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Portrait of The Last Remaining Pinball Wizard
Ant writes "Shacknews posted BusinessWeek's Pinball's Last Remaining Wizard article that is a portrait piece on Gary Stern, president and owner of Stern Pinball, which is the last remaining pinball manufacturer in the world. Yearly, his company produces 10,000 hand-built machines and designs about 3-4 different models. A few of their most recent releases used licensed rights of the Sopranos and The Simpsons."
I worked for Atari Games in the 90s. They were ultimately bought by Williams at about the same time Williams started seriously considering killing their Pin Ball development.
The big problem with Pin Ball and Video Games is supporting the hardware. Kids are brutal with the hardware and it breaks down a lot. That support costs a lot of money and the arcade owners don't want to pay for it. Pin Ball is much more brutal than Video Games, maintenance wise and that's why Williams stopped producing more than a few models of the things per year while I worked for them.
They thought the future was in Video Games, and they were right, what they didn't know is that the video games would be in the home, not at the arcade.
Coin op video game hardware was out paced by the home computer and eventually the home video game. Coin op volumes and gross margins were so low, that not much could be spent on research and that removed the graphic advantage that coin op had originally used to bring in kids.
They could still make better interfaces (steering wheels, joysticks, track balls etc) but kids were dumbed down by their Nintendo controllers, they didn't need the fancy / different controllers anymore and maybe they didn't want them either.
Pin still exists because its a physical challenge with real physics, a real ball and real flippers. Its simply fun no matter how its put together and you don't have to spend six million dollars to model people and cars, etc like 3D video games, so the development overhead is controllable.
I imagine maintenance is still high, but Stern is the only game left in town, so he can charge the right amount and the remaining operators have to pay it, they have no choice.
I didn't know he still made new pins (that's how long its been since I went to an arcade) and I think its awesome he's still going.
Raydude