Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  2. Digger machines were similar to claw machines, except instead of trying to win one large item, players controlled a miniature excavator that scooped up a few small items—gum or candy, for example. Or, as Moss no doubt despised, coins. Some gaming establishments, not bold enough to stock the diggers with coins but aware that their clients weren’t there for the gum or candy, instead used a standard buyback program. One patron described using a digger machine to win a small clock, which he handed over to a clerk, who “looked at a card and advised me that he would give me 75 cents for the clock.”

  3. Not for the first or the last time, Europeans in the 1930s simply looked at Americans and shrugged. Some pinball machines there dispensed free game tokens, but the fact that tokens were tokens and money was money appears to have settled the whole business in Europe.

  4. This last bit of trivia struck me as unlikely, since Ocean City is home to Jilly’s Arcade, which has included pinball since 1976. So I contacted journalist and pinball expert Seth Porges, who wrote the Popular Mechanics piece, and he happened to be in the middle of filming a minidocumentary for the New York Times investigating that very topic. The result: it turns out the law, which is indeed still on the books, only applies to pinball machines inside businesses that aren’t arcades—so Jilly’s is operating legally, much to the relief of director of operations Jody Levchuk, whom I think I scared with an e-mail asking if he knew whether Jilly’s was violating the law.

  5. The distinction between “extra ball” and “add-a-ball” is purely semantic but vitally important. Bingo machines, which looked somewhat like pinball machines but were unquestionably gambling devices, had been using the term “extra ball” liberally—so the term “add-a-ball” was coined, so to speak, to emphasize the distinction. Pinball historians will refer to a particular location by the type of pinball that was legal there—for example, saying something like, “Wisconsin was an add-a-ball state.”

  Notes

  1. I propose calling it MAMA.

  2. Paul Faris, who created the artwork for the 1978 Playboy, has said that Hugh Hefner disliked the machine’s backglass because it prominently featured Playboy models and not Hef. Because let’s be real: people don’t read Playboy for the articles, they read it for Hef.

  3. And the list of Native American–themed games goes on. O. D. Jennings and Company made Red Man (1934). Lindstrom Tool and Toy produced Indian Chief (1934). Italian manufacturer AMI did Navajo (1976). Williams made Arrow Head (1952), Thunderbird (1954), Tom Tom (1963), and, not to be confused with either of Gottlieb’s Big Indian or its two-player version Big Brave, the 1965 game Big Chief. Gottlieb itself also made Golden Arrow (1977) and Sweet Sioux (1959), the latter of which semi-ironically hosted one of the company’s standard slogans on its backglass: “Amusement Pinball, as American as Baseball and Hot Dogs!” And, you know, Native Americans.

  Notes

  1. Interestingly, as I discovered, the Silver Ball Museum doesn’t post “OUT OF ORDER” signs on nonfunctional machines. Instead, the signs say “UNDER RESTORATION.” Neat trick.

  Notes

  1. Arthur “the Fonz” Fonzarelli, Henry Winkler’s leather-jacket-wearing, motorcycle-riding rebel character on Happy Days, was often seen playing pinball—which, in both the 1950s (when the show was set) and the 1970s (when it was filmed), was a low-grade act of insurrection, tantamount to his ability to score free music on the jukebox with a well-placed fist pound. In 1977, Coleco released a stripped-down Fonzie-themed pinball machine, the wonderful commercial for which has been uploaded to YouTube by the Museum of Chicago Classic Television. “Aaay! It’s me talkin’! The Fonz Pinball! Wanna play me?” the game yells at a faux-surprised boy in bellbottoms, who, as you may guess, ends the commercial giving the camera a big double thumbs-up. It was a home model of a pinball machine, a cheap minigame with folding legs that kinda sorta brought the excitement of pinball into the rumpus room. The game lit up and even used legitimate flippers, but it had the sturdiness of a card table, so it wouldn’t last if a player decided to, as Fonzie would say, sit on it. Incidentally, an interview request I sent to Winkler’s agent, on a whim, was met with a polite but decisive reply that “Henry’s schedule is swamped and he is unavailable,” even though I had attempted to get my foot in the door by revealing that I attended Hebrew school with his cousin’s daughter.

  2. See, he does read it for the articles.

  3. Sharpe, carrying a pistol and wearing a sheriff’s star on his Wild West vest, would later appear on the backglass of the 1979 game Sharpshooter, a buxom maiden hanging from each pant leg—one of whom was, and still is, his wife, Ellen. Sharpe designed the game, and he’s hardly the only pinball designer to sneak his own likeness into a game’s artwork. Thanks to the “Hidden Artwork on Pinball Machines” page on the Belgian website Flippers.be, we know that artist Python Anghelo drew his head on a snake on Bad Cats (1989), John Youssi and his young son can be seen on Funhouse, Greg Kmiec is a pilot on the Supersonic (1979) playfield, and John Popadiuk appears as an acrobat on Cirqus Voltaire (1997). Popadiuk, not content to limit the Easter eggs in his art to homo sapiens, even drew his cat on three different machines—Cirqus Voltaire, Theatre of Magic, and World Cup Soccer (1994). Cat people, am I right?

  4. According to Section 4-304 of a very large legal document, this is true, unless the rats are used for research purposes. Whether rats can be trained to play pinball may never be determined, at least not in Billings—but you’ll be thrilled, if unsurprised, to learn that the Internet has no shortage of videos of perplexed cats trying to swat pinballs beneath the playfield glass. Again with the cat people.

  5. Drunk History also implied that Sharpe had never previously played the machine the council put before him, adding to his mystique as a profoundly talented pinball sight-reader. “Yeah, right,” Sharpe told me. “I played all the games, and I’ve actually played every production game made since 1966. I take a lot of pride in that.” I guess, contrary to common sense, you just can’t entrust faithful communication of historical facts to drunk comedians.

  6. The lyrics to “Silverball” are wholeheartedly, unapologetically laden with pinball references, including lines like “The multiball was on track again / But I watched it fall through the center drain” and “I’ll change your mind if I nudge you oh so carefully.” The chorus is probably the finest example of combining pinball with sexual desire: “Light me up, and knock me down / I’m free game whenever you’re around. / So lock me in; we’re special bound, / ‘Cause you’re my silverball.” It’s a far cry from a much older song about pinball, Red Foley’s 1954 “Pinball Boogie,” whose protagonist eschews sexual desire in favor of pinball: “One night I had a chance to date a lovely girl. / I went into a joint to watch the pinball whirl. / I shook it and I shook it for a few free games. / It wasn’t long till I forgot about that dame.”

  7. The unnecessary double-button press is also sometimes frowned upon. At Pinball Perfection, the museum of pinball antiquity, I saw a warning sign that looked like a free-verse poem: FLAPPING FLIPPERS / LIKE BIRD WINGS / AND REPEATED DRUMMING WILL NOT BE / ALLOWED AND IS CAUSE FOR / EJECTION FROM THE MUSEUM / THIS IS NOT AN ARCADE / TAKE CARE OF THESE MACHINES / WAIT FOR THE BALL / ONE FLIPPER AT A TIME / THANK YOU.

  8. On Road Show, a construction-themed game featuring hard-hatted workers Red and Ted, someone has written on a beer coaster they’ve placed on top of the glass: “Congress has voted against funding our infrastructure. Red and Ted are unemployed. VOTE BERNIE!” Sometimes it’s easy to forget that I live in our nation’s capital. Sometimes it’s not.

  Notes

  1. Cohn was not easy to please. He would go on to negatively review Abbey Road in 1969, writing in the New York Times that the Beatles’ iconic album was an “unmitigated disaster” and calling individual songs “mediocrity incarnate” and “purest Mickey Mouse.” Yet the man was swayed by pinball. Go figure.

  2. The phrase “pinball wizard” has also become so much of a cliché in the pinball communit
y that I would like to hereby formally apologize for the title of this book. Every time an article about pinball appears in the mainstream press that uses the phrase “pinball wizard,” somewhere, each in their separate basements, thousands of pinball enthusiasts groan. So, I’m sorry.

  3. Pac-Man is the highest grossing arcade game in history, selling more than four hundred thousand cabinets and earning more than $1 billion in its first year alone. That’s billion, and it’s all in quarters. The name Pac-Man was coined (another arcade pun!) when the game moved from Japan to the United States because its previous moniker, Puck Man, was deemed too easy to vandalize into obscenity.

  4. According to arcade machine distributor BMI Gaming, in 1990, less than 5 percent of new pinball machines were sold directly to consumers. By 2007, the number had risen to 45 percent.

  5. I ordered grilled cheese stuffed with filet mignon. How very L.A.

  6. If the game you’re picturing has two obnoxious talking puppet heads on the playfield instead of one, then you’re remembering Red and Ted’s Road Show, Pat Lawlor’s 1992 creation that would later sport a “VOTE BERNIE!” beer coaster.

  7. Initially, 20,270, according to IPDB. The 20,232nd game produced broke the official record, and it appeared, along with the humans who designed and manufactured it, on the cover of RePlay Magazine. The game was so successful that Williams churned out another thousand in 1994 as a “Special Collector’s Edition” with gold-trimmed accents and numbered certificates of authenticity. Lawlor himself owns #1.

  8. You may have noticed that the acronym for the Williams Manufacturing Company ought to be WMC, not WMS. You’re very observant! The name WMS actually isn’t an acronym—it’s short for WilliaMS.

  9. IPDB reports that, in the modern history of pinball machines—in other words, the part that doesn’t include tabletop games like what they’ll play in ’32 (Ball-y-hoo!)—the number of games sharing that rarified air is forty-one. Twenty-eight of these were made during the arcade renaissance of 1975–1982, and the other thirteen all fall between 1986 and 1993. That’s how peak-y and trough-y pinball’s peaks and troughs are: no game selling more than ten thousand units was made during any other period.

  Notes

  1. Not to get too technical, but it’s worth explaining that WPPR points (sometimes called “whoppers” when speaking aloud) are the pinball expertise ranking system that survived a protracted battle. Whoppers are awarded like prizes when you win a tournament, which explains my dismal ranking, since I haven’t played many tournaments. For a few years, WPPR existed alongside a parallel ranking system called the PAPA Advanced Rating System (PARS). Full disclosure: when I said in the introduction that I peaked at eightieth in the world, it was according to PARS. At that time, WPPR had me at 232nd. I’m glad I got that off my chest.

  2. A notable exception is The Simpsons Pinball Party, which includes a Springfield Mystery Spot mode that reverses the action of each flipper—the left button controls the right flipper and vice versa. Many players find it easier to cross their arms and grab the opposite button rather than mentally cope with the change.

  3. The 2008 delirium pinball winner, Reidar Spets, scored eighty million points on a Fish Tales machine with a Theatre of Magic backglass, sounds from Terminator 2 (1991), and two reversed-button flippers—one an upside-down curvy “banana” flipper that Williams Electronics introduced and immediately abandoned in the late ’70s and one a tiny Addams Family miniflipper. Oh those crazy Swedes.

  4. The game would offer Infallible Mode. The buttons on the console would be A, B, and HOLY SEE. When your score is announced, white smoke rises from the machine. And so on.

  5. Sometimes midnight is a good time to play pinball. If you’re playing Johnny Mnemonic and the game’s internal clock hits midnight, everything suddenly goes nuts for a rare mode called Midnight Madness. I’ve, um, played Johnny Mnemonic at midnight a few times.

  Notes

  1. It was actually 49 percent, but still. Must have been some plane ride.

  2. As Peterson correctly told the Daily Herald, though, even buggy whips aren’t extinct. If you want one, just take a trip to Westfield Whip, the last surviving whip manufacturer in Westfield, Massachusetts, nicknamed the Whip City. Seriously. If you’ve ever watched horse-drawn carriages around New York’s Central Park, their fancy buggy whips had to come from somewhere.

  3. This doesn’t please everyone. On an electromechanical machine from the 1970s, there’s one rule set, and you can know it inside and out. On modern machines, not only have the rules become more complex, but there are even individual rules for each machine subtype and edition—and manufacturers issue software updates. So not only do Metallica (2013) Pro and Metallica Premium have different rules, so do Metallica Premium running software version 1.4 and Metallica Premium running software version 1.5.

  4. Stronger, but even a show like The Simpsons has trouble finding universal acceptance. In September 2005, an Arabic satellite TV station aired what it deemed a culturally acceptable version of The Simpsons in which all potentially offensive material had been removed, thus introducing the show to a new audience. Homer Simpson became Omar Shamshoon, Bart was Badr, and Krusty the Klown was renamed Maarmish, which means “crunchy.” Gone were all references to beer, bacon, homosexuality, Christianity, and Judaism. The resulting show was generally uninteresting, and it was cancelled after thirty-four episodes. Worst Arabization ever.

  5. This is a brilliant way of testing games still in the design phase, because among Stern’s employees are some fabulous pinball players and some complete novices, so they can see how players of all levels respond to their games.

  6. Interestingly, the dozen or so workers doing the wiring—at least today—are all women. There’s a clear gender divide between departments. Soldering: women. Packing and shipping: men. It’s like a middle school dance.

  7. One of the holy grails of pinball licensing is Harry Potter, though rumors swirl (and Roger Sharpe has confirmed) that author J. K. Rowling is uninterested in a Harry Potter machine, even though it would give new meaning to the term “pinball wizard.”

  8. Maybe it took so long because he read the books. According to Dankberg, when Ritchie was first approached about a Game of Thrones machine, he knew nothing about the fantasy novels or the television series—so he read all the books and watched every episode available. I’ve done the same, and the task occupied a full year.

  9. Because of the lead time required to design a pinball machine, Dankberg and Ritchie were two of the first civilians to hear the script of the 2013 film Star Trek Into Darkness. According to Dankberg, CBS couldn’t send him the script for the sake of secrecy, but they arranged to read it to him, Ritchie, and designer Greg Freres, just one time, over the phone. This plan faltered when Ritchie couldn’t hear the phone, and Dankberg spent over an hour hurriedly hand-transcribing the entire script on a legal pad for Ritchie to read.

  Notes

  1. That moniker came from Stern Pinball’s own press release for CSI. Interestingly, if you Google “Godfather of Pinball,” you’ll find the same honorific bestowed upon Roger Sharpe, Pat Lawlor, Pinball Hall of Fame owner Tim Arnold, Wisconsin-based tournament organizer Steve Tulley, someone named Kim who runs a pinball league in rural Ontario, game developer Steve Kordek, and a man called Berkeley Mac whose basement pinball parties partially inspired the creation of the Pacific Pinball Museum. I guess everyone wants to call someone the Godfather of Pinball.

  2. In 2010, the Library of Congress named The Wizard of Oz the most watched movie of all time. However, despite this accolade, and perhaps as a lesson that no theme excites everyone, there are plenty of pinball-hungry locations where the film simply isn’t a cultural cornerstone. Polish Pinball Association president Łukasz Dziatkiewicz wrote in Pinball News that, though he was excited about Jersey Jack’s entrance into the pinball manufacturing scene, The Wizard of Oz “was never part of our culture” and may not be as beloved in Poland and Western Europe as it is in the United State
s. Poland, therefore, might even be a more difficult market for a Wizard of Oz–themed pinball machine than Stumble Shit, Wyoming.

  3. Polish Pinball Association president Łukasz Dziatkiewicz is excited about The Hobbit. In the filmography of small, merry people, the citizens of Poland may not be fans of Munchkinland, but they love the Shire.

  4. Maybe not TRON.

  Notes

  1. Reality shows about pinball are distressingly similar to reality shows about anything else. Pinballers, which would have been part American Pickers and part Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, included “Shelley and Rusty the Socialites,” a wealthy couple who loved to serve Jell-O shots at lavish pinball parties in their home arcade; “Jared the Promoter,” who declared, “Bring an extra pair of underwear, because I’m about to show you something!”; and motorcycle-riding “Marc the Hunter,” who burped a lot.