The silver-orbed game, once a barroom staple, may soon be extinct
Updated 8:12 a.m. ET (1312 GMT) February 17, 2000
 

By Michael Y. Park

NEW YORK — Once, in a dark corner of nearly every neighborhood bar in nearly every city in America, you could count on seeing some wiry young guy hunkered intently over rows of flashing lights, eyes following the path of a sleek silver ball.

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Interior of a bar with old-school pinball

Pinball. Yeah, pinball. Sport of a thousand American pubs. Proving grounds for countless teens with quick wrists and an instinctive eye for Newtonian physics.

 As recently as 1992, pinball was as popular as it had ever been, with 100,000 brand-new glasstops hypnotizing arcade kids and reasonably energetic bar rummies across the world.

And the all-time king of pinball games, a Bally-made black box based on The Addams Family movie, was on top, selling a record 22,000 units that year and showing no signs of slowing down. Everything looked rosy. The three major manufacturers of the games — Williams, Gottlieb and Stern — looked forward to a new golden age in pinball.

But at the beginning of 2000, pinball fans are instead heading for the Dark Ages. Worldwide pinball sales are down to a mere 10,000 units a year. Old machines are breaking down and, rather than being repaired, are now carted away by bar owners to make space for karaoke consoles. And of the major pinball makers, only one, Stern Pinball, is left, putting out a single line of machines at a time.

Although old pinball hands mutter that the game has always come back after a bad spell, they sound like they're not entirely convincing themselves that, this time, it's not all over.

Pin Ball Wizard

 "I think, eventually, that day will come," 28-year-old pinball whiz Penni Epstein says of pinball's seemingly imminent death.

Rob Maass/Fox News
	Pinball wizard Penni Epstein is serious about games like Monster Bash

"I thought for a while there was going to be a resurgence," says Epstein, an ad exec who's been playing pinball ever since she had to stand on a stool to reach the flippers. "But now it's not so sure."

Epstein, a national tournament player, hones her skills with the New York Pinball Group, which meets regularly at bars across Manhattan, but she's recently noticed an alarming trend: The number of places at which the group can meet has dropped considerably. Eventually, she fears the only pinball she'll be able to play will be the vintage Whirlwind game she recently bought for her living room.

Loss of Ground

 Epstein's hobby has been losing ground since October 1999, when a surprise announcement by what was then the biggest name in the business, the Williams Electronics Games company, announced what some felt might be the death knell of the entire industry — the company would no longer make pinball games.

 "With myself and my pin friends, it was like we lost a member of the family," Epstein says. "I felt like somebody died. I actually went home and cried that night."

At Williams' Chicago headquarters, the company's 89-year old games historian and former director of games design Steven Kordek says Epstein isn't far off the mark when she called the Williams pullout a tragedy.

"Right now are the worst days of pinball," he says.

Pinball for the People

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Customers playing pinball in a London amusement arcade circa 1935

Customers playing pinball in a London amusement arcade circa 1935 The predecessor of the game of pinball first emerged in France in the late 19th century, tabletop games in which players shot a marble or bead across a tabletop filled with a small forest of pins. These games, cheap to make and cheap to play, caught on in the United States, where they became generally known as pin games by the 1920s. By the 1940s, the game became recognizable as the pinball game we know today, with a backboard, glass, lights and a bell

In 1948, the venerable Gottlieb pinball company added a revolutionary touch — flippers, which allowed players to have more control over the ball. From that point, it was no holds barred as pinball machines added trimmings such as ramps, various levels, solid-state electronics and video displays.

The game then gained in popularity until the mid-1990s, when a series of factors began to make pin heads realize that the game might be down to its last ball. For one thing, the price operators had to pay for pinball games got larger and larger — as much as $4,500 — while returns got smaller and smaller.

 Too Many Bells and Whistles?

 And as the games grew more and more complex, they became harder and harder for novices — and even some true aficionados — to play. This meant that an increasingly smaller group of pinball fans were actually playing the games. And, despite the bells and whistles, the simple fact was that the new machines often weren't very fun.

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	The Tommy pinball game was popular in 1978

"You look at a game and all the gadgets on it, it looks like loads of fun," says Daina Pettit, president of the Salt Lake City-based Mr. Pinball Web site. "[But] it just bounces the ball around and it drains (slips down the end-of-game hole at the bottom)."

 Added to this problem are all sorts of competing entertainment opinions. Stand-up video games (which take up less of that all-important commodity, floor space), have been steadily growing form of competition since the 1970s, along with countless other distractions (home games,the Internet) begging for the public's free time and money.

 And the players' love of the game may have waned. Steve Epstein, owner of the now-defunct Broadway Arcade in New York (and no relation to Penni), says that he and fellow operators "lost faith" in pinball.

"We got distracted by new types of technologies and pinball kind of took a back space," he says.

Pinball 2000 Fails to Live Up to Expectations

 Pinball 2000, Williams' state-of-the-art machine, was supposed to be pinball's savior. A fusion of video game and old-fashioned mechanical pinball gaming, the game had a simpler playfield (less ramps and levels) but still included innovative graphics to lure players, who could now shoot at digitized representations of Jar Jar Binks, Darth Maul or evil Martians. And its new modular design had something to attract owners, too: Instead of buying a brand-new machine, they could just install the latest, self-contained playfield into the chassis of their old glasstop.

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Williams' Star Wars game features a hologram of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Maul

But when the two Pinball 2000brands — one based on the latest Star Wars film — hit the market, they didn't grant pinball the bonus ball everyone had been hoping for. When it was obvious the games weren't going to single-handedly save the market, Williams decided to call it quits and focus on its lucrative casino-game business. The company stopped production after only about 7,000 of the games were manufactured, and in October 1999, the day after a blow-out pinball exposition in Chicago, Williams made it official. Only one company, Stern Pinball, of Chicago, remained.

 Pinball's Last Hope

 Gary Stern, president of Stern, says that by bringing pinball back to its roots, he's hopes to revive the game.

The elaborate video display of the Pinball 2000, something Stern calls a mere novelty, won't make its way onto the newest games. Instead, they will have drop-down targets and mechanical figures popping out of the playfield; and less of a reliance on video screens and flashing lights. In Stern's current release, the soccer-based Striker Extreme, the object of the game will be easy enough to pick up: Shoot goals, using the silver ball as a soccer ball. In other words, the game will be accessible to greenhorns and old pros alike, Stern says.

Pinball 2000 didn't save the world

"You shoot goals, it's fun, you don't have to sit and figure it out," he says. "Pinball is something people have wanted to play, but they've been intimidated by it. It was too hard ... they had 20 seconds of game time and they walked away and they felt stupid.

  "What we want to do is provide fun — capital F-U-N — to the casual player," he continues. "We realize that pinball games are basically street games — cafes, pubs, movie theaters. We're going back to basics, to the pubs."

But die-hard players like Penni Epstein say they won't get their hopes up.

 "I don't even want to look to (the death of pinball) as something that will happen," she says. "I will not find a new hobby whatsoever."

But she adds, "I guess the future's not looking so bright."

Rob Maass/Fox News
Penni Epstein scores a few million points

And if her worst fears come true, it could mean bad days to come for pinball fans and non-pinball player alike. The next time you stumble into the local watering hole, the guy stooped over the fancy, light-filled box in the corner may very well befiddling not with a glasstop but karaoke machine.

And even worse, you may soon be swept up in a rousing chorus of "Wind Beneath My Wings."