State of the Art

Take it from Tommy

by Jumana Farouky

Before virtual reality, before Super Mario Brothers, even before Pac-Man and Space Invaders, there was pinball. For most people, pinball means surrendering a quarter or two and banging buttons on the sides of a metal box while trying to keep a shiny sphere from plummeting down a hole. A new video documentary by Boston-based pinball enthusiast Mark Helms, Pleasure Machines: The History of Pinball, offers a more comprehensive look at these ancient arcade inhabitants.

Fourteen years ago, a bored 13-year-old Mark Helms broke free from his family at Myrtle Beach and discovered the thrill of pinball. "It was like a religious experience," he explains. "I had never seen an arcade before. There were rows and rows of shiny, beautiful, blinking machines." His love of the sliver ball grew into a curiosity about its history. Two years ago, Helms (who now runs his own video production company) and one of the video's co-producers, Howard Cook, decided the 40 or so books written about pinball did not do the game justice. After near-obsessive research, they created this one-hour video, which takes you from pinball's origins in the lawn game Nine Ball -- popular in Britain at the turn of the 17th century -- to today's high-tech machines. Cook not only provided his memories of the old wood-rail pinball machines, he even used a lipstick camera to film a ball's-eye view of the inside of a pinball machine.

Along with pinball historian Richard Bueschel and pinball expert Roger Sharpe, who provide most of the narration, the video features observations from Frank Thomas of the Chicago White Sox, Slash of Guns N' Roses, and Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry. This cast of characters guides you through an intricate history of the game, including the birth of the infamous "tilt" and the evolution of flippers. (The soundtrack consists of generic rock and roll, and, sorry, licensing restrictions mean that the Who's arcade anthem "Pinball Wizard" is not included.) The video also documents the making of several popular pinball games, with their creators and artists revealing how and why they worked on the likes of Terminator 2 and Apollo 13.

Helms, owner of eight pinball machines, says people are coming back to pinball because video games, for all their cybernetic sophistication, lack a certain corporeal thrill. "Pinball is physical. You really do shake the machine. You really do slam the ball with the flipper. People are getting back to the physical rush that only pinball can give them. With pinball, more than with video, you can completely immerse yourself. For those five minutes that you're playing, you can't think about anything else. You're very focused, your only thought is keeping the ball alive."

Pleasure Machines: The History of Pinball is available by phone order; call 888-PIN-VIDEO.