bumpers Archives - Pinball Adventures

When did multi-player games appear for pinball?

Andrew MacBain — Thu, 28 May 2020 04:17:13 +0000

Originally, machines were all single-player games. It was one player at a time. But starting in 1954, Gottlieb came up with the idea to have two or even four people playing at a time. Player one would play ball one, then player two would play ball one. Then player one would play ball two, and player two would play ball two. Suddenly it was more competitive.

The problem was that with electromechanical architecture, the amount of circuitry needed to support multi-player games came at the expense of game play. Basically, it meant that the games couldn’t be as complicated as far as game play and game features were concerned. So there was always this kind of wresting match—do you have a multi-player game that people can play more or less head to head, or do you have a single-player game where the rule set can be considerably deeper but with only one person playing at a time?

As far as collectors go, most collectors like single-player electromechanical games because the games are more involved and they have a deeper rule set. There’s more to do. With the advent of solid-state microcomputers and microprocessors, all games became multi-player just by default because now the game could remember.

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What were some of the other most popular pinball themes?

Andrew MacBain — Thu, 28 May 2020 04:15:08 +0000

Gottlieb was really good at card themes. They were known for that. Card games like poker, you’re trying to get different hands, a royal flush, they used that name a bunch of times—Card Whiz, Royal Flush, Pop-a-Card.

In the 1950s, Gottlieb would run a machine for maybe three or four weeks in their factory and then make anywhere from 500 to 1,500 machines. They would produce maybe 10 different games a year. By the 1960s, production numbers began to bump up. One thousand was now a low production number, and 2,500 to 3,500 was a good run for any particular game. The games were becoming more popular. They were selling more of them.

By the 1970s, some of the machines were breaking sales records, especially the early Bally licensed stuff. They were selling 10,000 machines, 15,000 machines, and this is an incredible number of machines compared to what they were selling just a few years before. But in the mid-’70s, video games were just on the horizon, and by 1979, microprocessor games like Space Invaders, which was a black-and-white game, really started to cut into the pinball market share.

When Pac-Man came out in 1980, pinball really took a dive. Where just a couple years before they had been selling 8,000, 10,000, 12,000, or 15,000 machines, now manufacturers were having a hard time selling 2,000 machines. So the popularity would go down, and pinball would constantly have to reinvent itself. By the late 1980s, Bally was almost out of business, and Williams bought them just to get the name and basically kill a competitor.

By the early 1990s, pinball was on upswing again. Manufacturers were selling boatloads of machines, with the Adam’s Family being the most popular game of all time. And then in the mid-’90s, home-gaming consoles became popular and once again pinball’s popularity started to slide. People weren’t going out so much to be entertained. Arcades were having a hard time, some even closed.

In 1999, Williams/Bally stopped making pinball machines. They just stopped. They said, “We’re just making slot machines.” Remember, Gottlieb had already gone out of business in 1995. So now there was only one pinball manufacturer left, a company called Data East, which in 1995, was bought by Sega.

By 1999, Sega wanted out, so they basically dumped the pinball company. A long-time Data East guy, Gary Stern, picked it up for a very fair price. So now, Gary Stern is running Stern Pinball. There are no stockholders to answer to, it’s just Gary. Because of that autonomy, his pinball machine company has been able to survive. He’s been able to keep his company afloat even during these poor economic times. That’s good because if Stern Pinball goes under, there’s nobody left making any new machines. There almost has to be a new pinball manufacturer out there to keep pinball alive as a pop cultural icon.

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When did movie promotion begin for pinball?

Andrew MacBain — Thu, 28 May 2020 04:13:02 +0000

Bally was the first company to do that. They were the first company to get an official licensed theme. During the 1950s, Gottlieb had done some unlicensed themes. They had a game called Guy’s Dolls, and it just happened to come out at the same time as the Broadway play called Guys and Dolls. So they were trying to wrap themselves in the popularity of pop culture at the time without actually having to pay any money for it.

In 1975 Bally was the first company to pay for a license. The game was Wizard, which was based on the Tommy movie by the Who. They paid very little for the licensing at the time, but they were able to promote the machine around the movie. And since it was called Wizard, they actually would go around to different cities and give the machines away at pinball tournaments. They would host pinball tournaments to try and increase the popularity of their brand.

Then all the other companies followed suit. Gottlieb got a license in 1979 for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Williams did it to a much lesser extent. Bally was the key player in licensing themes. They really felt that they could bring new people in to play pinball if they recognized the theme.

Today, the only pinball manufacturer left is Stern out of Chicago. Just about every game they put out, if not every game they put out, is a licensed theme because they are really strong believers in the idea that themes attract new players to pinball. In other words, you can get somebody to play an Indiana Jones pinball machine because they just walked out of the Indiana Jones movie, that sort of thing.

anagement, and the band got a machine. That was the licensing fee, probably 15 machines. Stern did the Ted Nugent deal.

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Who were the major manufacturers for pinball?

Andrew MacBain — Thu, 28 May 2020 04:08:46 +0000

During the 1930s, there were literally hundreds of companies making pinball machines. After World War II, though, there was only a handful. The key players were Gottlieb—the biggest, and pretty much the Cadillac of pinball—and Williams, which was substantially smaller but still an up-and-coming game company. They were the two prime manufacturers. There were smaller players like Chicago Coin, Keeney, and United that made pinball. But really, it was Gottlieb and Williams. Even Bally only made a handful of pinball machines during the 1950s. They made mostly bingos. They looked like pinball machines, but they were really gambling devices. They didn’t have flippers.

The artwork on pinball machines, especially in the ’50s, was fairly racy because the players they were attracting were mostly male bar patrons, ages 20 to 50. There were always lightly clad, well-endowed women on the back glass. The general thought is that Gottlieb had the best artwork. There are some people who collect the machines just because they like the artwork. For them, Gottlieb is pretty much the king.

In the 1960s, Williams started making more machines, and Bally started to get into the market more aggressively. As the bingo machines became clearly illegal, Bally shifted its production over to pinball, and by the mid-1960s, it was starting to make a lot more pinball machines. So now the big three players were Gottlieb, Williams, and Bally, with Chicago Coin as a runner-up. United was bought out by Williams, and Keeney was out of business.

By the 1970s, Gottlieb was still the leader because of its artwork, game play, and quality. Williams was second. But Bally began pushing the envelope as far as artwork was concerned. The company hired a new artist named Dave Christensen, a guy who had been doing slot-machine art in the Bally slot-machine department. They shifted him over to pinball and he really brought Bally pinball machines to the forefront because of his racy artwork, which was much more realistic than the cartoony art that Williams and Gottlieb were creating. The women Christensen drew looked almost real, maybe a bit super-human.

For a while, Bally was up-and-coming, but as soon as the crossover to solid state happened, when companies dumped electromechanical technology for microprocessors, Bally and Williams really took over. Gottlieb fell behind because the operators didn’t view their system as being reliable. Gottlieb’s approach to game design also lagged, but the company eventually went out of business in 1995 because they could never get past the reliability issue.

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How long does it take to repair the average pinball machine?

Andrew MacBain — Thu, 28 May 2020 04:02:12 +0000

The quickest someone can restore a machine is maybe a week, and that would be the best-case scenario. It takes time to tear them down. All the mechanical assemblies have to be taken apart, cleaned, and the parts must be replaced and put back together. A lot of times they’ll touch up the play fields with clear coat so it doesn’t look like it’s been touched up.

Most of the machines are commercial devices designed to make money for an operator, and most operators just ran the games into the ground. They didn’t really maintain them or take care of them. When they got done with them, they sold them at auction, or maybe cleaned them up a little, ran a rag across them, put new rubber on, and sold them to a homeowner, who then played the bejebus out of it. Or their kids did. Most of the games that you end up with tend to be pretty tired by the time you get them.

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Why People Flip Pinball Machines

Andrew MacBain — Thu, 28 May 2020 03:59:33 +0000

I didn’t really get into to pinball machine collecting until maybe 15 years ago, but when I was a freshman in college, video games were really big. I went to Purdue University. They had a huge arcade there. I always said that Space Invaders and Pac-Man took so much of my money—money that I really didn’t have—that it would have been cheaper to just buy one of those machines.

So one day I went to an auction of coin-operated video games. They had pinball machines there, too, including a 1980 Spider-Man machine. This is about 1988, so the game’s only eight years old. They started bidding at a hundred dollars, and nobody’s bidding. I drag it home and set it up, and sure enough a few things don’t work on it. And of course I don’t know how to fix it, but I go through it, figure it out, and it’s rewarding.

So I started buying these machines, tried to figure out how to fix them, and started to network with other guys who were buying games. I’d say, “Hey, I have this problem, how do you fix that?” You couldn’t find anybody to repair them. As time progressed, I just started buying more games, figuring out how to fix them, and I would run an ad in the paper—“Buying pinball machines, broken or working.” I would get a zillion calls.

Over the course of talking to people, I was developing this library of repair information. Then, in about 1995, I got a new job, and they had this crazy thing at work called Internet access. I’m like, “Wow, I can post all my repair stuff on the Internet.” I made a database and it just kept growing until I ended up with this huge website called PinRepair.com.

As part of the hobby, I went to the Pinball Expo in Chicago. This was about 1999, and they had all these seminars with people involved in the industry—programmers, game designers, service guys. The next year we presented a demonstration at the show about repairing games. As a joke, we said, “We’re going to make a videotape,” just a goofy, comedy videotape on pinball repair. And so we came up with this Norman-Shaggy thing, where I was Shaggy, the guy with long hair, and Norm was the guy who you never, ever saw, but he talked with a Boston accent. It was loosely based on This Old House, so we called it This Old Pinball. It was a weird morph of a bunch of ideas.

We showed the tape after our repair seminar, and people just went nuts, saying, “Hey, can I get a copy?” And we’re like, “We’re not selling this. It was just a one-time thing.” So then this guy comes up to me and says, “Look, I’m running this pinball hall of fame thing in Las Vegas. I’ll sell your video, and I’ll give some of the money to the Salvation Army and some of the money to our nonprofit pinball hall of fame, and you’ll help a lot of people out.”

So we started making these videos, and we turned them into nine, two-hour DVDs. We’ve sold 5,000 of them, or something. It’s unbelievable.

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The Glory of the Pinball Machine

Andrew MacBain — Thu, 28 May 2020 03:55:20 +0000

What is it about the pinball machine that draws us in? Even today in our time of gorgeously illustrated video games, pinball machines continue to have an enchanting quality. In part this is the result ofthe game’s visuals: the lights, colors, and artwork. But it’s also a credit to the game’s simple mechanical brilliance — the fun and challenge of timing the action of two levers to guide the pinball into the machine’s most lucrative spots.The game was not always so simple. Early pinball machines demanded that a player shake the entire table in an effort to guide the ball through the obstacles (pins — hence the name). Later iterations had mechanical flippers like today’s, but more of them — six, which were distributed three on each side up and down the body of the machine. It wasn’t until 1948 that the standard two-flipper version was introduced, designed by Steve Kordek in an effort to save on production costs. But the two-flipper machine was a hit; its use of a direct-current (as opposed to alternating, which other companies were using at the time) meant the flippers were more precise in their motion, and, with only two, the game experience was more streamlined.

Kordek passed away in 2014 at the age of 100 in Park Ridge, Illinois. In his career, he moved on from mechanical games to video games, but the double-flipper pinball machine was “perhaps his most significant contribution.” Its success is a testament to the basic importance of getting the hardware right: Without Kordek’s innovation, pinball would be an overdecorated gambling machine. But together, the marriage of artistry and tech provides that particular pinball allure.pinhead, pinball, pinball-playing addict, backbox, Pinball Machine, BIFF, flipper, panic flip, Lazarus ball, Nudging, machine, ball, pinball video games, nudge, shake, bumpers, thumper, jet, pop, kick-out hole, ,gobble hole, drain, Ability, Achievement, Action, Arcade, Arrangement, Art, Artist, Artwork, Attempt, American Pinball, Chicago Gaming Company. Dutch Pinball, Haggis Pinball. HomePin. Jersey Jack Pinball. Multimorphic Inc. Penny K Pinball. Quetzal Pinball, Pinball Avdentures, Punny Factory, Ninja Mania, Sushi Mania, That’s Wack, Canada, Vancouver , Spooky Pinball, Stern Pinball, SunCoast Pinball, Team Pinball, Allied Leisure, Alvin G, Atari, Bally Manufacturing, Bill Port, Capcom, Centro Matic, Coffee-Mat, Chicago Coin, Data East, Exhibit Supply Company, Fascination Int., Inc, Game Plan, Genco, Gottlieb, Hankin, Heighway Pinball, Inder, InterFlip/Recreativos Franco, Jennings & Company, Jeutel pinball, Nordamatic, Nuova Bell/Bell Games, Maresa, Mirco Games, Midway Games, Pinstar, Mr. Game, Peyper, Playmatic, Rally Play, Recel/Petaco, Sega Pinball, Sega, S.A. SONIC, Spinball, Taito, Tecnoplay, The Valley Company, Viza, Wico, Williams Electronics / WMS Industries, Zaccaria, Zidware, Back-glass, Ball, Ban, Bells, Bing, Bonus, Brand name, Bumper, Business, Buyer, Cabinet, Challenge, Chicago, Circuit, Coin-operated, Colorful, Company, Competition, Compression, Computer, Concept, Configuration, Control, Coordination, Cost, Count, Craze, Creativity, Culture, Damage, Degree, Design, Development, Dexterity, Digits, Direction, Display, Elaborate, Electric, Electronic, Elimination, Entertainment, Enthusiastic, Era, Execute, Eye-catching, Fancy, Features, Field, Flipper, Forward,

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Simpsons Arcade Game rated

Andrew MacBain — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 10:04:24 +0000

The Simpsons Arcade Game may finally be in line for its first console port. As reported by XBLA Fans, the Australian government’s Classification Board has updated its database with a listing for The Simpsons Arcade Game on multiple platforms.

The Simpsons Arcade Game is retro, but the TV show never went away.

Originally released in 1991, The Simpsons Arcade Game was a four-player beat-’em-up from Konami. The game allowed players to plow through side-scrolling levels as Bart, Lisa, Homer, and Marge, pummeling generic suit-wearing bad guys, Matt Groening Life is Hell extras, and recognizable residents of Springfield alike. The arcade game was ported to the PC and Commodore 64 the same year, but never made it to the consoles of the time.

In 2009, Electronic Arts released a mobile phone game called The Simpsons Arcade, but the new classification suggests that the project is unrelated. Handed down yesterday, the listing details Konami as the publisher and retro specialist Backbone Entertainment as the developer. The Emeryville, California-based studio has previously released downloadable versions of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. It also developed Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection, a compilation of 40 games from Sega’s 16-bit system, for the Xbox 360 and PS3.

The Simpsons is another in a line of downloadable console ports for Konami’s licensed coin-op games of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Last year, Konami and Backbone teamed up to release X-Men: The Arcade Game on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The publisher also worked with Ubisoft for 2007’s Xbox 360 release of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game and in 2009 saw the French publisher remake the game’s arcade sequel, Turtles in Time.

Despite the classification, there are still a handful of licensed Konami arcade games of the era still awaiting a modern rerelease. Notably, the publisher’s 1992 arcade games Bucky O’Hare and Wild West C.O.W. Boys of Moo Mesa have yet to find their way to contemporary consoles.

Source

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The World Before Pong

Andrew MacBain — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 07:01:54 +0000

The World Before Pong

You can’t say that video games grew out of pinball,but you can assume that video games wouldn’t have happened without it. It’s Like bicycles and automobiles. One industry leads to the other and then they exist side by side.But you to have bicycles to oneday have motorcars. -Steven Baxter, former producer,The CNN Computer Connection

The Beginnings of Pinball

New technologies do not simply spring out of thin air.They need to be associated with familiar industries or ideas. People may have jokingly referred to the first automobiles as “horseless carriages,” but the name also helped define them. The name changed them from nebulous, unexplainable machines to an extension of an already accepted mode of transportation. Although video games are a relatively new phenomena, they benefited from a close relationship with the well-established amusement industry. The amusement industry, in turn, has long suffered from a lack of legitimacy. Asit turned out, however, legitimacy would never be much of an issue for video games. The beginnings of pinball can be traced back to Bagatelle, a form of billiards in which players used a cue to shoot balls up a sloped table. The goal of the game was to get the balls into one of nine cups were placed along the face of the table. Abraham Lincoln was said to have played Bagatelle.* No surviving records explain why the cue sticks in Bagatelle were replaced with a device called a “plunger,” but for some reason the evolution took place and the game transformed into a new sport called “pinball” before the turn of the century. If one event paved the way for today’s computer and video game industry, it was David Gottlieb’s Baffle Ball. The founder of D. Gottlieb and Company, David Gottlieb was a short, stocky man with a full head of brown hair and an ever-present cigar in his mouth. A showman and an inventor, he once made a living by taking carnival games to oil workers in remote Midwestern oil fields. He understood the balance of chance and skill that made games fun and had a talent for refining ideas to make them more fun. In 1931, Gottlieb created a game called Baffle Ball. Baffle Ballused no electricity and bore little resemblance to modern pinball games. It was built in a countertop cabinet and had only one moving part the plunger. Players used the plunger to launch balls onto a plane set at a 7-degree slope and studded with pins circling eight holes or “scoring pockets.” Each scoring pocket had a certain point value attached to it. For a penny, players could launch seven balls.

Baffle Ball did not have flippers, bumpers, or a scoring device. Players kept track of scores in their heads. Once they launched the ball, they could control its course only by nudging the entire Bo/JIeBallcabinet, a technique later known as “tilting.” Sometimes they tilted so forcibly that the entire Bo/JIe Ballcabinet could slide several inches during a single game. At first Bo/JIe Ballsales grew gradually, but within months, Gottlieb’s game became a major success. By the time the game reached peak popularity, Gottlieb shipped as many as 400 cabinets a day. Gottlieb, the first person to successfully mass produce pinball cabinets in a . factory, became the “Henry Ford of pinball.” His competitors worked out of their garages and couldn’t compete.

“ Imitators popped up immediately, more or less. I mean everybody got involved in the business, and,like I said, there were a lot of people building I them in their garages. I Gottlieb machines were a little more expensive. I think it was $16.50 for I.. : the machine, and that was$1.00 or $1.50 more than the competitors. But my ‘I grandfather used a better quality of walnut; I think the pins were a higher ~~ quality metal. He wanted it to be the Cadillac of pinball machines.”

-Michael Gottlieb, grandson of DavidGottlieb

Once Gottlieb proved money was to be made, imitators followed. David Rockola created several successful pin games* before establishing his company as one of the most famous names in jukeboxes. Ray Moloney’sfirst pinball machine, Ballyhoo, sold so well that he changed the name of his company from Lion Manufacturing to Bally. Gottlieb’s chief competitor was Stanford-educated HarryWilliams. Having studied engineering, Williams brought a deeper understanding of mechanical workings to the industry. He entered the business as a West Coast distributor selling other companies’ amusement machines but discovered he could purchase used pinball games and refurbish them with playfields of his own design for much less than it cost to buy new ones

In 1932, Williams decided to make pinball more challenging by limiting the amount of “body English” players could use. He designed a table with a device that contained a metal ball on a pedestal in its base. If players nudged the machine enough to knock the ball off the pedestal, the game ended. He originally called his device “Stool Pigeon,” but when a customer complained that the machine had “tilted,” Williams decided to call it a “tilt” mechanism. He tested this innovation in a game called Advance. Williams later refined the “tilt” mechanism by replacing the ball and platform design with a pendulum device, which has been present in nearly every pinball game made since. In 1933, Williams built Contact–the first “electric” pinball machine. The name Contactreferred to its electrically powered scoring pockets (called “contact holes”), which knocked the ball back into the playfield to continue scoring points. Like the “tilt” mechanism, electric scoring pockets became a standard for pinball that is still used today.

“Previous to Contact, the skill for the player was to send the ball up on the playfield, have it roll around. and hope that his aim was such that the ball would somehow magically weave its way around through the pins that were nailed into the playfield, With the contact hole, you still needed to have some precision to get the ball into the cup, but getting the ball into the cup give something back. There was a sound. there was motion. Part of the fascinating people have with pinball comes from those opportunities where the game takes over and does things.”

-Roger C. Sharpe, author, Pinball!*

Payouts

Though he was well aware of Harry Williams’s innovations, a different development frightened David Gottlieb more. Slot-machine manufacturers began making pinball-like machines called “pay-outs,” which combined pinball and gambling. Gottlieb saw these machines as a threat to the entire industry. Pay-out machines first appeared in the crime-conscious 1930s, and Gottlieb suspected that politicians would outlaw the new machines and anything associated with them.

“Yes, there was a certain amount of skill involved, but basically the law looked at it as a gamblingdevice. Pay-outs started out legally in many states and eventually ended up being operated mostly illegally in place where the police would look the other way, such as New Orleans. They were nickel games, by the way. They paid off in nickels. So it was a little gamble, but nevertheless it wasgambling.”

-Eddie Adlum, publisher, RePlay Magazine

“It the introduction of the flipper] not only changed the basic landscape of the games themselves, but specific to the players,it really changed how they interacted with the games. It was a totally different entertainment form than it had been. More importantly, it was a remarkable change for the game designers and developers. What had been the prescribed way of doing game development for the previous decade had to be altered dramatically. No longer was it a situation of a person passively interacting with the game; now there was true influencing and greater control from the standpoint of the player.”

-Roger C. Sharpe

Gottlieb’s “flipper games” became the salvation of pinball. Pushed on by a desperate need for respectability, other pinball manufacturers and distributors imitated Humpty Dumpty’s flipper bats and called their cabinets “flipper games.” In France, where pinball has a long and popular history, pinball machines are simply referred to as “le flipper.” After years of complaining about competitors stealing his ideas, Harry Williams found himself imitating rather than innovating, as he joined the growing number of pinball manufacturers adopting the Gottlieb flipper. Williams’s first flipper game was called Sunny. By this time, Harry Williams owned his own Chicago amusement company, Williams Manufacturing Company, which he founded in 1942. Though Harry Mabs created the first flippers, it was Steven Kordek, an engineer from a company called Genco, who discovered the best use for them. Kordek replaced Humpty Dumpty’s six flippers–two at the top, two in the center, and two at the bottom-with two flippers along the bottom of the playing field. Kordek’s innovation was introduced in a game called Triple Action.*

“I worked for a small company and I was always told to save money-and “. therewasno way the world that I was going to use six flippers.”

-Steve Kordek, former pinball designer. Genco

Most pinball machines created in 1947 had sixflippers. When Kordek’s two flippers design was demonstrated in a trade show in January 1948, it caused an immediate stir. The industry has followed his basic design ever since. Even as Gottlieb sought to legitimize pinball with flippers, Bally introduced Bingo machines-flipperless pinball machines with rows of pockets. Bingo re-opened some of the wounds caused by pay-out games. Though pinball remained legal, most states outlawed Bingo machines permanently.

“People tried to operate Bingo machines legally and treat them as regular pinball machines, but becausetheyweregamblingdevices, my grandfather didn’t want to have anything to do with

them.”

-Michael Gottlieb

Flippers were enough proof that pinball was a game of skill for some legislators. Satisfied by flippers and free-game rewards for high scores, some states relaxed their laws governing pinball. New York Continued its ban into the 1970s

AGrowing Industry

“There were five game manufacturers in the beginning. ItwasGottlieb making pinballs. It was Williams making pinballs and novelties. It was Bally’s making pinballs, novelties, and slot machines, although the major industry didn’t use those. ItwasChicago Coin making pinball and novelties. It was Midway making novelty games-target rifles and so on. There wasa sixth, United Manufacturing. But just about the time I Joined the industry in 1964, United was purchased by Williams, so that put it back down to five.”

-Eddie Adlum

The coin-operated amusement industry has two tiers of companies. The first tier includes companies like Gottlieb and Williams,which manufacture amusement equipment. The second is made up of local distributors and operators who place equipment in stores, bus stations, bars, restaurants, bowling alleys and set up routes to maintain it. Though flipper machines and other games have long represented a steady source of income, the jukebox defined the industry in the early going. During the 1940s and 1950s, jukeboxes were an integral part of the fabric ofAmerican society and the main source of income for amusement companies. Known as music operators, these distributors placed jukeboxes and games in bus stations, restaurants, and ice cream shops. In exchange for permission to place their equipment in businesses, operators paid location owners a portion of jukebox and game receipts. They established routes and hired teams of technicians to maintain their equipment, empty the coin boxes, and place new records in jukeboxes. Keeping current with the latest music trends Was essential to earning a good income and keeping location owners satisfied. It was a competitive business. The music operator’s entire livelihood depended on keeping customers happy. If a location owner thought he had received inferior equipment or old records, he could make arrangements with a new operator simply by picking up the telephone.

“;In the mld-1960s, Gottlieb was the recognized leader[in pinball]. Bally was, ‘I the recognized loser. In fact,1 knew a salesman named Irv Kempner in New I York City who worked for Runyon Sales Co. They were distributors of both I Rowe jukeboxes and Bally pinballs, and one of the guys said the reason b~ “Kempy” was the best salesman was because he had the worst pinball and I the worst jukebox to sell. ifrI I~.il’ Today. Rowe is number one in jukeboxes, and Bally owned the pinball • ” machine industry in the late 1970S and early 1980s.”

-Eddie Adlum

Novelty Games

“If You go to an old penny arcade. some of the equipment we consideranI,i, tique today wasquite popular in the days that I Started [in the industry]. It II makes me feel old.”

-Joel Hochberg

Historically, the oldest COin-operated amusement machines were known as novelty games. Before making Bcif.Jle Ball, David Gottlieb manufactured a novelty machine called the Husky grip that tested a player’s strength. By the 1940s, companies had already invented mechanical baseball games. Other games simulated horse racing, hunting, and Western gunfights. Over the years, the field has grown to include hockey, soccer (known by many as foosball), flying, and even building construction. One of the most popular themes was the shooting arcade. Taverns began carrying mechanical pistol games in which players shot tiny ball bearings at targets on the other side of a small glass-enclosed cabinet. Larger shooting galleries with rifles became staples at arcades.

“We had some wonderful ideas like the Seeburg Bear Gun, a classic that oldtimers still remember. You took an actual rifle that had a cable attached to a console about 6, 8, 10 feet away, and the bear moved from left to right. He had light-sensitive targets in his stomach and on each side. As you shot, he would rear up and growl and turn in the other direction, and you just kept shooting until ran out of bullets. It[BearGun]wasa huge, big hit; a lot of people had it. We also had the Six Gungame where you had a great big mannequin dressed like a cowboy. He stood at one side and challenged you to a gunfight, and you stood on the other side and had a pair of guns mounted in a little stand-up frame. He would challenge you to draw, like a 1-2-3, and you would pull your gun, and he would lift his arm. If You Got him, he would say, “You got me,” and if he got you, he would say, “You lost.You’re dead,” that kind of thing. The SixGun game was built like a Russian toilet so that it would last forever. And it did. By and large,you didn’t go into an arcade inthosedaysto playa specific game.You wentintothe arcade to go into the arcade. You went there, got change for your dollar (of course, some games in those days were still on nickel play), and you just looked around to see what there was to play. You put a couple nickels in here and put a couple nickels in there until your dollar was used up.”

-Eddie Adlum

Bythe 1960s, novelty games had become quite sophisticated. Black lights were built into the cabinets to make objects glow against dark backgrounds. One game, Chicago Coin Speedway, had a projection screen for a background. Playerssteered a race car in front of the screen, dodging the projected images of other cars. If the player came too close to a projected image, the machine made a banging sound to simulate a crash and the player went to the back of the pack. These were the direct ancestors of modern video games.

Birth Of a Visionary

If anyone person has worked at every level of the amusement machine industry, it is Joel Hochberg. A jovial, quiet man with a self-effacing sense of humor, Hochberg entered the industry to remain near his ailing mother. He never imagined that years later he would help reestablish a multibillion dollar company and change the evolutionary path of the entire industry. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Hochberg earned an associate degree in electronics from the New York Institute ofTechnology. “I never wanted to find out how to make things tick; I wanted to know how to make them tick better.” He got his degree in 1956 and began the selective interviewing process at Burroughs Corporation. One Saturday, a neighbor who worked for Master Automatic Music asked Hochberg to help him repair a jukebox.

“He [Hochberg’s neighbor! worked for one of the large companies in the five boroughs area. He asked me Saturday morning ifIcouldhelphim. There I f%’ was very prominent location that was without music and would have been without music untilMonday because the distributor was closed. It [having the jukebox shut off i would cost the company a lot of money, but I think more than the money was the lack of entertainment required for the weekend in that location.”

-Joel Hochberg

It is nearly impossible to understand the impact that jukeboxes made on . businesses in the 1950s. At that time, not having a jukebox meant that customers went elsewhere. Though he had studied electronics, Hochberg knew nothing about jukeboxes. He opened the machine and found a problem with the amplifier. The jukebox worked within a few hours. Hochberg later found out that his neighbor had never really expected him to be able to fix the problem. Harry Siskind, then president of Master Automatic Music, was impressed that Hochberg had fixed the jukebox and asked to meet him. Siskind didn’t have a job to offer at the time but told Hochberg that he should consider working in the music operators business because he had the “ability to take things with a technical approach.” Accepting a job at Burroughs would have meant Hochberg moving to Pennsylvania, which, because of his mother’s dire illness, he was unwilling to do. “My mother was deathly ill, and I really had no idea as to what the prognosis was. She was basically terminal, but I didn’t know it. At least I didn’t believe it.” Anxious to stay near his mother, Hochberg took a job at Tri-Borough Maintenance. “We did Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan. We probably did all five boroughs, but it was called Tri-Borough because I think the individuals who formed the company came from three different boroughs.” For a salary of $55 a week, Hochberg worked long hours six days a week and provided his own car. He began by repairing jukeboxes and pool tables. At this time, New York distributors carried novelty games as well as jukeboxes-pinball was still banned. For the most part, novelty games represented only a small part of the business. The popular novelty themes of the times included shuffle alleys-indoor tabletop bowling lanes on which players used metal pucks to knock down miniature bowling pins. Other popular themes included racing, baseball, and shooting galleries. In New York, where pinball was still illegal, novelty games often turned a good profit.

“The biggest part of your business was shuffle alleys and ball bowlers. Remember, I Came from the city[New York], and these were legal items. Every bar I and grill, every tavern had a shuffle alley. I Baseball was a very popular game. It used a bat and pitching mechanism. In some cases, lights on the playing field [were used to show bases I with runners], and in other cases, mens rotating on a motor carriage. You had some moving targets, some escalation ramps. You had home run areas that were predetermined, and of course, sometimes [homerun] ramps came up ifI and if you were able to hit them, yourball went out of the park.”

-Joel Hochberg

Wall Boxes were another popular item in the industry. These were tabletop cabinets that linked booths and tables to a central jukebox. Each box had a song list, coin slot, and buttons for ordering songs. Restaurants, diners, and malt shops placed wall boxes on tables and in booths so that customers could select and order songs more conveniently.

“and wall boxes were great for the industry because the machine would playa record once. It’s conceivable if a record was popular, that four, five, or six people would select that record-but it would only play it once. The same situation holds true today.Jukeboxes don’t dedicate songs to an individual; they just deliver the requirement to play. I’ve Had a situation where a gentleman who played the game after I Repaired it, lost a lot of money. So he was angry. He said, “If You Didn’t repair this game I Wouldn’t Have lost.” And he wanted to do a number on me. I’ve Seen A man carrying a gun in his hat. I’ve Had a shot fired at me.Let’s change that. … Not fired at me directly but fired into the location while I was working on a United Baseball game.”

-Joel Hochberg

Always the innovator, Hochberg found a way to improve the system. He was the first engineer in his area to place volume switches behind bars and counters so that bartenders and restaurant managers could make the music louder upon request. Location managers welcomed the change. Before this, the only volume control was a knob hidden on the back of the jukebox so that customers couldn’t get to it. Though his mother died shortly after he started work atTri-Borough, Hochberg continued working for NewYorkamusement companies until 1961.Thiswasduring a period in which working within the amusement industry had its hazards. Once, when Hochberg showed up at a bar early one Sunday morning to service a machine, he was attacked and beaten. An investigation into the incident revealed that he’d been mistaken for the bartender.

“The next thing I Knew, I Was Being Brutalized by a couple of people who were very aggressive because they didn’t know who to beat up. The indication was, he’s in the bar on Sundays before the bar opens, so there were two people in the bar. They didn’t ask what my name was or what the other gentleman’s name was. They just came there. It Seems that there was some kind of local area issue, something that had something to do with a relative of one of the people.The bartender’s wife was the sister of one of these fellows, and the bartender was mistreating the sister.”

-Joel Hochberg

Hochberg also remembers that many people liked him for what he did. Sometimes while working his route, he’d have to run outside to put money in a parking meter, only to discover that people had recognized his car and fed the meter for him. In 1961 Hochberg took a job with New Plan Realty, which was opening the Cavalier, one of the world’s first restaurant/arcades. Built in a new shopping center in Philadelphia, the Cavalier was an enormous endeavor with a 10,000- square-foot dining area and 2,500-square-foot arcade. Hochberg was hired to help build and manage the arcade. The same year that Hochberg moved to Philadelphia, a group of socially awkward college kids began an experiment that would eventually change Hochberg’s life.

Pinball Buzz is a North American manufacturing company producing fresh and unique Pinball machines, as well as a series of Pinball related regalia. Using all original artwork and created to the highest standards, our machines spark the same joy we found as gamers when we rolled our first quarter into that coin slot so many years ago. Stemming from a lifelong passion, Pinball Buzz is created by gamers, for gamers. We strive to bring high quality, innovative, and captivating experiences for all to enjoy.

Visit our website at pinballadventures.com.

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Why People Flip Over Vintage Pinball Machines

Andrew MacBain — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 06:55:13 +0000

Why People Flip Over Vintage Pinball Machines

By Maribeth Keane and Ben Marks — September 16th, 2009

Clay Harrell talks about collecting vintage pinball machines, and his personal road to pinball wizardry, from Gottlieb to Williams to Stern. He can be reached via his website, PinballHQ.com, or check out some of his personal collection.

Detail of back glass, Gottlieb Grand Slam, 1953.

I didn’t really get into to pinball machine collecting until maybe 15 years ago, but when I was a freshman in college, video games were really big. I went to Purdue University. They had a huge arcade there. I always said that Space Invaders and Pac-Man took so much of my money—money that I really didn’t have—that it would have been cheaper to just buy one of those machines.

So one day I went to an auction of coin-operated video games. They had pinball machines there, too, including a 1980 Spider-Man machine. This is about 1988, so the game’s only eight years old. They started bidding at a hundred dollars, and nobody’s bidding. I drag it home and set it up, and sure enough a few things don’t work on it. And of course I don’t know how to fix it, but I go through it, figure it out, and it’s rewarding.

So we started making these videos, and we turned them into nine, two-hour DVDs. We’ve sold 5,000 of them, or something. It’s unbelievable.

Collectors Weekly: How long does it take to repair the average pinball machine?

Harrell: The quickest I can restore a machine is maybe a week, and that would be the best-case scenario. It takes time to tear them down. All the mechanical assemblies have to be taken apart, cleaned, and the parts must be replaced and put back together. A lot of times I’ll touch up the play fields with clear coat so it doesn’t look like it’s been touched up.

Collectors Weekly: Are there a lot of pinball machine collectors?

Detail of back glass by Roy Parker, Gottlieb Flipper Cowboy, 1962.

Harrell: It is a fairly small hobby. I’m the co-editor of one of the pinball magazines, and the subscription number is 1,200 people worldwide. Now, I know not every collector subscribes, but that gives you an indication that the hobby is not huge. There are people who own pinball machines, but they’re not collectors. I would say there’s a difference between a pinball collector and a pinball owner.

We categorize collectors by digits: single-digit collectors, one to nine machines, or double-digit collectors, 10 to 99 machines. Well, I’m a three-digit collector, which is just sick. There’s something wrong with me. If you’re a three-digit collector, you’ve got issues. I think the largest collection known is around 1,500 machines. But the problem is that after you get so many machines, it’s hard to keep them all working and operating or even to have them all restored in the first place because they are a huge time suck.

We started a pinball club, a local Detroit pinball club. We call it the Detroit Pinball Collectors Club. We’ve got a little clubhouse, and so I’ve got a bunch of games there, too. And I’ve got games at a friend’s house. I’ve got games all over the place, unfortunately, just because the one single thread in pinball collecting is you can never have just one, and you always run out of room. If you’re a real collector, it seems like you’re just always amassing more games. I have a really great time restoring them and playing them. I’m probably an average pinball player, maybe above average, but I’m not great. But it’s fun. It’s a fun thing, and it doesn’t become old quickly like, say, video games.

Collectors Weekly: How did pinball evolve in the United States?

Detail of back glass, Williams Wonderland, 1955.

Harrell: It was a game that morphed from the French game of bagatelle. In the 1930s, it really exploded as a gambling thing, and that’s where pinball got this gambling association.

Coming out of World War II, the gambling laws were changing in the United States. In particular, in 1950, the Johnson Act made it difficult for slot machines or any sort of gambling device to be used in public. It was a federal offense. So, pinball had to shed its gambling association to become a game of skill. In 1947, they came up with this crazy idea of adding flippers to the machine.

Gottlieb came out with the first flipper machine. Instead of just letting the ball fall into a hole worth points or money, now the player actually had some control over the ball. With flippers, you could steer the ball into different point areas. All the companies jumped on this flipper technology—Gottlieb did not patent it. Soon everybody was using flipper machines, and it made all the pre-flipper machines of the ’30s and early ’40s—the pre-1947 stuff—obsolete.

In the ’60s, games became more technologically advanced, and in the ’70s they were still using the same electromechanical principles of coils (which are magnets), relays, and stepper units, which are, more or less, one-bit memory units, in a mechanical sense.

By about 1977, 1978, the companies all dropped the electromechanical stuff and went to solid state, using microprocessors to control the games as opposed to having everything hardwired with relays and stepper units. I collect the pre-solid state games.

Collectors Weekly: Who were the major manufacturers?

Harrell: During the 1930s, there were literally hundreds of companies making pinball machines. After World War II, though, there was only a handful. The key players were Gottlieb—the biggest, and pretty much the Cadillac of pinball—and Williams, which was substantially smaller but still an up-and-coming game company. They were the two prime manufacturers. There were smaller players like Chicago Coin, Keeney, and United that made pinball. But really, it was Gottlieb and Williams. Even Bally only made a handful of pinball machines during the 1950s. They made mostly bingos. They looked like pinball machines, but they were really gambling devices. They didn’t have flippers.

Gottlieb Skee-Ball-Ette, 1940.

Collectors Weekly: Did Williams and Gottlieb have their own artists?

Harrell: Yes, they had preferred artists. During the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, artwork wasn’t always created in house. Williams or another company would design a game, and then they would hand the game over to another company that just did art. This second company had their own staff artists. In the case of Gottlieb, they used one particular artist, Roy Parker.

“Gottlieb came out with the first flipper machine.”

So the look of each manufacturer’s machines took on a personality based on the artist—the theme was almost irrelevant. The art really didn’t have anything to do with the actual game play. It could be about almost anything. Clearly some games were designed with a card game like poker or blackjack or something like that in mind. But with a lot of the themes, the art could’ve been anything. The art company would often come up with names for the games, and they would do all the artwork based on the actual whitewood, which was the name for the raw prototype game without art on it. They would pretty much do whatever they wanted, but they knew what the companies were expecting, so that’s why the companies used the same artists over and over.

There were different artists in different years. Gottlieb started out with Roy Parker, who died in 1965 of cancer. Art Stenholm took over and did a lot of Gottlieb artwork through the rest of the ’60s. So you had these artists who would do games for a particular manufacturer for years and years. By the ’80s, the games were getting more sophisticated with voice and speech, and the theme of the game was more set in concrete, so an artist couldn’t really re-theme a game. So a lot of the artists were brought in house and actually worked at Williams or Gottlieb or Bally, and the artwork on the games became much more entwined with the theme.

Collectors Weekly: When did movie promotion begin?

Detail of gobble hole in playfield of Gottlieb World Champ, 1957.

Harrell: Bally was the first company to do that. They were the first company to get an official licensed theme. During the 1950s, Gottlieb had done some unlicensed themes. They had a game called Guy’s Dolls, and it just happened to come out at the same time as the Broadway play called Guys and Dolls. So they were trying to wrap themselves in the popularity of pop culture at the time without actually having to pay any money for it.

In 1975 Bally was the first company to pay for a license. The game was Wizard, which was based on the Tommy movie by the Who. They paid very little for the licensing at the time, but they were able to promote the machine around the movie. And since it was called Wizard, they actually would go around to different cities and give the machines away at pinball tournaments. They would host pinball tournaments to try and increase the popularity of their brand.

Then all the other companies followed suit. Gottlieb got a license in 1979 for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Williams did it to a much lesser extent. Bally was the key player in licensing themes. They really felt that they could bring new people in to play pinball if they recognized the theme.

Bally also did a lot of games based on rock groups. They did a KISS machine, which was hugely popular, and one with Ted Nugent. The payments to these guys were so small. For the Ted Nugent game, everybody on the road crew, the management, and the band got a machine. That was the licensing fee, probably 15 machines. Stern did the Ted Nugent deal.

Collectors Weekly: What were some of the other most popular themes?

Harrell: Gottlieb was really good at card themes. They were known for that. Card games like poker, you’re trying to get different hands, a royal flush, they used that name a bunch of times—Card Whiz, Royal Flush, Pop-a-Card.

Exterior paint on Gottlieb Harbor Lites, 1956.

Collectors Weekly: When did multi-player games appear?

Detail of animated metal umpire and pitcher from Williams Official Baseball, 1960.

Harrell: Originally, machines were all single-player games. It was one player at a time. But starting in 1954, Gottlieb came up with the idea to have two or even four people playing at a time. Player one would play ball one, then player two would play ball one. Then player one would play ball two, and player two would play ball two. Suddenly it was more competitive.

Collectors Weekly: Did the transition from wood rail to metal rail change game play, or was that just the frame?

Harrell: No, it was purely aesthetics. At first the games didn’t have a lot of security. There was a coin box. The coin doors were wooden. The legs were wooden. The side rails that held the top glass in place were wooden, and that’s why they call those games wood rails. Most games from the 1950s cost a nickel to play. So you only had a few bucks worth of nickels in the coin box. By 1960 the price of games had gone up to a dime, so now there’s more money in the coin boxes and they just felt that they needed more security. Also the cost of wood was going up. Metal was actually cheaper to produce. It’s also harder to pry them off, to get the glass up, and then get to the coin box.

Collectors Weekly: How do you choose new games to collect?

Harrell: There are games that I’m looking for, clearly. The one thing that’s very interesting about this hobby is it doesn’t have to be expensive. You can buy machines off Craigslist or out of the want ads, or wherever, for anywhere from $50 to $500. These are decent games that are restorable; something to work on and have fun with. And when you’re done, you got a game to play.

I tend to try and look for things that I can afford, that seem interesting and that maybe I don’t have a lot of experience with because it is a huge learning experience, the whole thing, working on the different games and learning their ins and outs.

Collectors Weekly: What do you look for in game play?

The bingo machines, Wonderland Arcade, Kansas City, 1968.

Harrell: I’ve never played a pinball machine that didn’t have some sort of objective. The game play always has an objective. With pool themes, those are pretty generic. You need to try to get all the stripes or all the solids. And once you get all the stripes or all the solids, in some games, anyway, then you want to get the 8-ball. Some Games are actually called 8 Ball or the 8-ball is an important part of the theme. But there’s always some objective, and sometimes there’s an order to the objective.

One thing that’s unusual about pinball compared to a lot of other amusement games is that you can actually win something from playing it. This goes back to that 1930s gambling association. The machines couldn’t pay out, but they could award a free game. So what’s a free game? I guess some people thought it was something of value, but really it’s just another game you get to play for free. So in a lot of games like Flipper Pool or Bank-a-Ball, both 1965 Gottlieb games, if you had hit all the targets associated with all the solids or all the stripes, you would get what’s called a replay. You would basically win a free game. And on some machines, you can win multiple free games if you accomplished enough things.

Some people remember playing that game. They’d put in a dime, rack up 10 credits, and play the rest of the afternoon for free. There are a lot of people who have that sort of recollection from their youth. Even today, if you get to a certain replay score, you can still win a free game. In some states, pinball machines were outlawed because winning a game was viewed as winning something of value. It felt too much like gambling. So Gottlieb figured that instead of rewarding the player with an extra game, they’d just reward the player by making the current game last longer. So you would win additional balls instead of winning free games.

Collectors Weekly: Finally, what was a conversion machine?

Harrell: There were really three types. Back in 1947, when flippers were invented, a lot of the non-flipper machines were converted to flippers with a kit. That was one style of conversion machine. Then in the 1970s, there were a couple experiments where you could buy a machine, say a Bally Mata Hari, and you could flip a different playfield into it. They would sell just the playfield, which is the wood portion that the ball rolls on, plus a different score glass and a different set of chips for the computer. It let you convert a base machine into an entirely different game.

The idea didn’t go over so well. Bally/Williams tried it again in 1999 with Pinball 2000. Again, you would buy a base machine, and in order to make it into a different game, you could basically flip in a new playfield, some new memory cards, and the new back glass art. None of these ideas seemed to work all that well. Pinball 2001 took this idea further and probably was the one format that could have worked, but Bally/Williams closed its pinball division in 1999, so it never really took off. So there you go, three different types of conversion machines.

Visit our website at pinballadventures.com.

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THE EEL MEETS PINBALL GEOFF

Andrew MacBain — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 06:45:30 +0000

THE EEL MEETS PINBALL GEOFF

January 3, 2010 by EEL COLLECTIVE

“I’ve always been called Pinball Geoff ever since I was a young boy and played the silver ball.”

So says Geoffrey Harvey of Stoke Newington- an avid collector of everything from armadillos to bowler hats to robots but most especially Pinball machines, in fact he has well over 200 of them.

“I had a holiday romance when I was thirteen, “ jokes Geoff, I saw this wonderful figure with sexy shiny legs- it was a Chicago Coin Gunsmoke.”

Over the next few years Geoff built up his pinball collection and quickly acquired around fifty machines, which filled his parents house in Hampstead “I used to have to sleep under the machines because there was no room,” recalls Geoff who still today sleeps in a bed less than a foot from the ceiling.

Born in North London in the late fifties, Geoff is a Grandson of the Raj; his parents were brought up in Burma and always encouraged Geoff in his pursuits. However they weren’t quite prepared for where his hobby would lead him.

Despite being sent to public school Geoff spent his teens bunking off school to hustle his thumbs in the West End. “I earned a living, much to my parents horror as a pinball hustler in The Golden Goose Arcade in Leicester Square.” Geoff’s skills soon came to the attention of local gangsters who would bet on the schoolboy with the crazy flipper fingers.

However Geoff’s benevolent nature got him into some scrapes; “To be a proper hustler you are meant to play badly to get the odds up, but because it was a semi religious exercise it was very hard for me to play badly”

Geoff was blissfully unaware of what was going on around him until someone pulled out a gun on him. “I thought it was terribly inconvenient’ says Geoff who was thankfully able to diffuse the situation with his youthful charm.

Geoff nevertheless went to university to study law but became interested in Sociology and transferred. This led to a career as a psychiatric social worker, which meant the Pinball became more of a hobby.

Geoff ended up running a needle exchange in the West End “I absolutely loved it” admits Geoff who still works for The Samaritans today. I find it very energising, I always come away thinking aren’t a lucky fellow, because we all have our ups and downs but my worst day maybe somebody else’s best day.”

As well as playing pinball machines Geoff is a renowned drummer, indeed one of his first gigs was supporting the legendary Hawkwind at Glastonbury in ’75 where he had a strange encounter with a horse. “The generator ran out of fuel so I jumped on this white horse and rode into town. No-one believed me until that film came out about Glastonbury and sure enough there was a shot of lots of horses.”

In recent years Geoff has provided pinball machines at Glastonbury.

“I only bring mechanical ones because they are easier to fix at 4am when you are a little worse for wear.”

These days he bashes the skins for surf-popsters The Bikini Beach Band, who can be seen playing regularly in venues around Hackney sporting their distinctive fezzes. “They put up with my peculiarities,” says Geoff who is officially the longest serving member of the band.

In 2009 he opened a pinball museum in Ramsgate with a friend who edits a pinball magazine and it is already proving popular with pinball enthusiasts from all over the UK. “Its turned out to be absolutely brilliant” says Geoff who is slowly moving all of his old machines into the museum,

“One of the joys of it is that all those machines gathering dust can now be used, there’s nothing worse than a derelict pinball machine.”

The museum hoses some of Geoffrey’s favourite machines including a 1932 machine called The Flying Scot, which replicates the journey of a steam train. It has no flippers and costs an old penny for a game. Geoffrey is a keen historian of the art. “A lot of people see pinball machines as antiquated’” he says “but they were in fact at the forefront of design.”

Pinball machines originate from bagatelle tables though there are also links with the game of croquet. They originally had no flippers so the skill was down to the power used to propel the ball. Flippers and electrical components came in the 1940’s “they were very skilled inventions” says Geoff who loves the artwork on the older machines. “It’s fascinating how the graphics reflected a style, they often look much older than they are.”

The early games reflected family values particularly those made by the famous Gottleib manufacturers. Games were based around card games and dominoes. Geoff’s own favourite is one called ‘Alien Poker’ in which aliens play a hand of cards for domination of the earth.

“Top marks says Geoff excitedly “Aliens and cards all in one game!”

Today there is still only one company making machines, which Geoff admits is very sad. Machines tend to be electronic and based around film tie-ins e.g. Spiderman and the X-men.

“The new generation find the old ones very dull whereas I find the old ones delightful.” Says Geoff

Although Geoff is still an excellent player he says one shouldn’t take the playing side too seriously “its basically fun with a serious element- 75%skill and 25% luck, and you need that lady luck element to give that sense of excitement.”

He continues to live in his beloved Stokey where he lives and has a studio. His flat is a museum in itself, home to his collection of Armadillos, (not real ones) Robots, Jukeboxes and an Egyptology department. There is also a signed photo of Einstein obtained by his great Uncle who used to decipher equations for the great man.

Also among the ephemera is an owl he received from Russian dancers who were aboard an oil tanker off the Cyprus coast in 1974. Geoff had been picked up after escaping from the Island following five days of shelling by Turkish dive-bombers. “That was the last family holiday we went on” says Geoff “of course nobody believed the story when I got back.”

These days Geoff divides his time between Ramsgate and London ad can often be spotted sporting his distinctive bowler hat or driving ‘Old Smokey’ is a reassuring sight. With the museum about to take off he is very excited about the future. He puts this positive outlook down to the philosophy gleaned from his parents- ‘they had a marvellous view of the world,

“The wonderful thing they gave me,” says Geoff “was the ability to embrace everything and never be bored.”

Visit our website at pinballadventures.com.

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Top 8 Most Innovative Pinball Machines of All Time

Andrew MacBain — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 06:24:31 +0000

Seth Porges

Aug 5, 2008

First With a Mechanical “Tilt”

Brokers Tip /// 1933 /// D. Gottlieb & Co.

Early pinball machines, which became immensely popular in a Depression-scourged America looking for cheap entertainment, were built without flippers. Instead of the now-standard paddles, users pulled a plunger to shoot balls onto the playing field, aiming for holes that were worth various point values. Of course, players would try to influence the outcome by shoving the machines themselves, and game operators were less than pleased with the potential for damage. This Wall Street-themed game was the first to feature the now-standard “tilt” mechanism, which punishes players for physically abusing their low-tech gaming console.

The tilt is the brainchild of pinball pioneer Harry Williams, who founded the legendary Williams Manufacturing and designed the first electrical pinball machine. Various types of mechanical tilts have been used over the years, but the first was known as the Stool Pigeon. In it, a small ball stood on a pedestal above a metal ring. When a player pushed the machine too hard, the ball fell off the pedestal and hit the metal ring, activating an electrical circuit that would end the round.

Today, tilt mechanisms are standard in all machines, and mastering gently pushing a machine just hard enough to manipulate the ball without activating the tilt sensor has become an integral part of game play.

First With Flippers

Humpty Dumpty /// 1947 /// D. Gottlieb & Co.

Beginning in the early 1940s, a large anti-pinball movement gained steam across the country, resulting in its banning in a number of locations, including New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago (where most of the machines were manufactured). Much of the opposition to pinball stemmed from the belief that it was a game of chance, and thus a form of gambling. The introduction of the flipper in the late 1940s was important not just as a key component of what people today think of as pinball, but also because it brought a new level of control and skill to pinball. (Although it would be another three decades before most of the pinball bans were lifted).

Humpty Dumpty had six flippers–all facing outward, away from the center of the playing field. It wasn’t until a 1950 game called Spot Bowler that the key hardware for game play took on its now common incarnation at the bottom of the playing field, facing inward.

First Licensed Movie Theme

Wizard /// 1975 /// Bally

Today, Illinois-based Stern Pinball is the only company in the world still making pinball machines, and every single one of its new games is based on a licensed theme (recent games include The Family Guy and NASCAR). But it wasn’t until a movie about pinball was released that a game took its theme from a film.

Wizard was based on the 1975 movie version of The Who’s Tommy rock opera (which was, of course, about that “deaf, dumb and blind kid” who sure played a mean pinball). The game, which featured depictions of Roger Daltry and Ann-Margret on its back glass, proved a hit, and another Tommy-based game came out the following year (Captain Fantastic, which featured Elton John in full pinball-wizard garb). Today’s pinball designers use themes to give their games a narrative and structure, and to bring in a built-in customer base.

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Things you didn’t know about pinball history

Andrew MacBain — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 06:20:46 +0000

The surprising history behind a beloved American pastime.

By Seth Porges Sept 2009

Pinball Was Illegal

Pinball was banned from the early 1940s to the mid-1970s in most of America’s big cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, where the game was born and where virtually all of its manufacturers have historically been located. The stated reason for the bans: Pinball was a game of chance, not skill, and so it was a form of gambling. To be fair, pinball really did involve a lot less skill in the early years of the game, largely because the flipper wasn’t invented until 1947, five years after most of the bans were implemented. Up until then, players would bump and tilt the machines in order to sway the ball’s gravity. Many lawmakers also believed pinball to be a mafia-run racket and a time- and dime-waster for impressionable youth. (The machines robbed the “pockets of schoolchildren in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money,” New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia wrote in a Supreme Court affidavit.)

NYPD Held Prohibition-Style Raids on Pinball

In New York, the pinball ban was executed in a particularly dramatic fashion. Just weeks after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia issued an ultimatum to the city’s police force stating that their top priority would be to round up pinball machines and arrest their owners. La Guardia proceeded to spearhead massive Prohibition-style raids in which thousands of machines were

Pinball Went Into Hiding

Although pinball was illegal in New York, it did not disappear entirely — it just moved behind curtains to seedy pornography shops, in places like Harlem and Greenwich Village. And the police were still raiding illegal pinball operators through the 1970s.

Pinball Production Changed During the War

During World War II, much of America’s manufacturing infrastructure switched over to the war effort. The pinball industry, which was a major user of copper wiring, was no exception. During the war, few new games were made. Instead, pinball suppliers began selling so-called conversion kits, which would allow pinball operators to transform a machine’s artwork to a fresh theme. These conversion themes often took the form of wartime motifs, such as the patriotic “Victory in the Pacific.”

Pinball Is a Symbol of Rebellion in Hollywood

Because pinball was illegal for so long, it became a symbol of youth and rebellion. If you watch a movie or TV show that was either produced or takes place during this period, virtually any time pinball makes an appearance, it is for the purpose of portraying to the audience that a particular character is a rebel. For example, the Fonz is regularly seen playing pinball in “Happy Days” episodes. And when “Tommy,” The Who’s pinball-wizard-themed rock opera album came out in 1972, pinball was still banned in much of the country. The album’s use of pinball is largely misunderstood by today’s audiences, who may view the deaf, dumb and blind pinball wizard as quirky. In all likelihood, The Who was using the game to portray the titular character as anti-authoritarian. Filmmaker Richard Linklater makes use of this symbol in a significant number of his movies, with rebellious or outcast characters seen playing or talking about pinball in virtually every one. And in The Simpsons, Sideshow Bob once proclaimed, “Television has ruined more young minds than pinball and syphilis combined.”

It Took a Babe Ruth-Like Move to Legalize Pinball in NYC

In 1976, the New York City pinball ban was overturned. The coin-operated amusement lobby (which represented the pinball industry) eventually succeeded in earning a City Council hearing to re-examine the long-standing ban. Their strategy: prove that pinball was a game of skill, not chance, and thus should be legal. To do this, they decided to call in the best player they could find in order to demonstrate his pinball wizardry — a 26-year-old magazine editor named Roger Sharpe. Fearful that this hearing might be their only shot at overturning the ban, the industry brought in two machines, one to serve as a backup in case any problems arose with the primary machine. Suspicious that the pinballers had rigged the primary machine, one particularly antagonistic councilman told them that he wanted them to use the backup. This presented a problem: While Sharpe was intimately familiar with the first-choice game, he had never played the backup. As he played the game, surrounded by a huddle of journalists, cameras and councilmen, he did little to impress City Council’s anti-pinball coalition. So he made a final Hail Mary move that, to this day, he compares to Babe Ruth’s famous called shot in center field. He pulled back the plunger to launch a new ball, pointed at the middle lane at the top of the playing field, and boldly stated that, based only on his skill, he would get the ball to land through that middle lane. He let go of the plunger and it did what he said. Almost on the spot, the City Council voted to overturn the ban.

I recently asked Sharpe what he thought would have happened if he had missed the shot. After thinking about it for a few hours, he got back to me: “I’m not sure pinball would be legal today.”

Pinball Has a Surprise Best-Seller

The best-selling pinball machine of all time is still “The Addams Family,” which came out in 1991.

Pinball Is Still Illegal in Some Places

Just a few years ago, Nashville, Tenn. overturned its ban on children under 18 playing, or even standing within 10 feet of a pinball machine. And, to this day, it is illegal to play pinball on Sundays in Ocean City, N.J.

Hugh Hefner Is a Huge Pinball Fanatic

He collects pinball machines and has cooperated with pinball companies for at least three Playboy-themed pinball machines over the years. A former editor at Playboy told me that the magazine’s editorial offices had a Fireball pinball machine in the ’70s.

There Was a Pinball-Video Game Hybrid

In 1999, Williams Pinball was the largest pinball company in the world. But it was also part of a larger, publicly traded company that demanded higher profits than the games were producing. And so the bosses gave the pinball division one last chance to save the company — and its jobs. It was to create a new game that would bridge the gap between pinball and video games. The result was Pinball 2000, and it was a strange hybrid of the two types of games. Instead of relying on physical targets, the system projected holographic characters on the screen that would interact with the flying ball. The new game was considered a modest success, and two Pinball 2000 games were produced. But it wasn’t enough for Williams’ parent company, which nonetheless pulled the plug on the entire pinball division.

Just One Company Still Makes Pinball Machines

And it does it in the U.S. Every new pinball machine comes from a single Stern Pinball factory in the Chicago suburbs, where factory workers assemble several thousand parts, largely by hand.

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Nike LCD Pinball Machine

Andrew MacBain — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 08:33:54 +0000

Nike has created an LCD Pinball Machine to advertise their wares as part of their ‘Write the Future’ campaign for the World Cup. It look very impressive in the video but I’m not sure it will capture the same gameplay as an old style mechanical pinball machine. Watch the video after the break to see it in action.

The traditional flippers on the pinball game are replaced by virtual Nike footwear. As you progress through the game you can select from a range of different Nike boots with different advantages and features as with the real pair.

The game is currently located in Spain at the moment , but may make a tour of Nike stores.

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Turn an Old Pinball Machine Into a Badass Coffee Table

Andrew MacBain — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 08:31:37 +0000

Turn an Old Pinball Machine Into a Badass Coffee Table

Love pinball? Looking for a new coffee table? Well, why not combine your love of pinball with your need for new living room furniture? If you’ve got a non-functioning pinball machine available to you, Instructables will show you how to turn it into the sweetest coffee table you’ve ever seen.

It’s not the most simple process in the world, and in the end you won’t be able to actually play pinball on the table. And sure, it might not fit in all that well with your modern decor. But really, it looks so sweet all lit up, it seems well worth the effort.

Visit our website at pinballadventures.com.

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Jersey’s pinball wizard

Andrew MacBain — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 08:28:45 +0000

Amanda Brown/The Star-LedgerThere are pinball machines from the 1930 to 2000s at the Silverball Museum Pinball Hall of Fame in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

It’s four days until the Fourth of July, and Rob Ilvento is scrambling, twirling cotton candy for customers one moment, barking orders to his staff the next.

The Silverball Museum Arcade is about to celebrate its first anniversary on July 4, and Ilvento is bouncing around the room just as, well, a pinball.

He’s waited for this moment ever since relocating the museum last February to a prime spot on the Asbury Park boardwalk from the basement of theHoldfast clothing store on Cookman Avenue.

Ilvento is treating the holiday as the museum’s official grand opening. Finally, lots of people will get to see what he has spent nine years gathering: a collection of the top-200 pinball games ever made from the 1930s to 1990s, presented in pristine working condition. For $10 an hour, visitors can play such rare games as Bally’s Evil Knievel, Mata Hari, and Gottlieb’s TKO.

Another 10 bucks buys an all-day pass.

Gallery preview

The 45-year-old Ilvento, who also is the guy behind the Cluck-U Chicken empire, paces the room amid a cacophony of flashing lights, clanging bells and the furious sound of bumpers, counters and flippers gone wild.

“Make sure we’re on point this weekend,” he instructs the staff.

One of his technicians, Bill Medwin, relays a customer’s inquiry about an unlimited season pass. The museum doesn’t have one, so Ilvento creates one on the spot: $200 until Labor Day.

In another instance, he decides to rearrange the non-pinball corner of the museum, which is filled with Skee-Ball, puck bowler and other classic arcade games.

“Asteroids’s not working,” he says. “Get it out! We can’t have it here for Fourth of July.” He wants Pac-Man in its place.

Ilvento’s cell phone rings constantly. During one call he seals the deal on a mint condition 1954 MagicPuck Bowler, a game popular with children. It sat in the seller’s basement for 30 years and requires little restoration. Ilvento, who paid $2,600 for it on eBay, hasn’t seen one this pristine in a long time. He desperately wants it for the holiday, so the seller’s son will drive it overnight from Rochester, N.Y

“I’ll make space for it,” Ilvento tells the man. “I’m moving out a ’52 United Bowler right now into the basement.” To almost console the seller, he tells him, “It’s in the right spot. It’s in the museum, so it’s gonna find a nice home.”

Four decades ago, scenes such as this were played out in Asbury’s old Casino arcade, now a rusted-out vacant building.

But Ilvento, who grew up in West Long Branch and played pinball in the old Casino, is on a mission to archive a piece of Americana.

“It’s like serendipity that, hopefully, we’re going to help Asbury resurrect itself,” he says. “I don’t know if I can get a funner project.”

A placard on the headboard of each game in the museum describes its history and features. Ilvento also has nearly 200 machines in storage.

The crowds have been surprisingly mixed between young and old players. And when visitors enter, their initial response, particularly among Baby Boomers, is a look of awe. It’s like the Sistine Chapel for pinheads. Pinball was most popular from the 1950s to 1970s, with machines in every arcade, candy shop and pizzeria. The museum’s oldest games, table-top wooden boxes from the 1930s, are rarely used, but their purpose is clear: to show the evolution of the game.

Ilvento’s joint is a museum first, an arcade second. Few new games are made. Only one manufacturer, Stern Pinball, remains. Besides Las Vegas, where a noted collector operates a similar business, Asbury Park is the only place where someone can play all of the best games.

For Ilvento, his “first life” was Cluck-U Chicken. In 1985, he dropped out of Rutgers after his sophomore year to open the first location in New Brunswick. One store has turned into 25, plus widespread branding.

“My brother came back from Syracuse, and he gave me my first buffalo wing,” Ilvento remembers. “At Rutgers, no one knew what buffalo wings were. People used to say, ‘What are buffalo wings? We didn’t know buffaloes had wings.’ So that’s how early we were to the wing market.”

Ilvento finds opportunities in unlikely places. He spends more time these days with Jersey Shore Fry Company, a business he started in 2006, which supplies thick-cut french fries to Yankee Stadium, Lakewood’s FirstEnergy Park and about 500 restaurants. He lives in Princeton with his two teenage daughters and wife, Jeanne, who is head nurse of the adolescent unit at the Bristol-Myers Squibb Children’s Hospital at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.

Ilvento became a hard-core collector only nine years ago. He wanted to buy the 1967 Gottlieb Melody game and visited an out-of-state retailer with his daughter Morgan, now 18, who is autistic. She immediately took to the game, launching her father on this surprising ride. “And then one led to two, and all of a sudden I had 80 or 90,” he says.

Ilvento tapped into a network of trade shows, journals, internet groups and online classifieds for hose who collect and repair games. Along the way he met several people whom he would later hire as technicians. Finally his collection grew to where he had to do something with it.

“Most people thought I was crazy,” he says. ” ‘Why would you want the public to play them?’ And I said, ‘Well, why wouldn’t you want the public to play them? To build appreciation.’

After a little due diligence, we realized we could have the public play them as long as we’re consistent with the maintenance.”

When Ilvento opened the museum in the basement of the Holdfast clothing store, there was little advertising. But word spread similar to the sea breeze, and it gained a cult following. Before long, Ilvento signed a 15-year lease for the museum’s current 5,000-square-foot home.

John Lescher opens up a 1975 WMS Industries Toledo game for some required maintenance. This is from pinball’s glory years, when the machines were electromechanical.

A pinball machine has three sections: back box, playfield and cabinet board. In the EM machines, the cabinet board holds the brains — thousands of wires, relays, bulbs and solenoids, bundled together in what look like large honeycombs.

The 72-year-old Lescher is one of six part-time technicians at the museum. They are all there, as head technician Medwin says, “for the love of the game.”

Each tech can recall his genesis story of how he fell for pinball.

Medwin, 54, who recently retired as a carpet-and-flooring installer, met Ilvento two years ago.

Lescher says fixing the machines is a simple process, even though it doesn’t seem that way. “They are mechanical relays that depend on each other.” The games usually have schematics, which show the sequences of the components, and the wires are color-coded, though the colors usually have faded over the years.

For the Toledo, Lescher, a recently retired engineer, pulls out a long white paper, which looks like an indecipherable diagram for an atomic bomb. Just as for several colleagues, this is a recent but dedicated hobby. He began buying, restoring and selling machines three years ago.

He wanted to make sure his 13 grandchildren each had a game. For the last two years, Ilvento has been buying two or three machines a week; each costs around $3,000, though rarer games fetch more. The repairmen spend two weeks fixing them up. They clean and wax the playfield, change the light bulbs and run diagnostics on the wires or, for newer games, computer chips.

Pinball’s EM era, which reached its height in the ’60s and ’70s, is the showcase of the museum. Ilvento has its rarest models.

His favorite is Bally’s 1977 Evil Knievel. Only 155 were manufactured. It was Bally’s prototype for the solid-state format to follow. Ilvento also has two 1979 Gottlieb TKO boxing-themed machines, one of the most valuable games in the world. It was the last game before everything went digital; out of 125 machines, only seven are believed to remain.

Pinball was initially nothing more than finishing nails on wood, with gravity feeding the ball down a small box. Then came legs and the boxes grew bigger. Flippers were the next revolution in the late 1940s, followed by assorted targets, such as pop bumpers and slingshots.

Mechanical led to digital, wires were replaced by circuit boards and digital displays. The new technology that ushered in the most advanced pinball games also led to its undoing, as young people turned to video games.

This long timeline is preserved in Ilvento’s collection. He has acquired as complete a pinball lineup as seems possible. But he doesn’t intend to stop there.

This might be just the first step in a boardwalk empire. Ilvento also has an option for 30,000 square feet in the historic Casino building, where he could bring the past to life for other arcade staples such as Skee-Ball, puck bowler and gun games.

“We’ll see if we can perform here and then we may be able to develop that whole end of the boardwalk and turn it into, you know, more or less everything — an arcade.

“I can bring the old arcade back into the old arcade.”

Visit our website at pinballadventures.com.

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Ben Heck chose to make his Bill Paxton pinball machine

Andrew MacBain — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 08:25:29 +0000

Ben Heck chose to make his Bill Paxton pinball machine the old fashioned way, using actual flippers and tunnels and whatnot. But there’s also another, less complicated way to make a pinball machine – by running an emulator on a computer. But “less complicated” doesn’t mean easy, especially if you choose to give your emulator an authentic-looking cabinet, like what Ryan O’Horo did with his 1/3-scale pinball machine, the Hot Touch Arcade.

At the heart of O’Horo’s machine is an Intel Atom motherboard and an NVIDIA graphics card, with Windows XP as its OS. The pinball’s playing field is digitally rendered on a 19″ 16:9 LCD display that’s been installed sideways. O’Horo also installed lots of analog touches, including a shooter, flipper buttons (with solenoid feedback), and even a coin acceptor. The graphics and the LED marquee also add to the authentic look. But I think the most important part of the Hot Touch Arcade is the emulator itself – the fantastic looking free software, Future Pinball.

Now that I think about it, this is actually the Ben Heckish way of making a pinball machine. Check out Ryan O’Horo’s Crave DIY page for more pics and info.

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Kalamazoo’s Star World Amusement is keeping classic arcade games alive

Andrew MacBain — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 08:20:34 +0000

KALAMAZOO — Long before Chuck E. was the big cheese in town and prior to Dave and Buster’s arrival in Detroit and other nearby areas, Star World arcade was the place to be — every single weekend.

In the 1980s, teenagers who are now in their 40s, packed the Portage arcade to socialize, feed their quarters into pinball machines and games such as Pac-Man and Centipede.

Decades after Star World closed its doors, some of those vintage games carry price tags in the thousands at the Star World Amusement Inc. showroom in downtown Kalamazoo.

“The game industry cycled out, so we had to make changes with the times,” said Fred Hecox, who co-owns Star World Amusement along with Bill Cekola. “If we didn’t, we wouldn’t still be in business.”

These days, Star World Amusement still sells games, but is now primarily a supplier to bars, bowling alleys, restaurants and other facilities. Hecox said the company sells and services machines they own that are placed at those businesses. They supply juke boxes, arcade games, air hockey, billiards and darts.

“We’ve got game systems in 25 movie theaters and in businesses all over Michigan and Northern Indiana,” said general manager Fred Wait, who listed Celebration Cinema and Airway Lanes as two locals in the large customer base. “Most people don’t realize that almost all of the game machines around here belong to us.”

Unmatched customer service from expert technicians, first-rate products and a rock-solid reputation has keep the business alive, according to Hecox — even in an age where homes are stocked with high-tech games like Wii and at least one computer offering Internet games that are free to enjoy.

“Our service department is absolutely unmatched,” Hecox said. “When a machine needs service, we’re there the same day if we can be — our customers don’t have to schedule an appointment and wait for three days.”

That’s why they keep coming back, said Wait, who described sporting and movie-themed games as the highest in demand from clients.

“We get about 90 percent of our business from word-of-mouth,” he said. “Our technicians are very talented, but they’re also personable, like everyone else on staff here. We treat people right and they stay with us.”

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