Pinball Wizards

by Adam Ruben

  I need a score of at least thirty million to secure my spot in the finals. I watched Kerins’s Full Throttle tutorial video this morning, in which he scored over two hundred million in less than seven minutes. Starting a multiball is key. It’s 11:20 PM, I’m on-offing adrenaline, and, as fate would have it, I happen to be wearing a Full Throttle T-shirt.

  Fate sucks. I never start multiball and drain with only twelve million.

  Which means I have one chance left, one game between me and the end of my last entry, or else I’ll once more fall short of qualifying for the finals. That game is The Twilight Zone. It’s the game I played regularly in grad school and my secret weapon in pinball league, the game whose rules I know better than any other, even Johnny Mnemonic. It’s probably my best game, but even on my best game, sometimes I just tank. We all do.

  I hate the pressure. Oh, how I wish I’d done well on Full Throttle and could relax with some insurance that I was already in the finals. I need two hundred million on The Twilight Zone. There are three balls between me and the end of the night. Here we go.

  Ball one is a joke. Three million. Three million. It’s possible to make a skill shot and score triple that much in the first five seconds of the game. Ball two hoists the score to thirty-five million, but still, it’s a long damn way to go from thirty-five million to two hundred million on one ball. This just isn’t meant to be. I’m going to choke while coming this close, just like I did at PAPA17 and 18. And, for that matter, before Maya and Benjamin were born, at PAPAs 8 and 12.

  Then ball three gives me the chance to start something called Fast Lock Multiball, an instant multiball mode that can rack up points as long as you keep the balls in play and occasionally bury one in the jackpot hole. I’m completely focused on the playfield, on the flippers, on keeping the balls out of the drain. I can’t even look at the score display. Doesn’t matter. Control what you can control.

  The multiball ends with a multidrain, a simultaneous loss of both balls that feels more frustrating than any single drain—one down the left outlane, one down the center. The score display has already moved on to adding my bonus, the extra points awarded at the end of the ball. It’s only when my score is fully tabulated that I see the grand total: 233 million.

  And so it comes to pass that on the last ball of the last game of my last entry, in what is probably the last time I’ll attend PAPA in the foreseeable future, I did it. I finished in nineteenth place, which qualifies me for the finals.

  Tomorrow I’ll have a chance to blow it all over again, but for now, I’m done, and I’m happy. PAPA closes at midnight, and back at the hotel, I tell my story to a pinballed-out Lee, who probably wants to go back to sleep. I know I need to rest, too, before the finals. But let’s be honest: I’m just not tired.

  Sunday morning at PAPA is different for the handful of players in the finals. For the first half hour, we’re allowed to scrutinize the machines we’ll be playing but not to touch them. People bend over games like they’re museum artifacts, peering through the glass and pointing out useful minutiae.

  I join the pack and assess the games, hands on hips, as though I can really glean useful information by inspecting machines that are turned off. It’s a different bank of games from yesterday. I know some games very well, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula; others, almost no one seems to know.

  Target Pool (1969), for example, is the lone game from its era in the bunch, and a gray-haired man—who looks like he played it when it was new—begins telling a friend the rules and strategies. Immediately the other players flock around him, desperate for the information.

  At every machine, competitors seek advice from their friends. “Short plunge, live catch, every time,” someone’s friend says at Avatar. “Upper playfield is bullshit.” Competitors relish these tidbits. The ten words this player just heard may dictate his entire strategy on Avatar. After all, the finals are head-to-head, so today players don’t need epically high scores to succeed. Like campers escaping a grizzly, they don’t need to outrun the bear; they just need to outrun each other.

  Terminator 3 (2003) is in my bank of potential games, and I don’t know the rules well—but since there are a few other T3 machines around PAPA, I decide my time is best spent playing these instead of squinting at games that aren’t on.

  “Judgment day is inevitable,” growls Ah-nold Schwarzenegger, who provided custom speech for the game. Indeed it is, Ah-nold. Indeed it is.6

  “Players, please go to your areas,” booms the loudspeaker. “Or—I suppose you’re already there. God bless you.”

  At this point we are allowed to play the machines. We’re supposed to be testing them, probing for valuable information, learning that this particular kickout always feeds the ball to the left flipper, that tilt bob is set tight, and this game is sloped so steeply that the right ramp is hard to hit.7 We’re not playing entire games, just a ball or two, then getting in line for the next machine. At least, I’m told by a grumbling player that this is the expected etiquette. He sighs loudly as he waits in line for Attack from Mars, displeased that his opponents aren’t rotating through machines fast enough.

  I practice Target Pool, from which I learn that I do not like Target Pool.

  Then PAPA official Ed Williams calls over our group of twenty-four players to review the rules, which include such I-can’t-believe-they-need-to-say-this-but-it-must-have-happened-before examples as “no hitting other players.”

  My group of four, which will play three games in this round and eliminate two of us, doesn’t really do much to tout pinball’s diverse appeal. We’re all men in our midthirties, and we’re all wearing black T-shirts and jeans, two of us with black hoodies on.

  “Hey, good luck, everyone,” says Williams before sending us to our first games. “I hope you all play well.”

  My group starts on Avatar: short plunge, live catch every time. Upper playfield is bullshit.

  Right away, I defiantly ignore Williams’s advice—not about hitting other players but about playing well. No one is playing well on Avatar, and a single multiball could spell the difference between a first-place and a last-place finish. Avatar offers two different multiballs. But I start neither, and by the time I’ve tilted my last ball in a frustrated attempt to save it—no no no no!—I’m at the bottom of my group.

  Why, Avatar?

  And why Avatar? Can’t Ed Rojas—the top-seeded player in my group, who therefore chooses the games we play—pick one I’m familiar with?8 Something I’ve played hundreds of times before? Something like Bram Stoker’s Dracula?

  “Game pick for the second game?” asks Williams.

  “Let’s do . . . Drac,” says Rojas.

  It’s the break I’ve been waiting for. I have a strategy on Drac: Shoot the left ramp five times in a row, then the upper scoop. The third ramp shot starts Bats, a countdown mode that offers fifty million points, with the value diminishing until your ball hits fifteen switches. Since it can take a while to hit fifteen switches with a single ball in play, the fifth ramp shot will light Mist Multiball, which the scoop shot starts. Multiball can pick off fifteen switches in no time, and the Bats award carries over to all future balls. So if, on ball one, I make these six shots in order—hell, five of them are the same shot—I can lock in a score of at least 150 million, which will probably win.

  That’s the value of knowing a game’s rules. Six shots, I win. I am here in Carnegie, I tell myself, to make these six shots.

  Or maybe I’m here in Carnegie because of the beautiful scenery and abundant culture, because—fuck fuck fuck fuck—it doesn’t happen. I pull off the first two shots to the left ramp, heart pounding—I’m doing this—but I never make the third, starting no modes at all and earning a total score under twelve million. Just like on Avatar, I’ve yet again locked in last place.

  At this point, my path to the quarterfinals has narrowed to a single option. In our third and last game, if I win and if the guy currently in second place happens to finish last and if I win the
tiebreaker that would arise from this outcome, I’d advance. I feel like Maryland governor Martin O’Malley in a conference room with his political advisers, mapping strategies to the 2016 Democratic nomination: “Well, sir, we’re not saying it’s impossible, just very, very unlikely.”

  There’s a long wait before our last game to let the other groups catch up; T3 needs repair mid-game (though, as Ah-nold promises, he’ll be back), interrupting everyone playing either T3 or the adjacent Metallica.

  Once the games are restored, Rojas chooses our final machine, a game that will end, for me, in either a miracle or heartbreak. The game is X-Men (2012).

  I remember the last time I played X-Men. In October, after a conference in Philadelphia, a few of my coworkers and I visited a downtown bar, where an X-Men machine sat in a corner.

  My boss, who knows of my propensity for pinball, watched as I played a couple games. I tried to narrate my basic strategy to him: “It says three more shots over here to light lock, so that’s what I’m trying to do.” I then played terribly, losing most balls quickly down the outlanes, probably leaving my boss to wonder why I thought I was good at pinball.

  Now X-Men is my last stand, but before I can touch the game, there’s another delay. It seems that the game has pre-awarded one of my opponents 1,110 points before he even launched his ball. Since his score ought to be zero, he waves for Williams to issue a ruling.

  This may seem like the epitome of nit-picking; 1,110 points will probably not matter in the grand scheme of millions. But if the game awarded the points because of a misregistered switch hit—in other words, if it thinks he already launched the ball and hit something—he may have lost his ball saver, the magical resurrection that recovers an early drain like preprogrammed pity and can make a difference of a lot more than 1,110 points. It’s worth asking.

  Like it or not, tournament players have to defer to the officials’ rulings. They strive for consistency, of course, but the simple fact remains that a machine with over 3,500 parts and a computer can malfunction in all kinds of unfamiliar ways.

  Williams examines the game, then issues the ruling, a very pinball-esque dismissal both simple and unsatisfying in its conciseness: “It does that.”

  My first two balls shit the bed. But on ball three, the very scenario I need has presented itself: my opponent currently in second place overall has an abysmal score on X-Men and is likely to lose the game. I have three million, and my other opponents have finished their games with eight million and sixteen million.

  So if, with this one ball, I can top sixteen million, I’ll win the game, and we’ll go to a tiebreaker. Forget the six shots on Drac, I’ve come to Carnegie for this: to find thirteen million points on X-Men, to rally a clan of mutants, to snatch victory from Wolverine’s adamantium claws of defeat. I’m calm. I’m thinking clearly. And once the ball launches, I start—finally, finally—hitting the shots I want. I’m the Juggernaut, bitch.

  There’s a mode called Hellfire Multiball. Since ball one, I’ve been trying to start it, and now—with one shot to the left loop—I do. Suddenly balls fly around the playfield, down to the flippers, up the ramps, back down again, fed to the flippers through the inlanes. I’ve got the rhythm now, sinking shots, gliding around loops. Jackpots announce themselves, and each is a step closer to first place. I’m so wrapped up in playing that I can’t watch the score increase; I can only catch and shoot and flip and save and sweat.

  The balls drain, and I finally lift my eyes to the display to see my score: 6,083,720.

  Six million. Not sixteen million.

  It does that.

  Thus ends my run at PAPA19. Two weeks from now, I’ll receive a check in the mail for fifty dollars, my prize for finishing twenty-third in C Division. With travel costs and entry fees, over the course of the last three PAPAs, I think I spent over $1,000 to get it.

  Lee pats me on the back. “Pinball, she giveth,” he says, “and pinball, she taketh away.”

  It’s Sunday, several hours until Lee’s flight back to Atlanta, and we each hold jingling cups of tokens in a warehouse with more than five hundred pinball machines. I suppose there are worse fates.

  Despite the loss, I’m surprisingly jazzed. I may not have won, but each game included instances of wanting something, then achieving it. Like hitting the left ramp on Drac, at least the two times I hit it. Or starting Hellfire Multiball, even if it didn’t pay off.

  It’s a satisfying feeling, like I had on The Twilight Zone last night, like I had in the league finals, that I did what I needed to do when I needed to do it. Not every time I needed to do it, but each minisuccess was its own achievement that promised more. And maybe that’s how pinball makes us all feel like we could win: I didn’t make my shot every time. But I know I can.

  In the late afternoon, we watch the A Division finals from the bleachers. This time Kerins has crapped out in tenth place. Instead of a PAPA victory, the highlight of his weekend, told and retold around PAPA, will probably be the time an excited fan approached him during a conversation with Barenaked Ladies singer Ed Robertson.

  “Oh my God!” the fan shouted. “It’s really you! It’s such an honor to meet you!”

  The fan then put his arm around Kerins—not Robertson—and smiled. He even handed his phone to Robertson: “Would you mind taking our picture?”

  I love that story.

  The four finalists this time are Zach Sharpe, two guys I’ve never heard of named Jim Belsito and John Replogle, and the twenty-seven-year-old autistic Canadian prodigy Robert Gagno—none of whom has ever won PAPA.

  “They spent two years filming Gagno on his quest to be world champion,” a man in the bleachers tells me. “Wouldn’t it be funny if he became world champion the year after?”

  He’s talking about Wizard Mode, a recent documentary about how Gagno finds comfort—not to mention frequent success—in competitive pinball. In the film, Gagno’s challenges at a pinball competition are not limited to playing the game; he also has to remind himself to congratulate other players and engage in similar social niceties. Tall and lean with unkempt curly hair, thin-rimmed glasses, and a wide smile, Gagno competes in pinball tournaments around thirty weekends each year, often traveling with his dad.

  John Replogle, with his beard, ponytail, roadie physique, and a T-shirt reading “KEEP CALM AND PAPA ON,” is the unlikeliest competitor in the final four—primarily because the thirty-nine-year-old local is less than two years into his recovery from maiming his hand with a chainsaw while cutting a branch. (Replogle’s painful accident is gorily immortalized in a trophy at PAPA’s information desk, labeled the John Replogle Memorial Trophy: an elaborate, gold-painted chainsaw cutting into a fake hand.) But it’s also because, only a few years ago, Replogle was competing in C Division. Just like me.

  By the time they reach their last game, the two favorites, Sharpe and Gagno, are far ahead. Sharpe selects Flash Gordon (1981) for the final game. In a lengthy play-by-play in Pinball Magazine, Tommy Skinner describes Flash Gordon as a game with “out-lanes that seem as wide as the Rio Grande, in-line drops that are crucial to big scores but have destroyed more players than they have helped, and exposed pop bumpers that can send a ball down the middle in the blink of an eye.” It’s a hard, cruel game, but you’d never know it from watching Gagno, who coolly builds his score until he’s topped the other players—without even playing his third ball.

  Sure enough, the documentarians behind Wizard Mode would have been wise to wait a year. The crowd rises to its feet to applaud Gagno, the tall Canadian with noise-canceling headphones and a huge smile.

  A tournament official carries out Gagno’s gigantic trophy, topped by a bronze figurine of one of the aliens from Attack from Mars. “The new world pinball champion,” he announces grandly, before a dramatic pause, “is me!” He fake-runs a few paces, pretending to abscond with the trophy, then returns, grinning. “Is Robert Gagno!”

  At the after party, which I missed but experienced vicariously through Facebook
, the large flat-screen monitors delightedly flashed the PAPA logo above the words “ROBERT GAGNO, WORLD CHAMPION” before changing to “ZACH SHARPE, NOT WORLD CHAMPION.” It was Josh Sharpe’s suggestion.

  According to Pinball News, twenty-three of the top twenty-five players in the world attended PAPA19. (Notably absent was the number-one ranked player in the world at the time, Jorian Engelbrektsson of Sweden, who chose to stay home with his new baby. Another one bites the dust.)

  I can’t match the dedication needed to succeed here. I just can’t. Even if I were as good as the A Division players, which I’m not, I’d need to travel for pinball every weekend. Just looking at the records of some of these players is dizzying—not because of their impressive wins but because of the sheer number of cities they visit in a short period of time.

  I once asked Josh Sharpe whether the birth of his two children curtailed his pinball-related activities. “Ohhhhhh hell yes,” he wrote in reply. He and Zach used to travel to a major tournament in a different city every month, but now he’s had to limit his pinball to local events, major championships, and competitions he helps to run. His wife, he wrote, has watched in horror—supportively, but in horror—as his position running a college pinball league in 2001 gave way to the IFPA, the tournament scene expanded fiftyfold, and the games in his personal collection multiplied from two to twenty-three.9

  I arrive home from PAPA close to midnight. While I’m cleaning up some toys from the living room rug, a bleary-eyed one-year-old Benjamin pitter-pats down the dimly lit hallway in his Dr. Seuss pajamas.

  “Hi, Benjamin!” I say gently but warmly, kneeling, arms outstretched. “It’s Daddy! I’m home!”

  He pushes me out of the way with a small, sleepy “No” and runs to Marina, who scoops him up. Completely oblivious to my presence, he rests his cheek on her shoulder and shuts his eyes.

  Well. That would have happened anyway.