Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  Entries six and seven include an NBA Fastbreak game with a total score of . . . eight. Yes, eight points. I’m never playing NBA Fastbreak again.

  As midnight approaches, bringing with it the end of qualifying, I have time for only one more entry, so it’s all riding on number eight. Miraculously, it’s a good entry—four decent scores, including an okay score on NBA Fastbreak, which I had previously promised never to play again. This puts me in striking distance of the finals, provided my fifth game is good.

  I run some numbers, compare the remaining games, and determine that I can feel confident about qualifying if I score 1.5 million on High Speed or 700,000 on Centaur (1981). I need some expert advice, so I find Scott and Sergio, two FSPA players who know the games well.

  The question is which task do they think is harder—scoring 1.5 million on High Speed or 700,000 on Centaur? The answer, Scott and Sergio agree, is meh, either one.

  I realize I’m disappointed, not just because they didn’t reach a clear conclusion but also because it doesn’t appear I’ve posed an interesting question. I guess I had envisioned a lively debate about the merits of each strategy, but instead I found two tired players who didn’t really care all that much what game I chose for my fifth game of my eighth entry in C Division.

  Many obsessive hobbyists know this sense of pointlessness. It’s one of those moments when it hits you that the thing you’ve been focusing on all day, the goal for which you’ve striven, the path whose details you’ve analyzed to death, is something that no one else really cares about. Trust me, I know that feeling well—I used to be a grad student.

  “The beauty of pinball—different from video games, by and large, and a lot of other endeavors—is that there’s no single right way to play,” Roger Sharpe once told me. “Any approach, depending on the level of effectiveness and risk and reward, can be just as good—and get you the same results.” So I close my eyes and choose High Speed.

  A million and a half points, and then I’m in the playoffs. A million and a half points, and then I’m in the playoffs. Shoot the highway loops, Scott said, and the ramp if it’s convenient. Here we go.

  Aaaaand . . . here we do not go. Here we hit no freaking loops at all. Here we end the game with 366,000. Here we yet again fumble what should have been a doable attempt to make the playoffs. As I can hear Jack Bauer say repeatedly on the adjacent 24 machine, “Damn it.”

  It’s 11:16 PM. I rush to the front desk to buy a ninth entry, an entry I’ll barely have time to play, but screw it. As the poker players would say if asked to make pinball puns, I’m on tilt.

  “And you’re the last one,” says the woman at the front desk. That would be a relief to hear, except she’s said it to the man in front of me.

  Decorum, if it had existed in the first place, is gone now. I’m in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, on a Saturday night, my armpits are wet, my contact lenses are dry, and I still smell like the hoagie I ate twelve hours ago. Guess what time it is, boys and girls! It’s begging time!

  Somehow my begging works, and the woman sells me entry nine. I run back to the games, not stopping to second-guess whether I’ve just debased myself in front of strangers, and I have no time to spare, so I can only choose short-playing games, and I’ve gotta finish gotta finish, and I quickly zip through three good games and two bad ones, and then—

  “Hey,” booms a voice over the loudspeaker, “you know what time it is. Aww yeah.”

  That “aww yeah” marks midnight,5 the end, done, and after some last-minute shuffling, with the top twenty-four advancing to the playoffs tomorrow, I’m in twenty-eighth place.

  “So you don’t need to play tomorrow?” Marina asks on the phone.

  “Uh, no.”

  “What time will you be home?”

  “Well, I’m still going to watch the A Division finals, and those end around 5:00—”

  “So you’ll be back after we’re all asleep.”

  “Yeah. I guess so. It’s a five-hour drive.”

  “Okay,” she says, and because I’m male, I have absolutely no ability to gauge from her tone whether it’s really okay.

  “And . . . after the finals . . . there’s kind of like a big party, where they turn down the lights, and everyone plays pinball and gets drunk,” I continue, then pause to assess the silence. I can’t, so I err on the side of good judgment, finishing the sentence with, “but I don’t need to stay for that.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  I’ve abandoned my kids for the weekend, left my wife on solo childcare duty, and—oh, shoot—forgot to call my grandmother to wish her a happy birthday, all so that I can shove a little ball around. Seriously, it sounds like I should be confessing this to a therapist: “First I started leaving my kids on the weekends. Then I missed my grandmother’s birthday. Then I converted Maya’s college fund into tokens.”

  I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that most of this is not okay.

  8

  The Day Pinball Died

  * * *

  PINBALL HAD ONE LAST SHOT. The industry had been on life support for much of the late ’90s, selling about tenfold fewer machines in 1999 than in 1992. If pinball was to have a future, manufacturers would need to do something drastic.

  “Management said we need to make it profitable,” said designer George Gomez in a now-famous seminar at the annual public Pinball Expo, later transcribed verbatim in Pinball Player, the magazine of the Pinball Owners Association. It was Saturday, October 23, 1999, and Gomez had arrived to triumphantly boast how he and his dedicated coworkers had just saved the industry with their new invention. WMS, Gomez’s employer, told him and his fellow designers that “the world has changed. Nobody wants what you guys are doing. You’re boring everybody. Invent something new.”

  To Gomez’s colleagues, it must have seemed like a “What more do you want from me?” moment. All they’d done for the past several years was innovate; each new game was cleverer than the last, and still pinball was going down the toilet.

  So Gomez, with the help of Pat Lawlor, Lyman Sheats, and dozens of others, devised something innovative. Something no one had created before, something fantastic and fun, something that, according to game designer Duncan Brown, “actually turned a profit for the first time in a long time.”

  Perhaps you’ve seen Pinball 2000, the mashup of pinball and video games that WMS produced as its Hail Mary pass. It was essentially a regular pinball machine, slightly smaller, but with a holographic video display somehow magically projected perpendicular to the playfield. Playing Pinball 2000, a.k.a. PB2K, was like playing real, physical pinball from inside a video game. The first machine using Pinball 2000 technology was called Revenge from Mars (1999), and among other neat holographic tricks, for example, the game could project a little green Martian at the bottom of a ramp—and sending the pinball up that ramp “squashed” the Martian, which vanished after a brief animated death.

  No two ways about it, PB2K was awesome. For a while, it looked like the geniuses at WMS had done it again, inventing not just a new gadget but rather a whole new revolutionary platform for pinball machines, devised from the ground up, amazing, beloved, lucrative.

  But not lucrative enough. And when Gomez gave his seminar at Pinball Expo, he must have felt the winds of change starting to blow. “My spider sense has been on fire this last month,” Gomez cautiously concluded his talk. “Pinball will survive . . . [but] I fear that our company may have lost the ability to make it make economic sense. If that’s the case, being as it’s a business, they might choose not to be in the pinball business.”

  Unfortunately, Gomez’s spider sense was excellent. On the very next working day after Gomez’s seminar, Monday, October 25, 1999, WMS—the only publicly traded pinball company, which at the time had a 70–75 percent market share in the pinball industry (the rest belonged to Stern Pinball, which had recently bought Sega)—stopped producing pinball machines forever.

  CEO Kevin Verner told the Chicago Tribune that he did
n’t want “to continue losing money.” Ironically, Williams redoubled its efforts as a manufacturer of slot machines—apparently Verner had no problem helping lots of other people lose money.

  I’ve always found the decision to ditch pinball for slots ironically appropriate for historical reasons: from gambling devices came pinball, and to gambling devices pinball manufacturers returned.

  “They handled that all really badly,” writes Brown, who was one of the employees on the WMS chopping block on October 25. He and his colleagues, who had just spent a cautious but gratifying weekend at Pinball Expo, where Gomez gave his seminar, “had a very strange morning, with rumors swirling around and weird card access and computer network things coming and going.” Finally, at an all-company meeting in the cafeteria, Brown, Gomez, Lawlor, and everyone else was asked to leave.

  The wheels of industry ground to a halt over the span of a few weeks, with the grand layoff followed by the shuttering of factories. In November, Williams made its last pinball game in Waukegan, Wisconsin. After Revenge from Mars, they had begun selling their second PB2K title, Star Wars: Episode I (1999). The Day Pinball Died is immortalized within the game’s code; shooting the right ramp to spell “JAR JAR” awards 19,992,510 points—a reference to October 25, 1999.

  I ask Brown, who jumped on the sinking Williams ship in 1997 and helped program Episode I, why WMS would request something like Pinball 2000, and then, when Gomez and his team produced exactly what they wanted, kill pinball anyway.

  Part of the answer, he says, lies in a management decision to raise the prices of both PB2K machines to recoup costs. Distributors balked at the new price, which WMS refused to change, and suddenly the momentum from Pinball 2000’s sales started to slow.

  Another reason was South Park (1999). At the same time WMS debuted the magical Pinball 2000, Sega—not yet sold to Stern—made a South Park pinball machine based on the irreverent cartoon series. The South Park game had no innovation, no triumphs of engineering prowess. But it did have a large toilet and a toy Kenny you could kill and talking feces. It was South Park.

  Brown explains that WMS had gone all in on the narrative that Pinball 2000 was the wave of the future, convincing operators that the added expense “would pay off in the cashbox.” Yet perhaps because players simply enjoyed the theme, South Park earned just as much for operators as either Pinball 2000 game.

  In December, just a few weeks before the Y2K bug that would wreak nothing upon no one, the Chicago Tribune declared “Pinball Runs Out of Wizardry.” The Economist later agreed, in a depressing article called “The Last Pinball Machine,” making a “game over” joke and announcing that “nobody much cares anymore” about pinball.

  Toward the end of his 1999 Pinball Expo talk, the one Gomez gave just before losing his job, the soon-to-be-unemployed pinball designer had made one more prescient comment, this time about his competitor.

  “Gary Stern might just be the last man standing,” said Gomez.

  And then, he was.

  “For dedicated pinball players, there is only one ball left in play,” wrote Bruce Headlam in the New York Times on October 28, 1999, three days after WMS closed its pinball division. Headlam quoted pinball historian Russ Jensen, who feared that “with one company left, there’s the possibility that pinball may not live into the next millennium.” And the current millennium only had two months left in it.

  Gary Stern, the last man standing, grew up in a culture of pinball manufacturing. In the 1930s, when pin games were starting to appear on every bar counter, a young Sam Stern, Gary’s father, decided to get in on the action. He bought a few games, installed them in drugstores, and stopped by to empty the coin trays before dates, hopefully with women who didn’t question why he bought their drinks with pennies. One night, Sam discovered that one of his games had a jammed coin acceptor—those readers of a certain age will recall when coin acceptors, like those at the laundromat, were long, flat pieces of metal you had to physically slide into a machine to deposit money.

  Dismantling the machine, Sam Stern immediately discovered what was jamming the coin acceptor: many, many coins.

  He decided to become a full-time pinball operator, naming his new company Scott Cross—a name that meant absolutely nothing but that his friend in advertising thought sounded snappy. (To me, it sounds like the protagonist of a Christian graphic novel in which groups of teenagers learn the evils of binge drinking, but I’m not in the 1930s.)

  Sam Stern eventually graduated from operator to distributor, growing his business and selling coin-operated machines in Philadelphia. In 1947, he met with one of his suppliers, pinball mogul Harry Williams. Semijoking, Sam Stern put his feet up on Williams’s desk and asked, “Why don’t you sell me the company?”

  “Harry said, ‘I have to think about that,’ went up in his airplane, flew around Chicago for three hours, came down, and sold my father half of Williams,”1 Gary Stern told me. Gary, who was two years old at the time, is now the seventy-year-old CEO of Stern Pinball, which was—until very recently—the last participant in a dying industry.

  With his open-collared white Oxford shirt and long fringe of swept-back white hair, Gary Stern looks every bit like an ex-lawyer with membership in a yacht club, which makes sense, since he’s an ex-lawyer with membership in a yacht club. His thick-rimmed white eyeglasses look like an Apple product. You can tell just from his appearance that he’s an iconic figure, a personality, a CEO. He can often be found carrying a glass of what he calls “adult water” (i.e., vodka—Russian, he says, not Latvian).

  “Gary, please,” I hear him correct someone who calls him Mister Stern. “Mister Stern was my father, or, when I was a kid, the dog’s name was Mister. So Mister Stern was a schnauzer.”

  At age sixteen, young Gary Stern began a summer job in the stockroom at Williams. The position gave Stern a direct sight line into what he now considers the most important part of pinball manufacturing: inventory control. He immediately noticed how a product with thousands of parts could see its profits evaporate if the manufacturer overordered—or, worse, how manufacturing halted if they underordered. You can have the best game in the world, but if your flipper bat supplier is two months late delivering the flipper bats, you can’t make games. The secret sauce then—and this is probably the least spicy secret sauce imaginable—is a well-maintained material requirements planning, or MRP, program.

  “The most important thing that the Engineering Design Department does is not the playfield layout,” says Stern. “It’s the bill of materials, the parts list, that drives the MRP.” Imagine the nightmare of building a pinball machine without one. The bill of materials can run up to twenty single-spaced pages, but each item on it is vital. “If they leave off a ball guide,” Stern points out, “all of a sudden we’ve got a million, two million dollars’ worth of parts with which you can build nothing.” In today’s Stern Pinball factory, six different games are in production at any given time, all with different lead times for parts.

  From the 1960s through the 1990s, Sam Stern and his son ended up at the helm of several amusement companies—Chicago Coin, Data East Pinball, Sega Pinball, even jukebox manufacturer Seeburg Corporation—primarily under the umbrella of Stern Electronics. On the day in 1999 that WMS stopped making pinball machines, Gary Stern had been running competitor Sega Pinball for over a decade, and he had a choice: bail or commandeer a potentially doomed monopoly. Did he really want to remain, as he told the Chicago Tribune, “the last dinosaur”—the world’s only manufacturer of a product the world seemed not to want?

  He did. For the first decade of the new millennium, Stern Pinball turned out games on reliable licensed themes, like Austin Powers (2001), Elvis (2004), CSI (2008), and appropriately, given Stern’s lack of competitors, Monopoly (2001). That was the general landscape when I first joined my pinball league in 2003: pinball had passed its heyday, but at least for now, Gary Stern was keeping it from vanishing completely.

  In 2008, as anyone with money remembers,
everything went to shit. The economy tanked, and one of the first things people stopped buying were expensive toys for their basements. In a down economy, Wal-Mart thrives. Pinball does not.

  In my lifetime, I’ve now seen three deaths of pinball: in the mid-’80s, the late ’90s, and 2008. Stern Pinball, like most businesses, simply couldn’t function without customers. The only pinball manufacturer in the world was about to drain its last ball. But then along came a man named Dave Peterson.

  Unlike Roger Sharpe or Gary Stern, Peterson was neither a pinball fanatic nor a manufacturer. He was the managing director of Hagerty Peterson, a firm described on its own home page in the following exciting terms: “a merchant bank and private equity investment and advisory firm that builds companies by providing strategic direction, active management, board representation, and supporting capital.” In other words, they save dying companies. Stern Pinball was a dying company.

  Peterson had worked as a lawyer, first for the SEC and then for Morgan Stanley. His expertise in management and marketing—along with actual cash money from Peterson’s investors—kept Stern afloat during the economic downturn.

  Tall and lean with close-cropped, military-style graying hair, Peterson is the sort of person who needs to only speak for one or two sentences before you know he’s a business guy.

  “We were just concerned that this was going to be another ‘buggy whip’ company and wasn’t going to last long,” Peterson told the Chicago Daily Herald in 2015. The old business school analogy goes that when Ford introduced cars, buggy whips became a dead-end product.2

  The first problem Peterson noticed was that Stern Pinball had alienated part of its market. Gary Stern was unenthused about enthusiasts, and in a muzzle-the-CEO moment, he actually told them he didn’t need their business. Many collectors recall Gary appearing at Pinball Expo, the annual gathering for people with dozens of machines in their home arcades, and telling them they’re not his market—he was only interested in selling machines to operators who could place them in bars to gather quarters. The operator market is important, of course, but you don’t want to tell your biggest fans to buzz off. (Jody Dankberg, Stern’s director of marketing and licensing, maintains that his CEO was only trying to reinforce the necessity of supporting on-location pinball and has been repeatedly misquoted.)