As a kid I loved Pinball machines. I have played from back in the say when it was 10 cents for a game. I used to dream pinball games in my 12 year old mind. It was really fun. I could bump the machine just enough to avoid the tilt and when the the "Pinball Wizard" came out by the Who in 1973 on Quadrophinia I was already a seasoned player.
I saw this article on the WTTW site, this is our PBS channel. This video is really interesting. I quote this article,
"I didn’t spend much time on pinball machines until I went away to college. I didn’t even go that far away–about 30 miles from home. But since I wasn’t living with my parents that was far enough. I met another suburban kid adrift in the city and he introduced me to pinball. Pinball and cigarettes.
You put a coin in (a quarter?) and played three balls. Usually I tanked. But I felt it was cool to spend an hour in a bar somewhere in the hours between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., lighting up John Player Specials bought from a shop on Wabash, dumping coins into a dead end of flashing lights, bumpers, flippers, TILT and art work that was entirely beyond the pale of anything that passed for tasteful or friendly or even nice.
Representations of women with come-on faces staring over shoulders showing off ample figures, posing like odalisques for the slightly smirking, bored-looking James Bond-like guys, or celebrations of autos and sports. I felt like I belonged to the edge of the movies I was just beginning to see, films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder about people destined for big league trouble, pinball-playing sadists who sometimes murdered to handle their complicated emotions.
Hey, it was just a pinball machine.
Gary Stern, president, CEO and chairman of Stern Pinball, Inc., might understand. Stern comes by his lifelong obsession with pinball honestly. His father, Sam Stern, was a partner in Williams Manufacturing, a pinball company that goes back to the 1940s. “You know,” Stern said, “my father used to say that a pinball machine is like a movie. It’s gotta have a good theme, good action, good sound effects, photography, art work, promotion, distribution, it has a climax, so forth. It’s not trying to tell some deep story, though, it’s just fun and that’s what we are: capital F, capital U, capital N, FUN.”
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