Pinball: A Love Story

Ever since I was a young boy, I played the silver ball. From Arlington Heights down to Charleston, I must have played them all. I've never seen anything else like it in any amusement hall. That fat, dumb and nerdy kid sure plays a mean pinball.

Finding a place to play a mean pinball is becoming harder and harder, and not just because there are barely any arcades anymore. The pinball industry all but died in the past decade, and only one company in the entire world -- yes, the entire world -- even makes pinball games commercially. That company is Stern Pinball, Inc., owned by Gary Stern and based right here in the Chicago area (Melrose Park, to be exact).

In fact, Chicago is pretty much been the center of the pinball universe. The pinball giants Bally, Williams and Gottlieb were all based in Chicago, and new games would often test in local arcades before going out to the world. The dearly departed Just For Fun arcade at the Town & Country mall in Arlington Heights would always have tons of brand new pinball games to play. I think the Terminator 2: Judgment Day pin, with its handgun launch system, got more of my money than any other.

But as home consoles got better and better, the coin-op game industry got smaller and smaller, and shoot-'em-ups, fighting games and DDR pushed pinball to the back burner. Data East, which made some decent pinball games in the '90s (Star Wars, Back to the Future and the original Simpsons table among them), was acquired by Sega, whose pinball operation was sold to Gary Stern. Williams tried a new concept called Pinball 2000, which merged a pinball table with a video display screen, and only made two games before the concept died; Williams' last table was a video-enhanced Phantom Menace game.

So only Stern is left, and they have to rely on licensed properties to help sell their machines to bars, movie theaters and game complexes like GameWorks in Schaumburg. GameWorks currently has six pinball tables, all Sterns, all based on other entertainment properties, and all in some kind of disrepair. I can't really blame them for that last one -- pinball tables must be extremely hard to maintain, and I'm sure theirs get quite the workout since hardcore enthusiasts only have a few places left where they can get their fix. The best of the games in Schaumburg is probably The Sopranos, although the Family Guy table is awfully entertaining.

None of the current Stern games, with the possible exception of the very well-designed and well-themed Lord of the Rings table, are in the same league as the best pinball tables of the '90s. The king-daddy of all pinball games must be The Addams Family, which made perfect use of its license and perfected a basic layout that designer Pat Lawlor used in many other games. Many of Lawlor's tables featured a second flipper high on the playfield used to shoot the ball up an otherwise impossible-to-reach ramp; you can play good variations of this concept on the "Pinball Hall of Fame" game available for many home consoles. (Whirlwind is my favorite.) The Addams Family table just made sense. All the goals were clear, and the shot combinations seemed natural. And the soundtrack was endlessly entertaining, using clips from the 1991 Barry Sonnenfeld film, as well as new dialogue snippets spoken by the movie's star, Raul Julia. In a way, every licensed pinball game since The Addams Family has been trying to recapture that same perfection, and very few have even come close.

I spent a large chunk of my college years playing an Addams Family table in the Taylor Hall lobby at Eastern Illinois University. If that machine is still there, which I highly doubt, I'd like to think that the scoreboard still lists SDS as the Grand Champion. (Alas, I tried to find the picture of me standing next to the display with my score on it, but failed.) I also notched high scores on Taylor's Starship Troopers machine, and on the No Good Gofers table at Thomas Hall. I'm sure there were a ton of kids at EIU who only knew me as the long-haired kid in the hockey jersey playing pinball. (My, how far I've come.)

Luckily, there is a way that we pinball junkies can get a big fix every year -- The Chicago Pinball Expo, which is coming to the Wheeling Westin Oct. 14-18. The truly hardcore can meet designers and attend seminars, but the main attraction is the showroom. You pay $15, you get to play an entire convention hall filled with pinball machines. I have somehow forgotten about this event every damn year, but my recent reacquaintance with the game I once so loved will make my attendance mandatory.

There must be an entire generation of kids that has never seen a pinball machine. Last week, I was playing the Sopranos table at GameWorks when I heard a kid ask her mom what those big flashing tables were. "That's pinball, it's an old-fashioned game," she said. That made me feel old. (And it made me wonder if kids even know what "old-fashioned" means.) But the old-fashioned games are still the best because they still feel like games. I sometimes feel like video games now are so concerned with giving you a quasi-realistic experience that they forget what it was like to just make something fun. And playing multiball mode on a pinball table is pretty darn fun.

Now get off my lawn.