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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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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
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
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."
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.
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.