Radical: Dan Langlois and the Tragic Lost Promise of Pinball
Why the hell are there not more skateboarding pinball machines? Of course we’re biased on this. Anyone who picks up a Nudge magazine immediately recognizes some of our influences and, when they talk to me, throws out shit like Jenkem, Big Brother, Thrasher, or, when we really suck, Transworld. But even beyond my increasingly sad attempts to feel relevant and dangerous, skateboarding and culture share a lot of the same shit.
Both are about youths and weirdos with nothing good to do and not a lot of money who just wanna burn time. In short, it’s about bumming around. I have a fuckin’ doctorate in bumming around. It’s what I do best, and I like to think that game recognize game. When I see some little snotnosed 13 year old skateboarder trying to grind at Boyd park, I see the same energy that I bring to an afternoon playing Mando in a poorly lit basement bar. It’s about the joy of doing nothing because it’s fuckin’ fun man.
While Bowen Kerins says in his PAPA tutorial that we get a skateboarding title every ten years (Zipadoo, Skateball, Radical,) but that really stopped with the aborted Tony Hawk pin. Which, side note, there was almost a Tony Hawk pinball machine? And it DIDN’T happen? I’ve been trying hard to believe in God these last few months, but that one really shakes me to my core. No just universe would allow a Tony Hawk pinball machine to get cancelled. Stern, restore our karmic balance. Make that shit.
But point being, we haven’t had another skateboard themed pinball machine in nigh on thirty years. And you know what? The last one SLAPS. We thought we’d dust off the ole Nudge Circle of Honor and induct a newbie. Why? It’s a great testament to what makes pinball fun: cool art, fun design, and a shitload of being RAD. It’s time to SKATE OR DIE, Y’ALL. We’re talkin’ Radical!
The artwork is, unequivocally, rad as hell.
John Youssi has done the artwork of every pinball game in existence. OK, that’s obviously not true in a world where Zombie Yeti exists, and yet — this dude has an unbroken streak of doing pinball art that goes back into the 1980s. That’s nuts. I’d argue that nowhere is it better than Radical’s totally tubular 90s skate aesthetic. There’s graffiti, there’s doofy looking guys who look sorta high and like they’re about to shatter their tibias, and there’s hot people in sunglasses. That plus a Saved By the Bell graphic package that absolutely fucking RULES. Like look at this stuff. It looks like something that existed only in the coke addled boardrooms of Nickelodeon in 1993.
That, plus in very cursory research for this game, I read that the backglass is actually a direct rip off (or “homage”) to a famous Thrasher cover. But ultimately they couldn’t/wouldn’t get the rights to it. Either way, it does rule.
It was created by Dan Langlois, the lost genius of pinball
Dan Langlois was only 33 years old when he died in 1991. During his only seven years at Bally, he made a name for himself with absolute brilliant and insane designs. The Lost World, Black Belt, Heavy Metal Meltdown, etc. It’s obvious just from his theme choices that Dan was a guy who Nudge would absolutely fuck with. Dinosaurs, karate, heavy metal, and — skateboarding. Look at this lil punk, this guy was MADE to create the coolest skateboarding pinball game of all time.
Dan Langlois pictured on the left.
Dan’s designs are full of strangeness (more on the layout in a second), but they always feel in service to the theme. Like that dude GETS skateboarding. Playing this game is like skating a line, you want to figure out what you’re doing just ahead of time, with enough reactions to deal with unexpected fuck ups. It’s so addictive.
And so when I learned about Langlois’s background mixed with how good this game actually was, I had to know more. The big tragedy seems to be that even though this guy seems like a total character, he’s also EXTREMELY hard to find information about. Like weirdly so. There’s almost nothing in his IFPD database entry, and even the kineticist just has a list of his games. It’s something that I’m going to remedy in the future. Who was this guy? What’d we miss out on from his tragic passing? Why were his designs so, well, weird?
So we’ve established the art is cool and the designer had the bonafides, but is it actually fun? I’m happy to tell you that, yes, motherfucker, it is actually fun.
This game is actually really fucking fun
Ah yes, skateboarding snakes.
The ruleset is simple. There’s a ball lock that starts a pretty easy to get and then you’re basically spelling radical by shooting different shots across the playfield. It’s the playfield that really tells the story here. There are four flippers, all needed. This game feels like it shouldn’t work. It’s absolutely insane. Drop targets hidden way in back where you can’t see them, crazy feeds through pop bumpers for critical shots that almost rely on luck, breakneck ramps super close to the flippers — and yet it all works. It’s so good.
The ruleset encourages you to shoot the entire game, which is cool. Yes it’s simple, but ultimately those rules are in service to a game that you want to play over and over again. The simplicity makes it easy to get into, the shots make it hard to master. That, to me, is pinball at its best. I don’t want to have to memorize a flowchart to enjoy your game. I just want to know a couple things and then set me loose to master it.
It’s fun to play with other people
In the age of the long player, it’s fun to have a game you can play with friends where you won’t be left sitting hitting your vape for an hour inbetween balls. Even a four player game on Radical moves along at a good clip. Sure, there are the oddballs who can have super good games, but for the most part even experienced players aren’t going to have super long ball times. That’s great. And an awesome change of pace from being stuck waiting for ur bud to drain his extra ball on Godzilla. Man, I’ve lost literal years of my life doing that.
We’ll be doing a more indepth look at Dan Langlois' career, but for now this is such a perfect example of a young dude putting himself into a theme that makes sense and just having magic happen. It’s a shame we don’t have decades more Langlois pins to play, but get out there, hit a big doink in the parking lot, then play a Radical as the sun majestically sets behind you. Not even chugging the best frickin’ Dew could taste as sweet.
