Star God EM+ comes to Legends Pinball next week

AtGames is bringing the Star God EM+ digital pinball table to its Legends Pinball platform on May 7. The release adds another reimagined Zaccaria table to the company's standalone arcade cabinets.

The original Star God was a solid-state physical machine released by Italian manufacturer Zaccaria in 1980. This digital version comes from developer Magic Pixel. The studio created the "EM+" line to blend vintage electro-mechanical aesthetics with modern combo systems and faster ball physics.

Fantasy art and neon lights

The table has a celestial theme with a winged deity and a glowing cosmic mountain. The artwork leans heavily into early 1980s fantasy tropes. It is exactly the kind of airbrushed art you would expect to see painted on the side of a 1978 conversion van, which I mean as a compliment. The digital recreation keeps the bright, saturated colors of the era intact without making the playfield look muddy.

Gameplay revolves around hitting specific rollover lanes and drop targets. Players spell out "STAR" and "WAR" to activate multipliers and ball saves. There is also a letter-collection mechanic for the word "SERPENTS" that unlocks secondary objectives across the playfield. The layout is relatively symmetrical. The modern physics engine keeps the ball moving much faster than it would on a physical table from the Carter administration.

Updating a European arcade staple

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Zaccaria was the third-largest manufacturer of pinball machines in the world. They sat just behind American giants Bally and Williams. Their tables rarely made it to arcades in the United States. This makes their catalog a blind spot for many North American players who grew up entirely on Bally and Williams machines.

Magic Pixel has spent years converting Zaccaria's obscure European pinball catalog into digital formats. Straight simulations of the original tables do exist in their software. The EM+ line takes creative liberties instead. The developers essentially ask what a 1970s table would play like if it had the complex rulesets of a modern machine.

Traditional electro-mechanical tables relied on physical score reels, basic chimes, and relatively simple logic boards. The EM+ versions retain that visual style but add deeper scoring modes, combo chains, and multiball events that the original hardware could never process. It is a strange middle ground between historical accuracy and modern game design.

Physical controls for digital tables

Star God EM+ is already available on PC through the Zaccaria Pinball app on Steam. This May 7 release brings the table natively to the AtGames ecosystem. Owners of the Legends Pinball cabinets can play it using the system's built-in controls.

The AtGames hardware uses physical flipper buttons and internal haptic exciters. These exciters vibrate the cabinet to simulate the feeling of a heavy steel ball hitting rubber bumpers. It is a clever trick that helps bridge the gap between a flat LCD screen and a real mechanical machine. The cabinet also supports a secondary backglass monitor to display the table's original scoring readouts.

Playing digital pinball with a keyboard is fine, but tables like this are designed around the physical feedback of real arcade buttons. Getting it onto a dedicated cabinet is the most practical way to play it short of tracking down a 46-year-old Zaccaria machine in an Italian warehouse.