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Pinball: a Resurgence In Retro Gaming From an Unlikely Place

Posted by timothy on from the shiny-and-physical dept.

woohoodonuts writes "The Professional & Amateur Pinball Association is creating a webchannel that will livestream content from their national circuit of tournaments ranging from Southern California to New York City. The most recent circuit tournament in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania sold out of all 400 tournament openings in less than three weeks, months in advance of the event. With several new companies in the process of creating machines and hundreds of new competitive events springing up worldwide at a record pace, is the retro silverball rising to prominence once again?"

17 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Um...what's the "unlikely place"? by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 2, Insightful

    >> Pinball...Resurgence...From an Unlikely Place

    Um...what's the "unlikely place"?

    1. Re:Um...what's the "unlikely place"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      The back of a volkswagon?

  2. will machines be more common? by jehan60188 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    i love pinball, but finding a machine is rare! let's hope bars/arcades start stocking them instead of that stupid bowling/golf thingy

    1. Re:will machines be more common? by Dins · · Score: 4, Funny

      I don't know about you, but I go to bard to get drunk and get laid, not to play pinball.

      For me I guess it would depend on the bard in question...

    2. Re:will machines be more common? by decipher_saint · · Score: 2

      I find them all the time in bars... broken

      Which is a shame, I've seen some great looking pinball games just sitting there with a jammed component.

      --
      crazy dynamite monkey
    3. Re:will machines be more common? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      How can you expect to get laid without showing off your pinball prowess?

    4. Re:will machines be more common? by mabu · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Games now cost in excess of $6500. It's no longer profitable to operate them. They are much higher maintenance than video games and neither bring in the coin-op money they used to. It is unfortunate since pinball really is a uniquely American form, a great combination of technology + mechanical design + art + culture.

    5. Re:will machines be more common? by tlhIngan · · Score: 5, Informative

      i love pinball, but finding a machine is rare! let's hope bars/arcades start stocking them instead of that stupid bowling/golf thingy

      Pinball started dying out in the 80s and 90s because video games were cheaper and more reliable, and more importantly, smaller. Pinball machines required a lot of space and tons of maintenance.

      The problem is, a pinball machine's purpose is to make money. The money goes to the operator (the person responsible for buying and maintaining the machines) and the site owner (the guy offering up space for the machine). So whenever it gets broken or goes down, it stops making money and the operator has to spend money to fix it. Video games and other machines last a lot longer so less money is paid out ot maintain them and more money goes to the site owner and the operator. Plus, since a machine consumes more space, you could often fit two video games in the space of one.

      Plus, good pins are hard to get - Williams was the #1 pinball manufacturer - their machines were high quality, had good feel, and had various compensation mechanisms to allow for it to be in quite a bad state of disrepair and still be playable. As a result, even the worst DMD Williams machine is now horrendously expensive (maybe even more $$$ than new - $5000+). Some of the more popular machines command even more - prices of $15K+ aren't exactly unheard of.

      So now it's even a worse proposition for operators and owners.

      The only manufacturer left, Stern, evolved out of Data East/Sega, well known for very cheap crappy pins. However, they survived purely because Williams' factories are designed to pump up 10,000's worth of machines (pinball, slot machines, etc) and are very unprofitable building thousands or less, while Stern's can build hundreds and still be profitable. The latest WPC pins only sold between 2-5000 units (Pin2K was one of the first to reverse the unprofitability of the pinball division).

      Williams in the end stopped pinball in 1999, but they wanted to hold it in their back pocket just in case it was a bad decision. Unfortunately, even doing something like reviving old hit machines wasn't ever an option because the sales wouldn't be enough to make money (again, when you're geared to build tens of thousands, building sub-10K is very inefficient and expensive).

      Pinball machines will remain a niche these days because the economics aren't there. The problem is the machines have to make money, so it's a balance between ball time and difficulty - too difficult, and people don't play, but too long a ball and the machine doesn't make money because it's in use all the time. And what happened was pro pinball players started demanding more complex pins, which ended up excluding newbies and bringing fresh blood and new money to the industry.

      It's changing, slowly, thanks to video pins - for those of us wanting recreations of the old machines, The Pinball Arcade is one of the premier video pinball simulators that feature many licensed recreations (many fully emulated a la PinMAME) on every platform (iOS, Android (including Android clones like Ouya, Kindle), PS3, Xbox360 (currently on hold because Crave (publisher) went bankrupt and is holding the contract hostage), and OS X). PC was just greenlit a few weeks ago on Steam, so the PC version is coming out soon. And of course it has a fan site with forums.

      There are many others as well, which have the advantage that if you're not making money per play, they can concentrate on fun more than balancing fun with the need to make money.

    6. Re:will machines be more common? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      You should look on http://pinballmap.com/ if you want to find machines...

    7. Re:will machines be more common? by Reverand+Dave · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Speak for yourself white man, the pinball machine at my favorite local hangout takes in a lot of money, it's pretty profitable. The initial capital outlay might be high, but the returns are pretty high. If someone wants to play Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter they can do that in their house for free, but if you want the visceral feeling of playing a pinball game, you have to leave your basement.

      --
      I got here through a series of tubes
    8. Re:will machines be more common? by cellocgw · · Score: 2

      but if you want the visceral feeling of playing a pinball game, you have to leave your basement.

      Funny thing to say, seeing as my pins *are* in my basement. But I do agree that the cost of pins, new or old, is too high for most people to collect a bunch for their game room (and of course ya gotta want to work on them. They require almost as much maintenance as the '80s BMWs a pal of mine spends all his free time on).

      And if anyone has an EM JokerPoker, I'd love to get my hands on it (as in buy).

      --
      https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
    9. Re:will machines be more common? by grahamwest · · Score: 5, Informative

      I worked at Williams in the 90s. You're pretty much spot on but I do have a few other comments. The fact that games broke more than videogames is true, but what really choked the industry - and I'm counting arcade videogames in this too - was that all the games wound up getting more and more expensive, yet earning less and less money.

      Back in the day, if a game didn't pay for itself in 8 weeks, it was a dog. Really good games could do that in 3 weeks. Once they'd done that, the rest was profit. After a while the original location would sell the game and a lesser location would pick it up. Cheaper price, lower earning but still the game paid for itself in a few weeks. Repeat 2 or 3 more times and you have a game in a pizza joint, not earning much but doing well enough to be worth the effort. When the time-to-profit stretched out it choked this whole 'food chain' to the point that distributors were telling the manufacturers that they didn't want to buy any more games, even if they'd signed a contract for exclusivity in return for minimum orders, even if the game was incredible, because they already had a warehouse full of stuff they couldn't sell to the top-tier operators and thus just taking up space and (more importantly) non-cash illiquid assets.

      There was also bloody-mindedness on the part of the locations, operators, distributors and manufacturers. Manufacturers kept jacking up prices without enough effort in R&D (Pin2k was an exception and I have so many heroic stories of our effort on that!) and without coming up with enough other ways to add value. Distributors cut back all the services they used to offer (e.g. board repair, big parts catalogs), operators were no longer willing to spend time fixing and cleaning games (easier to put in a Golden Tee Golf instead) and locations didn't want to deal with the space or the noise.

      Pinball and slots at WMS were separate business units with their own assembly lines. Spinning reel slot design was briefly under Larry DeMar who was the head of engineering for pinball (and a legend in his own right thanks to Robotron, Defender, Black Knight, High Speed, Funhouse...) but that didn't really affect things and was before Pin2k got going. The fixed cost of the production line was a big drag on profit and we were barely hitting the minimum run rate most of the time, but it wasn't in the tens of thousands. 5000 a year was about where it was at, if I remember rightly. Revenge From Mars perked that up considerably but then the CEO decided to pump up the price for Star Wars Ep 1 and orders, which had been higher, dropped below its sales. That's when they pulled the plug.

      After that, a bunch of the WMS pinball people went to Stern and some others went with Pat Lawlor who founded his own design company, manufacturing through Stern. That's why Stern's games improved in quality and play appeal. You can thank Dwight, Keith and Lyman in particular, plus Louis, Greg and John K along with Pat at PLD. George Gomez (Tron, Spy Hunter and the Monster Bash pinball, among others) now runs Stern.

      --
      Graham
  3. Re:why unlikely? by cayenne8 · · Score: 2
    Sure you can....I have one (a classic EM from 1967), and many of my friends have them.

    Got mine for about $700....sure, if you want the latest and greatest, they can run you $4K, but for older ones, they aren't that expensive.

    A couple of classic pins and a MAME machine, and you've got quite a gameroom going.

    Personally next house I move to, I wanna find a large enough room to put in a real, full sized, heavy as a tank air hockey table.

    --
    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
  4. Old guys rule by DeathGrippe · · Score: 2

    and old guys love pinball. We grew up with it. I'm 66, and I've got 14 machines, a whole room full, all digital. Fun to play, fun to maintain. My kids love 'em too, but they prefer their MMO's.

  5. Re:More hipster crap by xstonedogx · · Score: 2

    The key component of hipsterism is pretense. Just because people enjoy something "retro" doesn't mean they are hipsters.

  6. Pinball diehard by AnalogDiehard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Thirty years I outgrew video games while in college because I recognized early that they were addictive and they burned a hole in your pocket. But I never outgrew pinball machines. I always preferred the arcade games that relied on predictable real life attributes such as gravity and inertia, and video games don't offer that. With pinball machines you didn't burn a hole in your pocket trying to decipher patterns like you did with video games. But video games drew better money because of the addiction so the arcade owners gradually displaced pinball machines. There aren't many pinball machines around anymore, but when I cross paths with one I just have to play them.

    The old pinball machines from 1960 onward are really easy to fix. When I was in high school I completely restored one that belonged to a neighbor and didn't have to spend one dime on parts - most of the work was restoring mechanical parts such as solenoids, relays, springs, contacts, etc. Projects like that were the impetus to my earning an engineering degree from college.

    There are resellers making good money from scavenging parts to resell to pinball enthusiasts. Many pinball machines survive from as far back as the 1950s. With a few exceptions, you don't see that kind of loyalty with video games because the effort isn't worth it and spare parts are an issue. Replacing a CRT in today's flat screen world? Forget it. Video game computer flaking out? You need expensive test equipment and good diagnostic skills to fix them. Many video games from the 1970s and 1980s used ICs whose substrates suffered from chemical reactions over time that ultimately rendered a dead chip. Fixing a video game quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns because with their lower market value you will never recover the restoration costs.

    Playing a pinball machine gives you physical feedback. You can't feel the bumpers kick or the solenoids advancing the score counters on a video game. Bells and tonebars sound much more natural than electronic blips and bleeps. The playfields and backglass on many pinball machines are works of art, further highlighted by flashing lights. Video games are no match for the visual impact of a chrome plated ball dashing around bumpers, ramps, dropholes, et al with lights which react to impacts from the ball. Some of the later pinball machines did integrate sound effects but nothing corny like video games. And some of the themed pinball machines are downright excellent - you haven't played pinball until you played The Simpsons themed pinball machine.

    --
    Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
  7. Thje death of pinball: by ReallyEvilCanine · · Score: 2
    Video games: two fit in the same amount of space as one pin. That golf game earns $1-3 for just 3-5 minutes, with a general spend of $3-5. The most people are willing to pay for a game of pinball is generally 50Â, and that game better last 2-3 minutes, and can last a lot longer.

    Service: unskilled labour can pull and replace a control in most video games; few other problems exist these days. Pinball machines break. A lot. Fixing them requires lots of parts and lots of skill. There is only one person in the world able to reliably repair major problems on boards which haven't been made for the past 15-30 years (he bought the equipment from Williams when they shut down).

    Machines: There is only one manufacturer now: Stern. New machines run around $5500 plus shipping.

    Parts: There are hundreds of standard parts (though half of them differ by manufacturer) and a shitton of specialised pieces. All of them are expensive, as is the time of the guy who can reliably repair/replace them.

    Personal: I restore pins as a hobby. General parts come from only a couple of suppliers and specialised/unique pieces mainly from old stock from eBay. There are some modern replacement items such as redesigned power driver boards and LED replacements for lighting (bulbs always burn out) but it's a niche resurgence which won't bring around a renaissance because...

    Economics: a 50-50 split with the location on the 50-75Â per game max, on a machine which costs $5500 plus at least $100 in time and delivery costs and can be expected to require skilled service at least once a month, on-call and available within 48 hours with at least 300 parts on-hand. After 6-9 months the machine will have to be rotated out and after a couple of years, you can sell it for around $1000 to a collector if it's not lame and completely blown, in which case you might get $500 from a salvager. The no-service $4000 golf game will have turned a profit within a year.