Pinball article featuring the Who and some kid named Moon

["Kimberly Thompson"<lomara@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Found this at MSNBC.COM and thought it mildly interesting.  It has a Who
mention of course.  Funny how the kid who's interviewed has the last name of
Moon as well.

http://www.bcentral.com/articles/isyn/default.asp?newsid=20028118&cobrand=msn&LID=3800

Tilting at History 

Paul Glader, Washington Post Staff Writer
08.01.2002
  
 


That moment of pinball Zen arrives for Michael Moon when he becomes one with
the plastic flippers and the steel ball ricochets around the table for minutes
on end. The "Attack from Mars" machine he is playing comes alive with gaudy
effects -- zapping, tabulating and erupting with robot-like digital
exclamations like "Jackpot!"

"When people see you're still playing and it's getting more noisy, sometimes
crowds gather around," said Moon, 32, of Alexandria. "It's a great feeling to
have people clapping for you when you're done."

For pinball, though, the applause has died off.

Blame the stunted attention spans of children. Blame the Internet. Blame Bill
Gates and his little X-Box. Whatever the reason, pinball is vanishing from
America's cultural landscape, and a handful of pinball fanatics think that's a
shame.

 
In the basement vending room of the Northern Virginia Community College
cafeteria building in Annandale, Moon and others in the Free State Pinball
Association take turns hunching intently over four machines. Members of the
group, created in Maryland in 1995, work magic with the flippers -- using
spins, traps, nudges and a bump transfer between flippers equivalent to
basketball's crossover dribble -- to keep the ball going and to run up
obscenely high scores such as 156,613,020 on machines with names like
"Monsters Bash" and "Medieval Madness."

Once the prima donna of the arcade, pinball machines are now old maids of the
Midway. The new generation of gamers, by natural selection, has banished
pinball as too old, too difficult and too boring.

"A lot of kids feel pinball is nowhere near as stimulating as Doom, Quake or a
lot of games they are playing these days," said Robert Nideffer, a professor
at the University of California at Irvine who studies computer gaming.


  
The number of pinball machines nationwide dropped from 1 million in 1989 to
360,000 in 1999 and revenues slid from $2.4 billion to $1.08 billion in the
same period, according to the New York-based trade publication Vending Times.

An effort to keep the game alive, the association started at a sub shop in
College Park that was a haven for pinball players before closing in 1999. The
association now has three chapters that meet weekly in the Washington area and
is one of the largest, most organized pinball leagues in the nation. Many
members compete in national tournaments such as Pinburgh, in Pittsburgh. And
they got game.

"It's an athletic strategy game," Moon said. "I think pinball is going out
because it is not really understood by most people."

And being misunderstood is nothing new for pinball. Take Fiorello LaGuardia.
The mayor of New York smashed pinball machines with a sledgehammer in 1941,
because he thought the machines, before they had flippers, were games of
chance, not skill. He also believed they contributed to gambling and iniquity.
New York legalized pinball again in 1976, decades after it had become popular
nationwide.

Fast fading into relics, pinball machines are turning up in the home game
rooms of sentimental baby boomers willing to spend $5,000 a pop. 

"You used to see them everywhere," said Free State member Jessica Harrison,
39, of Arlington, who owns four pinball machines. "They used to be at the
laundromat, the college game room, airports. You just don't see them anymore."

During the golden era of pinball, between 1970 and 1990, a common scene of the
local dive bar was men, wearing mullet hairstyles, cheering for a skilled
player. Pinball was such a part of pop culture that the Who incorporated the
hobby into its rock opera, "Tommy," with "Pinball Wizard," which describes the
"crazy flipper fingers" of "that deaf, dumb and blind kid" who sure plays a
mean pinball.

Fun houses and boardwalk penny arcades are a fondly remembered part of many
Americans' childhood, with games like Skee Ball, shooting galleries and
pinball. University of Miami Professor Eugene Provenzo said the arcades were
intensely physical spaces where youth could "smell the park cotton candy and
hot sugar waffles, and hear the sounds of the roller coasters and different
pinball machines" -- an atmosphere that modern games lack.

Before the funeral begins, though, Henry Jenkins at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, points out that pinball machines, with their
longevity culture, paved the way for modern video games. And although video
games siphoned off the fan base from pinball, Jenkins said, "I don't think
they will ever succeed in killing it."

But a renaissance looks doubtful.

A main manufacturer, WMS Industries Inc., discontinued producing pinball
machines under the Williams and Bally labels in 1999, citing "a prolonged
period of weak demand and ongoing losses."

Now, the Chicago-based Stern Pinball Inc. has the market to itself. Company
president Gary Stern, who comes from a family of pinball machine makers, said
his company survives by shipping two thirds of its products overseas. Gary
Stern is, Vending Times publisher Vic Levay said, "about the last of the
Mohicans."

To stay alive in the vending world, companies had to make the machines less
cheesy and more sexy, linking them to movies and pop culture. One company made
"Dirty Harry" pinball machines in the mid-1990s with Clint Eastwood doing the
"Go Ahead, Make My Day" voice recordings.

Stern is following that path, cranking out about 10,000 machines a year with
modern or R-rated themes, including South Park, Austin Powers, Playboy and
Harley-Davidson. By contrast, four companies made 100,000 machines a year in
1990.

"It's an American icon," said Stern, ever the salesman. "Pinball is cool
because it is retro. It's a Volkswagen bug, a PT Cruiser, khaki pants."

Pinball was a twist on the late 1800s French game called Bagatelles and
developed into its modern form in the 1930s with tabletop machines such as the
Bally Hoo. Computer chips made the games more intelligent, but still pure and
unpredictable.

"The ball is wild," Stern said. "Unlike a computer generated game, a video
game or a touch screen game, you have a ball that you don't know exactly what
it will do."

Pinball association president Bernie Kelm of Glen Burnie said that "little bit
of randomness" makes the game's appeal last longer than a game that can be
mastered.

Arcade operators say youngsters like to master a game and move on. They don't
like games like pinball, which are impossible to defeat.

ESPN Zone, Steven Spielberg's GameWorks arcades and 8,000 other vending
operators turned a collective gross profit of $7.1 billion last year,
according to the trade publication Playmeter. The most popular games are
virtual reality games, pool tables, shooting games, racing games and hip-hop
dancing games -- not pinball.

Moon and others said they welcome new members to help revive the sport. A
season in the league, they said, can turn a pinball klutz into a wizard.

"People just don't know how cool pinball is," Moon said.

Reported By TechNews.com, http://www.TechNews.com 

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