by Adam Ruben
Beercade’s most important mission, with its exposed ductwork, brick mural, and massive tile mosaic of Mario, is fighting back against the basement arcades that swallow pinball machines and video games, never again releasing them into public hands. Preheim considers home-use-only enthusiasts as deplorable as private art collectors, as they selfishly hoard assets meant for all to enjoy. It is Preheim’s hope that pinball can still exist as a social activity—not an antisocial activity.
He’s not alone in that mission.
Without a doubt, the hippest, freshest-looking pinball venue I’ve visited is a club in downtown Los Angeles called EightyTwo. The place is half pinball machines, half classic arcade games, with Mortal Kombat live-streamed over the bar and a rotating cadre of food trucks.5 Kids in their twenties (they’re kids to me) pull up in Ubers, then wait behind the velvet rope—an actual velvet rope—to show their IDs and come in. Multiple times at EightyTwo, amid the loud club music, I’ve had to elbow my way past couples making out.
On the other side of the country, in a back room filled with electronics, Bill Disney—no relation to Walt—stares at a circuit board illuminated by a headlamp; his wife, Linda, shuffles papers nearby. He works on software for Unisys, and she’s a kindergarten teacher, but together, the couple in their late fifties operates Pinball Gallery, a pinball arcade in Malvern, Pennsylvania, where they sell ice cream instead of alcohol.
“Ten years ago,” he says, poking around with a screwdriver, “I couldn’t even name a place where you could buy a pinball machine.” In those ten years, during which he presumably figured out where to buy them, he’s purchased more than a hundred.
Like Preheim, the Disneys built their collection with the intention not of hoarding the fun but of sharing it. When his first purchase, a 1978 Sinbad, broke, he learned to fix it.
“I like to buy them when they’re not working,” he says. Machines are plucked from the dust heap, restored, and, best of all, made public. The couple recently purchased their third Sinbad. But it’s their day jobs, Disney says, not an influx of quarters, that keep their labor of love financially feasible.
If pinball doesn’t pay the bills, how—and why—do so many modern pinball arcades stay afloat? Maybe answering that question is a matter of wandering through a neighborhood in yet another corner of the country. I chatted with Constance Negley, one of the owners of D&D Pinball in Tucson, Arizona, which at the time was the second-largest pinball arcade in the American Southwest (after the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas). And a stroll through the community revealed the secret of Negley’s success.
I know nothing about neighborhoods in Tucson. In fact, I ended up outside D&D Pinball accidentally while in town for a conference. But here’s what I saw when I walked up and down the street.
There’s a bar advertising thirty-four taps. There are at least three specialty bookstores in five blocks. There are tattoo parlors; a food co-op; an improvisational theater; two smoke shops and two hookah lounges; a pizza parlor with a built-in bocce court; a medical marijuana dispensary called 420 Social Club; stores called Generation Cool, Tucson Herb Store, Wooden Tooth Records, Surly Wench Pub, Chocolate Iguana, and Mr. Head’s Gallery and Bar; and a brand-new streetcar that only runs up and down these few blocks, presumably because lots of customers patronize the locally owned businesses—and also because after 10:00 PM, many of those people are probably drunk or high.
I see a neck-tattooed woman in a long dress greet her friend’s young son: “Hi, Balthasar!”
When one store becomes retro-chic, it’s gauche. It’s obnoxious. It’s trying too hard. But when entire sections of cities make themselves over this way, clearly a real demand exists. And pinball can be part of that demand.
It’s like Greenwich Village in New York; Hampden in Baltimore; Adams Morgan in DC; South Street in Philadelphia; Dolores Park in San Francisco; the Old Fourth Ward in Atlanta; Christiania in Copenhagen; Benson, Nebraska; or pretty much all of Boulder, Colorado. I’ve found hipster enclaves in nearly every city I’ve visited, from Chicago’s West Loop to the Design District in Los Angeles. And they’re not Portlandia, a wild caricature of pretention masquerading as refined grittiness. They’re laid-back neighborhoods with bike lanes, farmer’s markets, and coffee that’s not Starbucks.
Now they have pinball.
From the glass display case stuffed with Nintendo Power Gloves and Tiger Electronics games to the 1988 Bangles ballad “Eternal Flame” blasting through the speakers to the name of the arcade itself, Yestercades in Red Bank, New Jersey, is unashamed to capitalize on nostalgia. But Yestercades is not just another modern retro arcade: it may hold the key to success for arcades to come.
Ken Kalada is not someone you’d peg as a retro-arcade owner. For starters, like Preheim, he’s in his thirties—which means that for him, nostalgia ends in the first Reagan administration. Consequently, Yestercades has no 1950s baseball pitch-and-bats, no woodrails, no Pong. Though his customers include young kids and old-timers, Ken’s primary clientele appears to be young professionals who want to relive their youth, not by sipping malts by the jukebox but by snarfing Fun Fruits and Hi-C Ecto Cooler while waiting for a turn at Double Dragon. It’s possible that this demographic seems to dominate because I’ve chosen to visit Yestercades at midnight on a Saturday.
Growing up watching his father run his own business—a pharmacy that I assume was much less fun than Yestercades—Kalada decided that he would someday own a toy store, ski resort, or arcade. Thus, Yestercades is less a business venture and more the product of a big kid finally designing an ideal arcade for himself, filling it with the machines he loves, and finding to his delight that others happen to enjoy it, too.
Kalada has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. As a kid, he bought and resold old Atari games on Usenet, a sort of proto-Internet discussion board that thrived more than a decade before anyone would type the letters “www.” At age thirteen, he proudly told his parents that he had earned more than $1,000 this way, and Kalada’s father—who, now in his seventies, plays at Yestercades every weekend—replied gleefully that he’d never have to buy his son a video game again.
At Yestercades, the pinball machines are in the back, like the unruly kids who commandeer the last row of the school bus. Kalada is more a video game fan than a pinhead, and he’s never heard of events like PAPA, but the pinball machines are an essential part of the experience.
And, just like at every other arcade, nothing is as infuriating for Kalada as maintaining the pinball machines. There are sixteen, and they demand more of Kalada’s time than his eighty video games.
When someone visits Yestercades and asks Kalada how he’s able to stay in business, he responds the same way as Clay Harrell at the Ann Arbor Pinball Museum. “We get people coming in here all the time,” he says. “‘What are your start-up costs? How many bracelets do you sell?’ I’m like, ‘Fuck off!’”
It’s a funny but ultimately insufficient answer. Throughout my tour of modern arcades, I had the feeling of a lingering unanswered question, one that undid arcades thirty years ago. It’s this: With today’s cheap and abundant entertainment options—you can binge-watch any television show in your underwear for a few dollars a month—isn’t there less motivation than in 1983, or ever, to visit an arcade?
For Kalada, the answer lies not just in nostalgia but also in something else that we lost when arcades closed, something we all need even when we think we don’t: a sense of community. Perhaps, he says, that’s the reason arcades haven’t vanished entirely. You can buy beer, he points out, and drink it in your kitchen, or you can go to a bar and pay five times as much. Yet people go to bars all the time because life is just better when there are other people, even strangers, enjoying the same pursuit in the same room.
“I love it,” Kalada says. “People are coming in here to remember a simpler time in their lives. So even if it’s just for an hour, it allows them to escape. We’ll see people come in here in the worst mood, but they’re grinning when
they leave.”
It’s nearly 1:00 AM at Yestercades, and a woman with an iced coffee and eight rubber bands spaced every few inches down her long ponytail plays a Q*bert console. A kid on a stool, probably in his early teens, is kicking ass at Donkey Kong. Two guys on beanbag chairs trash-talk each other over a game of the original Pokémon on a large flat-screen television while two more guys on the adjacent leather couch play Madden. It’s like a magical living room where no one ever has to put away the Xbox and go to bed.
Back on the darkened streets of Red Bank, New Jersey, it’s 2015 again, a year when there seems to be little reason an arcade can survive. But in Red Bank’s neighborhood—in which Yestercades thrives despite looking nothing like Benson’s or Tucson’s—during the one-block walk to my car, I pass Lacrosse Unlimited, which sells sticks with nets, and a paint-your-own-pottery store called A Time to Kiln. If a need for those stores truly exists, why the hell not an arcade?
Pinball owed its near death when arcades closed, Roger Sharpe explains, to the same doom and gloom that nearly took out other forms of entertainment. The phonograph will spell the end of live concerts, everyone feared; television will kill theater; cable TV will destroy the cinema. In each epoch, it’s a general question of “Now that we can re-create the experience of leaving the house, why leave the house?” Yet we continue to leave the house.
I’m typing this in a tea shop. I can make tea at home. Today I choose not to. All around me are people who made the same choice.
I’ve often watched stand-up comedy open mics in which the performer closes by reminding their audience, “Tip your bartenders, drive safely, and thank you for supporting live comedy.”
So thank you for supporting live pinball. Thank you for supporting live anything.
In the late ’80s and early ’90s, after Pac-Man and Space Invaders had become relics and kids couldn’t be pried from their home Nintendo controllers, something weird happened. Pinball suddenly found itself enjoying a new renaissance; when video arcade games lost their novelty, the good old wood-and-steel beasts were still standing.
And stand they did. By 1989, according to Crain’s Chicago Business, two large pinball manufacturers, Williams (which had acquired Bally) and Midway Manufacturing, ran a combined facility in Chicago that had over one thousand employees and produced about half of the sixty thousand machines that would be sold that year.
It was a far cry from Pac-Man’s four hundred thousand units, to be sure. But sixty thousand pinball machines are sixty thousand pinball machines. The industry had weathered the crash and, according to Roger Sharpe, emerged “a little bit better, a little bit less young.”
Throughout my childhood, the pinball machine that seemed most ubiquitous was Funhouse. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, it may help to think of it as the game with a giant, obnoxious talking puppet head on the playfield.6
“I’m not sure where the idea came from,” says Pat Lawlor, who designed the game. He pauses. “I mean, it was my idea.” The head’s name was Rudy, and though he taunted players throughout the game, he was more than a distraction—part of Funhouse’s goal was to advance the clock to midnight, lull Rudy to sleep, then use an upper flipper to shoot pinballs into Rudy’s open, snoring mouth.
“The way I ended up designing it,” Lawlor tells me in the lobby of a hotel outside Chicago, “it can be a target that’s hard to get to, the head can be somewhat annoying, and you can want to hit it.” That’s exactly the kind of well-thought-out whimsy that characterized pinball machines in that era, the era when I fell in love with them.
Pinball had risen in the ’30s, fallen in the ’40s, surged in arcades in the late ’70s, and fallen again by 1983. But then it was about to come back in a big way.
Ask any pinball player to identify the game’s modern zenith, and they’ll inevitably point to one machine made in 1992, another of Lawlor’s designs, renowned for being the best-selling pinball machine before or, unfortunately, since: The Addams Family.
“In 1989, we were selling maybe 2,500 of a game at Williams,” reminisces Lawlor. (Recall that in 1983, post-crash, game sales were measured in the hundreds, not thousands.) “By the time we got to Whirlwind (1990), we were selling seven thousand of a game. By the time we got to Funhouse, we were selling twelve thousand of a game. And by the time we hit Addams Family, we did twenty-one thousand games.”7 Thanks to the success of machines like The Addams Family, the industry produced nearly twice as many pinball machines in 1992 as it had in 1989—and with its sixty-thousand total machines, 1989 had been a terrific year.
The reasons for the runaway success of The Addams Family, as opposed to any other machine, are not obvious. The game was fun, easy to play yet hard to master, but so were many others. The game’s big toy—a giant plastic Thing hand that emerged from a box and stole the pinball—was neat, but other games had cool toys as well. The best I can conclude is that The Addams Family sold well because 1992 was a good year for pinball, and 1992 was a good year for pinball because The Addams Family sold well.
I remember 1992. I celebrated my bar mitzvah, grew four inches taller, and played The Addams Family at Funland at Rehoboth Beach. The sounds of that game—Raul Julia as Gomez Addams declaring, “Keep the ball! I have a whole bucketful!”—are mingled in my memory with the sounds of the carnival rides and with the sights and smells of that idyllic shore town. And somehow I’ve ended up, twenty-three years later, talking to the man who dreamed it up.
“We touched a nerve not only in the normal pinball community, but we touched a nerve in the community of people who don’t normally play those games,” says Lawlor.
The problem with a record-breaking game is that it sets the bar even higher for the next game, and with binoculars from the present, we can identify 1992 as the year pinball peaked. In 1993, high on the success of Addams but watching sales start to slip, Lawlor embarked on an even more ambitious game, one that included a working gumball machine that dispensed pinballs onto the playfield, invisible interactive magnets that could move the ball like ghost flippers, a special ceramic pinball that triggered its own mode, and more—so many toys, in fact, that they widened the playfield by more than six inches and called it a “SuperPin.” The theme was Rod Serling’s cult classic sci-fi television series The Twilight Zone.
Lawlor was the driving force behind The Twilight Zone’s innovations. “I went to the management at WMS,” he tells me, referring to the Williams Manufacturing Company,8 “and I said, ‘Look, we know that we can’t keep doing the same thing over and over. We’re going to have to change the candy bar.’”
According to the Internet Pinball Database, The Twilight Zone sold a respectable 15,235 units, which today would blow any pinball machine out of the water—but following The Addams Family’s record, it should have been cause for concern. Lawlor would never sell more than ten thousand of a single game again.
“In the modern history of pinball machines, anything above ten thousand is rarified air,” he reflects. “You can count those games on your hands. I’ve been lucky enough that I’ve had three of them.”
It’s a unique sort of legacy. When Saint Peter greets Lawlor at the pearly gates and demands an accounting of his accomplishments—his three blockbusters that shaped the world—Lawlor will be able to list two machines based on television shows from the 1960s and one with a creepy jabbering doll head.9
More than twenty years later, The Twilight Zone has probably become the most modified, or “modded,” pinball machine in existence. Collectors delight in buying custom toys to sprinkle on the playfield—one website lists light-up robots, a functional mini-TV, and even a launch knob shaped disturbingly like Rod Serling’s head. The extra gizmos don’t affect gameplay; they just light up or decorate an empty area or . . . whatever Rod Serling’s head does.
The extrawide SuperPin was meant to be the new standard in pinball machines (i.e., a game layout with more room so that more fun gadgets could be packed onto the playfield). But by the end of 1994, though seve
n different SuperPins were manufactured, cost savings became more important than toys, and SuperPins would become plain old Pins again.
Technologically, pinball was flourishing. Dot matrix displays could play videos and give instructions. Shaker motors, introduced on Earthshaker (1989), could vibrate the game to complement gameplay. Timed ball savers resurrected many prematurely drained balls, and electronic plungers—now much swifter than the ones at the Skokie bowling alley that annoyed Roger Sharpe—launched balls into play. It seemed each new game had its own featured gadget, often with patents obtained expressly for using that gadget on that game.
I’ve always viewed increased complexity in pinball as a good thing; it was the reason I found the game so appealing to begin with. The toys represent cleverness in design within a context of restrictions, an opportunity to watch designers’ imaginations run wild in the few hundred cubic inches under the glass, and complexity is the enemy of boredom.
But as technology improved and the limits of ingenuity stretched and the rules for each game became ever more elaborate, fans of the late ’70s games soon found themselves staring at the games of the ’90s, carping that there’s just too damn much going on.
“They’ve made the game so complicated that 5 percent of the people that play ’em understand the rules,” complains Gene Cunningham, the former CEO of parts supplier Illinois Pinball, in the documentary Special When Lit. To me, the crazy-deep rule sets are part of pinball’s appeal—juggling priorities and making split-second decisions, using as much information as is available, knowing that there are cool things I still haven’t seen. It never occurred to me that for other pinball fanatics, this intricacy destroyed pinball. The rules, they said, aren’t worth learning—and the toys aren’t fun, they’re distracting.
