Pinball Redux: The Hottest Games

Thawks, thwengs, thonks, thwocks, chings, chungs and bings

In the 1940s pinball machines and stellar striptease were expelled from New York City by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia --thereby giving New Yorkers two good reasons to visit New Jersey. While sex in every permutation has long since washed back across the Hudson, it was only last year that consenting New Yorkers were once again permitted to play the pins in public. Similar bans on pinball were decreed in Los Angeles and, of all places, Chicago, which is the Detroit--some, say the Mecca--of | that addictive, kinetic pastime. In those cities, as well, the pins have only in recent years returned from exile. Their return has been Napoleonic.

Once condemned as a corrupter of youth or as the nefarious and iniquitous pursuit of leather-jacketed punks, long relegated to tacky arcades and dingy diners, pinball today is played openly and avidly by scholars, doctors, scientists, showfolks, pols, brokers, journalists --members of the nervous trades. Manufacturers cannot supply enough of the new solid-state pins to meet the demands of upper-and middle-class families who want the erstwhile diabolus ex machina in their homes (for up to $1,600).

"It's the hottest new product in home recreation," says Division Director Harold Roberts of Brunswick Corp., which makes Super Star and Skate King. "This is the Age of the Pinball!" exults Ross Scheer, an executive of Bally Manufacturing Corp., which makes Evel Knievel, one of the hottest games on the street. Worldwide sales of pins over the past five years have grown by up to 30% annually. Also booming are pinball rentals (at up to $135 a day) to party throwers, organizers of company picnics, and families who want to try a fast sample of the action. Used, reconditioned machines fetch up to $1,200 each, depending on the game and vintage. As proof that the pins are now iquitous and farious. Sears, Roebuck is marketing a home model called Fireball for $645. Montgomery Ward will also sell an electronic game, for $650, by Christmas.

Pinball's rebirth is especially visible in suburban shopping centers. The bells ring again on college campuses, in airports, clubs and hotels. Even in Las Vegas, where any form of competition to the lucrative slots was discouraged, at least ten major hotels now have space reserved for pin play. A Midwestern firm has installed pins to keep its salesmen on a competitive kick at lunchtime. Celebrated pinball addicts--who do not call themselves pinheads--include Andrea McArdle, star of Annie; Bill Cosby, Ann-Margret, Mike Nichols, Sammy Davis Jr., Elliott Gould and, of course, Elton John, whose role as Pinball Wizard in the 1975 movie Tommy helped in the gilding of the pins. Elton, for whom Bally named its Captain Fantastic game, has four ringer-dingers in each of his two pads, and has given one to his Mum.

Playboy Publisher Hugh Hefner has batteries of pins in both his Los Angeles and Chicago mansions and is negotiating with Bally, the GM of pin, to produce a Playmate machine with Bunnies on the back glass. (Ironically, D. Gottlieb & Co., Bally's chief rival, produced a model called Playboy back in 1932, when Hef was six years old.) The English, among the world's most passionate pin pushers, trace pinball's origins to the bagatelle board mentioned in Dickens' Pickwick Papers. Abe Lincoln was big on bagatelle. The sheiks of Araby are clamoring for the new machines, doubtless to keep their kids out of the casinos; King Hussein of Jordan ordered three Ballys: Wizard, Bow and Arrow, and Ro Go. Pinmania has been exploding throughout Europe, notably in France, Italy and Germany, where the game is ecumenically called Flipper. The passion has even pushed through the jungles of Malaysia, where the machine is battery-powered in unelectrified villages.

The flashing lights and the cacophony are as much a part of the score as the 16 cannon blasts in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Yet hard-core pinballers find the game exquisitely relaxing. West Virginia's Secretary of State James Manchin, 49, plays early in the morning to sharpen his mind, at lunchtime to unwind and in the evening to forget his problems. "At the machine," he says, "all the cares and woes of the world are remote."

A test of reaction time and muscle is also involved. Tom Buckley, 49, a writer for the New York Times, spends his lunch hours playing Space Mission at a Broadway arcade. One of New York City's most diligent pin pushers, Buckley addresses the machine in the classic stance. With body about 1 1/2 ft-away from the cabinet, one foot slightly ahead of the other, weight leaning on the arms with index finger on the flipper button, he pulls the shooter gently and watches the ball rebound off the top arch. "This game rewards concentration, mastery of the technique of hand-eye coordination, a positive attitude," he observes. "You have got to lose yourself in it. That is the therapy of it. When I was trying to give up cigarettes, I'd come in here and play and forget all about them."

Other players say the body English, the nudging, gunching and infinite alternations of the ways to flip the flipper and score points off the thumper-bumper make the game a combination of, say, chess (brainwork), hockey (physical coordination) and lovemaking (sensitivity). Concludes Roger C. Sharpe, author of a new, definitive book called Pinball: "It takes years of practice every day."

And where are those electromechanical marvels of yesteryear? Contact and Bumper, Dragonette, Humpty Dumpty and Nudgy? Possibly they have been salvaged and soldered to play again another year. But if their relay points, solenoids and 500 yds. of wiring have finally expired, there is hope for them yet. Those lurid back glasses, with their impossibly bosomed sirens or flaming heroes and devils, were the precursors of Pop art. Today, in Europe as well as in the U.S., some golden oldies are fetching prices as high as the machines they once graced. Tomorrow, they may be sanctified as ... Pin art.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.