Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  Under Peterson’s guidance, Stern laid out its three market segments: operators, collectors, and rec room buyers. Then, cleverly, the company began manufacturing a version of each new pinball machine targeted at each segment. For operators, Stern made a “Pro” version, a basic game with fewer bells and whistles—it might lack a gadget or two that would have only added to the price and the list of breakable parts. Operators wanted a relatively cheap yet appealing game, one that Dankberg said would be “fast, mean, [and] play quick.” An extra ramp or miniplayfield probably wouldn’t attract enough additional quarters to offset the cost of the upgrade.

  At the other end of the spectrum were the collectors, for whom Stern made a limited-edition, or “LE,” version. This had every bell, every whistle (often literal bells, but probably not literal whistles), and other bonuses for the true collector—a hand-signed serial number plaque, for example.

  In the middle was Stern’s third segment, the one they called “rec room buyers.” These were people who wanted a pinball machine in their rec room alongside the bumper pool table and home theater. These people had a lot of money to spend but not a lot of knowledge about pinball, so there was no need for the custom plaque. Stern’s “Premium” category was aimed at them, taking the fancy-schmancy stuff off the LE version but leaving in some upgrades over Pro.

  Take, for example, Game of Thrones (2015). All three versions have a dragon toy, but on the LE and Premium models, it moves. LE and Premium have an additional miniplayfield with its own full-sized flippers. And at the top tier, LE includes a certificate of authenticity, designer Steve Ritchie’s autograph on the playfield, and hand-painted cabinet art. The price difference is not insignificant: $6,000 for Pro, $7,600 for Premium, and $8,800 for LE. And especially with recent games, like Game of Thrones, each of the different versions has its own set of rules.3

  Not only are the three market segments necessary for sales, but Stern now recognizes how all three must be appeased in order to keep the game going. The games that operators buy for twentysomethings to play in bars in 2015, for example, will be the games that rec room buyers, during their respective midlife crises, will crave in 2035. It’s a strategy he calls “keep the core player, broaden the base.”

  “If we don’t bring people into pinball,” Peterson told the crowd at Pinball Expo, “then pinball is obviously going to die a slow death.” Again.

  Stern likens it to selling a 1932 Ford Model A, the value of which has been on the decline, “because the guys who want to collect that car, who knew it when they were young, are dead.” Nostalgia has a specific time window, and it seems to usually center around high school and college, those years when freedom is at its most novel and responsibility is low.

  In a way, targeting different strata of buyers is akin to what pinball has done for years, targeting different strata of players. A novice can enjoy Attack from Mars, for example, because it has a huge UFO in the middle that needs to be bashed repeatedly. But actually progressing to the end of the game, performing a litany of other tasks during your three balls to begin a crazy wizard mode called Rule the Universe, is incredibly hard, which keeps serious players interested.

  Breaking the customer base down even further shows why manufacturers would be foolish to disregard any of their market segments. Half of Stern’s games are exported, and in Australia and northern Europe, like the United States, most of the customers are enthusiasts or rec room buyers. But elsewhere in Europe, people flock to low-stakes gambling halls and ale houses that include AWPs (amusement with prizes), so the operator market there is key. In Italy, nearly all of the business is to operators, both in bars and in traditional arcades. Stern even recalls shipping a pinball machine to Kuwait right before the start of the Gulf War. He later heard that the game had been spotted “in a truck going back to Iraq.”

  The size of the international market makes theme selection particularly important. You may think an NFL-themed game, like the one Stern made in 2001, would have universal appeal—but in Europe, what the hell is the NFL? Game of Thrones, Stern reminds me, is televised in 170 different countries and probably watched in a less than legal way in most of the others.

  When Data East Pinball, under Gary Stern, made a Simpsons pinball machine in 1990, they were one of the first licensees permitted to use Springfield and its characters. It was still early in the cartoon’s history, and Bart didn’t have much of a following outside the United States, so the game’s export market was small. When Stern released its follow-up Simpsons game, The Simpsons Pinball Party, in 2003, the new machine had much stronger international appeal.4

  The Holy Grail would be a machine themed after a sport that humans in countries around the world all love; alas, there isn’t one. Americans don’t care for soccer. Basketball is popular in China but not most of Europe. “Baseball you can’t do,” Stern lists next. “We’d sell machines in Cuba and Japan, neither of which are really pinball markets.”

  So what does everyone like? “Movies, television, and rock and roll,” says Stern. Take that, sports.

  Another alternative is to simply release multiple versions of the same game. “When we made NASCAR,” Stern tells me, “we re-arted it as Grand Prix for the export market.” Not only was that a smart marketing choice, it’s also the first time I’ve ever heard the word “art” used as a verb. Makes me want to walk into the Louvre and yell, “Hey, who arted?”

  Even NFL was a re-theming of Stern Pinball’s first newly designed machine, a soccer game called Striker Xtreme (2000). To make it palatable to Americans, in addition to re-arting the graphics, Stern replaced the goalie with a linebacker and the soccer goal with a goalpost.

  Today Stern has an active online presence, including a popular channel on gaming video platform Twitch.tv, hosted by the young, bearded, Raybanned minicelebrity “Jack Danger.” For the release of Game of Thrones, Stern appeared in a billboard-sized publicity still, sitting on HBO’s actual Iron Throne. The launch of the previous game, KISS (2015), featured Stern in full Gene Simmons makeup, posing next to the machine with his tongue sticking out.

  Dankberg relates that, after the photo shoot, Stern elected to keep the makeup on and drive to the yacht club in his convertible to watch the Blackhawks game. What was meant to be a fun surprise for his friends nearly spoiled Stern Pinball’s carefully crafted secrecy about upcoming themes—KISS had not been announced yet, and someone who recognized Gary took a photo of him at a gas station and sent it to his daughter, who posted it on her Facebook page. The Stern Pinball team had a hell of a time quickly undoing the picture’s online footprint. I guess that’s why it’s sometimes safer to rock and roll all night than to party ev-er-y day.

  That secrecy is all part of the marketing genius. Commenters on the Pinside forum—an online pinball discussion board—analyze photos on Stern’s Facebook page with the scrutiny of crime scene investigators, drooling over each new detail that might allow them to guess Stern’s next theme before it’s officially announced.

  As easily as he could claim credit for coming to the rescue on the Day Pinball Died, Stern insists repeatedly that he loves the game, but he didn’t save pinball. Since the early ’30s, however, when his dad joined the industry, the world had never gone more than a few months without a new pinball machine. If Stern had followed the pattern of business decisions in 1999, there wouldn’t have been any new pinball machines, possibly to this day. You didn’t save pinball, Gary? The hell you didn’t.

  While I’m talking to Stern, a middle-aged man in a pinball T-shirt interrupts to vigorously shake his hand and ask him to share a selfie.

  “This is, like, surreal!” the guy says after his wife takes a picture. “This is kind of a dream!”

  Shaking Stern’s hand a second time, he’s just so overcome with joy that he transforms into a kid in front of my eyes. “Mister Steeeern!” he says, suddenly sounding like a loud, gravelly-voiced teenager, “Woooooow! Huge fan! Thank you.”

  I wonder if I should tell him Mister Stern
was a schnauzer.

  The radio has predicted “a dusting of snow” on the late March morning that I visit the Stern Pinball factory in Melrose Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb about as attractive and vibrant as Carnegie, Pennsylvania. As it turns out, a Chicago “dusting” is the equivalent of a DC “holy hell I should just crash into a lamppost now and get it over with,” and I slog through the parking lot to the front door an hour late, soaked to my ankles in gray slush. Somehow I’ve convinced Marina and the kids to join me on this trip, but instead of skipping gaily around Millennium Park, they’re stuck in a hotel room with sleet battering the windows, Marina half knocked out from the flu, Benjamin restless, and Maya deciding to try out her new phrase “You’re not in charge!”—all of them counting the seconds until we can go home.

  I’m in wonderland.

  Well, I’m in a factory. I blame Willy Wonka for distorting multiple generations’ concepts of factories, casting them as magical places that make Pee-Wee’s Playhouse look like the DMV. Some factories have spruced up for the sake of tourism—I’m thinking of Jelly Belly, Ben and Jerry’s, Crayola, and Celestial Seasonings with its monstrous Peppermint Room—but most put function and compliance first, aesthetics second. Even though a few corners of the Stern Pinball factory give way to whimsy, with hanging banners paying tribute to previous games and a small arcade in which employees are required to play fifteen minutes a day,5 mostly it’s a warehouse filled with shelves, boxes, and men in dark hoodies.

  But inside the cardboard boxes labeled “Northern Precision Plastics, Inc.” stacked by the loading dock is something unique: a pile of clear plastic ramps, all identical, all destined to become the frictionless highways for the silver ball, each one capable of sealing the difference between victory and heartbreak.

  Colorful spools of cable line the workbenches, the wires waiting to be cut to the proper size and connected according to the appropriate wiring diagram.6 Off to the side, two men spray and apply a long, trapezoidal Star Trek decal to a wooden cabinet, then squeegee out the bubbles—in this day and age, pinball cabinets aren’t prettily painted, they’re covered in UV-resistant, three-hundred-dots-per-inch stickers. A handful of quality testers meticulously assess each switch, lamp, and coil in the nearly finished machines, tapping areas of the playfield that the glass would normally cover.

  This is not a factory that churns out a few million of the same simple widget. This is a factory that churns out a few thousand of the same very complicated widget, each one assembled from over 3,500 individual parts in multiple mediums—plastic, metal, wood, glass, electronics, paint, and half a mile of wire—each needing to be sanded, sculpted, melted, molded, soldered, or applied, sometimes by machine, sometimes by hand. In 2008, Stern told the New York Times that each machine takes thirty-two hours to build—longer than a Ford Taurus. Today the parts appear to include giant plastic Gene Simmons heads that dominate the new KISS machine, tongues outstretched to form miniramps.

  The toys are probably the coolest parts (or “subassemblies”) to see stacked on shelves or in bins. One shelf holds a stack of Starship Enterprises, rows of diamond-shaped wrestling rings from WWE Wrestlemania (2015), and a collection of medieval castles.

  The castles themselves are an unambiguous tribute to the resurgence of pinball. While Star Trek and WWE Wrestlemania debuted in 2013 and 2015, respectively, the castles come from Medieval Madness, a WMS game from 1997. Stern recently purchased the rights to remanufacture Medieval Madness, and they’ve now begun making new machines essentially identical to the originals.

  This is not normal. Pinball machines aren’t often remanufactured—for the most part, once they’re made, they’re made. It’s as though Ford decided yesterday to start producing, on a large scale, the 1955 Thunderbird—not a car that’s this year’s take on the ’55 Thunderbird but the original ’55 Thunderbird, made now.

  Dankberg, who’s leading my tour today, is just as excited about what’s inside the games as what’s on the playfield. “We make a unique set of wiring and cabling for every game,” he explains, showing me their newest “node boards,” essentially mini-computers that have helped Stern trim the half mile of wire in each game down to less than a quarter mile. He shows me digital power supplies that replace older-style transformers, trimming the game by thirty-five pounds.

  Dankberg came to Stern Pinball in 2009, by way of the music industry. A self-described “Star Wars baby” with a black baseball cap, large glasses, and an easygoing, unshaven demeanor, Dankberg looks kind of like a roadie, but the roadie who reads Dostoyevsky during downtime.

  When he was in his twenties, Dankberg thought he had a bright future as a guitarist. But he soon learned that “getting a record deal does not necessarily mean that you have a job.” So instead of playing guitar, he sold guitar amps, eventually transitioning into jobs in artist relations and marketing. That’s where he would have stayed, were it not for an overture from lawyer Dave Peterson, who knew Stern needed a marketer.

  “I said, ‘They still make pinball machines? Unbelievable!’” recalls Dankberg. “I never met [pinball designer] Steve Ritchie in my life. I just knew he was some jerk on the Internet.” Little did he know he’d soon be deciding, for the majority of the world, exactly which pinball machines Steve Ritchie would design.

  “My main mission,” says Dankberg, “as the marketing guy of pinball, is to get people interested in pinball.”

  So far, it’s working. If pinball is disappearing from the American landscape, it’s sure as hell news to Stern’s 250 employees, working in a 35,000-square-foot factory for a company whose revenue has quadrupled since 2008. (About a month after my initial visit, Stern relocated to a 110,000-square-foot facility down the road.)

  Inside the factory’s arcade, where everyone’s mandatory fifteen minutes of daily pinball beta testing takes place, a handwritten sheet hangs from WWE Wrestlemania, where employees have written “Wrestler music still not loud enough” and “Shaker motor feels too violent.” Wrestling fans rejoice: Body slamming your opponent and braining him with a metal folding chair is fine. But the shaker motor is too violent.

  Another of the games in production during my tour is the infamous Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons, a deliberate throwback to older-style games, both in terms of its mechanics (score is kept using electromechanical reels) and the unapologetic misogyny of its theme. This is not a remanufacture, as with Medieval Madness, it’s a completely new game that looks like a completely old game. The machine was dreamed up by a company with the ability to design pinball machines but not manufacture them. That company is called WhizBang, which, perhaps not coincidentally, are two slang terms for things one can do with a penis.

  Whoa Nellie! has some quirky features, like the fact that it sits on a faux fruit crate rather than metal legs, but there’s no denying that the dominant double entendres about melons (thumping them; hand-picking them; their ripeness, juiciness, sweetness, and bigness) could—and here it’s the Pinball Aficionado blog’s inadvertent double entendre—“definitely rub some [people] the wrong way.”

  Deciding which titles to produce is no insignificant task, and Stern Pinball delights in announcing its upcoming machines with great fanfare and, increasingly, more than twenty simultaneous launch parties around the world, a practice Dankberg adopted from the music industry. As he walks me around the factory, I think I’m being coy when I casually say, “You know what would be a good theme? Game of Thrones.” At the time of my visit, the game hasn’t been announced yet, and when Dankberg smiles, I’m pretty sure he sees me as yet another pinball player providing unsolicited recommendations, like George Costanza on Seinfeld cornering George Wendt to suggest taking Cheers out of the bar.

  As it turns out, Dankberg’s smile meant something more like “Wait seven months.” I’m still hoping for—no Iron Throne pun intended—royalties.

  The tricky part of licensing, says Dankberg, is that the license holder won’t necessarily give you carte blanche to go nuts with their theme. F
or example, if you bought the license to make and sell a Frozen-themed pinball machine, you could not depict Arendelle however you wanted. Disney would carefully choose and control the art, music, and sound bites that came with your license—lest you get overly creative and produce Whoa Elsa! Big Juicy Snowballs. Dankberg says the more your license grants you, the more immersive the game experience—Game of Thrones, for example, includes custom voice recordings made by Rory McCann, who plays Sandor “the Hound” Clegane. This means that at some point in his life, Rory McCann walked into a recording studio, script in hand, and said, “Ball one, locked.”7

  These days, Stern Pinball has found its rhythm. They produce three new games per year, with three versions of each, and they may even resurrect one or two “vault” games—a title from a previous year that was popular enough to produce again in a limited run. They make “studio” games, like Whoa Nellie!, designed by someone else but manufactured by Stern’s powerhouse. And they’ve even begun making custom accessories, like a fist-shaped plunger knob for WWE Wrestlemania or a light-up KISS sign to mount on top of the KISS backbox.

  When you’re choosing only three themes a year, you have to be careful not to allow even one dud into the mix. A new blockbuster fantasy movie might sound like the ideal vehicle for a new pinball table, but Dankberg has to assess staying power as much as current popularity. As Dankberg told pop culture website Inverse, Gary Stern’s standard cautionary tale is that he’s the guy who licensed Last Action Hero (1993).