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The Last Pinball Machine Factory
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Apr 25, 2008 08:27 PM
from the producing-at-full-tilt dept.
from the producing-at-full-tilt dept.
The New York Times is running a story about Stern Pinball Inc., which they say is the last pinball factory left worldwide. The story describes working there as a "game geek's fantasy job." The company president, Gary Stern, acknowledges the lack of demand, but he plans on sticking around. He also expects the industry to rebound within the next 10 years. We've previously discussed a slightly smaller version of pinball.
"Corner shops, pubs, arcades and bowling alleys stopped stocking pinball machines. A younger audience turned to video games. Men of a certain age, said [Pinball Hall of Fame operator Tim Arnold], who is 52, became the reliable audience. ("Chicks," he announced, "don't get it.") And so for Mr. Stern, the pinball buyer is shifting. In the United States, Mr. Stern said, half of his new machines, which cost about $5,000 and are bought through distributors, now go directly into people's homes and not a corner arcade."
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shifting... (Score:5, Funny)
Pinball is too expensive... (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean you pay 50p for three balls. Or 20p for three lives in most other arcade games.
So you're paying a 150% markup for seeing balls bounce around which is cute but it also seems to last a lot less time than normal video games too.
So higher cost, plus shorter games just means that people won't use the pinball tables anymore.
They'll either spend less for cheap video games or spend a little more for a much more interactive game like table football, dancing, or shooting.
Pinball killed its self... They set the price too high and over-valued their product.
Re:Pinball is too expensive... (Score:5, Interesting)
A mechanical game breaks all too often. Video games don't, and even damaged CDs are dealt with by downloading a cracked download. It's a shame -- hardly any pins anywhere any more.
Machine cost means only the richer types could afford _one_, or they were in a public place but set very difficult so the owner & renter could recoup their investments.
The Future Of Pinball [imdb.com] just came out on DVD but I've yet to see it. Looking forward to it when I can. Pinball was the solitaire of physical sports. I miss it.
Parent
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Amen, brother. I worked for Capcom's pinball division during the big crash around 1995, when all the major manufacturers packed it in. Maintenance cost was one of the driving factors. A pinball machine is a complex piece of equipment, full of finicky parts with tight tolerances. It takes constant tweaking by someone who knows what they're doing to keep it in good shape. A video game? Any high-school dropout can wipe down th
Re:Pinball is too expensive... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Pinball is too expensive... (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing I always wondered about is why pinball machines almost always seem to use regular bulbs still. I hardly ever see LED lights in them, which is dumb. The "retry" light - the one at the bottom between the pins and you get to shoot a ball again if you lose it within the first 30 seconds or so of play - burns out so fast because it's running in flash mode so much, and I've never seen a machine where it's an LED bulb.
Parent
Re:Pinball is too expensive... (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean you pay 50p for three balls. Or 20p for three lives in most other arcade games.
Pinball fails on the last two qualities. A pinball machine is outside the budget of casual gamers, so most people have to go to an arcade to play pinball. On the other hand, a gaming console sits conveniently next to their TV at home, allowing them to game whenever they have time.
Pinball has no cooperative component; it's a "single-player" game. Looking at the popularity of multiplayer and online games, I'd say gamers these days value an experience in which their friends can participate. They don't get that with pinball.
I personally love pinball, but it doesn't provide what contemporary gamers want.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You bring up an interesting observation. =)
It makes me wonder if there could be a way to make competitive pinball -- a double-ended table made more like a hill than a single slope.
Or cooperative pinball with multiple sets of flippers and catchers, where you had to co
Re:Pinball is too expensive... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and making the ball a slave to your will is very satisfying too.
Parent
Competitive Pinball ... Joust Pinball! (Score:3, Interesting)
It makes me wonder if there could be a way to make competitive pinball -- a double-ended table made more like a hill than a single slope.
This has actually been done. However, only one game that I am aware of had such a feature, and it only had a production run of 402 units. Which is probably why no one knows about it...
Joust Pinball [pinballrebel.com]
The machine features a double-ended table. The two players play across from each other. They are able to pass balls back and forth. When I've managed to track one down at the various pinball and classic arcade expos, I've found it to be a fun and unique experience. But so few got created that it is near im
Nah.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Pinball is too expensive... (Score:5, Insightful)
Arcades made zero sense to me until I had pretty much played every genre of video game. Now that I don't own a console...
You start doing other things besides playing video games all the time, like socializing and hanging out. You start thinking, hm, what could be a fun, cheap, casual date destination? And suddenly the arcade makes all the sense in the world. Think about it-- after class Friday, you walk to the local college arcade with your S.O. and play some pinball, 2-player Tekken, Galaga, whatever. Cheap, easy fun that gives you the option to make small talk about whatever, but also the option to stop and have a decent conversation when you find a common interest. BUT there are none (or very few) of the tense, silent moments where you're both just looking around trying to come up with something to talk about (like during a conventional date when you go get something to eat and sit down at Applebee's for 45m) and where your apparent lack of ability at making conversation rears its ugliest. Then, after, you can drop by the Graeters/Baskin-Robins 31 for some ice cream before you head back to your dorms.
I think us gamers were so far gone from the normal world that the obvious social genius behind the arcade was lost like the forest in the trees.
Parent
Re:Pinball is too expensive... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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I think, if pinball or arcades are to survive, they must start to appeal to young adults. Think about
Re:Pinball is too expensive... (Score:5, Insightful)
$0.25US is the key price point it always has been. $0.50US is tolerable but their insane prices today makes it so that nobody plays.
Hell by the time you master an arcade game nowdays you could by the PS3 and a couple of games. Back when Atari2600 was out I could master 5 games for the same price.
Parent
Better than arcades (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a pinball machine at my local laundromat, and it gets a buck or two out of me every time I wash clothes. I think pinball will always be around.
Playing out of spite (Score:3, Interesting)
We were back there every week feeding coins into it until we all mastered it.
I can't say I have played pinball a lot, but the machines I seem to get addicted to are the ones that are incredibly difficult and don't give you a score of a few hundred thousand points for only like 2 minutes of play.
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Nostalgia (Score:2, Interesting)
Shit. I just remembered that I played through the original Zelda last week. Oh well, at least that didn't cost me money or take up an enormous amount of room in my apartment like a pinball machine would.
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Where have they all gone? (Score:5, Interesting)
As with any first job, there Was a Mistake Made. Mine was to trouble shoot a Williams shoot 'em up game that used a rifle and a sensor board to detect where the rifle was pointed. Several wires had been cold soldered and were just hanging around without being attached. Since I don't come equipped with a third hand, I put the solder coil in my mouth so I could use my left hand to guide the wire to it's proper place, my right hand weilding the soldering iron, and by moving my head around and using my lips, guide the solder to the pad to secure wire to circuit board. (Let's leave aside for the moment the wisdom of putting 60% lead wire in one's mouth. Explains quite a bit about my later life though....)
The only problem was that I had not powered down the game to make my repairs. If you think a fresh 9 volt battery makes an impression when you lick the terminals, let me assure you that 24 volts AC leaves an even more lasting impression.
For the NEXT loose wire, I used a alagator clip. It took longer to get everything situated, but was much less painful.
A week after that, Atari came out with "Asteriods", and we put it in the current "hot spot" for pinball games. Two days later, the business where it was set called to say it was on the fritz. I went out, and found that due to the construction of the game, and the amount of quarters pumped into it, the coins had over flowed into the power supply and shorted it out.
If I remember correctly, the bucket to hold quarters was far larger and deeper than any other game to date. I don't know how much money was in the game (the techs were not permitted to empty money or to count it from the games, that was the work of the owner of the game company), but I suspect it was more than the rest of the games combined. After that, we visited the place of business daily for the next six months to empty the game.
Reliving this brings many more memories to mind, but none involve Stern games other than to note that while they were not the most trouble prone (CapCom earns that easily), nor the most money (Bally and later Atari had that tied up), Nor the most reliable (Williams had that tied up), they were like the plodders in the world. Never the best, never the worst.
One thing I remember from that time was cleaning the games. The owner of the game company was always saying "Make it shine like a diamond in a goat's a$$!". We used a glass cleaner called "Glass Wax", which went on as a pink liquid and was removed with vigerious use of a rough rag and newspaper. I can't find it now, even using Google, but it was the BEST product I ever used to clean glass and make it shine.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This company only dates back to 1999... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Maintenance (Score:2, Insightful)
Add to that the fact that assholes like myself refuse to play on crap machines, and these poor souls have a much harder job.
I believe the silverballs will b
Re: (Score:2)
Pinball games give you free games unlike video gam (Score:5, Interesting)
Too hard (Score:5, Interesting)
That just goes with the game, but that's why I don't play pinball. There's something unfair about losing that way.
Shove the machine (Score:5, Insightful)
Give the machine a decent nudge to the left or the right. The ball will continue to follow a path with its original inertia. You just move the playing field so that the ball isn't dead center.
Pinball is physical. Playing it like a video game is a sure way to lose.
Parent
Pinball Hall of Fame (Score:4, Informative)
Much easier to get the "unlimited life" hack ... (Score:5, Funny)
(Pinballs are basically big steel bearings... place HD magnet at the bottom pass the flipper and voila! Unlimited life.)
Never did manage to leverage that little tidbit of knowledge to get a date...
Coin-op videogames also disappearing (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm building my own MAME cabinet just because I miss those games, and this is the only way I'll get to play them anymore. (Or play them properly, I should say. A mouse and keyboard just isn't the same.)
Arcade games have declined mostly due to home console games and inflation. Serious game players have gravitated toward sophisticated computer and console games -- that takes many hours to play. A lot of the old classic and popular (and profitable in their day) coin-op games were the sort we would now sneeringly dismiss as "casual games". As for inflation. . . The components that go into a game machine haven't changed much, they still cost money to build. Meanwhile the quarter you plunked into a Pac Man machine in 1980 would be worth about 55-60 cents in today's money. Yet, people remain resistant to the idea of putting in two coins for only one play.
And pinball? Same thing only worse. Pinball machines are more expensive and much harder to maintain, take up more space, and have, I would say, probably a more seedy image. People still like to play pinball, but the economics are working against it.
With regard to image. . . The lady who runs the local coffee shop heard about my MAME cabinet, and now tells me she wants a cocktail-table videogame for her shop. She wants a Ms Pacman, Lady Bug, Frogger, Donkey Kong, or Arkanoid. . . something nice like that, not a Defender or SF2T machine scaring people away. I doubt whether she'd accept an upright cabinet, and although I haven't mentioned it to her, I suspect a pinball machine is right out of the question (even if she could afford one, which is also out of the question).
Here's the article text (Score:3, Informative)
MELROSE PARK, Ill. -- Being inside a pinball machine factory sounds exactly as you think it would. Across a 40,000-square-foot warehouse here, a cheery cacophony of flippers flip, bells ding, bumpers bump and balls click in an endless, echoing loop. The quarter never runs out.
But this place, Stern Pinball Inc., is the last of its kind in the world. A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000.
To most, the story seems familiar -- of a craze that had its moment, of computers that grew sophisticated, of a culture that started staying home for fun, of being replaced by video games. But to pinball people, this is a painful fading, and one that, some insist, might yet be turned around.
"There are a lot of things I look at and scratch my head," said Tim Arnold, who ran an arcade during a heyday of pinball in the 1970s and recently opened The Pinball Hall of Fame, a nonprofit museum in a Las Vegas strip mall. "Why are people playing games on their cellphones while they write e-mail? I don't get it."
"The thing that's killing pinball," Mr. Arnold added, "is not that people don't like it. It's that there's nowhere to play it."
Along the factory line in this suburb west of Chicago, scores of workers pull and twist at colored wires, drill holes in wooden frames, screw in flippers and tiny light bulbs and assorted game characters who will eventually move and spin and taunt you.
Though pinball has roots in the 1800s game of bagatelle, these are by no means simple machines. Each one contains a half-mile of wire and 3,500 tiny components, and takes 32 hours to build -- as the company's president, Gary Stern, likes to say, longer than a Ford Taurus.
Mr. Stern, the last pinball machine magnate, is a wise-cracking, fast-talking 62-year-old with a shock of white hair, matching white frame glasses and a deep tan who eats jelly beans at his desk and recently hurt a rib snowboarding in Colorado.
The manufacturing plant is a game geek's fantasy job, a Willy Wonka factory of pinball.
Some designers sit in private glass offices seated across from their pinball machines.
Some workers are required to spend 15 minutes a day in the "game room" playing the latest models or risk the wrath of Mr. Stern. "You work at a pinball company," he explained, grumpily, "you're going to play a lot of pinball." (On a clipboard here, the professionals must jot their critiques, which, on a recent day, included "flipper feels soft" and "stupid display.")
And in a testing laboratory devoted to the physics of all of this, silver balls bounce around alone in cases for hours to record how well certain kickers and flippers and bumpers hold up.
Mr. Stern's father, Samuel Stern, spent his life in the pinball business, starting out as a game operator in the 1930s -- when a simple version of the modern mass-produced pinball machine first appeared. Dozens of companies were soon producing the machines, said Roger Sharpe, widely considered a foremost historian of the sport after the 1977 publication of his book, "Pinball!"
The creation of the flipper -- popularized by the Humpty Dumpty game in 1947 -- transformed the activity, which went on to surges in the 1950s, '70s and early '90s.
"Everybody thinks of it as retro, as nostalgia," Mr. Sharpe said. "But it's not. These are sophisticated games. Pinball is timeless."
Perhaps, but even Mr. Stern acknowledges that demand is down. The hard-core players are faithful; the International Flipper Pinball Association keeps careful watch of the top-ranked players in the world. But the casual player has drifted.
"The whole coin-op industry is not what it once was," Mr.
Feels More Like Gambling Than Gaming (Score:3, Interesting)
The one thing I can tell you though is that there are a lot of pinball addicts at my company and those machines break A LOT. I've seen the brand new game break down more than a couple of times within a few months. The surfaces are roughed up and within a month you can't tell the difference from machines that you see in bars. I've seem them get repaired and there is A LOT of electronics and moving parts inside, easily rivaling a PC.
you will never know the joys (Score:4, Interesting)
Even though the ball is smooth and featureless, you can tell how it is spinning and can predict how it will rebound.
The feature rich machines which have emerged since the late 80's like the Addams Family and Twighlight Zone (a notoriously unreliable machine) are brilliantly realized fun, but for me the subtlety of the old 60s and 70s mechanical machines is just as fascinating. And the mechanical sounds are great. The replay "thwack" was produced by a solonoid knocking on a metal plate. Every manufacturer had a different component making this sound, so every machine was different.
Another great thing about pinball is that skills are transferable. There never was a good pinball player who was only good on one machine.
I spent 1000s of hours playing pinball in my teens and 20s, and I can honestly say that when the game is going great and you have saved disaster over and over and feel you have the machine under your control, you feel like a god. It's obviously not the very best feeling in the world, but I think it's comparable to what it feels like to be onstage if you are a performer. Not many video games can ever give you that feeling.
And of course, the next ball goes straight down the drain. And you miss the replay by 100 points... But then get the lucky number.
I pity those who don't get pinball.
Re:pinball is the video game for old people (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, I love it. It is a game that combines skill with the flippers, and some luck. To me,that's what keeps it interesting. While I love the old sounds of the real bells and gears on an old EM machine, the newer digital ones have so many challenges. This is a bit old of an example, but, the old Funhouse machine is a blast...you have to hit certain things to 'move the clock' to midnight, which puts the talking head, Rudy, to sleep...while he snores, you have to try to get a shot to land in his mouth...doing this, which isn't easy, a number of times...opens up bonus points, specials...etc. Some of the machines are actually a little too complex for my liking....the Star Trek Next Gen machine is one example. You have to do so much...it takes away a bit of the wild fast play....
But, recent machines, the Simpsons...is a blast. Just the right mix of fast play...with hitting special things in succession...multi-ball play...etc.
I loved the old arcade games...I still think Robotron is one of the best games every devised, but, pinball holds a special spot in my heart. Heck, in the old days....if you only had one quarter left..you could still play with a friend...each of you takes a flipper....
Parent
Re:pinball is the video game for old people (Score:5, Insightful)
Pinballs are a video game that is manifested in physical, moving parts. How is that NOT cool?
Parent
Re:pinball is the video game for old people (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:pinball is the video game for old people (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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"He seems to be completely unreceptive
The tests I gave him show no sense at all
His eyes react to light, the dials detect it
He hears but cannot answer to your call
His eyes can see, his ears can hear, his lips speak
All the time the needles flick and rock
No machine can give the kind of stimulation
Needed to remove his inner block
("Go to the Mirror!", Townshend)
Re:luck (pinball is the video game for old people) (Score:3, Insightful)
Watch a master player catch 3 of 4 balls in a multiball situation while shooting the 4th for the jackpot lane, and you'll see skill, not luck.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Star Trek Next Generation game is my favorite pinball game of all time. I love the launchers and the borg multiball -- real pressure and excitement. =)
Re:pinball is the video game for old people (Score:5, Interesting)
The combination of horrendous under-playfield ball storage, shearing joints with wires passed through them, buggy software, and a single fragile drop target that crippled the machine when broken made for a maintenance nightmare. Don't get me started on the ball trough opto channel that would warp its own PCB from overheated resistors, or the power supply that was so underpowered that you had to configure the transformer for 100 volt operation to get enough juice to keep the thing from rebooting in multiball.
Don't get me wrong, when the game is running it's one of the more entertaining games from the golden era of Williams pinballs. Unfortunately, it was far too much innovation shoehorned onto a platform that just wasn't up to the task.
You want to see perfection? Go play a Medieval Madness or a Twilight Zone.
I'll save my thoughts on the Stern family for another rant.
Parent
Re:pinball is the video game for old people (Score:4, Interesting)
Bump the machine to move the ball just right, but not enough to trigger TILT.
To a 10 year old, that's an invitation to cause havoc.
Parent
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Re:stern pinball sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
We all love to play the 'top rated games'.. but there are still a grip of great pinball machines out there. Dismissing Stern is just voiding yourself of pinball, you are not going to find anything else. Play some Spiderman, Family Guy, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, even T3.. good games. I just wish they'd make original themed machines instead of licensing everything.
>at least vpinmame will save pinball.
good lord that is a scary thought.. talk about missing the point.
Parent
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Other personal favorites are Captain Fantastic, and Black Knight:2000. there was one early 70's game I loved to death that had a circus & clowns theme & 3 flippers, but I've not seen it since about 1980.
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Don't you?