by Adam Ruben
It is a truth universally acknowledged that unnecessary convolution is part of pinball’s gestalt. At least, that’s what I thought before talking to a lot of older pinball players. Even Roger Sharpe, who’s played every game, only disdainfully tolerates the over-the-top complications of the newer games. Apollo 13 (1995), for example, includes a wacky-ass thirteen-ball multiball that’s either incredibly fun or not all that fun depending on who you are.
“Great. I’m gonna get thirteen pinballs spun at me, all at once. Wow, that’s exciting as heck,” says Sharpe unenthusiastically. “Seriously, really? And without a ball save? For what purpose?”
Pinball designers started taking their cues from players, and players wanted harder games; they wanted the machines in their basements to challenge them for years. The Simpsons Pinball Party, for example, features a Super Duper Mega Extreme Wizard Mode requiring so many subtasks to be accomplished first that few players in the world have reached it. To some, that’s awesome; to others, why bother?
“It became this albatross of designers needing to get affirmation from their audience,” says Sharpe. “In the late ’90s, the fact that you would go up [to a new machine] and be totally lost as a player wasn’t fun. What do I do first? I mean, the old way of playing pinball was, you shoot for the flashing light.”
After its peak around 1992, pinball would nearly disappear again by the end of the millennium. Unlike the postarcade crash in 1983, this time it was more of a slow, painful process, like the way my daughter removes a Band-Aid over the course of half an hour. Searching for a cause, I had always assumed that the Internet killed pinball this time around; after all, the timing made sense. But this time the cause of death, like pinball itself, was complicated.
In One Quarter at a Time, Tim Arnold, owner of the Pinball Hall of Fame, described how the mid-’90s evaporation of “the little mom-and-pop stores and the little corner beer-and-shot joints” reduced the number of possible locations for pinball machines. As an operator himself at the time, Arnold had more and more trouble finding locations amenable to hosting machines, “and with no locations, there’s no pinball.”
“Where pinball had its greatest strength was in street locations,” agrees Sharpe, referring particularly to bars. “The DUI laws and getting rid of happy hours basically killed that. Bars really died.” The result was, in a way, the extinction of the bar crowd’s middle class—not middle class in terms of income, necessarily, but in terms of casualness. Corner taverns continued to dispense beer to regulars, and going-out spots continued to host late-night parties, but that middle slice of the bar’s business—those stopping by for a quick game of pool or darts or pinball—started finding their entertainment elsewhere.
That’s certainly part of the reason pinball began drifting toward its third near demise, a ruin that would come closer than ever to eliminating the game forever. But many people in the industry I’ve talked to cite another antagonist that killed pinball in the late ’90s: pinball.
The strange fact is that pinball’s success in the early ’90s was responsible for pinball’s decline in the mid-’90s. Because The Addams Family and its contemporaries sold so well, arcades were starting to get full.
“The pinball market is like any other marketplace,” explains Lawlor. “The market was saturated with pinball machines. And it can only absorb so much.”
Pinball became a victim of its own success; if everyone loved The Addams Family and continued to feed it quarters, operators had less reason to replace it with a new game. Even worse—or better, depending on the year one wants to consider—The Addams Family and its Bally-Williams contemporaries were running new, very reliable software, which was easier to operate and repair. The games simply became too appealing, and too reliable, for operators to want new ones.
This fact didn’t stop new manufacturers from trying, ultimately unsuccessfully, to join the game. Alvin G. and Company entered the race in 1991 with their first machine, A. G. Soccer-Ball, marketed under the slogan “For years everybody has asked for something different.” It was certainly different, a weirdly configured head-to-head soccer-themed pinball with no backbox and on which either two players could compete, standing at opposite ends of the cabinet and facing each other, or one player could battle the machine flipping its own flipper. Alvin G. was out of business by 1994. Capcom suffered a similar fate, manufacturing games in 1995, 1996, and that’s it. Data East, which had been selling pinball machines since 1987, sold all assets in 1994 to Sega Pinball (yes, the makers of Sonic the Hedgehog had a pinball company)—which itself hopped off the bandwagon in 1999, selling all assets to Stern. Even Gottlieb, which had been purchased in 1984 by Premier Technology but continued to sell games under the Gottlieb trademark, closed its doors after a sixty-five-year run, bookended by the popular Baffle Ball in 1931 and, ignominiously, Barb Wire in 1996, based on the insipid postapocalyptic thriller starring Pamela Anderson Lee.
The truth is pinball had been in a precarious position to begin with. Unlike a video game, for which maintenance generally means “spray it with Windex,” a pinball machine requires skilled technical care. After a while, the abundance of pinball machines outran the efforts of the technicians, and machines fell into disrepair. Disrepair meant less interest from players, which meant fewer locations sinking their cash into pinball, which meant fewer technicians employed, which meant more disrepair.
One by one, the manufacturers fell. Call it a correction, call it oversaturation, or blame the extinction of simplicity. No matter where you point the flipper finger, just as a pinball launched up the playfield inevitably finds its way back to the drain, pinball would nearly disappear again before the year 2000. Only this time it almost didn’t come back.
7
Come (Back) to PAPA
* * *
IT’S MY SECOND TRIP to the World Pinball Championships, PAPA18, and as I yet again motor over the Appalachians to Carnegie, Pennsylvania, and its adjacent brown brick warehouses that seem to have fewer intact windowpanes and a smaller percentage of existing roof each time I visit, I’m ranked 12,799th in the world. This makes me eligible for the new division PAPA has added, D Division, which is only for players ranked somewhere between 7,500th and infinity.1 It’s meant for novices, for people who find C Division too competitive, but I want to finish in the top twenty-four in some division and qualify for the playoffs.
Not that I’m required to play in D Division. I could play in A Division if I wanted, especially if my primary interest is in donating entry money to the winners. But I like my chances in D Division.
As of the live standings posted online at the beginning of the competition, A, B, and C Divisions each have over thirty entries played, while D Division only has only eight—from just three people. Man, I like those odds. (In retrospect, the difference was probably due to D players being less likely to begin their PAPA experience on the less popular Thursday.)
One of the first people I see is Dave Stewart, a former FSPA league player and electrical engineering professor at the University of Maryland who once had his students build a rudimentary pinball machine over the course of a semester.
Stewart and I catch up while waiting in line for tokens. I casually mention that the new rules have placed me in D, and that feels a bit wrong. Seeking confirmation that I’m not a bully stomping around the kiddie pool, I ask, “I’m not sandbagging, am I?”
His reaction is decisive and uncompromising. “You’re definitely sandbagging if you do D,” he says. When I reach the front of the line, Stewart gleefully declares to the volunteer at the desk, “He’s sandbagging if he does D!”
Thanks a lot, Dave.
So it’s C Division again after all, and there’s just enough time to begin my first entry, including a great score on 24 (2009), a machine themed after the action-adventure television drama. PAPA closes for the night (Jack Bauer: “The following takes place between 11:00 PM and 12:00 AM”), so I drive to a cheap hotel and pass out.
I’m eager to finish my entry the next
morning, but I have to wait, because on a whim I’ve decided to do something weird just to see what happens—I’ve signed up to work at PAPA18 as a volunteer. For all of Saturday morning, instead of muttering about draining my ball down the stupid left outlane while approving my terrible score on some volunteer’s tablet, I’ll listen as players mutter about the stupid left outlane to me.
My first job, since the facility is open but not yet available for qualifying, is to shoo players away from the games until 10:00 AM. Wearing a gray T-shirt with “STAFF” in huge white letters on the back, I gather yesterday’s discarded Mountain Dew bottles while Rich Achterberg and Rob Wintler-Cox, two FSPA players volunteering with me, discuss their chances in the Seniors Division (age fifty and older). That’s where I’ve been assigned to work—it’s a bank of games designated for both the Seniors Division and the Split Flipper Division.
Oh yes. Split Flipper. That warrants some explaining.
Most of the time, a player stands at a pinball machine with his or her right hand on the right flipper button and left hand on the left flipper button.2 In Split Flipper, two players stand at the machine, each in charge of one button, each allowed to only use one hand. It’s a silly-looking way to play the game, and it’s a lot harder than it looks to coordinate flipping with a second person. It helps if the flipper splitters are mentally in sync, and it helps even more if the flipper splitters are Josh and Zach Sharpe.
Split Flipper is one of a few minitournaments, sideline competitions with an element of whimsy, as if regular pinball was somehow deficient in whimsy. Another popular minitourney is the frosted glass tournament, in which players compete on a standard machine with the playfield glass made partially opaque, either using cardboard, that Christmas snow window decorating spray, or, in PAPA’s case, a custom-machined semifrosty PAPA logo.
There are minitourneys that restrict players to one hand only or one ball only or one minute only. The Swedish Pinball Open even offers a delirium pinball tournament in which players compete on a bizarre Franken-game made from pieces of other games.3
I’m nervous about scorekeeping. I’ve seen what happens when impatient players can’t flag down a volunteer to record their score fast enough—especially if that volunteer isn’t doing anything else important but just happens not to see the player’s waving hand. It’s brutal: even the best-intentioned players will roll their eyes at the line forming behind themselves, as if to say, “Yeah, now we’re all just waiting for no great reason. These people.” And may Montague Redgrave Himself help you if you mis-enter someone’s score.
Some of these competitors look intense. I don’t see any golf gloves this time, but more players seem to be wearing headphones, as though they’re saying, “I will choose my own level of sensory input and social interaction, thanks.”
Achterberg hands me a Nexus tablet to input scores, then issues a quick series of instructions—too quick. “And don’t hit refresh,” he says while walking away. “It just does random shit. Oh, and there’s a glitch with voiding scores, so just do the green screen thing.”
The what?
And he’s gone.
The next two hours are a blur of typing scores on the tablet, asking players to approve and press the OK button, and reporting glitches. Every division has a car door remote nailed to a block of wood, and pressing the remote button somehow summons a higher-level volunteer to emerge from the token booth to make repairs or settle disputes. It’s like pressing the flight attendant button or the “It’s saying I didn’t weigh my grapes, but I weighed my grapes” button on a supermarket self-scan machine. In the event of a catastrophic malfunction, PAPA has supplied a stack of signs reading “OMG IT’S BROKEN” that one can place on any defective machine. I notice later that someone has taped one to a bathroom stall.
Echoing the volunteers who’ve recorded my own scores, I cheerily say “Good luck!” to each new person. It’s hard to keep cheerful, though, because every single person who calls me over is pissed off at the world, having drained their ball just a second ago.
I hear a woman tell her husband, with a measure of urgency in her voice, “Have fun. Have. Fun.” She says this before leaving him in the C Division area. He has a tropical shirt, a ponytail, and a big, fluffy, red beard. What she doesn’t realize is, when he drains and curses and realizes he needs to buy another ten-dollar entry to have any shot at feeling like a worthwhile human being, he is having fun.
About an hour in, just when I’m getting the hang of the tablet, I become that volunteer. I enter someone’s score for the wrong player, delaying the whole crowd while I run back and forth between the tournament game bank and the main desk, trying to undo my mistake. Then I get called in to mediate a dispute over the rules of Split Flipper—there’s a kerfuffle over whether each player’s unused hand is allowed to touch the machine at all, as long as it’s not pressing the flipper button. I can’t solve it. Then I enter someone else’s score incorrectly.
But hey, free T-shirt.
I can see why no one knows where to put their extra hand—there’s no way two dudes can share a pinball table without invading each other’s personal space. Nearly every split flipper team appears 100 percent unsure where to place that unnecessary arm, like a first-time stand-up comic obsessing over how to use the hand not holding the mic.
It’s with no small measure of relief that I turn over my Nexus tablet to the next volunteer and go finish off my first entry in C Division. Drain three balls, tap OK on the volunteer’s tablet, take out my phone, refresh refresh refresh, and . . . I’m in fifty-third place in C Division. (Remember that my ranking within the tournament, where I’m angling for twenty-fourth place or higher among my hundred or so cocompetitors, is different from my overall WPPR ranking of 12,799th.)
So, entry two. For the first time, three out of my five games on the entry are halfway decent! I blow it on The Shadow and 24, but now I’m up to thirtieth place in C Division.
Inhaling a hoagie for lunch, I start to feel the strain on my wrists, but less so than during PAPA17. I don’t think I’ve developed better wrist muscles—I think I’ve just taxed my tendons less by playing games that count as entries rather than playing random machines for fun. I eat while staring at a Popeye video game with a Post-it announcing its repair status covering the “ye” and spend way too long imagining an arcade game called Pope.4
Entry three isn’t bad, but two is still my best. I’ve dropped to thirty-first, but now I’m getting two or three good games per entry to balance the clunkers. I can do this.
So I drop another ten dollars right away on entry four, which starts with a disappointing game of NBA Fastbreak. This machine was supposed to be my secret weapon this time, the same way I relied on Johnny Mnemonic at PAPA17. Years ago, I was a member of my university’s grad student government. The administration gave us a bunch of money to use for such grad student extras as wine mixers and conference travel grants and coffee hours—but if we didn’t spend it all by the end of the year, they gave us less money the following year.
Toward the end of one academic year, we were discussing what to do with a surplus of a few thousand dollars. “Hey,” I suggested, “how about buying a pinball machine?” It’s one of those offhand proposals you offer in a jokey, long-shot kind of way, like saying, “Hey, how about we get a daycare at work?” But because the grad student government was run by grad students, instead of debating the practicalities of the suggestion, they basically said, “Sure, why not?”
That’s how The Twilight Zone ended up in the student union; I later exchanged it for two machines, a video Ms. Pac-Man and a pinball NBA Fastbreak. It’s also how I ended up with a key in my pocket that opened both. (It may also be why my PhD ended up taking seven years.)
The point is, I know NBA Fastbreak very well, almost as well as Johnny. The machine in the student union had my initials all over the high score list, with several scores over two hundred. (Recall that NBA Fastbreak uses a basketball-style scoring system, on which double- and
triple-digit scores are the norm.) And here, at PAPA, on my fourth entry, I’ve scored a damn seventeen.
The next entry, entry five, does a good job of showing my inconsistency; it includes the absolute best game anyone has yet played on The Shadow and the third-worst game anyone has played on High Speed (1986), a game based on a moving violation. The story goes that pinball designer Steve Ritchie evaded the police on a California highway at 146 miles per hour in his 1979 Porsche 928, then essentially said, “Hey, my disregard for authority and willingness to risk human life would make a kick-ass pinball theme!”
While I’m waiting in line, Marina calls to remind me that it’s my grandmother’s birthday. Benjamin, now eight months old, says “la la la” on the phone, and it’s adorable, but my mind is elsewhere. I don’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but probably something like this:
Marina: The kids are doing okay—Maya, hold on a minute, I’m talking to Daddy—we just got back from the grocery store—Maya, please wait—can you leave that there? Can you just leave that there until I’m off the phone?
Benjamin: La la la!
Marina: So—oh, hold on, Benjamin, what’s in your mouth? Maya, did you see him put something in his mouth?
Maya: Can I have a Popsicle?
Marina: Benjamin, I’m sorry to reach into your mouth—is that paper? Where did you get paper?
Me: I freaking dominated Shadow! It was awesome! I was playing Vengeance Mode, and I shot all four ramps, and I even played Khan Multiball three times, and . . .
It’s a wonder I’m still married.
Having precalculated some likely outcomes, I tell Marina that I can easily lock in a spot in the playoffs with this entry—I think—with a score of about forty million on Indiana Jones (1993).
There’s a pause, and Marina says, deadpan, “We’ll pray for you.”
I don’t hit forty million on Indy, but I’m close, about thirty-five million, which puts entry five in twenty-third place. If it were midnight, I’d make the playoffs for sure—unfortunately, there are still several hours for the other C Division players to keep topping my scores, so I need to keep playing.
