Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  Then there’s the Pinball Outreach Project, a public charity in Portland, Oregon, that aims “to improve the lives of children by sharing the history and excitement of the game of pinball,” according to its mission statement. In practice, this means bringing pinball machines to hospitals and schools temporarily and allowing other nonprofits to use their arcade space for fundraisers.

  Even PAPA, inside the mega-arcade that hosts the World Pinball Championships, used to hold an annual tournament called Cupids and Canines, inviting the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society to bring puppies to the Carnegie facility and donating entry fees to the charity. The idea was that pinball players would compete in a tournament while their long-suffering spouses snuggled with puppies. I dragged Marina to one of these before the kids were born. As I recall, the pinball competition lasted long beyond the time when the puppies had to return to the Humane Society in their crates, and the weekend ended up with me playing pinball after midnight while Marina resentfully fell asleep in a chair.

  “Hey,” I said, gently nudging her awake. “It’s 1:00 AM. The competition’s over.”

  “Did you win?”

  “No, I didn’t win,” I laughed. That was a relief to Marina, since first prize was a pinball machine. “But . . . I did come in third.”

  “Great,” she mumbled, extricating herself from the chair and blinking to moisten her desiccated contact lenses.

  “So, uh, I won something else,” I admitted as we walked toward the door. I showed Marina a small card. “I get to enter the next World Pinball Championships for free. Want to come back here in August?”

  She did not, and I returned in August alone.

  That was 2009. Five years later, in August 2014, I pushed open the doors of a nondescript warehouse in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, to reveal a bright panorama of pinball, pinball, pinball. In the years since I’d stopped playing, my worldwide ranking had plummeted from 80th place all the way down to 9,938th.

  I’m back, I thought. Ready to rock this thing.

  Boy was I wrong.

  3

  Come to PAPA

  * * *

  STEVE EPSTEIN DIDN’T INVENT PINBALL, but he did help make it competitive. He certainly had ample opportunity to play as he ran the family business, a crowded midtown Manhattan hangout called Broadway Arcade. In today’s era of Virgin Megastores and ritzy multistory bazaars defining their global presence with flagship Times Square retail destinations, it’s quaint to think that a true arcade could thrive in New York’s priciest zone. Yet thrive it did, starting as Sportland in the 1930s and happily siphoning coins from the local population until 1997.

  Broadway Arcade’s demise coincided with a decidedly “virtual reality is the future, clanging metal parts are the past” vibe that nearly killed pinball entirely. In 1997, I held a summer job at a lackluster indoor amusement park, so I can vouch for the sudden ridiculous obsession with virtual reality helmets and motion-simulated theaters.

  The pinball community wept for Broadway Arcade, as immortalized in archived postings from the Rec.Games.Pinball newsgroup in 1997. “Say it ain’t so!” wailed an enthusiast from Atlanta, while another player replied with only mild hyperbole, “This is quite possibly the worst thing I have ever read.”

  Before the Broadway Arcade shut down, however, Epstein made one last contribution to the pinball scene, an idea that would slowly blossom and develop into a worldwide institution with tens of thousands of adherents. Along with his friend Roger Sharpe, Epstein essentially invented the notion of competitive pinball.

  In some ways, pinball has always been competitive. You can play a multiplayer game, essentially alternating balls, then seeing whose score is highest at the end. Epstein and Sharpe’s idea was to make that victory only one in a series—in other words, to establish a metascoring system that would do for pinball what league play did for bowling.

  In the process, in the mid-1980s, Epstein and Sharpe founded the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association (PAPA), the organization that would oversee some of the world’s largest pinball tournaments. Soon pinball leagues and competitions began popping up around the country, with most adopting the PAPA scoring system that Epstein and Sharpe invented.

  Everything seemed to be going well. From 1991 through 1995, Epstein ran PAPA’s annual tournament at the Omni Park Central Hotel in New York. Then Broadway Arcade went under, and despite a brief attempt at one more tournament in Las Vegas in 1998, PAPA’s scoring system lived on, but the big PAPA competition took an indefinite hiatus.

  We should pause for just a second here to acknowledge the slight awkwardness of that acronym, especially when it leads to phrases like “big PAPA competition.” It’s an awkwardness I discovered myself when a fellow pinball player asked me, grinning, “You wanna come to PAPA?”

  Enter Kevin Martin, a pinball fan with a massive bankroll from his web-hosting business, Pair Networks. In 2004, Martin had the determination to restart PAPA as pinball’s foremost championship, but he had something else as well—something amazing, something wonderful, something Epstein would have loved. Martin had hundreds of pinball machines.

  Yes, his own collection. Yes, hundreds. Martin purchased a century-old, thirty-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh. The building was a sprawling, high-ceilinged, cement block begging to be rehabilitated and filled with pinball machines. Since if you build it, they will come, Martin had the walls painted, had most of the floor carpeted, and installed amenities like restrooms, lockers, a café area, and an information desk. They came.

  In September 2004, the seventh tournament run by PAPA (called, creatively, PAPA7) helped inaugurate Martin’s dream facility. Much pinball was played. The title went to Keith Elwin, who racked up more than 1.3 billion points on Theatre of Magic in the finals. A good time was had by all, and the competitors returned to their ordinary lives afterward, with no idea what horror would soon descend upon Martin’s gleaming pinball Mecca.

  A mere five days later, Hurricane Ivan dropped nearly six inches of rain on Carnegie in one day, swelling the adjacent Chartiers Creek well above its hundred-year flood line and—it still pains me to write this—right into PAPA headquarters. We’re not just talking about a little water. We’re talking about multiple feet of water containing “silt, debris, sewage, and diesel fuel,” according to a lament on the PAPA website. If you’re imagining a field of pinball machines with their metal legs covered in standing water, you’re imagining an outcome kinder than what actually occurred. Add a few more feet of contaminated water to what you’re imagining.

  Every machine’s wooden playfield was soaked with sludge. Every machine’s electronics were destroyed. I still remember sitting at my computer in Baltimore, scrolling through photo after photo on Flickr of waterlogged pinball machines, bellies submerged in brownish mire, brand-new machines and machines that had seen decades of play, never to be turned on again. In all, 232 pinball machines went to that Great Arcade in the Sky, along with about a dozen classic video games and, as can be seen in the gut-wrenching photos, a black Corvette in the parking lot.

  PAPA itself might have disappeared after Hurricane Ivan, because who wants to rebuild after such thorough devastation? Then, Hanukkah-style, a great miracle occurred. The pinball community rallied around the remains of Martin’s Mecca (to completely mix religious metaphors). Floors were cleaned, parts were salvaged, and new machines made their way to Carnegie. Flood insurance helped.

  “Once you’re crazy/determined enough to build the place,” Martin would later tell The Pinball Blog, “rebuilding it is only a few percentage points crazier.” The facility opened its doors once again in August 2005, just in time for PAPA8—with 277 functioning machines.

  As for Epstein—who lost his own Times Square arcade not by an act of God but through the more powerful forces of gentrification and changing public preferences—he’s found a home at the helm of a new Manhattan arcade in the Rose Hill neighborhood a couple blocks from Baruch College
. Modern Pinball NYC opened its doors in 2013, and Epstein has watched pinball players enjoy their unlimited play—ten dollars for one hour, or twenty for the whole damn day.

  The old Broadway Arcade “wasn’t for kids,” Epstein told me. I didn’t press him on what that meant, but I gather that at the time, much of New York City “wasn’t for kids.” At Modern Pinball NYC, however, he’s spoken to several parents who specifically bring their kids to offer an alternative to video games. (Of course, books are an alternative to video games, too, but there’s only so far you can push kids.) The arcade is even a registered vendor of the New York City Department of Education, hosting field trips for kids to learn about art, physics, and electricity.

  “I think there’s a return to live-action entertainment,” Epstein said, gazing at his little room of flashing lights—not in Times Square but certainly not in Timbuktu—“and you get that kind of entertainment on a pinball machine.”

  On a Friday in August, I leave my office in Rockville, Maryland, at the end of the day—but instead of driving home, I point my Saturn northwest, through the Appalachian Mountains, watching the sun sink lower and disappear. It’s an exhausting drive, not because of the distance—five hours—but because my new son, Benjamin, is a month old, which means I haven’t had a night of uninterrupted sleep in a while. I briefly entertain the possibility of driving straight to my hotel to rest, but that’s not going to happen. That’s insane. There’s pinball to be played.

  PAPA dwells in an unlikely location. Driving by, you’d think it was a large, solid, but decrepit warehouse with weeds sprouting from the asphalt in a faded parking lot. Actually, you wouldn’t think anything, because the facility is the epitome of the word “nondescript.” And actually, you wouldn’t drive by, unless you happen to conduct business at one of the adjacent industrial warehouses: NORD-Lock, Bisco Refractories, or the thrillingly named Heat Exchange and Transfer.

  Having added a second contest in the spring, PAPA is open exactly twice a year, at which points it converts from a characterless concrete monolith to a characterless concrete monolith with an overflowing parking lot. I park illegally in a weed-choked alley, as it seems most people have done, and step inside.

  How to describe the sensation of entering PAPA? (Again, the acronym is less than ideal.) For someone whose mood is instantly lifted by finding a random functional pinball machine in a bus station, the elation is overwhelming. Here at PAPA’s 2014 competition (PAPA17) are not one, not ten, not fifty, but more than five hundred pinball machines in Martin’s ever-growing collection, all playable, and me with nothing but tokens and time.

  Hell, the PAPA collection even includes woodrails, those pre-midcentury contraptions built from unpainted wood, before LED displays, before scores could be tallied by rotating number wheels—before it was even a given that a pinball machine might use electricity.

  On the inside, the concrete walls have been painted purple and yellow. Banners bearing the names of past champions—mostly Keith Elwin, Bowen Kerins, or Lyman Sheats—hang from the steel rafters. It almost feels like a casino, loud and windowless and unapologetically alluring, but a casino forced to display its splendor in a high school gym.

  And there’s security. Which makes sense—lots of people, lots of cash—but imagine being hired to keep the peace at a pinball competition. It’s probably an easier day than most. The security guards look bored out of their minds, or maybe they’re constantly tormented by the attractive pinball machines on all sides that they’re not allowed to play.

  Who travels to Carnegie, Pennsylvania, to play pinball on a Friday night? All types of people. Competitive pinball players are a varied bunch, which is a nice way of saying that they’re interesting, which is a nice way of saying that many of them look like your uncle who attends Battlestar Galactica conventions. Yes, there are middle-aged men, those dependable engines that keep the various hobby industries chugging along. But there are also kids and grandparents. The inescapably nerdy and those who meld well with crowds. Athletic shoes, sandals, combat boots, and work boots. Ponytails aplenty, for both genders. People who look like they just emerged from a biker bar, and people who look like they just came from their jobs as patent examiners. Guys who look like the Lone Gunmen from The X-Files (which is itself a 1997 pinball machine).

  I see a man stare intently at a machine, then wipe the sweat off the flipper buttons with his “HARDEST PART OF MY DAY IS MULTIBALL” T-shirt, stretch his neck in that cracky way that bodyguards and bouncers can pull off, and enter the zone. A willowy blonde woman with large glasses plays wearing white golf gloves. And there’s a squat man in cargo shorts and a fishing hat, looking a bit like Rick Moranis with square glasses, also wearing golf gloves. Are golf gloves a thing in pinball now? Are they trying to improve their grip on the buttons? Or are they, like the T-shirt man, protecting themselves from the finger sweat of hundreds of strangers?

  Upon further observation, they appear to be friendly with each other. They’re probably a married couple, though I think I prefer the possibility that they just met and fell in love that afternoon over shared interests.

  Him: “Hey, nice golf gloves!”

  Her: “Look, pal, they protect me from the sweat—oh! You have them, too! I never imagined I’d find that perfect someone!”

  Him: “You wanna, you know, play a multiplayer game?”

  And then a pun about balls that’s not even worth writing.

  Sixty machines have been roped off for the competition, but the remaining hundreds sit in neat rows, ready to be played by anyone for fun. I take ten dollars in tokens to the nearest interesting-looking machine, which happens to be Transformers, a 2011 game I’ve barely played before. On my first try, I surpass the score required for a free game and do a little internal dance. This is going to be a good weekend.

  For most pinball machines, that’s the reward for a high-scoring game: you get to play another game for free. The reward for pinball is more pinball. Sometimes a very high score will earn you multiple free games. I still remember earning more free games in college than I could reasonably play on the Medieval Madness in the student center basement, then walking away with the display reading “Credits: 5,” feeling like Robin Hood.

  With gambling so integral a part of pinball’s past, it’s kind of funny that we’ve come full circle and figured out a way to once again monetize the game: first prize in PAPA’s top bracket, A Division, is $10,000. Additional cash prizes for lower finishes, in the lesser B and C Divisions, and for minitournaments and random contests, bring PAPA’s total prize package to more than $45,000—not to mention trophies the size of mountain lions.

  There are two stages of the competition. In the first, you purchase an entry, which lets you play any five games from a designated group and receive a composite score based on how well your games rank against everyone else’s. The metascoring rubric rewards consistency, so it’s not enough to play one good game on an entry ticket—you need a few. The number of entries a player can purchase is limited only by the constraints of time (qualifying opportunities begin on Thursday morning and end at midnight on Saturday) and financing, which is partly how the prize package can be so lucrative.

  The second stage is the finals, played on Sunday by the top twenty-four players in each division. I’ve never made it to the finals.

  PAPA has grown every year, and this year there are more than 150 players competing in C Division alone. They wait for machines to become available, arms crossed, lanyards with their player numbers hanging from their necks.

  Under the right circumstances, anyone can look menacing. In my mind, they’re all secret pinball wizards capable of directing the silver ball wherever they want, and what the hell chance do I have?

  But I have a secret weapon. His occupation: mnemonic courier. His cargo: three hundred and twenty gigabytes of data wet-wired directly to his brain. His name: Johnny.

  Johnny Mnemonic (1995), the only pinball machine I’ve ever owned, is fairly unremarkable, especial
ly considering that it was released during an era that birthed some of the greatest machines ever manufactured. Often a pinball machine’s theme must be determined before anyone knows whether the movie on which it’s based will be a dud—such was the case with 1994’s The Shadow, based on the unfortunate Alec Baldwin film—and the less said about the Flintstones pinball machine from the same year, the better. There’s even a saying in the pinball industry: “Great games, bad movies.”

  Johnny Mnemonic is a dystopian 1995 film starring everyone’s favorite block of wood, Keanu Reeves, as a “mnemonic courier” who had to jettison memories of his childhood in order to carry 320 gigabytes of data in his brain for a wealthy client. Along the way he meets radical J-Bone (Ice-T), a street preacher (Dolph Lundgren), and a sassy dolphin named Jones. Yeah. It’s as good as you’d think.

  While The Shadow might have flopped at the box office, the pinball version is nicely complicated and well planned. The same cannot be said, unfortunately, for Johnny Mnemonic, which falls into the bad game, bad movie category. Apart from a weird bonus multiball grid and modes that don’t mean anything, Johnny has a single goal—something called the super spinner—that awards such an unbalanced number of points that it dwarfs all other strategies on the game. If you light the super spinner, a single shot to the circular spinner target can be worth more than the rest of your entire game.

  I know about the super spinner shot; then again, so do half the people at PAPA. But because I owned Johnny Mnemonic for a few years in grad school, I also know every nuance of the machine—yes, it was a lackluster game, but it was a lackluster game in my house.

  And at PAPA, it’s one of the ten games in C Division.

  I head straight to my old companion and put up a great score, more than 1.2 billion points. If I can rock four other machines, I’ll be doing great.