Silverball guide · Elvis
Let the blue notes collect themselves
Elvis puts three lights between you and Graceland and most players chase all three at once. One of them fills up on its own while you do the other two, and knowing that changes the order you play in.
Three panels, and only two worth chasing
Above the flippers sit three indicators: all five Features complete, the Top Ten Countdown complete, and all five Gifts from Elvis collected. Light all three and Graceland, the wizard mode, is available at the top saucer.
The Top Ten Countdown is ten blue notes, and the blue note panels sit on the shot indicators at the left orbit, both ramps and the right loop. Those are shots you will be making constantly for other reasons, so the notes accumulate whether or not you are thinking about them.
So do the Features and the Gifts first and let the notes arrive. In a normal game you will be five to seven notes in by the time the other two panels are lit, and only then is it worth hunting the remainder deliberately.
That matters because the shot that spots notes on demand is the worst shot on the machine, which is the next section.
The dangerous shots are the ones that look like progress
The Spot Note standup sits just above the right outlane. The ELVIS drop targets return the ball wild. The Hound Dog target can send it straight down the middle. The Jailhouse saucer is tight from either flipper. Every one of those is a shot that advances something you want, and every one of them is a plausible way to lose the ball.
The safe shots are the two ramps and the inner loop. They are where the ordinary game should live.
The way to take the dangerous ones is under cover. Knock down drop targets while the ball saver is running at the start of a ball, or during a multiball when a drain costs you nothing much. The same goes for the Spot Note target, and for leaving Hound Dog until you have a ball in hand.
None of this is timidity. It is that Elvis hands out its progress at the top saucer, and the top saucer is reached from the left orbit and the right loop, both of which are safe.
Everything is collected at the top saucer
All five Gifts from Elvis are collected there. Every extra ball is collected there. Graceland starts there. It is the most important hole on the playfield and it has no shot of its own.
You reach it with a left orbit shot or a right loop shot, and a weak right loop drops through the rollovers into the bumpers instead, which is occasionally lucky and usually not. The right loop lane has a gate that registers the shot on contact, so a shot that does not make it all the way round can still count.
Balls do sometimes bounce up into it out of the bumpers. Do not plan around that.
The Scarf target is always worth a shot
The Scarf sits between the KING targets and the Jailhouse saucer, and it hands out a semi-random award: adding a ball during a multiball, extending a mode timer, advancing progress towards a feature, sometimes lighting a Gift from Elvis outright.
It is relit by the four KING standups, which also feature in the King of Rock and Roll gift mode, so the two feed each other.
During a multiball this is the shot to remember. An add-a-ball from the Scarf turns a fading multiball back into a working one, and the multiballs are where the drop targets and the other risky shots become cheap.
The five Features, and what each is worth
Hound Dog is a frenzy: every switch scores 50,000 and each one raises the value by another 500. Blue Suede Shoes runs on the left orbit and the inner loop, starting at 500,000 a shot, climbing 500 at a time and capping at a million. The upper flipper magnet holds the ball around those loops and releases it back for the next one.
Heartbreak Hotel is a multiball whose jackpot is at Graceland on the upper playfield, which is a genuinely hard shot. It pays 1.1 million and builds through roughly 1.8, 2.7 and 3.8 million before resetting to the start.
Jailhouse Rock is a two-ball multiball, though you will usually add more, with jackpots at the Jailhouse saucer that begin small and climb as you spell JAILBREAK, by which point one is worth around 354,000. All Shook Up is a frenzy with random awards.
The Features are lit on the panels above the flippers as you complete them, so you can always see which one you still owe.
Gifts from Elvis, five of them
Down all five ELVIS drop targets and a Gift lights, to be collected at the top saucer. The targets score around 20,000 each and 375,000 for the set, and the completion award climbs by 125,000 each time until it reaches a million.
The five are: Flip Flip Dance Dance, a video mode where you pick a difficulty with the flipper buttons at the start and the harder runs pay substantially more; King of Rock and Roll, a frenzy where you hit five KING targets against a falling counter for up to five million; Gold Records, multiplied by how many records you have collected; Light Extra Ball; and an ENCORE letter.
Collecting certain Gifts more than once pays larger bonuses, so the drop targets stay worth doing after the panel is lit.
The two doublers most people forget
Hitting all three TCB standups near the top of the playfield gives twenty seconds of double scoring. It is easy to overlook because the targets are angled towards the rollovers and get hit by accident, but taking them deliberately before a multiball or a frenzy is worth real points.
The other is the Screaming Fans combo: left inlane into the right ramp awards two Screaming Fans and doubles the score. Each fan is worth 500,000 in the end-of-ball bonus, and it is a safe combo, so in a long game it adds up without ever putting the ball at risk.
During any multiball, remember to send a few shots up the middle to start the doubling and to light the Scarf for an extra ball in play.
Graceland, and the other finale
Graceland is a four-ball tour of five rooms. Collect five jackpots in a room before the timer runs out and you move to the next, with a ball saver and auto plunge at the start of each. The values climb as you go: the Music Room pays 2.2 to 4.4 million, the TV Room 4.5 to 5, the Billiard Room over 5, the Jungle Room from 8.6, and the Trophy Room a random 5 to 10 million. Clear all five and you start again at the Music Room.
ENCORE is separate and easy to confuse with it. Collect all the ENCORE letters, one of which is a Gift from Elvis, and you get a four-ball finale lasting thirty-five seconds, after which the flippers simply die and the balls drain.
The impersonator's voice is worth listening to during all of this. The machine tells you what it wants out loud, and it is often quicker than reading the display.
A note on this source
Our copy is a player's review-and-tips write-up rather than a manufacturer document, and it is unattributed.
It is also explicit that Elvis has an unusual number of adjustments, including four possible positions for the outlane posts and a number of deliberately random awards aimed at helping newer players. Treat the values above as the ones its author saw rather than as fixed.
If you are playing competitively, the machine should be on one of its tournament settings, which is the source's own recommendation and a sensible one given how much of the game is random by design.
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.
- Stern Elvis review and tips sheet (author not recorded in our copy)
