![]() "But they had games with very little soul." "They gave pinball lots of glitz and gizmos," Levine offers. * Rather than staying old school, the companies tried to compete with video games. Where did it all go wrong? Folks in the business offer these explanations: The pinball championships quietly disappeared, too. Last November, WMS Industries said goodbye after its pinball division lost $17.8 million in the last three fiscal years. Bally Manufacturing sold off its pinball division in 1988. One by one, like targets zapped with a quick wrist flick, the pinball makers disappeared. In 1992, when the pinball machine was successfully fighting the video challenge, 100,000 machines were sold worldwide. "And the valleys started to become a little deeper." "Each time it peaked, it peaked a little less," Haim says. Competitors vied for thousands in prize money inside Manhattan's funky Lone Star Roadhouse.ĭespite the good times, there were already bad signs for the future. Steve Epstein, founder of the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association, began hosting a national pinball championship in 1990. The late '70s were a boom time, the mid-'80s a rough stretch, the early '90s a comeback. Over the seven decades that followed its invention, pinball's popularity waxed and waned. In 1941, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia made headlines when he supervised the dumping of the machines into the East River. That didn't include New York, where the machines were illegal until 1976. Pinball quickly became a hit in most places. The payoff later was reduced to a free game or two for beating certain scores. It was first a gambling machine that offered players a cash payout if they could score points without "tilting" the machine-rattling it so hard that it shuts down. The pinball machine debuted in 1931, a hardy contraption that quickly became a hit in most places. These days, the Asbury boardwalk is empty of both people and pinball. ![]() The "wizards play down on Pinball Way," the Boss sang wistfully, "on the boardwalk way past dark."Īcross the Atlantic, Pete Townshend offered his own homage with "Pinball Wizard"-the tale of a "deaf, dumb and blind kid" who "sure plays a mean pinball." To die-hard players, it was the stuff of both poetry and patriotism.īruce Springsteen, once a regular at the Casino Amusements in Asbury Park, recalled the halcyon days of pinball in his 1974 song "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)." The pinball game was never merely about money. "This is an accommodation to the past," Levine acknowledges, standing alongside a vintage "Addams Family" machine and a newer "South Park" game. On a weekday afternoon, the machines are idle. In a cramped second-floor room, obscured by the new big-ticket games, sit a half-dozen pinball machines. Levine speaks while standing inside the future-Broadway City, a three-level collection of more than 200 high-tech arcade games. "The pinball player maybe played in college, or in a local bar. ![]() "There's a new generation brought up on games off their computers," says Levine. It's a generation raised on virtual reality, Nintendo and Sony PlayStation, a generation that views the pinball machine as an anachronism-a rusted-out pickup truck barely putt-putt-putting into the 21st century. "I doubt he'll go into this business," the elder Haim says. His father founded the business in 1946 his son, Daniel, is a law school student and unlikely successor. Belam Co., has watched pinball's steady decline. Many in the industry fear the silver ball is headed toward oblivion.īob Haim, co-owner of the Long Island-based pinball distributor R.H. Stern's is a lonely voice above the revving motors, soaring spacecraft and Dolby sounds that accompany the new generation of arcade games. "Now we just talk about how we intend to be around for a long time to come." ![]() "We no longer talk about how we're the last man standing," said Stern. Company President Gary Stern believes his business can keep the flippers flailing where others have failed. "This could be a thing of the past."ĭon't say that around the last bastion of pinball optimism: suburban Melrose Park, Ill., home of the family-owned Stern Pinball. "It's a shame," says Walt Levine, a 25-year industry veteran, offering an oft-echoed opinion. pinball machine-"as American as apple pie," as one arcade owner notes-now finds its biggest market in France, where it's as popular as snails and Jerry Lewis. Of the big four companies that once cranked out 100,000 glitzy machines a year, only one survives-and it produces a fraction of that figure.Įven worse, the proudly made-in-the-U.S.A. In the computerized, digitized world of high-tech entertainment, the pinball machine clings to a diminished niche. But the venerable pinball machine, once the undisputed arcade king from the Jersey Shore boardwalks to the Santa Monica Pier, is certainly down to its last ball. ![]()
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