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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'm deaf, dumb and blind, you insensitive clod!
Oh, hang on....
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I thought the story was going to be about an actual pinball machine player who gets massive highscores, not the CEO of a game corporation. That's one minute of my life I will never get back.
But the real question is, does he always get the replay?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
So, is he allowed to shake his own machines without the TILT going off?
--I smoked my sig.
But the Stern machines are not nearly as nice or as well designed as the old Bally/Williams machines. Pinball is a dying form of entertainment (along with the arcades) and while its great to see one lone survivor still out there, it would be even better if they were up to the quality of late Williams machines. Attack from Mars, Addams Family (BRUTAL!), and Medieval Madness all come to mind. Revenge from Mars was gimmicky along with Episode 1, and as a result I see very few of those machines still around. While Stern makes competetent machines, the Simpsons cannot hold a candle to the sheer genius that Attack From Mars was.
Oh FP btw!
zosxavius photography
[...] which is the last remaining pinball manufacturer in the world.
You'd think that with a lot of arcades around the world using pinball machines, some other companies would want to compete with these guys... or perhaps there's such a huge monopoly that everyone else just gives up. Makes you wonder about monopoly laws, though...
- dshaw
The Birthday/Proposal Story
Of course, Theatre of Magic is a Bally machine, amd they're already gone. :(
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
All right I see a market that's ripe for the picking, anybody else want to post the captial to get my new company off the ground?
The first thing I though of when I heard about physics processing units was that you might be able to make a realistic pinball simulation on the pc.
The 3d effects and models have been around for a while, but what makes most computerized pinball games lame to me is their arbitrary and clunky "feel" when the ball interacts with the environment.
Physics processing units might add that extra kick of realism and make it easier to stomach the dwindling population of real pinball machines. Lot of room for force feedback pinbabll controllers here.
-dameron
Theatre of Magic
AMAZING!!!
The price went up to $0.50 to play and I stopped there. Cold. Actually, I stopped going to the arcades in general at that point.
Once every couple of years I'll go to play a pinball game and reconfirm why I stopped: the game never seems to work properly. A flipper will be half dead, the ball will get stuck in some bizarre part of the board, or the game itself will be dead. I'm sure it's because the games don't get a lot of play and therefore see less maintenance, but it's a vicious cycle that, for me, started with the game costing $0.50.
Nowadays I see machines set to $1 to play. I'm not going to risk $1 on a machine that, these days, seems to have a 90% chance of being broken.
It's a shame to see that there's only one pinball machine manufacturer left, but I'm unwilling to pay $1 each time to help them out.
Without doubt one of my favorite machines made.
Pat Lawlor's finest creation in my opinion. That man was so damn prolific, and passionate about his machines. One of the defining quotes of his, which sort of sums him up:-
"Anyone in this business who designs something looks at that product like it is one of their children. You take a year to create this thing, put your own personality into it, and heaven forbid something should happen when you release it because it's like your child is misbehaving. You become attached to the games and they are important to you."
A true craftsman.
You can download various tables and emulate most pinball games, including many favorite Williams tables, such as Indiana Jones, and Star Trek the Next Generation, and Addams Family. These were classics, and the emulation is very good.
You need Vpinmame and Visual Pinball working together. It's a little complicated to get setup, but it works well. You then need to download table files.
There are some good sites on how to make them work together, but I don't want to slashdot them.
Anyway, enough wallowing in nostalgia for me - I'm still an avid pinball fan, and look forward to the day when I can own my own machine. It's nice to see such dedication to a wonderful form of electro-mechanical art.
Huxley
That blind, deaf, and dumb boy,
Sure runs a successful pinball-producing company.
*riff*
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
The problem with pinball machines is they were tied to the old style arcades. Arcades would have a guy come out every 3 months or so and bring them new games in exchange for old ones.
Since pinball machines break down [damned mechanical beasties] pretty often, the guy would often spruce them up, and/or replace the little broken bits here and there.
With arcades moving to smaller, less dedicated areas [in movie theatres for example] they don't replace the machines as often. If the machine breaks a little after 2 months, suddenly it's less desirable for maybe 4 months rather than 1.
Futher the larger, less complex video games meant the video game guy turned into more of a mover rather than a mechanic. Pinball machines stay broken longer, or aren't fixed as well. They make less money.
A shame. Pat Lawlor should be as famous as Sid Meier or Will Wright or Chris Sawyer.
PinballSim.com
Visual PinMame Guide
VPForums
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Anyone have a ballpark figure about what ones of these babies cost new?.. (one day!)
Ah, now a Slashdot pinball machine would be a game worth playing. Knock over webservers and destroy bandwidth to get the bonus. Multiplay after three first-posts in a row.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Ah, now those were the days.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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
It's truly amusing to see this come up on slashdot. Being both a computer and pinball aficionado, it's interesting to see that the slashdot crowd knows very little about pinball.
Lets clear up some misconceptions that I've seen in some posts thus far:
1) Why isn't there another manufacturer to compete with Stern? Monopolies are evil. Well, the problem with that is that the pinball market is very small. 10,000 units is pretty small for a global market. The article mentions that it takes about 6,500 to 7,000 units for Stern to just breakeven. Said another way, the 7,001st machine is where they start to make profit. This is because...
2) Pinballs are very expensive. Expensive to design, expensive to make and difficult to sell a decent quantity of. All told, a new-in-box machine goes for about $4,000. Damn near impossible to sell to a consumer and getting harder to sell to operators in the waning coin-op market. I suppose that there may be some ways for them to cut corners and churn out a slightly cheaper machine but if anyone has seen a Bally/Williams machine from the 90s and compared it with a current Stern product, the difference in quality is noticable. That is because...
3) In the heyday of Williams/Bally, the market was much bigger. Then it wasn't unusual to pump out 30,000 machines of the same model instead of the under 10,000 of current models. More sales equal more profit equals more development funds. The more money available general leads to better development of "toys" and new technologies (optical switches, new hardware platforms, etc). Most Williams machines have several unique "toys" in each model and added a great amount of excitement. Stern usually only puts one "toy" in a machine and isn't exceptionally exciting. That just comes from having to shave back the cost of each machine to try and make a profit easier. It's simple business math and I can't really blame them since the slack between profit and loss is very thin.
All-in-all, hopefully Stern will keep pinball alive for many many years to come. On most "pinhead's" wishlists though is for Stern to be a little bit more innovative and make machines that are a bit more complex like old Williams/Bally machines. But undoubtedly, we'll continue to keep cheering Stern on regardless because he's keeping the dream alive.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
A real one. One where they take extremely GOOD care of all the machines, including the 6 Pinball machines there. They allow smoking inside but they keep the cigarette burns off the machines. We have nice, metal, padded stools to sit on, if you like and tables between all the machines to put your food and beer on. Yes, the sell beer. The place is very well ran. The pinball machines are all Stern machines but, since thats all there are these days, thats all the owner can buy. There are no redemption machines here, its not part of a bowling alley, this is just a new version of the old-school arcade and it works! The owner had made money on the place since they opened and plans to be around for a long, long time.
.A loyal Rockys Customer
The reigning pinball champion is Lyman Sheats, winner of the PAPA 7 World Pinball Championships in September 2004. The next championships are August 11-14, 2005, same location.
http://www.papa.org/papa8/
Lyman works at Stern, incidentally - many of the former Bally/Williams designers and programmers either work at Stern or do contract work for them. Quality has improved considerably as a result.
K
the Simpsons cannot hold a candle to the sheer genius that Attack From Mars was.
If you like Attack from Mars, you should see the cool LED mod kit someone put together for it.
you need like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 points to get a free game these days?
Na..
All it normally takes is one multiball session and 1 or 2 trips up the ramps during the multiball.
I do miss pinball. I know of several places that still have them but I am getting bored playing the same machines over and over again, even more so when one of the flippers is weak and I know they will never get it fixed.
I remember in the early/mid 90's I used to go to a local gameroom the game room several times a week and play pinball, they had at least 20 different machines. It got to the point where my wife thought something fishy was going on.
I actually "flipped" the score playing Rollerball, It gave me another credit for exceeding the free game score a second time but it did not register as a high score when I was done playing. I had 137 million and the previous high score was 40 million. It was very frustrating to beat the previous 1st place score by just under 100 million and only get to leave my initial under second place.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
There are tons of other games out there, but for me the 'golden age' of pinball ended in the '90's.
High Speed
Guns N Roses
and my all-time favorite:
Theatre of Magic
I've owned a few pinball machines, and loved them literally to death. That's the problem with these things, they break too easily. I love to find an arcade that has a few machines- they don't even have to be good- as long as the flippers are strong, and the targets all work.
No reason to lie.
"You know, at one time there must've been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best g--damn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company? "
The point is Pinball machines are the horse and buggy of the gaming era.
I've been a huge pinball fan for many years but hardly play anymore because it's become so difficult to find machines. There are still places here in the DC area that have them, but you often have to go out of your way (then deal with the depression of seeing one forlorn pin off in the corner in the midst of swarms of video games). Also, you often find that the machines aren't being properly maintained (as others have commented). It's a real shame. Once, just a couple of weeks ago, I even had to walk away from a machine because all the balls were captured, then didn't release for the multiball, and I couldn't find anyone in the arcade to help.
There have been a lot of great games over the years... two of my favorites were Scared Stiff and Demolition Man. Terminator 2 was a real turkey, though.
I dream of the day when I can buy one or two machines for my own home and maintain them myself. No more hunting for machines, no more having to deal with lousy maintenance, and no more fretting about what I'll do if and when Stern closes up shop, since it's unlikely they'd ever be replaced. Pinball, I think, is going the way of the nickelodeon... it's been on its way out for many years, and I don't see the trend reversing. The best we can probably hope for is that the trend will bottom out and stop, but I don't see pinball ever becoming popular again.
I'm not too surprised the demand for pinball machines is low... The demand has dropped-off, and the machines already in-use can be kept going with a little bit of maintenance.
;-)
I know my neighborhood arcade had one single pinball machine going for over FIFTY YEARS, with very little downtime. The machine was retired about 10 years ago, for fear it might be seriously damaged or stolen. Now a collectable.
I moved away years ago, and shortly after, all the pinball machines were removed. Coincidence, or was I single-handedly keeping those machines profitable?
It's really a shame too. MAME can keep all the old arcade games alive, and though I do admit to enjoying a couple different pinball videogames, it really can't replace a real pinball machine. At about $4,000 new, it would be completely worth it, if I could try a few out, and find one I would be sure to enjoy playing, and not some junky gimmicky box.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Ummm... They were licenced rip-offs. Don't you think if you figured it out that Bally wouldn't have too? That's why they didn't obscure it. FYI, I used to analyze / repair production failures of those MPU , SDA, and LDA boards for a living at Stern in the 1980's...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Sorry to learn, though, that all his machines now are tie-ins to movies and TV shows. Half the beauty of pinball in its heyday was its aesthetic, which ranged voraciously across Americana as each table assembled a kind of comic book on glass and wood: you got legends and history and fantasy, blue collar pasttimes, pool and racing and cards, techno festishism, social trends, anatomically impossible chicks, and just plain weird and self-referential stuff about pinball. The backglass and table designs were a unique form not without their masterpieces (look up the artist Jerry Kelly--the form's Picasso--on the delightful Internet Pinball Machine Database).
> I've owned a few pinball machines, and loved them literally to death.
Ewww...
I love playing it. Like most said, any still out in arcades never play right. They're either unlevel, or flippers are weak or stuck which makes playing them truly suck. I remember working in an arcade in 1986 and remember when HIGH SPEED was brought in. I loved that game and would enjoy having my own to play. I remember all the sounds, and running the red light and if you were good, you could run up the ramp again as you looped around and make a quick getaway. I loved Williams games. CYCLONE was fun too. I think there was another similar to it, but cannot remember its name.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.