Lane Change

Lane change is a control that lets the player move the lit lamps across a set of lanes — pressing a flipper button shifts which of the Inlanes, Outlanes or Top Lanes is the one carrying the award.^[1]

It is a small piece of software that changes the shape of a shot. Before it, completing a bank of lanes meant putting the ball through whichever one was unlit; after it, the player lines the lamps up with where the ball is already going, and the skill moves from the shot to the timing of the button. Williams built it into Blackout (1980) and Space Shuttle (1984), Data East into Laser War (1987), and it settled into the standard vocabulary of solid-state design — Vector Pinball fits it to machines built in the 2020s.