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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.
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
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
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.
They only make 10,000 machines a year. Their break even is 65%-75% of that and if you read between the lines, they are struggling to sell all those machines. It seems that there is just not a big market.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
The problem isn't that they're quashing competition, it's that the worldwide demand for pinball machines is 10,000.
Think about it. Would you want to devote all the time, money, and resources into building a company that will only produce 5,000 units a year?
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
"some other companies would want to compete with these guys"
As a matter of fact just a few days ago an Australian company bought the rights to the Bally name and to reproduce most of Williams' parts.
They are also developing their first pinball machine which should be out later this year.
There's life in the silver ball yet!
(and for you RGP'ers out there: TZ, CFTBL, Farfalla, Firepower, Gameshow, Zac Circus)
Sits there like a statue, reloads like a machine,
Clicks on the day passes, gets the first post clean,
Smokes crack like he's got mod points, never seen him fall,
That insensitive clod - Slashdotting Stern pinball!
He's a Slashdot wizard, there has to be a twist!
None of my business where he got those supple wrists...
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
Reminds me of a story my freshmen physics professor told.
When he was young, he got a big magnet from an old radar that had been scrapped. He snuck it into the arcade in his backpack with the intention of manuevering the ball through the extra life gate with it. Unfortunately, when he moved it over the ball, the ball jumped up and smacked the glass with enough force to break it. He had to refine his technique a little bit and pick a different arcade, but it eventually worked.
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.
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)
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!
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
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.
This may or may not have been true.
I worked for Stern back in the 1980's, and I can tell you that pinballs are chrome plated copper! Non-magnetic, and for a reason - the parent tells exactly why.
However, there were a FEW games that used ferrous core balls for "Magna-Save" or other effects (Black Knight, Circus Voltaire, for example). However, those games are multi-level and the glass is waaaay up above the ball, to far for any reasonable-sized magnet to influence.
But those were made in later days, back in the olden days, they used the copper based balls almost exclusively to prevent fraud via magnets.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Here's the details about the ceramic pinball found in most Twilight Zone machines.
First thing, it doesn't have to have one. The operator can adjust the game so that it doesn't require one. This is good because the ceramic pinball has become a rather expensive part, going, I've been told, for over a hundred dollars on eBay. It's bad because many of the game's features rely upon this ball, and turning it off in settings will disable one or two of its special features, and result in arbitrary metal balls being labeled the Powerball for purposes of Powerball Mania.
The primary physical effects of the ball upon the game are:
* It's lighter than a standard pinball, and thus tends to be shot around a bit faster and is thus a little more difficult to react to, and is more likely to go down the outlanes.
* It's very slightly larger than a standard pinball, and thus it's a tiny bit more difficult to make some shots with it, including the Slot Machine.
* Most importantly, since it's not made of metal, magnets do not affect it, and the game can use its different electromagnetic characteristics to detect when it's in one of the holes on the board, and thus it knows when it's in play or when a certain shot (Piano) has been made with it.
The magnets thing is important because Twilight Zone, like Addams Family, has magnets beneath the table that turn on at special times in order to influence the ball. But while the magnets in Addams Family are there to mess up the player during multiball ("Feeeeeel the power!"), all the magnets in Twilight Zone help the player. The magnets in the orbits stop the ball when the Camera is lit or a Piano shot is ready, allowing the ball to slowly fall down over an upper flipper, greatly increasing the chances of making those difficult shots. They also turn on during multiball, where these shots are of even greater importance. And since orbit shots are the ones that get stopped, the ball is rarely sent blasting around and down towards the lower flippers at full speed, resulting in fewer drains on an otherwise drain-happy table. (Also, the ceramic ball is useless on the mini playfield, with the magnetic flippers, so the game will try to keep it out of there.)
The ceramic pinball, also known as the "Powerball," is subject to none of these effects. Because of this, left orbit shots are worth extra points, and a shot to the right orbit loads it into the gumball machine, starting "Powerball Mania," one of the more lucretive modes in the game. Powerball Mania takes one ball out of the gumball machine (guarenteed not to be the powerball since it just went in) and two out of the trough and challenges players to win the mini playfield *during* multiball.
More interestingly, it's possible to lock the Powerball for multiball, and start it too. If a jackpot is made with the powerball (rather difficult because the player doesn't get the benefit of the magnet setting him up for a Piano shot), the game "knows" it, and doubles the jackpot award for doing so!
But from a design stance, the most interesting thing about the Powerball is that it's a special pinball that the game can identify. At the start of a game it can either be in the gumball machine, in the trough, or even up in the lock. It's one more non-deterministic element for the game, one more aspect that carries over from game to game, like progressive jackpots. These features are part of what gives pinball its enduring charm, the idea that games are part of a larger continuity instead of starting completely over from an unvarying initial state each time.
The ceramic pinball, it should be said, isn't hollow like a teacup but solid, and is not at all fragile. It can take about as much punishment as the metal balls in the table.
That's about it. Any questions?
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...