Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  With around fifty employees, Jersey Jack Pinball can only produce ten machines per day. I say “only” because ten sounds like an “only” number to me. But I have been assured, repeatedly, that there’s nothing “only” about building a pinball machine in a day, let alone ten.

  Now that Guarnieri is actually shipping the Wizard of Oz machines his customers bought, his attention has shifted to The Hobbit, his sophomore entry into the world of pinball machines. Jack had told Slate he expected to have The Hobbit done by 2014, a deadline he’s already missed by at least a year. Six weeks, he tells me today, in August 2015. Six to eight weeks. (It’s not until mid-December that the Jersey Jack Pinball Facebook page shows photos of Hobbit playfields and cabinets being assembled, and even those customers who’ve sent Guarnieri a check for the full price of $8,000 had to wait until 2016.)

  This time Guarnieri has managed to redirect the disappointment, taking less of a “Give us a break! We’re new!” attitude and more of a “Quality takes time” approach. At Jersey Jack’s open house, it appears the public has gotten the message. I stand in a long line to play a Hobbit prototype, and my fellow visitors standing behind me—who just want to play a good new pinball game and have no stake in Jersey Jack’s success or failure—conjecture that the delays are because Jack wants to ensure he “hits it out of the park.”

  As a business, that’s exactly what you want: people categorizing your inability to meet production deadlines as a virtue. Can you imagine, for example, fast-food customers pleased that their burgers are taking an hour and a half because they’re certain that the chef is spending that time making them extra awesome?

  On this particular day, Guarnieri has set up a question-and-answer panel for his game designers and engineers. He greets the crowd with a cheerful “What the hell?” He says this, smiling, because we’ve overflowed the folding chairs in the tiny lecture room. “Let’s go in my office,” he suggests.

  Most offices are more intimate than a lecture room, but Guarnieri’s eight-hundred-square-foot office can easily fit the crowd of fifty people or so. It’s like a dream man cave/boardroom. There’s a dark wood table with swivel chairs but also neon signs for Budweiser and the Yankees, Wizard of Oz paraphernalia, a jelly bean dispenser, and even a full-size Atari Pong video game—with serial number 17, meaning it was the seventeenth Pong machine manufactured and therefore, as a collectable, not cheap.

  As the open house attendees find seats, Guarnieri starts a loud game on the Wizard of Oz pinball machine next to his desk, seemingly to make the point that he has one in his office, plays for a few seconds, then turns it off. He’s clearly delighted to have so many people validating his event, and he fills many silences with off-color jokes. He interrupts a discussion about how to interest the next generation in pinball to throw small plastic bottles of water to people across the room.

  Animosity toward Stern appears to be an accepted part of Jersey Jack Pinball culture. When Guarnieri discovers he has a few T-shirts from a Texas pinball show, he tosses them to audience members, laughing, “Let’s see Gary do that!” (Not to take sides, but I’m pretty sure Stern is also capable of throwing T-shirts.)

  In a 2014 interview for Pinball News, Jack was asked which Stern game was his favorite. He shot back, “When Gary Stern tells you which Jersey Jack Pinball game he likes, let me know.”

  “I want him to succeed,” Guarnieri assures the crowd in his office, though no one has asked. “I want him to have a thousand customers a week. I want to have two thousand customers a week.”

  Later, lead software developer Keith Johnson tells the room that “everything [Stern has] done is just take money out of the game,” meaning that they’ve sacrificed quality for cost savings. “We’re just trying to make games people like.” Johnson, himself a highly ranked competitive pinball player, has an extra reason to take a crack at Stern: he was one of the employees the company laid off during the recession.

  Guarnieri has a lot to say about Gary Stern, and it’s a strange blend of vitriol, admiration, passive-aggressive disappointment, and reassurances that if Stern knocked on his door tomorrow, he would be greeted with warmth. For the record, I asked Stern about Guarnieri, and here is the absolute verbatim entirety of what he chose to say on the subject: “He used to be a customer of ours.” (Jody Dankberg, Stern’s energetic and marginally more pugnacious marketing director, doesn’t mind throwing a few numbers around, reminding Inverse in 2016, “They have produced one-and-a-half games in 6 years. We have done 22.”)

  Brett, the ThinkLAB Ventures coinvestor whose dad gave away his $60 million bonus, has traveled from Florida for the event. “We don’t have an exit strategy,” he says about his investment in Jersey Jack. “We just hope to make pinball machines forever.” Massive applause; this audience likes that. Almost as much as they like when, shortly thereafter, someone’s cell phone randomly makes a dying Pac-Man sound.

  Guarnieri has entered full Jersey Jack mode. He’s friendly. He’s bombastic. He’s jovial. He starts a lot of sentences with “Guess what.” He needs to be the loudest person in the room. He invites three employees to do a Q&A, then answers most questions himself. He points out when someone’s wife falls asleep. He calls out “Hello?” when someone’s phone rings in the audience—every time. Jersey Jack has almost Trump-level self-assurance, and the more he answers his own questions, defends his strategy, and swears like a New Jerseyan, the more difficult it can be to tell exactly where his confidence ends and bombast begins. One could easily dismiss it as bluster—if it weren’t for the fact that he has lived up to his promises and irrevocably disrupted the pinball industry.

  Johnson, along with electrical engineers Butch Peel and Eric Meunier (who has a master’s degree in medical robotics) reveal a reason The Hobbit has not yet entered production: When they began their licensing deal, The Hobbit was supposed to appear as two separate films. Then MGM decided to split it into three films, not two, and some of the best artwork—which Jersey Jack’s designers wanted to put on the playfield—now could not be used until the third film debuted.

  Every cubic inch of Guarnieri’s games is a hard-won victory. Pinball, Lawlor says, is at a junction today, a junction at which it’s sat for fifteen years. He and Guarnieri, along with a dedicated and talented team, are trying to push it as far as possible down the Yellow Brick Road.

  “There’s enough negativity in the world. We’re trying to make a product that’s fun,” insists Guarnieri. “Who the hell wants to be negative? Not me! It’s pinball!”

  A few hours later, while I’m touring the Silverball Museum, thirty minutes north in Asbury Park, I happen to see Jack enter with his entire crew, still wearing their light blue Jersey Jack Pinball T-shirts from the open house.

  That’s right: this group of pinball manufacturers that spends every day building pinball machines, the folks who came to work at 4:00 AM that day and will be, as Guarnieri says, “putting shit away” at midnight, have taken a break to play pinball.

  10

  Backglass to the Future

  * * *

  ARE YOU HERE FOR A PINBALL CONVENTION?” asks the man renting me a car at Chicago Midway Airport, explaining that he just rented another car to someone with the same destination.

  I confirm that I am, indeed, a thousand miles from home for four days to immerse myself in everything to do with the present and future of pinball. There will be lectures, a vendor hall filled with new and rare machines, and manufacturers even smaller and newer than Jersey Jack.

  “I love pinball!” declares the agent with an enthusiasm that I allow to distract him while I quietly decline the optional collision insurance. “I wish there was someplace to play it!”

  It’s exactly like Tim Arnold, owner of the Pinball Hall of Fame, told the New York Times in 2008: “The thing that’s killing pinball is not that people don’t like it. It’s that there’s nowhere to play it.” Or, to be depressingly precise, it’s that no one knows where to play it.

  Here’s this H
ertz employee, living in Chicago, a place Gary Stern calls “the capital of pinball machines,” the city with one of the highest concentrations of on-location games—at the time of my visit, PinballMap.com listed 458 publicly playable machines in 184 places—and though he’d love to play a game, he doesn’t know where to go. And that, in a nutshell, is pinball’s exposure problem.

  Gary Stern once told me a story about his German colleagues from a company called Pinball Universe visiting a Chicago restaurant, where a waitress asked about pinball machines, “Oh, they still make those things?” The restaurant was down the street from the Stern Pinball factory.

  In a way, the best thing that could happen to pinball is happening. It’s becoming a haven for start-ups, innovators who aren’t trying to conquer the market with thirty thousand games a year but who are trying to build at least a few hundred of their own new machines. If the manufacturing tier below Stern is Jersey Jack, who at least has a few dozen full-time employees, then the tier below Jack is the grassroots pinball manufacturing movement, a boutique craft for makers, the newly empowered generation of do-it-yourselfers that looks at a pinball machine and asks, “How hard could it be?”

  “How hard could it be?” also happens to be Pat Lawlor’s joke about the flippant attitude (we’re almost done with the pinball puns, I promise) that has led far more of these start-ups—nearly twenty of them at the moment—to failure than to success.

  I’m on my way up Interstate 294 toward the thirty-first annual Pinball Expo. I’m about to meet all the people in various stages of finding out exactly how hard it can be.

  Expo is an annual gathering of all things pinball: New games make their debut. Trading cards of pinball players and designers—yes, actual trading cards—are distributed and bartered. Stern and Jersey Jack host simultaneous events, probably on purpose. Designer Steve Ritchie autographs flyers, and Roger Sharpe poses for photos. There’s a free-play game hall, a tournament, and an auction.

  In the vendor hall, entrepreneurs sell everything from pinball memorabilia and replacement parts to custom pinball-themed lamps. The most prevalent vendors are those offering custom mods and art—there are graphics printing companies whose passion is finding bare spots on pinball machines to decorate. The metal lock bar on the front? The blades running down the sides? Hell, the legs? All prime real estate for decals.

  I meet Pete Talbot and Ben Matchstick, for example, from the Cardboard Teck Instantute, selling the PinBox 3000 ArtCade Pinball System (all misspellings presumably intentional, or perhaps I should say instantentional). It’s a pinball machine about the size of a desktop printer made completely from laser-cut, recycled cardboard. The product, which looks exactly like the Kickstarter project it is, is meant to provide a dream-it-and-build-it blank slate for kids to make their own minipinball machines.

  The most interesting aspect of Expo may be the seminars. In one, Dr. Jim Schelberg, publisher and editor of PinGame Journal, screens the “sizzle reel” from Pinballers, a recent reality television pilot about the Texas pinball scene that unfortunately never progressed to production.1

  In another, Art Kreisel of Pinball Perfection describes Sip-and-Puff technology that renders pinball machines operable by blowing into, or sucking out of, a straw. This would allow quadriplegics—for whom Sip-and-Puff might be their best means of physically interacting with the world—to enjoy playing the same games as everyone else. Kreisel recalls a company called Arcade Access that modified dozens of games for Sip-and-Puff tournaments in Pittsburgh in the ’80s: “Not only could a kid realize a dream of playing a pinball machine, but they could play it against Franco Harris.”

  The 1946 Three Stooges episode “Three Little Pirates” is screened in the seminar room, to much delight. Set in some kind of Arabian-themed bar, the Stooges grapple with a pinball machine that bonks the player on the head with a giant mallet when one triggers “Ye Olde Tilt.”2

  More than just a pinball love-fest, however, Expo is—and has been for more than thirty years—the annual affair at which pinball manufacturers show off their latest creations. The year I visit, 2015, Stern launches Game of Thrones, and Jersey Jack, three months after my visit to his factory, brings a prototype Hobbit. I expected them to be the only two true manufacturers, since they’re the only two companies actually building, selling, and delivering their games so far, right? There is, however, one more.

  In the exclusive club of pinball manufacturers, it’s easy to think of Jersey Jack and Stern as David and Goliath. But it’s not just David and Goliath—it’s David and Goliath and Charlie.

  Charlie Emery, an impossibly agreeable father of two from Benson, Wisconsin (population 973), wearing a brown jacket and a porkpie hat, is tired. His homegrown company, Spooky Pinball, defied the odds to become the third pinball manufacturer in a field of three, and it certainly didn’t happen overnight.

  Emery’s journey began as innocently as the others: he and his nine-year-old son, nicknamed “Bug,” tinkered with a machine for fun, changing the art to give Firepower (1980) a Godzilla theme. While showing off their creation at an arcade show called Midwest Gaming Classic, Emery suddenly found himself the center of fascinated inquiries about the game—it turns out he had used a digital printing process different from the one used by the rest of the industry.

  While there, he met Internet celebrity Ben Heckendorn, better known in the hacking community as Ben Heck, a man renowned in certain circles for painstakingly dissecting video game consoles, like the Xbox and PlayStation, and stuffing them into custom laptop cases. After years of electronic tinkering, Heck took on the challenge of building a pinball machine from scratch—“not professionally,” says Emery, “but out of whatever he could find.” The process of making a pinball machine, which Stern and Jersey Jack can produce in around thirty hours, took Ben Heck from 2005 to 2010.

  The game’s theme makes the amount of time invested in construction that much sillier. You ready? It was called Bill Paxton Pinball. Yup. The game was based on the films and television shows of actor Bill Paxton, including True Lies, Weird Science, and Big Love. (Bill’s three wives from HBO’s Big Love are the multiball locks.) In a move that greatly pleased the pinball community, Ben Heck then turned around and sold the machine just to get it out of his garage.

  Their complementary strengths made Emery and Heck a good partnership—Heck could code, program, and laser-cut, and Emery could professionally print artwork on wood and plastic. What began as a hobby, with Emery and Heck making one-off games, gradually interfered with Emery’s day job, an intrusion he grew to welcome.

  Like Pat Lawlor, who fell in love with pinball while his father delivered beer, Emery’s first exposure came as something for a child to occupy himself with while the adults did things related to alcohol—in Emery’s parents’ case, drinking it. “It was nothing for them to sit in a bar for a lot of hours,” he says, and doling out quarters for barroom pinball was a 1970s babysitting option.

  “I would never do that with my kids,” Emery is quick to assure me, and I get a picture of a man who—in response to his own upbringing—decided to become the awesomest dad ever. The kind of dad who builds monster-themed pinball machines for fun in the garage with his kids.

  Emery was in his early forties when his father passed away. “I kind of started thinking about, well, you’re not here forever,” he says. So in 2012, he quit his job of twenty-one years, took $35,000 in savings, and devoted every waking moment to producing, on a commercial scale, Heck’s latest game.

  That game was called America’s Most Haunted (2014), a ghost-themed machine that also begat the company name, Spooky Pinball, and its tagline: “We put the ‘boo’ in ‘bootique pinball’!”

  Emery and Heck set a goal of making and selling 150 games of America’s Most Haunted. “When we set the number 150, we had sold maybe 30 games,” says Emery. “We thought 150 is so far away we’ll never get there.”

  For a year and a half, preorders gradually increased until they had sold eighty or ninet
y games. Then, as their reputation as a legitimate manufacturer began to precede them, at the Texas Pinball Festival in 2014, they sold the rest in a single weekend.

  Spooky’s website proudly declares it “The Best Pinball Company in Benton, Wisconsin!” That’s a joke structure Emery and Heck don’t seem to tire of—Heck called America’s Most Haunted “the finest pinball machine ever made about paranormal ghost hunting,” adding another time that “Roger Sharpe has called it ‘the finest game called America’s Most Haunted I’ve ever seen.’”

  Actually, at Expo, no one is interested in America’s Most Haunted, which already finished its production run by auctioning off its 150th machine to benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. They all want to know what Spooky Pinball will do next.

  As, I’m sure, with many of life’s turning points, this is where Rob Zombie comes in.

  For those unfamiliar with Rob Zombie, he’s a founding member of the heavy metal band White Zombie, known for their multiplatinum album La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1. In recent years, as a filmmaker, he’s come to represent all things scary and gory, and his 2003 film House of 1000 Corpses, with its on-screen mutilations of four hapless travelers in so very exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, still creeps me out to this day.

  For fans of the horror genre, Rob Zombie is something of a god, or a devil—whichever makes more sense. Emery came up with the idea to put him on a pinball machine.