Cheap Thrills
Pinball is True Americana: Garish, Gaudy, Loud, Tacky ... and Fun
By Andrew Cohen
The pinball brotherhood follows a strict code: Video is evil, pinball is good.
Make no mistake, it is a brotherhood, a guy thing. At last year's annual Pinball Expo, held at an airport hotel near Chicago, there were exactly six women among an audience of 200 or so listening to lectures on cable-lacing and flipper technique. The members of the brotherhood sat enrapt by talk of digitized speech and plastic injection-molding. One of the faithful asked the plastics expert why the game-field posts on many machines build in 1976 break so often. The expert explained that indeed a bad batch of posts had been made that year, but you can identity them by seeing if they float in water: Bad ones float, good ones sink.
This was precisely the type of information the crowd had come to hear. They also got to sample the latest games from the big three manufacturers, as well as buy and sell classic machines--but not just machines. In the adjoining exhibition hall, there was a booming trade in archaic and highly prized pinball paraphernalia, such as vintage parts catalogues and schematic drawings of pinball circuitry.
People were having a good time, soaking up the atmosphere at one of the most important gatherings in the pinball world. However, much of the good humor and fellow feeling vanished whenever someone brought up arcade video games. There were variously referred to as "wimp games," "geek games," "kid games," "twitch games" and "run-around-and-kill-things games." Video is the enemy, the hated Other. That's because its overwhelming popularity a decade ago nearly killed pinball. Enthusiasm for video has cooled considerably since then, but even with the bloom off the video boomlet, pinball disciples are slow to forgive. According to Frank "the Crank" Selinsky, a pinball columnist for several coin-op trade journals and the president of an Edison, New Jersey, arcade distributorship, these days, a top new pinball machine can pull in up to $200 a week for the first few weeks, but a decent video game will still earn a bit more per week over a longer period.
In the late Seventies, pinball was enjoying a renaissance: The movie Tommy had renewed interest in the venerable American institution. Production runs of pinball machines hit their highest levels, and many players' favorites--including Wizard, Gorgar, Playboy, Eight Ball, Space Mission and Evel Knievel--appeared.
But in the next decade, such smash-hit arcade video games as Space Invaders and Pac-Man pushed pinball out of the limelight. Pinball accounted for some 80 percent of the coin-op amusement market in 1975 but had fallen to just 5 percent of arcade revenues by 1984. D. Gottlieb & Co., one of the premier pinball manufacturers since the game's birth, changed owners that same year, and video drove pinball machine-maker Stern Electronics (successor to the old Chicago Coin) out of business.
All during the bad years, sad years, members of the brotherhood stood by pinball. Remaining companies, such as Williams Electronics and Bally (which merged in 1988 and as Williams Electronics now controls 80 percent of the world market), but they never completely abandoned pinball.
"Pinball has a tendency to fall into the background when something newer comes along," says Steven Kordek, head of the eight-man design staff at Williams Electronics. "Gun games, shuffle games, video games--no matter, pin games always come back."
Kordek should know. At 80, he's been active in the business since 1937. He's the man responsible for one of the greatest innovations in pinball history. Though Harry Mabs, a Gottlieb designer, was first to put flippers on a pinball game--Humpty Dumpty in 1947 had six--it was Kordek who used flippers to their fullest advantage by putting a single pair at the bottom of the playing field, still the standard placement. Even the beloved Kordek received a cool reception when he asked the Expo crowd to lobby Congress for a new dollar coin so that arcade owners could charge more than the current 50 cents a game. "We should be charging $1.50 for all the entertainment we're giving," Kordek said to a stony audience.
What is it, beside inflation-fighting prices, that has sustained pinball's popularity over the years? "Each ball plays differently from the last ball," says Kordek. "Each game is different and very exciting. It's not like video, where you know what's going to happen and a guy can stand there and play for two days without putting in another quarter."
"It's an escape, it's relaxing," says "Jelly" Joey Cartegena, a 25-year-old doorman and the winner of a recent tournament at New York City's Broadway Arcade, the establishment recognized by aficionados as coming closest to earthly paradise.
Pinball is as authentic a slice of Americana as you can find. It's always been like a favorite black-sheep uncle--wacky, spirited, a lot of fun to be around...but a little embarrassing to be seen with. Pinball has no class, no sophistication, yet on the other hand, it has no pretension, no French terminology or obscure etiquette. Pinball is garish, gaudy, loud and tacky. Pinball is a game of cheap theatrics and visceral pleasures, of delicate tactile feedback from bumper and flipper action...
And it's a game with a poor reputation, largely because it has spent nearly its entire life hanging around in bars and bus terminals. It also caters to a short attention span: pinball designers aim to give players an average of forty-eight seconds of play per ball. And somewhere along the line, the game got mixed up with a bad crowd--gamblers, toughs, miscreants. Pinball's reputation took an additional hit in 1936, when Humphrey Bogart played a petty-vice lord who bullies mom-and-pop shopkeepers into taking his pinball machines in a little-remembered movie called Bullets or Ballots. Back before flippers, righteous folk knocked pinball as being a game of chance no better than one-armed bandits. (Some pin games of the Thirties even made cash payouts for high scores, as do slot machines.) Controversy persists in the matter of matching, the game feature that is traditionally supposed to give the player a random 1-in-10 chance of winning a free game. But it's not always a 1-in-10 chance; today, arcade operators can program computerized pinball machines to award free games a lot less often, like 1-in-100. Hard-core players think that's wrong.
Coin-operated pinball was born in 1931, but there is little agreement as to who the real father was. Whiffle Board, Baffle Ball, Whoopee Game, Dutch Pool, Jostle and El Bumpo all appeared that year. We do know that pinball is directly descended from bagatelle, a gimmick-laden variation on traditional parlor billiards that was played by idle French noblemen of the ancien regime. In the nineteenth century, it was enjoyed by the likes of Charles Dickens and Abraham Lincoln.
Richard Bueschel, an amateur pinball historian who has already published the first volume of a projected ten-volume history of the game, told the Expo audience how the start of World War II had abruptly curtailed production. With no new machines being produced, "conversion kits" were created to give new life to old games. Wartime conversions in the U.S. featured such names as Smack the Japs and Bomb the Axis Rats. Meanwhile, in Nazi Germany, American-made pin games were cruelly pressed into propaganda service and given new names such as Bomben London and Ostkrieg.
Morality was even more ruinous than war to pinball's fortunes. Between 1939 and 1942, the machines were banned in several large cities--most traumatically in Chicago, pinball's hometown. New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia led the crusade, smashing pinball machines in the streets of Gotham for photographers while accusing candy-store owners of cheating kids out of their lunch money. Incredibly, these big-city bans were on the books until the mid-Seventies.
But pinball's biggest handicap was also its greatest asset: Pinball art is probably the main reason for the game's cultural ostracism. It has seldom been subtle--in fact, think "dirty old man." Whatever the ostensible theme of a specific game--billiards, baseball, betting--there's a fourth B that usually predominates: busty babes. Make that big busty babes (although leggy showgirls enjoyed a brief vogue back in the Fifties).
Pinball is possibly the last refuge of undisturbed, unapologetic male-bonding machismo. Disturbing? Harmful? Well, maybe. But consider the alternative: big-eyed puppies and kitten in soothing pastels. No way!
A decade after the Tommy boom, pinball has again edged back from the abyss and now accounts for 30 percent of arcade revenues. The assets of Gottlieb were bought to start Premier Technology, which still makes games under the Gottlieb name. Japanese-owned Data East was launched in the U.S. in 1986 with some staffers from Stern Electronics. At the latest arcade-industry trade show, it was a pinball machine--Data East's The Simpsons--not a video game, that was the big hit.
The Simpsons, along with other recent items such Dr. Dude and FunHouse, is a fine game, but many of the mavens at the Pinball Expo contend that these games lack the feel of such Sixties classics as Slick Chick or Magic City. Steven Kordek says that one of his company's newest efforts, Harley-Davidson, is an attempt to return to the less complex pin games of the past. That's the thing about pinball: The best machine is always the first one your dad helped you play when you weren't tall enough to see over it, or the game you couldn't beat in college.
Fortunately, classic pinball is reasonably inexpensive to domesticate. While a brand-new machine can run up to $3,000, an older one in good working order can be had for as little as a few hundred dollars. Only the rarest and most desirable machines--like a '72 Bally Fireball in good condition--go for exorbitant amounts, sometimes almost five figures. Best of all, with a pinball machine of your own, you can spend more time with your family, especially that wacky black-sheep uncle you haven't seen for so long.
This article first appeared in the November 1991 issue of GQ Magazine
