... now THERE is something ripe for lots of improvement. It's downright asinite how once extra ball is lit, it cycles on and off with hitting nearly anything. Personally, I'd rather just do it with a ROM hack than installing an entirely new MPU.
 
Yeah, but it's a fairly involved mod. A lot of little things need to be changed (mechanically) in order to handle more than 1 ball in the game (i.e addition of gates in the outlanes of both playfields). And that's on top of swapping out the boards for that "P1-80" system.

As for the addition of speech, while cool technically... I'm not sure it "fits". The robotic-sounding voice is right at home in the space-theme Black Hole, but I'm not so sure about the fit with Haunted House.

The ruleset on HH... now THERE is something ripe for lots of improvement. It's downright asinite how once extra ball is lit, it cycles on and off with hitting nearly anything. Personally, I'd rather just do it with a ROM hack than installing an entirely new MPU.

I agree w/ your last paragraph. At first I was looking for another spot on the playfield where it cycled to - nope! Dumb idea!

I think the biggest thing for me is the speech. The 'robotic' voice never bothered me. Remember, Volcano, Devil's Dare, Striker all have speech - not sure if a robotic voice is appropriate for those themes either. (I WISH Spirit had speech!)

I'm probably the only one around that multiball is not an issue for me. I don't know, the layout for H.H. doesn't fit a multiball scheme unless there were captive locks like some other Gottliebs. I thinks it's fine w/ single ball, but as stated above, rules could use some fine-tuning.
 
A lot of little things need to be changed (mechanically) in order to handle more than 1 ball in the game (i.e addition of gates in the outlanes of both playfields). And that's on top of swapping out the boards for that "P1-80" system.

As for the addition of speech, while cool technically... I'm not sure it "fits". The robotic-sounding voice is right at home in the space-theme Black Hole, but I'm not so sure about the fit with Haunted House.


I totally agree with the reasons behind not having the speech. You are 100% right that it wouldnt fit. The music is great by itself.

I was more concerned with the multiball and share the same questions about having to modify your table to accomplish this. What a PITA that would be!
 
Back
Top Bottom