Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  If pinball owes its resurgence partially to Tommy, it’s reasonable to ask why a band like the Who even decided to write an entire rock opera about pinball. The answer, according to British author Richard Barnes—who had suggested in 1963 that the band change its name from the Detours to the Who—is that Pete Townshend wrote a rock opera about pinball to impress a rock journalist named Nik Cohn who liked pinball. Townshend wanted a favorable review from Cohn, so while kicking around ideas one day, the musician floated the possibility that Tommy might play pinball. Cohn replied, “It’ll be a masterpiece.”1

  Townshend hurriedly dashed off the song “Pinball Wizard,” pausing to marvel at what he called “awful, the most clumsy piece of writing I’ve ever done.”2 Cohn, however, loved it, and thus the famous deaf, dumb, and blind kid became a pinball prodigy.

  Imagine how different the world would be if Nik Cohn liked backgammon.

  Pinball turned out to be the right choice for the rock opera, the perfect selection of a campy, semirebellious pastime to lionize and partially mellow the album’s otherwise seriously spiritual overtones. In doing so, Barnes wrote in the liner notes of a reissue of Tommy, “it captures part of the magic, or whatever, of the sixties.” I missed the ’60s—the time period when the title character displays his pinball wizardry—mainly due to my parents not conceiving me during their adolescence, but from what I’ve heard, there’s hardly a more apt description of the era than “magic, or whatever.”

  The Tommy album had been available for listeners to see it, feel it, touch it, heal it since 1969. But it was the star- and musician-studded 1975 film, which gave screen time to Roger Daltrey, Ann-Margret, Elton John, Tina Turner, Jack Nicholson, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, and Pete Townshend himself, that really got the world once more buzzing about pinball.

  The machines themselves also reached a new plateau in their evolution, using microprocessors and circuit boards to give the games brain power. (Some terminology: before this transition, the games were called “electromechanical,” or “EM,” since those were the primary ingredients—electricity and machinery. The new games were called “solid-state.”)

  For example, the introduction of semiconductors meant the introduction of memory, and memory meant that a player could score in more complex ways—earning an award on the playfield, for example, and having that award stay lit on the same player’s next turn. And now games could make noises beyond the sounds associated with one metal part hitting another.

  One of the most important advantages of solid-state electronics was the ability to keep score electronically. As Marco Rossignoli reminds readers of The Complete Pinball Book, underneath its gameplay, a pinball machine is essentially an adding machine.

  Pinball machines weren’t always adding machines. While the games of the early ’30s forced players to perform mental math, they soon gave way to light-up scoring—various numbers to various powers of ten would be displayed, and if lights shone behind, for example, “500,000,” “10,000,” and “2,000,” then you knew your score was 512,000.

  Then the ’50s brought the invention of the drum score reel, a series of rotating circles with painted numbers, like in an older car’s odometer, which gave backglass artists more space for decoration without having to somehow incorporate thirty different numbers into their artwork.

  Those mechanical scoring reels had one major deficiency: you could have the ball zinging and slinging between high-scoring targets, and the machine’s tally of your score couldn’t keep up simply because the reels couldn’t turn fast enough. Microchips allowed pinball machines to register every target hit, and more accurate scoring allowed for more targets, which meant that playfields, and rules, could now become more complicated and interesting.

  Another plus for digital scoring: the new games could accommodate multiple players much more easily than earlier ones, for which one-player, two-player, and four-player versions had to be manufactured separately.

  Of course, solid-state electronics benefited more than pinball. And one of the technologies made possible, while it would partially complement and promote pinball, would ultimately smash it to bits like a barrel thrown by an angry monkey.

  If you were born in such an epoch as to have missed the 1980s, you may find it hard to believe how nuts people went over the most rudimentary, monochrome, detail-free video games. Seriously, go look at Pong on YouTube. That’s Atari’s first video game, circa 1972, and that’s what people were lining up to play—a black-and-white Ping-Pong game in which the ball was a square, the paddles were rectangles, the net was a dotted line, and that’s it. “Black-and-white” didn’t even mean gray—it meant black, and white. You know what was way too futuristic for Pong? A circle.

  Old stalwart pinball faced a challenge when confronted with the fresh, exciting, and addictive allure of video games. For a generation raised on television, Roger Sharpe says in his interview in Pleasure Machines, “the idea of controlling something on a TV screen was incredibly compelling.” (The closest my parents’ generation had come to interacting with a television, from what I understand, was a show called Winky Dink and You that aired from 1953 to 1957. Kids whose parents purchased a Winky Dink kit would stick a piece of clear vinyl to their television screen, then trace a connect-the-dots puzzle at the behest of a cartoon boy named Winky Dink. Kids whose parents didn’t purchase the kit, or who simply forgot to affix the clear vinyl to the screen, ended up drawing directly on their televisions.)

  Now the television, the appliance that imported entertainment and information to their living rooms, became something much more interesting: a competitive public pastime. With video games like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man,3 Donkey Kong, and Pole Position (released in that order) driving their rampant popularity, the New York Times reported that the number of arcades doubled between 1980 and 1982.

  Not that everyone loved arcades. As they grew and blossomed, so did a sort of arcade culture that made adults nervous. In the documentary Special When Lit, Dr. John Broughton of Columbia University describes them as places of “downward mobility, wasting time, [and] developing highly refined skills in an area that was going to be relatively useless in adult life.”

  It was yet another moral (or, rather, moralizing) battle between the excited youth and the cautious adults in pinball’s history. Roger Sharpe described the dominant fear at the time among adults: “We don’t want an arcade in our area because children are going to congregate, and when children get together, bad things happen.”

  As I recall from avoiding the Time Out arcade in my local mall, arcades in the ’80s weren’t seedy per se, but they weren’t exactly wholesome either. They were places the kids with the rattails spent their Saturdays, chugging Mountain Dew and joking about stealing sneakers.

  Occupying those arcades were two main activities, pinball and video games, sharing space and customers. Of all the pinball fans I’ve met, probably half love arcade games just as much as pinball, and half, like me, have no interest in video games whatsoever. In the short documentary One Quarter at a Time, multiple people talk about how conquering a video game is tantamount to memorizing patterns—but pinball is, pardon the expression, a whole different ball game, with its literal mechanical physics that simply can’t be replicated on a screen.

  For a while, both pinball and video games enjoyed the arcade boom together, though each was fully aware that it had to vie with the other for quarters—both the spatial and monetary kind. So pinball designers now concentrated heavily on operator profitability. The goal became creating games on which players would average about half a minute per ball—so a standard five-ball game for the average player should last about two and a half minutes. If that sounds stingy, remember that most game buyers weren’t youth seekers finding pinball machines for the rec rooms of McMansions, which would not start to gobble the landscape for another two decades. They were pub owners, grocery store owners, arcade owners—and the shorter the game, the sooner another quarter entered the slot.4

&nbs
p; In case you’re wondering, yes, a five-ball game really was the standard. What a time to be alive! The default arsenal would later shrink to three balls in order to bring playing times more in line with those of video games. Actually, in many ways, video games forced pinball to up its game—literally. Suddenly pinball machines had multiple levels: upper miniplayfields reachable via ramps or VUKs, lower miniplayfields underneath a transparent window. Some had additional flippers, windier ramps, prettier backglasses, weirder toys.

  Pinball even added speech for the first time, starting with a game set in a fantastical hellscape, called Gorgar (1979). The ad for Gorgar bragged that “GORGAR SPEAKS,” and indeed, Gorgar was capable of saying seven different words, two of which were “Gorgar” and “speaks.” (The other five were “beat,” “you,” “hurt,” “me,” and “got,” and Gorgar could shuffle them into any order to form more complex sentences, such as “Me got you” and “Me hurt,” which sound like lyrics to a love ballad sung by Cookie Monster.)

  Depicting pinball’s innovations as a struggle to keep pace with video games almost makes it sound like pinball rode into success on the coattails of the newcomer. But Sharpe claims the opposite. “Without pinball, video games would not have emerged,” he asserts. “There would have been no place to put them.” It’s a good point: arcades existed long before Pac-Man munched his first ghost. Video games just made them insanely profitable.

  For a while.

  If pinball machines enabled video arcade games, they soon ironically became burdensome in their own realm. Arcade owners saw where the quarters ended up; they also saw which type of machine required the most repairs. Dan Toskaner, of the Silver Ball Museum, summed up the industry-wide snubbing of pinball in the early ’80s: “Video games made a lot more money, required a lot less maintenance, and they took up less space.” It was like inviting your younger, cooler friend to stay in your basement, then one day learning your wife prefers him to you.

  The uneasy peace between video games and pinball machines ended, unceremoniously, with pinball as the clear loser. According to a 1989 article in Crain’s Chicago Business, in 1980, Williams Electronic Games—which was one of twenty-three pinball manufacturers at the time—produced fifty thousand pinball machines. In 1983, they only produced twenty-three hundred. Video games, meanwhile, according to a 2013 Slate article, consumed $1 billion in quarters in 1979, and three years later that number had ballooned to $8 billion.

  Or consider this: according to the Internet Pinball Database (IPDB), Williams sold over seventeen thousand Firepower pinball machines in 1980. Just two years later, they manufactured a new game called Defender. They sold 369.

  But arcade games didn’t last much longer either. Continuing its celebrated history of declaring things dead, the New York Times tolled the chime for video games on October 17, 1983, writing that “the electronic centipedes, outer space invaders and spooky goblins that only a year ago seemed to have an extraterrestrial grip on the play hours of America’s children are consuming each other like so many Pac-Men.” The Times cited boredom (“You kill the invaders and that’s it,” lamented an unimpressed 12-year-old) for the massive loss in revenue that had already begun to shutter arcades by the hundreds.

  Those who predicted the end of all video games in 1983 could not have been more wrong, of course; they could not have imagined the thorough cultural saturation video games would one day enjoy. How could they have foreseen a family in a restaurant booth waiting for dinner to arrive, children tapping away at Minecraft on iPhones to give the adults a moment’s peace—so that the adults can play Fruit Ninja on their Samsung Galaxies?

  Pinpointing (again with the puns) what killed arcades can’t be as simple as the fact that kids were enthralled in 1982 but jaded in 1983. Yes, children are fickle, but the bursting of the arcade Bubble Bobble had less to do with the whims of youth and more to do with what was happening in the children’s living rooms.

  In 1983, home video game consoles were nothing new. My parents, for example, owned a 1978 video game system called the Magnavox Odyssey2. It was an inconvenient dinosaur of a toy—when we wanted to play, we had to take the parts out of its cardboard box and attach the wires, using a screwdriver, to inputs on the back of our television. Playing video games became an event, and not an event the kids could undertake on their own. Now video games fill the two minutes in the bank line or the ten minutes on the subway, and this time it’s the kids who aren’t necessary.

  The games themselves, by nearly any standards, sucked. For example, we had a game called Computer Golf! that featured a little blue golfer with about as much physical detail as a Tetris piece. Players would maddeningly direct him around a green rectangle and try to “swing” a “golf club” at a “golf ball.” All of those terms are in quotes because none of those items or activities resembled anything but moving rectangles and squares from one place to another.

  This is why everyone went to the arcade: like miniature World’s Fairs, arcades showcased the newest, zippiest technologies that simply couldn’t appear on a home television set. But soon they could. Graphics improved, game cartridges improved, and by 1982, the Atari 2600 had already sold ten million units. Who needs to waste quarters on a few minutes’ worth of an experience that can be enjoyed limitlessly at home?

  Game designers attempted to win kids back to the arcades with even more advanced technology—which, at the time, meant laser discs. Remember those? Designers knew they needed to offer an experience that dwarfed the home games, so they pinned their hopes on larger and more immersive—and expensive—machines.

  In modern arcades, which rely on the same bigger-is-better strategy, that machine can be a redemption game on which you nearly, but not quite, win a pair of Beats headphones. It can be a six-passenger motion simulator ride, a massive air hockey table, or a side-by-side racing game with two full-size motorbikes. Or it can be the one quality that home video games can never re-create, a feeling one can only find at brick-and-mortar arcades, a sensation younger players may not want and older players may not know they want: nostalgia.

  That arcades exist today must strike kids as odd. Arcades feel so arcane, so much a part of someone else’s past, that it’s hard to imagine children wandering into one unless they’re playing Pokémon Go and spot a Jigglypuff near the change machine.

  Let the kids think what they want. Not only are there arcades today, there are arcades that aren’t always meant for kids. It’s been a good ten to fifteen years since the last arcade generation reached legal drinking age, which means they now have both a wistful recollection of days gone by and enough money to occasionally chase that feeling. Hence the barcade.

  Barcades represent a new form of interactive theme bar, and they’ve been popping up across the nation like mushrooms from Mario’s question block. They promise a night in which you can relive the adolescence you wish you had—i.e., an adolescence with no bedtime and abundant alcohol—and have names like Insert Coins (Minneapolis), HiScores (Las Vegas), 16-Bit Bar+Arcade (Columbus, Ohio), and The 1-Up (Denver), which features a custom-built game cabinet that dispenses craft beer.

  The name Barcade itself is now a registered trademark of one of the first barcades, in (of course) Brooklyn, a venture so successful it has expanded to six locations.

  Beercade, on the other hand, is a bar/arcade in Benson, Nebraska, a far cry from Brooklyn both geographically and culturally. General manager Ash Preheim sits across from me at a booth after pouring me some kind of draft beer with “peach” in the name. Preheim is in his late thirties, with a dark mustache, short shirtsleeves, and a brown Odell Brewing cap, and he’s come equipped with two packs of Camels. He looks like many of our dads did in grainy photos from the ’70s.

  Even though it’s late on a Monday night, the vintage arcade games and pinball machines at Beercade are popular with—okay, let’s just say it: I think these are all grad students. But Preheim assures me that the place is full of families on Saturdays, which semicopy the conditions that attr
acted many kids to pinball a generation ago: Dad gets a whiskey and a beer, and junior plays the games.

  Preheim developed an affinity for arcade games in a gas station game room, where he’d spend his junior high days smoking cigarettes and playing Rollergames. Today pinball is an integral part of Beercade, and just like in the halcyon arcade days, it’s the part that’s the biggest pain in the ass. Not only do the stresses of constant play break his games on a daily basis, but since the pinball machines have a steeper learning curve than the video games, Preheim reports that sometimes patrons will demand a refund “because they don’t know where the START button is.”

  So here’s the plight of today’s pinball operator: it’s the operator’s job to bring pinball machines to locations, hope patrons know how to play them, cringe while the machines withstand abuse, and fix them a lot more frequently than the quarters in the cash box make worthwhile—only, unlike during the arcade craze, without the volume of patrons required to justify the headaches. It’s not that pinball machines are poorly quality controlled or especially fragile. They just have so many moving parts that can fall out of harmony when they’re smacked repeatedly.

  They’re also huge, requiring a trailer to lug them around, and expensive—Preheim estimates that about $33,000 of the bar’s assets are tied up in their eight pinball machines.

  “Everything always breaks on a Friday night,” he says, “usually right when I’m about to walk out the door.”

  Preheim tells me, not looking too pleased, he has $1,000 worth of pinball machine parts in the back. Pinball machines are money pits, and it would be different if their earnings offset their cost and annoyance. But that’s not the case: bar sales, not quarters, keep Preheim solvent. At Beercade, the beer subsidizes the cade.