Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  Roger Sharpe, who knows a lot about licensing, told the Pavlov Pinball blog that it’s not always a strictly financial arrangement between pinball manufacturers and the companies whose licenses they seek. “Pinball is something of a speck on these companies’ balance sheets,” he said, so their decision to license a pinball machine is partially motivated by the uniqueness of the proposal. “[The TV show] The Walking Dead doesn’t need to have a pinball machine,” he continued, “but having a pinball machine as part of that is kind of neat.” Yes, the multimillion-dollar pinball industry often relies on convincing executives that pinball machines are kind of neat.

  Licensing may sound like some boring legal detail, but in pinball, it’s everything. After all, pinball manufacturers can’t just make any machine they want to—otherwise I’d be playing Wallace and Gromit, Spinal Tap, or Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure right now. During interviews, I’ve heard people agitate for games based on the television shows Big Bang Theory and Rick and Morty. At my request, Dankberg lists some of the suggestions he’s fielded: Gwar, Reservoir Dogs, and Evil Dead. In the documentary Special When Lit, Ron Shuster, a former youth pastor with a collection of over 150 games, envisions a Passion (as in, of the Christ) themed pinball machine. That would go nicely with the Pope video game.

  Seven months pass (and the Game of Thrones game debuts) before I return to visit Stern’s new, triple-sized factory, and this time I’m with a tour group of pinball enthusiasts, arriving on a yellow school bus. “It doesn’t look that big,” says the man in the seat behind me. There’s no pleasing some people.

  Since this is a public event, with hundreds in attendance, Gary Stern has upped the fun factor, hiring an oldies deejay in a Hawaiian shirt and displaying life-sized cardboard cutouts of himself and Whoa Nellie’s fictitious, fruitfully endowed trollop Melony to pose for selfies.

  The new factory has an automatic zip-tie machine for bundling cables and a four-post press, an ancient gray behemoth that presses holes in playfields, originally purchased by Gary and Sam Stern together. Three men with calipers compare the exact measurements of steel parts to their drawings, picking a bracket from a bucket, measuring it, and grabbing the next bracket. A woman applies a heat gun to a plastic ramp next to balloons and flowers. (For me, visiting the Stern Pinball factory is like a birthday. For this woman, it’s actually her birthday, hence the balloons and flowers.)

  The factory has no fewer than twenty-two microwave ovens, since nearly three hundred workers need to eat their lunch simultaneously, literally at the blow of a whistle, to avoid slowing the production line.

  Even the company’s move itself barely slowed production. “We moved out of the old facility on a Friday,” says designer George Gomez, who found a home at Stern Pinball after his downsizing from WMS, “and the following Monday we were building games here.”

  Today’s games include James and Politico, if the labels on the metal guides through which workers drill holes into wooden playfields can be believed. They can’t be believed, though, because James and Politico are deliberate pseudonyms for Metallica and Game of Thrones. That’s how closely guarded pinball machine themes are—just as the film Return of the Jedi was called Blue Harvest during production in order to keep Star Wars fans in suspense, new pinball machines have deliberately misleading working titles. (At this point, both games had already been revealed, but the metal guides had been labeled previously.)

  At the end of the line, next to the loading dock, games sit upright in cardboard crates, protected by custom-shaped foam to keep them pristine until delivery. The crates are grouped by destinations stamped on the outside; I notice a handful of Game of Thrones games destined for New Zealand. (Take that, Frodo.)

  Perhaps the coolest, and most secret, room is the model shop, a massive cage where workers tinker with prototypes of games in development. According to the photo frame on a desk in the cage, many of the models are made by the world’s greatest grandpa.

  But the most revered person in the room today, maybe even more so than Gary Stern (or Melony), is Game of Thrones designer Steve Ritchie. In a short documentary released by Stern, Ritchie says he spent more time working on Game of Thrones than on any other machine in his career.8 That’s saying quite a bit, considering Ritchie has designed more than two dozen pinball machines, first for Atari, then Williams, and now Stern. He’s known as the King of Flow, meaning that it just kind of feels nice to flip a pinball up the ramps and loops on his machines. Ball goes up a ramp, ball swings over across the game, ball goes smoothly down to your flipper. It’s a feeling that can be disrupted by a design-element shift of one-sixteenth of an inch, and Ritchie spends months futzing with a yardstick and repositioning ramps to optimize the movement aspects of his games.

  “Steve’s a pinball designer,” says Dankberg. “That’s what he is. That’s why he wears the same clothes every day. The man is a genius.” The clothes in question are a semi–Steve Jobs–esque black shirt and jeans, plus two hearing aids.9

  A designer’s dominion is the “whitewood,” a blank, artless playfield that frankly doesn’t look like much fun to play with. Designers experiment endlessly, balancing skill and luck, feeling for the first time the shots for which thousands of players will later develop muscle memory. It’s a skill specific to a handful of people, but there may be a genetic component—Steve Ritchie’s brother Mark also became a celebrated pinball designer, working on games for Williams and Capcom.

  Perhaps the complexities of game design are best summed up by Alvin Gottlieb in Roger Sharpe’s Pinball!: “How do you design a game? That’s like asking a Jewish mother how to make chicken soup. You put in a little of this and a little of that until it’s ready.”

  In 2008, during Stern’s darkest time, the New York Times had called the factory “the last of its kind in the world.” It was a depressing, though accurate, way to frame Stern and indeed the whole of pinball in 2008—not only had all competitors gone out of business, but there was a general consensus that the end of this form of recreation was at last imminent.

  At that point, not knowing that pinball would one day thrive again, who in their right mind would start a new pinball company?

  9

  Everything Nobody Needs

  * * *

  IT’S BEEN A LONG DAY for “Jersey Jack” Guarnieri. “I was here at four in the morning getting stuff set up,” he tells me, slouching on a black leather couch in the late afternoon, “and I’m sure I’ll be here at midnight putting shit away.”

  Midnight relocation of shit is not the most glamorous job for a CEO. But Jersey Jack, the namesake and public face of Jersey Jack Pinball, in his T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers—essential activewear for putting shit away—isn’t just any CEO. Through toil, innovation, intuition, and a little braggadocio, he’s done what no one else managed to do for an entire decade and a half after the Day Pinball Died: compete with Stern.

  “I know if Gary Stern rings the doorbell, I’m going to welcome him with a hug and a kiss,” says Guarnieri, though he’s certain Stern wouldn’t greet him so warmly. We may never know if that hug and kiss will take place (outside the context of some pretty obscure and unlikely fan fiction that I don’t want to read), but we do know that, since 1999, Jersey Jack Pinball is the first company besides Stern to mass-produce and sell pinball machines.

  They’re not the first to try. In November 2005, a Melbourne-based company called The Pinball Factory announced its plans to make a Crocodile Hunter–themed game, but their timing couldn’t have been worse: the Crocodile Hunter himself, Steve Irwin, was tragically killed by a stingray just ten months later. The Pinball Factory abandoned its project, and today it’s nothing more than a footnote in pinball history and a cautionary tale about the best-laid plans of koalas and men.

  Jersey Jack grew up repairing CB radios and televisions, then decided to take half a year off from high school to work as a pinball mechanic at colleges in and around New York. “I got to go to every college,” he jokes. “I just didn’t gra
duate with a degree from any of them.”

  In 1978, Guarnieri began his transition from repairman to operator. Thanks to the arcade craze, a few years later, Guarnieri was operating games—and keeping a portion of their revenue—all over the New York metropolitan area. That’s the financial model: if you drop fifty cents into a pinball machine in a bar, it’s likely that part of the money is going to the bar owner, part to an operator who owns games at several locations.

  Guarnieri opened a series of amusement centers, one of which he sold in 1999 to someone who closed it in 2001. “It’s funny,” he reflects. “People buy a business that’s . . . making money, and they get involved and change everything about it that was successful because they have their own idea about what it’s going to be. People like that should start their own business. They shouldn’t buy an existing business.” Jersey Jack has a lot of ideas about what other people should do, and there’s nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that other people don’t always like to be told what to do. (I point out that 1999 may simply have been an inadvisable year to buy an arcade, and he reminds me that he started Jersey Jack Pinball in 2011. “That wasn’t a good year, people would say, to start anything.”)

  Jersey Jack also started another company in 1999, PinballSales.com, later trademarking the company’s motto, “We sell everything nobody needs.” As the millennium closed out, Guarnieri started importing games from Europe to resell, and business picked up. Ford Motor Company listed a new Stern pinball machine called Sharkey’s Shootout (2000) in its incentive catalog for salespeople, then approached Jersey Jack to fill the orders.

  At the time, Guarnieri was not a licensed distributor for Stern Pinball, just a broker between private buyers and sellers, so on a whim he attended a trade show in Las Vegas to meet Gary Stern, a moment Guarnieri remembers as akin to “an audience with the pope.” Stern wasn’t interested in making Guarnieri a distributor—he already had two in New Jersey—so Guarnieri waited until Stern was more desperate for cash. “His words of wisdom to me were, ‘Nobody wants to buy a pinball machine for their home, and you’ll be out of business in six months, and this Internet crap will never amount to anything,’” Guarnieri recalls. “That was my congratulations and welcome to become a Stern distributor.”

  To boost sales, Jersey Jack sold Austin Powers games by making his own “gold” edition. He sent the metal legs to be colored gold, arranged for Gary Stern to sign the backglass, and numbered them one through ten. It’s the classic business ploy of faux scarcity, the limited edition. I fall for it all the time in the candy aisle. “Dark chocolate Reese’s cups are limited edition? If I don’t buy them now, I’ll regret it forever!” But some of Stern’s other distributors became annoyed at the breach of protocol. Why did Guarnieri get to invent a gold edition anything?

  Still, the ploy sold games, as did Guarnieri’s attentive service. “When there was a problem with the game, we went out and fixed it for nothing for a while,” he says. “You know, you just gave us two or three grand for something, and I’m not going to charge you a hundred bucks to fix a flipper. I’d rather have the goodwill in the bank.”

  Guarnieri tells me how, before a 2001 trade show, he decided to apply his limited edition magic to Monopoly, the pinball machine he said would “make or break Stern.” Only instead of ten gold editions, Guarnieri outdid himself, mounting each of the forty title deed cards from a Monopoly board game on a platinum plaque, chroming most of the hardware, and soliciting signatures from Gary Stern, designer Pat Lawlor, artist John Youssi, and Alan Hassenfeld, the CEO of Hasbro, the company that sells the Monopoly board game. He auctioned off the Boardwalk edition and gave the proceeds to a charity called Boundless Playgrounds, which builds accessible play structures for children with disabilities.

  Guarnieri’s proactive sales approach and an article in RePlay Magazine earned him notoriety, both good and bad. Other distributors, he says, fought to keep up with him and copy his approach of selling to the home market. “It was a crazy kind of time because we could sell anything we could get,” he says. “The economy was pretty good—people were taking home equity loans and stuff like that. They’re buying hot tubs and home theaters and man caves and all that stuff, and that’s where the money was going.”

  But some distributors, Guarnieri says, used their relationship with Stern to leverage other sales—when a customer would call asking about the latest Stern machine, the distributor would bad-mouth new Stern games and instead recommend “this used pinball machine I have in the back.” Once Stern realized this was taking place, and that Guarnieri had remained loyal, even more buyers were directed to him. “I got every lead from the company. For years. And what did I do with them?” he asks himself. “I sold Stern pinball machines,” he answers himself.

  He recalls a day in 2006 when he sold one hundred Pirates of the Caribbean games over a nine-hour period while stuck in a lounge at O’Hare Airport. Jersey Jack became the biggest distributor of Stern games in the world. “In three weeks, I would do a million dollars’ worth of business,” he says. “So from Black Friday through Christmas Eve, I would be in my office from three in the morning until ten or eleven at night, running credit cards. Some days I ran more than $100,000 in credit cards. In a day. Selling pinball machines.”

  Guarnieri has very little love for his fellow distributors, characterizing them as charlatans who sold broken machines they wouldn’t service. “Those guys put games out on the front lawn of their buildings, Christmas Eve, hoping to get some jerk [to] come by and buy some old piece of junk,” he says. “And then if you called them for service a month later, they told you, ‘Nah, we don’t do that anymore.’”

  Guarnieri was different. “People had problems with the playfield?” he asks. “People had problems with the cabinet? People had problems with something Stern didn’t do? I gave ’em a free playfield. I gave ’em a free cabinet. I went out and did their service. Or I got somebody in Stumble Shit, Wyoming, to go do their service, and I paid for it. That’s how I started Jersey Jack Pinball.”

  He names two competing distributors. “I crushed all those fucking guys,” he says, shrugging matter-of-factly. “Every one of them. Because why? Because I took care of the customer. That’s why.”

  But even Jersey Jack couldn’t coast through the economic decline of 2008 and a vitriolic phone call with Gary Stern in which Guarnieri alleges that Stern yelled at him “like I was a two-year-old,” claiming Guarnieri was delinquent on certain payments. Jack thinks the pressure of the collapsing economy made Gary act the way he did, but it’s a conversation he’s never forgotten. I don’t know Jersey Jack very well, but I can tell from one day at his factory that he’s someone who wants to be liked and admired. That’s not a flaw—I think most of us feel that way—but it does imply a certain sensitivity to, say, getting unfairly berated by the Godfather of Pinball.1

  It’s around this time that I ask Guarnieri how much of our conversation he’s comfortable with me putting in writing. “I’m a big boy,” he assures me. “I know if I don’t want to say anything, I don’t say it, but I can’t tell you anything that’s not true. What I tell you is true, and it’s factual. I have e-mails to back it up. There’s a lot of shit I can’t tell you, but the day you really want to write a book that’s pretty fucked up, I’ll tell you a lot of stuff that nobody could sue me over, or anybody else over, because it’s all true.” I promise him that when I want to write a book that’s pretty fucked up, I’ll call him first.

  Guarnieri realized that relying on Stern could break his company as easily as it had fueled his success. “It was like somebody had poured a bucket of water over me and told me the party was over,” he says. A week after his phone call with Stern, at a trade show in Las Vegas, a chance encounter led to him accepting a position as the CEO of a company called Elaut.

  “They make cranes,” Guarnieri says, “that I never operated.” Based on this statement, I immediately misunderstand that Elaut is a company manufacturing construction machinery
. As it turns out, Elaut makes the other type of cranes, the kind that charge a dollar in exchange for watching a weakly powered claw not pick up a plush SpongeBob. Guarnieri soon merged Elaut with PinballSales.com to form Elaut USA; in a year, he says, he had erased the company’s $3 million debt. In another year, Elaut USA was turning a $1 million profit.

  One of Guarnieri’s accomplishments at Elaut USA in 2009 was inventing a popular Wizard of Oz “pusher,” one of those machines full of tokens cantilevered over an edge that seem to defy gravity, enticing players with a payoff that’s so close to falling. The Wizard of Oz pusher’s rewards, and possibly a reason for its popularity, are collectible tokens and plastic cards that can later be exchanged for prizes.

  “I created that game,” says Guarnieri, “and it’s probably one of the greatest redemption games ever made.” He shows me a pack of cards, which he keeps in his desk drawer, from the machine. More importantly, the license to use The Wizard of Oz characters in the pusher game included an unexpected but important bonus: the license to someday produce a Wizard of Oz–themed pinball machine.

  “In 2010, honestly, I was really bored—because as challenging as some things were there, they were too easy for me to solve,” Jack says. “My biggest challenge was what I was going to eat for lunch that day.” Every now and then someone would suggest that he start his own pinball company—not one reselling games but one that would invent and manufacture brand-new games from scratch, an idea he rejected immediately.

  Guarnieri considers 2009–2010 a bad time for pinball. Stern still monopolized the manufacturing space, and the games they turned out were, in Guarnieri’s opinion, uninspired. The economic crisis persisted, but he blames the games themselves for his substantial financial downturn that year. Previously, he had sold an average of about 1,500 Stern pinball machines per year. “In 2010,” he says, “I think I sold forty-seven.”