A fixture since the ’50s, pinball may not enjoy Peter Pan’s eternal youth, but it has had a renaissance. In 1983 – the videogame explosion’s ground zero – pinball racked up a feeble 5 percent of the arcade market. Now the game has pulled a Pac-Man of its own, fighting back to gobble a 38 percent slice of the $8 billion industry. ““And that’s a quarter at a time,’’ points out Roger Sharpe of pinball maker WMS Games, Inc.
Engineering advances have helped burnish the silver ball. It’s hard not to plunge a quarter into a machine that speaks to you in Clint Eastwood’s voice, or rewards you with a holographic image of the Creature from the Black Lagoon reaching up from the inky void above the flippers, perhaps to pluck your eyeballs out. But, ironically, much of the boom seems to be fueled by the game’s lack of technological perfection. A videogame’s responses are programmed; burned into a memory chip. The chromed orb still has a mind of its own. ““With Mortal Kombat, you know the guy’s leg is going to go up the same way every time,’’ says David Vogel, 11, demonstrating with his own spindly limb between rounds of competition at the recent Professional and Amateur Pinball Association world championships in New York. ““You don’t know what’s going to happen with pinball.''
And the same low-fi backlash that’s led twentysomethings to re-embrace vinyl’s homey crackle is also drawing them to pinball’s vintage feel. ““It’s a classic game, like baseball,’’ shouts Chris White, 25, working the flippers on one ofa quartet of machines at Manhattan’s raucous, Xer-crammed pub 7B. ““The esthetics of pinball kill videogames,’’ he says. ““People always come back to the human element, the randomness.’’ Further downtown at hipster hangout Max Fish, which boasts three machines, 27-year-old Michael Humphries also waxes philosophical. ““There’s something really satisfying about watching the ball roll and bounce off a bumper that’s been worn down,’’ says Humphries. ““You feel like it never gets old, it just grows older gracefully.’’ In an era where today’s computer is tomorrow’s doorstop, that’s scoring a lot of points.
