Earthshaker is coming to AtGames 4K pinball cabinets in April

Zen Studios is bringing the 1989 Williams pinball table Earthshaker to AtGames Legends Pinball 4K cabinets on April 15. The digital recreation will be available natively through the AppStoreX storefront.

Designed by Pat Lawlor, the physical machine was the first pinball table to include a shaker motor. When players triggered certain events, a motor inside the wooden cabinet would physically vibrate the entire machine to simulate an earthquake.

This makes the table an obvious candidate for digital pinball cabinets. The Legends Pinball 4K hardware already has built-in exciters and haptic feedback motors. Zen Studios maps the original game's shaker motor code to the cabinet's modern haptics to replicate the feeling of the 1989 release.

The California fault line

The table's layout revolves around a literal fault line splitting the playfield. The central toy is a physical representation of the border between California and Nevada. During normal play, it looks like a standard ramp. When the player triggers a seismic event, the playfield splits apart to reveal a hidden ball lock mechanism.

Lawlor designed the ruleset around chaos. Players take on the role of a researcher driving up and down Highway 99 to visit different zones. Once enough tremors occur, the fault line opens up. Locking a ball there leads to a frantic three-ball multiball mode where the entire cabinet shakes continuously.

As with many of Lawlor's designs, scoring big requires mastering the upper flipper. The main jackpot shot is only accessible from the top left flipper during multiball. If you drain your balls without hitting it, the game provides a brief "Aftershock" grace period to try again.

The original physical production run had a notorious cost-cutting change. The first 200 units included a mechanical Earthquake Institute building that actually sank down into the playfield during multiball. Williams decided this mechanism was too expensive to mass-produce and removed it from the remaining 5,000 units. Digital pinball developers often include options to toggle these early production features in their recreations.

The digital version retains the original table's alphanumeric display and the synthesizer soundtrack by Jon Hey and Chris Granner. It also keeps the famous audio callouts, including the ones Williams had to remove from family-friendly ROM revisions back in the late eighties.

Earthshaker was previously available digitally through FarSight Studios' The Pinball Arcade. That version was delisted in 2018 when FarSight lost the Williams license to Zen Studios. Fans of the table had to rely on community-made Visual Pinball versions for years until Zen finally digitized it.

Catching up to consoles

This AtGames release follows the table's arrival on standard gaming platforms. Zen Studios originally added Earthshaker to Pinball FX back in December 2024 as part of the Williams Pinball Volume 8 DLC pack. That release covered PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series consoles, and the Nintendo Switch.

The AtGames version runs the same underlying simulation engine but is optimized for the vertical 4K display and dual-screen backglass setup of the Legends hardware.

Lawlor followed up Earthshaker a year later with Whirlwind, a table that swapped the shaker motor for a literal fan mounted on top of the backbox to blow air in the player's face. Digital pinball developers have figured out how to simulate a rumbling cabinet, but nobody has tried to sell a USB desk fan attachment just yet.