Silverball guide · Demolition Man
The machine lights the next shot for you
Demolition Man buries its scoring in something most players treat as a bonus. Combos are the game, and the machine goes out of its way to keep the chain alive if you let it.
Combos are the game
A combo is any sequence of the seven major shots taken while lit by its flashing red arrow. What makes this different from combos on most machines is that the machine does the work: hitting a shot lights whichever shots can reasonably be made next from where the ball is going. The left inlane lights the right ramp, the right loop and the centre ramp. The right inlane lights the left orbit and the left ramp. And so on round the playfield.
The values climb without an apparent ceiling. Five million for the first, six for the next, seven for the one after that. They only drop back to five million when the lit shots time out, and you can make other shots in between without losing the chain.
The skill shot is really the first combo shot: the launched ball round to the upper left flipper and up the side ramp. Beyond the points, every made skill shot raises the base combo value by a million for the rest of the game.
One combo worth knowing by name: the side ramp scores a Double Combo when taken as the second half of a right loop into side ramp.
What combos buy on top of the points
Every ten combos lights the Computer at the Underground, which is a random award in the mould of Twilight Zone's Camera. The interval is operator-adjustable between six and twelve, with ten the default.
Twelve combos lights an extra ball, and fifty combos lights another. The twelve-combo one is percentage-adjustable, so it may not appear on every machine.
Combos are also worth a million each in the end-of-ball bonus. So the same habit is simultaneously your scoring, your progress and your bonus, which is why it earns the top of this guide.
The Computer awards are worth wanting: light extra ball, light all four explodes, 3x car crash, 2x retina scan, light arrows, maximize freezes, collect bonus, collect standups. Maximize freezes is the standout, freezing four balls and lighting multiball outright.
Explodes are ten million a shot, from a wasted shot
Four of the combo shots, both loops and both ramps, carry Explode lamps worth ten million each. They are lit by hitting the Underground when it is unlit for anything else.
That is worth restating, because the Underground is normally where you go for the Computer or Demolition Time and it feels like a wasted shot otherwise. It is not. An unlit Underground is forty million waiting on four shots you already know how to make.
The Retina Scan opens the other route. The first Retina Scan hit starts an Explode Hurry Up with all four ramps lit at fifteen million and counting down; each one you collect adds ten million to the next. The round ends when the countdown falls back to five million. After the first, it takes four Retina Scans to start another, and three Retina Scans lights an extra ball.
The Claw, and five different doors
The Cryo-Claw is the machine's gimmick and its structure. An elevator carries the ball from the right ramp to a magnetic claw you steer with the gun triggers, dropping it into one of five lanes. Completing the MTL rollovers lights the left inlane, which lights the claw on the right ramp.
Start AcMag rewards repeated centre ramp shots on a climbing ladder from five million. Prison Break pays fifteen million outright, doubled by a reflex shot into the Underground or tripled into the side ramp, and lights Car Chase for five million a ramp. Super Jets lights the bumpers for twenty-five hits at a million each, and the yellow targets add hits. Capture Simon lights the seven major shots at five million each for three shots, with twenty-five million for taking all three, so forty million for a clean run.
Lock Freeze is the one that is not really a mode and is the most useful. It freezes as many balls as you need to light multiball, or starts one if it is already lit, and starting a multiball this way gives you one extra frozen ball. Every claw award increases the second time round.
The bonus pays ten million for each claw visit rather than each unique claw award, so going back to the claw for a mode you have already played is still worth ten million in bonus.
Demolition Time
Complete all five claw modes and Demolition Time lights at the Underground under a blue lamp. It opens with a fifty million award before you have shot anything.
Then every major shot is lit for fifteen million and stays lit, for as long as you keep more than one ball in play. That is unusual and it is the reason this is the machine's best round rather than merely its last one. Completing the five yellow targets adds a ball and raises the award by five million; losing a ball lowers it.
The total gets its own high score table entry, in the way Lost in the Zone does on Twilight Zone.
Four multiballs and the jackpot that pays for all of them
Ball locks are lit by the yellow targets lighting Freeze lamps, balls are locked at the left ramp or the claw, and multiball starts at the top lock via the left loop, or occasionally a lucky centre ramp.
Fortress needs one frozen ball, Museum two, and Wasteland and Cryo-Prison follow. Fortress runs centre ramp, Underground and left ramp for jackpots then the right ramp for a triple-value super. Museum lights everything then the right ramp. Cryo-Prison is the odd one: the regular jackpot shots do not pay, they only add to the super at the right ramp.
Complete all four and the Demolition Jackpot lights at the right ramp. It is built from how many jackpots you collected in each: Fortress count plus one times fifteen million, Museum plus one times twenty, Wasteland plus one times twenty-five, Cryo-Prison plus one times thirty. Even a game with no jackpots at all pays ninety million.
Two warnings. Starting another multiball while the Demolition Jackpot is lit makes it vanish, exactly as draining does. And after Cryo-Prison you begin again at Fortress.
The yellow targets, and the shots that will kill you
The five yellow standups work like Twilight Zone's Greed targets: a million plus a million per hit, resetting each ball, up to twenty hits. Depending on how the machine is set, one, two or three complete sets are needed to light Quick Freeze.
The Car Crash target has a habit of returning the ball straight down the middle. There is a short ball saver for it, but on LA-4 ROMs that saver can be switched off, so do not rely on it.
The outlanes are dangerous because of how much spin the ball picks up, and the machine ships with no rubber on the outlane posts. The MTL rollovers that build the bonus multiplier are almost invisible behind the two ramps, which is worth knowing because reaching 5x bonus lights an extra ball on the left loop.
A note on this source and the machine
Demolition Man is a widebody and a five-ball game, which is worth remembering before you decide a ball has been wasted.
Our copy is an early-1990s write-up, unattributed, and it compares P-1 against L-1 sound ROMs and flags LA-4 ROM behaviour, so it was written while the code was still moving. Several values it gives are marked operator-adjustable in the sheet itself, including the combo intervals for the Computer and the extra ball.
Its author is also candid that the machine has strange physics, with the ball taking long airborne trips and unexpected bounces. Treat the shot map as reliable and expect the ball to occasionally do something no guide can prepare you for.
Where this came from
Silverball wrote this, but not from scratch: it was compiled against the published rules below and checked against them, rather than written up from one person’s games. None of the wording is theirs. Machines get code updates that move the right shot, so a guide has a date on it for a reason.
- Demolition Man rule sheet (author not recorded in our copy)
