This weekend was the big Brisbane Pinball and Arcade Collective Show in Australia. Haggis Pinball brought its new Fathom Remake Mermaid Edition machine to the event.
The machine won Best of Show for modern games, which is really cool. Congratulations Haggis. Not only was the game available for people to play at the event, but it also to my pleasant surprise made it into the tournament.
Viewers of the Brisbane Pinball Masters Stern Pinball Pro Circuit tournament got to see the machine in action on the live Twitch stream. I flipped it on last night. The machine itself played great. I personally thought that the playfield played really fast compared to a much older original Fathom, but that could have just been how they had it set up for the tournament. A lot of machines were made really tough in the interest of keeping the good players moving.
There was a bit of controversy though when some of the top players at the event figured out a code exploit. If I understood it correctly, players who started a mode and immediately drained without hitting any switches were awarded a million points. Exploits in game code are nothing new, tournament players have been taking advantage of them for years but the director of this tournament made the decision to remove the game from the tournament bank.
Supposedly the exploit has already been fixed in the game’s latest code update.
Congratulations to Steve Bowden who made a big comeback to win the tournament!
