Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  Today, the abundance of leagues predicted by—and partially brought about by—Roger Sharpe has come to pass. And with league victories worth world pinball player ranking (WPPR) points that contribute to a player’s worldwide ranking, success in pinball leagues can actually place one within flipping distance of earning the World Pinball Champion title.

  “Pretty much anything competitive pinball related didn’t exist before my dad and Steve Epstein invented it,” Josh Sharpe wrote to me. It began with a recognition that bowling leagues brought players into bowling alleys on otherwise slow nights—maybe, Roger and Epstein thought, the same could happen to arcades.

  In early 1978, Roger started asking himself how exactly a pinball league would work. It would be more complicated than bowling, for example, where a lane is basically a lane, whether you play in a league in Cleveland or El Paso. A score of two hundred on one bowling lane is as impressive as a score of two hundred on another lane. But pinball machines—even different copies of the same machine—can handle quite differently. One could be set with a tighter tilt or a shallower incline or a malfunctioning gizmo or a weak flipper that makes a certain ramp shot impossible.

  So Sharpe, along with Broadway Arcade owner Steve Epstein and their friend Lionel Martinez, began gathering data to help design their new league scoring system. And by “gathering data,” I mean playing tons of pinball.

  For the next three years, the founders of what they called MES (Martinez, Epstein, and Sharpe) International played thousands of games, meticulously recording their scores. They then used those numbers to lay the foundations of a league scoring system, the heart of which is that players compete against their groupmates on a given machine, not against everyone who’s ever played that game in any location. In 1980, MES International was ready to begin testing and tweaking their scoring system in a Sunday-morning league at a New Jersey arcade called Game Town.

  Today some pinball leagues still play in arcades. Others can be found in restaurants, bars, or even private homes. Anyplace with a few pinball machines can host a league, provided it can recruit sufficient players. One goal of the original leagues, Sharpe says, was to feed players to the various larger competitions, and it’s still working: WPPR points accumulated for league play increase a player’s overall ranking, and every New Year’s Day, sixty-four of the top-ranked players are asked to compete in the IFPA World Pinball Championship (not to be confused with the PAPA World Pinball Championships), an invitation-only tournament reserved for the best of the best.

  That’s not me.

  It’s been more than four years since I played in a weekly pinball league, having retired my flipper fingers shortly before Maya was born. I even remember panicking about whether she might arrive early and prevent me from competing in that season’s finals.

  With Marina’s full (but tenuous) permission, I have now signed up to play an eight-week season, partly to practice for the next World Pinball Championships and partly to learn why pinball leagues have recently become so popular. As of my first week back, IFPA registers a whopping 237 independent pinball leagues around the world, with a collective population of over six thousand players, from the Alley Pass Pinball League in Flint, Michigan, to the WNY Pinball League in Rochester, New York. There’s a London Pinball League in England and a London Pinball League in Ontario. There’s the Space City Pinball League in Houston, the Magic City Pinball League in Birmingham, Alabama, the Liga de Pinball de Madrid, and the Osnabrücker Flipperliga in Osnabrück, Germany. Even in my local area, there are two separately operating pinball leagues, the Free State Pinball Association and the DC-Maryland-Virginia (DMV) Pinball League, with nearly two hundred players between them.

  I join the DMV League, since it allows players to compete once per week at any league location—this Mexican restaurant in Baltimore on Wednesday nights, this bar in Glen Burnie, Maryland, on Tuesdays. For my first week, on a frigid Sunday night in January, I walk into the Black Cat, one of the hippest venues in DC. It’s hip in the earned, legitimate sense, not in the quinoa sense—for more than two decades, the Black Cat has hosted indie bands that cool people have heard of in a checker-tiled, brick-walled, standing-room-only theater with room for seven hundred people. And now, somehow, in the maroon-walled bar at the front of the venue, someone has convinced them to plug in a bunch of pinball machines.

  A sign on the door reads, “NO CROWD SURFING OR STAGE DIVING OR YOU WILL BE REMOVED WITHOUT REFUND,” presumably a warning for concertgoers, not for pinball players. Fair enough, Black Cat.

  Many of my fellow league members look like the nonpinball patrons of the Black Cat, who on this night have gathered in a different part of the club to hear a Southern politipop performer called the Grey A covering Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.” Maybe that’s how pinball leagues are filling their ranks—with the sort of modern urbanites choosing between this, dodgeball, and darts.

  Pierce McLain, an early thirties tattooed Black Cat employee with his head partly shaved in a manner inscrutably yet casually cooler than anything I’ll ever achieve fashion-wise, welcomes the new players and divides us into groups of three. I crush my opponents that night on all four games we play, and as the weeks pass, I develop a habit of hitting the reload button while on the DMV Pinball Standings web page at least twice a day, watching the new scores come in. I’m scoring high and fist-pumping my way home each night, describing every victory to Marina, who cares very little.

  One week, I can’t get into the Black Cat. There’s a line of people down the block, some of whom have camped there in the cold for hours. I’d later learn that they’ve all turned out to hear Australian singer-songwriter Matt Corby, who I’ve never heard of, and frankly, his fans are blocking the pinball machines.

  Corby’s presence makes league night a little more interesting; we get to witness multiple concertgoers yelling at the Black Cat’s management (“We waited for three hours in the cold, and now you’re telling me that because I don’t have my ID . . .”), each crisis effectively diffused by a Black Cat worker with a firm, “You don’t want to go to fucking jail.”

  Corby probably isn’t a pinball fanatic, but there’s one musician who definitely is. It’s Ed Robertson, lead singer of Barenaked Ladies. A self-described “pinball freak,” Robertson has a personal game room filled with pinball machines. In 2015, Barenaked Ladies even released a pinball-centric album, Silverball, with pinball not only appearing in the album’s title and art but also featuring prominently in music videos for the songs “Silverball”6 and “Say What You Want.” The former was filmed in Robertson’s game room; in the latter, the band performs the song inside a giant pinball machine. Robertson even once injured his hand—the one he needs for the guitar—by playing too much pinball.

  I’m no Ed Robertson, but in the league, I’m playing surprisingly well. I almost feel like I know what I’m doing. It helps that many of my randomly assigned opponents are new to pinball—I’m even playing against people who flip both flippers at once. In pinball, that’s kind of the mark of an amateur, someone so unused to the game’s geometry that they flail with every possible resource whenever the ball comes near.7

  The double-flippers remind me of an incident involving a kid named Herb I used to play chess with at summer camp. Herb was some kind of chess champion, and he almost always beat me, but I learned a lot from him—and as you may be picturing, neither of us had an overabundance of conflicting social obligations.

  One day, one of the jocks in our bunk asked to play. As was often the case throughout childhood, we couldn’t be certain if he was making fun of us, though he probably was.

  “No,” Herb told the jock. “You’re not good enough.” Though not the kindest reply, this was a great moment in nerddom, the ability to exclude a popular kid, who looked genuinely hurt that someone told him no. The jock begged, and finally Herb reluctantly let him sit down to play.

  The jock opened by advancing his rook’s pawn, a completely useless move. Herb never touched his own piece
s. He just said, “See. You’re not good enough.” And he took his board away.

  The double flip is the rook’s pawn opening of pinball. In my attempt to avoid acting like Herb, I’m becoming self-conscious, congratulating the newbies when they do well, cursing myself when I drain, and pretty much staying silent otherwise.

  To avoid playing in pinball league on Valentine’s Day (the correct choice, I’m told), I switch to a venue that meets on Thursday nights, Lyman’s Tavern—named after owner Kevin Perone’s grandfather, not pinball designer Lyman Sheats. It’s a narrow bar in DC that serves drinks in mason jars, features a giant mural of chimerical jackalopes clutching cans of Pabst, and embraces pinball down to the painted flippers on the marquis.

  “Gift of the gods!” yells my groupmate Francis, a short, jocular fellow with a shaved head, as he drains his ball on Star Trek. He explains that his unique expletive came from a shot on Gilligan’s Island (1991) during an intense tournament. When “Gift of the Gods” is lit in the left outlane, draining the ball that way awards one million points—to all of your opponents. This shot cost Francis the tournament, so when he loses a ball in a manner he deems unfair, he yells, “Gift of the gods!”

  Even at Lyman’s, playing against more experienced opponents, I’m still winning most games. I don’t get it. Maybe it’s luck. Maybe I’m actually learning how to play well. Or maybe it’s a gift of the gods.

  The next week at Lyman’s, I notice that two machines have been changed out since my previous visit—Flight 2000 (1980) and Genie (1979) have now become James Cameron’s Avatar (2010) and Red and Ted’s Road Show (1992).8 Switching machines around is no small task. Moving a pinball machine requires a special dolly and, depending on how far one is moving it, a van. Most games on location will sit in their designated spots for years; rotating in the other members of one’s collection shows unusual dedication on the part of the operator. In other words, to swap out two games, you have to feel confident that the increased profit will offset the amount of hassle—or you just have to do it for the love of variety in pinball. Perone, who owns both the bar and the machines inside, clearly loves pinball.

  One day after a league night, I find myself opening a secret browser window and Googling “tingling left arm.” In movies, this is a precursor to a heart attack. My entire left arm has been tingling all morning, as though it’s fallen asleep but just won’t recover.

  Various legitimate-sounding websites confirm my fears, but it also may be one of a dozen other things. Did I recently put unusual strain on my arms or fingers? Well . . . I did score ten billion on Attack from Mars. So I guess there’s that. Luckily the tingling subsides after a day, but now I can add “made me think I was dying” to the list of things pinball has done for me.

  Despite the generally cheery environment of pinball league, I get to see a few heated disputes over rules, particularly regarding unplanned misfortunes at the hands of physics. The official ruling for these occurrences, adopted from rules outlined by PAPA and IFPA, sounds like a good description of life in general: “Unusual events and outright malfunctions cannot be prevented, nor can they be perfectly compensated for.”

  Pinball’s fast-paced unpredictability, in fact, has led PAPA and IFPA to categorize no fewer than seven different types of malfunctions and their consequences: minor malfunctions, major malfunctions (breaking a flipper), known malfunctions (a broken flipper everyone knows about in advance), catastrophic malfunctions (power outage), beneficial malfunctions (a broken tilt bob), stuck balls (problematic during normal play but beneficial during multiball), and player errors (bashing the machine around so severely that you tilt not only your own ball, but the next player’s).

  The DMV League’s specific rule set is a delightful combination of strict and casual. Other rules include “Please have clean hands” and “Reserve trash talking for members you know are cool with it.”

  I don’t know anyone well enough to know if they’re cool with it, so I do my trash talking gleefully out loud alone on the ride home. By the time the eight-week season ends and the finals begin, I’m somehow in first place out of the 108 players in the league, just above former FSPA player Dave Hubbard.

  The IFPA website says Hubbard ranks in the top one hundred worldwide, even once rising as high as fourteenth. Like a cartoon character on a tightrope only becoming scared when he sees how high up he’s balanced, learning Hubbard’s international ranking induces a crisis of confidence. Suddenly I’m picturing every opponent as Dave Hubbard, a tall, sandy-haired man in his early forties with a goatee and a seemingly endless pinball T-shirt collection who sometimes engages in vociferous online debates about rules and policies. In my imagination, he’s racking up a world-class score on some game, which I’ve certainly seen him do before, and I’m flailing at air. He plays in A Division at PAPA, for goodness sake. He gave advice to Lyman Sheats. When he sees my name as an opponent, he must be relieved.

  To prepare for the finals, I surf PAPA’s massive collection of pinball tutorial videos starring the one-and-only self-deprecating pinball champion Bowen Kerins. “Hey, it’s Bowen, and we’re here at PAPA to play some Walking Dead pinball, one of the newest machines from Stern,” he narrates in a much-watched YouTube clip as the camera pans over the Walking Dead (2014) playfield.

  Next comes a wide-angle shot showing Kerins lingering by the machine like a trespasser in the otherwise empty PAPA facility. “I tend to have difficulty with this game,” he lies, “but let’s give it a shot and see how far we can get.”

  Kerins’s gameplay is amazing. If the ball approaches his flipper, he rarely bats it back onto the playfield—he catches it. His game is all about control, and he regularly makes the shots he’s aiming for, partially because he’s just that accurate and partially because, with a caught ball, he can take his time with each shot. It’s not a fun and fast-paced way to play the game, but it works. Kerins calmly narrates the whole game, describing his strategy and often disparaging his mistakes. His games frequently run over an hour.

  There are several ways to catch the ball on a flipper, many of them demonstrated by Kerins in a separate set of tutorial video clips on the PAPA website. I can do the “dead bounce,” in which one refuses to flip when the ball falls toward the flippers from a certain angle, letting it bounce easily from the still flipper onto the other flipper. Then there’s the “drop catch,” which I can’t do—hold the flipper up and release it the moment the ball touches it, thus killing its momentum.

  The “live catch” is harder to describe. The ball rolls toward a flipper, and then there’s a subtle and perfectly timed slap, and then . . . the player is cradling the ball. It looks for all the world like the ball is under a magic spell, or like there’s an electromagnet in the flipper. It’s a crucial part of Kerins’s strategy: Catch everything. Mitigate risk. “If you don’t have a reason to shoot something,” he told the Pavlov Pinball blog in 2014, “then it is a bad idea because you are putting the ball in danger with no purpose.”

  I read recently about the phenomenon of people watching other people play video games on YouTube. The practice was presented semimockingly, implying that we’ve discovered new depths of laziness—not just stagnating in our living rooms with Xbox controllers in our hands but stagnating in our bedrooms, staring at laptops, watching other people play Xbox.

  But I’m not like them, I think as I watch another hour of Kerins playing pinball. This is not the same thing at all.

  Not that his techniques help me in the finals. Inspired by Kerins, I start the first round of the finals by choosing The Walking Dead against a player who—oops—has the same machine in his basement.

  Still, somehow I survive the various eliminations throughout the day to make it to the very last round. I shake hands with the other three finalists, wishing everyone good luck. Per the conclusions of the New York City Council, it may be more appropriate to wish them all good skill, but these guys already have it. Somehow my premonitions have come true, and here I am, about to start t
he finals, proud and amazed to have made it this far but knowing that I’m about to lose to Dave Hubbard.

  Yet . . . I don’t. By the last ball of the last game, Medieval Madness, I’m feeling different. I’m feeling sweaty. It’s a good sweat, an adrenaline sweat, a sweat born of tuned focus. I’m going medieval on Medieval Madness. I’m live catching, actually live catching like Kerins in his videos, and when I finally drain and release my fingers from the flipper buttons, there’s applause. I look around to see who the applause is for, but it’s for me. What the fuck? It’s for me. In this bar, in this city, on this day, I’m the A Division finalist whose game people are watching, the same way I watched Kerins and Elwin and Cayle George from the bleachers at PAPA. I’m the slap-saving, live catching whirlwind of pinball magic who might have squeaked into the finals, sure, but I belong here. I belong here.

  Clutching my envelope of $100 cash—local league prizes aren’t quite at the level of PAPA’s—I smile and pose with Dave Hubbard in a photo for the DMV Pinball League’s Facebook page. Hubbard holds up two fingers, and I hold up one.

  I still don’t know how the hell I did it. Nor do I know whether I could ever do it again, or whether Marina would even let me try. But I guess that’s all it takes, right? One good ball. One good game. One good day.

  6

  Space Invaders

  * * *

  THE MID- TO LATE ’70S were a wonderful time for pinball. Games could be found at Laundromats, in drugstores, even capping the ends of aisles at supermarkets. Sharpe had done his song and dance for the New York City Council, and it worked: at one point, the largest manufacturers—Bally, Williams, Gottlieb, and Chicago Coin—were designing and producing eight to twelve new titles a year—each. That’s about forty different games per year. (By contrast, nowadays, there are around three to five titles a year across the entire industry.) And, unlikely as it must have seemed at the time, pinball found fame as the subject of a certain rock opera by the Who.