Of course, the history of pinball stretches back much further than the history of video games, with pinball as we know it believing to date back to the 1930s, and some historians claim that you can trace the game’s origins back as for as the 1500s!
Physical, mechanical pinball tables are still manufactured to this day. Indeed, we reported on a new home TMNT pinball table earlier this year.
But pinball has also proven to be a popular basis for video games, too, and previous pinball games covered here on RetroNews include Pin-Crawl and Dino Land.
Later this month, a new “spin” on pinball is set to arrive on Steam, with the launch of Tilt Rivals, which is a new pinball game that focuses on head-to-head competition.
Features promised in Tilt Rivals include…
The ability to challenge opponents, both in public or in private online 1v1 matches, or by joining a friend using a room code; online, local and solo play modes, with the ability to compete on the same computer with a shared keyboard or gamepads; or to face the CPU, with a choice of easy, normal and hard difficulties; Power-ups that change the rally: Enlarge your flippers, shrink or slow your opponent’s flippers, shield your side lanes, unleash a charged shot or set bumpers in motion; new arenas to unlock: Discover Classic, Ricochet, Switches and Central Lock as you level up, with separate arena progression in Solo mode; the ability to progress and personalize by earning XP and tokens, with which you can unlock cosmetic flippers and six ball skins; the ability to and save your progress to the cloud; the option to customize keyboard and gamepad bindings, choose the match’s power-up and set the target score from 3 to 15 goals; the ability to track your progress, comparing online progression on the leaderboard, and reviewing your end-of-match statistics; and localization in seven languages.
While Tilt Rivals may offer some very modern features, such as online battles and cloud saves, the gameplay looks as though it will be the classic pinball that we know and love, and despite being a new game for 2026, its visual style really doesn’t look all that far removed from the Atari 2600’s Video Pinball from 1981!
Tilt Rivals will be the debut game from the independent Canadian studio Hollow Light, and it will launch on Steam on October 26th, 2026.
