Had a bit of a flashback recently. Took my two lovely and charming daughters, Cathleen and Emily, to Funspot in Laconia, NH. Funspot is one of those places where you can burn through twenty buck in an hour or so, but not mind the loss for a minute. Penny arcade. One of those places where there is, quite literally, something for everybody. We get a bunch of tokens, divvy them up, and from that point on the kids know where to find me. At the pinball machines.
I used to play pinball any time I got the chance, back in the day. It was one of my primary sources of entertainment, especially when I was in the Navy in the mid-70's. For me, there were three good reasons to hang out at a bar. They had good live music, good pool tables, or good pinball machines. Maybe, in my waning years, it's time to impart some of what I've learned on this subject.
First of all, I should let you know that my style of play was not like that of a lot of pinball fanatics I've known. I don't rock the machine. I've seen a lot of people tread that thin line of manipulating the table to the edge of tilt. For those of you raised on digital video games, a pinball machine has a device sort of like a pendulum, and if the pendulum swings too far, the game ends. It's called tilt, which means you tilted it too far. There was a bowling alley on the base at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, where they taped the tilt mechanism down. You could literally lift the machine off the floor and roll the ball any way you wanted.
To me, that takes the fun out of it. My style was more about finesse. Use of the flippers. I have good enough hand-eye coordination that I could aim the ball fairly well, if I were in practice. Even yesterday, having not touched a pinball machine for years, I was doing pretty well.
There were three or four major manufacturers of pinball machines back then. Remember that the information I'm about to impart is in no way official statistical data, or anything of that sort. It is merely observation, based on several years during which I travelled extensively and played a wide variety of machines. The main manufacturers were Bally, Williams, Chicago Coin, and Gottlieb. I suspect that Chicago Coin and Gottlieb might have been the same company, because the machines were so similar.
My personal favorites were the Williams. They were fast! There were a lot of reasons for this, I suspect, but I believe the main one was that the table was set at a steeper angle. My favorite trick on the Williams machines was a quick double flipper action. The ball would come down and just barely nick the end of one flipper. If you hit it just right, you could knock it into the tip of the other flipper, and then it had enough purchase to shoot it back up the table. baBAM! Plus, the spinners spun faster, the strobes flashed faster, the ball moved faster, and they were noisy sonzabitches!
The main problem with Williams was that they were more cheaply made. It could be one of the things that made them so fast, but little things would break down on them all the time. A roll-over button would cease operating, a spinner would stop spinning, or even a flipper would get loose. A well-used Williams might spend half its life out of order.
Chicago Coin and Gottlieb machines were made to be taken into combat. They had Gottlieb machines at Funspot yesterday that most of the graphics had worn off them, they were so old, but they still worked perfectly. They're slow, though. Painfully slow. The ball crawls around the table. They also seem to have the glass closer to the playing surface than other manufacturers. You're always hearing this scary CRACK as the ball hits the glass.
The happy medium was the Bally machines. Tougher than the Williams, faster than the Gottliebs, and classier than either. They weren't always the first with new innovations - Williams had that distinction - but they were almost always interesting, challenging, and well-made. The only real advantage the Williams had was, they were flashier. To young men, that's a big factor. Still, as long as it gave you fun for money, they were all good, and all got played.
Way before the days of action figures and other pop culture tie-ins, there was hardly a cultural phenomenon that didn't get immortalized on a pinball machine. A big movie, a popular TV show, a hot band, just about any cultural icon could be found with a silver ball cruising around it. I've played machines dedicated to everything from Playboy to Kiss to Star Wars, to Laurel and Hardy fercrissake. Some of them had a certain 'what were they thinking?' savoir faire to them.
It was a definite high point in pre-digital, mechanical entertainment technology. Unfortunately, that simple thing alone meant it was doomed, in the same way the electric guitar has given way to the synthesizer as a provider of tonal possibilities. I could see that the best, most high-tech and up-to-date pinball machine was John Henry to Pong's steam drill. You could see the winds of change moving the world any time you went into an arcade and walked past the rows of quiet pinball machines, and saw the crowds around the Space Invaders game.
Now, there's even digital pinball games, downloadable to your computer, which is the ultimate sacrilege. Not because of some warped sense of purity, but because it's just not the same. A mechanical game like pinball requires a certain amount of finesse that no digital technology can duplicate. It's like comparing film to digital photography. At the end of the day, digital is still tiny square blocks of pure color, and no matter how small the squares get, that's all they'll ever be.
So here's to the remaining pinball machines in the world. Long may they ding, bang, buzz, flash, and ratchet.
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