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REMEMBER THOSE CLASSIC PINBALL MACHINES FROM YOUR TEEN YEARS? WELL, THEY'RE
STILL OUT THERE, AND THEY'RE FOR SALE.
Bumper To Bumper
by Terrance Fagan
Sirens wail as bells ring and voices cry out in the darkness, taunting
voices drawing you closer. Flashes of light and color compete for you
attention, the faces of heroic men and beautiful women stare back at you
from the glass, animated scenes dance across dot matrix displays. You step
up to the machine and drop a quarter or two into the slot, press a button,
and the machine rumbles to life. A ball pops into the lane, you hit the
plunger and start to play.
Your eyes follow the silver steel ball as it careens around the playfield,
diving down an alley, ricocheting of a bumper. Voices boom out of the
speakers, guiding you as you send the ball up ramps and through gates.
Lights flash on, revealing TRIPLE SCORE and EXTRA BALL, and quickly,
teasingly flash off again. The score continues to mount as you send the
ball back into the game with the smack of a flipper. Extraneous noises and
distractions fade into the background. Now there are no deadlines, no
bills, no career pressures. It's just you and the game. You're playing
pinball.
The pinball obsession has gripped the United States (and a surprising
number of other countries) since its explosive birth in the 1930's. In the
past 65 years, pinball has gone from a simple marble game to the classic
wood-railed beauty of the 1950's to the solid-state, digitized,
multi-leveled, maddening machine that it is today.
The financial impact of that appeal is considerable. In 1994, pinball made
up roughly 38 percent, about $3 billion, of the $8 billion-a-year U.S.
coin-operated amusements industry (video took about 45 percent and the
remainder went to skee ball, arcade baseball and the like). By comparison,
the U.S. film industry grossed about $5.4 billion in 1994. But pinball
reached its billions a quarter at a time.
A lot of these quarters didn't come from kids. Wander into New York City's
Broadway Arcade any weekday evening, and you're as likely to see men in
suits-lawyers, corporate executives, Wall Street brokers, Madison Avenue ad
men-at the machines as well as kids in baggy jeans. (Although increasing
numbers of women are playing pinball, it is still a male-dominated
pursuit.)
But the action isn't just in the arcades and bars. The number of private
pinball collectors is growing. For surprisingly reasonable prices (about
$350 to $500 on average for a restored machine), pinball collectors,
predominantly men between the ages of 25 and 55, are buying the machines
they remember from childhood summers at the beach arcades, teen years at
the local pizza joint or their collage nights at the student pub.
Whether they're searching out machines from their youth or gathering
particular genres of pinball history, an estimated 2,000 to 5,000
collectors worldwide have created an expanding subculture, complete with
books, magazines, conventions, clubs, competitions and Internet sites, all
dedicated to the pursuit of the silver ball.
What is the appeal of that 2.8 ounce, 1 1/16-inch-diameter steel ball? Ask
10 collectors and you'll get as many different answers.
"Pinball gives three things Americans demand: instant gratification,
fast response and aesthetics," says Richard Bueschel, a collector and
author in the Chicago suburb of Mt. Prospect. "There might have been a
pinball machine named Siesta," he says with a laugh, "but I can't
think of it." (Bueschel, a historian of pinball and other
coin-operated machines, is writing The Encyclopedia of Pinball. Volume one
is due out in November.)
To Sarasota, Florida, physician and cigar aficionado Randy Silverstine,
owner of about 120 machines, pinball's appeal is in its individuality.
"Most lay people think, 'Pinball is pinball,'" he says.
"They don't necessarily care which machine they put their money into.
But each machine has its own personality; it plays differently, for
collectors and others who play a lot of pinball."
Tim Arnold stopped counting when his collection of pinball machines topped
1,000. "It's beyond a hobby," he says. "It's a
sickness." A former owner of amusement arcades near Lansing, Michigan,
Arnold decided to keep his old pinball machines rather than accept the
"insulting" $50 a piece offered in trade by dealers of the new
machines. He bought a building and stated stacking- and the machines added
up. "The floors were sagging, the back wall was ready to come down,"
Arnold recalls. "There was stuff back there that I didn't even know I
had." It took him about two years during the early 1990's to move his
collection from Michigan to a specially built aircraft hangar behind his
new home in Las Vegas.
For Roger Sharpe, director of licensing for WMS Games Inc., parent company
of pinball and amusements giant Williams Bally/Midway, pinball's appeal is
metaphysical: "In pinball, I am the mad scientist. I am the one that's
creating those things and getting the thing to reach out or the Borg ship
to fire back at me in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I am the one who's
effecting what is happening, what's taking place. That's the part that's
magical."
Sitting in his office at the Williams factory in Chicago, surrounded by pinball
artwork and plastic figures of comic book characters, Sharpe, 47, warms to
his subject. "We look at the brave new world of interactive
entertainment with its 'total immersion.' What's more immersive than being
in a pinball machine? If you're really at one with the game, if you're
really in sync, or as an old buddy of mine once said in Sports Illustrated,
if you're really in 'the zone,' you are the pinball machine. There's no two
ways about it. For that 10 seconds or 20 seconds or a minute, where everything
Is just kind of clicking, there's no difference between you and the game.
Both of you have the same rhythm; it's almost as if both of you have the
same heartbeat. So, if you could lose yourself in that world, in that
reality, you don't need a headset.
Pinball as we know it today is a Chicago-born child of the Great
Depression, but its ancestry lies in an eighteenth century parlor game of
the French nobility called bagatelle. Using a small cue, or pusher, on a
slanted table, players shot balls into holes on the playfield. When French
soldiers crossed the Atlantic in the early 1780's to aid the American
colonists in their revolution, they brought their bagatelles with them,
The game caught on, and for the next century, bagatelle and its variations
would spread with American expansion to saloons and drawing rooms across
the continent. (an 1962 political cartoon shoed President Lincoln playing
bagatelle in a sleazy saloon). In 1870 a toy manufacturer in Cincinnati
named Montague Redgrave brought bagatelle to the next level, replacing the
cue with a spring plunger. Bagatelles for adults, and smaller versions for
children (the plastic marble games you played as a child were a type of
bagatelle) proliferated into the next century. But it took a worldwide economic
collapse before bagatelle truly took off.
The year was 1931. The United States was in the depths of the Depression;
breadlines and unemployment were the norm. But one industry was about to
explode. In Youngstown, Ohio, a small company called Automatic Industries
created a coin-operated bagatelle known as Whiffle Board (then known as a
marble or "pin" game, for the pins surrounding the scoring
holes), while Chicago's In & Out-Door Games Company Inc. presented the
Whoopee Game. They were a hit, but the Whoopee, at $175, was prohibitively
expensive. Later that year in a Chicago garage, a man named David Gottlieb
and his family created a colorful marble game at one-tenth the price,
called Baffle Ball.
What was once a fad became a phenomenon. For $17.50, druggists and
tobacconists, barkeeps and barbers could buy a countertop-sized Baffle Ball
that, at seven balls for a penny, often paid for itself within three or
four days. "All of these other businesses were failing, but the people
buying these machines, their problem was that they couldn't lift the
machines because they were so full of pennies," says Mark Houk, who is
filming a documentary on pinball with his partner, Howard Cook, and their
Revere, Massachusetts-based production company, ESS Productions.
"Everybody was out of work and out of luck, and here is this little
device on a drugstore counter, and for a penny you could forget you were
unemployed and just play your troubles away." The game's appeal was
not lost on the literati of the time. In William Saroyan's 1939 play, The
Time of Your Life, a "marble-game addict" named Willie spends the
entire drama trying to defeat a pin game in a man versus machine parable.
In the end, he succeeds.
Baffle Ball sold 50,000 units in less that six months and set Gottlieb on
the financial path that would make his name synonymous with pinball but he
couldn't make nearly enough Baffle Balls to meet the overwhelming demand.
Tired of the back orders, Gottlieb distributor Ray Moloney introduced a
game at the 1932 Chicago Coin Machine Exposition that raised the stakes.
It was called Ballyhoo, taking its name and design from a popular magazine
of its day. The game was flashy, it had a hugely successful promotional
campaign, it even had a jingle: "What'll you do in '32,
Ballyhoo!" ? and in the depths of the Depression 75,000 machines were
sold in seven months. The company that grew from Ballyhoo took its name
from the game, becoming the amusement giant Bally.
With the incredible success of these games, the pinball industry exploded.
Home to the majority of manufacturers, Chicago became the pinball capital
of the world, a title it still holds. By the end of 1932, there were about
150 pinball manufacturers (many of them one- or two-man operations),
creating hundreds of different games. The competition was fierce, with
companies stealing ideas from each other faster than you can say
"patent lawsuit." Of the 150 manufacturers in business in 1932,
only 14 survived to 1934.
The more successful firms offered innovations in sound, electricity, and
game design at a dizzying pace. Electricity, lighted back-glasses, plastic
bumpers and legs for the countertop machines were all in use by 1937. A
young California game designer named Harry Williams (who in 1942 founded
the firm that thrives today as Williams Electronics Inc., parent company of
WMS Games) created the infamous tilt device in 1932-a ball on a pedestal
that, when disturbed, would fall on a metal ring and stop play. Williams
soon improved on his tilt with a pendulum device that is still in use
today.
To attract the attention of players and operators in a glutted market, some
pinball manufacturers turned to machines that offered payouts to
high-scoring (and high-paying) players in the form of returned nickels, or
tickets and tokens redeemable by the operators. By the mid 1930's,
lawmakers in cities and towns across the United States began to view
pinball as a threat, claiming that the machines amounted to gambling. Even
Hollywood got involved. In the 1936 Warner Brothers gangster film Bullets
or Ballots, Humphrey Bogart played a lowlife who forced pinball machines on
helpless owners of mom-and-pop stores.
Municipalities around the United States began banning "payout"
pinball, in which an increase in coins played increased a player's possible
return. Many cities banned pinball altogether rather than bothering to
distinguish between payout and amusement versions. In 1941, New York City
Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia delighted in photo opportunities in which he would
smash machines with a sledgehammer or watch as they were dumped into the
East River. By 1942, pinball was banned in Los Angeles, New York and, in
painful irony, its birthplace of Chicago. It was a ban that would last for
at least 30 years.
Production of new games was suspended during the Second World War, with
pinball factories turning out aircraft parts and ammunition. A few
entrepreneurs refitted old games, often with patriotic motifs-targets
picturing Hitler and Tojo were popular. But at war's end, pinball was again
off and running.
The game took a great leap forward one day in 1947, when a D. Gottlieb
& Co. designer named Harry Mabs, working on a spring bumper,
accidentally touched two wires together. The bumper jumped. Recognizing the
potential of his discovery, Mabs created a swinging bumper, similar to the
bats of arcade baseball games, that was activated with the press of a
button. Three pairs of his first "flipper bumpers," as he called
them, when into Gottlieb's 1947 Humpty Dumpty, and with it, Mabs turned a
game of chance into a game of skill. No longer did players have to watch
helplessly as the ball rolled to its inevitable "draining," that
is, out of play. Although the flippers on Humpty Dumpty and other early
games faced out, not in, and were placed in the middle of the game, the
idea caught on instantly. Flipperless games disappeared from the market. On
a 1948 machine called Triple Action, Genco designer Steve Kordek added
power to the flippers and moved them to the bottom of the game, where they
are still placed to
day.
The decade from 1948 to 1958 is known as pinball's "golden age,"
when pinball giants Gottlieb and Williams battled it out and a number of
smaller firms -- Genco, Chicago Coin, Marvel Manufacturing and United --
contributed a few games of their own. Gottlieb controlled about 70 percent
of the market during the 1950s, averaging a new machine every three weeks
(compared to today's pinball manufacturer's average of about four a year).
It was a time when pinball reached new heights of backglass artwork and
game design.
"Gottlieb, far and away, was the Cadillac of the industry," says
collector Gordon Hasse Jr., an ad agency senior vice president in New York
City and owner of more than 100 Gottlieb pinball machines from that era.
"It was a combination of superior artwork and superior design. The guy
who was designing for Gottlieb through most of the '50s was a gentleman by
the name of Wayne Neyens. He was probably the industry's primo designer,
certainly at that time, and probably of any time. The collaboration between
Neyens and the artist, Leroy Parker, was that most incredible and
productive of any in the history of the game."
Yet even during its golden age, pinball had its detractors.
"Bingo" pinballs offering replays angered lawmakers, who believed
the games were created to dodge federal antigambling laws on payout
pinball. On some machines, the player could win up to 999 free games in an
afternoon, which operators thoughtfully redeemed for cash. Clergymen and
mothers spoke out against the evils of pinball, noting the unsavory
locations where machines were often found, such as pool halls and bars, and
decrying the dangers of teenage boys wasting their time and money in front
of machines that frequently featured scantily clad, busty women. What's
more, pinball also had to compete with the latest fads, such ad drive-in
movies, coin-operated shuffle alleys and the resurgence of bowling.
The industry responded in the 1960s with new enticements for the player: an
add-a- ball feature (which gave high scorers extra balls instead of extra
games, satisfying players and lawmakers alike, if not the clergy), drop
targets, spinning targets, score-to-beat counters, mushroom bumpers and
other innovations. Bally, dormant through the 1950s, returned with a series
of innovative games in the late 1960s.
The game received a huge boost in 1969, when The Who released the world's
first rock opera: the story of a pinball wizard named Tommy. When the album
was made into a movie in 1975, pinball soared once more. (The two games
used in the film -- Elton John played a 1965 Gottlieb Buckaroo and Roger
Daltrey had "such a soulful wrist" on a 1965 Gottlieb Kings and
Queens -- and the two games inspired by the movie, Bally's Wizard (1975)
and Captain Fantastic (1976) have all become hot collectibles.) In 1975,
pinball was grossing 80 percent of the coin-op amusement industry income.
The following year, a pinball fan in New York City celebrated America's
bicentennial with a little revolution of his own. "I grew up in Chicago
and never played pinball," Roger Sharpe recalls. "You had all the
manufactures based in Chicago, providing thousands of jobs and considerable
revenue, yet you couldn't play the game. It was kind of like not allowing
people to drive cars in Detroit, or god forbid you ate cereal in Battle
Creek." As an adult, Sharpe would have the last laugh. Testifying
before the New York City council at a hearing on pinball in April 1976,
Sharpe, than a 27-year-old-magazine editor in Manhattan, played three balls
on a Gottlieb Bankshot, explaining to his audience as he played how pinball
was a game of skill, not of chance. Then he took a gamble -- the pinball
world's equivalent of Babe Ruth's legendary called home run in the 1932
World Series against the Chicago Cubs.
Sharpe tells what happened next: "Even down to this plunger,' I told
them, 'there's skill. If I pull this back the right way, I should be able
to send the ball into the middle slot.' I actually specified a lane, which,
in retrospect, I probably should not have done. I pulled back the plunger,
and wouldn't you know, boom boom, it went straight down where I had sad [it
would go]. These people kind of threw up their hands and said, 'All right.
Enough. Fine, thanks.'"
The council reinstated pinball in New York City that summer and Chicago
followed suit a few months later. (Los Angeles had legalized pinball in
1972.) After nearly 35 years it had taken a Chicago native son to bring
pinball home again.
At the same time, pinball was undergoing its own revolution. The mid-'70s
saw the introductions of solid-state pinball machines. The numerous
advantages of solid-state circuitry, with its ability to create sound and
more sophisticated playfield action, increase machine memory, produce cost
savings in design and constructions and (usually) effect greater machine
reliability, led to the twilight of pinball's 40 years of
electromechanicals.
But the computer revolution was a two-edged sword. While pinball was going
high-tech, the greatest threat in its history was invading arcades in the
guise of digital space ships and dot-chomping circles. Video games had
arrived.
The Pac-Mans, Space Invaders, Asteroids and other video games of the early
'80s dealt a staggering blow to the pinball industry. Pinball creators fought
back with increasingly innovative game designs, even borrowing concepts
from video games, but to no avail. By 1984, pinball's 80 percent share of
the amusements market had plummeted to 5 percent. To nonbelievers, the game
seemed doomed to pop culture's scrap heap.
But, again, pinball came back. By 1992, players were feeding $2.5 billion
into pinball games in the United States; overseas markets added $10
billion. (Sixty percent of the pinball production in the United States--the
only nation making pinballs today--is exported.)
Filmmaker Houk offers his theories for the resurgence: "For a while,
people had been in this virtual reality thing with video. Maybe people
started to realize that pinball is reality; it's not virtual reality. The
flipper smacks, the ball hits the glass, it goes around the thing; it's
very physical, it's sexual, you're really getting into it, OK? Also,
pinball fought back with multilevel games, dot matrix animations, more
sophisticated voice sampling and playfield gimmickry that had never been
seen before."
New York collector Hasse is one of many pinball aficionados who wasn't
surprised by its comeback. "I love a quotation from [pinball designer]
Harry Williams. Harry used to like to say, 'The ball is wild.' It's really
true," the ad executive says. "There's nothing that is unexpected
that can happen in a video game. It's all programmed. It's electronically
predestined. There's ultimately predictability. And pinball is always
unpredictable, because it's subject only to the laws of physics. There's no
such thing as a preprogrammed ball. I think for that reason--the
randomness, the unpredictability, the fact that each ball, each game will
be subtly different than the one before--pinball will always endure."
The past few years have been a mixed bag for pinball. The industry's four
manufactures--Williams Bally/Midway (an 800-pound gorilla, with a 70- to
80-percent market share), Premier Technology (which bought the Gottlieb
name), Sega (which bought 19080's pinball maker Data East) and a video
game-financed newcomer, Capcom, all based in the Chicago area--are
experiencing a slump. Part of that reason is that they are victims of their
own success. From a manufacturer's standpoint, the ideal pinball machine
spends about a year in an "A" location, such as a high-profile
arcade or amusement center, and then moves down the distribution
chain--smaller arcades, bowling alleys, pizza parlors, convenience stores,
bars, Laundromats, airports and rest stops, finally ending in storage or
the home market.
But games such as Williams' Black Knight (1980), Pin.Bot (1986), Bride of
Pin.Bot (1991) and Fun House (1990), with a taunting three-dimensional
dummy on the playfield called Rudy, and Bally's Eight Ball Deluxe (1981),
Elvira and the Party Monsters (1989) and Twilight Zone (1993) were such
huge hits with players that the games lingered in locations far longer than
manufacturers would have liked. They were flattered, but flattery doesn't
sell new machines.
Perhaps the worst "offender" is Bally's 1992 hit The Addams
Family. It has been voted the top-ranked pinball machine four years in a
row and it set a flipper-era total production record of 22,000 machines.
Based on the 1991 movie of the same name, the game features an electric
chair, train wrecks, a haunted house and a clever script, with the voices
of the film's stars, Raul Julia and Anjelica Houston.
"Addams Family is one of those enigmatic phenomena--the most
successful, most honored pinball machine of all time," says Sharpe.
"Obviously, Addams Familys that came out in '92 are still in active
operation in most 'A' locations. You had something that had international
notoriety--people remembered it from the [1960's] TV series or the old
Charles Addams cartoons--brought to life in a pinball machine. You had some
unique mechanical devices--Thing's hand coming out and reaching for the
ball, "Thing Flips," which was an automatic flipper on the side
of the cabinet where if you touched the button, if the ball came at the
right time would actually flip automatically for you. You had really solid
game rules--there was a full choreography of events and activities from the
logic of a pinball machine."
But most importantly, says Sharpe, "The guiding principle for a
successful game in pinball design has always been: something that is easy
to understand and difficult to master. If anything, The Addams Family
resides as the quintessential example of that." Sharpe himself has
designed about a dozen games. One of the, Sharpshooter, is on permanent
display in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Sharp is pictured
on the backglass with his wire-rimmed glasses and walrus moustache, dressed
in Western garb. "It's my homage to High Noon," he says with a
laugh. "I play Gary Cooper's part."
A recent tour of the Williams factory in Chicago with Sharpe offered a
glimpse of where pinball is headed. Workers were busily assembling the
3,000 parts of one of Williams' latest games, Johnny Mnemonic, based upon a
William Gibson science fiction story about cyberspace that became a 1995
movie starring Keanu Reeves. The machine features a launch button in place
of a plunger and a pair of magnetic "data gloves" that snatch up
pinballs, which the player than moves to a "Cyber Matrix"
magnetic ball lock. Line up three balls and they're launched into
"multiball," where all three are in play simultaneously.
"We're fortunate to have 10 design teams here doing pinball,"
says Sharpe. (There are fewer than two dozen pinball game designers in the
world.) "So we have probably the lion's share of pinball designers,
not the least of which is Steve Kordek, a legend and a true patriarch of
pinball, who has been in the business since 1937. He heads up pinball
design here. He's a font of wisdom and knowledge who, as he says, works
with these 'young kids,' guys in their 40's and 30's, and some in their
20's/ It's nice to have that perspective."
Unlike the simpler days of game-a-month, two-man pinball teams in the
1950's and '60s, today's more complex machines take a crew of creators nine
to 18 months--and about $1.5 million--from concept to released machine.
"With today's team," says Sharpe, "you have a lead designer,
a programmer who is going to create rules, a graphic artist who is going to
make it look wonderful and a sound [engineer] or two. Now, with the
addition of dot matrix displays for scoring and other visual effects, you
probably have one or two people on that, you have a mechanical engineer, a
technical engineer, so you are probably looking at a core group of six to
eight individuals who are married at the hip--or, more importantly, married
at the brain; for what you are doing is giving birth to a creative
idea."
Visit an arcade these days and you'll find pinball machines light years
removed from what you remember growing up. Bally's Apollo 13, based on the
hit movie, has a 13-ball multiball (with the potential for 13 balls in play
simultaneously); Bally's Stargate has a 3-D pyramid on the playfield that
swallows balls; while Bally's Attack from Mars, just released this spring ("a
throwback to '50s sci-fi movies," says Sharpe), features flying
saucers, a dot matrix screen with wisecracking women in peril, and, yes,
little green men leaping around the playfield.
While commercial pinball is continuing its latest comeback, the collector
pinball market is taking off. Home demand is "very high," says
Steve Young, the 43-year-old owner of The Pinball Resource in
Langrangeville, New York, and collector, with partner John Fetterman, of
about 300 classic pinball machines that he hopes to one day put in a
pinball museum. The Pinball Resource is probably the world's largest
supplier of pinball parts for the hobbyist (The Mayfair Amusement Co. in
Ridgewood, New York, is another large supplier), with an inventory of about
one million parts, from bumpers to bulbs, flippers to fuses. ("I think
it's over a million," says Young. "Anybody who doesn't believe it
can come and count ;em. I won't pay them to count 'em, but they can come
and count 'em.")
When you enter into Young's sprawling split-level home, the site of The
Pinball Resource, it's almost like walking into a pinball machine itself.
Two machines sit on the living room floor with their guts spilling out
("I've been meaning to get to those," he mutters); backglasses
and old bagatelles line the hallways. One room is filled with classic
Williams games; another room is lined with classic Gottliebs. These games
are in perfect working order, but to play them, you'd first have to remove
the piles of schematic drawings of countless other pinballs sprawled across
the tops of the machines. Young's office is crowded with file cabinets
filled with more schematics, manuals, flyers and pamphlets. "We have
all of the documentation that anybody ever had on pinball," Young
says. The basement is room after room of shelves lined with labeled
boxes--coils, rubber rings, bumper caps, etc.
Another room is his workshop, where he makes replacement parts for
particularly hard-to-find playfield pieces. "It's a controlled
madhouse," Young admits. " I don't live in my house anymore.
Pinball lives in my house."
With a customer base of about 5,000 pinball enthusiasts, Young is seeing a
rise in collecting. But as of now the price of a pinball machine is still
quite low.
"You can buy these games at surprisingly reasonable prices," says
Sharpe. "Brand new games? No. But you can get a good game for probably
in the $300 to $500 range on up, and have something that's going to be very
entertaining for a long period of time, that can become a very cherished
possession."
The first order of business is to choose what game you want. Since the
invention of the flipper in 1947, he U.S. pinball industry has created
about 1,200 different machines. One of those is the game that, for whatever
reason, haunted your adolescence. For some collectors, it's the first game
they ever played; for others, it's the game they couldn't beat. The search
for that game is the way many collectors get started.
Before you set out, a few caveats are in order. First, collecting pinballs
can be addictive. Just ask Gordon Hasse, Steve Young, or Randy Silverstein.
Or Tim Arnold, with his 1,000 plus machines. "It's not your average
hobby," Arnold says. "Two or three in the basement is an average
hobby. We kind of define collectors as one-digit, two-digit, and
three-digit collectors. The one-digit collector has a couple in the his
basement, while the two-digit collector, he no longer has his cars in his
garage. The three-digit collector is spending all his money on a storefront
or a bunch of U-Store-Its and has no money left at the end of the
month."
And what do they say about four-digit collectors? "Financially and
timewise, it makes absolutely no sense to have that many," he admits.
Second, pinballs are not stamps or coins. At six feet high, four and a half
feet long and 275 pounds (on average), adding a pinball to your collection
may mean adding a wing to your house. So if you live where extra space is
hard to come by, grab a tape measure.
Third, take a little self-appraisal. How handy are you? Pinballs are a
fabulous conglomeration of wood and metal and glass and wires and solenoids
and coils and transformers and microchips and circuits and plastic and
paint and--well, you get the idea. For many collectors, that's part of the
attraction. Arnold has totally rebuilt about a fifth of his
collection--"180 of 'em, up and running," which he claims is the
largest operating collection in the world. Each game takes about 40 to 80
hours to recondition. When he rebuilds 400 or 500 of them, Arnold hopes to
open a pinball museum, or as he calls it, "a big-ass pinball
arcade," in downtown Las Vegas.
Hasse also has dreams of opening a museum one day. "I love to repair
them," says Hasse. "It's therapy to me. All of my work during the
day is head work. It's refreshing to be able to do something tactile,
physical. I love nothing better on a rainy Saturday than to grab a six-pack
of beer and tinker with one of these things."
But Hasse warns, "You almost have to become self-sufficient if you
want to become a major collector. First of all, it's very hard to find
people who can work on these things, and it's even harder to be able to
afford them. Generally speaking, the only people available to do this are
people who are route mechanics for current operators or distributors, and
the only time you're going to be able to get them to do anything with your
stuff is on their off time."
Assuming that you have a barn in your yard and you teethed on Allen
wrenches as a baby, your next step is do y our research. "Don't buy a
game you don't know something about," says Dick Bueschel.
The first step is to subscribe to Jim Schelberg's pinGame journal, a
"casually monthly" magazine published in Plymouth, Michigan, by
Schelberg, 46, a podiatrist with about 50 pinballs in his collection. He
started the magazine in 1991, about a year after he received his first
game, a 1959 Gottlieb Straight Shooter, from his wife as a birthday gift.
"I've always liked to take old things and make them look new
again," he says.
PinGame journal is a pinball collector's sourcebook, with features on
pinball events, machines new and old, letters from other collectors,
industry news and a classified section called "The Good Stuff."
It's a great place for the budding collector to become market savvy.
Next you should decide in what type of machine you want. Are you attracted
to the classic lines and the nostalgia of the older electromechanicals, or
has the flash and speed of the newer solid-state games caught your eye? Are
you collecting a certain theme, such as games with a billiards or poker
motif (both very popular areas)? Do you want a collection of
"firsts": first flippers, bumpers, drop targets, etc.?
Or perhaps you prefer pinballs for their backglasses. With the
electromechanicals, that pretty much means two artists: Leroy Parker and
George Molentin.
"Leory Parker, probably one of the best backglass artists of all time,
was great at drawing those Vargas-type girls," says Mark Houk.
"There's no such thing as a flat-chested woman on a backglass. The
reason for that is pinball has always been geared towards young males.
Everybody says, 'Oh, pinball's for everybody.' Baloney. Look at the
backglass--it tells you one thing: It's geared to young men. There's not
one backglass around, hardly, without beautiful women on it."
Arnold also singles out Parker's particular style. "His specialty was
always--we call them 'Parker Babes'--women in various stages of undress. It
was just amazing the quality as well as the quantity of what he did. And he
did it not only for Gottlieb. He did it for Genco, Chicago Coin, Marvel
Manufacturing, a lot of the Williams games and a lot of the United
games--the backglass art, the playfield are and the cabinet designs. As far
as we can tell, [his prolific output] would only be humanly possible if he
came to work at 8, sat down and drew till noon, took a half hour off for
lunch and drew till 5, from 1937 or '38 though 1964." Arnold estimates
Parker did the artwork for more than a thousand games.
Molentin, an artist at Williams during the 1950s, had a very different
style than Parker, says Hasse. "Molentin was much more in the mold of
the great fashion illustrators, whereas Parker was much more in the genre
of the cartoon, or panel artists--the Milt Caniffs, Wallace Woods, Alex Raymonds.
Parker tended to draw his women in kind of a very stereotypical, cartoon,
leering sort of way. They were always wasp-waisted, melon-breasted, just
fabulous-looking women. George, on the other hand, his women were at once
more realistic and yet more romantic. He drew them a lot softer; they were
clearly no less voluptuous, but they were always ladies. You always had a
sense that there was a refinement to George's illustrations that were
lacking in Parker's. It was a more sophisticated approach, to be honest with
you."
Some collectors collect nothing but backglasses, dubbing them an art form.
"They are the Tiffany glass of tomorrow," predicts Bueschel.
To the big question: Do you want to collect a certain manufacturer of a
certain era? If the answer is yes and the make is Gottlieb
electromechanical flippers from 1947 to 1960, be prepared for a lot of
company. Games from pinball's golden age still dominate the market, and
Gottlieb dominates those games. Many of the machines pictured on these
pages--the Dragonette (a 1954 spoof on the popular Dragnet radio serial of
the day), Grand Slam (1953), Happy Days (1952), Lady Luck (1954) and the
1953 Queen of Hearts (all five are from Gordon Hasse's collection)--are
Gottlieb single-player games with wood rails, among the most popular of
their time and in great demand among collectors today. According to Young,
Gottlieb wood-rails are running about $900 each in restored condition.
So what is it about the electromechanical Gottliebs?
"The feel of the game, first and foremost," says Arnold, who
boasts 382 of the 384 types of electromechanical flipper games Gottlieb
ever made. "It feels more solid, the parts are definitely beefier. And
there was always more power to the flippers and bumpers. Also there was a
continuity of design. Every game from '47 through '83 was designed by one
of three guys. One guy did 162 games in a row. Also, the Gottlieb game was
always more of a player's game and less of a punter's game. The Bally games
were more for guys on dates and guys in the bus station who were killing
some time. The were faster playing, and there was less risk and
reward."
But Steve Young sees the demand for electromechanicals changing. "The
hobby's moving. The guy who's 40 years old now, 15 years ago he played a
solid-state game, not an electromechanical one. He's looking for Kiss or
Playboy or Mata Hari or Black Knight or Firepower, because that's the game
he remembers playing," Young says. "It changes the flavor of what
the collector base is, and the new collectors tend to collect newer games.
If you go to shows, you see a lot of newer games. And a person who likes to
'50s games may be disappointed, because there may not be a representation
of '50s games like what we're hoping to see."
Where do you shop games? The answer is easier that you think. "You can
run an ad in the papers saying, 'I pay cash for pinballs,' and the phone
will ring off the hook," Arnold says. "People have 'em in their
basements, they've had 'em there for 30 years, they haven't run them, they
wanna get rid of them. Distributors--the manufacturer's selling arm--have
huge quantities of them. They're around, and it's no real trick to find
them. But usually, an operator would never park a game that works. I've
never heard of it. And usually the stuff you get out of the basement is in
pretty bad shape, 'cause it's been sitting there for 30 years."
Attending pinball conventions and coin-op shows and meeting other
collectors is a good way to scout out sources.
But caveat emptor. Know what to look for in a pinball. Is it fun to play?
If you buy a game that bores you a week after you bring it home, you're
stuck with a 275-pound paperweight in your rec room. And when considering
the condition of the game, the most important concern is the appearance.
"For the serious collector, cosmetic condition is paramount,"
says Hasse. "We can do almost anything by way of getting the machine
working again, but if the playfield is badly scratched, or if there's a lot
of paint missing," leave the game where it stands. The same goes for
the backglass. If it's peeling--and the way to check is by looking at the
glass from behind, not from the front--then either forget the game or
prepare to shop for an artist or a reproduction backglass--if it's
available. But unless the games is valued at $800 or more, it's rarely
worth the expense.
How else do you judge a game? "You should do the 'sniff test,'"
says Arnold. "Stick your nose inside, and if it smells like it's been
wet, or you cam visibly see rust on any of the mechanisms, that's a big
no-no." And beware of pinball games sold in home versions by Sears,
Montgomery Ward and other retailers in the 1960s and '70s. They were
designed with highly inferior materials and poorly constructed; collectors
call them the absolute dogs of the pinball world.
Now comes the haggling. Collectors and distributors may drive a harder
bargain that the casual game owner, buy chances are you're getting a
machine in far better condition. Prices generally range from $300 to $500
for a decent game in fine condition, but they can top $1,000 for games in
great demand. New games still in commercial distribution usually run about
$3,000 or more.
When you find the game of your dreams, there's a satisfaction in it that
you can't get from many other collectibles. "I know most of the major
collectors," says Hasse, "and I don't know anybody who's in it
for the [financial] return."
People collect pinballs because they are seeking a piece of their youth, a
piece of Americana. It's an art form you can knock around. It's a
collectible that doesn't sit on a shelf; it is made to be played. And when
that game is home and humming, you can follow Randy Silverstine's
suggestion. He fires up a La Gloria Cubana or Moore & Bode, turns off
the lights and plays. In the darkness, all you can see is the glow of his
cigar and the glow of the game.
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