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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."
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.
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.
Oh, I love it. It is a game that combines skill with the flippers, and some luck. To me,that's what keeps it interesting. While I love the old sounds of the real bells and gears on an old EM machine, the newer digital ones have so many challenges. This is a bit old of an example, but, the old Funhouse machine is a blast...you have to hit certain things to 'move the clock' to midnight, which puts the talking head, Rudy, to sleep...while he snores, you have to try to get a shot to land in his mouth...doing this, which isn't easy, a number of times...opens up bonus points, specials...etc. Some of the machines are actually a little too complex for my liking....the Star Trek Next Gen machine is one example. You have to do so much...it takes away a bit of the wild fast play....
But, recent machines, the Simpsons...is a blast. Just the right mix of fast play...with hitting special things in succession...multi-ball play...etc.
I loved the old arcade games...I still think Robotron is one of the best games every devised, but, pinball holds a special spot in my heart. Heck, in the old days....if you only had one quarter left..you could still play with a friend...each of you takes a flipper....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Pinballs are a video game that is manifested in physical, moving parts. How is that NOT cool?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
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
It's interesting how pinball tastes can vary, too! =D
The Star Trek Next Generation game is my favorite pinball game of all time. I love the launchers and the borg multiball -- real pressure and excitement. =)
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...
The appeal of pinball (for me at least) is that there is no BS, well at least you can't claim BS.
When me and buddies are playing halo I hear "WTF Lag!" or "WTF was that BS?" a lot more than, "Man, that guys good".
In pinball you can't claim random computer errors, lag or random technology based BS. You see exactly what happens in the game and why. You HEAR and FEEL the ball move around the machine (not just sound effects). If you F up, you can see exactly why and try to change it. Your reflexes are executed in real time and can't be argued by "I swear I was pressing the button!".
In short Pinball Machines were like the first (and best) 'virtual reality'.
Don't forget the best challenge of the 70s and 80s... TILT!
Bump the machine to move the ball just right, but not enough to trigger TILT.
To a 10 year old, that's an invitation to cause havoc.
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).
Stern sucked up until recently.. thankfully, they've finally gotten their act together and I'm starting to really enjoy their games. I would rather play some late 80's to mid 90's Williams machines, but game operators have no idea how to service them anyway. If you run across a Medieval Madness on location there is a next to 0% chance that it will actually work perfectly.
We all love to play the 'top rated games'.. but there are still a grip of great pinball machines out there. Dismissing Stern is just voiding yourself of pinball, you are not going to find anything else. Play some Spiderman, Family Guy, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, even T3.. good games. I just wish they'd make original themed machines instead of licensing everything.
>at least vpinmame will save pinball.
good lord that is a scary thought.. talk about missing the point.
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.
No kidding! When they first came out I despised the "new" pinball machines that had 7-segment displays for the counters. The mechanical reels that audibly ticked off your score were so freakin' cool, and the digital displays and tinny beepers just seemed like a horrible replacement. After a while, of course, we got used to them, but they never held the same special cache of the electro-mechanical machines of the past.
John
That was mostly true BEFORE Williams stop making pinball. Most of the good folks went over to Stern and that is the reason new Stern pinball feel like playing a new Williams game.
Hey I was playing a perfectly working Medieval Madness machine over the Christmas break. It was in the games room of the Avalon airport (just outside Melbourne, Australia).
That machine kicks ass.
Tommy? Is that you? *goes off to download the movie*
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
They stopped manufacturing in 1999. They just do slots now.
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!
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
John
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."
You realize that there are now, being booked, flights from around the world that will have a layover in that airport for no other reason than that machine...
Don't you?
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The only people who don't love TNG pinball are the poor saps who have to keep the bastard running. I praised the pinball gods when we sold our last one to a home.
The combination of horrendous under-playfield ball storage, shearing joints with wires passed through them, buggy software, and a single fragile drop target that crippled the machine when broken made for a maintenance nightmare. Don't get me started on the ball trough opto channel that would warp its own PCB from overheated resistors, or the power supply that was so underpowered that you had to configure the transformer for 100 volt operation to get enough juice to keep the thing from rebooting in multiball.
Don't get me wrong, when the game is running it's one of the more entertaining games from the golden era of Williams pinballs. Unfortunately, it was far too much innovation shoehorned onto a platform that just wasn't up to the task.
You want to see perfection? Go play a Medieval Madness or a Twilight Zone.
I'll save my thoughts on the Stern family for another rant.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
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.***
Go back even further to Flash, the first pinball game with an electronic sound board. 6800-based with an LM1408 DAC. 1979 or thereabouts, I think, it's been a long time. I remember the excitement induced by the rising background sound. That was followed by the likes of Firepower, which had an even cooler background sound and CVSD-generated voice, and Black Knight. Those were great times for pinball players.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
They're nice to watch and nice to play but I think my problem is it lacks complete control. It's a cross between a game of skill and a game of luck and I'd rather know my score bites because I suck.
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.
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*
That's one of most interesting things about pinball. The concept of cheating is built right in and the machine judges whether you've cheated "too much".
I'll admit it. I'm an old fart (60) that grew up with the real thing in the back corners of the local bowling alleys and to me pinball has always been more enjoyable than most video games in part due to the real physics AND the physical feel, sound and even smell of the machine. My Dad bought me a used "Derby Day" machine back in the late 60s and I kept it running for another 25 years or so when I finally gave it to a guy who had a collection of machines. I can still remember the smell of the wood, oil, toasting insulation and ozone when that baby was fired up and cookin'.
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.
Firepower rocked. I liked Black Knight, but it was too much of a one-trick pony; I still drove 45 minutes to play it on the weekends for about 6 months, though.
Other personal favorites are Captain Fantastic, and Black Knight:2000. there was one early 70's game I loved to death that had a circus & clowns theme & 3 flippers, but I've not seen it since about 1980.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Maybe, maybe not. The thing that made pinball great was that turning the luck in your favor was part of the skill. Once you get that it is hard to stop......
All points of time and space are connected.
Except he wasn't.
....
"He seems to be completely unreceptive
The tests I gave him show no sense at all
His eyes react to light, the dials detect it
He hears but cannot answer to your call
His eyes can see, his ears can hear, his lips speak
All the time the needles flick and rock
No machine can give the kind of stimulation
Needed to remove his inner block
("Go to the Mirror!", Townshend)
Plus that special "clack" when you won a free game.
Ahh, Dave's Hot Dogs. So much time wasted, and me, too!
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
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.
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.
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