by Adam Ruben
But with abysmal scores on Batman (2008), Attack from Mars (1995), Jack*Bot (1995), and Corvette (1994), I don’t rock any other machine. My skill set is too limited and specific, like a baseball pitcher with a dynamite fastball who can’t bat, run, or field.
“Tap here when you’ve verified your scores are correct,” says a volunteer holding a mini–Nexus tablet. As frustrated as I am with my performance, I can’t help feeling impressed by the technology. Five years ago, this was all done with paper tickets, and an army of volunteers typed all day and night to keep the leader boards up to date. Now with one tap on a tablet, I’ve registered my score, and I know immediately that I’m sitting in . . . 117th place.
The next morning, thinking about nothing but how I’ll advance from 117th place, I emerge from my room at the Red Roof Inn. Thanks to my son’s nocturnal needs, it’s my first contiguous night of sleep in a month—thanks to pinball excitement, it’s only six hours of sleep.
Oh, right, I suddenly realize. The weather is gorgeous, it’s a Saturday, and I’m in the mountains. Yet I’m going to spend the day indoors staring at electronics. That somehow feels wrong, but here we are.
Even more wrong is the feeling that, for the weekend, I’ve abandoned my family. Marina calls to say good morning, and she puts our daughter on the phone. Maya is effusive about most things, and today it’s the pancakes that Marina’s mother cooked.
“They had chocolate chips on top and chocolate chips on the bottom,” Maya reports with glee, “and when I saw them, I said yum right away!” She’s three. That’s the age when every other sentence out of a child’s mouth is surprising, cute, or quotable. Our dining room is littered with paper scraps of Maya’s quotes. How many quotes will I miss today?
Seemingly just to enforce the feeling of choosing pinball over family, I’ve also removed my wedding ring. I’m not trying to pick up love-starved pinball singles; I’m eliminating any barriers to an effective slap-save with my left hand. Still, yeah, pinball over family.
Pulling back into the PAPA parking lot, I reach for my cup of tokens.
Oh, right. To keep it from tipping in the car, I’ve placed it in my daughter’s car seat. No, Maya, it’s not what you’re thinking. You and your baby brother are my top priority. I’ve only physically replaced you with a cup of tokens.
It’s time for my second entry. If I can pull off a few good games, maybe I can supplant the cruddy entry that earned me 117th place.
But on The Addams Family (1992) it’s drain, drain, drain. That’s one drain per ball, for those keeping score—which, unfortunately, the Addams Family was. This entry includes a brilliant game of Jack*Bot—twentieth highest overall!—but paired with The Addams Family and three other lousy games, it’s a fat lot of nothing. Another ten dollars spent on an entry, and I’ve moved from 117th place to . . . 115th place.
The problem is, I’m flailing too much. Good players know that, as much fun as it is to manically shoot everything at once, the way to win is to focus on catching the ball, then deploy it in a more controlled way. Catch, aim, shoot. Catch, aim, shoot. But catching is an amazingly difficult task to accomplish using flipper buttons rather than fingers, so my pattern is more like shoot, kind of aim, shoot again.
My third entry is not as good as my second, but somehow in the shuffle of other players, I’ve climbed to seventieth place. The victory feels as unexciting as it sounds.
I notice I’m flagging, missing some easy saves. My wrists have started to hurt, like in the carpal tunnel area. It’s a strange feeling, because it’s a muscle group I rarely use anymore—are there even muscles inside the wrist?—and now I’m making it work repeatedly. Every time I flip, a tiny nerve ending requests that I please not do that again. I’m thinking of taking Extra Strength Tylenol so that the pain doesn’t deter me from flipping. Yes, I’m considering doping.
Entry four. I freaking dominate Johnny Mnemonic, not even touching the super spinner yet scoring just shy of two billion points—the sixth-highest score on the machine. And it’s my first game of this entry. Unfortunately, yet again, it will be the only game I’ll play well during this entry, and my domination of Johnny turns out to be meaningless.
I should point out that two billion is a great score on Johnny, but unless you know the machine, you wouldn’t automatically be able to figure that out. Each machine has its own scoring framework, and as with foreign currencies, a high score on one machine may be worthless on another. Ten million on Mousin’ Around! (1989) is a champion-level score. Ten million on Attack from Mars? You practically get that just for launching the ball.
Some of the scoring disparity can be attributed to a gradual point inflation over time—presumably players in the 1950s felt satisfied with scores in the thousands, but half a century later, only a score in the billions would do. A notable exception is the 1997 game NBA Fastbreak, which, for good or ill, adopted a basketball-style scoring system of two- and three-pointers. A great game of NBA Fastbreak may end with a score of 150.
Pinball is an inherently frustrating activity, because every game—even the ones you achieve the supersecret wizard mode on—ends in a drain, as that little ball trickles into that hole twelve inches from your hands. It’s right there. I just lost it.
Better play again.
As the daylight dims through the few skylights, I feel mighty once more. Despite my aching wrists, I decisively churn out entry five.
Feeling mighty is different from being mighty, and entry five is another dud.
Before I can consider a sixth entry, I run into Joe, Julie, and Scott, three competitors from the Free State Pinball Association (FSPA), the Maryland-based pinball league where I played in my pre-offspring days. Joe and Julie, who are probably one of the only married couples competing at PAPA, have a custom-built basement in their suburban Virginia home with more than a dozen pinball machines. I don’t know how many machines Scott has, but he frequently wears a soldering iron on his belt, so he’s pretty badass already.
Joe, Julie, and Scott gather the FSPA players and alumni, and we carpool to dinner.
“World Cup Soccer,” says Dave Hubbard, reading from his phone in the back seat, starting an impromptu guessing game to name the bottom score achieved so far on each machine. Hubbard is a Maryland-based web developer who used to kick my ass in pinball league.
“A hundred and fifty million,” someone speculates.
“In A Division? Really?”
“All right, a hundred million.”
“Can you even get that low if you try?” someone else muses.
“Seventy-three million,” reads Hubbard, to sounds of amazement. No one in this car is anywhere near the top of their division tonight, so it’s reassuring to hear about how poorly others have done.
We claim a large table at faux-tropical chain restaurant Bahama Breeze, the concept of which feels all the more ridiculous because we’re outside Pittsburgh. The playful psyche that generally defines a pinball player combines with the euphoria of dinner with friends, and a lot of straw paper is shot across the table.
“Julie,” Joe asks his wife, handing her a plastic coffee stirrer, “can you put this in your hair?” Julie is one of the top female pinball players in the world. She complies without looking up from the menu. I feel like I’m at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, or maybe the eighth grade cafeteria.
There’s something wonderful about competitive pinball players, people who regard as a serious pursuit what the rest of the world considers a diversion. I still remember the first time I went out to dinner with the FSPA. I had never seen so many adults order milk shakes, and I realized that they—like me—were just a bunch of big kids.
I never order alcohol, but what the hell? I get a drink called a Painkiller. It tastes nearly as good as the feeling of pressing its chilled glass against the underside of my damaged wrists. Seriously, body? You can’t play pinball anymore without agony? Did my wrists and tendons used to be stronger?
Hubbard tells a story about pinball celebr
ity Lyman Sheats Jr., who designed and programmed some of the best games over the past two decades and ranks among the world’s top players. The man is so revered that the concession stand outside PAPA sells a beverage called Lyman-ade.
Today Lyman was playing Black Hole, a 1981 game with a lower playfield, a secondary scoring area embedded under the main playfield that has its own flippers and targets, visible through Plexiglas. Hubbard apparently knows Black Hole better than Lyman, so in the middle of his game, Lyman, the pinball luminary, asked Hubbard what he should shoot for.
“Lyman Sheats,” Hubbard recalls loudly, beaming as he finishes his story and his drink, “is asking me for advice!”
Lyman Sheats also happens to be sitting at the Bahama Breeze bar.
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out who Lyman Sheats looks like—the closest I can get is a cross between actors Noah Taylor and Karl Urban, author Neil Gaiman, and, in his younger days, comedian Eric Idle. Hearing his name, Sheats raises his drink and gives our table a friendly nod.
“That’s what I love about pinball,” announces Hubbard. “All of the pinball legends, all the people who made the game what it is, they’re all alive right now, and you can talk to them.”
Back from dinner, it’s time for entry six. This one kicks off with a lackluster game on Johnny and never improves. Number six may be my most miserable ticket yet, not a bright spot in the bunch. Another wasted entry.
The lines for the tournament games are longer than ever, as everyone not in the top twenty-four is hurrying to play entries that might qualify them. Even those above the cut are continuing to play, lest they get knocked off the roster by all of the Saturday night madness. The result is that an entry now takes more than an hour to play, most of which is spent waiting for an open machine.
It’s late. I’m tired. My forearms hurt when I use a pen. My contacts are dry, and true to its biochemical nature, alcohol is a depressant. I can’t just be out of practice, because I have no certainty that I could have done any better when I was playing regularly. It’s one of those “I’m just not as good as these people, and I never will be” moments.
There’s time for only one more entry before qualifying ends. Should I throw away another ten dollars on a seventh entry, or should I just have fun and play pinball? It’s always the last attempt that leads to victory, isn’t it? It’s only when you’ve given up entirely that miraculous things start to happen.
So I begin entry seven. I put up three terrible games right away and assume I’m done. But my terrible game on Johnny turns out to be twenty-sixth best, so I still have a chance if I can slaughter the last two games.
I choose Corvette, a game I know nothing about and thus have been largely avoiding. Now I’m hoping that the novelty and my thorough unfamiliarity with Corvette’s rules will somehow magically translate to an awesome game.
They do not.
After PAPA shuts down at midnight, I drive back to the hotel and run numbers while brushing my teeth. My best entry was still my second out of the seven, which I played last night, and I’ve finished the tournament in . . . eighty-second place. In the lowest division. Granted, it’s 82nd out of 169 players in that division, but still.
If I could collect my highest scores from each game and put them all on the same ticket, I would have finished in fourteenth place, and I’d return tomorrow for the finals. Instead, I’m left with just a miserable ranking, a plastic cup of tokens, and, as I soon discover while my wrists continue to throb, a complete inability to unbutton my pants.
While most attendees spend Sunday ambling around playing pinball for fun, the top twenty-four players in each division begin the playoffs. At least the pressure is off for the rest of us. Between games, I check the results on the real-time-updated website—this guy beat that guy, so this guy advances.
I say “guy” because, despite plenty of female competitors, those who qualify for the playoffs are almost exclusively men—in all three divisions. By my count, A Division has ninety-five players, and only four are female—the most successful of whom has finished in seventy-sixth place. This isn’t a new phenomenon. For years, PAPA players and organizers have debated the uncomfortable problem, with the most vociferous opinions emerging over one question: Should PAPA have a separate Women’s Division?1 PAPA already offers a Juniors Division (under sixteen) and a Seniors Division (over fifty). So why not a Women’s Division?
If you’ve ever read discussions on Internet message boards, you can guess the diversity and vociferousness of the responses.
“Yes! We need to attract more women to pinball!”
“No! Creating a Women’s Division implies that women are unequal to men!”
“Yes! Dozens of screaming men in a small, roped-off area can be intimidating to women!”
“No! If you’re going to segregate women, why not have an Asian Division? A Transgender Division?”
Inevitably the debate takes a predictable turn when someone points out that all of the arguers so far have been (surprise!) men.
Tournament organizers often wonder why there aren’t more female pinball players: Is it a matter of inherent discrepancy in interests? Less free time? Inadvertent but legitimate bullying? There’s no easy answer. I can’t imagine, however, that the artwork helps.
Pinball machines are beautiful. The sheer complexity contained within each one is staggering—if you ever get a chance to peer underneath the playfield, you’ll see a landscape of solenoids, a spaghettilike network of wires, the machine’s own circulatory system.
Then there’s the artwork.
I have to wonder about the men who provided the art for pinball machines. I say “men” again, because it’s hard to imagine that a woman would have felt comfortable drawing the clownishly large-boobed maidens that leer down from backglasses. They’re practically a requirement in older games, even when these balloon-breasted adolescent fantasy temptresses have zero to do with the machine’s theme.
Even just looking at the machines in a single section of PAPA, that aspect of the art is unavoidable:
Pinball Pool (1979): A billiards-shooting robot impresses two barely dressed women.
Car Hop (1991): Sexy roller-skating waitress.
Rollergames (1990): Sexy roller-skating everyone.
Robot (1985): A nearly naked woman in the clutches of a giant robot. Shoot some billiards, robot! Women like that!
Band Wagon (1965): Three underdressed women, two clowns.
Star Race (1980): Three women in winged helmets wearing dangerously incomplete space suits and flying space scooters.
Jumping Jack (1973): No fewer than six women, each with a waist narrower than a typical ankle, surround a jack-in-the-box. (Woe be to the sexually hungry women when they discover he has no legs or torso.)
The litany of casual sexism in pinball art goes on and on. And while you could call 1978’s Playboy pinball machine a product of a bygone era, you’d have to forget about the 2002 Playboy pinball machine—which allowed the operator to decorate the game with their choice of clothed, topless, or nude decals.2 Not to mention a 2015 game, announced amid a flurry of controversy, called—subtly—Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons, whose cabinet art is exactly what you’re picturing.
It’s Comic-Con fantasy women, it’s Lara Croft, and it’s the Black Widow, but it’s worse. It’s gratuitous beyond gratuitous. There are drawings that would make Barbie’s physical proportions look reasonable by comparison.
Many players—male and female—insist that the sexy caricatures of impossibly proportioned women are simply a part of pinball’s beauty and history, or at least that their prevalence and irrelevance to gameplay makes them blend into the background. But every now and then, such as at PAPA, I’ll look around and wonder why I’m being leered at, from every angle, by lascivious fake women.
One day, visiting my parents, I told them I was writing a section of this book about why more women don’t play pinball, when I realized I happened to be speaking to an ac
tual woman.
“So, Mom,” I asked, “why don’t you play pinball?”
Her answer was straightforward, logical, and doesn’t speak for all women, but I think I can say it certainly represents some: “Probably because there are so many other things to do instead.” Thanks, Mom.
You’ve probably heard the explanation, “Well, it was a different time,” as a means of excusing politically incorrect missteps that wouldn’t pass muster as easily today. It’s dismissive, but it’s not false. Many games reflect the attitudes of their eras. And sometimes that attitude was, frankly, a little racist.
You won’t find most of these at PAPA, but thanks to the Internet Pinball Database (IPDB), which contains photos and information about nearly every pinball machine ever made, it’s possible to ask an interesting question with a horrifying answer: What were the most racist pinball machines ever?
For the purpose of this query, I’m going to go ahead and exclude a special class of pinball machines, specifically the bizarre and horribly jingoistic slate of conversion kits produced by Victory Games between 1942 and 1947. Conversion kits are like makeovers for existing games. You could take a 1941 Star Attraction, for example, a pinball machine whose theme appears to be “some numbers and also some stars”—and, for a mere $9.50, purchase a conversion kit that included a backglass, bumper caps, and a scorecard, which you’d use to convert the game to a shiny new 1943 Bomb the Axis Rats. An ad in a 1943 issue of Coin Machine Journal boasts “Only five minutes required to make this STARTLING CHANGEOVER.” Startling indeed.
Other Victory Games changeover kits whose names speak unapologetically for themselves include Girls Ahoy (1944), Artists and Models (1945), Tail Gunner (1944), and an array of games that involved doing not-nice things to Japanese people: Hit the Japs (1942), Slap-the-Japs (1942), Smack the Japs (1943), Sink the Japs (1942), and the 1942 classic Knock out the Japs. It’s as though the Victory Games executives sat around a conference table to discuss their next pinball theme:
