Stern Pinball SAM, Spike 1, Spike 2 and Spike 3 Explained

When shopping for Stern Pinball accessories and parts, you may encounter terms such as SAM, Spike 1, Spike 2 and Spike 3. Over the years, Stern organized design elements, such as cabinet, CPU, power distribution, lighting, and display into a common architecture and each architectural generation was given a name, such as SAM, Spike 1, Spike 2 and Spike 3.

Some parts and accessories are obviously specific to a single pinball title, such as the shooter knob for King Kong as it is designed specifically for King Kong. But many other parts and accessories are common across all titles in a given architecture, such as the Spike 2 speaker lighting kit, which is compatible with all Spike 2 pinball machines. Because of cabinet changes in the Spike 3 architecture, the Spike 2 speaker lighting kit cannot be installed in Spike 3 machines.

We do our best to identify such dependencies/compatibilities on our Pixels and Pinball site, but if you are not sure, please reach out to us before ordering.

Want to know which architecture your Stern Pinball machine is? Check out these resources from pinwiki.com, which cover Stern pinball machines from 2006 to present: