The Continuing Death of Pinball

angkor writes: "To me, the first video games were something like electonic versions of pinball machines, so it's sad to hear that pinball is apparently dying off." I'd really like to see a pinball game based on Zoolander, but I doubt even that would be enough to reverse the current trend.

Comments

It really is a sad state of affairs

[whirred]

More to the point, however, I think the problem is the loss of ARCADES. Dave and Busters just doesn't do it as far as economy goes (very expensive) and I don't know how many of those charming, cigarette burn covered arcades are still around.

Only one in San Francisco/Oakland that I know of... God I miss the silver bowl. Where the hell are they going to put pinball machines?

And bring back arcade games at 7-11 - that's where I learned how to play!

Good games endure

[Anonymous Coward]

Chess is many hundreds (thousands?) years old, and people still play it today in large numbers. If enough people find a game fun/exciting/interesting, it will continue. If pinball can keep up, and can keep people interested, great, pinball forever. If not, so long!

Lament

[AtariKee]

It's sad really. I own a pool hall in a small town and pinball still registers decent coin drop (I have two machines). The problem is that the industry went a little crazy trying to catch up to video in the early 80s and the designs got too complicated and therefore, more expensive to purchase and maintain. Operators started abandoning them in droves near the end of the last century. When companies such as WMS (Bally/Williams/Atari Games), who owned two of the major pinball manufacturers, bailed out in early 2000, the death knell was sounded for the industry. Stern Pinball is still alive, having bought out Sega's pinball division (originally Data East Pinball), but most of their sales are to overseas distributors. The pins they sell in the US are basically writeoffs. It's a shame really. I think if the industry stuck to innovative, less complicated designs, it might still be thriving, rather than barely surviving.

pinball is not dead.- i hope

[RembrandtX]

Stearn pinball still makes them .. and while some of their more recent ones were not that good ..
monopoly was very good. Austin powers was ok .. but prone to breakage.

of course .. most machines are neglected by their operators .. so they have to dum them down to the operators only have to take 5 seconds to clean them.

Where pinball is dying is a crock really, i know several operators who still operate pinball machines on location .. and they make good money.

they also dont cost as much as a silent scope .. or whatever game.

the real issue is operators are lazy .. and would rather spend 10 mins emptying quarters from a bucket under streetfighter alpha-omeaga-zeta-jones than to spend 10 mins cleaning a pinball machine off.

A well kempt pinball will make a lot of $$ .. where a broken one makes crap .. its kinda like a well kempt retail store makes good money .. and a dirty one makes cockroaches.

http://www.remsbox.com/index.php?content=0000000 00 8 is my basement pinball santuary.

Completely One-Sided

[nathanh]

The story is rife with biassed comments like this...

The new generation of gamers, by natural selection, has banished pinball as too old, too difficult and too boring.

A lot of kids feel pinball is nowhere near as stimulating as Doom, Quake or a lot of games they are playing these days

I think pinball is going out because it is not really understood by most people.

Arcade operators say youngsters like to master a game and move on. They don't like games like pinball that are impossible to defeat.

If this article is a true reflection of the industry's opinion then the operators are ignoring a major cause of the decline in pinball machines, and it's not a decline in popularity.

My local arcade has 4 pinballs and 3 of those have been broken and unplayable for weeks. I went to play the last remaining pinball machine last night and it died too: looks like the ball eject has finally failed. Wherever I go it's the same story. The pinball machines are typically broken and unusable. No wonder the arcade managers aren't showing any interest in buying them.

But it's not a lack of popularity from the consumers. Where there is working pinball you'll find hordes of people crowded around it with dozens of dollar coins lined up along the table top. And it's not just 20-somethings. Younger kids and teenagers are just as interested. It's difficult to find a working pinball, and it's even harder to fight your way through the crowd to play on one.

But the article only focusses on the elitist "People don't understand pinball" or the defeatist "Nobody wants to play pinball anymore". I think the article should have at least mentioned "Arcade managers don't like pinball because they're always broken".

As An Owner...

[MrMetlHed]

My father owns a number of video games and pinball machines located throughout the Grand Rapids, Michigan area. It's a small business, but after revenue sharing with the locations he puts the games in, we make about $200 a week on about 20 games. Not a bad deal when it costs very little to operate them except in time.

The problem with many new pinball machines is flawed design. We've got a Goldeneye pinball in our basement and there are a number of spots where balls constantly get stuck or where pieces break. We've been wires countless times just to keep the top ramp operating properly.

But for the most part, our pinball machines don't require too much attention. Not nearly as much as the Toy Crane we have (which once had wire problems almost weekly). Much of the pinball work is having a ball stuck or a wire break (coin mechanism problems are the norm in all of our machines, mostly because kids decide to jam dimes and pennies in the things to see if it works), we occasionally have a flipper coil go bad or a bumper break. Those problems aren't many. Granted, this could be because people aren't playing them frequently (everyone seems to gravitate towards the 3 Ms. Pacman machines we've got set up on Turbo speed), but maybe it's because many of our pinballs are older and more simple. We've got a Spiderman machine that sits in our basement and works fine except that the soundcard died a few years ago.

It's a shame that most arcades are dying and that it's nearly impossible to keep updated machines in an area where people will play them enough for you to pay for the machines. With pinballs costing over $3000 a piece nowadays, it's more wise to buy a number of older machines and put them in laundramats, pizza places, and convinience stores. The older games (Ms. Pacman, Police Trainer, Galaga) amazingly outperform our newer ones (Mortal Kombat 2, Tekken 3, South Park Pinball) regularly... Perhaps because many people see them as a novelty. But no machines make as much as the Toy Cranes and a prize vendor we have called "Sports Arena" that my dad sticks Zippo lighters and Laser Pens in. Those make fortunes.

Just my two cents.

Charlie

ps. Best Pinball of all time? I loved the Guns N' Roses Machine... perfect flipper balance (you weren't always using one of them like in Goldeneye and others).

Re:Lament

[Galvatron]

This was exactly my intuition when I saw the article, glad to see my guess confirmed. There IS a market for pinball, it's a fundamentally solid game. But, pinball machines should be cheap, and built as much as possible with standardized parts for ease of repair, not have everything customized.

It's not like pool table manufacturers are trying to find ways to shove expensive computerized components into a pool table, and pinball has reached a level of maturity where they ought to start acting similarly.