# Adam Ruben - Pinball Wizards: Jackpots, Drains, and the Cult of the Silver Ball

**Source:** Pintastic New England  
**Type:** video  
**Published:** 2018-07-22  
**Duration:** 49m 30s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-vc7UlNGJI

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## Analysis

Adam Ruben, author of 'Pinball Wizards: Jackpots, Drains, and the Cult of the Silver Ball' (released November 2023), discusses his narrative nonfiction book about pinball's history, present, and future at Pintastic New England. He shares excerpts focusing on his personal pinball journey from childhood at Funland Amusement Park in Rehoboth Beach through competitive play (reaching 80th world ranking), his four-year hiatus due to family obligations, and his wife's motivational deal enabling his return to competition and book writing. The presentation emphasizes pinball's cyclical boom-bust history: 145 manufacturers in the 1930s, 23 by 1980, down to one (Stern) by 2000, and now a resurgence to 6-8 active manufacturers.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] In the 1930s, there were 145 different pinball manufacturers, with some titles selling over 50,000 units — _Adam Ruben presenting historical industry data from his book research_
- [HIGH] By 1980, pinball manufacturing had consolidated to 23 companies; by end of 1999, only 1 remained (not WMS, which had 75% market share) — _Adam Ruben citing historical industry consolidation data_
- [HIGH] Stern Pinball nearly went out of business during the 2008-2009 financial crisis — _Adam Ruben discussing Stern's near-bankruptcy during recession_
- [MEDIUM] Currently there are 6-8 companies actively manufacturing and shipping pinball machines (as of book publication, down from 8 due to Heighway and Dutch Pinball failures) — _Adam Ruben noting recent closures: 'if I had given this talk a month ago, I would have said eight companies... now there are probably seven or maybe six'_
- [HIGH] Heighway Pinball and Dutch Pinball have recently become bankrupt or undergone fire sales — _Adam Ruben: 'Heighway Pinball... are now bankrupt. Dutch Pinball... had something akin to a fire sale just this week online'_
- [HIGH] Adam Ruben reached 80th world ranking in the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association (PAPA) rating system — _Adam Ruben's autobiography: 'according to the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association Advanced Rating System, I rose as high as 80th in the world'_
- [HIGH] The book was substantially edited (20,000 words removed) after Adam's wife and mother-in-law reviewed it, finding pinball-specific jargon and details inaccessible to non-enthusiasts — _Adam Ruben describing the editorial process: 'my wife and mother-in-law don't give two shots about pinball... about two months later, 20,000 words dropped out of the book'_
- [HIGH] Flippers were not added to pinball games until 1947, 12 years after the 1935 New York legal debates about whether pinball was a game of skill or chance — _Adam Ruben quoting from his book's chapter on pinball banning history_
- [HIGH] In 1976, Roger Sharpe demonstrated pinball as a game of skill before the New York City Council, leading to re-legalization in May 1976 — _Adam Ruben: 'the New York City Council, in May of 1976, met, watched Roger play, and re-legalized pinball in New York'_
- [MEDIUM] Pinball remained illegal in Wildwood, New Jersey until clarified that prohibition only applied to pinball-only venues, not arcades with mixed games — _Adam Ruben describing his research discovery about Wildwood ordinance ambiguity_

### Notable Quotes

> "Pinball machines almost look like attempts at what's kindly called outsider art, the kind you'd find at a specialized museum next to a placard reading, This machine and the adjacent toothpick model of the Burj Khalifa were built by hand over a span of 20 years by a high-functioning chimpanzee trapped in a municipal steam turbine."
> — **Adam Ruben**, Introduction excerpt
> _Captures Ruben's humorous literary voice and unconventional perspective on pinball's absurdist design philosophy; sets tone for narrative nonfiction approach_

> "Pinball is a kinetic sculpture, like the one in the lobby of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia's science museum, that I used to stare at endlessly during class field trips. It's a shiny, blinking, flipping, bouncing, shooting, cracking overabundance of stimuli."
> — **Adam Ruben**, Introduction excerpt
> _Defines pinball as art/sculpture rather than mere game, reflecting Ruben's artistic and scientific perspective_

> "Give me two quarters and a 1997 Medieval Madness and suddenly the rhythm of the world makes sense."
> — **Adam Ruben**, Introduction excerpt
> _Illustrates personal connection to pinball and why competitive play became central to his identity_

> "If you write that book you keep talking about, she said, you can play all the pinball you want."
> — **Marina (Adam Ruben's wife)**, Introduction excerpt
> _Describes the pivotal motivational deal that enabled Ruben's return to competitive pinball and completion of the book; demonstrates spouse's understanding of external motivation needs_

> "The point of my project was to see if it could be done someday, if I, an ordinary person with a modicum of experience, stood any chance of becoming a world pinball champion."
> — **Adam Ruben**, Introduction excerpt
> _States the book's central narrative premise: returning to competitive pinball after 4-year hiatus to test if amateur success is possible_

> "Based on everything I've read, at least as far as pinball is concerned, Fiorello LaGuardia was kind of a douche."
> — **Adam Ruben**, Chapter 2 excerpt on NYC pinball banning
> _Demonstrates Ruben's irreverent, conversational tone while introducing historical critique of mayoral pinball suppression_

> "What's the difference, really, between pulling a slot machine lever and watching reels randomly spin, and pulling a pinball machine plunger and watching a ball randomly drift into one hole or another?"
> — **Adam Ruben (quoting historical argument)**, Chapter 2 excerpt
> _Captures the historical regulatory ambiguity that led to pinball's ban—the skill vs. chance debate central to the game's legal persecution_

> "Think about how confident Murawski must have felt that his experts would play the chancy bagatelle machines well enough to outscore a beginner. Think of the pressure on the three players."
> — **Adam Ruben**, Chapter 2 excerpt on Jacob Murawski court case (1935)
> _Illustrates the high-stakes gamble inherent in the skill-vs-chance legal test, and how a single failed demonstration doomed pinball's legal status for decades_

> "The youths known to their friends as successful shooters of the little balls in the pin game had been called Barnyard... for a long time the little balls rattled around and fell into the holes in the board and bells rang as lucky shots were made, but it all came to nothing."
> — **Adam Ruben (quoting New York Times)**, Chapter 2 excerpt
> _Documents the actual failure of the Murawski defense—expert players failed to outperform amateurs, sealing pinball's legal fate in NYC for 40 years_

> "I'm hoping, and I'll talk about this a little bit at the end, I'm hoping, as I'm sure many of you are, that this new rise is different than the last one in the early 90s, and then the one before that in the early 80s, in that it's of a bit more of an organic nature to it that's going to cause it to stay."
> — **Adam Ruben**, Opening remarks
> _Expresses community concern about whether current pinball renaissance can sustain, distinguishing organic growth from speculative boom cycles_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Adam Brett Ruben | person | Author of 'Pinball Wizards: Jackpots, Drains, and the Cult of the Silver Ball'; writer, biologist, Science Channel host; competitive pinball player with PAPA ranking of 80th in the world |
| Marina Ruben | person | Adam Ruben's wife; instrumental in motivating book completion by offering deal allowing competitive pinball play in exchange for manuscript; critical editor ensuring non-enthusiasts could understand content |
| Roger Sharpe | person | Legendary pinball figure who demonstrated pinball as game of skill before NYC Council in 1976, leading to re-legalization; Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 host; oversees IFPA with sons covering 40,000+ players |
| Fiorello LaGuardia | person | NYC's 99th mayor (pre-WWII); led anti-pinball crusade, publicly smashing machines and dumping them in Hudson River; banned pinball in NYC for ~40 years based on gambling concerns |
| Jacob Murawski | person | Bronx stationery and candy store proprietor (1935); attempted legal defense of pinball by demonstrating skill with three expert players; failed when experts underperformed amateurs, setting precedent for NYC pinball ban |
| Paul Moss | person | NYC Commissioner of Licenses (1935); refused to license pinball venue in Brooklyn, initiating legal test of whether pinball was game of skill or chance |
| Louis J. Valentine | person | NYC Police Commissioner (1934); advocated for slot machine elimination; reported that slot machines 'bred worse vices' |
| Pinball Wizards: Jackpots, Drains, and the Cult of the Silver Ball | product | Narrative nonfiction book by Adam Ruben, published November 2023; text-only (no pictures); covers pinball history, present industry state, and author's personal competitive journey; heavily edited by wife/mother-in-law to remove jargon |
| Funland Amusement Park | organization | Family-owned amusement park on Rehoboth Beach, Delaware boardwalk; featured pinball machines since Ruben's childhood in 1981; still operating as of book publication |
| Free State Pinball Association | organization | Pinball league in Washington, D.C. area; Adam Ruben joined summer 2003 season after friend Mike paid $40 entry fee; served as Ruben's entry into competitive pinball |
| Professional and Amateur Pinball Association (PAPA) | organization | Hosts World Pinball Championships outside Pittsburgh annually in warehouse arcade with 500+ machines; runs Advanced Rating System; Roger Sharpe's sons oversee organization and IFPA |
| International Flipper Pinball Association (IFPA) | organization | Overseen by Roger Sharpe's sons; manages competitive pinball players (40,000+ players tracked) |
| Pinball Expo | event | Chicago-based annual event where vendors showcase innovations and fans learn about pinball industry's future |
| Heighway Pinball | company | Pinball manufacturer praised in Ruben's book as innovative upstart; has since become bankrupt (as of book publication in Nov 2023) |
| Dutch Pinball | company | Pinball manufacturer; underwent fire sale online in weeks prior to Ruben's Pintastic New England presentation (late 2023/early 2024) |
| Stern Pinball | company | Last remaining major pinball manufacturer by early 2000s; nearly went out of business during 2008-2009 financial crisis; currently one of 6-8 active manufacturers |
| Williams Manufacturing (WMS) | company | Historical pinball manufacturer with 75% market share by end of 1990s; did not survive the transition to 2000s; defunct by 2000 |
| Bally | company | Pinball manufacturer; created Rocket (1933), an Art Deco machine that paid players for high scores, effectively becoming a slot machine with physics |
| Theater of Magic | product | Pinball machine from 1990s (fishtail type); played by Adam Ruben and friend Mike at local bar on Tuesday nights during college; destroyed by camper leaning on playfield glass |
| Medieval Madness | product | Pinball machine from 1997; referenced by Ruben as his favorite game ('give me two quarters and a 1997 Medieval Madness and suddenly the rhythm of the world makes sense') |
| Jilly's | organization | Pinball arcade in Wildwood, New Jersey; Ruben contacted them regarding apparent illegal operation under local ordinances; clarified that arcade operations are legal in Wildwood despite overall pinball ban |
| Pintastic New England | event | Pinball tournament/convention where Adam Ruben presented his book; venue included packed presentations and Free Play Hall with historical bagatelle machines |
| Rehoboth Beach, Delaware | location | Beach town where Ruben spent childhood summers (1981+) at Funland; central to his origin story of pinball love; still visited annually by extended family |
| New York City | location | Site of pinball ban from ~1935-1976 (~40 years); Mayor LaGuardia's anti-pinball crusade; legalized in May 1976 by NYC Council after Roger Sharpe demonstration |
| Mike | person | Adam Ruben's college friend; excelled at sports but average at pinball; paid $40 entry fee for Ruben into Free State Pinball Association summer 2003 season; introduced Ruben to competitive pinball |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Pinball history and industry cycles, Regulatory persecution and NYC pinball ban (1935-1976), Current pinball renaissance and sustainability concerns, Adam Ruben's personal pinball journey and competitive return, Skill vs. chance legal debate in pinball
- **Secondary:** Narrative nonfiction book marketing and audience accessibility, Recent manufacturer failures (Heighway, Dutch Pinball), Roger Sharpe's role in pinball re-legalization and IFPA leadership

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.75) — Ruben expresses genuine affection for pinball and optimism about current renaissance, though tempered with concerns about sustainability. Critical but affectionate tone toward pinball's absurdist nature and troubled history. Humorous critique of LaGuardia reflects frustration with historical persecution. No hostility toward industry or community; enthusiastic audience reception.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Recent high-profile manufacturer failures (Heighway Pinball bankruptcy, Dutch Pinball fire sale) occurring within weeks of book publication, raising questions about industry consolidation and viability (confidence: high) — Ruben notes book praised Heighway as innovative but 'they are now bankrupt' and Dutch Pinball 'had something akin to a fire sale just this week online'; current manufacturer count revised downward from 8 to 6-8
- **[event_signal]** Pintastic New England serves as major community gathering for competitive players, collectors, and historians; supports multiple concurrent seminars and book-focused content alongside tournament play (confidence: medium) — Event includes author presentation, Free Play Hall with historical machines, concurrent seminars, and packed audience indicating strong regional pinball culture
- **[community_signal]** Packed audience attendance at Pintastic New England for author presentation indicates strong community interest in pinball history and narrative-focused content beyond operational/technical discussions (confidence: medium) — Ruben observes 'packed row' and notes attendance 'is now one attendee for every hour I drove to get here'; venue provides Free Play Hall with historical machines
- **[design_philosophy]** Historical debate over skill vs. chance in pinball design (1930s-1970s) demonstrates how mechanical implementation (absence of flippers until 1947) made games appear gambling-like despite designer intent; flippers fundamentally changed skill perception (confidence: high) — Ruben details 1935 legal cases where lack of player agency (no flippers) made pinball indistinguishable from gambling; 1976 re-legalization occurred only after flippers enabled visible skill demonstration by Roger Sharpe
- **[market_signal]** Current pinball renaissance characterized as potentially more organic and sustainable than previous boom cycles (early 80s, early 90s); community hopes this resurgence differs from historically unsustainable spikes (confidence: high) — Ruben: 'I'm hoping... that this new rise is different than the last one in the early 90s, and then the one before that in the early 80s, in that it's of a bit more of an organic nature to it that's going to cause it to stay'
- **[licensing_signal]** Historical parallels drawn between pinball regulation and digital piracy (Napster MP3 downloads); both involved widespread vice practice normalized until regulatory crackdown, suggesting pinball's regulatory struggles as precursor to modern IP/gambling debates (confidence: medium) — Ruben: 'Using pinball as a gambling device was kind of like downloading MP3 files on Napster, in that it was a vice so universally practiced at the time that no one gave a second thought to its legality'
- **[market_signal]** Consolidation from 145 manufacturers (1930s) → 23 (1980) → 1 (2000) → 6-8 (2024) demonstrates cyclical industry boom-bust pattern; historical precedent for concern about current sustainability (confidence: high) — Ruben's quantified industry data spanning decades: '145 different ones' in 1930s, '23 companies' in 1980, 'at the beginning of 1999, there were three. At the end of 1999, there was one'
- **[community_signal]** Roger Sharpe transition from individual player/demonstrator (1976) to organizational leadership role overseeing 40,000+ IFPA-tracked players through his sons; represents professionalization of competitive pinball structure (confidence: high) — Ruben: 'I would meet Roger Sharpe, the Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 host who helped re-legalize the game, and whose sons currently oversee more than 40,000 players in the International Flipper Pinball Association'
- **[product_concern]** Editorial process revealed that detailed pinball mechanics/jargon initially included in book (20,000 words) was inaccessible and boring to non-enthusiast readers (wife, mother-in-law), requiring substantial cuts for market viability (confidence: high) — Ruben: 'my wife and mother-in-law don't give two shots about pinball... no one cares about that. No one cares about that. This is boring. I don't understand what this means. Post-pass. Who cares? And what ended up happening was about two months later, 20,000 words dropped out of the book'
- **[technology_signal]** Addition of flippers to pinball games in 1947 (12 years after 1935 legal ban) fundamentally changed skill perception and enabled re-legalization 29 years later; mechanical innovation directly addressed regulatory concerns (confidence: high) — Ruben: 'Remember, this is 1935. The first flippers did not get added to a game until 1947. So flippers were still 12 years in the future. The idea that you could go against gravity in any way was still new.'

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## Transcript

 This pinball author, we had a little drought there for a while, but the pinball books are starting to come back. And so, Pinball Wizards, Jackpot Strains, and the Cult of the Silver Ball came out last November, and we have its author here to give us some choice selections. Please welcome Adam Rubin. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, David, especially for inviting me here. So happy to be at Pentastic New Robert Englunds speaking to a packed row. And I'm grateful to all of you for coming in because this is now one attendee for every hour I drove to get here. So each of you is an hour. One of you is midnight to 1 a.m. That was a fun hour. But so I don't know if perhaps people are just looking for something very different than all the frenetic activity over in the pinball rooms and just ready to sit back and listen to a person read from a book. But if so, that's basically what I'm going to do. So this book, as Dave said, came out in November. I am a writer, a biologist, and I host a show on the Science Channel called Outrageous Acts of Science. It's basically scientists making fun of YouTube clips. If you haven't seen it, it's really fun. And in addition to those things, I've always really loved pinball. I'll talk a little bit about that when I read the book. And so as David said, there was kind of a drought in pinball books, or rather, there are a lot of pinball books out there. And most of them you have to go to eBay to find, and I have. But they're all a certain type of pinball book. They are all books with pictures. And when people would ask me about my book, and people who know pinball, and I would tell them What my intention was, and I'm writing just a narrative nonfiction book about the past, present, and future of pinball, they would say, no pictures? What are you doing? Why would you do that? I have no idea whether it's going to be successful or not. But the book came out in November, and many parts of it are already out of date. I am praising this new company toward the end called Highway Pinball. And as we know, they are now bankrupt. Dutch pinball, which is, I don't know if they're bankrupt, but I know they had something akin to a fire sale just this week online. So who knows? Pinball is changing. So the book is partly my experiences of pinball. Some of it is first person narrative. I'm going to Pampa in Pittsburgh and trying to win. And you can read the book to see whether I do or not. But you can also go to pampa.org and see that I haven't. And then also a lot of interesting things that I learned about the history of the game, when it was invented, when it was banned, when it was re-legalized, when it almost died, when it was very popular, when it almost died again, when it was very popular again, when it almost died again. So the history of pinball, it goes like this. And before I start reading it, people ask me, like, sum up your book in a few sentences. What I tell them are the following numbers. In the 1930s, at one point, there were 145 pinball manufacturers, 145 different ones. Pinball machines were smaller. They're more like the Cuba Libre game that we saw in the Free Play Hall. They're wood. But even so, 145. Some of the most popular games sold more than 50,000 of a single title. Okay, 145 then. The next time pinball was insanely popular-ish, let's say 1980. In 1980, there were 23 companies making pinball machines, which is still an enormous number. But as many of you know, at the beginning of 1999, there were three. At the end of 1999, there was one, and it wasn't the big one. WMS, which had a 75% market share, was one of the ones that did not make it out of the millennium. And then for most of the 2000s, there was one, just one company, Stern, which almost went out of business themselves in the financial crisis, 2008, 2009. What's so cool about pinball now is it's basically more popular than it's been in a quarter of a century. Today, well, I guess now with highway and Dutch, I don't know. But if I had given this talk a month ago, I would have said that there are now eight companies actually shipping and selling pinball machines successfully. Now there are probably seven or maybe six. But even so, it's still a far cry from one and maybe zero. So pinball is on its way up. And I'm hoping, and I'll talk about this a little bit at the end, I'm hoping, as I'm I'm sure many of you are, that this new rise is different than the last one in the early 90s, and then the one before that in the early 80s, in that it's got a bit more of an organic nature to it that's going to cause it to stay, rather than five years from now we all say, oh crap, pinball's dead. So I'm just going to read a couple excerpts from the book, and then I'll take questions. And then after that, I've brought books to be happy to sell and sign. I can either hang out in the back of the room, or when the next seminar starts, I can go out in the hallway with them. So they're here. So I'm just going to read a little bit from the introduction. I love pinball. It is a bizarre, intricate game that has no valid reason to exist. Just think of the absurdity of someone inventing this thing from scratch, designing the 3,500 individual pieces that compose today's games, meticulously assembling and decorating every square inch, programming a complicated set of rules, and then putting it in a bar for strangers to slap. Pinball machines almost look like attempts at what's kindly called outsider art, the kind you'd find at a specialized museum next to a placard reading, This machine and the adjacent toothpick model of the Burj Khalifa were built by hand over a span of 20 years by a high-functioning chimpanzee trapped in a municipal steam turbine. Once in graduate school, I mentioned the word pinball to a classmate, and she asked, pinball? Is that like the game with the ping-pong ball and paddles? I explained that no, the game with the ping-pong ball and paddles was called ping-pong. Oh, there it is. I then described pinball in excruciating detail until I realized that she had stopped listening because she thought I was describing a video game. My first exposure to pinball came during childhood when it was just one component of the greatest time and place the universe had to offer. summer nights at Funland Amusement Park in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Like many visitors down shore, my family spent 51 weeks a year in northern Delaware and one glorious week in southern Delaware at the beach. Delaware boasts a handful of beach towns, of which Rehoboth is the largest. My family would rent a little house in one of the smaller towns, Lewis or Bethany, and spend a week in a kid's paradise. During the day, we'd play in the ocean or on the sand, eating a lunch of local sweet corn and canned tuna on the porch. At night, we'd drive to Rehoboth, where we could hear the screams of the Ferris wheel and paraglide the moment we opened our car doors. My dad would feed the parking meter quarters we'd brought in black plastic film canisters. Remember those? Grumbling about how a quarter used to buy you half an hour, and now it was 20 minutes. This gives us until 9.40, he'd say. And my sister Rachel and I would beg for just one more quarter, a little more bought time, 20 more of the most treasured minutes we knew. Funland was, and still is, I'm happy to report, a wonderful little family-owned amusement park on the Rehoboth Boardwalk. There were rides, there were win-a-stuffed-animal games, but not the impossible kind, like throw a basketball through a hoop slightly smaller than a basketball. And always, sitting in the same spot between the shooting gallery and the carousel, just beside the toddler boats and with a clear view of Super Goblet Toss, there was pinball. At the end of the night, arms full of new stuffed animals that needed names, we'd amble down the boardwalk, the Atlantic crashing softly on one side and the bright saltwater taffy shops on the other, buy frozen custard, and count the hours, or if it was the week's final trip to fondland, the months, until we could return. My wife Marina says I over-romanticize Rehoboth, that it's really just another hot, crowded beach town with cheap pizza and henna tattoos. Maybe that's true. But whatever neural processes lock a place and time into one's memory as heaven on earth have locked it into mine. Even now, more than 35 years since our initial visit to the shore, my family has returned every summer, spouses and grandkids and all. Rachel's then-boyfriend, now her husband, proposed to her during one of these trips. One of my happiest moments was watching my daughter, Maya, ride the toddler boats in 2013, just like I did in 1981, possibly even without the boats having been repainted in the interim. For years, pinball embodied everything I loved about the beach, but it remained strictly a beach activity. I didn't hang out in arcades, and even when a restaurant or bowling alley had a pinball machine, it held no special sway beyond, I know what that is. Then during college, I dated a woman who loved pinball. When we were camp counselors together, we'd play whenever possible, usually on the 1992 fishtail machine in the cafeteria, until a destructive camper leaned too hard on the playfield class, taking fishtails out of commission for the rest of the summer. Some aspect of her affinity for pinball must have stayed with me, and the affinity grew into an obsession. If I saw a pinball machine, I had to play it. Leaving it untouched would be like walking past an exquisite sunset, saying, meh, there'll be another one tomorrow. There's just something about pinball. It's not like a video game. Pinball is a kinetic sculpture, like the one in the lobby of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia's science museum, that I used to stare at endlessly during class field trips. It's a shiny, blinking, flipping, bouncing, shooting, cracking overabundance of stimuli. It is, however, only a game. Or so I thought Then I joined a pinball league In grad school I had a friend named Mike Mike and I had a ritual of playing Theater of Magic at a local bar on Tuesday nights Mike excelled at all sports From racquetball to martial arts But pinball was my thing I think that's why he played it with me so often When he won on occasion he'd have the extra Gloat power of beating me at something I was good at For my 24th birthday Mike's gift Was simple. He had the foresight to Google two words it had somehow never occurred to me to Google, and those words were pinball league. Mike paid my $40 entry into the summer 2003 season of the Free State Pinball Association, and for me, the world would never be the same. As the years passed, I learned from my competitors. I picked up advanced techniques like the hold pass, the bounce pass, the shill maneuver, the list of machines whose rules I knew grew. And according to the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association Advanced Rating System, I rose as high as 80th in the world. In the world. I put it on my resume. I actually did, at the very bottom, under other interests and activities. An interviewer even asked me about it once. Oh, sure, I said, nonchalantly exhaling under my fingernails. I dabble a bit. I don't play sports. I have a physique like an Ethernet cable. Pass me a basketball and I feel helpless. Put me on the volleyball court and I'm counting the seconds until I can rotate off. But give me two quarters and a 1997 medieval madness and suddenly the rhythm of the world makes sense. which is why I felt the physical symptoms of withdrawal when I stopped playing pinball for four years. I could pretend I dropped out of my league and stopped traveling to competitions because I wanted to retire at the top of my game. I could offer a respectable excuse like carpal tunnel syndrome, but the real reason I stopped playing is far more common among men who suddenly quit the leisure activities they used to enjoy. I had a baby, and my wife wouldn't let me. Shortly after my daughter turned three, my son was born. Now that's it, I thought, but two kids? I can scarcely justify a trip to the bathroom, let alone a night at a pinball league or a weekend at a tournament. Pinball is history, and they'll just have to take up another hobby, like nothing. Yes, that's what I'll replace pinball with, nothing. Then something wonderful happened. For years, I dreamed of writing this book, but I kept procrastinating, not for any good reason, but just because writing a book is a lot of work, even when it's about something you love. To help me out, Marina, who is nothing if not a proponent of professional development offered a deal If you write that book you keep talking about she said you can play all the pinball you want I should emphasize that she said this out of the blue Caught me completely off guard I probably stammered with my tongue on the floor, cartoon-like, wondering what the trick was. But this one was things where women want you to resist to prove that you care. But I don't want to play pinball, she was expecting me to say. I only love you and the children and laundry. I then concluded she must be having an affair. But no, the offer was genuine. In that wonderful way that spouses know exactly what the partner is required to succeed, she had intuited my need for external motivation to write a book. I could play pinball, free and clear, and I could start with a triumphant return to the world pinball championships. I knew I wasn't going to take the pinball world by storm, to suddenly kick ass and clean house and dominate the competition, screaming to the heavens while gripping the first place trophy in my bleeding flipper fingers. That wasn't the point. The point of my project was to see if it could be done someday, if I, an ordinary person with a modicum of experience, stood any chance of becoming a world pinball champion. The World Pinball Championships, run by the Professional Amateur Pinball Association, PAPA, are held outside Pittsburgh every year in a warehouse arcade of over 500 pinball machines. Over the course of the next year, I would travel from my home in Washington, D.C. to compete in the World Pinball Championships three times. Between the championships, I would rejoin my pinball league for one season, not only to see if I lost my touch, but also to see how pinball had changed. The country is currently enjoying a pinball renaissance. Not only is the game's popularity back on the rise after a multi-decade drop, but the industry itself, which nearly disappeared off the face of the earth on four different occasions, is reinventing itself in risky, interesting ways. I would learn the fascinating history of the game, which began in a much simpler form, then so irked the establishment that New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia publicly smashed pinball machines with a sledgehammer and dumped them into the Hudson River. I would meet Roger Sharp, the man who helped re-legalize the game, and whose sons currently oversee the more than 40,000 players in the International Flipper Pinball Association, IFPA. I would visit pinball arcades and barcades, pinball museums, and the factories where pinball machines are built. I would talk to the people keeping the sport alive, including competitive pinball champions, game designers who sweat for months over the exact placement of a ramp, and the CEOs of pinball manufacturing companies, from the largest and oldest to the upstart startups, trying and sometimes failing to make and sell new pinball machines from their garages. I would fly to Chicago for Pinball Expo, where vendors show off their newest innovations, and fans get to find out what future, if any, pinball can look forward to. And maybe, just maybe, throughout all of this, I'd stay married. So that's excerpts from the introduction. In the book, I do go on to talk about what it's like to try to compete at Pampa, asterisk, in C division. Where I didn't win, anyway. But also what the history of the game was like. And I think in talking to people, I tell people about the book, and most people I talk to in real life are not like the people in this room. They don't think about pinball ever. Which doesn't mean they don't like it. It's so strange. I talk to people. Sometimes I say, oh, I'm writing a book about pinball. They're like, oh, that's so cool. I like pinball. When's the last time you played? I have no idea. I don't think I have. But like, when I was a kid once. So there's nobody who says, oh, pinball. Fuck that thing. They all like it in some way. Or there are a number of people who just plain haven't heard of it. I mean, at all. And so actually when I finished writing the book, I gave it to, I was going to turn it into the publisher. And then my wife said, wait a minute, you're just going to send it to them? And I go, yeah, it's due tomorrow. I'm going to send it in. And she said, but no one else has looked at the book. I'm like, oh, but it's fine. It'll be fine. And she said, do you want people who aren't pinball fanatics to read the book? I'm like, yeah, that's kind of the point. I want them to read it and go play pinball. And she said, well, let me look at it first. And so I let her look at it. And I let my mother-in-law look at it. And then I had to ask for an extension to turn to the book. Because my wife's going through it. She's like, no one cares about that. No one cares about that. This is boring. I don't understand what this means. Post-pass. Who cares? And what ended up happening was about two months later, 20,000 words dropped out of the book. Because my wife and mother-in-law don't give two shits about pinball. And now it's down to something that even they can be OK with. So I'm going to read a little bit from chapter two, which is about the banning of pinball in New York City. There are a lot of interesting things in there that I didn't know. Chapter two, just going to read a little bit of it before going on to one more excerpt, and then I'll take questions. So chapter two is called The Vicious Form of Amusement. I don't want to draw unfair conclusions, but based on everything I've read, at least as far as pinball is concerned, Fiorello LaGuardia was kind of a douche. I say that not only as a pinball fan who cringes at press photos of a New York mayor smashing pinball machines with a sledgehammer, but also as a concerned citizen who feels that unease is not an overreaction any time a politician publicly smashes things he dislikes with a sledgehammer. A complicated figure with an occasional penchant for authoritarianism, New York's 99th mayor helped the city recover from the Great Depression, but he also imposed his own fundamentalist sensibilities on industries that offended him. Pinball offended him. LaGuardia's anti-pinball crusade was, at least nominally, part of his pre-World War II crackdown on organized crime, but he had no compunction about expanding that crackdown to suppress any activity he deemed evil. Pinball, roulette wheels, jukeboxes, pool tables, burlesque houses, and, see if you can guess, artichokes. LaGuardia's artichoke embargo had more to do with accusations of mob-driven price-fixing than any animosity toward artichokes in particular, but I'll grant him that if there is such a thing as an evil vegetable, it's an artichoke. I can't eat you unless I steam you. Get over yourself. The mob had a stranglehold on his city, controlling more than a lot of people were comfortable with, and LaGuardia was determined to save New York's soul. But pinball? Before Before 1934, the New York City Police Department had a huge job on its hands. Slot machines were proliferating throughout the city, and unless officers could absolutely prove that they were being used for gambling, a more difficult task than it sounds, they could do nothing. Meanwhile, according to Police Commissioner Louis J. Valentine, the slots bred worse vices, and the primary obstacle to eliminating them was political will. In the first couple months of 1934, LaGuardia mustered that political will, and about 2,000 slot machines were seized, half owned by mob boss Frank Costello, effectively wiping the city clean of the offending war-armed bandits. Pin games, which is something that pinball machines are sometimes called then, pin games rushed in to fill the void, flourishing in all the corners previously occupied by slots. Let's drive the bums out of town, LaGuardia famously declared in a radio address, broadly and problematically implicating nonspecific bums. Moth connections aside, to the casual observer, it's easy to assume that pinball was banned simply because it was a game, a frivolous amusement, a time and money waster for a generation that could spare neither. But the reality was a lot messier. Pinball manufacturers had begun blurring the line between pinball machines and gambling devices. For example, even though games like Contact, 1933, easily took in pennies and nickels in exchange for a fun few minutes, their true competition for patrons' coins, slot machines offered automatic payouts for lucky pulls. So Bally debuted Rocket 1933, a handsome Art Deco pinball table that paid players for high scores, making it essentially a slot machine plus physics. The advertising flyer boasted that it could operate in open or closed territory, meaning the payout door was lockable, converting it back when necessary to what they called a novelty game, one played purely for enjoyment. It didn't help that many of the machines set to give cash payouts were the type known as one-balls, games that consisted of launching a single ball, seeing what happened, and then either collecting or not collecting coins. What's the difference, really, between pulling a slot machine lever and watching reels randomly spin, and pulling a pinball machine plunger and watching a ball randomly drift into one hole or another? The pinball boom scared LaGuardia, who watched the public's growing addiction to pin games with concern. Store owners, he learned, were lowering the price of pinball from a nickel to a penny during school hours, presumably in order to attract students on their lunch breaks, and as some claimed, to encourage truancy. I'm just going to skip ahead a little bit. On July 4, 1935, the New York Times reported on a High Court decision regarding the legality of the game of bagatello or the pin game. The court case arose when City Commissioner of Licenses Paul Moss refused to issue a license for a Brooklyn amusement place. The dispute, as it remained until a dramatic event in 1976, which is later in the book, was over whether the pin game was a pin game of skill or a pin game of chance. The Times sub-headlines are unambiguous, declaring in all caps SKILL RULED NO FACTOR and quoting the judge's decision that the device relies on innate gambling spirit. Which may seem strange, by the way, that there's a debate over whether there's skill or lock-in pinball. But remember, this is 1935. the first flippers did not get added to a game until 1947. So flippers were still 12 years in the future. The idea that you could go against gravity in any way was still new. Although, as some have pointed out, there was no flipper yet, but there was a bat, a mechanical bat on some baseball-like games at the time. So asterisk. Putting in things like that, because I'm afraid that David is hearing something, and he's like, actually, sorry. To be fair, the machines in question made only a token effort, literally, to distinguish themselves from gambling devices, dispensing tokens rather than actual money, tokens that, Moss argued, a proprietor could arrange to exchange for prizes or cash. Still, it's quite a gray area. If you find yourself agreeing that a machine giving out jackpots of tokens is essentially gambling, you should probably ask whether the awarding of prize tickets at Chuck E. Cheese's or Dave & Buster's is truly any different. And then there's the whole footnote in here about, I found this fascinating. These people who call themselves the ticket kings, 1,200 people make their living this way. They go to Dave and Buster's. They win as many tickets as possible. They have tricks to win maximum numbers of tickets from the machine. This is from a 2015 article in Wired that I learned. It's a great article. You should look for it. And then they use the tickets to buy iPads. They sell the iPads on eBay. They make about $50 an hour. And so where is the line for gambling? Yes, of course, you play a Chansey machine. Coins come out, that's gambling. Tokens come out, sure, you just exchange tokens for prizes. You have to change the token for prizes for, so it's just gambling with extra inconvenience. Using pinball as a gambling device, was kind of like downloading MP3 files on Napster, in that it was a vice so universally practiced at the time that no one gave a second thought to its legality until the authorities started issuing fines to random users and shut it down. The unlikely individuals in the crosshairs were 19-year-old Sidney Turner and 38-year-old Sadie Billet, both of whom violated their city-issued pinball licenses by offering payouts to lucky patrons. As with any legal decision, the conviction of Turner and Billet, each of whom had to pay a fine of $50 or earn its equivalent in what the New York Times called a 10-day workhouse, did more than punish the defendants. It provided the legal precedent that would send pinball into back rooms for the next four decades. Jacob Murawski, the proprietor of a stationery and candy store in the Bronx, found himself in court in 1935, accused of running an illegal gambling room. Murawski's defense included a logical but risky proposition. Bring in three skilled bagatelle players. Bagatelle was basically the early name for pinball without flippers and many other things If they consistently score higher than an amateur bagatelle must be a game of skill If not it a game of luck and therefore a gambling device Think about that. Think about how confident Murawski must have felt that his experts would play the chancy bagatelle machines well enough to outscore a beginner. Think of the pressure on the three players. And imagine if a similar challenge had been issued to, say, golf. Tiger Woods, a judge, would say, if you sing this next putt, golf must be a game of skill. If you miss, well, clearly it's a game of luck. If it really was Tiger Woods on the green, he might well have sunk the putt, but he could just as easily have choked. That, unfortunately for the pin game, is exactly what happened. Quote, the youths known to their friends as successful shooters of the little balls in the pin game had been called by the defense in an effort to show that bagatelle is a game of skill, reported the New York Times. Quote, for a long time the little balls rattled around and fell into the holes in the board and bells rang as lucky shots were made, but it all came to nothing. None of the youths made a score better than 11,500, the lowest winning figure, and he could not place the balls where the justices told him to as a test of their control. To add insult to injury, a detective with no apparent bagatelle skill stepped up to play, and he scored about the same as the so-called experts. This outcome could not have been too surprising. According to the Brooklyn Public Library's blog, in a post beautifully titled, Pinball Gets Blackballed, a New York University professor in 1936 sought to test the skill question with brute force academic rigor, his students tallied their scores during a whopping 67,800 unskilled plays on pinball machines, sometimes playing blindly with machines obscured, plus another 30,000 games played by department assistants assigned to develop their skills. The skilled players did demonstrate an improved chance of winning, but only between 2% and 9% of the time. So the end of the chapter goes on to describe how pinball ends up being completely banned in New York and remains banned for the next 40 years, essentially, until, as probably most people in this room know, Roger Sharpship steps in to do the exact same demonstration showing that pinball is a game of skill by playing one skillfully. And the game he's playing is a game that was in existence in 1976 when he came in to do it. And so, of course, it has flippers. And he's got skill. And he's telling people how he's aiming and doing his shots. And the New York City Council, in May of 1976, met, watched Roger play, and re-legalized pinball in New York. Which is just one microcosm of the struggle that pinball had over those years, because this is all true of New York. But when pinball was re-legalized in New York, which is one of pinball's most told stories, Roger Sharp with the machine making it legal again. When that happened, pinball had already been legal in Los Angeles for two years. So the re-legalization happened spotily. Some places it never became illegal. Some places it remained illegal for a long time. I actually read online that in Wildwood, New Jersey, it's still illegal today. And then I found a place online, a pinball arcade in Wildwood called Jilly's. And I emailed them and said, do you know that your arcade seems to be operating illegally? And I should have said more in my emails. I think I scared them. they thought I was accusing them of something and then Andrew contacted someone who was working on a mini documentary for the New York Times and he actually explained okay, the nuance of that law is if you have a place that is only operating pinball machines that's illegal in Wildwood, New Jersey but otherwise it's okay I mean there are stories of there's a bar in Montreal that had to get pinball re-legalized before it opened which we heard yesterday Which are yesterday. Oh, OK. I missed it. It was in, what, 2016? 2017. JOHN DELANEY- 2017. Yeah, so not too long ago that the struggle is real. I'm going to read just one more excerpt before taking questions. This is something that I read at Pinball Expo also. And I figured this is a very Expo-like event, where you've got pinball over there, and the vendor hall, and you've got seminars. So this is from chapter 10, Backglass to the Future. and about where pinball could be going from here. Are you here for a pinball convention? Asks the man renting me a car at Chicago Midway Airport, explaining that he just rented another car to someone with the same destination. I confirm that I am indeed 1,000 miles from home for four days to immerse myself in everything to do with the present and future of pinball. There will be lectures, a vendor hall filled with new and rare machines, and manufacturers even smaller and newer than Jersey Jack. I love pinball, declares the agent, with an enthusiasm that I allow to distract him while I quietly decline the optional collision insurance. I wish there was some place to play it. It's exactly like Tim Arnold, the owner of the Pinball Hall of Fame, told the New York Times in 2008. The thing that's killing pinball is not that people don't like it, it's that there's nowhere to play it. Or, to be depressingly precise, it's that no one knows where to play it. Here's this Hertz employee living in Chicago, a place Gary Stern calls the capital of pinball machines, the city with one of the highest concentrations of on-location games. At a time of my visit, pinballmap.com lists 458 publicly playable machines in 184 places. And though he'd love to play a game, he doesn't know where to go. And that, in a nutshell, is pinball's exposure problem. Gary Stern once told me a story about his German colleagues from a company called Pinball Universe visiting a restaurant in Chicago, where a waitress asked about pinball machines, oh, they still make those things? The restaurant was down the street from the Stern Pinball Factory. But in a way, the best thing that could happen to pinball is happening to pinball. It's becoming a haven for startups, innovators who aren't trying to conquer the market with 30,000 games a year, but who are trying to build at least a few hundred of their own new machines. If the manufacturing tier below Stern is Jersey Jack, who at least has a few dozen full-time employees, then the tier below Jack is the grassroots pinball manufacturing movement, a boutique craft for makers, the newly empowered generation of do-it-yourselfers that looks at a pinball machine and asks, how hard could it be? How hard could it be also happens to be Pat Lawley's joke about the flippant attitude, sorry about the pun, that has led more of these startups, nearly 20 of them at the moment, to failure than to success. I'm on my way up into State 294 toward the 31st Annual Pinball Expo. I'm about to meet all the people in the various stages of finding out exactly how hard it could be. I'm just going to skip through to one little bit toward the end before I take questions I guess this next part sounds a little spoiler alert-y but it's not like it's a novel where someone dies I think pinball has a future for two reasons one is that it continues to evoke such intense emotions from those who alternately love and hate it sometimes within the same minute as long as pinball can make players feel so game-wallopingly frustrated and so high-fivingly exultant, all it needs is a stream of players willing to seek it out. The second reason has more to do with Pinball's current trajectory. The fact that there were 145 manufacturers in the 30s, 23 in 1980, then only three by the late 90s, then one, then nearly zero, but now, just in the last few years, as the book says, the count is back up to five. Well, as we've seen, we're six to eight, depending on how you register it. The influx of boutique manufacturers may be problematic in some respects, but it shows something incontrovertible, that pinball can adapt. Pinball has reflected the zeitgeist of the eras it's passed through, from the salon de jeu normalizing the pursuit of leisure, to the tug-of-war between gambling and puritanical overreach, to the public mini-expositions of innovation in the arcade age, to the individualization of entertainment that shifted pinball machines out of corner stores and into basements, to what we're seeing today, a re-empowerment of a small-time creator, using tools formerly only available to large companies to make and distribute pinball machines. We live in an age of unprecedented resources for individuals to do stuff. You can become a taxi driver for Uber or Lyft, own a bed and breakfast with Airbnb, manage a store on eBay and crowdsource startup funds. It remains to be seen whether this is a realistic business model for pinball manufacturers, but I think it says something that at least people want to try it. Quote, the forces of change and development are relentless, wrote Roger Sharp in 1977, and some people worry that the classic pinball machine may evolve into something less beautiful and appealing than it is today. Whether his concern has been borne out over the past 40 years is a matter of opinion. Some would say that today's sleek machines are more fun to play than the Marc Silk-screened beasts of the Carter years, while others believe that pinball peaked at some juncture in the irretrievable past, as often did the players themselves. But even though pinball can't always adapt to what everyone wants, it's shown a remarkable ability to do what's necessary to stay alive despite facing serious challenges. When I started writing this book, I had no idea I'd encounter anything beyond surface-level controversy. I was naive, though, and I soon discovered that the pinball world, like every other part of society, is sometimes roiled by major acrimony and abrasiveness. While many people I talked to were simply happy to bask in the fun of a complicated game, others seemed to stop controversy with every sentence. Multiple people ordered me to stop my iPhone's voice recorder function before they'd continue talking. Once for no reason, and without me noticing until later, my voice recorder stopped itself ten minutes into a two-hour interview. Many thanks to Jay Stafford of the IPDB for being a good sport about this. This isn't for your book, someone told me about their last statement, eyes narrowed, and if you print this, I'll deny it. I didn't print it. I even had someone deliver a Facebook message diatribe about another person's fiscal mismanagement slash embezzlement that led me to enlist a computer-savvy co-worker to dig through public tax records, only to learn that I have no idea how to interpret public tax records. Part of the reason for the secrecy and subterfuge is, maybe, a general fear of claiming to know where pinball is headed next. No one wants to publicly misjudge the future, especially in the light of the consequences for those who've misjudged the past. It is hard to predict the future for a game that has endured so many ups and downs, wrote Marco Rossignoli in the Complete Pinball Book. Rossignoli wrote this in 2000, when we all thought virtual reality helmets were the future. Quote, imagine a virtual reality pinball where one can pick out their favorite pinball from any era, just like songs on a jukebox, quote Sonia Oli-Muses. Insert the money, step up onto the game arena, pick the pinball, and put the visor on. Quote, nothing will ever beat playing a real-life pinball machine in a dark, sticky Florida arcade, wrote Jessica Condit in the tech blog Engadget. But pinball FX2 VR is a close, gratifying second. I'm skipping the part where I talk about what that is. It's basically like virtual reality pinball with goggles on. I played it. My brother-in-law bought an HTC Vive, which is basically like an Oculus Rift, and you can play pinball on it. It's still not the same. I think pinball will always be around, says Dan Toscanner, the admittedly biased general manager of the Silver Ball Museum in Asbury Park, New Jersey. I'm willing to agree that pinball will always be around at the Silver Ball Museum. As long as kids, both the regular kind and the technically adult kind, need something to do at the beach in the evenings between dinner and ice cream. But what about the rest of the world? Will pinball ever be as ubiquitous as it was 40 years ago? Will there be a pinball machine in your barber shop? Can you play a game while waiting for an oil change or ordering pizza? Quote, pinball deserves a better fate than it currently has, laments Roger Sharp in the documentary Pleasure Machines. The good news is that he said this in 2009, And just a few years later, pinball already has a better fate. Whether or not it will ever be as widespread as it was in 1934 or 1982 or 1992, pinball already has a new direction. I, for one, can't wait to see where it goes. So thank you so much for coming and listening rather than playing games, which is what I know everybody wants to get back to. We're just going to check on the time. In the next 15 minutes or so, I'd be happy to take questions if anybody has. Please come up here. Please go to the microphone up there Thank you I start off So you can also get this microphone up. If you're pointing out something, I got historically wrong. I'm sorry. OK, good. Well, I worked on the Pleasure Machines documentary. You saw the reissue of it. It's originally from 1997. Oh. Thank you. I knew you were going to do it. You made a very brief passing reference there to kids who are actual kids as opposed to technically adults. And that has come up quite a bit during the earlier seminars. So you have kids. You're probably trying to indoctrinate them, I would imagine. Do you have any thoughts, your ideas, about what's a good way to get kids interested in pinball, or what engages them, and should things change to make it more engaging for them, et cetera? Good question. I found that, from having kids, I found that kids will like a lot of the things that you tell them to like because they're foolish. They'll be like, isn't pinball great? They'll be like, yes, Dad. So I've got my kids that like pinball with no problem. I only own one machine because I have a small house. And I promised my wife that machine would go into the attic. And we got it in the house and found that there's no way it was getting up into the attic. So it's in the dining room. It's Monopoly, so it's a fun one. And so my kids play Monopoly sometimes. And I've brought my daughter. She's the older one. She's seven now. I've brought her to VOOC, which is this great pinball and pizza place in Bethesda, Maryland. like 10 machines, but all really, really good ones, and pizza and ice cream. So I brought her there a few times. I talked about it in the book a little bit. And then for her seventh birthday, I asked if she wanted to have a birthday party at VOOC. And she said yes. And so that was one way we silently indoctrinated an entire school of first graders, because the rule is when you invite one kid, you have to invite your whole class. So we had 24 kids invited, and they all came to VOOC. And I think my daughter was the only one who'd ever played pinball, other than some of the parents who were like, oh! So that was neat. The downside to that was that in order to do that, I had to supply the quarters. And so I got a cup of quarters there, and saying, yep, take quarters. Go ahead and play, kids. We'll have pizza soon. And the kids are just like, if you ever give kids access to money, they'll just like, OK, so I can take as much as I want? Cool. And they'll go for it. And the kids were just sitting there feeding quarters into machines. And you'd be like, crap, it's 12. And I'm like, no, no, no, stop. Stop that part. Stop that part. And my wife's like, stop stopping other kids from doing things. I'm like, no, no, you don't know what to do. Press the button first. Press the button to play. So that was one way to indoctrinate kids into pinball, just exposing them to it in that way. I think all of her classmates have birthday parties at a bouncy gym or in their house or something. We were the one pinball party. So maybe there are places near a lot of you where you can force kids to play pinball. It is a good question, though, because without new people to play pinball, pinball will die. Pinball will die when we do. But the good news is, if you look out of this door, there are families here. There are not a small number of families here. And some of the pinball places that I visited while researching the book, some of them were very clearly just adults of a certain age that were there. I went to a place called Beercade in Benson, Nebraska. And the guy said, oh, yeah, we get all kinds of people And I looked over at the pinball machines, and they're basically all grad students. And I thought, well, OK. Another night. Another night to get all kinds of people here, right? Oh, yeah, sure. But then I went to the Silver Ball Museum in Asbury Park, and there were tons of people there. And there were kids, families. There was an 11-year-old having a birthday party. So I think all it takes is to show them what it is. And that's step one, because so many people, they're not seeing it because it's not ubiquitous like it used to be. Other questions? Not really a question, but I have to laugh. I'm going on 54. So back in the mid-'80s in my Canadian city, we had the introduction of punk rockers, So the youth had tattoos and body piercings and stuff. So we had a tiny hole-in-the-wall arcade with pinball machines and a few video games. And just because punk rockers would hang out on the street corner near City Hall and the State Capitol, like they hated it, and they outlawed it pretty well. So we went from having arcades and bowling alleys and bars to having next to nothing. So still, this is now 2018, a large city still has a law limiting pinball machines to three per location. Really? What city is it? Halifax, Nova Scotia. Everyone write the government of Halifax now. So the bizarre thing with, I opened my own arcade and I scurried a lot. They didn't want to do anything because it was too embarrassing. But it goes way back. They put any type of amusement center in with a strip club, a junkyard, and another one. And it's like there's no zoning ever where you can have it. So, like, even in 2018, we just lost, like, our last strip club. Like, there's nothing left. So it's amazing how they can outlaw stuff. Yeah. And it goes away. Although there's a loophole, and I think this is in the book too, from a seminar that I heard at Expo a couple years ago, where Joshua Clay Harrell in Michigan wanted to basically put all of his pinball machines in a big place for all his friends to play, but the city was banning it and outlawing it, and there were problems, and then he was fine until one of his players jokingly put up a flyer that said, like, pinball and prostitutes, and then the city found out again. And so the loophole he ended up finding was that the city would not allow him to open an arcade, but they would allow him to open a museum. And so he calls it the Ann Arbor Pinball Museum. And it is. It's got a lot of games, puts some information up about the games. It doesn't take much effort. And they allow that. But then they said, OK, we're going to permit you to be a museum, but we're not going to permit you to be open more than four times a year. So I don't know what legal limo they're in, But people are finding rootfalls, yeah. It is a shame. And Roger Sharp talked about this to me, too. He said, you know, when he was a kid, he never understood the band. Because every week, his mother would give him $1.35 to go play in his bowling league. And she said, go bowling, but whatever you do, don't go upstairs. And one time he went upstairs, and what was upstairs was billiards. So somehow bowling was wholesome enough that she would pay him to go do it weekly. But billiards was problematic enough that she forbade him, his mother forbade him from ever looking at it. So it's just a perception among adults that whatever the kids are doing, it must be up to no good. Other questions? Wherever Sterling knew audiovisual TVL, there's only nine to all of us. Although it might be for the recording. It's for the recording. So For the five people who watch the recording. So the new next generation into pinball, what do you think that pinball manufacturers need to do to get the younger crowd into it, because they're more interested in playing Candy Crush on their smartphone? And is it also involving the streamers as well online, because we're having e-sports involved, and a lot of people want to play Overwatch or something like that rather than play pinball? DAVID CHIESA- It's a good question. Again, I think it has to do with exposure. any kid who has shown pinball and given the opportunity to play it will instantly feel what we all felt, which is that this thing is qualitatively different from a video game. And there's some pinball fanatics who like video games too, but there's some like me who just don't care about video games, but would play pinball all day if we could. It's just something different about the actual literal physics that are there. The steel ball is there. We've got the virtual pinball machines over in the vendor Hall. I'm sure some people love them. I don't. They're just not that interesting to me, because unless something has an actual physical ball, I don't really, it's just not that much fun for me. So I think that's part of it. What manufacturers can do is in many ways what they are doing. They're making games that have titles that appeal to kids. And I do think they could do a little bit more of that, a little bit more family-friendly titles. There will be people saying the opposite, saying, too many family-friendly titles bring back Playboy. And honestly, it's personal preference. For me, since I have little kids and I was looking to buy a pinball machine and I suddenly found how limited the choices were for ones that could go in my house, I think there's a sweet spot. There are some themes out there that are just kind of good for everybody. But there's no theme that's good for absolutely everybody. Even when Jersey Jack put out Wizard of Oz, and I talk about this in the book too, It was sort of a, wow, this is interesting. It's a universal kind of theme. Kids like it. Adults like it. It's timeless. It's a beautiful machine. And then it got a review from the president of the Polish Pinball Association saying, great machine, but we don't really have Wizard of Oz as a cultural touchstone in Poland. And so we can take or leave the theme. So there's no theme that everyone's going to love. I think that by making games that are a little bit more instantly accessible, that's one of the reasons why Attack from Mars is so successful. Easy to play, hard to master. It's got a great big bash target in the center. You know how to play it as soon as you get there. Same thing with Medieval Madness. You know there's a big castle. You have to hit it with the ball. So I think a lot of the things that manufacturers are doing is helpful, but it would be good to remember that it's also helpful to have something that a brand new player can look at and know exactly what to do with. And this is true even for those of us coming up to a brand new machine, we don't know what to do yet. That's part of the charm of pinball. The whole rule set would take you forever, not forever, it would take you a long time to memorize and the number of machines that you know is a limited number, unless you're someone like Bowen Kerins who knows absolutely all of them. You know these 20 games and if one of them is in the tournament, then you're very happy about it. And if it's only games that you don't know, you're not happy about it. So I think that will certainly help. It's also a very different landscape now than it used to be. In 1980, 5% of the pinball machines that were sold went into someone's house. Now that number is more like 45%. So it's a little different. They have to cater to a different market. It's not just people putting them on location. It's a lot of people just buying them for themselves. Any other questions? Last call. So what I think we should do is have you take a corner there for another five minutes. Sure. Maybe sign a few books and come back to the autograph session at 5 p.m. and sign some more. Sure. So I'll be at that table right now for the next five minutes and then I'll move out of the way so I'm not interfering with Project Pinball, son. Which you guys should stay for because they do great things. I talk about them in the book too. So thank you all so much for coming. And I guess we'll be up in all of our sessions at 5 as well.

_(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: e43eba56-4c96-414b-a890-99b215893fc0*