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I imagine there was a mechanical, rotating drum with metal contacts to "randomly" trip the scoreboard. There would have been 5 such patterns on the drum. I even

I imagine there was a mechanical, rotating drum with metal contacts to "randomly" trip the scoreboard. There would have been 5 such patterns on the drum. I even imagine a human was operating the drum, choosing among the five possible patterns. I could be wrong but this was early in the era of popular computing — and interfacing with high-current lamp circuits would have been a challenge for most. The other compelling reason to believe it was mechanical is that having only 5 patterns seems really lame if there was software driving it. Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation.

jedberg 3y ago
> Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation. They used slide projectors to change the board. Each projector advanced at the same time. They only had three options in each projector. It's unclear why they only chose three options, probably for production simplicity. They would switch out the carousels on the projectors between rounds, with more whammys in subsequent rounds. So the best guess is that they wanted a certain whammy ratio and leaving two squares with only good stuff would achieve that. Also it made for good TV, when it was possible to earn an extra spin on every board configuration.
sparky_z 3y ago
>Why only 16 of the possible 18 tiles would ever have the Whammy, I have no speculation. I'll speculate. I imagine they simply never audited the 5 patterns for full "whammy coverage". They just created 5 random patterns and didn't think any more about it. If they'd only had 3 or 4 patterns, maybe there would be a couple more whammy-less spaces. If they'd had 6 or 7, perhaps there wouldn't be any, just through random chance.