Pinball

On a cold, drizzly day in October of 1993, the stranger walked calmly in to Dooley's on Farnham with his friend KS. Skeptical of what he would find and whom he would meet, he started at tackling the $0.25 draws of cheap domestic the bar had to offer.

After meeting a few of the guys: PD, TP, TR, EO and KG to name a few, the stranger was soon invited to play a game he had never heard of before. An alien game in the mind of the stranger. A game called pinball. The stranger was me.

Specifically, the pinball machine was Terminator 2. The game was designed by Steve Ritchie and brought into the world by Williams in 1991. A very popular game in the early nineties, it used a gun and trigger to deploy the balls onto the playfield instead of a more traditional plunger. Not only had I never seen anything quite like it before, I hadn't even touched a pinball game since I was 12. Back then, some friends of mine and I discovered that if you stood in between two certain pinball machines at the arcade, you could get quite a shock. So, instead of learning anything about pinball, we shocked ourselves most of the day.

I played pinball with my new acquaintances. Well, I shouldn't say "play". It was more like embarrassed the hell out of myself. As the boys racked up more and more points, extra balls and free games, I managed to watch the ball drain time and time again while hitting both flippers in a vain attempt to stop the little, bastard, silver ball from leaving the playfield within 10 seconds of firing. Suddenly, I found myself searching for another pinball machine close by, so I could impress everyone by shocking myself.

It turns out I made a lot of new friends that night. Most of which are still my friends today. And pinball became to me, one of the best games ever invented. I learned over time that pinball is not about hitting the flippers in sync as rapidly as you can to prevent the ball from slipping away. Pinball is about strategy, movement and fluidity. Use the flipper that you need to use, bounce the ball from one flipper to another, give the machine a quiet shake (but not too much), keep the ball in the high scoring areas, create chances for an extra ball, get excited (but not too excited) when you get a match after the last ball. These things, and more, are what pinball is all about.

PD, TP and I would often spend lunches together over the years and in that time we played a lot of pinball. Some of the best were the Addam's Family and the Twilight Zone. These Bally machines were both designed by Pat Lawlor in 1992 and 1993 respectively. These Lawlor games will always be my favorite. The opportunity for strategy and gaining points were so divine, I couldn't believe it. Addam's Family had a Thing, an It and a quipping Gomez helping you along as you search each delightful room in the family mansion. The tombstone in the graveyard on the playfield was emblazoned with the family motto "Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc" (We gladly feast on those who would subdue us). Fester was delighted when you activated the electric chair and Gomez would say "Now you've done it!" when you finally achieved pinball nirvana, MULTIBALL.

The multiball on Twilight Zone would bring your emotions to a frenzied pitch and the machine zapped, buzzed and screamed with delight when you got that last ball in place. Then a stream of balls would come forth and the user would struggle to keep them all afloat. It was like juggling 10 live cats 10 feet above your head. One by one each ball would unavoidably drain from the field. Every so often though, one of the balls would make it into the one place on the machine that would give you a jackpot. Points adding up, the machine might POP with a free game winner as the appropriate number of points was reached. Balls still flying everywhere, draining, pulsing, POPing, bumping, thumping, until only one ball remained. You gently rest it on an extended flipper, take a deep breath and go at it again.

My primitive words can't hold a candle to what the great Umberto Eco had to say on the subject in the 1989 novel Foucault's Pendulum:

You don't play pinball with just your hands; you play it with the groin too. The pinball problem is not to stop the ball before it's swallowed by the mouth at the bottom, or to kick it back to midfield like a half-back. The problem is to make it stay up where the lighted targets are more numerous and have it bounce from one to another, wandering, confused, delirious, but still a free agent.

And you achieve this not by jolting the ball but by transmitting vibrations to the case, the frame, but gently, so the machine won't catch on and say Tilt. You can only do it with the groin, or with a play of the hips that makes the groin not so much bump, as slither, keeping you on this side of an orgasm. And if the hips move according to nature, it's the buttocks that supply the forward thrust, but gracefully, so that when the thrust reaches the pelvic area, it is softened, as in homeopathy, where the more you shake a solution and the more the drug dissolves in the water added gradually, until the drug has almost entirely disappeared, the more medically effective and potent it is.

Thus from the groin an infinitesimal pulse is transmitted to the case, and the machine obeys, the ball moves against nature, against inertia, against gravity, against the laws of dynamics, and against the cleverness of its constructor, who wanted it disobedient. The ball is intoxicated with vis movendi, remaining in play for memorable and immemorial lengths of time. But a female groin is required, one that interposes no spongy body between the ileum and the machine, and there must be no erectile matter in between, only skin, nerves, padded bone sheathed in a pair of jeans, and a sublimated erotic fury, a sly frigidity, a disinterested adaptability to the partner's response, a taste for arousing desire without suffering the excess of one's own: the Amazon must drive the pinball crazy and savor the thought that she will then abandon it.

Eco was spot on with this analysis. Pinball is played with the mons pubis, not the brain, not the fingers and definitely memorizing digital patterns of enemy ships ( I had a friend in high school that could play Galaga blindfolded). Tim Arnold, curator of the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas said, "Pinball is skill, but it's also completely random, kids play video games and they say it takes skill to play a video game. No, it takes rote memorization of moves. There's no randomness to it. In pinball, the ball could go this way, it could go that way. It's completely random."

Like life in its randomness, pinball is a living breathing creature that brings back more than memories; it brings back sense what it means to be out of control. Nowadays, our whole environment is customized and fit to make sure we are never out of control and nothing is random. Our neighborhoods our pre-designed, our restaurants all have the same meals and our cars are starting to look identical. It is sad to say that pinball declined shortly after I discovered it. Manufacturing firms have merged and designers simply quit designing. Still, today, I look for a pinball game in every bar I walk into. Usually, I am out of luck, but sometimes surprised by a random treasure sitting in the corner. The treasure usually has a coat of dust and one bad flipper, but I try it anyway. Sometimes I am reminded of the bliss of a well-working, well-designed machine and most of the time, I am not. And you know, I certainly wish I had known all of this about pinball before October of '93, because I could have saved myself a lot of electrocutions.

Best Regards,
Micheal

Links:
Internet Pinball Machine Database
Powell's Books
Pinball Hall of Fame