July 25, 2024 • 46 mins
We continue to explore the evolution of pinball and learn how the humble solenoid powers so much of the game. Plus, what happens when transistors, integrated circuits and computers join the party?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jovin Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you. We are continuing our look at the
evolution of pinball, which was inspired by my visit to
(00:26):
the Southern Fried Gaming Expo where I appeared as media,
appeared at as too strong a word, I attended as media.
So in the last episode, we learned that pinball's origins
trace back to lawn games that eventually were moving indoors
because not everyone had a lawn and there is disagreement
over what game constitutes the first true pinball table. But
(00:50):
we learned how a gradual evolution brought us from simple
machines outfitted only with like a spring loaded plunger up
to the early days of electro mechanical pinball tables, and
some of the things that were added were really a
big deal. I would argue probably the most important was
the addition of a coin slot. One early title Bally,
(01:11):
who reportedly sold around fifty thousand units to various shop
owners and other proprietors. Fifty thousand units, that's no small shakes.
Remember this is in the nineteen thirties when this happened.
That really helped put the company Bally on the map,
and Bally would play a huge role in the development
of pinball here in the United States. But yeah, these
coin operated machines like it became a new source of
(01:34):
revenue for shop owners and bar owners and such. They
would buy a machine for a large amount of money,
but then they would get to keep the proceeds the
coins made up. And so you know, if you had
a really popular machine, you could earn back what you
spent on it within a relatively short amount of time.
And then everything on top of that is profit, apart
(01:56):
from whatever you have to spend to keep the machine working.
But these early machine, because they really had very few
moving parts, they were relatively easy to maintain. But let's
talk about some of the electro mechanical components in later
pinball machines and how those components work. Now, as I
mentioned in the last episode, the earliest electrified pinball machines
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didn't really have much going for them. Usually there was
some sort of noise making element that would signify scoring
and help draw attention to the table so that more
people would want to play, but there were few components
that actually used electricity to create mechanical motion. But it
didn't take long for that to change. Harry Williams of
(02:40):
Williams Manufacturing Williams is another important pinball company, came up
with an idea to set up a game that would
make it stand apart from the competition that was on
the market. So this was way back in nineteen thirty three,
and his idea was a relatively simple one, which was
the inclusion of solenoids. Solinoid is an electro mechanical component
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that works through electromagnetism. In many ways, it's similar to
your basic electromagnet. So if you think of a standard electromagnet,
you have a coil of conductive wire, typically copper wire,
and it's wrapped around a core of some sort like
sometimes it's just iron, right, And when you run electricity
(03:23):
through the coil of wire, it creates an electromagnet, and
you can interact with ferromagnetic stuff using this electromagnet, and
with a solenoid it's pretty similar. You've got your coil
of conductive wire. When you pass a current through this coil,
it creates a magnetic field, and you have a sleeve
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inside this coil. Nestled in the sleeve is a movable plunger,
so the plunger can slide in or out of this coil.
Sometimes it's called the armature. When the magnetic field is on,
it pulls the plunger into the coil. There's a stop
on either end so that the plunger doesn't just shoot
(04:06):
through the coil or or fall out of the coil,
so that it can come to a stop where it's
partially inside the coil. But when you run electricity through
the coil, it pulls the plunger in entirely. So when
the magnetic field is on, the plunger is inside the coil.
When the magnetic field goes off, like when the current
stops flowing through this coil, the plunger moves back out
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of the coil and mounting a post at the end
of the plunger, like extending the plunger so that it
can punch through something. You have a little device capable
of giving a quick push. Whenever the electric current flows
through the wire, the plunger moves in. It pushes this
arm out and it's pretty fast. It's a pretty simple
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electro mechanical device, and effectively it turns electric current into
mechanical work. That's its main purpose. Solenoids would in up
being kind of the heartbeat, the lifeblood of pinball machines.
They power so much like a lot of the elements
in your basic pinball machine are worked with solenoids. So
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Williams pinball machine had this name called Contact, which is
very clever because contact is what we would say was
made within the circuit to activate the solenoid in the
first place. So the playfield of Contact had holes with
little barriers around them. So the ball you know, your
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goal is to get the ball into the highest scoring
holes in the playfield. Those were closer to the bottom
of the playfield, which meant that the ball needed to
pass over or around the holes that were higher up,
because otherwise you would get a lower score. Well, at
the very top of the playfield was this solenoid, so
it's facing downward like toward you. It's at the top
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of the play you're playing at the bottom of the playfield.
If you were to fire a ball up so that
it would activate a switch, a contact at the top
of this playfield, the solenoid would activate and it would
hit the ball, and if you were lucky, it would
propel the ball so that it would roll over the
lower scoring holes and the ball would settle into one
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of the ones that had a higher score if you
were pretty lucky. Contact relied on a dry cell battery
to provide this electrical current, and according to Williams, the
battery would hold a sufficient charge to provide three months
of play. After that, I assume you would swap the
battery out. I mean possible that you could recharge it,
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but you would definitely have to swap it out if
you wanted to be able to play after that time
and to have the electro mechanical elements work. Contact was
a game that went through some changes. This is something
that still happens with the pinball machines now, where manufacturers
will make changes to a machine and later versions will
be slightly different, or they will these days because things
(07:03):
are running on microcomputers. They will update the firmware of
a machine and it will include new modes and such.
We'll talk about modes later. So the company, William's Company
would incorporate a door bell into the machine so that
when the ball made contact with this switch, that would
activate the solenoid, it would also ring the bell, and
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Williams also included his anti tilt measure. I talked about
this in the last episode. So his anti tilt design
was there was inside the machine was a post. On
top of this post was a ball, and if the
player were to shake the machine in an attempt to cheat,
the ball could roll off this post and it would
then signal a tilt, which would invalidate the accumulated score
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at that point. Back to solenoids, These would become incredibly
important components for pinball machines. They are pretty darn simple,
which is good right. Simple means they're fewer points of failure.
They can fail if you run electricity through wire. One
of the byproducts you get is heat, and if electricity
(08:09):
is running through wire for a long time, a lot
of heat can build up and that can cause damage
to the components. So there are points of failure, but
there are few of them. Solenoids are used not just
to knock a pinball around. They can also be used
as noise makers, they can strike a bell, or they
can be used as knockers. So if you're really good
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at pinball, you have probably experienced a replay or you know,
if you've ever matched. Matching is when you know modern
pinball machines, they'll take the last two digits of your
score and then they'll display kind of a random selection
of other scores, and if you end up matching, then
you get a replay. Well, a lot of pinball machines
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include a knocker to signal that a player has managed
to get a replay and they have a free game.
The pinball machine lets out this very loud knocking sound. Well,
a solenoid is what is actually making that sound. There's
a dedicated knocker or solenoid mounted in the machine to
do this, and there are a couple of different types
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that you could find in various machines. One would be
a spring mounted solenoid. So the spring would typically keep
the plunger out of the coil, but when an electric
current runs through the coil, the magnetic pole is strong
enough to compress the spring, pull the plunger in quickly,
and mounted on the top of the plunger as a
post that's capped in plastic. This post strikes a plate
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typically mounted near the pinball machine's back box, and the
current only passes through the wire for a fraction of
a second, so the spring decompresses, the plunger is pulled
into the coil, and the cap strikes the plate and boom,
you get your old knocking noise, which could be quite loud.
Usually there's like a fifty volt current that's being put
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through the device order to make this happen, and if
you have a lower power supply, the knock's going to
be less impressive. Many knocker solenoids actually are simpler than
this design. They don't have the spring loaded piston at all. Instead,
they rely on gravity. So these solenoids have to be
mounted vertically so that the plunger naturally slides down. Like
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if there's no current running through the coil, the plunger
is going to be resting on a rest plate, so
it's only partly inside the coil. Then when current runs
through the coil, it pulls the plunger up right because
magnetic attraction and the plunger the post mounted on the
end of the plunger will strike the striking plate and make
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the knocking noise. And then when the current is shut off,
the plunger will naturally slide back down the sleeve inside
the coil and rest against the resting plate, so you
have to have it mounted vertically so that gravity will
pull the plunger back down. But this does simple things
quite a bit. But what about other elements inside a
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pinball machine? What about flippers? These are pretty common today,
I mean, they're almost universal in modern pinball machines. Again,
it wasn't until nineteen forty seven that we got the
first pinball machine that had flippers. And even then they
were oriented opposite, like they were facing outward on the
machine rather than inward, and they were along the sides
and there were six of them, so it was very
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different from the way flippers are today. But yeah, it
wasn't until nineteen forty seven that we even got flippers,
and now they're pretty much standard on pinball machines. How
do they work, well, no, big surprise. They also use solenoids,
which are mounted below the playfield where they're out of sight.
But a solenoid works, you know, like a piston. Right,
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The plunger moves linearly, it moves in and out, so
you need to have something that translates this action. Because
a flipper acts like a bat, It swings, it rotates,
So mounted on the solenoid plunger is a little piece
typically called a linkage, and the linkage connects to a
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rotating element that in turn is mounted on a spindle.
The spindle is connected to the flipper, so the rotating
element translates the linear action into a rotational action and
then transmits that through the spindle to the flipper. So
the flipper can swing and there's a stop. Typically that
all may mean the flipper can only rotate so far.
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It's not gonna make the flipper go all the way around.
It'll just rise up when you're looking down from the
position of a player. So when the solenoid activates, the
mechanical motion causes the flipper to swing, and a spring
on the spindle will return the flipper to its resting
position afterwards, so it's not just relying on gravity to
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return the flipper to its downward position. There is a
spring there so that it adds resistance and pushes back
against the flipper so it returns to its normal downward state.
When you connect this assembly to a power supply and
a flipper button, the flipper button serves as a switch.
You have your classic pinball flipper as long as you're
holding the switch down the flipper will remain up, but
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it does get a little more complicated, and in my opinion,
this is a really cool element for flippers because it's
engineering a solution to a real problem. So again, pinball
machines typically have balls that are made out of solid steel,
which allows for some other fun gimmicks that we'll talk
about a bit later. These balls weigh in and around
eighty grams, which is significant, so the flipper bats have
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to be strong enough to whack an eighty gram steel
ball around a playfield. Anyone who has played a machine
that has really weak flippers can tell you it's a
very frustrating experience. So the solidoids powering these flippers need
to be sufficiently strong to generate the mechanical force necessary
to give the ball a good whack across the playfield,
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and that means having a fairly significant coil to generate
a strong enough magnetic field to pull the plunger with force.
But this also creates an issue if someone is holding
the flipper button down to keep the flipper raised up,
and players will often do this, like you might want
to pause so that you can prepare for a specific shot.
Maybe you're lining up a shot so you can shoot
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a ball up a ramp, for example, and you kind
of have a feel for where on the flipper that
needs to happen, but you need to get control of
the ball first in order to be able to do
it reliably. So you've trapped the ball and you're holding
it in place before you make your shot. You could
be holding the ball the button down for a bit.
Maybe you've also decided, Hey, I'm going to take a
swig of my frosty beverage that I have next to me,
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and I'm going to pause gameplay a little bit by
holding the ball in place while I do this. The
issue here is that a high powered solnoid's going to
generate a lot of heat as that electric current runs
through that coil, which it will keep doing while you're
holding the button down, right, because that button's a switch. This,
as I said, can damage the machine over time. Specifically,
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can damage the solenoids and melt them so that they
become less effective, and eventually they become ineffective and you're
going to have to replace the solenoids in the pinball machine.
So what was needed was a way to switch from
the high powered coil to perhaps a secondary coil that
was just strong enough to keep the plunger in position
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once it already had been pulled into the coil itself.
It takes a lot of energy to move the plunger
into place, but once it's there, it doesn't take as
much energy to hold it there. So flippers solenoids often
have two coils, one essentially kind of nested inside the other.
One coil is the high powered one that pulls the
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plunger in the other one requires much less power and
is just there to hold the plunger once it's in place.
The rotating element of the flipper's spindle actually breaks a
contact that is for the heavy duty coil, so once
the flipper is in full upright position, it is no
longer under the power of the main coil. It is
(16:04):
swapped to the secondary coil, which requires much less power
to operate. It also generates much less heat, so the
power coil does the heavy lifting of pulling the plunger
in the later coil just holds it in place once
it's there. All because a mechanical element physically changes the
circuit underneath by breaking this one contact and making another.
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And I think that's really super cool, Okay, I've got
a lot more to talk about with pinball machines, but
first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors.
So before the break, I was talking about flippers and
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solenoids and how a pair of different coils can allow
you to hold a flipper an upright position without burning
out your solenoids. Well, we are starting to get into
why some pinball machines have really weak flippers, and there
can be a few different things that contribute to this.
One is that the power supply that's going to the solenoids,
(17:07):
that power of the flippers is in turn weak. That
could be an issue. And you know, a lot of
these pinball machines get pretty janky over time, with people
replacing components with stuff that wasn't necessarily designed to go
in a pinball machine, or wasn't the same sort of
power supply that was used in a previous version of
the machine, which means that some of these solenoids might
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be receiving far less power than they typically would, and
that means when you push the button, you get a
kind of weak flipper and you're not really able to
play the game very effectively. Other times, it can be
an issue where there's a problem with the actual mechanical
components where they're not able to turn or move as
freely as they usually would. They might need some cleaning
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or replacing in order to do that, and sometimes it's
because the solenoids themselves have become damage due to overheating.
This is a good point to remind y'all that if
you do ever play a pinball machine, or if you
happen to be rolling in the bucks and you own
a pinball machine, because these things are expensive, y'all, don't
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push a flipper button a whole bunch of times in
quick succession. When you do that, you're activating that primary coil.
Each time you push the button and release it and
then push it again, they're activating that primary coil and
you're building up heat. So if you hold the button down,
that's less damaging because you're using that secondary coil that
consumes less energy and doesn't generate as much heat. But
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if you press the button really quickly over and over
and over and over and over again, that can make
the coil heat up, and the coil can actually melt
and the flippers will stop working. Eventually, you'll have to
replace the solenoid underneath, and that could be that's a
bit of a thing, like it's not impossible, people do
it all the time, but it is a bit complicated.
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Another common feature in pinball machines are bumpers. So in
the previous episode I talked about a game called Bollow
Bolo and it had passive bumpers that has had these
little obstacles. So in Bollow they were the shape of
bowling pins and they were mounted on rods that in
turn were attached to springs. They otherwise had no other
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mechanism attached to them, so they were what you would
call passive bumpers. So a ball could hit them and
bounce off of them, and they would wiggle around in stuff.
But that was pretty much it. Well, I say that
was it, But there were also passive bumpers that could
actually send a signal for the purposes of scorekeeping. Ballow
as far as I can determine, wasn't this way, but
others were. And sometimes these bumpers are called mushroom bumpers
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because they look kind of like mushrooms. So these bumpers
are also passive. They don't bounce back, but they can
register when they've been hit and that can then go
toward the progressive scorekeeping part of the pinball machine. And
the way that this typically works is that these bumpers
have a diss sitting near the top of the post
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of the bumper. So if you think of the bumper,
you got the post that's the centralized stand, the pedestal
kind of that makes up the bumper. Then you've got
a disc on top, and then maybe you've got like
a cap on the very top that shows how many
points the bumper is worth. So when a ball makes
contact with the pedestal, the rod the post of this bumper,
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there's this little disc that the ball impacts and it
lifts the disc up slightly. Now the disc, in turn
is connected to a stem. That stem is ultimately connected
to a leaf switch, and when the disc lifts up,
the leaf switch is activated and it sends a signal
to indicate scoring. These simple bumpers date back to the
nineteen forties, but they would get much more attention in
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the sixties and seventies. They would become kind of emblematic
of pinball machines of that era. Just as flippers were
really important for pinball machines to take off, these bumpers
would become something that people just associate with pinball machines.
There are also active bumpers, however, they have different names.
Some people call them pop bumpers, or jet bumpers or
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thumper bumpers, among other things. So these react when they're struck.
They strike back, so they propel the ball in the process.
These are electro mechanical bumpers, and the basic pop bumper
is a pretty clever design. So typically at the very
base of the bumper's post or pedestal on the playfield side,
there's a little plastic disc that's raised up just to
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touch off the playfield itself. Now, it's low enough that
a ball can roll onto this plastic disc, and when
that happens, the weight of the ball tilts the disc
slightly so. Connected to this disc, underneath the playfield is
a stem, and that stem rests inside a kind of
a shallow bowl or spoon under this playfield. Now, when
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the disc is in its resting position, the stem's not
really making content with the bowl. It's almost but not
quite touching, or if it's touching, it's touching so lightly
as to not displace the bowl. When the disc tilts,
the stem is deflected, and it starts to push against
the rising sides of this bowl, and it makes the
whole bowl push downward. This is what completes a switch.
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That switch does a couple of things. It sends a
signal to the progressive score keeping system, so it increases
the score to the appropriate amount depending on how much
the bumper is worth. And it completes a command that
ultimately sends a signal to a solenoid that's attached to
this bumper. That's a separate circuit typically, but that circuit
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is what gives the bumper the bump. The solenoid in
turn connects to a metal ring that is also around
the bumper's post. So you have a disc at the
base of the ring. On the playfield side, you've got
the post that extends up and at the top of
the post typically you have this metal ring that connects
down through the playfield to the solemn So the solenoid,
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when it activates, it pulls the plunger in. This pulls
the ring downward, and the ring acts as a bumper.
It hits the ball and knocks it away. So once again,
solenoids are the work courses of the pinball world, and
Typically you would find pinball machines that would group a
bunch of these active bumpers in a configuration, often in
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like a triangle where you have one bumper at the
top and two bumpers below, and with a good trajectory,
the ball could start bouncing in between these like crazy
as they activate one bumper after another and get knocked around.
We're also not done with solenoids yet, and we still
have another classic element to talk about that uses solenoids
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for the purposes of transferring electrical energy and turning it
into mechanical energy, and that would be the sling shots.
I've seen Gottleib's Double Feature pinball machine credited as the
first pinball machine to have a playfield with sling shots
like these active shots, But then, considering how loosey goosey
pinball history is, I can't swear that Gottleib's Double Feature
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was the very first pinball machine to have slingshots. It's
often credited that way, but I'm not sure if that's true. Anyway,
a slingshot is typically triangular in shape. You will often
see these at the base of the playfield in a
pinball machine, usually just above where the flippers are and
the slingshot has a rubber cord or band wrapped around
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it and it kicks a ball if the ball comes
in contact with a slingshot. So how does this work? Well,
it's not passive, it is active. And if you were
to take a cover off of a slingshot, you would
see that this rubber cord stretches around three posts. They
provide the points of the triangle, and a solenoid is
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what gives the the slingshots their kicking power. No surprise there, right,
because solenoids are used everywhere in pinball machines. The solenoid
connects to a mechanism that allows for this quick punch
of power. But what triggers the solenoid? While behind this
rubber chord making contact with the rubber chord typically on
either side of where the solenoid's post is, you have
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a pair of switches. So if a ball hits the
rubber band or rubber chord hard enough to trigger one
of these switches, it completes the electric current needed to
activate the solenoid, and the solenoid activates pulls the plunger
inside the coil. This movement also powers the little post
that punches out through this rubber chord and boom, the
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ball gets propelled somewhere else on the playfield, often down
one of the outlanes, and down the ball drained. Gosh
darn it. Many bimbo machines also have kickout holes, so
these are holes in the playfield that the ball can
fall into, very similar in many ways to the holes
that were used in the old Bagatelle games way back
in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, and these
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are part of play right. This is a hole that's
purposefully put there so that you can have it as
an element of the game. So shooting a ball into
such a hole typically accomplishes something like maybe you get
certain number of points, maybe there's a bonus, maybe you
earn an extra ball, or something along those lines. It
might be part of a mode in later games. And
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once again, a ball falling into such a hole activates
a switch. This in turn activates a solenoid to knock
the ball back out of the hole and onto the playfield.
And if the ball were to fall right back into
the hole, then it'll happen again, and often the ball
will drain straight away. A lot of the game designers
make these holes where that often the trajectory of the
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ball is one that is darn close to draining, like
close to ninety percent of the time, and it is
mad frustrating. One last common element in pinball machines are ramps,
and I think it's pretty obvious what a ramp is.
It's an inclined surface that brings the ball somewhere else
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on the playfield. It might be a raised playfield, so
you have a secondary playfield that's separate from the main
playfield of the game. Maybe the ramp will just guide
the ball down to one of the in lanes that
lead to the flippers. Usually hitting a ramp activates a
switch of some sort that does something at bare minimum
increases the score, but it might be part of a
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mode or some other more advanced game feature. There are
other basic components as well, like spinners. For example. I
also mentioned drop targets in the previous episode. These little
targets typically made out of hard plastic that, when the
ball strikes them, drops down into the playfield. And there
are countless gimmicks that are usually called toys in pinball, lingo.
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Toys you can find in lots of different pinball machines.
Some are unique to a specific table where it's a
really innovative design and there's not really anything else like
it in pinball. One of them are based off a
very similar concept, and it's just that the iterations you
see looked and act a little different. But these are
(28:08):
all sorts of stuff and they can do anything from
shooting a ball elsewhere on the playfield to moving it
with magnets. Like I think of Adam's Family, which is
one of my favorite tables of all time. There is
a toy of thing the hand, and it comes out
of a box and it's got a little magnet on
the end of it, so it can pick up a
pinball and pull it in for a ball lock for
(28:31):
a multi ball further down the game. That's a simple
example of a toy in a pinball machine. And magnets
are really important in pinball. Not only do they activate solenoids,
not only are they important for all that physical action.
Remember that the balls themselves are made out of steel
and thus are affected by magnets. So some games have
(28:54):
electromagnetic elements mounted under the playfield in order to change
the direction of the ball's path as it's zooming around
it might make it suddenly swerve and go a totally
different way. Some use magnets to pick up a ball
put it somewhere else on the playfield. Some pinball machines
also have special balls that aren't made of steel, that
are made of ceramic like usually mixed in along with
(29:16):
the steel balls. Twilight Zone is an example of this.
Twilight Zone has a power ball that's made out of ceramic.
It is lighter in weight, they don't weigh as much
as the steel ball, so they go a lot faster.
And they also aren't affected by magnetic fields, so the
electromagnet stuff doesn't work on the ceramics, so they change
the nature of the game as it's being played. So yeah,
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there are versions as well. You can have elements of
a game work because the balls are mostly made out
of steel. You can also have elements of the game
for balls that are specifically not made out of steel.
To be the exception, It gives a lot of versatility
when you become a game designer. All right, we've got
more to say about pinball, but before we get into that,
(30:00):
let's take another quick break. Now. In my last episode
about pinball, I talked about how various communities across the
United States had identified pinball as being a great social evil,
(30:20):
and pinball machines were associated with gambling and delinquency. And
since early pinball machines didn't have flippers, they were seen
as games of chance. And I think that was a
more than fair assertion, Like, yes, you could use some
skill to be able to plunge a ball in a
particular way, but there was way more chance at play
(30:43):
than skill, I would say, And since proprietors would often
award prizes for people who achieved top scores, these games
a chance were essentially seen as gambling. And thus the
authorities eventually came down hard as moral panic drove them
to do something that would says by their constituents. But
it's important to do something that's not too hard, something
(31:03):
that's achievable. You know. It's one thing to say you're
going up against like organized crime and the mob. It's
another thing to actually do that. So why not just
smash a few pinball machines and make pimball illegal? And
that'll make you look tough on crime. So folks were
seeing pimball as a corrupting influence on the youth, of
the day, partly because pinball machines were also often found
(31:25):
in places that were a little unseemly, you know, like
bars and that kind of thing. And so cities like Atlanta,
New York, Chicago, and several more would pass laws making
pinball illegal. And then we get up to an event
that is famous in the history of pinball, at least
for pimball enthusiasts. So, if you'll recall, in the nineteen forties,
(31:48):
New York Mayor LaGuardia would outlaw pinball and famously pose
for publicity photos sledgehammer in hand, smash pinball machines at
his feet. And it wouldn't be into till nineteen seventy
six that this band would get overturned. The New York
City Council was called upon to review the ban, and
(32:08):
a man named Roger Sharp successfully convinced the council that
the ban was not appropriate. Sharp wrote for GQ magazine,
and he really really wanted to play pinball. He had
played pinball in college and he wanted to be able
to play pinball day to day. He wrote an article
and later a book about pinball. But you know, he
(32:28):
worked in New York City and there was no pinball
to be played there, it was against the law. So
his writings would eventually lead to this council meeting and
he was called upon to provide expert testimony about the game.
And here's where we get into the myth and legend
segment of the episode, not to say that this stuff
isn't true, just that it's become kind of a central,
(32:51):
really important moment in pinball history here in the United States.
So Sharp was pulled in to talk to the council
about pinball, and he was arguing that modern pinball was
a game of skill, not chance, and that the reasons
for banning the machines were based off outdated devices that
were really more like slot machines than they were like
(33:13):
pinball games. And he said, well, that's not the case anymore.
That's not what pinball is anymore, and the band shouldn't stand.
And you know, modern machines were games of skill in
which a player who was actually good at the game
could achieve specific outcomes. You know, you could aim for
and make a particular shot. It wasn't just random chance.
(33:35):
Otherwise the ball would just bounce around and eventually drain,
and players would not really be able to affect the
score in any meaningful way. So Sharp was put to
the test. The Council had Sharp play a pinball machine
and asked him to make several specific shots, which Sharp
managed to do, which is great, he must perform fantastic
(33:56):
under pressure. I hear he's legit a phenomenal pinball. But
the thing that I think was interesting is that even
great pinball players don't make every shot right like It's
just like any great athlete never doesn't make every shot.
They might make most, but not all. So he made
it when it counted, And the council saw that it
was possible to actually play pinball as a game, and
(34:18):
that it was a game of skills. So they lifted
the ban, and the war on pinball, at least in
New York City, was over. I'm sure the extremely moral
guardians of the nineteen thirties and forties were beside themselves
with horror and sadness to see the evil pinball machines
return to corrupt the youth. The nineteen seventy saw a
real boom in pinball. Not only were various cities lifting
(34:43):
or ignoring earlier bands on the game, but game designers
were coming up with new gimmicks and themes to entice
people to play. The rise of video games would also
give rise to the video game arcade. And it used
to be that, like video games, and pinball machines could
only be found in random spots like movie theater lobbies
or bowling alleys, or pizza joints and bars. But over
(35:06):
time the possibility of a video game and pinball arcade arose,
and for a short amount of time it was a
darn good business. Here in the United States, you would
find such arcade galleries in pretty much every shopping mall
you came across. These days, they're far more rare because
over time the home market would change things. Lots of
(35:27):
things would kind of converge to make the classic video
game arcade a less viable business. Pinball machines didn't tend
to be as popular with these arcades as video game
cabinets were. Pinball machines took up a lot of space.
For one thing, the mechanical components also meant that parts
could and would need replacing on a regular basis, so
(35:50):
sometimes a proprietor would even have to stop what they
were doing in order to come over and open up
a machine, slide the glass pane out of the way
and remove a ball manually, because balls would sometimes get stuck.
And even a machine that had a ball clearing routine
where all the solenoids would go off in sequence or
in series, sometimes that wasn't enough and you would have
(36:11):
to open a machine up to remove a ball that
got lodged somewhere so that games could continue. So pinball
machines were seen as kind of a hassle for some folks,
and the question was would they be worth the hassle
of operating them. Now there were still enough people thinking
they were worth the hassle that there were lots of
companies making pinball machines. Licensing had become a really big
(36:34):
deal as well. These companies would strike deals with various
IP holders to make machines themed after known commodities. These
could be television shows or movies, or magazines or comic
books like you know, I keep mentioning Adam's Family that
was actually based off the film version of Adam's Family
with ral Julia as Gomez Adams and Angelica Houston as Mortsia.
(36:57):
That is still one of my favorite tables to the
stay that's a licensed property obviously, there are lots of examples,
ranging from things like Marvel Comics to Playboy to Jaws,
to musicians, famous musicians and rock acts, Guns n' Roses,
Iron Maiden, Metallica, Elton John. They all have dedicated pinball machines. Well.
(37:22):
In nineteen seventy five, a company called Micro released an
electronic pinball machine called the Spirit of seventy six, which
was really notable because it was a solid state pinball machine,
meaning that instead of having a mass of wires and
physical circuitry underneath the playfield, this one had integrated circuit
(37:43):
boards that were connected to one another. You still had
wires running to stuff and everything, but you had these
integrated circuit boards, which drastically simplified the layout underneath, at
least from a wire's perspective. The invention of the transistor
and then lay the integrated circuit revolutionized electronics across the board.
(38:04):
It became possible to build much smaller circuits, which in
turn led to the miniaturization of various devices. So stuff
like radios and computers and televisions and much more would
transform thanks to miniaturization, and again that was due to
transistors and integrated circuits. Now, in pinball, miniaturization wasn't really
a big concern, but transistors meant that you could create
(38:28):
these mechanical systems that could be controlled by digital inputs
rather than analog circuits wired to physical buttons and whatnot.
Integrated circuits allowed for more accurate score keeping and control,
and they would also pave the way for more advanced
effects such as sound cues and voices speech. In other words,
I'm told that the first table to have speech was
(38:49):
the nineteen seventy nine pinball machine called Gorgar gor Gar.
It had seven whole words to its vocabulary, and it
could make simple sentences is like you beat me, or
gorgr speaks. Another change in pinball would be how scores
would be displayed. So you might remember in our first
episode I talked about a pinball machine that featured a
(39:12):
dial and it had a needle that would point to
score increments, so as your score would go out, the
needle would move and show you what your score was.
Later on you would get the famous digit counters mentioned
in the whose song Pinball Wizard, and these were essentially reels,
and the reels had numbers printed on the circumference of
(39:32):
the reel. And the reel would turn to show whatever
the score was, and you would have a sequence of
reels right so that you'd have one that would be
the single digits, one that would be the tens, the hundreds,
et cetera, and they would rotate to show whatever current
score was in place. These gave way to digital displays.
You would get like digital then LCD, THN LED and
(39:56):
so on, and that would really allow for a lot
other opportunities to use the BackBox display as part of
the game. You could incorporate video game elements into your
pinball game. The solid state era would lead to computer
micro controllers handling the operations of the game, which also
allowed game designers to create increasingly sophisticated modes. So a
(40:20):
mode is typically a series of tasks that the player
has to complete in order to finish that mode, and
then you win points or earn an extra ball or
some other outcome is dependent upon completing that mode. So
maybe hit these two ramps like five times each. That
would be a pretty crappy mode, but it could exist.
(40:41):
Or it might be hit these outer lanes a certain
number of times, or hit them in this order right ramp,
left ramp, and then the pop bumpers, it could be
something along those lines now. Eventually, game designers got the
idea of including several different modes within a single game,
and if a player were able to complete all the
(41:04):
modes listed, then a new bonus mode could pop up,
and in the pinball community this is referenced as a
wizard mode. Many newer games feature some sort of wizard mode.
One of the ones I'm again most familiar with is
Adam's Family. If you complete all the different modes, you
get a tour of the mansion, which allows you to
(41:26):
really rack up points if you're a really good player.
I've actually done it a few times back when I
was in college. These days, I doubt I could ever
get that far. But back when I was playing it
pretty regularly, I got really good at it and it
was a lot of fun. And people who are really
good at pinball machines and playing pinball, they can really
show off with getting to wizard modes. It often is
(41:49):
a bit of a chore. Some games have so many
different modes you have to complete first before you can
unlock Wizard mode that I think I would be exhausted
before I could ever get there. My wrists give out
from playing with the buttons too much. But this was
also in an era in which we would see some
important companies actually get out of pinball design and manufacturing.
(42:09):
Some companies would shut down important companies that really led
the way in pinball development. So Gottlieb was the first
to go. Bally and Williams would also get out of
pinball after having an amazing run in the eighties and nineties,
which left a single pinball manufacturer active at that time.
It was Stern Pinball. Stern Pinball was founded in nineteen
(42:32):
ninety nine. It actually traces its history back to an
earlier company called Data East Pinball, which kind of produced
pinball machines for Sega, But Stern Pinball would establish itself
in the late nineties and it stuck around. It's still
making pinball machines today. They made the Jaws machine that
I mentioned in the last episode, the Jaws machine that
(42:52):
I desperately would love to own because it's such a
great machine. Now, the two saw a lot of companies
get out of pinball, but some companies actually got their
start later in the two thousands. In twenty eleven, a
company called Jersey Jack Pinball came into business. Their tables
often include much more advanced technology, including stuff like Bluetooth
(43:14):
connectivity so that you can be part of like worldwide
leader boards and stuff. I got to play one of
their tables at the Southern Fried Gaming Expo too. That
was their Elton John table. I mentioned that earlier. Elton John.
That's another fantastic table. I really love the table design,
plus has an amazing soundtrack. I think they did a
fantastic job with that game. It always had a big
(43:36):
line waiting for it. There were three Elton John tables there,
I want to say, and all three had a line
and yeah, great machine. Other companies currently making pinball machines
include Spooky Pinball, American Pinball, Chicago Gaming Company. They're several more.
There's even a DIY home building pinball community. You have
(43:56):
people who are designing and building their own customized machine
because you can get the various components off different markets,
and if you have knowledge on how to program, you
can program a machine. And if you've got really you
need to have access to some precision machinery to machine
(44:18):
the playfield properly. But if you have access to that stuff,
you can design and build a pinball machine. That's just
based off your own ideas, which is really cool. So
I feel like pinball had a massive setback in the
early two thousands, like it was in danger of going extinct.
But since it's seen a resurgence. You can find pinball
machines in lots of different places. You have these expos,
(44:41):
you have various museums that have set up around the
United States that have collections of pinball machines. So, if
you are a pinball enthusiast, I think the future looks bright.
I think that the hobby has got a lot of
new life to it over the last decade or so.
If you are not a pinball enthusiast, well, there's no
better time than the present to go and check out
(45:02):
a pinball machine. Give it a whirl. There are a
lot of great ones out there. There are also some
real stinkers. It helps to kind of go and look
at what games are generally agreed upon to be good
versus those that people think are bad. Now, there's a
lot of disagreement in the space. You've got people who
will passionately defend one title and say that another beloved
(45:22):
title is the worst thing to ever happen to pinball.
That happens too, because gamers, as we know, are a
passionate group. Sometimes they don't agree with each other, but
I think you'll find general consensus around certain games, and
if you play those, you'll know whether or not this
is something that appeals to you. As for me, yeah,
I'm gonna keep playing. I love my pinball, and I
(45:46):
had a lot of fun going into talking about these
machines and what makes them work. Obviously, when we get
to the modern ones, there are a lot of components
that are pretty advanced stuff that you would find in
things like computer displays and beyond. But it's hard to
talk about that because it tends to get very game dependent,
(46:07):
and then you're doing just an episode where you're talking about,
you know, four or five specific games, and I felt
that that was less important than a more broad approach.
I hope all of you out there are doing well.
I hope you earn all the extra balls and get
all the replays and set all the high scores, and
(46:27):
I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows,
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jovin Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you. We are continuing our look at the
evolution of pinball, which was inspired by my visit to
(00:26):
the Southern Fried Gaming Expo where I appeared as media,
appeared at as too strong a word, I attended as media.
So in the last episode, we learned that pinball's origins
trace back to lawn games that eventually were moving indoors
because not everyone had a lawn and there is disagreement
over what game constitutes the first true pinball table. But
(00:50):
we learned how a gradual evolution brought us from simple
machines outfitted only with like a spring loaded plunger up
to the early days of electro mechanical pinball tables, and
some of the things that were added were really a
big deal. I would argue probably the most important was
the addition of a coin slot. One early title Bally,
(01:11):
who reportedly sold around fifty thousand units to various shop
owners and other proprietors. Fifty thousand units, that's no small shakes.
Remember this is in the nineteen thirties when this happened.
That really helped put the company Bally on the map,
and Bally would play a huge role in the development
of pinball here in the United States. But yeah, these
coin operated machines like it became a new source of
(01:34):
revenue for shop owners and bar owners and such. They
would buy a machine for a large amount of money,
but then they would get to keep the proceeds the
coins made up. And so you know, if you had
a really popular machine, you could earn back what you
spent on it within a relatively short amount of time.
And then everything on top of that is profit, apart
(01:56):
from whatever you have to spend to keep the machine working.
But these early machine, because they really had very few
moving parts, they were relatively easy to maintain. But let's
talk about some of the electro mechanical components in later
pinball machines and how those components work. Now, as I
mentioned in the last episode, the earliest electrified pinball machines
(02:19):
didn't really have much going for them. Usually there was
some sort of noise making element that would signify scoring
and help draw attention to the table so that more
people would want to play, but there were few components
that actually used electricity to create mechanical motion. But it
didn't take long for that to change. Harry Williams of
(02:40):
Williams Manufacturing Williams is another important pinball company, came up
with an idea to set up a game that would
make it stand apart from the competition that was on
the market. So this was way back in nineteen thirty three,
and his idea was a relatively simple one, which was
the inclusion of solenoids. Solinoid is an electro mechanical component
(03:02):
that works through electromagnetism. In many ways, it's similar to
your basic electromagnet. So if you think of a standard electromagnet,
you have a coil of conductive wire, typically copper wire,
and it's wrapped around a core of some sort like
sometimes it's just iron, right, And when you run electricity
(03:23):
through the coil of wire, it creates an electromagnet, and
you can interact with ferromagnetic stuff using this electromagnet, and
with a solenoid it's pretty similar. You've got your coil
of conductive wire. When you pass a current through this coil,
it creates a magnetic field, and you have a sleeve
(03:43):
inside this coil. Nestled in the sleeve is a movable plunger,
so the plunger can slide in or out of this coil.
Sometimes it's called the armature. When the magnetic field is on,
it pulls the plunger into the coil. There's a stop
on either end so that the plunger doesn't just shoot
(04:06):
through the coil or or fall out of the coil,
so that it can come to a stop where it's
partially inside the coil. But when you run electricity through
the coil, it pulls the plunger in entirely. So when
the magnetic field is on, the plunger is inside the coil.
When the magnetic field goes off, like when the current
stops flowing through this coil, the plunger moves back out
(04:30):
of the coil and mounting a post at the end
of the plunger, like extending the plunger so that it
can punch through something. You have a little device capable
of giving a quick push. Whenever the electric current flows
through the wire, the plunger moves in. It pushes this
arm out and it's pretty fast. It's a pretty simple
(04:51):
electro mechanical device, and effectively it turns electric current into
mechanical work. That's its main purpose. Solenoids would in up
being kind of the heartbeat, the lifeblood of pinball machines.
They power so much like a lot of the elements
in your basic pinball machine are worked with solenoids. So
(05:14):
Williams pinball machine had this name called Contact, which is
very clever because contact is what we would say was
made within the circuit to activate the solenoid in the
first place. So the playfield of Contact had holes with
little barriers around them. So the ball you know, your
(05:36):
goal is to get the ball into the highest scoring
holes in the playfield. Those were closer to the bottom
of the playfield, which meant that the ball needed to
pass over or around the holes that were higher up,
because otherwise you would get a lower score. Well, at
the very top of the playfield was this solenoid, so
it's facing downward like toward you. It's at the top
(05:59):
of the play you're playing at the bottom of the playfield.
If you were to fire a ball up so that
it would activate a switch, a contact at the top
of this playfield, the solenoid would activate and it would
hit the ball, and if you were lucky, it would
propel the ball so that it would roll over the
lower scoring holes and the ball would settle into one
(06:22):
of the ones that had a higher score if you
were pretty lucky. Contact relied on a dry cell battery
to provide this electrical current, and according to Williams, the
battery would hold a sufficient charge to provide three months
of play. After that, I assume you would swap the
battery out. I mean possible that you could recharge it,
(06:42):
but you would definitely have to swap it out if
you wanted to be able to play after that time
and to have the electro mechanical elements work. Contact was
a game that went through some changes. This is something
that still happens with the pinball machines now, where manufacturers
will make changes to a machine and later versions will
be slightly different, or they will these days because things
(07:03):
are running on microcomputers. They will update the firmware of
a machine and it will include new modes and such.
We'll talk about modes later. So the company, William's Company
would incorporate a door bell into the machine so that
when the ball made contact with this switch, that would
activate the solenoid, it would also ring the bell, and
(07:25):
Williams also included his anti tilt measure. I talked about
this in the last episode. So his anti tilt design
was there was inside the machine was a post. On
top of this post was a ball, and if the
player were to shake the machine in an attempt to cheat,
the ball could roll off this post and it would
then signal a tilt, which would invalidate the accumulated score
(07:48):
at that point. Back to solenoids, These would become incredibly
important components for pinball machines. They are pretty darn simple,
which is good right. Simple means they're fewer points of failure.
They can fail if you run electricity through wire. One
of the byproducts you get is heat, and if electricity
(08:09):
is running through wire for a long time, a lot
of heat can build up and that can cause damage
to the components. So there are points of failure, but
there are few of them. Solenoids are used not just
to knock a pinball around. They can also be used
as noise makers, they can strike a bell, or they
can be used as knockers. So if you're really good
(08:31):
at pinball, you have probably experienced a replay or you know,
if you've ever matched. Matching is when you know modern
pinball machines, they'll take the last two digits of your
score and then they'll display kind of a random selection
of other scores, and if you end up matching, then
you get a replay. Well, a lot of pinball machines
(08:52):
include a knocker to signal that a player has managed
to get a replay and they have a free game.
The pinball machine lets out this very loud knocking sound. Well,
a solenoid is what is actually making that sound. There's
a dedicated knocker or solenoid mounted in the machine to
do this, and there are a couple of different types
(09:12):
that you could find in various machines. One would be
a spring mounted solenoid. So the spring would typically keep
the plunger out of the coil, but when an electric
current runs through the coil, the magnetic pole is strong
enough to compress the spring, pull the plunger in quickly,
and mounted on the top of the plunger as a
post that's capped in plastic. This post strikes a plate
(09:36):
typically mounted near the pinball machine's back box, and the
current only passes through the wire for a fraction of
a second, so the spring decompresses, the plunger is pulled
into the coil, and the cap strikes the plate and boom,
you get your old knocking noise, which could be quite loud.
Usually there's like a fifty volt current that's being put
(09:58):
through the device order to make this happen, and if
you have a lower power supply, the knock's going to
be less impressive. Many knocker solenoids actually are simpler than
this design. They don't have the spring loaded piston at all. Instead,
they rely on gravity. So these solenoids have to be
mounted vertically so that the plunger naturally slides down. Like
(10:21):
if there's no current running through the coil, the plunger
is going to be resting on a rest plate, so
it's only partly inside the coil. Then when current runs
through the coil, it pulls the plunger up right because
magnetic attraction and the plunger the post mounted on the
end of the plunger will strike the striking plate and make
(10:43):
the knocking noise. And then when the current is shut off,
the plunger will naturally slide back down the sleeve inside
the coil and rest against the resting plate, so you
have to have it mounted vertically so that gravity will
pull the plunger back down. But this does simple things
quite a bit. But what about other elements inside a
(11:03):
pinball machine? What about flippers? These are pretty common today,
I mean, they're almost universal in modern pinball machines. Again,
it wasn't until nineteen forty seven that we got the
first pinball machine that had flippers. And even then they
were oriented opposite, like they were facing outward on the
machine rather than inward, and they were along the sides
and there were six of them, so it was very
(11:24):
different from the way flippers are today. But yeah, it
wasn't until nineteen forty seven that we even got flippers,
and now they're pretty much standard on pinball machines. How
do they work, well, no, big surprise. They also use solenoids,
which are mounted below the playfield where they're out of sight.
But a solenoid works, you know, like a piston. Right,
(11:45):
The plunger moves linearly, it moves in and out, so
you need to have something that translates this action. Because
a flipper acts like a bat, It swings, it rotates,
So mounted on the solenoid plunger is a little piece
typically called a linkage, and the linkage connects to a
(12:06):
rotating element that in turn is mounted on a spindle.
The spindle is connected to the flipper, so the rotating
element translates the linear action into a rotational action and
then transmits that through the spindle to the flipper. So
the flipper can swing and there's a stop. Typically that
all may mean the flipper can only rotate so far.
(12:27):
It's not gonna make the flipper go all the way around.
It'll just rise up when you're looking down from the
position of a player. So when the solenoid activates, the
mechanical motion causes the flipper to swing, and a spring
on the spindle will return the flipper to its resting
position afterwards, so it's not just relying on gravity to
(12:49):
return the flipper to its downward position. There is a
spring there so that it adds resistance and pushes back
against the flipper so it returns to its normal downward state.
When you connect this assembly to a power supply and
a flipper button, the flipper button serves as a switch.
You have your classic pinball flipper as long as you're
holding the switch down the flipper will remain up, but
(13:11):
it does get a little more complicated, and in my opinion,
this is a really cool element for flippers because it's
engineering a solution to a real problem. So again, pinball
machines typically have balls that are made out of solid steel,
which allows for some other fun gimmicks that we'll talk
about a bit later. These balls weigh in and around
eighty grams, which is significant, so the flipper bats have
(13:34):
to be strong enough to whack an eighty gram steel
ball around a playfield. Anyone who has played a machine
that has really weak flippers can tell you it's a
very frustrating experience. So the solidoids powering these flippers need
to be sufficiently strong to generate the mechanical force necessary
to give the ball a good whack across the playfield,
(13:55):
and that means having a fairly significant coil to generate
a strong enough magnetic field to pull the plunger with force.
But this also creates an issue if someone is holding
the flipper button down to keep the flipper raised up,
and players will often do this, like you might want
to pause so that you can prepare for a specific shot.
Maybe you're lining up a shot so you can shoot
(14:15):
a ball up a ramp, for example, and you kind
of have a feel for where on the flipper that
needs to happen, but you need to get control of
the ball first in order to be able to do
it reliably. So you've trapped the ball and you're holding
it in place before you make your shot. You could
be holding the ball the button down for a bit.
Maybe you've also decided, Hey, I'm going to take a
swig of my frosty beverage that I have next to me,
(14:38):
and I'm going to pause gameplay a little bit by
holding the ball in place while I do this. The
issue here is that a high powered solnoid's going to
generate a lot of heat as that electric current runs
through that coil, which it will keep doing while you're
holding the button down, right, because that button's a switch. This,
as I said, can damage the machine over time. Specifically,
(15:00):
can damage the solenoids and melt them so that they
become less effective, and eventually they become ineffective and you're
going to have to replace the solenoids in the pinball machine.
So what was needed was a way to switch from
the high powered coil to perhaps a secondary coil that
was just strong enough to keep the plunger in position
(15:22):
once it already had been pulled into the coil itself.
It takes a lot of energy to move the plunger
into place, but once it's there, it doesn't take as
much energy to hold it there. So flippers solenoids often
have two coils, one essentially kind of nested inside the other.
One coil is the high powered one that pulls the
(15:42):
plunger in the other one requires much less power and
is just there to hold the plunger once it's in place.
The rotating element of the flipper's spindle actually breaks a
contact that is for the heavy duty coil, so once
the flipper is in full upright position, it is no
longer under the power of the main coil. It is
(16:04):
swapped to the secondary coil, which requires much less power
to operate. It also generates much less heat, so the
power coil does the heavy lifting of pulling the plunger
in the later coil just holds it in place once
it's there. All because a mechanical element physically changes the
circuit underneath by breaking this one contact and making another.
(16:25):
And I think that's really super cool, Okay, I've got
a lot more to talk about with pinball machines, but
first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors.
So before the break, I was talking about flippers and
(16:45):
solenoids and how a pair of different coils can allow
you to hold a flipper an upright position without burning
out your solenoids. Well, we are starting to get into
why some pinball machines have really weak flippers, and there
can be a few different things that contribute to this.
One is that the power supply that's going to the solenoids,
(17:07):
that power of the flippers is in turn weak. That
could be an issue. And you know, a lot of
these pinball machines get pretty janky over time, with people
replacing components with stuff that wasn't necessarily designed to go
in a pinball machine, or wasn't the same sort of
power supply that was used in a previous version of
the machine, which means that some of these solenoids might
(17:28):
be receiving far less power than they typically would, and
that means when you push the button, you get a
kind of weak flipper and you're not really able to
play the game very effectively. Other times, it can be
an issue where there's a problem with the actual mechanical
components where they're not able to turn or move as
freely as they usually would. They might need some cleaning
(17:51):
or replacing in order to do that, and sometimes it's
because the solenoids themselves have become damage due to overheating.
This is a good point to remind y'all that if
you do ever play a pinball machine, or if you
happen to be rolling in the bucks and you own
a pinball machine, because these things are expensive, y'all, don't
(18:13):
push a flipper button a whole bunch of times in
quick succession. When you do that, you're activating that primary coil.
Each time you push the button and release it and
then push it again, they're activating that primary coil and
you're building up heat. So if you hold the button down,
that's less damaging because you're using that secondary coil that
consumes less energy and doesn't generate as much heat. But
(18:34):
if you press the button really quickly over and over
and over and over and over again, that can make
the coil heat up, and the coil can actually melt
and the flippers will stop working. Eventually, you'll have to
replace the solenoid underneath, and that could be that's a
bit of a thing, like it's not impossible, people do
it all the time, but it is a bit complicated.
(18:56):
Another common feature in pinball machines are bumpers. So in
the previous episode I talked about a game called Bollow
Bolo and it had passive bumpers that has had these
little obstacles. So in Bollow they were the shape of
bowling pins and they were mounted on rods that in
turn were attached to springs. They otherwise had no other
(19:16):
mechanism attached to them, so they were what you would
call passive bumpers. So a ball could hit them and
bounce off of them, and they would wiggle around in stuff.
But that was pretty much it. Well, I say that
was it, But there were also passive bumpers that could
actually send a signal for the purposes of scorekeeping. Ballow
as far as I can determine, wasn't this way, but
others were. And sometimes these bumpers are called mushroom bumpers
(19:40):
because they look kind of like mushrooms. So these bumpers
are also passive. They don't bounce back, but they can
register when they've been hit and that can then go
toward the progressive scorekeeping part of the pinball machine. And
the way that this typically works is that these bumpers
have a diss sitting near the top of the post
(20:03):
of the bumper. So if you think of the bumper,
you got the post that's the centralized stand, the pedestal
kind of that makes up the bumper. Then you've got
a disc on top, and then maybe you've got like
a cap on the very top that shows how many
points the bumper is worth. So when a ball makes
contact with the pedestal, the rod the post of this bumper,
(20:26):
there's this little disc that the ball impacts and it
lifts the disc up slightly. Now the disc, in turn
is connected to a stem. That stem is ultimately connected
to a leaf switch, and when the disc lifts up,
the leaf switch is activated and it sends a signal
to indicate scoring. These simple bumpers date back to the
nineteen forties, but they would get much more attention in
(20:48):
the sixties and seventies. They would become kind of emblematic
of pinball machines of that era. Just as flippers were
really important for pinball machines to take off, these bumpers
would become something that people just associate with pinball machines.
There are also active bumpers, however, they have different names.
Some people call them pop bumpers, or jet bumpers or
(21:11):
thumper bumpers, among other things. So these react when they're struck.
They strike back, so they propel the ball in the process.
These are electro mechanical bumpers, and the basic pop bumper
is a pretty clever design. So typically at the very
base of the bumper's post or pedestal on the playfield side,
there's a little plastic disc that's raised up just to
(21:33):
touch off the playfield itself. Now, it's low enough that
a ball can roll onto this plastic disc, and when
that happens, the weight of the ball tilts the disc
slightly so. Connected to this disc, underneath the playfield is
a stem, and that stem rests inside a kind of
a shallow bowl or spoon under this playfield. Now, when
(21:56):
the disc is in its resting position, the stem's not
really making content with the bowl. It's almost but not
quite touching, or if it's touching, it's touching so lightly
as to not displace the bowl. When the disc tilts,
the stem is deflected, and it starts to push against
the rising sides of this bowl, and it makes the
whole bowl push downward. This is what completes a switch.
(22:19):
That switch does a couple of things. It sends a
signal to the progressive score keeping system, so it increases
the score to the appropriate amount depending on how much
the bumper is worth. And it completes a command that
ultimately sends a signal to a solenoid that's attached to
this bumper. That's a separate circuit typically, but that circuit
(22:39):
is what gives the bumper the bump. The solenoid in
turn connects to a metal ring that is also around
the bumper's post. So you have a disc at the
base of the ring. On the playfield side, you've got
the post that extends up and at the top of
the post typically you have this metal ring that connects
down through the playfield to the solemn So the solenoid,
(23:01):
when it activates, it pulls the plunger in. This pulls
the ring downward, and the ring acts as a bumper.
It hits the ball and knocks it away. So once again,
solenoids are the work courses of the pinball world, and
Typically you would find pinball machines that would group a
bunch of these active bumpers in a configuration, often in
(23:22):
like a triangle where you have one bumper at the
top and two bumpers below, and with a good trajectory,
the ball could start bouncing in between these like crazy
as they activate one bumper after another and get knocked around.
We're also not done with solenoids yet, and we still
have another classic element to talk about that uses solenoids
(23:43):
for the purposes of transferring electrical energy and turning it
into mechanical energy, and that would be the sling shots.
I've seen Gottleib's Double Feature pinball machine credited as the
first pinball machine to have a playfield with sling shots
like these active shots, But then, considering how loosey goosey
pinball history is, I can't swear that Gottleib's Double Feature
(24:06):
was the very first pinball machine to have slingshots. It's
often credited that way, but I'm not sure if that's true. Anyway,
a slingshot is typically triangular in shape. You will often
see these at the base of the playfield in a
pinball machine, usually just above where the flippers are and
the slingshot has a rubber cord or band wrapped around
(24:28):
it and it kicks a ball if the ball comes
in contact with a slingshot. So how does this work? Well,
it's not passive, it is active. And if you were
to take a cover off of a slingshot, you would
see that this rubber cord stretches around three posts. They
provide the points of the triangle, and a solenoid is
(24:49):
what gives the the slingshots their kicking power. No surprise there, right,
because solenoids are used everywhere in pinball machines. The solenoid
connects to a mechanism that allows for this quick punch
of power. But what triggers the solenoid? While behind this
rubber chord making contact with the rubber chord typically on
either side of where the solenoid's post is, you have
(25:13):
a pair of switches. So if a ball hits the
rubber band or rubber chord hard enough to trigger one
of these switches, it completes the electric current needed to
activate the solenoid, and the solenoid activates pulls the plunger
inside the coil. This movement also powers the little post
that punches out through this rubber chord and boom, the
(25:35):
ball gets propelled somewhere else on the playfield, often down
one of the outlanes, and down the ball drained. Gosh
darn it. Many bimbo machines also have kickout holes, so
these are holes in the playfield that the ball can
fall into, very similar in many ways to the holes
that were used in the old Bagatelle games way back
in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, and these
(25:59):
are part of play right. This is a hole that's
purposefully put there so that you can have it as
an element of the game. So shooting a ball into
such a hole typically accomplishes something like maybe you get
certain number of points, maybe there's a bonus, maybe you
earn an extra ball, or something along those lines. It
might be part of a mode in later games. And
(26:21):
once again, a ball falling into such a hole activates
a switch. This in turn activates a solenoid to knock
the ball back out of the hole and onto the playfield.
And if the ball were to fall right back into
the hole, then it'll happen again, and often the ball
will drain straight away. A lot of the game designers
make these holes where that often the trajectory of the
(26:42):
ball is one that is darn close to draining, like
close to ninety percent of the time, and it is
mad frustrating. One last common element in pinball machines are ramps,
and I think it's pretty obvious what a ramp is.
It's an inclined surface that brings the ball somewhere else
(27:03):
on the playfield. It might be a raised playfield, so
you have a secondary playfield that's separate from the main
playfield of the game. Maybe the ramp will just guide
the ball down to one of the in lanes that
lead to the flippers. Usually hitting a ramp activates a
switch of some sort that does something at bare minimum
increases the score, but it might be part of a
(27:24):
mode or some other more advanced game feature. There are
other basic components as well, like spinners. For example. I
also mentioned drop targets in the previous episode. These little
targets typically made out of hard plastic that, when the
ball strikes them, drops down into the playfield. And there
are countless gimmicks that are usually called toys in pinball, lingo.
(27:47):
Toys you can find in lots of different pinball machines.
Some are unique to a specific table where it's a
really innovative design and there's not really anything else like
it in pinball. One of them are based off a
very similar concept, and it's just that the iterations you
see looked and act a little different. But these are
(28:08):
all sorts of stuff and they can do anything from
shooting a ball elsewhere on the playfield to moving it
with magnets. Like I think of Adam's Family, which is
one of my favorite tables of all time. There is
a toy of thing the hand, and it comes out
of a box and it's got a little magnet on
the end of it, so it can pick up a
pinball and pull it in for a ball lock for
(28:31):
a multi ball further down the game. That's a simple
example of a toy in a pinball machine. And magnets
are really important in pinball. Not only do they activate solenoids,
not only are they important for all that physical action.
Remember that the balls themselves are made out of steel
and thus are affected by magnets. So some games have
(28:54):
electromagnetic elements mounted under the playfield in order to change
the direction of the ball's path as it's zooming around
it might make it suddenly swerve and go a totally
different way. Some use magnets to pick up a ball
put it somewhere else on the playfield. Some pinball machines
also have special balls that aren't made of steel, that
are made of ceramic like usually mixed in along with
(29:16):
the steel balls. Twilight Zone is an example of this.
Twilight Zone has a power ball that's made out of ceramic.
It is lighter in weight, they don't weigh as much
as the steel ball, so they go a lot faster.
And they also aren't affected by magnetic fields, so the
electromagnet stuff doesn't work on the ceramics, so they change
the nature of the game as it's being played. So yeah,
(29:39):
there are versions as well. You can have elements of
a game work because the balls are mostly made out
of steel. You can also have elements of the game
for balls that are specifically not made out of steel.
To be the exception, It gives a lot of versatility
when you become a game designer. All right, we've got
more to say about pinball, but before we get into that,
(30:00):
let's take another quick break. Now. In my last episode
about pinball, I talked about how various communities across the
United States had identified pinball as being a great social evil,
(30:20):
and pinball machines were associated with gambling and delinquency. And
since early pinball machines didn't have flippers, they were seen
as games of chance. And I think that was a
more than fair assertion, Like, yes, you could use some
skill to be able to plunge a ball in a
particular way, but there was way more chance at play
(30:43):
than skill, I would say, And since proprietors would often
award prizes for people who achieved top scores, these games
a chance were essentially seen as gambling. And thus the
authorities eventually came down hard as moral panic drove them
to do something that would says by their constituents. But
it's important to do something that's not too hard, something
(31:03):
that's achievable. You know. It's one thing to say you're
going up against like organized crime and the mob. It's
another thing to actually do that. So why not just
smash a few pinball machines and make pimball illegal? And
that'll make you look tough on crime. So folks were
seeing pimball as a corrupting influence on the youth, of
the day, partly because pinball machines were also often found
(31:25):
in places that were a little unseemly, you know, like
bars and that kind of thing. And so cities like Atlanta,
New York, Chicago, and several more would pass laws making
pinball illegal. And then we get up to an event
that is famous in the history of pinball, at least
for pimball enthusiasts. So, if you'll recall, in the nineteen forties,
(31:48):
New York Mayor LaGuardia would outlaw pinball and famously pose
for publicity photos sledgehammer in hand, smash pinball machines at
his feet. And it wouldn't be into till nineteen seventy
six that this band would get overturned. The New York
City Council was called upon to review the ban, and
(32:08):
a man named Roger Sharp successfully convinced the council that
the ban was not appropriate. Sharp wrote for GQ magazine,
and he really really wanted to play pinball. He had
played pinball in college and he wanted to be able
to play pinball day to day. He wrote an article
and later a book about pinball. But you know, he
(32:28):
worked in New York City and there was no pinball
to be played there, it was against the law. So
his writings would eventually lead to this council meeting and
he was called upon to provide expert testimony about the game.
And here's where we get into the myth and legend
segment of the episode, not to say that this stuff
isn't true, just that it's become kind of a central,
(32:51):
really important moment in pinball history here in the United States.
So Sharp was pulled in to talk to the council
about pinball, and he was arguing that modern pinball was
a game of skill, not chance, and that the reasons
for banning the machines were based off outdated devices that
were really more like slot machines than they were like
(33:13):
pinball games. And he said, well, that's not the case anymore.
That's not what pinball is anymore, and the band shouldn't stand.
And you know, modern machines were games of skill in
which a player who was actually good at the game
could achieve specific outcomes. You know, you could aim for
and make a particular shot. It wasn't just random chance.
(33:35):
Otherwise the ball would just bounce around and eventually drain,
and players would not really be able to affect the
score in any meaningful way. So Sharp was put to
the test. The Council had Sharp play a pinball machine
and asked him to make several specific shots, which Sharp
managed to do, which is great, he must perform fantastic
(33:56):
under pressure. I hear he's legit a phenomenal pinball. But
the thing that I think was interesting is that even
great pinball players don't make every shot right like It's
just like any great athlete never doesn't make every shot.
They might make most, but not all. So he made
it when it counted, And the council saw that it
was possible to actually play pinball as a game, and
(34:18):
that it was a game of skills. So they lifted
the ban, and the war on pinball, at least in
New York City, was over. I'm sure the extremely moral
guardians of the nineteen thirties and forties were beside themselves
with horror and sadness to see the evil pinball machines
return to corrupt the youth. The nineteen seventy saw a
real boom in pinball. Not only were various cities lifting
(34:43):
or ignoring earlier bands on the game, but game designers
were coming up with new gimmicks and themes to entice
people to play. The rise of video games would also
give rise to the video game arcade. And it used
to be that, like video games, and pinball machines could
only be found in random spots like movie theater lobbies
or bowling alleys, or pizza joints and bars. But over
(35:06):
time the possibility of a video game and pinball arcade arose,
and for a short amount of time it was a
darn good business. Here in the United States, you would
find such arcade galleries in pretty much every shopping mall
you came across. These days, they're far more rare because
over time the home market would change things. Lots of
(35:27):
things would kind of converge to make the classic video
game arcade a less viable business. Pinball machines didn't tend
to be as popular with these arcades as video game
cabinets were. Pinball machines took up a lot of space.
For one thing, the mechanical components also meant that parts
could and would need replacing on a regular basis, so
(35:50):
sometimes a proprietor would even have to stop what they
were doing in order to come over and open up
a machine, slide the glass pane out of the way
and remove a ball manually, because balls would sometimes get stuck.
And even a machine that had a ball clearing routine
where all the solenoids would go off in sequence or
in series, sometimes that wasn't enough and you would have
(36:11):
to open a machine up to remove a ball that
got lodged somewhere so that games could continue. So pinball
machines were seen as kind of a hassle for some folks,
and the question was would they be worth the hassle
of operating them. Now there were still enough people thinking
they were worth the hassle that there were lots of
companies making pinball machines. Licensing had become a really big
(36:34):
deal as well. These companies would strike deals with various
IP holders to make machines themed after known commodities. These
could be television shows or movies, or magazines or comic
books like you know, I keep mentioning Adam's Family that
was actually based off the film version of Adam's Family
with ral Julia as Gomez Adams and Angelica Houston as Mortsia.
(36:57):
That is still one of my favorite tables to the
stay that's a licensed property obviously, there are lots of examples,
ranging from things like Marvel Comics to Playboy to Jaws,
to musicians, famous musicians and rock acts, Guns n' Roses,
Iron Maiden, Metallica, Elton John. They all have dedicated pinball machines. Well.
(37:22):
In nineteen seventy five, a company called Micro released an
electronic pinball machine called the Spirit of seventy six, which
was really notable because it was a solid state pinball machine,
meaning that instead of having a mass of wires and
physical circuitry underneath the playfield, this one had integrated circuit
(37:43):
boards that were connected to one another. You still had
wires running to stuff and everything, but you had these
integrated circuit boards, which drastically simplified the layout underneath, at
least from a wire's perspective. The invention of the transistor
and then lay the integrated circuit revolutionized electronics across the board.
(38:04):
It became possible to build much smaller circuits, which in
turn led to the miniaturization of various devices. So stuff
like radios and computers and televisions and much more would
transform thanks to miniaturization, and again that was due to
transistors and integrated circuits. Now, in pinball, miniaturization wasn't really
a big concern, but transistors meant that you could create
(38:28):
these mechanical systems that could be controlled by digital inputs
rather than analog circuits wired to physical buttons and whatnot.
Integrated circuits allowed for more accurate score keeping and control,
and they would also pave the way for more advanced
effects such as sound cues and voices speech. In other words,
I'm told that the first table to have speech was
(38:49):
the nineteen seventy nine pinball machine called Gorgar gor Gar.
It had seven whole words to its vocabulary, and it
could make simple sentences is like you beat me, or
gorgr speaks. Another change in pinball would be how scores
would be displayed. So you might remember in our first
episode I talked about a pinball machine that featured a
(39:12):
dial and it had a needle that would point to
score increments, so as your score would go out, the
needle would move and show you what your score was.
Later on you would get the famous digit counters mentioned
in the whose song Pinball Wizard, and these were essentially reels,
and the reels had numbers printed on the circumference of
(39:32):
the reel. And the reel would turn to show whatever
the score was, and you would have a sequence of
reels right so that you'd have one that would be
the single digits, one that would be the tens, the hundreds,
et cetera, and they would rotate to show whatever current
score was in place. These gave way to digital displays.
You would get like digital then LCD, THN LED and
(39:56):
so on, and that would really allow for a lot
other opportunities to use the BackBox display as part of
the game. You could incorporate video game elements into your
pinball game. The solid state era would lead to computer
micro controllers handling the operations of the game, which also
allowed game designers to create increasingly sophisticated modes. So a
(40:20):
mode is typically a series of tasks that the player
has to complete in order to finish that mode, and
then you win points or earn an extra ball or
some other outcome is dependent upon completing that mode. So
maybe hit these two ramps like five times each. That
would be a pretty crappy mode, but it could exist.
(40:41):
Or it might be hit these outer lanes a certain
number of times, or hit them in this order right ramp,
left ramp, and then the pop bumpers, it could be
something along those lines now. Eventually, game designers got the
idea of including several different modes within a single game,
and if a player were able to complete all the
(41:04):
modes listed, then a new bonus mode could pop up,
and in the pinball community this is referenced as a
wizard mode. Many newer games feature some sort of wizard mode.
One of the ones I'm again most familiar with is
Adam's Family. If you complete all the different modes, you
get a tour of the mansion, which allows you to
(41:26):
really rack up points if you're a really good player.
I've actually done it a few times back when I
was in college. These days, I doubt I could ever
get that far. But back when I was playing it
pretty regularly, I got really good at it and it
was a lot of fun. And people who are really
good at pinball machines and playing pinball, they can really
show off with getting to wizard modes. It often is
(41:49):
a bit of a chore. Some games have so many
different modes you have to complete first before you can
unlock Wizard mode that I think I would be exhausted
before I could ever get there. My wrists give out
from playing with the buttons too much. But this was
also in an era in which we would see some
important companies actually get out of pinball design and manufacturing.
(42:09):
Some companies would shut down important companies that really led
the way in pinball development. So Gottlieb was the first
to go. Bally and Williams would also get out of
pinball after having an amazing run in the eighties and nineties,
which left a single pinball manufacturer active at that time.
It was Stern Pinball. Stern Pinball was founded in nineteen
(42:32):
ninety nine. It actually traces its history back to an
earlier company called Data East Pinball, which kind of produced
pinball machines for Sega, But Stern Pinball would establish itself
in the late nineties and it stuck around. It's still
making pinball machines today. They made the Jaws machine that
I mentioned in the last episode, the Jaws machine that
(42:52):
I desperately would love to own because it's such a
great machine. Now, the two saw a lot of companies
get out of pinball, but some companies actually got their
start later in the two thousands. In twenty eleven, a
company called Jersey Jack Pinball came into business. Their tables
often include much more advanced technology, including stuff like Bluetooth
(43:14):
connectivity so that you can be part of like worldwide
leader boards and stuff. I got to play one of
their tables at the Southern Fried Gaming Expo too. That
was their Elton John table. I mentioned that earlier. Elton John.
That's another fantastic table. I really love the table design,
plus has an amazing soundtrack. I think they did a
fantastic job with that game. It always had a big
(43:36):
line waiting for it. There were three Elton John tables there,
I want to say, and all three had a line
and yeah, great machine. Other companies currently making pinball machines
include Spooky Pinball, American Pinball, Chicago Gaming Company. They're several more.
There's even a DIY home building pinball community. You have
(43:56):
people who are designing and building their own customized machine
because you can get the various components off different markets,
and if you have knowledge on how to program, you
can program a machine. And if you've got really you
need to have access to some precision machinery to machine
(44:18):
the playfield properly. But if you have access to that stuff,
you can design and build a pinball machine. That's just
based off your own ideas, which is really cool. So
I feel like pinball had a massive setback in the
early two thousands, like it was in danger of going extinct.
But since it's seen a resurgence. You can find pinball
machines in lots of different places. You have these expos,
(44:41):
you have various museums that have set up around the
United States that have collections of pinball machines. So, if
you are a pinball enthusiast, I think the future looks bright.
I think that the hobby has got a lot of
new life to it over the last decade or so.
If you are not a pinball enthusiast, well, there's no
better time than the present to go and check out
(45:02):
a pinball machine. Give it a whirl. There are a
lot of great ones out there. There are also some
real stinkers. It helps to kind of go and look
at what games are generally agreed upon to be good
versus those that people think are bad. Now, there's a
lot of disagreement in the space. You've got people who
will passionately defend one title and say that another beloved
(45:22):
title is the worst thing to ever happen to pinball.
That happens too, because gamers, as we know, are a
passionate group. Sometimes they don't agree with each other, but
I think you'll find general consensus around certain games, and
if you play those, you'll know whether or not this
is something that appeals to you. As for me, yeah,
I'm gonna keep playing. I love my pinball, and I
(45:46):
had a lot of fun going into talking about these
machines and what makes them work. Obviously, when we get
to the modern ones, there are a lot of components
that are pretty advanced stuff that you would find in
things like computer displays and beyond. But it's hard to
talk about that because it tends to get very game dependent,
(46:07):
and then you're doing just an episode where you're talking about,
you know, four or five specific games, and I felt
that that was less important than a more broad approach.
I hope all of you out there are doing well.
I hope you earn all the extra balls and get
all the replays and set all the high scores, and
(46:27):
I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows,
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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