Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  That was the last straw for Jersey Jack, who decided he would no longer rely on Stern to produce games his customers would buy. It was time to make the damn games himself.

  Guarnieri’s customer base was clamoring for a new game, a game more interesting than Stern’s Big Buck Hunter Pro (2010), a pinball machine based on an arcade game. “They were like people in the desert that didn’t see water,” he says, “and they would drink out of any hole, anywhere, if there was a promise that water would be in that hole.” Guarnieri declared to the world that he was going to personally end Stern’s decade-long monopoly of the pinball industry, decided on the Wizard of Oz theme, and started digging his hole.

  The theme was, in an important way, inspired by the 2006 Stern game Pirates of the Caribbean, a popular machine with a sinking boat, a treasure chest, and a centrifuge that spun balls around. “It was the only game that girls wanted their husbands to buy,” explains Guarnieri. “Johnny Depp is on it. It’s a Disney theme. It’s not Iron Man, Batman, This Man, That Man . . .” The success of Pirates inspired Jack—Jersey Jack, not Captain Jack Sparrow—to create a game with a universally appealing theme. “If I make something, and women don’t like it? Children don’t like it? I’m eliminating 70 percent of the earth’s population.”

  In that regard, The Wizard of Oz is a brilliant choice. “I liked it,” he says, “because it was timeless, it was ageless, it wasn’t men, it wasn’t women, it wasn’t boy, it wasn’t girl, it wasn’t young, it wasn’t old—it was everything.” It was a theme with universal appeal, and it became, he describes, “the pole that I want to put in the middle of my tent to start the company around.”2

  According to Guarnieri, Elaut USA could not have been less thrilled. They issued a press release officially wishing him luck but making it abundantly clear that Elaut USA was not in the pinball business. “Imagine you’re partners with somebody in a business,” he says, “and you read that in a press release. Nice.”

  The reaction from Gary Stern made Elaut look enthusiastic by comparison. “I told him what I’m doing,” Guarnieri says. “He told me if I do that, we’re gonna both be out of business.”

  Guarnieri’s manufacturing difficulties began immediately. “Everything was a challenge,” he recalls. “I mean, there was nothing that was easy.” He would visit plastic vendors, for example, who would greet him with “Oh, you’re the guy who’s gonna go out of business next.”

  Somehow, despite Guarnieri launching a company that had never manufactured a pinball machine in an era when it looked like one’s potential customer base could be measured in dozens rather than millions, Jersey Jack Pinball managed to secure more than a thousand preorders, with pinball enthusiasts taking a leap of faith that their $6,500 prepayments would result in a beautiful pinball machine and not a sheepish, empty-handed Guarnieri saying, “Uh, so here’s what happened.”

  For a while, deliveries seemed imminent. “We expect games to be rolling out of the building in great numbers by late spring or early summer,” Guarnieri told the Chicago Reader in early 2012. When that didn’t happen, he assured a reporter for Slate he’d begin shipping in January 2013. Then mid-March. On the Pinside forum, customers began sharing stories of their own patience wearing thin. Much later, Guarnieri would admit to Pinball News that “maybe we promised too much.”

  Delays are nothing new for a manufacturer’s first attempt; everything is more complicated than it appears. However, Jersey Jack’s delays came not only from start-up woes but also from Guarnieri’s desire to make a pinball machine—and a pinball company—unlike any other. He wanted to reimagine what a pinball machine could be, and while certain tropes of the game were inescapable—pop bumpers, flippers, ramps—there were certainly areas that hadn’t been updated in decades, despite advancing technology.

  One of those changes is obvious. Recall the alphanumeric 1970s and ’80s calculator-style score displays, which themselves evolved from mental math, followed by light-up scoring, followed by drum score reels. Then, in 1991, Data East manufactured a racecar-themed game called Checkpoint that used a dot matrix display in its backbox to communicate scores. This was a quantum leap in technology that allowed pinball machines to not only display scores but also tell stories, communicate complicated instructions, and show rudimentary graphics. Considering that most dot matrix displays are simple, 64 pixels high by 192 pixels wide, one could say it’s remarkable how much the modern pinball industry has been able to do with them. That’s the kind way of looking at it. Guarnieri would say it’s shameful that, in 2015, we’re still using the same displays that appeared on machines nearly twenty-five years ago.

  The Wizard of Oz, unlike any pinball machine previously, boasts a twenty-seven-inch flat-screen monitor in its backbox. It’s basically a giant iPad, and Jersey Jack uses it in every conceivable way—including showing licensed clips from the original film, gorgeous animations, and game maps that detail a player’s progress through the various modes. Heck, you can even view the repair manual, a large PDF file, directly on the game’s display—another first.

  “Does anyone know why there’s a twenty-seven-inch monitor in the backbox?” I once saw Guarnieri ask an audience. “’Cause it’s the biggest monitor I could fit in the backbox.”

  The Wizard of Oz oozed innovation. It used special multicolored light-emitting diodes (LEDs); there were no more lightbulbs to replace. It contained an off-the-shelf computer with wireless capabilities. It had a seven-speaker sound system and even a jack on the front for players to plug in headphones. It packed everything onto an extralarge wide-body playfield, the pinball industry’s first wide-body since SuperPins were discontinued in 1994.

  No detail was neglected. “It’s artwork,” Guarnieri says. “It really is. We thought about a lot of things with that game.”

  On April 29, 2013, Jersey Jack Pinball shipped its first truckload of Wizard of Oz games. In a YouTube video titled “SHIP SHIP HOORAY!,” Guarnieri, wearing a black hoodie with his company’s logo and attempting a cartwheel on wet grass, barely conceals his glee as the delivery truck pulls out of his parking lot.

  The reaction to The Wizard of Oz was overwhelmingly positive. “I cannot see how it would be possible to make this game better,” wrote a user named seanymph on the IPDB ratings board, and many players agreed. Drop Target, a now defunct five-dollar illustrated Kinko’s-dependent pinball zine, calls The Wizard of Oz “a deep, engaging game that doesn’t hold back on the bells and whistles, and in doing so, makes me really happy while playing it.” So maybe, unlike Jack told Pinball News, he didn’t promise too much—he just promised it too soon.

  Two and a half years after “SHIP SHIP HOORAY!,” at my visit to the company in the fall of 2015, Jack proudly announced that more than 2,500 customers had purchased Wizard of Oz machines, with another 1,500 already prepaying for The Hobbit, a machine that wouldn’t begin production for another couple of months.3

  One of Guarnieri’s highest-profile poaches from Stern Pinball, his only competitor at the time, was Pat Lawlor, one of the aforementioned half-dozen godfathers of pinball and the designer of Funhouse, The Addams Family, and The Twilight Zone, whom Stern had lured after WMS closed. Lawlor had spent part of the 2000s designing games for Stern—Monopoly included—before publicly predicting in 2007, with disgust, that pinball would be dead in five years.

  Perhaps that’s why, when the offer came along, Lawlor jumped ship and joined Jersey Jack Pinball, a decision that Guarnieri says will probably render Lawlor a permanent defector from Stern. “Pat’s last job in pinball will be working for my company,” Guarnieri says, not without a note of pride, “when he’s about a hundred years old and he makes his last game. He’ll still be working for Jersey Jack if I have anything to do with it.”

  Watching Lawlor in action, moving metal ramps a fraction of an inch at a time around a bare wood playfield, obsessing over the tradeoff between gadgetry and flow, I think Guarnieri may be right. “Look at this guy,” he says, showing me a photo on his iPhone
of Pat with a new game’s whitewood. “It’s like he’s six years old again. He’s got his life back, this guy, he’s got his fire.”

  For Lawlor, being six years old meant accompanying his father on his Schlitz delivery truck, playing coin-operated games at each stop while Dad sold beer. He codesigned his first game in 1987, a delightfully bizarre motocross-themed pinball machine called Banzai Run. Instead of a backglass with a glowing piece of art and score reels, Banzai Run had an entire second playfield, a vertical one, where the backbox normally is. Through a couple of neat tricks with magnets, the ball could move from the horizontal playfield to the vertical one and back again. It was the kind of machine a kid would dream up: “So, instead of this pretty backglass that doesn’t do much, could we have, like, another pinball machine up there?”

  “The reason I’m doing what I’m doing with Jack is that pinball fell into a rut,” says Lawlor. “There’s no other consumer product that you can describe . . . that stays the same over a period of . . . two decades. That’s ridiculous. . . . Why are we still building these things as if it were 1992?”

  Lawlor’s passion to modernize pinball’s dated feel—A dot matrix display? Really? When two-year-olds have iPads?—aligned perfectly with Jersey Jack’s, though Lawlor’s enthusiasm emerges in a much more measured way. Tall, lean, and soft-spoken, a Midwestern gentleman with a shy smile and clear blue eyes, Lawlor may have strong feelings about the industry’s missteps, but you probably won’t hear him openly disparage his rivals.

  For a designer like Lawlor, who undoubtedly thought his glory days were behind him, the offer from Guarnieri must have arrived like a winning lottery ticket—the opportunity to return to the industry, leading his own team, once again making something grand and complicated of his own design. Finally, someone was making pinball disruptive—and he wanted Lawlor there, leading the charge. “When you hire Michelangelo,” says Guarnieri, “you’re not gonna tell him how to paint the Sistine Chapel.”

  “In the good old days, you’d have a game designer and a programmer and a standard game team of a mechanical engineer and an artist,” recalls Lawlor. “Today I easily could have four programmers working full time on making that pinball machine come to life. Along with triple the artists, counting a video artist. Maybe two video artists. Animators.” And unlike Stern’s recent games—indeed, unlike Jersey Jack’s first two games—no licensing is involved. Lawlor won’t be beholden to the graphics or sound clips of a particular movie or television show; he can make whatever he wants, period. (At the time of my visit, everything about Lawlor’s unlicensed game was a hugely hyped mystery. In late 2016, Jersey Jack Pinball revealed that the mystery game would be Dialed In!, a SimCity-ish cavalcade of technology that includes the ability to control the flippers from your own smartphone via Bluetooth and a “Selfie Mode,” which takes and displays photos of the player during gameplay.)

  An unlicensed game is a risky move. The ’90s saw plenty of unlicensed games, like Medieval Madness, with its medieval theme, or the garbage-themed Junk Yard (1996). The theme of a game can dictate its popularity, regardless of whether it’s a good game. Collectors often preorder pinball machines upon hearing what the theme will be—their favorite film, their favorite band. There are undoubtedly customers who immediately bought Disney TRON Legacy (2011) or AC/DC (2012) machines simply because they’re fans of TRON or AC/DC.4 In order to succeed in this day and age, a game with an original, unlicensed theme must be a really, really good game.

  And wouldn’t you know it: some of the best games with original themes came from the brain of Pat Lawlor.

  It’s another way the industry has evolved. The first pinball machine licensed from a movie was Wizard! (1975), based on the film version of Tommy, and the next twenty-five years produced a blend of licensed and unlicensed games. That all stopped when Stern became the only pinball manufacturer on earth. The fact that there have been no unlicensed games this millennium—until Dialed In!—may be a symptom of pinball’s loss of complacency. Why take a chance? Just make Avatar or Wheel of Fortune (2007) and guarantee yourself a little success.

  An original game gives Lawlor a ton of freedom as a designer, since he’s not stuck using artwork that had been purchased from Universal Studios or Disney. When you license a theme, you’re buying a set art package, and if you want to redo any of that art—jazz things up, maybe change a font—you need to go back and seek approval, which may not be granted. For example, whenever Kili the Dwarf appears on The Hobbit, he’s labeled with stylized text reading “Kili the Dwarf.” Early critics of the Hobbit prototype artwork, which Jersey Jack posted to various pinball forums to seek feedback, pointed out that it’s unnecessary to write “the Dwarf” with his name every time. But “Kili the Dwarf” is the piece of art that was licensed, and you legally can’t just take out “the Dwarf.”

  The downside of designing an unlicensed game is that you start with nothing. “I [have] no video assets,” says Lawlor. “Everything has to be built from scratch. And so I’m building a movie. I’m building animations. I’m building a pinball playfield. I’m building a world that I’ve envisioned that I have to make you understand as quickly as possible. So I’ve got a game team that’s three times larger than I did twenty years ago, and I’ve become a movie director. The business has transformed radically.”

  Lawlor may be reenergized, but he knows the era of Funhouse, The Addams Family, and The Twilight Zone, his three games that each sold more than ten thousand units, isn’t coming back tomorrow. “Right now, if we built a game that was every bit as good as one of those—and I fully expect we’re building that game—we’re not going to sell ten thousand of them,” he admits, pragmatically. Not only does the demand not match that of 1992, but neither Guarnieri—nor, for that matter, Stern—has the capacity to churn out so many. The pinball factories are smaller, and even more important, the parts manufacturers—those who make plastic ramps, coin acceptors, and all the thousands of ingredients in each pinball machine—have slowed down their production. (These days, the magic number ten thousand is more than a lofty sales figure. It also happens to be the price threshold—$10,000—for a new game that collectors worry manufacturers will creep above. Jack’s bells and whistles may be fun, but collectors remember the days when you could buy four or five new machines for that price. Whether or not the pinball community embraces the theme and gameplay of Dialed In!, there seems to be universal grumbling over its price tag, which ranges from $8,000 for the Standard Edition up to a whopping $12,500 for the Collector’s Edition, thus smashing through the once-feared price ceiling.)

  Thankfully, Lawlor’s doom-and-gloom prediction that pinball would be extinct by 2012 clearly has not come to pass. “There was something that nobody quotes that I said [after] that,” points out Lawlor, “which was if nothing changes.” In Jersey Jack Pinball, Lawlor has found a company that embraces change and that wants to dazzle players with complex games that look like they’re from the future rather than the past, led by a hardworking pit bull of a CEO who knows that the only path forward is unrelenting innovation.

  And, despite fears to the contrary, Jersey Jack’s success has not meant Stern’s failure. In fact, according to Guarnieri, not only did his own company not put Stern out of business, it forced them to keep up and may have even helped sustain Stern Pinball during a difficult time. Guarnieri, of course, expresses this a bit more starkly: “Left to himself, if I didn’t start a company, he would’ve been out of business. Without question.” Whether Stern’s continued growth is a result of increasing their efforts to compete with Jersey Jack, or Stern’s own hard work, or simply a happy accident of a rising tide is a question that may never be settled to the satisfaction of either Gary or Jack.

  In January 2016, Stern Pinball tacitly acknowledged the influence of Jersey Jack and his cohorts in an article for the gaming website Polygon. “For the longest time we were the only ones making pinball tables,” said Stern’s marketing director, Jody Dankberg. “But now there are some bou
tiques making pinballs and they’re using full color displays, and that gives us a little nudge.”

  As if Jack’s nascent company doesn’t have enough challenges, in December 2014, Elaut USA filed a lawsuit against Jack Guarnieri for $1.6 million, alleging he diverted funds to himself and to Jersey Jack Pinball during his time as CEO. Guarnieri immediately denied the allegations and continues to do so, calling the suit “utterly without merit” in a statement to RePlay Magazine.

  But it hasn’t been all bad financial news. In 2015, Miami-based ThinkLAB Ventures invested millions of dollars in Jersey Jack Pinball. That anyone with millions of dollars would choose to prop up pinball was amazing in itself—especially since they supported the company that had thus far only manufactured one machine—but even more impressive is the force behind ThinkLAB itself, entrepreneurs Leonard Abess and his son, Brett. Guarnieri walks me to his laptop and plays a YouTube clip from President Obama’s 2009 State of the Union speech.

  “I think of Leonard Abess,” Obama declares, “a bank president from Miami who reportedly cashed out of his company, took a $60 million bonus, and gave it out to all 399 people who worked for him—plus another 72 who used to work for him. He didn’t tell anyone, but when the local newspaper found out, he simply said, ‘I knew some of these people since I was seven years old. It didn’t feel right getting the money myself.’”

  Guarnieri appreciates both the money and the vote of confidence from Leonard and Brett Abess. “That’s Brett’s dad,” says Guarnieri, beaming. “That’s something you don’t see that often.”

  What I do see at a public open house inside the Jersey Jack Pinball factory in Lakewood, New Jersey, is a production facility not unlike Stern’s. There are workstations, conveyor belts, boxes on wooden pallets. Half of the factory is a sight familiar to anyone who shops in the final room of Ikea, a high-ceilinged maze of categorized components—manufacturing a pinball machine must be like assembling the Hjälmaren towel rack from hell. At a wiring station, a monitor lists more than one hundred switches to test on a Wizard of Oz in progress, including “Crystal Ball VUK” and “Witch Melted.” A table has piles of toys labeled “Witch Hut” and “Oz Face.”