Ancient Web: Scared Stiff Pinball Still Has Its 1996 Official Website

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A machine sold in 1996 could come with a website that was almost a miniature electronic press kit. Bally's Scared Stiff did, and an original-looking version of that official presentation is still available.

Visit the Scared Stiff official website archive.

The machine stars Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, and uses the affectionate vocabulary of camp horror. Its objective is tied to the “Six Tales of Terror,” including Terror From the Crate, Monster's Lab, and Night of the Leapers. The page advertises a three-dimensional interactive backbox feature: a player-controlled spinning spider.

A web page with an actual pinball map

The site's Explore the Playfield area is particularly revealing. It uses client-side image maps, allowing visitors to select parts of the machine and read about the corresponding playfield features.

That was a natural browser-based way to explain a complicated physical game in 1996. There is a directory for the Tales of Terror as well as extra balls, jackpots, the spider's web, skill shots, and the Stiff-O-Meter.

The official page also lists the people responsible for the machine. Dennis Nordman and Mark Weyna receive design credit, Greg Freres is named for artwork and design, and Mike Boon and Cameron Silver for software. Mechanical engineering, music, sound, and dot-matrix animation all receive their own entries. This is unusually helpful for a preservation project: it connects a familiar game to the team that built it.

Then come the sound files. The site offers Elvira voice lines as WAV downloads in two versions, labelled 32 kHz and 8 kHz. These compact audio links are a perfect reminder of when a lower-quality file was offered specifically because bandwidth was precious.

The game brochure that never got thrown away

The page concludes with machine measurements and a 1996 Midway Manufacturing copyright notice. Unlike an enthusiast's later reconstruction, the material presents the product in its own promotional language.

The larger Robert Winter pinball site preserves this web artifact alongside other material about the hobby. A recent game database can explain the rules, but it cannot reproduce quite the same perspective as a machine's contemporary official web brochure.

I inspected the surviving site and linked playfield directory, not the physical machine or every audio file. The value here is the period document itself: a still-readable record of how one spectacularly silly pinball machine was introduced online.

Explore the original promotional page and its downloadable voice samples.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.