@Uncle Deej – That’s a terrific point about tickets/gambling. For all the money Williams spent on Pinball 2000, they probably would have been much better off by simply slapping in a ticket dispenser and giving out tickets for high scores rather than free games.

I suspect a few things held back this change: One is, as you mention, the lingering stereotypes about pinball being a gambling machine. Though with all the other ticket dispensing “games” in arcades, I don’t think anyone would have made a fuss at that point if pinball got tickets.

Relatedly, I bet pinball’s own makers would have resisted that — because they rightly viewed pinball as a skill game and pinball-making as a craft. Adding tickets would make it seem little different from Skee Ball and the claw “game.” Still, it probably would have been worth it to suck it up and try.

And boy, I’m right with you on this:

“Maybe if we truly turned the pinball games into gambling devices (much like was thought of them in the 1970’s) they would still have a large following as people could actually enjoy losing their money on a fun game, rather than lose their money on a ‘game’ that provides no entertainment value whatsoever.”

I’ve only been to casinos a couple of times, but it’s beyond me why people would rather plug quarters into a slot machine when they could be plugging the quarters into pinball machines. Like you said, I’d rather lose my money while playing a fun game rather than lose my money repeatedly pressing a button to start a random number generator.

First I suspect there was a lot of hate from the arcade owners and game suppliers. With all of the moveable parts, pinball machines needed constant maintenance, while video games rarely broke down, since the only moving parts they had were a couple buttons and a joystick. Also, most video games take up less space, so you can cram more video games in than you can with pinball machines.

From the players’ side, it seemed like enthusiasm started dissipating when arcades starting only giving 3 balls per game. Then when they started charging 50 cents (or more) for those three balls, things really went downhill. Also, I agree with you Josh that the more complicated the games got, the less fun they became. Also, another pet peeve of mine seemed to become more prevalent in pinball’s twilight years: the operators’ practice of jacking up the machines so high that the balls would drain almost right away.

One other note: I never played Pinball 2000, but I did play Revenge From Mars a few times and thought it was a blast. And coming from someone who hates video games, that’s saying something.

For instance, my wife has been a saint in not only supporting my wishes to visit Disney Quest, Musee Mechanique, and Funspot, but in coming along each time. She knows pinball is one of the main reasons I’ve wanted to go to those arcades, and she’ll play the first couple of rounds. But she doesn’t really find the game fun, I don’t think. There’s just too much going on; it’s too hard to track the screen without losing track of the ball, or to understand what you’re supposed to be doing.

And I don’t blame her — unless I know the game really well, I barely know what the heck I’m supposed to do! I still find it fun, but definitely understand why the non-obsessed wouldn’t.

So while us pinball lovers think of the game as much simpler than, say, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, I’m not sure if it comes across that way to newbies.

Well, let me clarify a bit on that statement. When I say I’m surprised they weren’t making any money in arcades, I’m not talking about the 80′s or early 90′s style dark-and-musty rooms we all spent far too many hours in; rather, I am shocked at the lack of money they made in all of the “family fun center” types of arcades. Parents would go bowling and take the kids to the arcade for an outing in such places, which were springing up all over (at least, they were here) and were the predecessors to Jillians/D&B.

Given that these establishments had a somewhat captive audience here (parents supervising their children pumping tokens into redemption games or cheesy indoor carnival rides and whatnot), it doesn’t seem to follow that a pinball table wouldn’t at least hold some promise for them of a cheap trip down memory lane. Which was somewhat what I was getting at in my previous reply – with no pinball around, it’s hard to get someone particularly nostalgic (especially about a particular pin they may never have seen elsewhere).

You don’t often see ski-ball or any of the various basketball games lacking players. While it could be argued that these are redemption games, they also have a very nostalgic appeal to adults who have played them for years. It’s my thought that pinball once had that appeal and lost it as new generations had never had a frequent connection with the game.

I mention this because I recall a local amusement park having a great arcade with an entire room of pinball tables when I was young. The arcade was often full of younger kids, resting their stomachs for the next round of greasy food and “toss-and-puke” rides, but the pinball room was always packed with their parents. Half the time, you couldn’t even hope to get a chance to play one without a long wait. Granted, that was the late 80′s, just before the arcade boom, so it was a bit different from what most of us fondly look back on as the “arcade crowd”.

Another example would be in the early 90′s, at one of the first family amusement places in my area. The arcade was hugely popular thanks to the arcades’ resurgence. They kept it stocked with the latest fighting games – SF2, MK/MK2, KI/KI2, etc. – and they had a full row of pinball (likely 15-20 machines) which often were occupied. This was where I first played Addams Family, Data East’s Star Wars (as opposed to the later Sega SW Trilogy table), Back to the Future, Black Knight 2K, and many other notable tables of the time. Again, these games were usually packed.

A few years later (mid-late 1990′s), when the former arcade had gone into disrepair and the latter was gone entirely, another similar family spot opened up with an ice rink, a bowling alley, a bar, and a huge, well-stocked arcade. In this one we had 2 or 3 pins at a time – Attack From Mars, Medieval Madness, and No Good Gofers were some of the high points. Somehow, at this point I rarely (if ever) needed to wait to play them, despite that the place was just as crowded as the previous two examples.

I suppose it could have been that these weren’t licensed properties like Addams Family (which had been huge when the table was released), but I’d expect it had something to do with the generation of parents with young children at that time being less familiar with pinball in general – which goes back to my point. Had these games been present in those other locations and the tables made a bit more money, pinball as an industry might have held on a little bit longer…at least until those arcades gave way to the bar/arcade fusions we see today, and as mentioned, these places would then have had a cheaper alternative to the expensive cabinets we see in them now.

Sadly, the pet store no longer has a Judge Dredd. I checked a few weeks ago to see if my high score still stood (it had been there well over a year – not because it was a great score, but because the flippers were in such disrepair it was barely playable at that point). The table and MVS that had long stood next to it were gone, replaced by a bare spot on a wall.

I was thinking of a sort of middle group between the casual players/places you describe and arcade junkies — casual arcaders, let’s call them. These are the people who powered the arcade boom (which in turn powered the brief pinball renaissance), but who weren’t hardcore enough to care about the latter ’90s fighting games. When they stopped frequenting arcades, that pretty much sealed pinball’s fate.

The unfortunate thing is not just that bowling alleys, restaurants, etc. didn’t replace their one or two pinball machines once they broke. It’s that even if those places kept buying pinball machines, it might not have been enough to sustain the industry. Piecemeal sales to such places probably were secondary to more frequent (and higher volume) sales to arcades. (If that’s not the case, I may boycott any bowling alley that doesn’t have a pinball machine.)

Also, I want to go to the Judge Dredd pet shop.

Pinball, unlike most recent arcade games, wasn’t really confined to arcades. It was something you’d find in odd places. Since it was easy to pick up and play, much like the examples you put forward (NBA Jam, SF2, and MK), it didn’t quite fall into the arcade pigeonhole – and likewise as games became more complex and thus were relegated to the hardcore fans, so were the pins to the arcades as well.

Think back. It doesn’t even have to be too far back – a few years will do it. Pinball machines were often found in cafeterias on college campuses, in bowling alleys, in eateries, and especially in bars. Seeing a pin in a bar – granted, maybe this would be a beaten up old table – was once almost as common as the billiards table or the dartboard or (now, anyway) the Megatouch. When in college, I’d often visit a friend in New Paltz to see various bands play at a venue. His campus had a Medieval Madness, a local pizza joint had a Monster Bash. My own campus had a Judge Dredd, also found in a nearby pet store. Ok, admittedly that last one was a bit odd.

In any case, pinball had an impressive cultural impact. From The Who’s Tommy (Pinball Wizard) to more recent music (Rancid’s line in “Olympia, WA.” – “where we played a lonely pinball machine”), to Ralph Bakshi’s animations, to Sesame Street’s counting song, pinball was everywhere. To think it’d just up and vanish after decades of such popularity is strange.

Yet what happened is exactly as you said: “people forgot pinball even existed.” The gamers out there aside, many of pinball’s fans were people who might never have set foot into an arcade – it was a game they would simply find in the places they normally went. To them, pinball was what they’d do in the bowling alley when they couldn’t afford to rent the lane for another game, or what they’d play while waiting for pizza, or while having a beer with a friend. When the machines broke and nobody fixed them, they were quickly removed from these locations and only missed as an afterthought.

Remove the casual players’ contact with pinball, and a game that might have endured a bit longer was tied to the arcades’ decline. It was no surprise that no game sold as well as Addams Family, but that they sold far less than expected caused Williams to exit the market. Furthermore, it left us with the current state of things, where some areas simply have no pinball at all.

The current business model Stern seems to be working on, often making games mainly for home collectors, might have worked perfectly for getting these games into the non-arcade spots they once had. The saddest part about this is that as mentioned by someone from PinMaineia at PAPA 12 (sorry I forgot your name!), pinball is one of those games that can’t properly be done at home without a table – it’s exactly the type of game that arcades should have relied on rather than shunned. The physics are never quite right, nudging becomes unrealistic (at best), and it removes the entire social aspect.

This last one is a huge factor – if anyone doubts this, just look at the amount of pinball machines that hysterically announce your skill (MULTIBALLLLLLLLL!) or broadcast the free game you won throughout the entire room with a loud “THWACK!”