Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  Executive 1: Well, we’ve hit them, slapped them, sunk them, and knocked them out. Let’s see, Japs, Japs, Japs . . . what could we do to Japs . . .

  Executive 2: Kick them?

  Executive 1: Seriously, Johnson? That’s racist.

  Moving on from conversion kits, here are some more racially cringe-worthy pieces of pinball’s past:

  Diner (1990): You’re the waiter. Can you serve food to all of these ethnically stereotypical customers in time? There’s Haji, the nonspecific Muslim/Sikh (“Could you please give to me a hot dog and a root beer?”), drawn to look a little like Dwight Schrute with Barack Obama’s complexion, plus a turban; Pepe the curly-mustached Mexican; and good old Soviet Boris.

  Big Indian (1974): Loincloths, headdresses, war paint—not a detail is missing from Gottlieb’s attempt to have a little fun with the tribes. But you know who didn’t think it was fun? The actual Native Americans working in Gottlieb’s wiring and assembly plant in South Dakota. In fact, the title of Big Indian is the concession the workers won after protesting its previous name, Big Injun.

  Poker Face (1953): Not to be confused with the 1963 J. H. Keeney game of the same title set in a gunslingin’ saloon, Gottlieb’s Poker Face included squaws, teepees, smoke signals, and . . . is that . . . someone being burned at the stake? Oh dear God.3

  Minstrel Man (1951): The theme of this game is those happy-go-lucky white performers who painted their faces black and danced and sang, all for the amusement of more white people. The backglass features a minstrel man and minstrel woman, supported by a nightclub band of at least seven more minstrel musicians, with an additional nine minstrel faces adorning the scoring lights, and they even found a way to fit eight more minstrel men on the playfield—four with full bodies, one as a giant face, and three above stand-up targets.

  Black Fever (1980): The Spain-based pinball manufacturer Playmatic must have sympathized with the injustice of white women being the center of sexist pinball art and made Black Fever as their attempt to even the score. Three black women adorn the backglass, and you know they’re black because you can see about 95 percent of the surface area of their skin.

  And the award for the most ethnically prejudiced pinball machine goes to Happy Gang (1932). Happy Gang’s implicit assumption clarifies a dimension to racism that may not have been obvious to those, like myself, born after 1932. Not only were other races and nationalities stereotyped in offensive ways, but they were basically told to be pleased about it. Billed as “The Game of Nationalities,” Happy Gang’s advertisement tells you everything you need to know, so I’ll just step back and let this sentence sink in: “Cheer up the Masses—The Goldberg’s, the O’Reilly’s, The Sambos, The Scotch, The Chinese—The Drys, The Wets—Cheer ’em all with THE HAPPY GANG.” Wow. That’s the melting pot right there, folks. And there they all are, painted on the playfield along with their names: O’Reilly is the Irish cop. Mac Burnie, the Scotsman, plays bagpipes. Señor Bulls, a Spaniard, serenades a woman on a balcony with his guitar—not to be confused with Wet Pancho, the Mexican singing next to a cactus. Chief Standing Bear makes the Washington Redskins logo look culturally sensitive by comparison—he’s naked, with a bow and tomahawk. Goldberg, the white-bearded Jew, for some reason pushes a wagon of fish. The Chinese man with a Fu Manchu mustache is named Wun Lung. And black Sambo—unlike the other characters, who simply stand above holes the pinball can fall into—catches balls in his mouth. Paradoxically, it’s quite possible that the designer of Happy Gang felt he was promoting tolerance, as if declaring, “Yep, that’s us in America in 1932! We may have our differences, but we’re all a part of one big happy gang. Ain’t this country grand? Oh, nice, here comes Goldberg with my fish.”

  Today, on the final day of PAPA17, pinball is enjoying one more addition to validate it as a sport: spectators. Against the wall behind A Division, a small set of actual metal bleachers has been arranged, and lots of people are watching pinball.

  Watching pinball is not only interesting but also realistic, thanks to one of PAPA’s own innovations, PAPA TV. Each pinball machine has a camera mounted overhead broadcasting the game in high definition to a portrait-oriented flat-screen television. Spectators are watching multiple games at once, some even following the overall scoring on laptops. Elsewhere in the world, pinball fans who couldn’t make it to PAPA are logged in to PAPA TV, monitoring multiple games from their computers. Remember, to each his own: while watching pinball may sound to you like watching paint dry, to me it sounds about a thousand times more interesting than watching golf.

  Right now, everyone has gathered to watch one player who’s no stranger to televised contests: Bowen Kerins, a Stanford graduate and math textbook writer with a side job as a mathematical consultant for game shows who once won $32,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He also happens to be the A Division champion of PAPAs 4, 8, and 16, the first of which he won at age eighteen.

  When not winning PAPA, Bowen uses PAPA TV to host a series of how-to videos, including episodes titled “Pinball Flipper Skills—Flick Pass” and “Lord of the Rings Pinball: The Valinor Strategy.” The channel has more than two million views.

  At the moment, Kerins is struggling—on Johnny Mnemonic, no less—having lost his first two balls almost immediately. As he approaches the machine for his third ball, I find I’m rooting for him, because even though he’s a pinball celebrity and guru, he seems like such an underdog. Maybe it’s because he’s such a friendly, well-intentioned fellow, or maybe it’s because he’s friends with my friends.

  Kerins starts multiball, a mode that gives him three balls on the playfield at once to shoot for high-value jackpots. “Let’s go, baby!” he yells to himself as spectators applaud. “Come on! Get some points back!” Then he pauses and adds, “You sound like a dumbass!”

  That’s Bowen Kerins—smart and skilled, with an encyclopedic knowledge of pinball and a self-deprecating sense of humor. After he drains his final ball, resurrecting his game from a certain loss to a reasonable 523 million, he sits in the bleachers, where he’s greeted with compliments—not on his final score but on his skill in general. “Those live catches were insane,” Joe tells him. “They looked beautiful.”

  Maybe so. But Kerins’s final score on Johnny is, I note with some pleasure and some spite, lower than most of mine. And it’s significantly lower than that of his competitor on Johnny, Cayle George. George is a tall, young Seattle-based software designer with longish blond hair, dressed in all black with a backward black hat and lime-green sneakers. Everything about him, combined with the fact that he’s never won PAPA, screams dark horse. Once George’s Johnny score hits 1.3 billion, he’s easily overtopped all of his competitors, and so—why rub it in?—he voluntarily drains the ball. And just like that, Kerins is out. Sixth place.

  In the finals, I watch Josh Sharpe, son of Roger, put up more than one million on ball two of Alien Star, a space-themed 1984 game on which one million is pretty darn spectacular. The crowd has swelled to more than a hundred on the bleachers. Sharpe is, and there’s no other way to put this, in the zone. He’s so in rhythm with the machine that he can catch any shot, shoot any target, save any near drain. It’s like watching someone with secret magnetic influence over the ball. The thirty-five-year-old whose dad saved pinball in 1976 is not draining anytime soon, and he knows it.

  And I know something, too. I’m also thirty-five. And I’ll never, ever be that good.

  On ball three, Sharpe drains the ball down the middle—and recovers it. Through a lucky bounce and a sudden, precise double flip, he somehow propels the ball back up between the flippers.

  This is allowed, but it requires artistry. There are, incidentally, several other methods for recovering a ball from certain doom that are so risky and effective that they appear on PAPA’s “Illegal Techniques” web page, listing the machine manipulations that can immediately disqualify you. A “death save,” for example, involves thrusting the entire machine against an already drained ball, nudging it via
a series of clever angles back into play. Even more severe is the “bangback,” a well-timed smack on the front of the cabinet to bounce the ball off the metal bracket near the drain and up through the flippers. The latter includes an instructional video with a warning that a bangback could damage the machine and you, possibly breaking your wrist; yes, you can break your wrist playing pinball. (Maybe that’s why Tommy’s were supple.) The player demonstrating the bangback in the video—“for informational purposes only,” stresses the web page—sums it up well when he says, “I’m not hitting it pretty hard, but I’m hitting it hard enough to—actually, it kind of hurts.”

  The spectators watching Sharpe’s save go as nuts as I’ve seen them go, with one collective gasp followed by applause, like they’ve witnessed a near fall from a trapeze. We’re all viewing this on the flat-screen, so it feels like sitting at a sports bar watching your favorite football team on TV.

  Josh Sharpe ends up taking second place in A Division, with his younger brother, Zach, finishing third. The dark horse wins the day as Cayle George earns his first ever PAPA championship.

  I start the drive home after PAPA has officially closed, though that’s apparently when the real fun begins. With the pressure of the contest gone for the players—and for the scorekeeping staff—the lights dim, the music blasts, and the best pinball players in the world combine ramp shots with alcohol shots. It’s basically an all-night pinball rave.

  Not for me, though. Not this time. My wife and kids are waiting, and I can’t justify making them wait any longer. I do, however, make a quick stop at a service plaza in Breezewood, Pennsylvania, a town that exists only to sell gas and food at the junction of I-70 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It’s 11:00 PM, I’m drowsy, and my wrists are numb. Still, I find myself wandering past the minimart and toward a sign labeled “ARCADE”—just, you know, to see if they have pinball. They don’t.

  It’s kind of amazing when you think about it. People have traveled to PAPA from all over the world. They’ve flown, driven, abandoned their families for a weekend, rented hotel rooms, rented cars, bought tokens, bought entries, flicked their wrists for hours upon hours—all to obsess over the control of an eighty-gram steel sphere.

  To an outsider walking into PAPA, poking his head into a boardwalk arcade, or just sitting at a bar and watching some folks in the corner play pinball, the game looks like a cacophonous mess of strobing lights, fast action, and sound effects. One might assume a pinball player’s job is to make sense of the chaos, to chart an elegant path through the clamor by directing the ball to go this way, that way, this way. Not so. The best pinball players try to maintain control as they complicate the situation even more—playing multiball, stacking scoring modes, building additional complexity, all while focusing on keeping the game going.

  When I get home, after a long drive on dark roads, Maya and Benjamin are asleep. They are my complications, my multiball, the extra factors I’ve happily added to bounce around my life—while I try, every day, to keep the game going.

  4

  “It’s More Fun to Compete”

  * * *

  PRETTY MUCH EVERY ARTICLE, documentary, or informative list about pinball includes one particular machine, a game-changing game produced by Gottlieb in 1947. The machine, still technically illegal in many places at the time it was manufactured, featured a new invention that proved critical for setting pinball on a path to reacceptance: flippers.

  The game was Humpty Dumpty, and it had six flippers, three on each side, up and down the playfield, flapping like the stubby legs of a dancing insect. “With a little practice,” reads a 1947 Billboard article, “the game’s manufacturers believe that players can become accustomed to the principles of flipper button action and attain high scores.” It’s not clear exactly where designer Harry Mabs, who invented the flippers, intended for them to direct the ball—the important element was that the ball could be directed, that players could do more than simply plunge, stare, nudge, and cheer or curse.

  Again the caveats are necessary: Humpty Dumpty had the first electromechanical flippers, meaning that they operated by pressing buttons that used electricity to move mechanical pieces, as opposed to purely mechanical flippers or tiny baseball bats, which had already been on games for fifteen years—one early machine was even named Flipper (1932). (The difference between a mechanical and an electromechanical flipper is that the former is operable the same way you’d control a miniature soccer player in foosball—the actual physical spin you put on the handle dictated how hard the bat hit the ball.)

  Yet another case of ambiguity and scandal surrounds the electromechanical flipper, as Chicago Coin Machine Manufacturing Company designer Jerry Koci claimed to have beaten Mabs to the invention, though Chicago Coin didn’t adopt it before Gottlieb could. Koci finally did get electromechanical flippers, albeit in a weird configuration, on a 1948 game called Bermuda, just a few months after Humpty Dumpty made history. For what it’s worth, if anything, Mabs took the credit, but Koci ended up with the patent, number 2,520,283, “Pivotal Ball Return Means for Pin Games.”

  And pivotal it was, in both senses of the word, because flippers gave players something to do after launching the ball. Mabs called the buttons that operated his flippers “control buttons,” a deliberate name choice meant to underscore the element of skill. This was no game of chance. How could it be? Players used control buttons. They had control.

  Some control, at least. The six flippers on Humpty Dumpty faced outward at unnatural angles near the game’s sides, in contrast to the central, V-shaped, two-flipper configuration we know and love today, which almost feels like an extension of the player’s own hands.

  “I’ve seen so many changes in pin games,” designer Steve Kordek says in the 2009 pinball documentary Special When Lit. Indeed, at the time the documentary aired, Kordek was ninety-seven years old and had led teams responsible for designing over one hundred pinball machines. “But when those six flippers came out on Humpty Dumpty, I said, ‘I’ve gotta do something like that.’” So he did—and since every flipper increased production costs, Kordek compromised and gave his next game, Triple Action (1948), just two flippers, both at the bottom, though they still pointed outward in the pigeon-toed direction. Triple Action, whose theme is one of those “Well, it was a different time” motifs, shows three women in bathing suits labeled (with no further explanation) “single,” “double,” and “triple.”

  He also gave those flippers direct-current power, making them much stronger than Humpty Dumpty’s—which meant, as Roger Sharpe told the New York Times for Kordek’s 2012 obituary, that “a ball skillfully flipped from the bottom of the playfield could actually get to the top, and anywhere in between, with some semblance of accuracy.”

  Unlike mechanical flippers, the electromechanical flipper button kept the action under the player’s control, but it made that action harder, a little less one-to-one, allowing a lot of “Oh, almost!” and “I flipped, you stupid machine!” Sentiments like those kept players pumping in the coins, convinced that the outcome of the game was in their hands, and neither completely right nor completely wrong about that.

  Suddenly pinball was a different game. In a way, it now bore a stronger resemblance to racquetball than to slots. But even with the element of skill placed front and center, pinball was still a physical game of solitaire, not exactly a sport, nor really capable of becoming one.

  Then in 1954, Gottlieb invented a new motivation for people to play. Since gambling was illegal and high scores were not always sufficient amusement for adults, the manufacturer introduced a circus-elephant-themed game called Super Jumbo, the first flipper pinball game that allowed multiple players to compete against each other.

  Gottlieb saw multiplayer games as the wave of the future. With several competing on each machine, the cash dropped in the coin box with each game would be doubled, tripled, or quadrupled. Technically it was possible to compete before Super Jumbo, but only by playing a complete game beginning to e
nd, then remembering your score and waiting while your friend played a complete game. Super Jumbo required players to switch after each ball, not after each game, and it displayed four different scores at once on the backbox.

  “The earnings of this machine increase when more than one player use it at the same time,” explained Gottlieb in an instructional letter sent to pinball operators. “Therefore you and your serviceman, as well as the location owner, should tell the players that it is more fun playing in competition. Four players can choose partners for team play. Have the location owner play with them until they become thoroughly familiar with the machine.”

  Whether or not location owners actually attempted a disingenuous “Hey, Mac, let’s you and me and your buddies all play a game of Super Jumbo together!” attitude, Gottlieb started using the slogan “It’s more fun to compete,” a five-word catchphrase that would appear on dozens of games over the next few decades.

  But as some sought to distance pinball from its gambling-oriented past, a significant part of the industry was perfectly happy to explore the possibilities for its gambling-oriented future.

  In 1951, Bally Manufacturing had doubled down, so to speak, on the wagering aspect, introducing a line of bingo pinball machines that visually resembled regular pinball, including steel balls, a wooden playfield, and a spring-loaded plunger—but the game itself was essentially regular bingo, with a five-by-five grid and payouts awarded for filling rows, columns, or diagonals.

  Bally released its first bingo pinball machine, A-B-C, in 1951. I saw one at Pinball Perfection, the museum where I played Jig-Saw: it was essentially a self-serve roulette wheel, and it seemed to count as pinball only insofar as it involved launching a steel ball onto a playfield. What happened after the launch? On the playfield, a spinning wheel captured the ball in a numbered hole. The end.