Retro Fun
By Davy Carren
Our world is replete with distractions. Everything is competing for your attention. It can be exhausting just trying to negotiate your way through it.
But I’ve got an idea: Put your phone away. Take off your earbuds. Unplug. Tune it all out. Play some pinball.
There’s something gratifying about the noises, the feel of the buttons and flippers, and the ball careening into things. It’s interactive; it’s engaging; it’s frustrating as hell; it connects you to the past, and it’s loads of fun.
At Alameda’s Pacific Pinball Museum, they’ve really got it all. From Montague Redgrave’s first spring-loaded plunger game to the present day’s elaborate digital-display, subwoofer-enhanced machines. There are five rooms of games, each room its own unique time capsule. Three of the rooms even have their own era-appropriate jukebox. And for $22 you can play all the machines “for free” — no additional quarters required.
The nonprofit at 1510 Webster Street was founded in 2002 with a simple mission statement: “The promotion and preservation of pinball, one of America’s favorite pastimes,” according to its website. Every section hosts a different era of machines, a different story. I checked it out one day recently, and this is my tour:
Antique machines room
The first room is where all the historic games reside. The most antique ones are roped off, but you can stand inches from them to inspect their odd intricacies. There’s even game of Bagatelle, the precursor of pinball, that you can play with marbles.
The marbles drowsily float and softly bounce off the little pins that are arranged in semicircles around holes with numbers. If you land a marble in a hole you score some points. The player has zero control besides the initial plungering of the marble onto the playing surface. I try a few marbles, but am unimpressed. Simple, but not super exciting.
There’s this gorgeous wood-encased machine called Spot-Lite. It lacks flippers and uses a similar ball-falls-into-hole method for scoring. But unlike Bagatelle, it’s under glass, and has a backbox where the numbers line up on an illuminated card as the balls fall into the holes. I try my luck.
A staff member tells me that people come from all over the world to play this one, but the scoring system has always baffled him. It is strange, with different buttons to push before you plunge in each ball. I have to say, I wasn’t able to offer much help figuring it out.
I start to notice that a lot of the early games have a warning against gambling on them. This is because pinball used to be thought of as a game of chance, not skill, and people would wager on the outcomes. In New York, where pinball was banned from 1946–1970, pinball arcades were once raided and the games were smashed by then-mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who demonized them, believing that they “robbed school children of their hard-earned nickels and dimes.”
Obviously this did not last, as the advent of flippers with nudging and trapping techniques, really put pinball into the game-of-skill category.
I play some Humpty Dumpty, the first game to feature electromagnetic flippers. These tiny forward-facing flippers aren’t very powerful, though having six of them is exciting, and they do little to redirect the ball, which take its time gliding slowly from rubber-banded bumpers to soft kickers, eventually depositing itself into a holding cell at the bottom.
After a few more miserable scores on some other five- and ten-cent machines, I wander over the the jukebox which holds old 7-inch records. The clicks of score cards and faint jostle of flippers are muted and tinkle almost serenely from the half-dozen machines being played as they chime and beep like cash registers. The volume is low. The mood is leisurely.
It’s louder in the 1960s modernist room, where the games sport angular and abstract figures on their backglass.
Member’s Choice room
This space has a rotating lineup curated by the museum’s loyal dues payers. It’s got a mix of everything, and even a clear see-through machine that lets you inspect its innards. An AC/DC machine is blasting “Highway to Hell” right next to a quaint baseball-themed game called Upper Deck with tiny cardboard players circling the bases inside the backbox.
1980s, 90s, and beyond
The jukebox pulses Devo’s “Whip It” in the 1980s room, and a few kids crowd around an original Star Wars game. But the real action is in 1990s and beyond, which is by far the most crowded room.
A No Doubt song is playing. I’m overwhelmed by a cacophony of powerful flippers and booming digital effects, laser-like zaps and demonic screams well beyond any bells and whistles of the previous rooms. The roar of these thumping machines is jarring, and I scuttle through, passing on the Metallica and CSI games, but curiously eyeing the Twilight Zone one, which is unfortunately perpetually occupied.
But even these games are more than artificial entertainment. They pack a wallop of reality instead of creating a passive barrier between you and the action. You drop a quarter in the slot. The table trembles. Hips shake and twist, ready to propel the ball into the action.
And this is why people are still playing pinball: A tinge of nostalgia mixed with slight physical exertion; the delicate art of trapping the ball, letting it fall for a half-second and then thwacking it.
Pinballs get slingshotted from a plunger, ricochet from bumpers and kickers, are slapped by flippers, make all the lights and buzzers go like firecrackers in byzantine playfields under the glass. This is their life. Like spit-shined slivery marbles, they bang and crash between long periods of hibernation in storage.
So there it goes, over the ramps and through the switches and the gates, into the saucers with kickers inside, to drops and bullseyes. And you are lost in it. And you are gobsmacked by the grain of the wood rails against your hands and mesmerized by the corkscrew ramps and the deft taps of your supple fingers on the flipper buttons. A real pinball wizard. This is what it feels like to be alive.
Davy Carren is an Oakland-based writer.
More pinball in San Francisco
- Free Gold Watch at 1767 Waller St.
- Outer Orbit at 3215 Mission St.
- The Detour at 2200A Market St.
- The Emporium at 616 Divisadero St.
And there are more in the Bay Area — this old list is a good resource but has some shuttered spots, so Google the hours or website before going.
