Silverball guide · The Shadow
Three of the four only ask you to turn up
The Shadow pays a billion points for Final Battle, and the four things that light it are mostly not achievements. Two light when a multiball ends, one lights even if you drain, and only one asks you to win anything.
The scarf, and what it actually asks
Near the Side Saucer is a scarf with four inlays, and lighting all four lights Final Battle. Read them carefully, because three of them are not asking you to be good at anything.
Complete Scenes lights when the last scene finishes, or when the ball drains during the last scene. Shadow Multiball lights when Shadow Multiball finishes. Khan Multiball lights when Khan Multiball finishes. Only Conquer Battle Field asks for a result, and it asks for one: defeat Khan at least once.
So the route to the billion is to get through the six scenes however badly, start and lose two multiballs, and beat Khan once. When the scarf completes, Final Battle lights at Start Scene, or at the Side Saucer when Khan Multiball is not lit there. It lights immediately, even during multiball.
The scenes pay nothing for being finished
The source is explicit that there is no wizard award for completing all the scenes. They score, they feed the bonus, and they light one inlay on the scarf, and that is the whole of it. A player grinding for a scene completion award is grinding for something that does not exist.
What you do get is the choice of which one to play. The scenes are shown in the middle of the playfield, lit ones played, the flashing one next, and shooting a ramp moves the flashing scene up or down the list depending on which way you set that ramp's diverter with the blue button beside the flipper. Start Scene is always lit when you are not in a scene and not in multiball, and shooting Start Scene while a scene is running pays a 2M scene bonus.
The six scenes, and which are worth steering to
Two of them are simply shots for points on a thirty-second clock. Punish the Guilty lights the left orbit, side loop and right orbit at 10M each, then Start Scene for 30M. The Beryllium Sphere is six wires, each arrow cutting one and then staying dark, worth 10M and rising 2M a shot, then Start Scene for 30M. Escape Underwater Doom is a hurry-up from 30M through a fixed order, the ramps, the left orbit, the Shadow Loop, the left ramp, then Start Scene.
The other three behave differently enough to be worth choosing deliberately. Farley Claymore lights every arrow except the side loop and the Wall against his Hit-O-Meter, about five or six shots, and Battle Field hits count towards it as well if it is open, which is the part most players miss. Duel of Wills is a video mode, so it costs you no risk of draining at all, and an extra ball is one of the things it can pay. Discover Hotel Monolith is a two-ball multiball: three hits on the Wall for 10M, 10M and 20M, then a ball into the Sanctum to light every arrow from 10M upward, 30M for all of them, though you cannot lock balls or start Khan while it runs.
Final Battle, and the billion that is always awarded
Four more balls launch for a five-ball multiball with a thirty-second saver, and the job is twenty-seven shots at 10M each. The source is emphatic on the point that separates this from most wizard modes: the billion is always awarded.
The twenty-seven are the six Mongol targets, the left orbit, both sides of the left ramp, the side loop, eleven Battle Field targets, the Battle Field drop target, the yellow target, the Wall, both sides of the right ramp and the right orbit. The Side Saucer and an unlit Start Scene each spot one, working through the yellow target, then Mongol, then the Battle Field targets anticlockwise from the top left, then the arrow shots. A broken drop target is spotted for you, which leaves twenty-six.
After the billion is paid, all five balls relaunch and every shot relights for another run, and this time there is no ball saver at all. The scenes reset too. Completing it puts your initials in the machine's Final Battle Immortals list.
Park a ball to double the jackpot
Shadow Multiball is locked at the Wall and the Sanctum, which are effectively one shot. Lock one is lit from the start of the game and every subsequent multiball needs one more hit on the Wall to light each lock. The jackpot is 20M at the side loop, and because the side loop returns the ball to the upper flipper, repeat jackpots are the plan rather than a bonus; the machine holds the remaining balls in the lock while you are on a run of them. Five jackpots lights a 100M super at the Side Saucer, and five more relight it each time.
Parking a ball in Start Scene or the Side Saucer doubles the regular jackpot, and holding one in both triples it. A double literally awards two jackpots rather than a doubled one. It lasts a single jackpot or ten seconds, whichever comes first, and then the held balls are kicked back out. The super jackpot can only be doubled, and only from Start Scene.
Khan Multiball is lit by completing KHAN in the in and out lanes and started at the Side Saucer. Every jackpot shot starts lit at 20M each, and the lanes add 100K to the value as you play. Collect all of them and the super jackpot lights on the mini-playfield, on one lit drop target at a time, worth 100M and doublable the same way. If the mini-playfield has been switched off, that super jackpot cannot be collected at all.
The Battle Field is the only real work
Knock down the drop target to open it, shoot the popper, and the ball is thrown onto the mini-playfield where the flippers move a bat. The first Khan takes thirty target hits to find, and then the drop targets at the back have to come down to finish him, which is worth 30M.
Every repeat is harder in three separate ways: 10M more for defeating him, twenty more hits required each time up to a cap of a hundred, and one extra hit on the drop target to open the Battle Field at all. There is a reward for thoroughness, though. Each target carries a light, and if you hit every one of them at least once, defeating Khan pays an extra 20M for each time you have done that. Defeating Khan also lights an extra ball, and it is the only scarf inlay that cannot be got by turning up.
Vengeance is the cheapest big score on the machine
Each ramp has a ring on either side of its diverter, and the ring that lights is the one on the side you sent the ball, which means the blue buttons decide it. Each ring is worth 3M and all four start Vengeance.
Vengeance runs thirty seconds with the rings worth 5M, 7M, 9M, 11M and climbing, and completing all four pays 50M and restarts the timer, with the single ring values continuing to escalate. The grace period at the end is generous enough that a late shot still scores after the music has stopped. Start it with the shot that was itself a combo and you get Super Vengeance, where each ramp is worth 10M, and getting all four rings in a row during either version pays 100M. One thing to watch: starting Vengeance from the skill shot does not spot the ring you just used, so the same ramp has to be shot again.
The skill shot is a choice you can change after plunging
Before each ball the display offers points on the left, starting at 10M and rising 5M a time to a maximum of 40M, against an unnamed award on the right. The left ramp diverter decides which one you get, and the left blue button sets the diverter. You then have to actually shoot the ramp to collect it.
The useful detail is that the choice stays live for about five seconds, so you can keep flipping the diverter after the ball is already in play. The awards on offer include completing Mongol, starting Vengeance, lighting lock, lighting an extra ball, bonus multiplier and lighting Khan. A ball that drains and is saved loses the skill shot.
Loops, orbits, and a bonus multiplier worth less than it looks
The Shadow Loop from the upper flipper stays lit for a few seconds after each shot, paying 2M and rising while you keep hitting it, resetting the moment you miss. Three in a row lights an extra ball and five pays a 40M Shadow Bonus, though both of those float with the machine's reflex scoring. A slow shot up either orbit that dribbles out of the side loop pays a 5M secret passage.
Orbits pay 1M, and consecutive ones 2M, 4M, 8M, 16M and 32M, where it caps. Every fourth consecutive orbit pays a named award, from China Town at 5M up to Super Loops beyond twenty, worth 20M a loop, and the count does not reset between balls.
Then the trap. Completing KHAN in the lanes advances the bonus multiplier from 2x up to 10x, which sounds like the end-of-ball payoff. It is not. The bonus here is mostly made up of the totals from the scenes you played, and the multiplier applies only to the bonus before those totals are added in. Complete KHAN because it lights Khan Multiball, not for the multiplier.
A note on this source
This was compiled from version 5 of Cameron Silver's rule sheet, dated 16 March 1995. He grants permission to use and republish the rules on the condition that his name stays on them, along with the fifteen contributors he thanks by name in the sheet. This guide is our own prose rather than a copy of his, but the condition is why the credit names him rather than describing his sheet as an anonymous community document, and his sheet remains the place to read those contributors' names.
It is a document from the machine's first year, written against an L-2 machine, and it records bugs as it goes: the orbit awards never actually reaching Mari-Tech on P-1 ROMs, a loop counter that ran away to 255, and a Final Battle shot counter that did the same once and could not be reproduced. Some values are marked unknown in the source and have been left as gaps here.
Two practical notes for a machine three decades on. The Shadow is a five-ball game by default, and extra balls can also be bought in. And the mini-playfield is the part most likely to have been switched off: the source is clear that the Khan super jackpot is then impossible, and it describes the drop target spotting mini-playfield targets during Final Battle. It does not say what happens to the scarf, so if the Battle Field is disabled on the machine in front of you, check that Khan can be beaten at all before planning a billion around it.
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.
- The Shadow rule sheet, version 5, compiled by Cameron Silver, 1995
