Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  There are many strategies for a pinball manufacturer to acquire a license to something cool without going bankrupt, one of which is what Jody Dankberg at Stern called a “halo project.” All you have to do, Dankberg said, is convince someone—in his case KISS, in Spooky’s case Rob Zombie—that having a self-themed pinball machine would be awesome.

  Once he had Rob Zombie’s attention, Emery pitched a game whose plot centered around the backstage goings-on at a Rob Zombie concert: players would work their way up from being a roadie to being Rob’s tour manager. Rob Zombie hated the idea, instead requesting what Emery remembers as “a straight-up, badass horror game.”

  That’s exactly what it became, an explicit gore-fest called Rob Zombie’s Spookshow International (2016) that included, for the sake of customers with kids, a slightly toned-down “family mode.”

  “It will ship in family mode,” Emery assures the audience at Expo, “and trust me, that’s for a reason.” (When the game is finally released in 2016, part of the reason becomes immediately obvious upon starting a non–family mode game: the machine greets players by yelling, “Go to hell, motherfucker!”)

  Since they’re still in development at the time of Expo, none of the game’s graphics have yet been publicly described in detail, but Heck’s offhand description to the audience of how he programs says a lot about the game’s content: “Put boobs here, make this ball blood, put the limbs here.”

  “And the ball save is absolutely horrific,” adds Emery with a smirk. “Wait till you see it.” Rob Zombie’s band has, apparently, and it was so gory they laughed for an hour.

  “There are no exposed nipples,” Heck announces, before adding, with his thumb and index finger spread an inch apart, “close!” Sitting between the two on stage, Emery’s wife Kayte widens her eyes, compresses her lips, and nods good-naturedly. She handles sales, cohosts their podcast, and, according to Spooky’s website, “makes great French toast on Sunday mornings when she makes Charlie take a day off every week.” Immediately their roles become clear: he and Heck are the overgrown adolescent scoundrels, and Kayte is the long-suffering but permanently smiling wife who hasn’t had enough coffee yet today to deal with these two.

  Charlie says that Kayte “was the sane one that held her job and kept the insurance for the family.” After about two years, though, Spooky Pinball grew too massive for him to handle alone, so bye-bye insurance. Kayte is also a pinball fan; she grew up following her older brothers to arcades. “When I first wanted to get a game,” says Charlie, “she didn’t argue at all. She just said, ‘Oh, cool! That would be great to have one in the house.’”

  I’m just saying, Marina.

  Benton, Wisconsin, is no Chicago—the nearest large city is Dubuque, Iowa. But the warehouse is affordable, the town is supportive, and wherever Emery goes in Benton, people gleefully recognize him as “Charlie the Pinball Guy.”

  Spooky operates on a much smaller scale than Stern or even Jersey Jack. While the former has nearly three hundred employees eating their lunches nuked in the twenty-two microwaves, and the latter employs around fifty, Charlie Emery has three. That’s not counting himself and Kayte, plus thirteen-year-old Bug and his sixteen-year-old sister. “If you’re an Emery,” he says, “you’re going to be making pinball parts.”

  Perhaps that’s the way a boutique (or boo-tique) pinball manufacturer can survive: cheap land, reasonable production goals in the hundreds rather than the thousands of machines, and child labor.

  “We’re not profiting a lot right now,” admits Emery. So I guess there’s that, too.

  In a certain way, smaller also means less vulnerable. “I think we’re sitting in kind of a unique position where we don’t have the overhead that [Stern and Jersey Jack] do,” Emery says, “and we would be able to survive a bad pinball economy, so to speak. Maybe a little better than they can. I don’t know. Let’s hope we never find out!”

  Unlike some of the other start-ups, Jersey Jack included, Spooky didn’t accept much cash up front from interested customers—just $1,000, with the rest of the game’s $6,000 price payable upon delivery. That decision helped mitigate some of the risk on his customers’ end and some of the pressure on Spooky’s. “What’s the worst that’s gonna happen at this point? We’re not sitting on piles of people’s money,” Emery says. “If I did that, I don’t think I could live with myself. I couldn’t sleep at night.”

  “Our rewards will come later,” he adds. “I’m not worried about that. I don’t need a lot of money to be happy; I never have. I’m a happy guy now. If you give me more money, I’m not gonna get any happier.” Emery laughs. “Be able to relax a little more, be able to hire people to do some of what I have to do every day, but no. Money doesn’t make me happy, and it’s not what drives me.”

  After hearing the same sentiment from pretty much everyone involved in pinball, it’s not even slightly hard for me to believe him.

  The attendees at Pinball Expo are like sharks smelling blood, and the blood they smell is the possibility of new games. Pinball is on an upswing it hasn’t seen in years, and those who love the hobby have waited a long time for manufacturers to enter, not leave, the marketplace. Rumors fly about who’s producing what and when it will be ready—after Stern, Jersey Jack, and Spooky, everyone wants to see where the next pinball machine will come from.

  The answer might be Wales.

  In a way, Andrew Heighway snuck into the pinball industry. In 2014, rum maker Bacardí asked him to produce a couple hundred weird little cocktail table games that resembled vintage bagatelles to be placed in bars worldwide, thus conveying the classic, daring, hipster nature of their beverages. The result was Cuba Libre, and while it isn’t pinball—the game looks more like two small, adjacent roulette wheels stuck together in a handsome wooden cabinet—it got Heighway thinking.

  Heighway is a former racecar driver, and let’s get this part out of the way: yes, his name is pronounced “highway,” and yes, it’s kind of neat that someone with this name drove Formula 1 racers for ten years—though it’s possible, he admits, that his name nudged him toward his profession.

  In the early ’90s, before his racing career left the starting line, Heighway managed a British McDonald’s, sneaking off to a wine bar after work to play arcade games. One day, at age eighteen, he had what he calls a “eureka moment” in which he got pinball. Usually when an eighteen-year-old has a eureka moment, it’s the postadolescent swagger of someone who believes their epiphany more world changing than it probably is, but a quarter century later, Heighway is making his a reality.

  Heighway initially chanced into the pinball supply business when he moved to Limerick and tried to buy two games, only to discover that no one was selling pinball machines in the entire nation of Ireland. (He ended up purchasing a Funhouse and a Bram Stoker’s Dracula [1993] from a distributor in Poland.) Before he knew it, Heighway was buying and reselling machines all over the Isles, taking a ferry between Ireland and the United Kingdom every month, ultimately abandoning other business ventures and volunteering to rescue the UK Pinball Party, an annual British pinball festival in need of a host. Somehow pinball had taken hold of his brain.

  “I remember that golden two, three years when pinballs were magical to me,” he says, “and I loved everything about them.” He remembers his visits to the seaside town of Blackpool, where over the years the once ubiquitous machines dwindled to almost none.3

  Now gray-haired, with a kind face, a bit of a beer paunch, and a reasonable, businesslike demeanor, Heighway has become the managing director and CEO of Heighway Pinball, which proudly bills itself as “the UK’s first ever major pinball manufacturer.”

  Heighway Pinball has invested a lot in manufacturing pinball machines—something, as of my discussion with Andrew Heighway over French fries, or “chips,” in the hotel restaurant, it has not yet accomplished. They recently moved to a forty-two-thousand-square-foot factory in the very Welsh-sounding town of Merthyr Tydfil, where they devised a work-around
for the crucial inventory supply problem that plagues Gary Stern and Jersey Jack: Heighway Pinball became its own parts supplier.

  They bought the equipment to manufacture their own plastics, as well as to cut, sand, and lacquer their own playfields. They installed a $150,000 flatbed printer. They hired employees to work in a factory the size of Jersey Jack’s that, Heighway confesses, “could do with a lick of paint, but that’s not at the top of the list.” Thus they began, slowly, to manufacture prototype pinball machines.

  Heighway’s first machine’s premise left the pinball world a little underwhelmed. To a community thirsty for quirky, original themes, Heighway Pinball introduced Full Throttle, a motorcycle racing game that, according to the company’s web page, allows the player to “face off against arch-rival Francisco Valentino and force him to eat his taunting words.” Even Full Throttle’s tagline feels a little lackluster: “Be the Champion, Become a Legend!”

  I confess to knowing very little about sports, but . . . who the hell is Francisco Valentino? Why a bike racing game? In the history of pinball, there hasn’t really been a shortage of motorcycle- and motocross-themed machines, including Pat Lawlor’s brilliant, half-vertical Banzai Run.

  Heighway is hoping for killer sales in Japan, where four of the five major motorbike manufacturers are located. He explains to a packed room at Expo that the Japanese love the tiny ball bearings careening around in pachinko,4 “but if we can convince them that larger balls are better, maybe Full Throttle is the way to do that.”

  On the outside, Heighway’s games are a little different from standard pinball machines. His backboxes look almost like a desktop Mac; they’re a two-inch-thick rounded rectangle with silver edges and a black face, absurdly thin for a pinball machine. There’s also a ten-inch video screen built right into the wooden playfield to display scores and animations. Then, because people seemed to want it, he built a version with a duplicate ten-inch screen in the backbox. And another with a much more Jersey-Jack-sized screen, which Heighway’s ponytailed technical director Romain Fontaine reveals to the Expo audience by dramatically whipping off a sheet to a moderate amount of cheering.

  But the real magic, Heighway says, is inside his machine. Imagine you own a beautiful new pinball machine and a solenoid burns out. To replace that solenoid, you need to know at least a little bit about electronics. An amateur can swap a lightbulb or two, but unless you know your way around a soldering iron, you can’t rebuild a flipper coil.

  Heighway Pinball, claims Heighway Pinball, has solved that. They’ve reimagined every component of the game and made them modular, exchangeable, plug-and-play. If your flipper mechanism on Full Throttle breaks, simply toss it and plug in a new one. The glass top of the game, usually painstakingly slid out frontward to search for a loose ball or clean the playfield, is now on hinges.

  And that modularity goes beyond individual components. Once you’ve bought a pinball cabinet from Heighway, if you want a different game, you just need to buy a playfield, cabinet art, and a flash drive with the new software—then you can make the change yourself. Heighway posits an “infinitely upscaleable system,” an entire home arcade made from a single machine, plus a stack of playfields and cabinet art in the closet.

  To top it off, Heighway is adding near-field communication technology so that you could pay for a game via your PayPal or Worldpay account on your smartphone, thus eliminating the need for quarters (or pence). And with pinball machines connected wirelessly to the web, players can compare scores head-to-head or instantly post scores on social media.

  “We looked at every aspect of the pinball machine and said, ‘Can we do this better?’” Heighway tells me, explaining that his games are meant to be a gentler introduction to the possibility of owning one’s own pinball machine: “We’re not trying to attract us back to pinball.”

  He shows me a YouTube video of a full changeover between games—the playfield and art panels come out, and new ones are dropped in. “You know how long it took to do that?” he asks. “Three minutes, twenty seconds.” I decline to point out that, because Heighway Pinball has not yet made its second game, I’ve just watched a video of someone changing a Full Throttle into a Full Throttle.

  The collectors at Expo have heard about Full Throttle. At a party tonight at a Hooters-like wing joint across the street, they’ll get to play Full Throttle, and they’ll walk away with Full Throttle T-shirts. But even though Full Throttle is not yet available for purchase, they’re far more interested in Heighway’s second game.

  That game is Alien, based on the Ridley Scott movies. It will have a “chest burster” toy that captures the ball and flings it back toward the flippers, a giant “xenomorph” head whose spring-loaded tongue eats the pinball, and an animated screen that hides the alien queen.

  “Would you all like to see the queen?” Heighway asks the audience mischievously, receiving a chorus of yeses. They clearly like this more than motorcycle racing.

  So he shows a slide of Queen Elizabeth holding up the middle finger of each hand. It’s the universal sign for “Fuck off, we know you want to see it, but we’ll show it to you when it’s ready.”

  Heighway has one more trick up his sleeve. Just as Jersey Jack hired Pat Lawlor to design games, Heighway announces that he has made successful overtures to another famous pinball designer, Barry Oursler.

  A humble, practical Midwesterner with a light brown mustache, Oursler looks gratified yet baffled at being the center of attention. He was a Williams stalwart, starting work on the assembly line the day after he graduated from high school in 1970 and eventually rising through the ranks to design games like PIN·BOT (1986), Doctor Who (1992), and the amusement-park-themed trilogy Comet (1985), Cyclone (1988), and Hurricane (1991), which are all the names of fictional roller coasters. Oursler gave us Gorgar, the first talking game, and though he didn’t directly provide Gorgar’s voice, he can be heard through a speech-synthesizing vocoder on PIN·BOT and, with the help of helium-filled balloons, providing high-pitched giggles on Jokerz! (1988).

  The late ’80s were good to Oursler. He designed popular games for an expanding industry. When someone asks him which is his favorite, he wistfully replies, “It’s like saying, what’s your favorite kid?”

  The late ’90s were not good to Oursler: one day he returned from vacation to learn that his entire team had been laid off. At age forty-four, jobless, without a college degree, and possessing a skill valuable only within a soon-to-be-nonexistent sector, Oursler was in trouble. To support himself, he sold off his own collection of a dozen games, later accepting a job in the food safety industry. Food safety is important, of course, but it’s no pinball. How in the world, Oursler wondered, would he ever have the opportunity to design another pinball machine?

  Oursler’s trip to Expo in 2015 is a kind of farewell—not to pinball but to the United States. In a few weeks, Oursler is moving to the United Kingdom, where Heighway Pinball is copying Jersey Jack’s strategy: after Full Throttle and Alien, Heighway’s third game will have an original Barry Oursler theme.

  Now, Oursler will not only take back his spot at the drafting table but also reenter pinball at a time filled with increasing optimism. “It’d be nice to have three or four companies like there used to be,” he says. “Plus, if you’ve got competition, it’s a lot easier to get a raise from your boss.”

  Oursler’s boss can’t wait for his new designer, his very own classic American game guru, to get to work. “We want to see it come back in a big way,” says Heighway, “so we want to innovate as much as possible.” And that, to make the understatement of the industry, is so very freaking much easier said than done.

  Just ask Jaap Nauta, co-owner of Dutch Pinball.5

  At Pinball Expo, while Guarnieri brags, Emery basks, and Heighway shows pictures of the queen, Nauta is in the awkward position of defending, to a packed seminar room, exactly why he hasn’t yet delivered the game he promised several months ago—and for which many have prepaid a sizeable deposit.r />
  “How many have been preordered?” someone shouts during the question-and-answer session. “Can you give a rough estimate?”

  Nauta, who owns the start-up with his friend Barry Driessen, gives a small grin. He delivers both good and bad news with a pleased, upbeat Dutch accent. “I don’t dare anymore,” he says.

  This is not what the question’s asker wanted to hear. He sits back down and grumbles, “Good question-and-answer session.”

  In 2013, Driessen was a man with a dream: build a pinball machine based on the 1998 Coen Brothers cult classic film The Big Lebowski. He and Nauta started calculating whether there was any way this could be a viable commercial venture. They concluded it was—and today they’re dealing with the results of that conclusion.

  Step one: get money. More than two hundred people paid preorder deposits of $8,500, in installments, to reserve a Big Lebowski on faith. That’s a lot of faith. In part, customers trusted Driessen because of a previous project: along with programmer Koen Heltzel, he took a 1991 The Machine: Bride of Pin·bot, Oursler’s classic sequel to PIN·BOT, and wrote new software, converting its dated alphanumeric display to a color dot matrix with animations, upgraded sound, and even new rules that made Bride play like a completely different machine. Called Bride of Pin·bot 2.0, Driessen and Heltzel’s conversion impressed pinball players around the world.

  But here at Expo, Nauta has some explaining to do. “Pinball is 5 percent fun and 95 percent frustration,” he jokes with his audience, “and we all love frustration!” Except they don’t. The attendees of Nauta’s session would like to learn about the struggles he’s faced in building Lebowski, but more than that, some of them want to know when they’re going to get their damn games.

  One reason for the delay has been a failure of communication. After successfully licensing The Big Lebowski theme from Universal Studios, Nauta and Driessen showed them some of the art they planned to use. Universal replied that they’d prefer some changes be made, a reply Nauta and Driessen interpreted as a request. “The Dutch and rules, we don’t go well together,” Nauta explains. “You can smoke weed. We don’t care! Prostitution . . . in Holland, we don’t care!”