Sandokan

Sandokan is a one-off Electromechanical pinball that Ditta Artigiana Ricambi, an artisan parts-and-repair firm at Sesto Fiorentino outside Florence, built by re-skinning a single-player Gottlieb table, Card Trix, whose backglass had originally pictured a college dorm room.^[1] The game borrows its name and its swashbuckling subject from the television event of the year: the RAI miniseries Sandokan, six episodes broadcast in 1976 that dramatised Emilio Salgari’s Adventure tales of the Malaysian Pirates, turned the unknown Kabir Bedi into a star, and drew an average of twenty-seven million viewers a night.^[2] Only ten examples were ever planned — a run tiny even by the measure of Italy’s cottage pinball trade.^[3]