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The Last Pinball Machine Factory
The New York Times is running a story about Stern Pinball Inc., which they say is the last pinball factory left worldwide. The story describes working there as a "game geek's fantasy job." The company president, Gary Stern, acknowledges the lack of demand, but he plans on sticking around. He also expects the industry to rebound within the next 10 years. We've previously discussed a slightly smaller version of pinball.
"Corner shops, pubs, arcades and bowling alleys stopped stocking pinball machines. A younger audience turned to video games. Men of a certain age, said [Pinball Hall of Fame operator Tim Arnold], who is 52, became the reliable audience. ("Chicks," he announced, "don't get it.") And so for Mr. Stern, the pinball buyer is shifting. In the United States, Mr. Stern said, half of his new machines, which cost about $5,000 and are bought through distributors, now go directly into people's homes and not a corner arcade."
Even when choices were limited between the likes of Pac Man and Pinball, I could never really see what was so exciting about Pinball.
It can be fun, don't get me wrong, but any more than 15 minutes and it starts to get boring really fast, imo.
Top Hat sales have plummeted since their heyday in the 1900's.
We are all just people.
stern couldnt make a pinball game to save his life.
stern pinball is weak, half-assed and boring.
look at the top rated pinball games, none of them are made by stern.
at least vpinmame will save pinball.
i gotta make my monthy pilgrimage to pinball petes and get some theater of magic time in.
can't say this trolling effort is very good compared to, say, the one where the title of the article is changed to include goatse.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
I think the reason Pinball is dying out is purely the cost of playing it.
I mean you pay 50p for three balls. Or 20p for three lives in most other arcade games.
So you're paying a 150% markup for seeing balls bounce around which is cute but it also seems to last a lot less time than normal video games too.
So higher cost, plus shorter games just means that people won't use the pinball tables anymore.
They'll either spend less for cheap video games or spend a little more for a much more interactive game like table football, dancing, or shooting.
Pinball killed its self... They set the price too high and over-valued their product.
In an age of video game consoles, there's not much reason to pay for a 3 minute arcade game. But pinball is something that most people don't have at home, and video simulations just don't cut it. There's something viscerally satisfying in the experience of playing on a real machine with a real steel ball flying around the table.
There's a pinball machine at my local laundromat, and it gets a buck or two out of me every time I wash clothes. I think pinball will always be around.
Nostalgia can be fun, but this is too far. If I'm still playing PS2 games 30 years from now instead of whatever awesome stuff will be out then, I hope my kid shoots me.
Shit. I just remembered that I played through the original Zelda last week. Oh well, at least that didn't cost me money or take up an enormous amount of room in my apartment like a pinball machine would.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
I'm not normally a pinball player, but a couple of years ago in my local pool hall my mates and we got burned really badly by a machine one night, it was a monster that would eat your money as soon as you put it in.
We were back there every week feeding coins into it until we all mastered it.
I can't say I have played pinball a lot, but the machines I seem to get addicted to are the ones that are incredibly difficult and don't give you a score of a few hundred thousand points for only like 2 minutes of play. Those machines I just get angry with and keep feeding money till I beat them.
The easy machines I am bored by the time my first turn is done. My friends were the same, we all got so angry with this one machine we made it our mission to beat it.
I know everyone is different, but I think pinball still would have a market if people were motivated to play it, it can get pretty competitive.
Unfortunately the links in the nano-pinball story are all dead.
My first "real" job was as a tech for a game/vending company. I was always struck that Stern was a solid money maker. Never first, never more reliable, almost never more innovative than Bally, Williams, Gottieb, Atari (when video got popular) or Capcom, but a solid money maker.
As with any first job, there Was a Mistake Made. Mine was to trouble shoot a Williams shoot 'em up game that used a rifle and a sensor board to detect where the rifle was pointed. Several wires had been cold soldered and were just hanging around without being attached. Since I don't come equipped with a third hand, I put the solder coil in my mouth so I could use my left hand to guide the wire to it's proper place, my right hand weilding the soldering iron, and by moving my head around and using my lips, guide the solder to the pad to secure wire to circuit board. (Let's leave aside for the moment the wisdom of putting 60% lead wire in one's mouth. Explains quite a bit about my later life though....)
The only problem was that I had not powered down the game to make my repairs. If you think a fresh 9 volt battery makes an impression when you lick the terminals, let me assure you that 24 volts AC leaves an even more lasting impression.
For the NEXT loose wire, I used a alagator clip. It took longer to get everything situated, but was much less painful.
A week after that, Atari came out with "Asteriods", and we put it in the current "hot spot" for pinball games. Two days later, the business where it was set called to say it was on the fritz. I went out, and found that due to the construction of the game, and the amount of quarters pumped into it, the coins had over flowed into the power supply and shorted it out.
If I remember correctly, the bucket to hold quarters was far larger and deeper than any other game to date. I don't know how much money was in the game (the techs were not permitted to empty money or to count it from the games, that was the work of the owner of the game company), but I suspect it was more than the rest of the games combined. After that, we visited the place of business daily for the next six months to empty the game.
Reliving this brings many more memories to mind, but none involve Stern games other than to note that while they were not the most trouble prone (CapCom earns that easily), nor the most money (Bally and later Atari had that tied up), Nor the most reliable (Williams had that tied up), they were like the plodders in the world. Never the best, never the worst.
One thing I remember from that time was cleaning the games. The owner of the game company was always saying "Make it shine like a diamond in a goat's a$$!". We used a glass cleaner called "Glass Wax", which went on as a pink liquid and was removed with vigerious use of a rough rag and newspaper. I can't find it now, even using Google, but it was the BEST product I ever used to clean glass and make it shine.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
The REAL reason pinballs died was the maintenance those things required, compared to video games on PCBs. I knew several arcade operators when I was a kid and they all frowned at new machines arriving at the bar. It took a long time to change out light bulbs, fix jammed balls, clean, etc. Meanwhile, video games don't require anything, just plug and play.
Add to that the fact that assholes like myself refuse to play on crap machines, and these poor souls have a much harder job.
I believe the silverballs will become more and more a collector's item for people who lived those early days. Like many already said here, kids nowadays just dont see the fun of it.
Oh yeah, my local arcade only has Mars Attack, John Mnemonic, Pinball Revenge (or whatever...), and Addams Family, and I still enjoy those...
Pinball games give you free games unlike most video games and with stern TOPS you can win cash as well. Stern should put the knocker back in to the games it cool to hear it go off when you get a free game.
That just goes with the game, but that's why I don't play pinball. There's something unfair about losing that way.
I suggest you read Slashdot
For those of you that like pinball, The Pinball Hall of Fame mentioned in the article is a worthy trip. Not only do they have a shit ton of machines to play, including a couple that you can't find anywhere else in the world, but the proceeds go to the Salvation Army. Next time you're in Vegas, check it out.. www.pinballhall.org
I picked up a brand new Simpsons Pinball Party for my birthday a while back. Quite a fun game, especially for someone well versed in the Simpsons.
Just keeping them clean inside and fresh rubber on the pegs (much less a set of good light bulbs) took a significant amount of time; the maintenance expense on these games is what killed them. For the same price you could get an electronic game that would run for years without problem.
do you ever get to hard to get to Super Duper Mega Extreme Wizard Mode?
We used to bring a HD magnet down to the pin ball machine in high school. The owner of the Lamp Post pizza didn't mind as long as we kept buying drinks and pizza... he thought it was pretty clever :-)
:sigh:
(Pinballs are basically big steel bearings... place HD magnet at the bottom pass the flipper and voila! Unlimited life.)
Never did manage to leverage that little tidbit of knowledge to get a date...
When I was young, about 13 or 14, my neighbor had a pinball machine that he couldn't quite get to work properly. At that time I was really getting the hang of building simple circuits, radios, etc. and he let me take a look at it.
We never fixed it completely, but did make quite a bit of progress over a month or two poking around in it.
Was a fascinating experience, a truly beautiful combination of electronics and kinetics, comparatively commonsense compared to a PC for example. Would be a great study for a high school engineering class.
some games use there own magnets to push the ball around.
Oblig #1
Fry: I can't swallow that!
Professor: Good news! It's a suppository!
Oblig # 2
Zoidberg: Hmm. We'll need to have a look inside you with this camera.
(Fry opens mouth)
Zoidberg: Guess again.
Nah. The problem is that there is no grind. They just need to make a table that has no no drain. That way anyone can just sit all day and grand away hitting the ball into a target. That way they can feel good that they are doing well.
In the early 1980s there were coin-op videogames all over the place. It seemed like every convenience store had one or two. Cafes and pizza parlors had them, corner grocery stores had them. Now they've mostly disappeared. In my town there's one burger joint that still has a few vandalized, worn-out and broken down games in the back room, and I think they've quit even turning on the power (which is just as well). I think the laundromat may have a couple too. That's all.
I'm building my own MAME cabinet just because I miss those games, and this is the only way I'll get to play them anymore. (Or play them properly, I should say. A mouse and keyboard just isn't the same.)
Arcade games have declined mostly due to home console games and inflation. Serious game players have gravitated toward sophisticated computer and console games -- that takes many hours to play. A lot of the old classic and popular (and profitable in their day) coin-op games were the sort we would now sneeringly dismiss as "casual games". As for inflation. . . The components that go into a game machine haven't changed much, they still cost money to build. Meanwhile the quarter you plunked into a Pac Man machine in 1980 would be worth about 55-60 cents in today's money. Yet, people remain resistant to the idea of putting in two coins for only one play.
And pinball? Same thing only worse. Pinball machines are more expensive and much harder to maintain, take up more space, and have, I would say, probably a more seedy image. People still like to play pinball, but the economics are working against it.
With regard to image. . . The lady who runs the local coffee shop heard about my MAME cabinet, and now tells me she wants a cocktail-table videogame for her shop. She wants a Ms Pacman, Lady Bug, Frogger, Donkey Kong, or Arkanoid. . . something nice like that, not a Defender or SF2T machine scaring people away. I doubt whether she'd accept an upright cabinet, and although I haven't mentioned it to her, I suspect a pinball machine is right out of the question (even if she could afford one, which is also out of the question).
IMNSHO, it sucked. Ripley's Believe it or Not (another Stern title) is actually a lot of fun. Even though you figure it will be dumb since its based on a TV show. Spider Man is good, too.
Did it work?
I hope Williams is not gone. Attack From Mars is one of the best machines ever and I want spare parts to be around for it.
Is it a body type 5? I love those curves!
The used pinball table market is strong, at least according to my father who has recently acquired two tables. Craigslist pointed him to this little old lady who's husband used to own a few beachside arcades. She was looking to get rid of a few tables for cheap ($500-ish) From her he picked up a 1978 Star Trek table. One of the scoreboard displays was flickering so she gave him the number of a repairman who deals exclusively with pinball tables.
While dealing with him my father somehow got talked into buying a 1991 Ninja Turtles table. This guy also told my dad that he knows of many other people in the New England area who have used tables for sale and trade and to get in touch with him if he was ever interested in adding to his collection.
The Star Trek one is really neat due to the old, yet somehow in perfect working condition, circuitry. The lady who sold it to him also gave him the original owners guide which has has fold-out circuit diagrams and self-test code lists. Really interesting stuff.
The Ninja Turtle table has this annoying spinning pizza on the board that constantly messes up rail combos.
Anonymous Coward: "This is slashdot. Accuracy is second class citizen here, unlike King Bias."
I grew up playing Star Raiders on an Atari 400, held a high score on BERZERK, and I play a game based on some ID based engine pretty much every night. I still try any game that I can get my hands on, even MMORPGs. I would love playing pinball if it wasn't a trade off of 50 cents for 20 seconds of agony. Even Battlezone and Joust lasts longer than any pinball machine I've ever played. Re-design or die. Good riddance to the armless one-armed bandit. The ONLY good thing about pinball is the artwork. Okay, maybe the sounds too.
Haha, no. I'm actually quite bad at it. I'm just happy when I can get a couch multi-ball or even better, the mystery spot multi-ball.
The Indiana Jones Pinball game was really the best of the few which I can remember playing. It had all of the movie scenes from Raiders to Crusade covered in the modes and the funny one-liners from the movie mostly made it into the game too, giving the humour a sarcastic, irreverent, and dry feel that was just perfect for the whole Indy theme. For example, you received 25,000 points for "choosing poorly" in the grail scene (complete with rapidly decomposing corpse). If I could own any Pinball cabinet of my choice then it would have to be Indiana Jones.
This story brought back many memories! When I was in college (1975 - gasp!) I had a summer job at Chicago Coin Co. which was the former name of Stern electronics. I built the Dolphin game and a few others. They would produce a game for about 30 days, then change over production to a new one. Their plant was on Diversey Ave in Chicago before moving to the suburbs. The site of their plant is now elegant condo-townhomes. I worked there with the largely mexican, black, and Appalachian workers. I started with basic assembly tasks (such as putting light bulbs into sockets over and over) but eventually moved to the manual assembly line and attached parts to the game surfaces. I longed to move up to the tester positions. On that game you got a free ball after 100,000 points. Believe it or not, there were actually guys at the end of the assy line who played each game up to 100,000 just to test the free ball function! Many more memories are flooding back - too many to tell. Glad that Stern has kept the place alive.
For a Pinball Survivor, the Game Isn't Over By MONICA DAVEY
MELROSE PARK, Ill. -- Being inside a pinball machine factory sounds exactly as you think it would. Across a 40,000-square-foot warehouse here, a cheery cacophony of flippers flip, bells ding, bumpers bump and balls click in an endless, echoing loop. The quarter never runs out.
But this place, Stern Pinball Inc., is the last of its kind in the world. A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000.
To most, the story seems familiar -- of a craze that had its moment, of computers that grew sophisticated, of a culture that started staying home for fun, of being replaced by video games. But to pinball people, this is a painful fading, and one that, some insist, might yet be turned around.
"There are a lot of things I look at and scratch my head," said Tim Arnold, who ran an arcade during a heyday of pinball in the 1970s and recently opened The Pinball Hall of Fame, a nonprofit museum in a Las Vegas strip mall. "Why are people playing games on their cellphones while they write e-mail? I don't get it."
"The thing that's killing pinball," Mr. Arnold added, "is not that people don't like it. It's that there's nowhere to play it."
Along the factory line in this suburb west of Chicago, scores of workers pull and twist at colored wires, drill holes in wooden frames, screw in flippers and tiny light bulbs and assorted game characters who will eventually move and spin and taunt you.
Though pinball has roots in the 1800s game of bagatelle, these are by no means simple machines. Each one contains a half-mile of wire and 3,500 tiny components, and takes 32 hours to build -- as the company's president, Gary Stern, likes to say, longer than a Ford Taurus.
Mr. Stern, the last pinball machine magnate, is a wise-cracking, fast-talking 62-year-old with a shock of white hair, matching white frame glasses and a deep tan who eats jelly beans at his desk and recently hurt a rib snowboarding in Colorado.
The manufacturing plant is a game geek's fantasy job, a Willy Wonka factory of pinball.
Some designers sit in private glass offices seated across from their pinball machines.
Some workers are required to spend 15 minutes a day in the "game room" playing the latest models or risk the wrath of Mr. Stern. "You work at a pinball company," he explained, grumpily, "you're going to play a lot of pinball." (On a clipboard here, the professionals must jot their critiques, which, on a recent day, included "flipper feels soft" and "stupid display.")
And in a testing laboratory devoted to the physics of all of this, silver balls bounce around alone in cases for hours to record how well certain kickers and flippers and bumpers hold up.
Mr. Stern's father, Samuel Stern, spent his life in the pinball business, starting out as a game operator in the 1930s -- when a simple version of the modern mass-produced pinball machine first appeared. Dozens of companies were soon producing the machines, said Roger Sharpe, widely considered a foremost historian of the sport after the 1977 publication of his book, "Pinball!"
The creation of the flipper -- popularized by the Humpty Dumpty game in 1947 -- transformed the activity, which went on to surges in the 1950s, '70s and early '90s.
"Everybody thinks of it as retro, as nostalgia," Mr. Sharpe said. "But it's not. These are sophisticated games. Pinball is timeless."
Perhaps, but even Mr. Stern acknowledges that demand is down. The hard-core players are faithful; the International Flipper Pinball Association keeps careful watch of the top-ranked players in the world. But the casual player has drifted.
"The whole coin-op industry is not what it once was," Mr.
Give the machine a decent nudge to the left or the right. The ball will continue to follow a path with its original inertia. You just move the playing field so that the ball isn't dead center.
Pinball is physical. Playing it like a video game is a sure way to lose.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Visual Pinball is emulated for Windows, but not the same as real thing.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The one things most video games lacked is the chance that you'll get to play again for free.
God spoke to me.
Ever since I was a young boy, I played the silver ball... from Soho down to Brighton, I must have played them all... but I ain't seen nothing like him, in any amusement hall... that deaf, dumb, and blind kid, sure plays a mean pinball... good times.
You've got to be kidding?!?! If the ball is going straight down the centre give the machine a good "nudge". With practice you'll know how hard you can nudge without tilting.
I always found a great release in pinball, because part of the play is HITTING THE MACHINE! If you were feeling particularly tweeked, you could pick it up and drop it to force a deliberate tilt. Every programmers dream, you didn't have to hold back your frustration, you could go for the direct physical action. Even with the WII baton, there is no comparison. I pity a generation that lacks an outlet for direct aggression against hardware.
Also, when you got good, you could keep playing by winning more games. I could spend a few hours on less then $3 if I was on top of my game. Sometimes it was fun to walk away from a machine and leave a few games on it, just to show how good you were.
I still use a few phrases from the pinball days: "Without the double bonus, life is just a diet of worms". I know it sounds insane. Also, I still describe some activities as being "like pinball"; when you succeed, all you get is more of the same. In some sense, it's really pure, because success is circular. THe reward for winning is more playing.
I stopped playing pinball when I could no longer get 3 balls to stay in motion for longer than 2 minutes. Insert "vacuum pump" joke here.
But seriously, I used to kick ass back in the day of Pinbot, T2, Motocross, Simpsons, Earthshaker, and Adams Family.. wha happen? Where's the mojo, baby?
It makes me wonder if there could be a way to make competitive pinball -- a double-ended table made more like a hill than a single slope.
This has actually been done. However, only one game that I am aware of had such a feature, and it only had a production run of 402 units. Which is probably why no one knows about it...
Joust Pinball
The machine features a double-ended table. The two players play across from each other. They are able to pass balls back and forth. When I've managed to track one down at the various pinball and classic arcade expos, I've found it to be a fun and unique experience. But so few got created that it is near impossible to find one.
While it is possible to create a competitive pinball machine, it doesn't look like the idea ever really took off.
Slashdot Required Reading
For those in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can visit the Lucky Ju Ju pinball gallery in Alameda with over 30 machines: www.ujuju.com. Also, there is the Pacific Pinball Exposition in Marin County October 3-5 with over 300 pinball machines from the 1930's to today: www.pacificpinball.org. Happy Flipping!
Well, someone should let Mr. Arnold know that some of us gals do "get it".
Pinball rocks!
-Kinsey
My work has pinball machines lying around (tech company in Silicon Valley, go figure) and when they first arrived, I was pretty addicted to them, especially since I didn't have to pay. One day I finally realized that the almost total lack of control, especially for newbie for me, and hard to predict scoring system was a lot like playing the slot machines. Every time I'm done, I would say, "just one more game" and try to improve my score. Sometimes I would get a new personal high score but most of the times I don't. Nonetheless, I always felt like the next game would be it. This is something I never get from video games. Especially for strategy games, I would consistently get better and analyze and learn after each game.
The one thing I can tell you though is that there are a lot of pinball addicts at my company and those machines break A LOT. I've seen the brand new game break down more than a couple of times within a few months. The surfaces are roughed up and within a month you can't tell the difference from machines that you see in bars. I've seem them get repaired and there is A LOT of electronics and moving parts inside, easily rivaling a PC.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
You don't seem to be aware that Stern Electronics - the company that produced the machines you're referring to as unreliable - went out of business in 1985. The modern company, Stern Pinball, was founded by Sam Stern's son Gary in 1999. That was the year that Williams folded their pinball division to concentrate on slot machines. It was also the year that Sega (Data East) decided to get out of the market and sold their Pinball division to Gary Stern. Stern hired several brilliant Williams designers including Pat Lawlor, George Gomez and Steve Richie to design games for "Stern 2.0."
Firstly I don't know many cafe/bar with a multiplayer videogame. Actually I know of NONE at all. All they offer are single player game. So your comment is valid only already for game arcades. A game arcades will have, what, 50, 100 games ? Cafe/bar around here have 1 up to 2. How many cafe/bar for how many arcade ? I doubt the MAIN buyer of pinball were EVER arcades.
Secondly do you really think only people alone palyed on pinball ? There was this wonderful things called "taking turn, and mocking the lowest score". I spent a lot of time in cafe/bar , not drinking anything, just playing with my 3 best friends on the pinball machine. When it was replaced with some sort of fighting game, do you know what we did ? We went to the next Cafe.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I think we had an article here a few months ago when the last manufacturer of reel-to-reel audio tape closed. I can remember when I purchased a slide rule in the stationery section of Woolworths. Both no longer exist; I can't even remember the last time I saw a slide rule. Yet, I'm sure there will be places and applications where a slide rule might be more appropriate than either a hand-held computer or a calculator. Perhaps they'll be around again in the future. They still make buggy whips and equipment for horses, but a lot less than they did back around 1908 even though there are a lot more people now than there were then.
There are actually some musical groups that still release recordings on vinyl. And a number of people who still have large record collections; in fact my brother wants a new needle for his phonograph as a birthday present.
Technology changes things, and sometimes some things become less interesting than others. Chess is still popular on physical chessboards even though we have chess servers and chess playing programs, for a number of reasons including no need for electricity.
--
Paul Robinson <paul@paul-robinson.us> -- My Blog
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Bringing up this painful topic about a device that almost ruined my entire life is pure torture!
I learned pinball in the basement of my fraternity house with a game called 'Royal Flush'. It was a simple game and the 'old guys' showed us how to really work the thing. After that, it was 'Target Alpha' - another simple game that really taught precision and dexterity. The end result was a very good understanding of what the limits were - and how far you could push a game.
Nothing, but nothing compares to being able to get absolute control of a machine and master it to the point where you can play all night on a roll of quarters. The problem was that I ended up doing just that. I'd find myself at 3:00 in the morning thinking "just one more game..."
A couple of years ago, I was on a road trip with my 16 year old son and we took a break at a truck stop that had two great machines: Terminator 3 and Playboy. Two hours later, my son (who never new of my addiction) looked at me in complete disbelief and said: "Dad, I realize that you have four free games but, for the last time, we HAVE to go!!"
To me, today's video games just never give you that 'feel'. There is
a) no sensory feedback loop and
b) you only win levels, not games.
That's what kept me hooked for so long. That said, I hope Mr. Stern is recognized as a 'dealer' and does hard time for continuing to 'push' this very, very addictive and questionably ilicit product!!
*** Don't be dull.***
actually there is another solitary 'physical sport' that most slashdotters are extremely familiar with, playable with only one hand, although it does take some 'reset time' of an hour or two every time you 'complete a level'
without the double bonus, life is defending books you've written?
A good pinball game took skill. One thing I always liked was that giving the machine a nudge was part of the game. It semed like cheating. You knew if you pushed a little too much you'd be punished, but if you pushed just the right amount you got that double bonus. It was a thrill.
Even though the ball is smooth and featureless, you can tell how it is spinning and can predict how it will rebound.
The feature rich machines which have emerged since the late 80's like the Addams Family and Twighlight Zone (a notoriously unreliable machine) are brilliantly realized fun, but for me the subtlety of the old 60s and 70s mechanical machines is just as fascinating. And the mechanical sounds are great. The replay "thwack" was produced by a solonoid knocking on a metal plate. Every manufacturer had a different component making this sound, so every machine was different.
Another great thing about pinball is that skills are transferable. There never was a good pinball player who was only good on one machine.
I spent 1000s of hours playing pinball in my teens and 20s, and I can honestly say that when the game is going great and you have saved disaster over and over and feel you have the machine under your control, you feel like a god. It's obviously not the very best feeling in the world, but I think it's comparable to what it feels like to be onstage if you are a performer. Not many video games can ever give you that feeling.
And of course, the next ball goes straight down the drain. And you miss the replay by 100 points... But then get the lucky number.
I pity those who don't get pinball.
I can't believe NYtimes can't do some basic fact checking. This is certainly not the last factory in the world - Chinese are making them like everything else. A quick search on Alibaba is all that would have been needed
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
If you want reconfigurable games that combine new players penchant for video and video-based story lines with simpler and easier to maintain playfields they existed with Pinball 2000. I wasn't a fan of Star Wars EP1, but Revenge from Mars was excellent. At recent arcade expos those machines were never idle. But since Williams wanted nothing but gambling Stern has decided to dredge up the same old crap from the 90s which is getting more and more stale. Arcades were where we went to play new games. They died out around the time it was nothing but fighting and driving games (1980-84 was amazing - even Atari's people were forbidden to do the same old thing unless it was a mandated sequel in the late 70s and 80s). Take another dedicated crack at pinball 2000, or pack in the physics because it's tired tired tired.
Ultrapin looks promising because of lack of maintenance but the lame-ass Pinmame engine is not the way to go (physics? terrible. Lag? You bet! Playable? barely). The best video pinball I've been playing have been from LittleWing. Their most recent 2 simulations put Pinmame to shame for the amount of detail and the physics. If it was done right - then that would be it's best bet (the pinball collections from Gottleb and Williams are also far better than pinmame - but Littlewing's are over the top).
Zizzle manufactures pinball machines. Last FACTORY, maybe. Last pinball maker??? No way. *Goes to play on his PotC pinball*
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Those are pachinkos, which have nothing to do with American pinball. Pinball was invented in Chicago and continues to be made solely in Chicago.
J
I think that's one of the essential elements of pinball, the organic nature of it. Lots of clunks and cracks, and you feel like you're in control. The absolute best was a table where the tilt was off, and you could shift the field around and show it who's boss.
http://www.papa.org/papa11/
August 14-17, 2008 - come see what real pinball is.
J
There's a couple HUGE arcades here on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. And they still thrive and thrive thanks the the hundreds of thousands of people that walk on the boardwalk in the summer time. Marty's Playland in particular has a pretty impressive pinball machine collection. It used to be bigger than it is now, but there's at least a good 30 machines or so. My favorite is 'South Park'. That's what I love about modern pinball in particular, is how they've integrated characters from TV shows and movies in to the game. I'm laughing and being entertained. Long live the Pinball machine! :-)
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
You must not have won a game recently. All stern games have a knocker. Most kids have no idea what that sound means though.
If the pinball manufacturer switches to LED bulbs, I sure hope they put diffusers over those things. In many applications incandescent bulbs with areas of a few square centimeters are being replaced by LED's with areas of a few square millimeters. I find those intense points of light painful to look at, like hundreds of little camera flashes burning streaks into my retinas.
I was a teenager in the late70's early 80's. Most of my generous weekly allowance went into pinball machines. I must have spent US$3K-US$5K in pinball machines back then. If only I had invested that money instead, eh?
The physical, tactile nature of the machines is something lost on the last couple of generations. Shaking the table, hearing and feeling the solenoids, getting that syncopated double flipper-tip save! These machines taught a generation of geeky misfit guys about physics. Today's physics-based computer games are so coarse in comparison; they don't even come close to having as many possibilities of actions / reactions as a real pinball table has.
Oh well, everything dies, and pinball is pretty much dead these days. There are just a few poorly maintained tables left in my town. I can still amaze people when I play them. It's a skill that never really goes away once you've spent / wasted your youth learning it.
If just a single table didn't get horribly boring after awhile, I'd probably buy one for my own home. I like the fact that a different, albeit still poorly maintained, table shows up once or twice a year in the places that still have a pinball machine (usually when the current machine breaks beyond field repair).
But, I don't play enough for anyone to make any money off my habit anymore, so, I'm as responsible as anyone for killing pinball.
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
I think a large part of the fun of games is showing off your abilities to others. In the old days, "others" was family and neighbors. Board games and card games let you show your stuff to a small social group.
Pinball and arcade games extended "others" to people you haven't met but in the same town. It was fun to be the best kid in school or best regular at some hangout.
The Internet has extended "others" to anyone that speaks your language around the world. The biggest reward is pwning everyone on a server with thousands of players. Getting the high score on a pinball game can't compare, especially now that classmates and neighbors are online and won't even notice.
A niche to save pinball is personal machines. Then the game has returned to home, where family and friends give each other the incentive of attention to compete.
Now that was a pinball game maker. I worked for them briefly in the '80s and it was excellent... their break room was stocked with free-play pinball machines. The atmosphere was definitely a gamer atmosphere... at lunch time you could rub elbows with the guys that designed the games. Ask them questions. Get tips. Share a few beers after work. It was the best job I ever had.
My job was data entry, I put in A/P data. They bought millions of little parts for each. It took an army of accountants just to keep track of it all. It doesn't surprise me that pinball games are going away, but I do miss them.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
The reason that pinball is dying is we all grew up, and got to press our girlfriends / wives buttons instead.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I got good at those games - but at a price. As other video games were introduced, it became obvious that I was playing against a rigged stack, so I quit playing video games.
I went back to my old vice - pinball machines. I get more enjoyment playing a game in which a law of physics - gravity - is directly involved. Video games can be rigged easily, but you cannot rig the law of physics in pinball machines.
Years after I graduated college, I still make a beeline when I spot a pinball machine.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Pinball is a game of luck only the way poker is. Or maybe Ultimate. The more you anticipate the next few collisions between ball and playfield (or flippers), the less likely you'll get in a situation where the ball is headed for the outlane.
Watch a master player catch 3 of 4 balls in a multiball situation while shooting the 4th for the jackpot lane, and you'll see skill, not luck.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
So your statement is true. But if you try to apply it to all gamers, it is a patently false and laughable claim. Even when I was 8 years old, I knew how much a life cost me. With the coupon that got me X tokens for $30, with 50% matching from my parents, and games that gave you 2 plays per 25 cent token, I quite enjoyed knowing that one life cost around 2 cents (not going to do the math again). I am not so singularly unique as to be the only one to consider such a thing. I think you are confusing gamers with fiscally irresponsible people. Fiscally responsible people consider the cost of everything. Don't confuse enthusiasm with irresponsibility.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
The knocker is usually virtual - why use a $3 part when you can have the sound system generate more or less the same sound?
I mean in modern Stern games.
J
*I* don't particularly like pinball despite having grown up when they were huge. I think they're boring. My girlfriend, who is a decade too young to remember when they were big, and her friends, all *love* them, and go out on a regular (bimonthly) basis to a local bar/venue that has a half-dozen mechanical pinball system, get a pitcher of Red Bull and vodka, and play until 2 AM, when I come and pick them all up and drive them home.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
The Hercules machine is quite a draw at the back of the Cedar Point main arcade. I still play it every now and then just because its different than the normal pinball machines because of the sheer size. I enjoy nothing more in an arcade than a few decent pinball machines.
The most interesting game of pinball I played was on the Cape May-Lewes Ferry. The table was bolted clearly to the deck, and as you might imagine, since it was on water had it's tilt detector turned off. You could smack it and shake it, but given you were on a BOAT, it wasn't very predictable. But it was fun though. This would have been the very early 80s.
The most annoying pinball I played was something with curved flippers circa mid 1980. Oddly enough the flippers gave you points for just hitting them, so one could rack up a ton of replays even before you release the ball. The drawback was the flippers melted.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Ba Ba Booey to y'all!
It's always been my favorite arcade game except for Spyhunter which I got so good at I could play for hours and have all 4 weapons and in speedboat mode! I've always liked the Williams machines. I remember playing High Speed when it first arrived in the local arcade in 1986. The flashing light always got peoples' attention. When it was set up right, it was pretty easy to run the green/yellow/red light and go up the curving ramp. Wish I could find my own to have now. The Comet, Cyclone and even Taxi! were fun pins to play also. You could tell who was a 'real' pinball player because they'd use body english, nudge the table, and if you used your flippers right, you could some pretty crazy things like catch a ball on the way down so it would not bounce, and if you did it right, you could move the ball from one flipper to the other one without having to send it back up the table. I think the fact that since they were electromechanical, there can be a lot of work to repair/adjust all the mechanisms. Nothing is more annoying that finding a table with a weak flipper or bumpers, being unlevel, or tilt sensor set way too high. There's some fairly new tables at a Frankies fun park here, but they tilt way too easily, and you cannot nudge the tables hardly at all. Pins were the best game around for two bits.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
Let's cut to the chase....
Pinball games are designed to separate you from your money as fast as possible while giving you 'cheap thrills' along the way. This is done through 3 things.
Artwork - Growing up, I played pinball games on the tail end of the electromechanical era and into the electronic era. You could always count on 'eye candy' to distract you when playing games in that era. Bally / Midway was notorious for this -- the women depicted in the artwork on their machines were always drop-dead goregeous and sometimes scantily clad (a few that comes to mind is Eight Ball Deluxe, Xenon, Fathom, and Future Spa). If the artwork didn't distract you, there was the....
Layout -- Without a doubt, pinball games are designed to make you lose FAST due to the way the playfield is designed. This is usually accomplised by a 'dead zone' leading between the main flippers from 'strategically placed' ramps or by 'careful' positioning of the bumpers above the main flippers such that the ball will deflect down the right/left drain holes 9 times out of 10 instead of falling down the lanes leading to the main flippers. Some games had a post you could 'pop up' temporarily to keep the ball from draining down the center but that did no good if you had the flippers extended and the ball raced between the post and the flipper. Then there is...
Setup -- You basically had two kinds of people who setup (and serviced) pinball games: the 'nice' operators and the 'not nice' ones. How could you tell? Two ways: playfield incline and flipper effectiveness. If a pinball racess down the playfield or is barely able to make it up to the top of it is a sure sign the playfield is tilted too severely, also if the ball tends to drain on the left or right side or 'drifts' left or right as it drains down the middle is a sign the table is not level. Flipper effectiveness is another indicater. Table leveling will have an impact on flipper effectiveness and if the table seems to be level due to the movement of the ball but the flippers seem 'puny' would indicate that the flippers are malfunctioning. Another indicator is the 'tilt' sensitivity. Is it on a hair trigger or not? I'd imagine Atari's HERCULES didn't need a tilt mechanism--it was the largest commercially available pinball game I've ever seen and played. One last indicator is the score needed to get a free game. Do you have to be a pinball wizzard to get it or not? In short, the 'nice' operators will give you a fighting chance to get a free game, the 'not nice' ones don't care or are 'out to get you'.
3D Ultra Pinball Thrillride has perfect physics. I got a surplused copy via Amazon some time back and have played it for hundreds of hours. Nicely designed for widescreen. Let me know if you beat 300B (no milking) or 11 lights out.
I come here for the love
For me the golden age of pinball was games like Cyclone,Pinbot,Laser War,Xenon and Black Knight I played those games over arcade machines while all my friends were wrapped up in video games nearby there was always something visceral about the pinball experience that just could not be replicated with a joystick and video screen
I fell in love with pinball when I was 9, in the summer of '72. There was a machine at the corner drug store. Back then, before Pong, it was a lot easier to play pinball, because it was much more widespread. Where's a kid going to fall in love with pinball these days? Certainly not at the corner store. Arcades, when you can find them, rarely have pinball machines. The most common setting for them these days is in bars, which are off limits to kids.
As a result, fewer kids develop a love of pinball, which translates into fewer adults playing pinball. Fewer kids and adults means a smaller customer base and fewer machines sold.
The pinball manufacturers spent 30 years combating video games. First they moved to cpu control, then increased complexity, added DMD displays, and finally, Williams tried adding a CRT with their Pinball 2000 machines. After producing two different P2k designs, they dropped pinball for video poker. For me, that's a pretty sad ending for my favorite manufacturer.
One thing they were never able to do was make pinball machines appreciably more reliable. I have a 1973 Gottlieb that's more reliable than most newer pins, probably because it has fewer playfield parts. For an operator's perspective, that's a fatal flaw. Pinball machines require constant service. Video games require the occasional retightening of a button or joystick or the resoldering of a switch. Replace the marquee lamp every year or two. By the time the monitor needs re-capping, the game has probably been replaced with a new one. This is what encouraged operators to switch from mechanical games (not just pinball) to video games, as much as the popularity of games such as Pong, Asteroids, and Space Invaders.
I co-own Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade in Portland, OR, and AFAIK, we operate the most pinball machines west of the Pinball Museum in Vegas. I'm discouraged that I don't see more kids playing pinball. But I do see a lot of people in their early 20s playing. Many of them say pinball is a recently acquired taste. So I'm hopeful that the decline in the number of players has stopped. I don't foresee a resurgence like Gary Stern does, but I'd be glad to be wrong.
I hope Stern can survive, because without them, pinball is doomed.
Check out: http://www.lyonspinball.com/ and http://www.yelp.com/biz/arcade-amusements-inc-manitou-springs
No workie on OSX Intel. Too old. Mine however is a little newer and has a classic table design.
Is that the Tim Arnold who started Pinball Pete's in East Lansing? Dude! I used to play at the original Pinball Pete's out by Coral Gables (before you moved downtown on MAC) -- remember that dinky little building with the elephant on the roof? I'll stop in and see you next time I'm in Vegas.
(P.S. How's your brother doing?)
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.