Twenty years ago pinball seemed to be circling the drain. Today it is thriving again, both in arcades and in people’s homes
Northwest Side, Ian, a 57-year-old assistant manager, looks at the Rick and Morty pinball machine. “This is a frustrating machine,” he says. He steps up and takes his turn—one of a group of four, including your correspondent—bashing the flippers to try to direct the ball into the garage of a model house with a flying saucer at the top. A screen above records the scores and shows clips from theshow, a bizarre cult cartoon. When you hit the right targets, the show moves along.
Twenty years ago, pinball seemed to be circling the drain. In the 1980s and 1990s video games stole market share from the mechanical sort, and home games-consoles stole market share from arcades. By 2000, the Chicago-based maker of the Bally and Williams brands of pinball machines, then the biggest manufacturer, closed its loss-making pinball division to focus on selling slot machines. Yet today, pinball is thriving again, both at places like Logan Arcade and in people’s homes.
Sales of new machines have risen by 15-20% every year since 2008, says Zach Sharpe, of Stern Pinball, which afterclosed became the last remaining major maker. “We have not looked back,” he says. Next year the firm is moving to a new factory, twice the size of its current one, in the north-west suburbs of Chicago. Sales of used machines are more buoyant still—some favourites, such as Stern’s Game of Thrones-themed game, can fetch prices well into five figures.
A couple of generations ago many states banned pinball, seeing the machines as encouraging gambling. In some cities the mafia had a monopoly on servicing them. In 1940s New York City, Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor, went around smashing them with a sledgehammer. In the 1970s Roger Sharpe, the father of Josh and Zach, helped overturn the ban in the Big Apple by proving that the game was one of skill, not pure luck.
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