Infinity Gems, And A Fight With Thanos Built Into A Pinball Machine (Stern Avengers Infinity Quest)

Six stones. Total control over reality, time, space, mind, power, and souls. Whoever holds all six can rewrite the universe — and in 2020, Stern Pinball built a machine around exactly that fight, right as the movie version of this story became the biggest theatrical event in history. In this episode of The Skill Shot, we're covering Avengers Infinity Quest Premium (Stern, 2020), designed by Keith Elwin — and the one deliberate choice that makes this machine completely different from the $2.79 billion movie it's based on. Stern licensed Marvel's comic books here, not the MCU — no Robert Downey Jr, no Chris Evans, just voice actors playing the comic-accurate versions of these characters, with art from Zombie Yeti leaning fully into vintage Marvel style. The Premium edition's signature mechanism is a motorized pop-up disc under Dr. Strange that drops the ball into a physical subway running under the playfield, visible through RGB-lit windows, alongside a Captain Marvel inverse-gravity wireform ramp and a Pym Laboratories vertical up-kicker. Only 500 LE units were ever built, and the whole ruleset is built around collecting Infinity Gems from Thanos's lieutenants before facing him directly. If you're into deep dives on modern Stern machines, channels like Bitvint and Silverball Chronicles cover a lot of the same ground from a competitive-play angle, and PAPA Pinball and WayOut Pinball have some great tournament footage of this one in action if you want to see high-level gem strategy in practice. Every machine on this channel gets scored with my 5-category, 100-point rubric covering Shots, Code & Depth, Theme, Build Quality, and Resale Value — and this one landed a spot that might surprise you given how it's talked about in the community. 🎯 Stern Pinball, 2020 🎨 Designed by Keith Elwin, art by Jeremy "Zombie Yeti" Packer 🔧 SPIKE 2 system 🎰 Pro / Premium / Limited Edition — only 500 LE units built 🛡️ Motorized Dr.