by Adam Ruben
Universal cared—about the game’s art, not the weed and prostitutes—and it took some time before Dutch Pinball understood that Universal’s request was more like a command. “In America,” he explains, “it means ‘You. Must. Change it!’” So the playfield art was held up while they worked, for example, to unblush Julianne Moore’s cheeks. (Moore, now a L’Oréal Paris brand ambassador, which the Internet assures me is a real thing, apparently had to maintain a certain cosmetically consistent image, even in pinball art.)
Then there was a problem with the music. Dutch Pinball somehow acquired the rights to twenty songs from the film, like Bob Dylan’s “The Man in Me” and “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. What a treat, his customers thought, to hear snippets of the movie’s idiosyncratic soundtrack while making shots.
At least they thought they had the rights. Months later, they would discover that the Dutch music rights authorities had “falsely informed” them—it turns out they had secured the rights to the songs but not as performed by their original artists.
So Nauta and Driessen began a quest to find covers of the same songs—only to learn even later that they could only use the songs uncut, beginning to end—no snippets. In a pinball game, that’s impossible. No player wants to pause for three minutes and listen to a Dylan song every time he or she shoots a ramp.
Another unanticipated delay, and another apology to Dutch Pinball’s presumptive customers. Finally, like the Stranger stepping in to give the Dude advice,6 Roger Sharpe volunteered to interact with Universal and—at least for Driessen and Nauta—once again saved pinball.
Nauta has brought three prototype Big Lebowski machines to Expo, all available for free play. The game’s goals include mixing a white Russian, bowling down ten miniature pins, and even unrolling the Dude’s rug, which really ties the room together. The video clips on the color display (that’s color dot matrix, a level more rudimentary than Jersey Jack or Heighway’s color video screen) look slick, with Walter telling Smokey he’s over the line and (spoiler alert) Donny’s ashes flying onto the Dude. Good night, sweet prince.
There’s no denying it’s a neat, nearly complete game with a popular theme—now there’s just the small matter of manufacturing hundreds of them. Stern could probably accomplish this in a week, Jersey Jack in a month, Spooky in a year. As for Dutch Pinball, we’ll find out.
“I’m sorry to my customers, our customers,” Nauta explains to the audience, sounding validly contrite, “but we didn’t make it. But we’re this close.”
Convincing customers to give thousands of dollars to someone who’s never manufactured a game may be a strategy that will never work again. In May 2015, a post on the Bay Area Pinball website announced, “Pre-Order Pinball Is Dead,” complete with a mock tombstone graphic. One of the biggest reasons was a man named John Popadiuk.
“I did not realize what it entails to run a company and get a machine designed and produced from start to finish,” John Popadiuk wrote in May 2015 in an apology to investors in his company, Zidware. In the same letter, he made clear that no one should expect a refund, but if they’d kindly sign the attached legal document confirming that they won’t sue, he’ll try to get their machines manufactured by a “licensee.”
Popadiuk never responded to my e-mails, and he’s the center of some pretty fervent controversy, so I don’t want to speculate on anyone’s intentions. But what’s agreed upon is this: Popadiuk, a designer who was fired from WMS the same time as everyone else, announced that he would take preorders for three brand-new pinball machines of his own design: Magic Girl, Retro Atomic Zombie Adventure, and Alice in Wonderland. Eager fans cheerfully gave Popadiuk their money, estimated at over $1 million total—after all, he had designed some pretty cool pinball machines while at WMS, including Theatre of Magic and Tales of the Arabian Nights (1996).
But the jobs of designing games and running the day-to-day manufacturing operations are sometimes incompatible for one individual, and Popadiuk ran out of money before even finishing a prototype of his first game, Magic Girl.
Around the same time, investors in Skit-B Pinball, a different start-up, run by Kevin Kulek and Aaron Klumpp, found themselves in a similar predicament. Kulek and Klumpp had taken preorder money for a pinball machine based on the film Predator, and, by all accounts, they physically developed their machine even further than Popadiuk had his, bringing a whitewood prototype—the undecorated barebones ramps and targets screwed into plywood—to gaming shows in 2012. But according to Pinball News, they had neglected one teensy detail: the license. Twentieth Century Fox not only refused to grant Skit-B a license for Predator Pinball but also asked Kulek on multiple occasions to stop working on the game.
Those who gave thousands of dollars to Zidware or Skit-B may have made an expensive donation to learn a valuable lesson: unless it’s given to Stern, or maybe Jersey Jack, a preorder—even one accompanied by a check for thousands of dollars—guarantees nothing.
For good or ill, we’ve entered a new age of pinball, one in which a large company with a large factory isn’t necessary to produce games, though it sure as hell doesn’t hurt. Pinball Magazine maintains a “Who’s Working on What?” page with, as of this writing, no fewer than seventeen companies attempting to develop games, from Chinese manufacturer Homepin, which is making a Thunderbirds game, to Quetzal Pinball, which has been working on Captain Nemo since 2009. There have always been both large and small pinball companies, with varying degrees of success, but never before has the proportion tipped so strongly in favor of the start-ups.
“That can’t last,” says Pat Lawlor, which is a pretty definitive declaration from someone typically judicious with his words. “The economics of what we do cannot allow those people to survive.”
Zidware and Skit-B may represent the most public meltdowns of start-up pinball companies, but plenty of others start small, promise big, and either vanish or appear to be in the process of doing so.
“This business is littered with the carcasses of millions and millions and millions of dollars of people who thought they saw an easy way to make money and died horribly doing it,” explains Lawlor, referring to all of the manufacturers who have come and gone. It’s not that the pinball industry attracts rubes and charlatans—though from some of the comments on the Pinside forum, particularly from people who preordered games with Zidware or Skit-B, you’d think it was. It’s that making a pinball machine is hard and expensive.
One way to deal with the expense, if you’re only going to produce a few dozen or hundred units, is to slap a huge price tag onto your game. “At that point,” Lawlor reminds me, “you’re selling Rolls-Royces.”
“Pinball prices are going out of control,” agrees Heighway. “Eight, nine, ten thousand dollars, where does it stop? And that’s what’s going to kill pinball.” His competitors might point out that, depending on the day’s post-Brexit exchange rate for British pounds, $8,000 is about the price of a new Limited Edition Full Throttle. But after that initial investment, Heighway hopes his fans will enjoy buying Heighway Pinball’s next games at half the price, since they’d only be buying playfields, art, and software, not a new cabinet.
Roger Sharpe agrees that “the price point of pinball has become somewhat silly.” For players and collectors, there’s no easy solution: they complain when there aren’t new pinball manufacturers, and they complain when the games cost too much. I think what they really want is for it to be 1980 again.
Outside of the “Who’s Working on What?” list is yet another stratum of manufacturers: those making machines not as products but as projects. The beauty of making a pinball machine is that anyone can do it, and not necessarily commercially. In addition to pinball players and collectors, Expo is filled with intrepid tinkerers who, like Ben Heck toiling for years on his Bill Paxton machine, have a dream, a garage, and a patient family.
Perhaps the best example of specialized homebrew pinball at Expo is a m
achine made by Josh Kugler, a middle-aged man who appreciates his patient family so much that he made them the theme of his pinball machine: Kugler Family Pinball. The cabinet is decorated with art, presumably of the Kugler family, including backglass line drawings and a collage of tiny photos. I give the game a try, and it’s absolutely charming: Players can pretend to do the normal things the Kugler family does on a regular basis, like checking the mailbox or going to the mall. One mode is called Help Eydie Make a Bracelet. I suppose everyone expresses their love for their family in a different way; Kugler’s way is to build a pinball machine.
It seems everyone in the exhibition hall has their own ideas about how to revolutionize pinball. A company called Multimorphic shows off Lexy Lightspeed—Escape from Earth, a game by designer Dennis Nordman and built for their P3 Platform—a standard-size pinball machine on which half of the playfield is a giant screen that can show, for example, aliens to squash when the ball rolls over them or smoke trails zipping behind the moving pinball. “The reception for the P3 and Lexy Lightspeed has been interesting,” founder Gerry Stellenberg wrote to me in an e-mail. “Technical and forward-thinking people love it. Traditionalists are hesitant to give it a chance.”
Perhaps that’s because the giant screen in the playfield reminds them too much of computer pinball. But Multimorphic’s game is more of a compromise between computer pinball and Heighway Pinball’s modular—yet physically traditional—machines.
Also like Heighway, Multimorphic wants the P3 to be the Nintendo of pinball, a gaming system that can be used for any number of games; just buy a new cartridge. Only for Heighway and Multimorphic, the new cartridge is software, cabinet art, and a playfield—ramps, bumpers, targets, the whole shebang. Well, for Multimorphic, half the shebang.
Playing Lexy Lightspeed (the title character of which is a phaser-toting female “space adventurer” who has crash-landed in a Florida swamp) is fun, but Stellenberg is right—the differences between his game and traditional pinball take some getting used to. He admits it’s “a different enough environment that it scares some people away,” but he hopes it’s not too many.
“Some get over that after three to five games,” he wrote. “Some never do.”
If pinball conservatives remain dubious of the P3, the fully virtual machines are outright pariahs. These house a flat-screen monitor facing the ceiling—and nothing else. It’s like playing computer pinball, because it is playing computer pinball, only inside a full-sized cabinet—and it’s probably the least popular offering in the room. That’s how important it is to have a physical silver ball and not just a moving picture of a silver ball. (In response to an article about pinball using the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, one pinball fan commented, “All simulated pinball is like sex with a condom.”)
Indeed, as Pinball Hall of Fame owner Tim Arnold says in the documentary Special When Lit, what differentiates pinball from other forms of nostalgia is its inability to be reproduced digitally. A favorite old song or movie can be purchased from iTunes in seconds, and it’s the same song or movie you once knew, but a favorite pinball machine can only exist as a well-maintained wooden cabinet containing moving parts.7
In May 2016, a Fairfield, Ohio, company called VPcabs, which makes virtual pinball inside real pinball cabinets, appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank. Creator Brad Baker delivered the standard pitch to the panel of investors, hoping one would purchase equity in his company: “Life is a buffet, and pinball can be, too. So, sharks, who’s hungry?” Billionaire Mark Cuban probably caused pinball aficionados around the country to facepalm when he remarked, “This is actually better than traditional pinball.” FUBU founder Daymond John was hungry and bought a quarter of the company for $200,000. But real estate mogul Robert Herjavec, who declined to make an offer, stole the show for me when he casually dropped the fact that he owns ten pinball machines. Then again, he’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars, so he probably owns ten everything.
In a corner of the exhibition hall, Canadian manufacturer FAST Pinball shows that it’s possible to requisition a one-of-a-kind pinball machine on any theme you’d like—as long as you don’t mind waiting a few years and paying a hefty sum. One of their games, the sparse but artistically nice Tattoo Mystique, sold to the person who commissioned it for $25,000.
I’m a bit baffled, at first, by FAST Pinball’s apparently magical success with licensing: their other half-finished games, essentially plastic ramps screwed into plywood at this point, have themes Stern or Jersey Jack would probably kill for. Peanuts? The Muppets?
This is the world of the one-copy license, the perfectly legal use of copyrighted themes as long as you’re only making one machine out of them. And it’s fun to see what people have built in their spare time. But something about it rubs Jay Stafford, senior editor of the Internet Pinball Database, the wrong way.
To him, there’s an element of narcissism in bringing your homebrew game to a pinball show, because not only are you saying “Admire what I built,” you’re standing next to the machine, implying, “Admire me.” He likens it to bringing a classic car you’ve restored to a car show, then sitting next to the car in a folding chair all day to collect compliments. At a car show, he laments—unlike at, say, a car museum—“part of the experience of appreciating the car is appreciating the owner.”
I also see Stafford’s point in the sort of celebrity worship that has sprung up around pinball’s famous designers and public figures like Gary Stern, Roger Sharpe, and anyone else with their own trading card or autograph session at Expo. Steve Ritchie can’t sign Game of Thrones flyers fast enough, I had to register in advance for a twenty-on-one lunch with Barry Oursler, and Pat Lawlor is thanked for his service like a military veteran. In a way, Expo succeeds in maintaining enthusiasm for pinball by promising attendees something rare, something special, a chance to meet the hardworking geniuses behind the toys. But this new lionization of the builders and makers, says Stafford, is a trend that could lead to pinball machines focused more on hype and less on pinball.
I don’t know. What I do see at Pinball Expo, for sure, is enthusiasm. People who bemoaned pinball’s near extinction—essentially once a decade for the last three decades—are excited, because to them, this upswing feels different than the others. This time it’s driven by the ingenuity of everyday people, and while they don’t all realize their dreams, they’re sure as hell trying.
It feels like pinball is reinventing itself organically. The companies manufacturing games at the time of pinball’s major demise in the late ’90s were all founded, or were divisions of companies founded, many decades previous—Gottlieb in 1927, Williams in 1943, Sega in 1960, Capcom in 1979. Of the companies making games now, all except Stern were founded in the past five years.
This doesn’t mean that Stern’s business model is outmoded or that the “last dinosaur” in the industry is unnecessary. “I don’t believe we exist without those big fish in that pond, and we’re the little guys swimming around below them,” says Charlie Emery. His 150 America’s Most Haunted machines and upcoming 300 Rob Zombie games will thrill the hell out of 450 people, maybe more if someone dares to install such a rarity in a bar,8 but he knows Spooky won’t dent the pinball market. “We’re not capable of flooding the market the way Stern is, you know? We can’t do a Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead. We can’t afford those licenses. So I think it’s incredibly important to our little company that those big guys are there.”
Gary Stern agrees, of course: “We need a critical mass of product being produced, or it won’t exist,” he tells me, answering a question that I get the sense he’s a little tired of answering, particularly because his answer isn’t the “Rah rah support the underdog” response that most people, me included, naturally want to hear. “And without making multiple models a year, we won’t have a critical mass.” His point is clear, because at least today, there’s only one manufacturer that can make multiple models per year, and that’s him.
Jersey Jack Guarnie
ri may call this viewpoint monopolistic, but there’s some validity to it. In most industries, competition invigorates innovation and pushes everyone forward, and in many ways, pinball is no exception. But the proliferation of start-ups can have a negative impact as well, by making consumers’ spare cash unavailable while they wait for boutique manufacturers to deliver games—some of which will never arrive. Because there’s only one big player in a uniquely precarious industry, if too many pinball machines are left unpurchased, the whole hobby could be jeopardized. Everyone talks about how difficult it must be for the little companies, the Heighways, the Dutches, the Spookies. It’s easy, in that context, to underappreciate the big one.
“We are the only pinball manufacturer in the world,” Stern told Slate in January 2013, back when that was true, adding that “pinball will survive if Stern Pinball continues to make pinball machines in a meaningful volume.” He’s right: while pinheads gossip about the new innovations from all the start-ups, if Stern Pinball vanished tomorrow, there would be no workhorse to keep the sport going.
So, what will kill pinball next? It seems like a mean question, but assuming pinball is eternal, that its ball saver is always flashing, is as naive as assuming the international economy will never endure another recession.
At this point, pinball has proven itself impervious to many potential sources of doom. Television didn’t kill pinball. The Internet didn’t kill pinball. Smartphones didn’t kill pinball. Sledgehammer-wielding zealots, an aging customer base, bankrupt start-ups, successful but slow start-ups, hoarding collectors, the Xbox, public scarcity, daunting maintenance, and a societal tendency toward antisocial endeavors like solo Netflix binges didn’t kill pinball.
