Some of the answers in the upcoming list might surprise you. If you’re thinking that surely Lord of the Rings or any game in the last 20 years produced a ton, you’d be wrong. The best selling pinball machines of all time mostly come from a 20 year period from 1975 to 1995, where pinball saw a boom, a bust, another boom, and then another bust. Boom periods are what drive lots of companies to start making games, and the bust periods are the ones that drive them out of business.
This is a list of all the games where production exceeded 15,000 machines. For a long time, Eight Ball was the champ as far as games produced, until The Addams Family came along and knocked it off in the early 90’s boom. You can see that the majority of these games came out in late 70’s when pinball converted from EM (games with moving scoring reels) to solid state (games with digital displays). The digital displays (plus advent of giant arcades) drove pinball sales to numbers way beyond anything before for individual machines.
Only three games, Addams Family, Twilight Zone, and Terminator 2 are games that feature a more modern DMD display. And no game made after Twilight Zone has made more than 15,000 and it’s not likely that will change anytime soon.
That has a list of all the current prices for machines. Now it doesn’t take into account condition, so that can influence the price quite a bit in some situations, but it’s a starting point. It’s kind of like classic cars, a 65 mustang might be worth 10k in normal condition, 60k as a restomod, or $100 sitting rusting in the weeds. Pinball machines are kind of the same way.