by Adam Ruben
2. Lest you think pinball machine sightings in ordinary television shows and movies are rare, Josh “Pingeek” Kaplan has meticulously chronicled every single appearance of a game on the small or large screen. As of this writing, his web page lists and describes pinball sightings in 455 films and 339 television episodes, along with the identity of the game and any contextual clues one might need—if one really wants to, say, locate the episode of Mr. Belvedere that aired on November 29, 1985, in which a Bally Fireball (1971) distracts the eponymous butler from his duties. Or maybe the January 3, 2009, episode of Dave Attell’s Insomniac Tour in which comedian Dane Cook, playing a South Park machine, recalls, “My dad used to say, ‘Life is like pinball. Sometimes you tilt, sometimes you’re special, and sometimes you have an extra ball like me.’” Helpfully, Pingeek’s “Pinball on TV” page lists the following disclaimer at the top: “Whatever you do, DON’T rent the 1976 ABC After School Special, ‘The Pinballs.’ There is not a single pinball machine in this program.”
3. Today the Pinformer database—which monitors “Where to Play in the UK”—shows Blackpool as a fair example of pinball’s on-location scarcity. The city of Blackpool is home to thirteen pinball machines, of which eleven are in someone’s home, and only two, a Spider-Man at a pub and a Fish Tales at an arcade, are publicly playable.
4. Have you ever seen pachinko? It’s full-on bonkers. Imagine the most confusing, brightly colored, cartoonish vertical pinball machine you can picture, then place hundreds of them in long rows like slot machines or Laundromat dryers on acid. Players purchase a tub of pea-sized silver balls, which they feed into a machine to watch them get instantly flung into trapdoors and weirdness, some of which results in the dispensing of yet more pea-sized balls. The modern Japanese pachinko parlor is not dissimilar in purpose from the American gaming halls of the 1930s; cash payouts are forbidden, but if you can make the machine give you more balls than you paid for, you can exchange your tub of balls for prizes, some of which are medallions exchangeable for cash at the establishment next door. Supposedly some people make a living playing pachinko skillfully. I tried the game once in Tokyo in 1999. I put in 1,000 yen, watched some balls fly, continuously reinserting the balls I “won” until the total dwindled to zero. Then I returned the plastic bucket and left. Also, the crane machine at the arcade next door awarded actual live lobsters, and I encountered the Hello Kitty brands of both gasoline and meat. I freaking love Japan.
5. For the Dutch-impaired, “Jaap” is pronounced “Yop.” According to an employee listing on the Dutch Pinball website, other workers at Nauta’s company with extremely Dutch first names include Koen, Roel, Guus, and Freek.
6. The Stranger narrates the pinball machine as well, gruffly explaining that “multiball is lit” or declaring, “Let’s go bowling,” but it’s not the real deep-voiced character actor Sam Elliott. Nauta tried to sign up Elliott but had to settle for a voice actor.
7. If you want to play pinball at home, and you don’t have a pinball machine, the closest you can come—besides the giant cabinets with flat-screens at Expo—is something called Visual Pinball, open-source software that faithfully re-creates classic pinball machines on your home computer. Even the rules and scoring are identical to those of the real machines. Of course, it’s still not the same.
8. I had my first sighting of an America’s Most Haunted machine at the Silver Ballroom, a pinball bar in St. Louis. I had invited my cousin Kevin to join me there, and while we enjoyed the Silver Ballroom’s famous meat pies, I bored him with the reasons it was so cool to see America’s Most Haunted standing among the others. And yes, for those of you overly familiar with the cast of characters in the Who’s Tommy, I’m aware of the irony of playing pinball with “Cousin Kevin.”
Notes
1. Only Zuul.
2. Maybe she’s just excited: for the first time ever, PAPA has added a Women’s Division, though they haven’t named it MAMA. It’s relatively successful—thirty-six women have signed up—and the winner will end up being someone named, pleasantly enough, Sunshine.
3. Robertson later told me in an e-mail about a pinball-related encounter he had with actor Patrick Stewart while filming an episode of The View. Robertson told Stewart he was a big fan, to which Stewart asked a “bullshit detector” question: “Really? Which of my roles is your favorite?” Robertson cleverly avoided saying “Captain Picard” or “Professor Charles Xavier” and instead endeared himself to Stewart by naming an obscure BBC adaptation of a Shakespeare play. Having cleared the first fanboy hurdle (I guess even famous people have Famous Person Mode), Robertson felt comfortable telling Stewart, “Actually, I have a confession to make. My favorite line of yours is ‘All hands prepare for multiball,’” citing the often-heard line of dialogue recorded on the Star Trek: The Next Generation (1993) pinball machine, which Robertson owned. This sparked a discussion of Stewart’s pronunciation of “multiball”—in his version, the central syllable had a long i sound, as in, “mul-TIE-ball,” not the traditional “mul-TEE-ball”; Stewart insisted his own pronunciation was correct. This is probably the most satisfyingly nerdy celebrity-meets-celebrity story I’ve ever heard.
4. Maybe he also took my hotel room. In which case, screw you, Kody.
5. Only a week later, Dutch Pinball will announce that they’ve started shipping The Big Lebowski, making them the fifth pinball manufacturer in the world—recall that only three years earlier, the entire industry was Stern and a bunch of talk.
6. At another point in the game, in a sound bite so classically awkward that it’s become a running joke among pinball players, Ah-nold offers the following lackluster and unclear advice: “Shoot here and here.” The only game I can think of with a more ambiguous call-out is Star Wars: Episode I, in which Anakin Skywalker suggests, “Plunge the ball, and use your flippers!” Good advice, Ani.
7. The slope of the playfield of any pinball machine can be adjusted, making the gameplay faster or slower. The industry standard incline is 6.5 degrees, but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. At tournaments like PAPA, operators frequently set the games steeper to reduce the possibility that a champion player will occupy a game, and thus hold up the entire contest, for a long time. In other words, since the industry standard isn’t hard-and-fast, they’ll set up the games to play hard and fast.
8. Between the musician, the tournament official, and my opponent, there are three people in this story named Ed. Sorry for any confusion. I guess three Eds are better than one.
9. Zach is now the better player of the two, as evidenced both by their respective tournament records and Josh’s own admission, which he conceded to me in an e-mail followed by a smiley emoticon and the phrase “Fuck you Zach.”