# Pinballs

## Concept

I like pinball games. I liked them, really.
And I think they are the right example to talk about what we are losing along the way.

## Trains

So if you think about trains... Modern trains are better.

No disclaimer, no "everyone has opinions". They are more silent, more stable, they are way faster, the toilets are better, time for cost competitive. When I say modern trains I am not talking about Amtrak, OK. More like bullet trains.
Now you can argue that there was some charm in a steam locomotive. Or that the slow pace is part of the charm. Ok, but modern trains are still better.

## Pinballs

Modern pinballs, on the other hand... well, first, there are no modern pinballs. After the peak of the 90s, they lost track, they got worse, then it died as a market.

![medieval madness](pinball/medieval.jpg)
The last of its kind, trying to get mobile.

Pinballs were very heavy, they literally had weight. You'd smash the button, slap them brutally on the side to move the whole machine, it would be noisy. The right strength and the ball would be shifted just to the right place. Push too hard? It bricked, Tilt! Light shutdown, somehow the machine would feel life without movement, the ball would fall dead, unresponsive buttons. The whole thing's life was sucked away. You'd often have a few seconds wondering if you had broken it. But you don't break a pinball. The pinball breaks you, then laughs at you from the high score.

It was a marvel, a complex system of electricity with lights and wires, mechanics with ramps made from trial and error, electronics for the score and special modes. Even starting the game required physically pulling a plunger. And we'd pretty much all push it the same way. 'till the max. But still we felt special. Focused. Look at the ball. Cigarettes on the pinball ashtray burning the eyes. Let's go.

Sometimes, your score would give you an extra-ball. I know only what we called that : clack. And boys, it clacked. You could hear the very loud sound. It was as if metal was stamped, you could feel it in your hands and body. There is not a single thing on Earth quite like that. The thing that was heavier than me was moved. So was I.

And there is nothing you can do like that on a smartphone.

It is not a grandiose claim about obsolescence and better times. I mean that a lot of things do improve. They peak. Then they go extinct. Overall things are progressing. But this very thing, this specific feeling, it is just gone. There is no competition between a pinball and a video game, except economical. If video games get better and get a larger market largely compensating for pinballs, that does not mean you did not lose something. And it is not a zero-sum game.

And that's a feeling you will probably face. To me it is a big reason why people say things were often better. Not the only reason, clearly. But a lot of what you come to love and hate is at its peak. I did not meet pinballs drunk at a party, it was a mainstream entertainment. And the pinballs were insanely good at that time. The Addams Family, Star Trek, to name a few.

The machine was made from art and craft, hand-made for a large part. Making a good one was a question of pace, increasing difficulty, managing expectations, hope even. The quality of the ramp, how it integrated in the whole, how hard was the landing, everything mattered.

## A place

It was a place. I was often playing with a friend at the local place, the "Starter". I knew the guy owning it, he was cool, very traditional Corsican Mafia (our Sicilians). I remember once a young guy who smelled like trouble passing the door. The owner said : you got a member card?

The guy said : What member card? He needed a member card. He asked how to get one politely. The owner took a metal baseball bat from behind the desk and said : you can't get a member card.

It was fight club, here. In the noir place, literally painted in black, rejects, smoke, traffics. I loved it. Beers were fine if you were a regular. I was 17. I was a regular. We'd play video games also, they had Virtua Racing for a long time, a metal slug I just found there, put a coin, never heard about it before. No youtube, nothing. You had to try for yourself. But the pinball was the cheaper. The threshold to get longer plays was lower. You were always a clack and multi-ball away from insane gameplay. No timer, no music speeding up. I think you could not win a pinball game, anyway. I sure never did.

The place was glorious. I'd go there every Saturday and more.

Younger different place, same player, younger, I had to use a trick, you know? Catholic School, but they could not force people to attend the weekly mass. So that was the trick : You go to school like a boy scout, mass' day. But you never enter. You leave with your friends and go to the local arcades. That place was like it would be in the news one day. A mix of boys like me and adults drinking beer. But never had a problem. You just don't look people in the eyes, but you don't look down. If someone must smash something, the wall has to look more interesting than you. Basic survival.

## Places

And that was the cool thing, a lot of bars had a pinball machine or two. So you'd just enter and see what they got. And same, it is not like you had internet on you. Or at all. You'd look at the machine in the eyes. Look at the ramps. How they go down and loop, the lighting, bumps. You don't want something too open in the middle, or flat lights that never light up. You want fire from the ramp, bump at reach, real mechanical bump, not some electronic detection bullshit. Williams brand was guaranteed success.

And in each place...

## There is a friend

We rarely went alone, if ever. Friends, brothers, whatever. And it would be just super exciting. Either the OG pinball machine you love playing together. Or this new exciting one. And you'd test. It was not really competitive, more "I crushed it!!!!" than "I beat you". It would have been stupid to compete. Because you both lost to the machine and the high score. We laughed a lot. It was so unfair sometimes. A strong "oh fuck you" when the machine was delicate, rage quit, banter. And the machine had quirks. I call that the soul of the machine. The left button that does not register well, the broken piece or lighting.

## Tech and reality

Relative to its time, it was a technological artifact. To play it was not like playing ball. The light, the noise, it was something really modern to us. And a form of rite of passage. Because it's not for kids. You can't physically play a pinball if you are small kid. We had lots of healthy rites of passage like that, cigarette, alcohol, drug, Julia.

Anyway! It had kept something physical. It was really heavy, you pushed it. With someone, physically near you. Which one feels like... real?

- swiping a smartphone screen on tik tok?
- smashing a fucking pinball machine while your friend laugh?

The pinball.

## But machines lose

You see, it is not like pinballs lost because they were not fun. Well, perhaps they lost relative fun. But there is one thing I believe plays a lot.

### We don't really choose.

You see, a pinball is a big beast in limited series, partly hand-made, taking a lot of time to develop. They take space in a physical space someone rents. And so they are not cheap to produce and not cheap to play. The pinball machine maker builds it, sells it. Then someone else finds a good place, a good name, buy a baseball bat and starts a business. For the owner, revenue is coin, the asset is expensive. For the maker, there is no cut on coins.

Now you take a video game, granted, it is also not cheap. But you build it once, you sell worldwide for cheap. And directly to the consumers. Possibly millions of them.

And a lot of companies can compete to make games. Some companies die, new enter, the barrier of entry is lower and the market expand largely along the console and PC market. For pinballs, there is so much place available. The builders can't just manufacture so many new models. Getting the brand known, getting pinball machine reputation, you can't dilute the market too much when one place won't have more than a dozen machines. That takes time to build. It is not fast, it changes slowly. A few bad years, places and makers close and they won't regrow quickly.

Even if you had metrics and internet for a pinball, it is not like you can build an algorithm that will adapt to each player by setting a different pinball play.

It is economically dead before you get a vote on the disappearance of the pinball machine.

And so... physical objects lose ground, automatically. Space, renewal of the genre, selling system, the game itself is not attractive financially. But I believe that pinballs are one of the funniest things I have done in my life.

That's where I feel we are set to fail in this regard. Slapping a pinball machine was meaningful. But what wins is not necessarily what we want, it is often what we can easily sell and consume.