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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.
I have to say, on the cool toy scale, pinball ranks way up there, and it's pretty cheap to get your own machine (well, at least it was a few years ago).
Arcade auctions happen all over the country, and you can still pick up machines at good prices if you know what you're doing.
Got my machine in storage right now. Can't wait to set it up again.
The current computer games in bars are quite stupid. I guess it's more economic to place a small console with some (stupid) games on, than those huge pinball machines.
Luckily we still have table football (at least in Belgium). Do you have it in the states too? (I will try to explain the game if you're interested).
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Pinball is not dying off. What I see is that kids think that pinball is too easy and not challenging enough. That really isn't the case, I see that people want to do the cool thing and play those hefty 3d packed video games. I've also realized that a lot of arcades don't keep pinball machines since there is no competition with other players and games can last a long time. If pinball is dying, it is at the hands of the arcade owners, not the customers.
Arcades in general are basically dead.
Games like DDR breathe some life into them, but it's nothing like the Midway/Atari/Namco/Sega days of long ago.
Games are too expensive, they all seem to be 'imitations', and there's no arcade culture anymore.
Why there aren't/never were coin-op iD games.....arcade play against others all over the world.....
It's been a few years since I've been, but Hawai'i (Oahu, Kaneohe area) had TONS of video arcades when I was there. In fact, on the relatively small air force base that we were stationed on, there were at least five decently sized arcades. Granted, they were attached to other things, but at least two of the ATTACHED arcades in Hawai'i were larger than anything I've seen here in Memphis, Tennessee.
I imagine there's quite a great deal more overseas (China, Japan), but that's strictly a guess, as I've never ventured quite that far.
The local university has about the biggest selection of games around, and while I don't attend, I was up there with a friend of mine for the day once, and didn't lose once to any of the "hardcore" gamers stationed around it. I was quite pleased with myself, but after I realized that I'd just spent 8 hours in front of a stand up arcade on one quarter, and wasted the entire day away, I made a conscious decision not to go back. I've got real life responsibilities nowadays, and don't have the kinda time that sort of addiction requires.
-9mm-
First off, it seems like the last US manufacture stopped production about 3 years ago and there was a story here on /. about it. (I'll let someone else dig up the link).
Secondly, pinball machines couldn't keep evoloution-wise. They are too maintainence intensive compared to video arcade games (which break often enough as it is).
To the point: here at the office where I work, there are about 16 arcade machines: 15-video and one pinball. The video games include Lunar Lander, Space Duel, Assault, Mortal Combat 3, pac man, sinistar, soul edge, virtua fighter 2, xybots, crystal castles, a D&D game, Blitz 99, sinistar, and star wars.
The lone pinball machine is Star Trek: The Next Generation.
When it is working, The Star Trek Pinball machine is the most popular arcade machine we have (followed by Mortal Combat 3).
And that is the problem: It's been in a state of disrepair for more than 6 months.
Over the last couple years we have had it repaired 3 times. I remember watching the first repair sessions and was astounded by the large numbe of individual mechanical repairs that had to be made: Bumpers, solnoids, lights, track alignments, and whatnot. Not to mention the table surface then had to be waxed - which changed the play characteristics (until it was played a lot and worn in again).
And then there was a problem with the plastic ball storage holder underneath the deck. The balls had worn a small groove in it, which caused problems for the ball sensor to report no balls available when there really were. Since that custom molded piece wasn't available from the manufacturer anymore, the repair guy took it and filled in the groove with some substance several time - sanding between coats, to bring it back to new condition.
So my conclusion is that modern pinball machines have too many custom parts, and are too physically demanding on them to have the uptime to compete with video games. And not to mention the knowledgable repairmen are hard to find.
And that was in a private setting. In an arcade setting, the operator can not afford for the machine to be down half the time, producing no revenue, and requiring him to spend $$$ on repair guys. The economics just don't work today.
-Mp
they should make holographic pinball, they have the technology, transparant sheets of organic light emiting diodes,.. would be the first real use for holographic arcade game, would fix the repairage problem of real pinball and let them do cool ultra impossible stuff that'd be too fragile and all that, not to mention you could load in any table you wanted.
Too late in life I rediscovered pinball.
:^)
As a kid, I used to accompany my granddad or my mom to the store to get groceries and occasionally I'd get a dime (that's right, 10) to play a pinball game that sat near the front, near the magazine rack. That machine had a mechanical scoreboard, unlike the LED boards I saw later in life. I recall being absorbed by the lights and the idea of trying to keep the ball in play with those little bumpers (hey, I was easily amused). After a while my mom stopped going to that store and pinball just about left my life for good.
Flash forward 20+ years and a fellow grad student, Joerg, started going to get pizza at a little college-quality Italian place over by the campus. The great arcade next door had closed, mostly, but some of the games had stayed to soak up quarters from the pizza eating patrons. As it turns out Joerg was a real fan of pinball and he enticed me into playing and I got hooked. It was really cool to finally be a bit coordinated and to have the cash to spend to actually get to know a machine. In this case, it was The Addams Family, with little audio clips from the movie. ("The Mamushka!" was my favorite.) Although I never measured up to Joerg's mastery of the game, I found truly irresistible the tactile feedback and use of real, honest-to-physics english that goes into working the table. Sure, feeling the kickback of the gun in Time Crisis is cool, but not like pinball.
Now, that Italian place is gone and the games are gone for good. While I still plan to get a Robotron machine first, I'm thinking of adding a pinball machine to my computer and work room when we finally get time to get a real home. They really are awesome.
If you haven't ever played a pinball machine and you get the chance, just remember that those quarters are pretty well-spent, even if just to say that you played pinball for a bit. I bet you'll find you enjoy it, to boot.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
I love pinball machines. They're great. However, the arcades I visit either end up ripping you off or the machines are in such a state of disrepair that well, it's not fun to play.
The main reason is probably because arcade machines, tend to be generic. Short of the special-equipment games like those from Konami (DDR, etc), all an arcade operator needed was to replace the CPU module, or even just the ROM cartridge. Whereas for pinballs, they have to ship the entire thing around (Pinball2000 attempted to resolve this, but ultimately, died because Williams decided to get out of the pinball business). So instead of a relatively simple job on putting in a new game up, you have to ship this $5000 pinball machine around (shipping $200 typically), rather than order a $100-$500 ROM cartridge (shipping trivial), or a hard drive...
Now, there are recreations of various pins around - thanks to Visual Pinball. Combine it with VPinMAME, and you can play some damn close reproductions to the real machines. (Hint to those interested: avoid the forums, or just read them. There's so much pettiness and egotism and selfishness on them that it's not worth it. Just leech. Your mind will thank you. I was on the forums back when WPCMAME was novel and everyone "played" them, and 2002 was nothing but a disaster for pinball emulation. Plus, you gotta register, and if you want to post, you better not register using a hotmail account - they want *real* email addresses).
However, check out ShivaSite (www.shivasite.com) for some of the best pin info ont he web!
Stern is an interesting company by the way. Stern stopped producing pinball machines in the early eighties, whereupon the company sat dormant for almost two decades. Only recently did they resume pinball production once again. A pinball phoenix if you will.
Here is a great links for anyone interested in pinball:
The Internet Pinball Database.
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
You are a cruel person.
And stop comparing apples and oranges: Chess boards and pieces are cheap and easy to make, pinball machines are big expensive things. Chess is a game of thought, pinball is a game of dexterity. Pinball is a BALL game, like baseball or football, except that there's no running, and you play alone. Chess is not a ball game.
Pinball is not a living entity either, so lay off the darwinianism a bit.
You can't take the sky from me...
Man, you are so right! Half the fun for me was in beating the High Score and then being able to brag about it to my buds.
But who the hell is going to remember 1,356,239,332 points? I curse Sega for that mess. They started ridiculous scoring with games like Space Harrier (something like a million points per second of play). I've always wondered why American games manufacturers felt the need to keep up with that crap.
Just because you can use more than 16 bits for a scoring system doesn't mean you should!
...actually, I'll take part of that back. The machine makers helped a little by introducing the "shoot again if you lose your ball quick" feature, and that made things a little more fun...
I'll give a few reasons for pinball being less popular now. Most of which have been already said in various posts. Many arcades have closed(mostly because kids can play high quality video games at home for less money). Pinball machines are expensive to ship and will break fairly often if they are used a lot(especially the newer ones and this makes it a crap shoot when you decide to play a pinball machine because it may or may not work properly). Many pinballs added pathetic video game elements to the pinball which annoyed serious pinball players and looked like crap compared to real video games, so it never impressed the people who liked video games either.
;)
;) One interesting thing about the ProPinball games is that you could actually make all of them in real life if a company was so inclined, they don't feature any impossible ramps or anything that couldn't be built on a real pinball table. I think the ProPinball Timeshock game is one of the greatest pinball machines ever made.
Pinball shouldn't have tried to put video games in the pinball, they should have focused on the things that pinball has and video games don't, like allowing you to shake the table more to control the ball instead of making the tilt more and more sensitive for most games. What good is a pinball machine if you can't give it a good shake while you are playing to try and save the ball? Pinball used to be a very physical game, I'm not kidding, my arms would get tired from shaking the machine when I would play for a few hours.
Then they raised the price to 50 cents and many machines won't even give you free games anymore, just a free ball for getting high scores unless you get a match(the digit of your final score matching a randomly genrated number at the end of the game). What good is a pinball machine if you can't win free games on it with high scores and specials?
Also many of the newer pinball machines are too hard and have too many friggin rules. I'm not spending a ton of money learning a new game before I can have a decent game. I'm a decent pinball player, but many new machines just don't give me 50 cents worth of play for my money.
Now there are still plenty of pinball games to play for most people if you really want to play them. I had an idea for a website(or an addition to a pinball website) a while ago. I've looked at a lot of pinball sites, but haven't seen anything like this yet. I think that serious pinball players should document all of the pinball machines in their area and give ratings on the condition of the games and maybe a brief decription of the places they are in. Then pinball enthusiasts could look up their city or town on the site and find all or at least most of the decent machines worth playing in their area pretty easily. Sure this is a lot of work, but I'm sure there are many pinball fans who would be glad to help make a database like this. For example, in my area, all the arcades have closed except for the ones at the two shopping malls, but there are pinball machines all over the place if you know where to look. The local poolhall has
several of them and many bars also still carry them. I'm sure I could find hundreds of them if I put any effort into it, but I'd rather see someone start a pinball database and save me the trouble
My last comments are about computer sims. I've been playing pinball since I was about four(I had to stand on a box to play then because I was too short to reach the table) because my father bought a used pinball machine and put it in our basement. He knew how to fix it and where to get parts, so it was always in great playing condition. I've also wasted a good deal of my life playing pinball in arcades, bars poolhalls etc... So I was pretty surprised when I bought a couple of pinball simms and really enjoyed them. I bought Microsoft Pinball Arcade which has 8 classic Gottleib tables. The graphics are good and the sounds sound exactly like the real games, I've played most of the real versions of these games so I know what they sound like. I really enjoy playing most of these games and I can even shake the table instantly while I am playing just like on a real pinball machine. I mean it's not exactly the same of course, but it's pretty damn good. I use my middle fingers to hit the flippers with the shift keys and my index fingers to shake the game right or left with the z and ?/ keys. This allows me to instantly shake the game while I am playing it, to save balls. I use the enter key to shake the table up and I can also hit that pretty fast, but not instantly like the right and left shake buttons. I only use the right and left shakes on all of the games except one. On that game I reconfigure the shake keys, so the ?/ is the up shake key.
The ProPinball games are amazing. They are by far the best computer sims and I bought all 4 of them in a set for I think it was $6.98 at http:www.gamestop.com They are really complicated games and take a long time to get good at, but unlike playing a real pinball machine it doesn't cost a lot of money to play them
You can also get sims of some older games like Eight Ball Deluxe and Royal Flush, but they are out of print, so you need to go to fleabay for them. When I get around to putting in a bigger harddrive on this computer, I am going to add every decent pinball sim that exists. Beware though, many pinball sims suck. You best bet is to read reviews of them before you buy one. I'm too lazy to do it now and can't remember the sites, but just do a search for "computer pinball" and review on Google and you will find the review sites pretty quickly. And if you don't have the four ProPinball games, go and buy them! The only problem with these computer sims is that
I play less "real" pinball now. They satisfy most of my pinball addiction and I only own a few games. Once in a while I still go and play real pinball, but I can't see spending a lot of money on it anymore.
agreed :( its a vicious cycle. .. (early 80's) I used to go to an arcade in my local area .. and admist the handful of 'popular' coinops (rampage comes to mind) that people used to crowd around .. were pinball machines.
..
.. because one day I asked him why he was always cleaning them. And (for whatever reason .. boredom .. thought i looked interested .. whatever) .. he TOLD me.
:
.. no one will be playing it in a few months .. and it cost me ($1800)(?) .. This pinball machine has been here for 3 years .. and as long as i clean it .. and fix broken parts .. it will make me money. not as much as that (rampage?) machine, but when you think that people have played it for 3 years, it is probally the machine that *paid* for that machine over there. So I clean it everyday.'
.. as I began to buy up pins (because they were getting harder and harder to find) this guy became my hero.
... one who maintained all his machines .. and I would buy it .. just because I knew by looking at it .. that it didn't matter if it had been operated for 10 years .. the playfield was clean and glossy, which told me someone knew its value. :)
When I was a teenager
I *ALWAYS* saw the owner of the arcade cleaning them etc
thats probally why I love them so much
He said something along the lines of
'Well kid, those machines over there make me some money. But that Rampage(?) machine, well
YEARS later
Every once in a while I would come across a pin that was handled by an operator like this guy
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
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Rawr