Game over

Pinball's last big player folds up, and a hobby goes tilt

by Andrew Weiner

Despair, like anything important, means different things to different people. Some people get existentially spooked by clowns, or deserts, or waiting in airports. But for any devoted pinball player, despair has always meant only one thing: watching helplessly as the ball travels past the flippers and into the drain at the base of the table, irretrievable.

Then, late last year, something happened to make this angst seem like just another case of the jitters. The day after the close of the annual Pinball Expo convention, WMS Industries announced its decision to terminate production of pinball machines altogether. After having watched its losses mount to nearly $1 million monthly, the company called it quits in order to focus on its more lucrative slot-machine business.

To the pinball industry, this announcement looked a lot like a big TILT signal. In fact, it would hardly be exaggerating to say that WMS, whose various brands together controlled 75 percent of the market, was the pinball industry. Its withdrawal leaves just one remaining manufacturer, Stern Pinball, which makes only a couple thousand games a year, most of which end up overseas.

For fans of the game, the news was unexpected, and it hit hard. The three lines marketed under the WMS trademark -- Bally, Midway, and Williams -- are virtually synonymous with the modern electromechanical pinball table. The machines that are played in contests and prized by collectors, such as Fireball, Attack from Mars, and the Addams Family, are mainly WMS machines.

Among the company's more impressive engineering feats were multilevel playfields, animated obstacles, and hidden magnets that would redirect the ball at random. A pinball-video hybrid called Pinball 2000 was the company's final attempt to keep the game relevant, but it tanked with casual and committed players alike.

Brinda Coleman, editor of the "flipper action culture" 'zine multiball, says that the decline of the industry was an open secret, but the actuality of the situation was still stunning to most everyone. In her view, fierce competition for entertainment dollars eventually swamped a company whose chief asset was the nostalgic affection that many people harbored for its games. The high resale value of vintage machines indicated an ongoing interest in pinball, but did nothing for the company's bottom line.

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With the active history of the game all but finished, pinball enthusiasts now find themselves sentenced to the shadowy retrophiliac purgatory known to Civil War re-enactors and the cult of Elvis.

In a time when computer games are the knee-jerk scapegoat for handgun violence, it's worth remembering that pinball instigated a moral panic of its own in the 1950s. When Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia took an ax to a New York City pinball parlor, supporting the city's long-time ban, he symbolized the widespread belief that the game was a bad influence.

Of course, all this prudishness only made pinball look sexier, and before long the game joined muscle cars, horror comics, and electric guitars in the private pantheons of 12-year-old boys everywhere. Pinball's apotheosis occurred in 1969, when the Who made it the center of their classic rock opera Tommy. Until being rudely dethroned by Pac-Man (ironically, a Bally game), the silver ball made it close enough to the mainstream that schlockster Elton John had his own machine, named Captain Fantastic.

Yet even then, the sport retained a certain desirable seediness by association. For kids my age growing up in the city, one of the first great illicit thrills was to ride the subway to 1001 Plays on Mass Ave or Teddy Bear's in Park Square. Both arcades are long gone, respectively eclipsed by a futon store and a New American restaurant. In this sense, the decline of pinball parallels a more general shift from the public realm of the game room to the cloistered privacy of the home gaming system.

More than that, though, the waning status of the game represents the end of a singular aesthetic. Pinball is all chrome and mirrors and electricity, and the rush of a good game is as intense as walking into a casino. Like Las Vegas, pinball somehow managed to sell sin, sex, and speed as democratic and American. C'mon, it would say in the voice of a pusher on an after-school special, everybody's doing it. And for a long time, everybody was.

Perhaps that's because anyone can look at a pinball machine and know how to make it work. The big red flipper buttons practically scream HIT ME, and that's really all a player needs to know. In contrast, the fighting games that increasingly dominate arcades are based on the memorization of complex series of moves. Look in the "Hints" section of any video-game magazine and you're likely to be confronted by the type of arcane flow chart usually found in engineering manuals. But the jackpot instructions for any pinball game fit neatly onto the index card that comes mounted on each table. And, unlike the Masons, pinball doesn't ask for a secret code to get in, just a couple of quarters.

Pinball requires the same skills as a video game -- concentration, timing, quickness -- but it also demands that intangible quality usually called touch. Any good player knows how to nudge, slap, and otherwise cajole the machine in a time of crisis. When the Who sang about Tommy having a supple wrist, this is what they meant. Part of the satisfaction in shooting pin -- if you've got touch, you "shoot pin" -- is that success depends on a continual but delicate infraction of the rules. A tolerance for touch is literally built into the machines, in the form of a wand-and-ring device that distinguishes wiliness from cheating.

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Unlike almost everything else in today's arcade, pinball doesn't try to simulate reality; it is reality. Players don't control pixel-filled images, but actual moving objects. This makes the game less about escaping than about engaging. Your enemy isn't an algorithm, but gravity. You don't reimagine yourself as a kickboxer or a commando; you're a pinball player. And you don't sit behind a plastic wheel, pretending to drive a car -- you stand at a pinball table, actually playing pinball.

It's this same allegiance to old-fashioned reality that keeps people using typewriters or buying records. (Full disclosure: I am one of those people.) I don't presume to speak for anyone else, but I'm willing to be thought a Luddite if it means getting my music in crackles and pops rather than ones and zeros. Though I used to think the fullness and immediacy of the sound made up for the imperfections, I now wonder if the two are so easily separated.

Sadly, this human fallibility of the pinball table is among the factors contributing to its demise. The machines need regular maintenance in order to function properly, and few operators are willing or able to make that commitment anymore. To an arcade owner, the choice looks a lot like this: a broken pinball machine, or a working arcade game.

Expert pinballers sometimes use a last-ditch move called the death save, where by giving the table a sharp shove they can bounce the ball out from the drain, putting it back between the flippers and into play again. Although it's possible that some future circumstance might similarly resurrect WMS's pinball operation, the time when whole arcades were filled with pinball tables is already long gone. And it's this that the pinball faithful are now gathered to mourn.

Andrew Weiner's last article for the Phoenix was on Neil Diamond fans. You can find him at the Salem Willows Arcade, or at weimar99@yahoo.com.