September 2, 2014 • 44 mins
Pinball was actually illegal until the 1970s in NY and other cities, hidden in the backs of pornography shops. The game was finally legalized, thanks to a Babe Ruth-style shot by the best player in the world. Learn all about it with Josh and Chuck.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Doo Doo doo doo,
and there's Jerry Doo and this is stuff you should
know the podcast. What is that? Oh? Yeah, I thought
(00:25):
you're making pinball pings and no bells and whistles. No
sounds like Vegas. Vegas like one big pinball machine. It
is that you've been to walk through those casinos. Yeah,
you just made my neck muscles tight. Now, man, I
hate Vegas. I like Vegas. Yeah, I wouldn't. I wouldn't.
I don't. I don't want to live in Vegas or
(00:46):
like go to Vegas every weekend or anything like that.
But going to Vegas once a year, once every couple
of years, that's fine with me. Yeah, not for me.
I mean, I've been a bunch and I'm just I'm done.
Oh you're one with Vegas. That's what you're saying that
I don't see any reason to go back. I guarantee
somebody you want to see will have some sort of
residency out there, and you will be back in Vegas.
(01:09):
When I'm like sixty. Yeah, like pavement will have a
residence valleys. That's exactly I think, what's going to happen. Well,
then you'll find me in living in Vegas, my friend.
There you go. Yeah, see I got you back on
the Vegas train. But that sound. Yeah, it's like a
million pinball machines that take your money faster than pinball machines. Yeah,
(01:29):
and that was an early worry about pinball. Actually, as
we will soon see because I say, chuck, let's dive
right into the history of pinballs. So pinball machines actually
find their lineage back in the nineteenth century. There were
um things called or what were they? I want to
(01:49):
say Bagat machines, but that's not correct. The table, Yes,
the Bagatel table, thank you. Um. They were basically a
cross between pool and pinball. He used a pool que
and everything, and they sucked and nobody liked him. I
think it looks pretty cool, does it? It looks I'm
boring to me? Well, I mean it's if you're used
(02:13):
to modern gaming, is not gonna thrill you, but look
kind of neat. So the Bagatel table was there, it
was in place, and in the thirties a guy named
monte Redgrave came along like, you can't not say that
guy's name like that. Um. He came along and said,
you know what, people just invented a spring. How did
(02:35):
you say his name? Again? Montague, like he's on lad
on um um and uh. He came along and said,
somebody invented a spring recently. I'm gonna add it to
this bagatel table make it less sucky. And then all
of a sudden we have the the what did he
(02:55):
call it, the ball shooter, which makes sense, that's what
you call it. And now we had the first introduced
mechanism of pinballs. Things are starting to take shape a
little bit here. Yeah, but you didn't stick a coin
in the game. What you would do is kind of
like pool tables these days at a bar. You would
go up to the keeper of the balls and say,
(03:16):
here's some money, give me my balls, and let me
go play the game on the bagotel table. Yeah, and
he would go, you know it sucks, don't you, And
you would say, yes, but it's the eighteen thirties. Yeah,
and if I play really well, then I can win
free drinks and cigarettes. And they said, exactly, can you
(03:36):
see a little twelve year old, winning cigarettes and then
going back to play more bagatell Sure, so this is
the way it went for many decades. People were miserable
until the nineteen thirties, and there was this enormous explosion
of innovation and pool table re um in the thirties. Yeah,
(03:57):
like just almost everything that you think of and you
think of a pool, a pool um. We've been saying.
I've been saying pool table just for the last like minute.
Why didn't you correct me? I thought you were talking
about bull tall I'm talking about pinball. Anyway. In the
thirties there was a huge explosion in pinball, pinball or yeah,
and um, everything that you think of when when you
(04:20):
think of a pinball machine, almost all of it came
about in the thirties. Coin operation, the back glass, the
thing that has like a kiss or Hugh heff neuron
it or something like that stands up off of the
playing field. The table um electric well, I guess an
electric current running through it, legs um, the tilt mechanism, bumpers,
(04:48):
uh sounds yeah, score keeping. And then first, of course
I think I said bumpers, did I not? I don't know. Maybe,
And then most of all, most wortaintly chuck was. The
thirties led to a huge surge in popularity because you
had the Great Depression and pinballs were cheap entertainment that
were wide, widely available. You notice the one thing we
(05:10):
didn't say though and all that innovation, what flippers, Because
still up until nineteen seven, you just bumped the thing
to make the ball move. Yeah, there were no flippers,
which seems very counterintuitive to pinball. And the flippers really
changed things. They fundamentally changed pinball, not just in the
(05:34):
way you play, but in pinball is a game because
before flippers, it was a game of chance. It was
the same thing as playing like um high low. Basically
like you had no way really of manipulating the movement
of the ball. Well you shake them sheen, you could
without tilting. I mean that's what you did. Yeah, that
(05:55):
was how you did it. Even still it the amount
of skill it took was minute compared to the skill
that could be used. Once flippers were introduced, pinball wizardry
and it became a game of skill. Um. And then
but before that, the like I said, things were popular.
Get this um. In the early thirties there were a
hundred and forty five companies making pinball machines, and the
(06:18):
field became so competitive and ruthless that by the mid thirties,
like five years later, there were fourteen. Yeah, and most
of those were based in Chicago, which became sort of
the pinball capital of the world. And I've never been there,
but I bet you anything, Chicago still has a lot
of a lot more pinball machines than elsewhere, you know.
(06:40):
I was trying to think of like this, researching this
made me want to go play pinball, like researching sushi.
Maybe we want to go eat sushi. And I was thinking, like,
I have no idea where to go to play pinball,
you know, and we'll go to my brother's house. Does
he have one? He's got three? Oh, I love your
brother even more now, dude. He built a whole game room,
of course, because that's what my brother does. What does
(07:00):
he have he has? Uh F he has a Tomcat
F four team, which is the rip off of top Gun.
He said, there's a lot. There were a lot of
rip off games for a while, of movies and actual
movie time games. Uh. He has black Hole, but not
the movie. Another rip off game. I would love that.
Uh And those are both kind of old school. And
(07:20):
then he has a Jurassic Park, which is uh newer.
I think didn't they have like a t rex that
comes down and eat your ball? I can't remember. I
feel like all three of them. But yeah, and he
also kicked this. He took an old um video game
like stand up video game console and removed all the guts,
(07:41):
got a computer screen and um computer and hooked it
up in there too, where you can play all the
old school games, you know, those programs they have now,
and change the screen vertically so it just looks like
a regular arcade game. And you can go up and
play Frogger and Space Invaders and Scott Bite me over
(08:02):
and it's all free. That's so awesome. Man. He's like,
um Ricky Schroeder and silver Spoons or something. But growing up, yeah,
pretty much. Um. And I think the reason why I
don't play more pinball over there is because, um, we're
always playing ping pong. Yeah that's a game of skill,
and I love ping pong. But I'll try and get
in a pinball game. Man. I want to play some
pinball so bad. Let's just go out to Roswell dude, Okay,
(08:25):
do it right? Now. Uh, and I if I, if
I collected pinches, it would definitely be mid mid seventies
and mid eighties. From me, I would think, yeah, you know,
all the bells and whistles and all that, the new
fangled bells and whistles. They're fine, that's cool. But I
like a not so old that it's like electro mechanical,
but not so new that it's like nothing. But like, um,
(08:47):
you know, plasma screens and stuff like that. Well, we're
in the middle. Sure, I'm the same way. My favorite
game of all time pinball wise, um, favorite game ever, gallagha,
but favorite game pinball wise was Adams Family Pinball. And
then I learned in this article that is the top
selling game of all time from yeah, I think it
(09:09):
was either Bally or Williams put that one out and
they sold more than twenty thou units of it. Dude,
it's awesome and it didn't surprise me. And like, I
have no iffinity for the Adams Family, but it's the
best pinball game I've ever played. And when I saw
it was number one, I was like, well, of course
it is, because it's the best one. You don't like
the Adams Family, No, I mean, I like it fine,
but I don't. I didn't play it because of the movie.
(09:30):
I played it because it was an awesome pinball game.
And they had one of them all not them all
the bowling alley near me in Athens Bowling Alley. That's
where I could probably go find a pinball machine. Huh yeah,
or maybe not. Sadly, I'm starting a quest, all right,
um so telling you let's go to my brother's house
(09:51):
because we can have a scotch okay. Uh So. Anyway,
seven is when they finally invented the flipper. D Gottlieb
Company introduced a game called Humpty Dumpty, and that was
where what most people say that the first modern game
came about. It took at the level flippers, all the
(10:11):
innovations of the thirties and out of flippers and boom
you've got pinball, not pool table pinball pretty much, although
the flippers weren't the same. It was the nineteen fifties
the same person and came up with spot bowler, and
that was the first modern arrangement of flippers, right, and
they were longer with that introduction or else a little
(10:33):
later on. The first flippers they introduced were Um, they
were shorter. Yeah, and they didn't face this. They faced
in reverse of the way they face now. It was weird.
It was like they were working it out beta pretty much.
So it's funny that they introduced flippers in because by
(10:53):
the time flippers came around, pinball was illegal and most
of the major cities in the United States, Um, and
have been for several years. I never I think I
had heard this once and forgotten it. But pinball was
totally outlawed because they equated it to gambling because it
was not a game of skill, which and I guess
because you got prizes. Yeah. Um. Mayor Lea guardia Um,
(11:18):
who you will remember from the Burlesque podcast, was a
bit of a moralist, although he was a wet politician.
He was in favor of repealing prohibition. He hated pinball,
hated it. He he thought it was a mafia racket.
He thought that it robbed the quote pockets of school children,
the forms of nickels and dimes came to them as
lunch money. And he got an outlawed in New York.
(11:42):
And once it was outlawed, he ordered like really dramatic raids. Yeah.
Right after Pearl Harbor. He said, you know what we
need to do. The Japanese have just bombed us. We
need to get rid of these pinball machines. And so
let's go round him up, uh like in a raid style.
Let's smash him with sledgehammers. Let's dump him in the river.
What they did, they dumped them in the river after
(12:03):
they smashed them. That's a very New York nineteen forties
thing to do. Exactly. I bet you there's still pinball
machines down there, if anyone's brave enough to get into
the East River. I don't think they are. We should
say also give a shout out to Popular Mechanics, who, um,
we're working off in part really awesome article. They came
(12:23):
up with eleven things you didn't know about pinball history.
Um So, from the forties until the mid nineteen seventies,
if you wanted to play pinball in New York City
and Chicago and l A most cities in the US,
it was illegal. Um you had to go to a
pornography shop basically and go behind the curtain and play pimball.
(12:47):
Is that weird? It's the weirdest thing we've ever said
on this show. Until the mid nineteen seventies, and like
there were still raids and pimball operators. Little five year
old Chuck, Yeah, I would have been dropped off at
a porn shop to play pinball, which I'm sure your
parents would have been happy to do. Well they did,
and I played pinball. I didn't look at nudy people.
(13:09):
Did you really know what I was gonna say? Man,
he just blew my mind. No, no, And get this,
The city of Oakland, Oakland, CALIFORNIAWN, just this past July
overturned an eighty year ban on pinball. Free the pinballers. Yeah,
good for them. Yeah, so pinball's band people are still
(13:31):
playing it like crazy. Um And apparently the manufacturers realized
this as well, because they're still innovating and adding and
making new games and machines and all sorts of stuff. Yeah.
Well this is after World War Two, that where things
really slowed down, obviously because of the war effort. Pointball
was big. Dent was put in pinball manufacturing too. Yeah,
like everything else. And then after the fifties it took
(13:53):
off again, and it also became kind of a symbol
of rebellious youth. In this popular mechanic starticle points out
like the Fons played a lot of pinball. I never
considered that from Tommy Um, from the Who's Tommy the
Pinball Wizard? And Tommy both kind of rebellious, like stick
(14:13):
it in your ear LaGuardia. Yeah. I mean, it seems
silly now to think about that. But when Tommy came out,
it was illegal, so pinball was sort of uh yeah,
I guess it was just the rebels. Yeah, you're anti
authoritarian if you played pinball, it was just an image
of it. Yeah. And then the Great Simpsons quote side show,
Bob said television is ruined more young minds than pinball
(14:34):
and syphilis combined. That one flew right over my head
when I heard it the first time. I just thought, oh,
that's silly pinball, right, But I didn't think about like
moral turpitude. Yeah. I didn't get that one either, but
I do know. So luckily, pinball was still widely available,
albeit in the backs of pornography shops UM. And the
(14:55):
reason we say luckily is because somewhere along the way,
a young man in I think in his early twenties
named Roger Sharp, who is a magazine editor, UM, was
called upon to save the pinball World at a New
York City council meeting. Yeah, they finally said, hey, City council,
can we get a hearing on pinball machines? You guys
(15:17):
are being ridict because it's a bicentennial of this country
and we need pinball. It's as American as America gets
as pornography. So they said, sure, we'll have a hearing.
Because their intent was to prove that it was a
game of skill and not chance, which was the whole
rub in the first place. They brought in there a
pinball wizard. Game of chance is gambling? Sure, LaGuardia had
(15:38):
a point, well sort of. I still don't get it.
But this law was obsolete because they added footperson now
as a game of skill, but the law was still
around basically. So they brought in their pinball wizard Sharp
and um. They brought two machines because if one broke down,
they wanted to have a backup, and some jerk councilman
when he went to play the game, said no, no, no,
no no, why don't you play the their game, the
(16:00):
backup one. Yeah, the backup game. And Sharp started sweating
because he was like, oh, I'm not very good at
that game. Yeah, he never played it before. I'm a
master at this one, but he was a pinball wizard,
so I believed in him. Yeah. Well I didn't know
what happened, did you. Did you see the the documentary
Special Windlet. No, Oh my god, it has footage of this.
It's amazing, amazing documentary. All about pinball, I mean all
(16:24):
about pimball is not so awesome documentary there is that's
about a specific moment in history and pinball. I haven't
seen that one, but it sounds pretty good too. But
see Special Winlet amazing um and see Tilt two. It's
what's the deal? So um. Roger Sharp's playing, he's not
really impressing anybody, and things are kind of going bad,
(16:46):
and he decides to do a Babe Ruth call. He
pulls back the plunger and before he releases it, he goes,
I'm going up the middle aisle here. Yeah, And just
so you know, if you've never seen a pinball game,
you you pull the plunger, it's shoots the ball up
the right hand side through a trough and then it
spits it out at the top. And what he was
trying to prove is where I'm going to spit it out,
(17:08):
and where it's going to start it's descent back to me,
It's going to be in a very specific place in
the center of the board, not on the left, not
on the right, right up the middle. And um, he
did it. And apparently right afterwards the city council was like, okay,
we'll repeal it, like it's obviously a game of skill,
like Roger Sharp single handedly, well double handedly because he
(17:31):
was using the flippers. Um, save pinball from illegality. I
wonder if they said, yeah, fine, good lord, just it's legal.
Get the machines out of here, get this loser out
of here. But he is not a loser, because he
is currently still the number five hundred and thirty six
ranked player in the world. I'm surprised. I thought he
(17:53):
went on to be. I think at the time he
was number one, which is why they chose him. He
probably was, but he's been falling ever since. Man, that's
another thing in special win let Man, there are some
like really good pinball players. Well, I've got the list.
I'll quickly go with the top five, number one in
the world as of today, two thousand, fourteen August whatever
(18:15):
it is. Keith Lwyn of the USA is number one.
U s a Urian ingele Brixton of Swedeness number two,
Swedie din Zack Sharp recognize that name. It sounds vaguely familiar.
Roger's son. Yeah, he's the number three player in the world.
That's awesome. Number four Danielle Celestino Axiarty, what was that?
(18:38):
He's Italian, he's before Jorgan Home is also Swedish. He's
number five. There's a Canadian at six, a Sweet at seven,
then eight through twenty save one are all Americans and
number twenties Josh Sharp. So his sons followed in his footsteps.
That's great, and are both top twenty ranked players. And
I bet Josh is supers jealous. Maybe maybe Josh is
(19:02):
also He's like, I want to be a veterin area,
so I'm paying more attention to that kind of thing.
Maybe so. Um So, pinball was saved by Roger Sharp,
and um pinball just kept going on and on. Apparently
it had its golden day age. It's widely believed between
ninety eight, but it was also huge in the seventies,
(19:24):
huge in the eighties, and then video games came along
and all of a sudden pinball was like uh, and
it started to decline and decline and decline and decline,
and all I think we were down to maybe five
major pinball machine producers, and by major I mean the
only ones. Um no, because I mean it's all it
(19:47):
takes a lot of time and effort to manufacture of
functioning pinball game. Yeah. So, um, by the nineties there
were just a couple left. Everybody was selling off their
pinball divisions and there was a company called Bally Williams,
which were former competitors that emerged and this is what
the documentary Tilt is about. They went to their pinball
(20:10):
division and said, hey, you guys are great in the
pinball world, but the pinball world sucks. We want more
money out of you guys. What are you gonna do?
Is that pinball two thousands? Yes, they came up with
pinball two thousand. They said, we will give you a
chance to save yourselves. Figure out what will revive pinball
for they and they came up with Pinball two thousand. Yeah.
(20:32):
It's basically a hybrid of video gaming and pinball, where
you have a kind of a standard pinball set up,
but a video screen that's interactive as the back um
backdrop no on the playing field too, so like holograms
pop up on the on the playing board and like
run away from the ball and interact with the ball.
(20:53):
It stinks, though, and no one liked it. Have you
played it? I haven't played it, but I saw videos
of it and it didn't look like fun, and no
one liked it. So the thing is is like this
one article I read pointed out like it wasn't given
a chance to flourish, Like the idea was great, and
the fact that they pulled it off successfully it was
really something. Well, they built only two games, right, and
I think each one had a few thousand production run. Um.
(21:17):
But there was Star Wars episode one, which here's my
theory the reason Pinball two thousand went nowhere charge R Biggs. Yeah,
the other one was Revenge from Mars and um you
can still find those used today. Um. But despite the
fact that Pinball two thousand was created, it was it
(21:37):
was okay as far as successes go. Um. Bally Williams
pulled the plug, which left one company stern. Uh. There's
a guy named Michael Stern, I believe, who inherited his
father's business and um became the only people making pinball
(21:57):
machines in the world. Still. No, yeah, man, had we
been have we been recording this two years ago, we
would have basically been saying, like, pinball's dead, it's on
its last leg. There's one company making it. They've started
to lay off their designers because of the economic crisis.
(22:18):
Some of those designers went on, some of the Stern
Vets went on and founded a company called Jersey Jack,
and for the first time in many many years, there
are more than one pinball manufacturer. There's too, right, but
the competition has caused Stern to go back and rehire
some of the people they laid off, come up with
new designs, and um they are there's a pinball renaissance
(22:41):
and nascent pinball renaissance just beginning to bud that could happen. Well,
pinball is definitely a sort of an end thing now. Um,
if you're super cool and you have some money, then
you might have a pinball machine in your house like
my brother. Um. It is a Apparently Sterns ratio of
(23:02):
home sales to commercials sales has risen from thy percent
to six of their total sales. So the market now
isn't for arcades, because what are those. The market is
for the person who has enough money to buy a
pinball machine. You don't have to Well, yeah, if you
want a new one, it's gonna cost you, But if
(23:23):
you want like a vintage one, it's I mean it's
hundreds still. I mean that's a decent amount of money,
but the high like the Adams family wants less than
five thousand. Man, that's the one that you need in
the house. Yeah. So, um, I think my brother actually
refurbished his. I think, I think I'm right. I think
they weren't even working and he was able to fix them. Um. Yeah,
(23:46):
I imagine you can get him for way less because
these are like fully refurbished, like polished, ready to go
one um and a lot of them are starting to
come from overseas because the demand in intege collectors UM
items are like is rising so much that like seventy
of them come from overseas. They're re importing them back
(24:08):
to America. Well, and it's big in Europe because I mean,
as evidence from that top ten, h two or three
of them were European Swede Swedes look at them. So
we'll get into how pinball actually works right after this.
All right, So we've talked a lot about the history
of pinball, which is way more interesting than I thought
(24:28):
it would be. But um, we haven't talked about the
game because I assume everybody has played pinball. But if
you haven't, we're gonna break it down. Yeah, and it's
actually it's pretty simple if you really think about it.
There's two real components to the game. Now ever since
time before, you seven flippers in the ball. Uh yeah.
(24:49):
Everything else is just kind of ornamentation or whatever. But
to play pinball, you need flippers and the ball because
the point of pinball is too score points using the
ball bouncing off of obstacles and all that stuff. And
then to prevent the ball from going down the drain
using the flippers. That's right there, you got flippers in
the ball. That's right. You've got your flippers, um, typically
(25:12):
at the bottom of the playfield, which is what it's called,
directly above the drain on both sides. Um. A lot
of games you'll see now have other flippers on the
upper right and upper left that also do fun things,
um like flip the ball. But you know a lot
of times the ones at the top will flip it
into the very special chamber where you can score tons
of points. We'll get to the scoring here in a minute. Um,
(25:35):
And you basically want to propel the ball up with
your little plunger and then all the bumpers and ramps
are there to score your points. And um, it makes
a lot of noise, it's a lot of fun, and
that's beIN ball. Yeah, I mean that's it for me.
This article on how stuff works pointed out, like you know,
when you're talking about scoring, which we'll talk about later,
(25:56):
that's like doesn't mean anything to people who are playing pinball,
most of us, because I'm just trying to keep the
ball from going down the train. Um. But the way
that pinball's arranged, as you get better and better at it,
you'll learn that, Um, there are all sorts of combinations
and tricks and stuff that you can do to really
score some points. We'll get to that later on. I
(26:16):
get ahead of myself. That's right. The ball itself, if
you want to just talk hardware, it's one and one
sixteen inches in diameter. It's steel in a ways, about
two point eight ounces and can reach speeds up the
ninety miles an hour when you see that thing shoot
out of a one of the little chambers that will
come back at you. It's going really fast, and that
(26:40):
is um. Sometimes it will use magnets underneath the table too,
because since it's a steel ball, you'll sometimes see a
game that has like a like a spinning disk, like
a vortex in the center of the table that will
start at any given moment and it can catch your
ball and keep your ball there with its magnet just
sort of spinning in place, which is no good or
it could be super good, depending on what you're after. Uh.
(27:03):
Sometimes they do use a ceramic pinball called the powerball,
and it is lighter and faster and immune to magnets.
So a lot of times when you'll have multi ball
going on, some of those other balls are ceramic, and
that's when things get crazy. So as the ball is
going around the table, um, it's hitting the bumpers, it's
hitting the targets, and they're sending messages to them. Well,
(27:27):
if it's post seventies six game to the motherboard that's
keeping track of your score and all that jazz, and
you've only got the three balls, that's that's a game. Yes,
But there are circumstances where you can get more which
will tell later. So Chuck, there's also another component you
don't have to have to play pinball, but all pinball
(27:47):
games have it now. It's called the black box. And
if you look at a pinball table, you've got the
field right, Yeah, the playfield, which is the board that
has all of the bumpers and the stuff and the
flippers and everything on it. And then at a right
angle to that, coming off of it, you've got what's
called the back glass. And connecting the two is called
the black box. And this is where all of your
(28:08):
electronics and your solid state stuff goes. Yeah, your backglass
is not only gonna have your scoreboard and your information,
Like they'll say things like aim for the aim for
the canyon. You know, they'll give you hints and little
tricks along the way. Look out for the t rex
look out for the t rex um. But it's also
to the backglasses where like, if you're walking through your
(28:31):
arcade in its that's where you're gonna see, That's where
your attention is gonna go. So that's where you see
the Playboy models on both sides of you Hefner or
kiss looking cool so it's it's sort of an advertisement. Hey,
come put your quarters into me. It's shiny, it's colorful.
It's been money designing those things, and uh, a lot
(28:52):
of those have become art. Now they'll remove them and
frame them and hang them on the wall, which would
be wicked cool, I think it would be. But I'd
rather have the actual pinball game. Yeah sure. Um. So,
like I said, back in the seventies, they they introduced
solid state electronics. Prior to that, all pinball machines were
(29:13):
electro mechanical. And at first, when I was researching this,
I thought like, well, okay, so solid state took over everything.
That's not the case. Solid state took over basically the
back class. Everything else is still electro mechanical, or it
was up until the very very very recent times, although
they still might be electro mechanical. So, um, when you
hit a bumper with your ball and it makes it
(29:36):
like bounce and vibrate and you get some points, that's
because you set an electrical impulse using an electro mechanical
assembly to the motherboard, the solid state motherboard that's keeping score.
So the motherboard is now keeping score. It's um. Now
they can use digital sounds, so they could add speakers
to the back glass and all the stuff, but the
(29:57):
actual function of the the pinball machine while you're playing
is still electro mechanical. Yeah, that's old school. Uh. And
there's about a half a mile of wiring in each one.
And um, if you come over to my brothers, he
will show you the guts. He has his rigged where
you can pull down the back back glass look under
the hood. Yeah, basically, and you know it just looks
(30:19):
like a huge mess of wires and half as a lot.
It's pretty crazy. Um does he wear like a chain
wallet when he works on his pa? I don't know. Maybe.
Uh So the playfield itself, which is what everything is on,
is tilted at about six to seven degrees towards you,
and it is made of wood. And it's also very
(30:40):
old school, you know, so at some point someone makes
this like a wood based like cornhole, and it's got
holes drilled in it, and it's got stuff painted on
it and a bunch of layers of finish to keep it,
you know, to protect it and to make that ball go. Yeah,
but I mean that's basically it. It's pretty simple. Yes,
some of the very newer ones um I guess from
the twenty for century replaced the wood playing field with
(31:04):
um uh, plasma screens or LCD screens. Yeah, but you
know kids today, no thanks, um. But other than that,
it's like screws and glue and would it's just it's
fairly old school. Yeah, and still like entertaining. Pinball's challenging.
(31:24):
That's why you hate pinball two thousand. Huh it was newfangled, Yeah, totally, like, hey,
let's take something awesome and make it new for everybody.
Like I hate that. You know, it's like taking some
classic drink. Like you're a cocktail guy, so you know,
let's add you know, let's had some some new oxygen
eated something to the Manhattan. You're like, no, Manhattan's perfect.
(31:49):
I don't know, oxygenated something. I just hate every Like,
some things are perfect the way they are, and I
think pinball is one of them. So, Chuck, you approached
the pin ball machine, you put your quarters in and everything, um,
and you either so you press the start button or well,
once you press the start button, a ball should fall
(32:09):
into the launch lane, which is the at the back
of the launch lane is the plunger and some of
the newer games, there's a solenoid which shoots it for
you like a like a gun handle, trigger and stuff,
instead of the plunger. Very clever, but again I'm into
the like the plunger. Um one way or another, you're
(32:30):
going to launch the ball. The advantage of a solenoid
that launches it for your with the press of a
button is that if you are playing a game and
you're pretty good and the pinball machine decides it wants
to see what kind of a wizard you are, it
will send more balls into action. The way it does
that these days is by using a solenoid. In olden
(32:51):
days before the solenoid, say the eighties, Um, it's a
little man inside. Well, you had to pull the plunger
back yourself, and that meant you had to take your
finger off of a flip for button. K man, Hey man,
you better be quick. I kind of forgot about that,
or you're dead. Yeah, that's why solenoids. That's the advantage
they have. Yeah, I'll take that umu advancement that passes
(33:12):
my bar. The solenoid is good. So let's talk about
actual pinball play after this message. Chuck okay, scoring in pinball,
like you said earlier, If you're a regular shmo like us,
(33:33):
we're just trying to keep that ball on the table.
But if you are a pinball wizard, then that means
you know the game within the game and all the
combination shots that you're specifically trying to hit in order
to rack up the big, big big points. This is
nuts to me. I have to tell you, I didn't
even know that this existed until Yeah, I knew. I
(33:54):
just you know, like, that's how poor my pinball playing is. Now.
I'm I'm not any good either, But you you is
your brother good? So you've seen him, Yeah, he's better
than me. So they used this um in this article
to use the example of a game called high Roller Pinball,
and basically imagine this. While you're playing high Roller, um,
(34:16):
you basically want to knock out some icons that are
associated with poker. Once you've hit all the icons with
the ball or something like that, so there're tiles that
you knock down or whatever. Once you've hit them all,
you've unlocked a game within a game. Yeah, and I
think it starts with poker, and all of a sudden,
(34:36):
you're playing pinball while you're also playing poker on the
back class. Yeah, so like you're trying to hit a
specific thing that will give you a specific card and
a poker hand, let's say, And like you have to
be you know, you have to You're trying to do
this with your flippers game of skill, like we said, right,
but at the same time, you're still playing your pinball
game too, right, Well, I mean it's part of the game.
(34:58):
So like you know, you'll know you've got the cards
up on the backglass and I'll say, all right, I
gotta hit that bumper to get a king. I'm aiming
for that king the whole time. Okay, So if your
brain hasn't melted yet, prepare for the finish. Once poker's done,
there's like four or five other casino games that you
play after that, and you play them in succession and
(35:21):
and as you win them, you get closer and closer
to this um special play mode called Casino Frenzy. That's
what it's called in the high Roller Machine. Yeah, that's
after you've won all the game, the poker games not,
but yeah, all the games, and so you're playing Casino Frenzy,
and that's what's called a Wizard Award where it's like, Okay,
(35:43):
this kid's good. Now we're gonna really let them or
her up their points by playing a special round. And
all of a sudden, the field is like flooded with
balls and every bumper you hit is worth like hundreds
of thousands of points and it's just scary and terrified. Yeah,
multi ball is stressful for a guy like me. Same here, man,
(36:05):
I just try and keep you know what happens to
me and multi ball is I'll usually lose them all
pretty quickly. Like I can't even hold onto the one
because it just it stimulates me too much. I'm like,
what what happened? Me too? And I'm like, as long
as I've got one, I'm break even. But with um,
with Wizard Award functions, um, that's when you start to
(36:25):
earn even more points. But imagine having like three or
four or five balls on the field and the computer
in the machine is telling you, like, hit this combination
and we'll give you like twenty million points. And um,
if you're even in Wizard Award ball, you're a pretty
good pinball player, I would imagine for sure. And that's
(36:46):
just the high roller game. But most games have a
couple of games within the game that you should look
out for and um, that's how you get your free game.
If you've ever uh locked up or been super good
and gotten um, you know, they'll tell you on the
backglass how much you have to have, like replay value
thirty million um. And that's what you're shooting for because
(37:06):
you want to get that free game, not just because
it's a quarter or whatever, but because it's like a
big award. You know. It's like entering your name on
the in the top ten in Galica. Right yeah, Um,
so I didn't understand this. When you get a free game,
is that like three free balls or one extra ball?
I think it's three. I think it's a full free game.
(37:26):
That would make sense. That's why they keeps calling it
doesn't like reset R. Yeah. You can also fall backwards
into a free game with something called match where I
had never heard of this. Every once a while, the
computer will just flash like a random number between what
zero zero and ninety I think, yeah, multiple of ten
and um, if the last two digits of your score
(37:47):
at that moment happened to match that number, then you
win a free game. It's like a little lotto game.
And I think I've gotten a free game that way,
because I remember getting free games before. But being like,
how did I get a free game? I must, I
must have hit the mat. You like just turned into
Christopher walking in the dead zone. I saw that not
too long ago. That holds up do um. But as
(38:08):
far as replay goes, it says that most machines are
set so you have to be in the top ten
to get a replay, and you can get a second replay,
but they have it maxed out at a hundred and
fifty of the first, so a double replay is tough. Yeah,
I mean you're Tommy at that point, or your last
name is Sharp Yeah, I guess so. Um. And then tilt, chuck,
(38:31):
you know, tilt, it's synonymous with pinball. Tilt is where
you are being well, basically where you've been punishing the machine.
The machine says enough, hands off, man, and basically, like
we were saying early pinball machines, Um, the only way
you can manipulate them before the flippers was to move
the machine. You can bump it. So the tilt mechanism
(38:53):
has been in place to prevent people from overly cheating
by tilting the machine. By it's really the old timey contraption,
and I guess it's still in use. It's pretty funny
how old school it is. Basically, they have like I guess,
like a copper copper wire with a circle on the end,
a ring on the end, and dangling in the ring
but not touching. It is like a metal ballast, right,
(39:17):
and it's connected to the machine. So as long as
the ballast is just swinging around freely within the ring,
you can tilt as much as you like, and a
skilled player knows how to tilt without getting caught, right,
it's part of the game. But once you tilt too
far and the metal ballast touches the copper ring, a
(39:38):
current is formed and all of a sudden it sends
that to the motherboard, and the motherboards is tilt. This
is your first warning, and apparently most modern games give
you two warnings, and then the flipper stop working and
you lose your ball, and that's just losing one ball.
If you really get upset, if your ball is stuck,
or if you're just having a bad day at the
(39:58):
office and you pick up the front of the machine
and slam it down, that's called a slam tilt. And
they have these little leaf switches inside the machine for
that and if they touch each other, that means you
have really taken things too far, and that is shut
it down. No game, not worth taking your ball. They're saying,
(40:19):
leave the machine. You're not gonna win any cigarettes doing
that exactly. And that's the uh, that's the slam tilt.
That's pinball, baby, Yeah, I got nothing else. I don't either.
This is very exciting. I'm glad we finally did it.
It's been on my list forever ever since I found
out it was illegal. Yeah, you're like, oh, I I
gotta get into that. But that was like a couple
of years ago. I feel like, yeah, when I saw
(40:41):
a special winlet, nice man, everybody go see that? Is
that on the old Netflix? I believe it is tilt?
Definitely is all right. I think special Winlet might be
to add that to the former queue, which they had
to change because Americans are dumb. What do they call
it now? It's not called a list because people are like,
what's a queue? Really? Why was it spelled like that?
(41:02):
I hadn't noticed that they did that. Oh my goodness, Yeah,
I've heard. That's the reason. It makes sense to me.
I can't verify that though. Uh well, if you want
to learn more about pinball, go check out special when
let go check out kill check out the popular Mechanics
article we mentioned eleven things you didn't know about pinball history.
It's pretty awesome. And of course check out the article
(41:23):
on how stuff works dot Com. Go to the search
bar and type in pinball and it will bring up
this article. Since I said search bar, it's time for
listener mail. Yeah, this is via Facebook. Actually, um, in
regards to our more Gallon's podcast, because one of our
is it funny? I think it's more Gelan's. But you
(41:43):
are literally the only person on the planet that calls
it that fine, Um, Tyler Murphy are one of the generals.
And the stuff you should know army and Facebook and
email friend uh pinged, I guess a doctor end of
his name, Chris Wells, and I was like, hey, dude,
check this out. Do you know anything about this? And
(42:04):
so he commented on there. I was like, hey, this
is a listener mail. Can I use it? And he
said yes. So he says he's only come across it twice.
In both cases they brought stuff in, telling me it
was eggs and bugs, eye along with my med technologists
reviewed it under a microscope and it was mainly lent
and hair follicles. One had some insight that it was
not an actual infection and felt relieved. The other was
(42:25):
very upset that I suggested otherwise, so he kind of
got both ends of the spectrum. I would never treat
um with an antiseptic I'm sorry anti parasitic med if
I didn't think it was a real infection. The risk
of causing harm versus fixing anything it's too high. Anti
parasit meds can have all kinds of unwanted effects, from
kidney and liver impairment, to lowering the threshold procedure to
(42:45):
potentially being carcinogenic themselves. For every case of monsters inside
me on TLC that goes undiscovered and later as found
to truly have a parasitic infection, there are many more
for there is no physical evidence of infection because they're
simply not one. Uh. You feel really crappy as a
physician though, when you have to tell someone that everything
they brought into your office is all dust and lent,
(43:05):
that there is no physical evidence for their ailments. The
most important thing for a clinician. To remember is that
even if this is all in their head or imagine
or however you want to word it, the patient is
still experiencing it, which is what we pointed out. So
you need to try and treat the root cause, whether
it be with continued reassurance in second opinion, within reason,
or cognitive behavioral therapy or other means. And that is
(43:29):
Chris Wells via our buddy Tyler Murphy. Cool. Thanks guys.
Who Tyler is a teacher and in the summertime he
works at the Big Putt Putt chain Putt Putt. No,
that's it's like the Big Adventure Land or what I
can't remember what it's called Hire Pirates Cove. Is that
a chain? I don't know, it sounds like a chain. Anyway,
that's what he does. Since it sounds like fun, It's like, man,
(43:50):
I could totally do that would be yeah. Well, thank
you very much you guys in uh, anyone else out
there who has any further clarification on any episode we've
ever done. We want to hear from you. You can
tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You
can join us on Facebook dot com slash You should
know you can Send us an email to Stuff Podcast
(44:11):
at Discovery dot com and it's always good. Check us
out at our home on the Web, Stuff you Should
Know dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics because at how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Doo Doo doo doo,
and there's Jerry Doo and this is stuff you should
know the podcast. What is that? Oh? Yeah, I thought
(00:25):
you're making pinball pings and no bells and whistles. No
sounds like Vegas. Vegas like one big pinball machine. It
is that you've been to walk through those casinos. Yeah,
you just made my neck muscles tight. Now, man, I
hate Vegas. I like Vegas. Yeah, I wouldn't. I wouldn't.
I don't. I don't want to live in Vegas or
(00:46):
like go to Vegas every weekend or anything like that.
But going to Vegas once a year, once every couple
of years, that's fine with me. Yeah, not for me.
I mean, I've been a bunch and I'm just I'm done.
Oh you're one with Vegas. That's what you're saying that
I don't see any reason to go back. I guarantee
somebody you want to see will have some sort of
residency out there, and you will be back in Vegas.
(01:09):
When I'm like sixty. Yeah, like pavement will have a
residence valleys. That's exactly I think, what's going to happen. Well,
then you'll find me in living in Vegas, my friend.
There you go. Yeah, see I got you back on
the Vegas train. But that sound. Yeah, it's like a
million pinball machines that take your money faster than pinball machines. Yeah,
(01:29):
and that was an early worry about pinball. Actually, as
we will soon see because I say, chuck, let's dive
right into the history of pinballs. So pinball machines actually
find their lineage back in the nineteenth century. There were
um things called or what were they? I want to
(01:49):
say Bagat machines, but that's not correct. The table, Yes,
the Bagatel table, thank you. Um. They were basically a
cross between pool and pinball. He used a pool que
and everything, and they sucked and nobody liked him. I
think it looks pretty cool, does it? It looks I'm
boring to me? Well, I mean it's if you're used
(02:13):
to modern gaming, is not gonna thrill you, but look
kind of neat. So the Bagatel table was there, it
was in place, and in the thirties a guy named
monte Redgrave came along like, you can't not say that
guy's name like that. Um. He came along and said,
you know what, people just invented a spring. How did
(02:35):
you say his name? Again? Montague, like he's on lad
on um um and uh. He came along and said,
somebody invented a spring recently. I'm gonna add it to
this bagatel table make it less sucky. And then all
of a sudden we have the the what did he
(02:55):
call it, the ball shooter, which makes sense, that's what
you call it. And now we had the first introduced
mechanism of pinballs. Things are starting to take shape a
little bit here. Yeah, but you didn't stick a coin
in the game. What you would do is kind of
like pool tables these days at a bar. You would
go up to the keeper of the balls and say,
(03:16):
here's some money, give me my balls, and let me
go play the game on the bagotel table. Yeah, and
he would go, you know it sucks, don't you, And
you would say, yes, but it's the eighteen thirties. Yeah,
and if I play really well, then I can win
free drinks and cigarettes. And they said, exactly, can you
(03:36):
see a little twelve year old, winning cigarettes and then
going back to play more bagatell Sure, so this is
the way it went for many decades. People were miserable
until the nineteen thirties, and there was this enormous explosion
of innovation and pool table re um in the thirties. Yeah,
(03:57):
like just almost everything that you think of and you
think of a pool, a pool um. We've been saying.
I've been saying pool table just for the last like minute.
Why didn't you correct me? I thought you were talking
about bull tall I'm talking about pinball. Anyway. In the
thirties there was a huge explosion in pinball, pinball or yeah,
and um, everything that you think of when when you
(04:20):
think of a pinball machine, almost all of it came
about in the thirties. Coin operation, the back glass, the
thing that has like a kiss or Hugh heff neuron
it or something like that stands up off of the
playing field. The table um electric well, I guess an
electric current running through it, legs um, the tilt mechanism, bumpers,
(04:48):
uh sounds yeah, score keeping. And then first, of course
I think I said bumpers, did I not? I don't know. Maybe,
And then most of all, most wortaintly chuck was. The
thirties led to a huge surge in popularity because you
had the Great Depression and pinballs were cheap entertainment that
were wide, widely available. You notice the one thing we
(05:10):
didn't say though and all that innovation, what flippers, Because
still up until nineteen seven, you just bumped the thing
to make the ball move. Yeah, there were no flippers,
which seems very counterintuitive to pinball. And the flippers really
changed things. They fundamentally changed pinball, not just in the
(05:34):
way you play, but in pinball is a game because
before flippers, it was a game of chance. It was
the same thing as playing like um high low. Basically
like you had no way really of manipulating the movement
of the ball. Well you shake them sheen, you could
without tilting. I mean that's what you did. Yeah, that
(05:55):
was how you did it. Even still it the amount
of skill it took was minute compared to the skill
that could be used. Once flippers were introduced, pinball wizardry
and it became a game of skill. Um. And then
but before that, the like I said, things were popular.
Get this um. In the early thirties there were a
hundred and forty five companies making pinball machines, and the
(06:18):
field became so competitive and ruthless that by the mid thirties,
like five years later, there were fourteen. Yeah, and most
of those were based in Chicago, which became sort of
the pinball capital of the world. And I've never been there,
but I bet you anything, Chicago still has a lot
of a lot more pinball machines than elsewhere, you know.
(06:40):
I was trying to think of like this, researching this
made me want to go play pinball, like researching sushi.
Maybe we want to go eat sushi. And I was thinking, like,
I have no idea where to go to play pinball,
you know, and we'll go to my brother's house. Does
he have one? He's got three? Oh, I love your
brother even more now, dude. He built a whole game room,
of course, because that's what my brother does. What does
(07:00):
he have he has? Uh F he has a Tomcat
F four team, which is the rip off of top Gun.
He said, there's a lot. There were a lot of
rip off games for a while, of movies and actual
movie time games. Uh. He has black Hole, but not
the movie. Another rip off game. I would love that.
Uh And those are both kind of old school. And
(07:20):
then he has a Jurassic Park, which is uh newer.
I think didn't they have like a t rex that
comes down and eat your ball? I can't remember. I
feel like all three of them. But yeah, and he
also kicked this. He took an old um video game
like stand up video game console and removed all the guts,
(07:41):
got a computer screen and um computer and hooked it
up in there too, where you can play all the
old school games, you know, those programs they have now,
and change the screen vertically so it just looks like
a regular arcade game. And you can go up and
play Frogger and Space Invaders and Scott Bite me over
(08:02):
and it's all free. That's so awesome. Man. He's like,
um Ricky Schroeder and silver Spoons or something. But growing up, yeah,
pretty much. Um. And I think the reason why I
don't play more pinball over there is because, um, we're
always playing ping pong. Yeah that's a game of skill,
and I love ping pong. But I'll try and get
in a pinball game. Man. I want to play some
pinball so bad. Let's just go out to Roswell dude, Okay,
(08:25):
do it right? Now. Uh, and I if I, if
I collected pinches, it would definitely be mid mid seventies
and mid eighties. From me, I would think, yeah, you know,
all the bells and whistles and all that, the new
fangled bells and whistles. They're fine, that's cool. But I
like a not so old that it's like electro mechanical,
but not so new that it's like nothing. But like, um,
(08:47):
you know, plasma screens and stuff like that. Well, we're
in the middle. Sure, I'm the same way. My favorite
game of all time pinball wise, um, favorite game ever, gallagha,
but favorite game pinball wise was Adams Family Pinball. And
then I learned in this article that is the top
selling game of all time from yeah, I think it
(09:09):
was either Bally or Williams put that one out and
they sold more than twenty thou units of it. Dude,
it's awesome and it didn't surprise me. And like, I
have no iffinity for the Adams Family, but it's the
best pinball game I've ever played. And when I saw
it was number one, I was like, well, of course
it is, because it's the best one. You don't like
the Adams Family, No, I mean, I like it fine,
but I don't. I didn't play it because of the movie.
(09:30):
I played it because it was an awesome pinball game.
And they had one of them all not them all
the bowling alley near me in Athens Bowling Alley. That's
where I could probably go find a pinball machine. Huh yeah,
or maybe not. Sadly, I'm starting a quest, all right,
um so telling you let's go to my brother's house
(09:51):
because we can have a scotch okay. Uh So. Anyway,
seven is when they finally invented the flipper. D Gottlieb
Company introduced a game called Humpty Dumpty, and that was
where what most people say that the first modern game
came about. It took at the level flippers, all the
(10:11):
innovations of the thirties and out of flippers and boom
you've got pinball, not pool table pinball pretty much, although
the flippers weren't the same. It was the nineteen fifties
the same person and came up with spot bowler, and
that was the first modern arrangement of flippers, right, and
they were longer with that introduction or else a little
(10:33):
later on. The first flippers they introduced were Um, they
were shorter. Yeah, and they didn't face this. They faced
in reverse of the way they face now. It was weird.
It was like they were working it out beta pretty much.
So it's funny that they introduced flippers in because by
(10:53):
the time flippers came around, pinball was illegal and most
of the major cities in the United States, Um, and
have been for several years. I never I think I
had heard this once and forgotten it. But pinball was
totally outlawed because they equated it to gambling because it
was not a game of skill, which and I guess
because you got prizes. Yeah. Um. Mayor Lea guardia Um,
(11:18):
who you will remember from the Burlesque podcast, was a
bit of a moralist, although he was a wet politician.
He was in favor of repealing prohibition. He hated pinball,
hated it. He he thought it was a mafia racket.
He thought that it robbed the quote pockets of school children,
the forms of nickels and dimes came to them as
lunch money. And he got an outlawed in New York.
(11:42):
And once it was outlawed, he ordered like really dramatic raids. Yeah.
Right after Pearl Harbor. He said, you know what we
need to do. The Japanese have just bombed us. We
need to get rid of these pinball machines. And so
let's go round him up, uh like in a raid style.
Let's smash him with sledgehammers. Let's dump him in the river.
What they did, they dumped them in the river after
(12:03):
they smashed them. That's a very New York nineteen forties
thing to do. Exactly. I bet you there's still pinball
machines down there, if anyone's brave enough to get into
the East River. I don't think they are. We should
say also give a shout out to Popular Mechanics, who, um,
we're working off in part really awesome article. They came
(12:23):
up with eleven things you didn't know about pinball history.
Um So, from the forties until the mid nineteen seventies,
if you wanted to play pinball in New York City
and Chicago and l A most cities in the US,
it was illegal. Um you had to go to a
pornography shop basically and go behind the curtain and play pimball.
(12:47):
Is that weird? It's the weirdest thing we've ever said
on this show. Until the mid nineteen seventies, and like
there were still raids and pimball operators. Little five year
old Chuck, Yeah, I would have been dropped off at
a porn shop to play pinball, which I'm sure your
parents would have been happy to do. Well they did,
and I played pinball. I didn't look at nudy people.
(13:09):
Did you really know what I was gonna say? Man,
he just blew my mind. No, no, And get this,
The city of Oakland, Oakland, CALIFORNIAWN, just this past July
overturned an eighty year ban on pinball. Free the pinballers. Yeah,
good for them. Yeah, so pinball's band people are still
(13:31):
playing it like crazy. Um And apparently the manufacturers realized
this as well, because they're still innovating and adding and
making new games and machines and all sorts of stuff. Yeah.
Well this is after World War Two, that where things
really slowed down, obviously because of the war effort. Pointball
was big. Dent was put in pinball manufacturing too. Yeah,
like everything else. And then after the fifties it took
(13:53):
off again, and it also became kind of a symbol
of rebellious youth. In this popular mechanic starticle points out
like the Fons played a lot of pinball. I never
considered that from Tommy Um, from the Who's Tommy the
Pinball Wizard? And Tommy both kind of rebellious, like stick
(14:13):
it in your ear LaGuardia. Yeah. I mean, it seems
silly now to think about that. But when Tommy came out,
it was illegal, so pinball was sort of uh yeah,
I guess it was just the rebels. Yeah, you're anti
authoritarian if you played pinball, it was just an image
of it. Yeah. And then the Great Simpsons quote side show,
Bob said television is ruined more young minds than pinball
(14:34):
and syphilis combined. That one flew right over my head
when I heard it the first time. I just thought, oh,
that's silly pinball, right, But I didn't think about like
moral turpitude. Yeah. I didn't get that one either, but
I do know. So luckily, pinball was still widely available,
albeit in the backs of pornography shops UM. And the
(14:55):
reason we say luckily is because somewhere along the way,
a young man in I think in his early twenties
named Roger Sharp, who is a magazine editor, UM, was
called upon to save the pinball World at a New
York City council meeting. Yeah, they finally said, hey, City council,
can we get a hearing on pinball machines? You guys
(15:17):
are being ridict because it's a bicentennial of this country
and we need pinball. It's as American as America gets
as pornography. So they said, sure, we'll have a hearing.
Because their intent was to prove that it was a
game of skill and not chance, which was the whole
rub in the first place. They brought in there a
pinball wizard. Game of chance is gambling? Sure, LaGuardia had
(15:38):
a point, well sort of. I still don't get it.
But this law was obsolete because they added footperson now
as a game of skill, but the law was still
around basically. So they brought in their pinball wizard Sharp
and um. They brought two machines because if one broke down,
they wanted to have a backup, and some jerk councilman
when he went to play the game, said no, no, no,
no no, why don't you play the their game, the
(16:00):
backup one. Yeah, the backup game. And Sharp started sweating
because he was like, oh, I'm not very good at
that game. Yeah, he never played it before. I'm a
master at this one, but he was a pinball wizard,
so I believed in him. Yeah. Well I didn't know
what happened, did you. Did you see the the documentary
Special Windlet. No, Oh my god, it has footage of this.
It's amazing, amazing documentary. All about pinball, I mean all
(16:24):
about pimball is not so awesome documentary there is that's
about a specific moment in history and pinball. I haven't
seen that one, but it sounds pretty good too. But
see Special Winlet amazing um and see Tilt two. It's
what's the deal? So um. Roger Sharp's playing, he's not
really impressing anybody, and things are kind of going bad,
(16:46):
and he decides to do a Babe Ruth call. He
pulls back the plunger and before he releases it, he goes,
I'm going up the middle aisle here. Yeah, And just
so you know, if you've never seen a pinball game,
you you pull the plunger, it's shoots the ball up
the right hand side through a trough and then it
spits it out at the top. And what he was
trying to prove is where I'm going to spit it out,
(17:08):
and where it's going to start it's descent back to me,
It's going to be in a very specific place in
the center of the board, not on the left, not
on the right, right up the middle. And um, he
did it. And apparently right afterwards the city council was like, okay,
we'll repeal it, like it's obviously a game of skill,
like Roger Sharp single handedly, well double handedly because he
(17:31):
was using the flippers. Um, save pinball from illegality. I
wonder if they said, yeah, fine, good lord, just it's legal.
Get the machines out of here, get this loser out
of here. But he is not a loser, because he
is currently still the number five hundred and thirty six
ranked player in the world. I'm surprised. I thought he
(17:53):
went on to be. I think at the time he
was number one, which is why they chose him. He
probably was, but he's been falling ever since. Man, that's
another thing in special win let Man, there are some
like really good pinball players. Well, I've got the list.
I'll quickly go with the top five, number one in
the world as of today, two thousand, fourteen August whatever
(18:15):
it is. Keith Lwyn of the USA is number one.
U s a Urian ingele Brixton of Swedeness number two,
Swedie din Zack Sharp recognize that name. It sounds vaguely familiar.
Roger's son. Yeah, he's the number three player in the world.
That's awesome. Number four Danielle Celestino Axiarty, what was that?
(18:38):
He's Italian, he's before Jorgan Home is also Swedish. He's
number five. There's a Canadian at six, a Sweet at seven,
then eight through twenty save one are all Americans and
number twenties Josh Sharp. So his sons followed in his footsteps.
That's great, and are both top twenty ranked players. And
I bet Josh is supers jealous. Maybe maybe Josh is
(19:02):
also He's like, I want to be a veterin area,
so I'm paying more attention to that kind of thing.
Maybe so. Um So, pinball was saved by Roger Sharp,
and um pinball just kept going on and on. Apparently
it had its golden day age. It's widely believed between
ninety eight, but it was also huge in the seventies,
(19:24):
huge in the eighties, and then video games came along
and all of a sudden pinball was like uh, and
it started to decline and decline and decline and decline,
and all I think we were down to maybe five
major pinball machine producers, and by major I mean the
only ones. Um no, because I mean it's all it
(19:47):
takes a lot of time and effort to manufacture of
functioning pinball game. Yeah. So, um, by the nineties there
were just a couple left. Everybody was selling off their
pinball divisions and there was a company called Bally Williams,
which were former competitors that emerged and this is what
the documentary Tilt is about. They went to their pinball
(20:10):
division and said, hey, you guys are great in the
pinball world, but the pinball world sucks. We want more
money out of you guys. What are you gonna do?
Is that pinball two thousands? Yes, they came up with
pinball two thousand. They said, we will give you a
chance to save yourselves. Figure out what will revive pinball
for they and they came up with Pinball two thousand. Yeah.
(20:32):
It's basically a hybrid of video gaming and pinball, where
you have a kind of a standard pinball set up,
but a video screen that's interactive as the back um
backdrop no on the playing field too, so like holograms
pop up on the on the playing board and like
run away from the ball and interact with the ball.
(20:53):
It stinks, though, and no one liked it. Have you
played it? I haven't played it, but I saw videos
of it and it didn't look like fun, and no
one liked it. So the thing is is like this
one article I read pointed out like it wasn't given
a chance to flourish, Like the idea was great, and
the fact that they pulled it off successfully it was
really something. Well, they built only two games, right, and
I think each one had a few thousand production run. Um.
(21:17):
But there was Star Wars episode one, which here's my
theory the reason Pinball two thousand went nowhere charge R Biggs. Yeah,
the other one was Revenge from Mars and um you
can still find those used today. Um. But despite the
fact that Pinball two thousand was created, it was it
(21:37):
was okay as far as successes go. Um. Bally Williams
pulled the plug, which left one company stern. Uh. There's
a guy named Michael Stern, I believe, who inherited his
father's business and um became the only people making pinball
(21:57):
machines in the world. Still. No, yeah, man, had we
been have we been recording this two years ago, we
would have basically been saying, like, pinball's dead, it's on
its last leg. There's one company making it. They've started
to lay off their designers because of the economic crisis.
(22:18):
Some of those designers went on, some of the Stern
Vets went on and founded a company called Jersey Jack,
and for the first time in many many years, there
are more than one pinball manufacturer. There's too, right, but
the competition has caused Stern to go back and rehire
some of the people they laid off, come up with
new designs, and um they are there's a pinball renaissance
(22:41):
and nascent pinball renaissance just beginning to bud that could happen. Well,
pinball is definitely a sort of an end thing now. Um,
if you're super cool and you have some money, then
you might have a pinball machine in your house like
my brother. Um. It is a Apparently Sterns ratio of
(23:02):
home sales to commercials sales has risen from thy percent
to six of their total sales. So the market now
isn't for arcades, because what are those. The market is
for the person who has enough money to buy a
pinball machine. You don't have to Well, yeah, if you
want a new one, it's gonna cost you, But if
(23:23):
you want like a vintage one, it's I mean it's
hundreds still. I mean that's a decent amount of money,
but the high like the Adams family wants less than
five thousand. Man, that's the one that you need in
the house. Yeah. So, um, I think my brother actually
refurbished his. I think, I think I'm right. I think
they weren't even working and he was able to fix them. Um. Yeah,
(23:46):
I imagine you can get him for way less because
these are like fully refurbished, like polished, ready to go
one um and a lot of them are starting to
come from overseas because the demand in intege collectors UM
items are like is rising so much that like seventy
of them come from overseas. They're re importing them back
(24:08):
to America. Well, and it's big in Europe because I mean,
as evidence from that top ten, h two or three
of them were European Swede Swedes look at them. So
we'll get into how pinball actually works right after this.
All right, So we've talked a lot about the history
of pinball, which is way more interesting than I thought
(24:28):
it would be. But um, we haven't talked about the
game because I assume everybody has played pinball. But if
you haven't, we're gonna break it down. Yeah, and it's
actually it's pretty simple if you really think about it.
There's two real components to the game. Now ever since
time before, you seven flippers in the ball. Uh yeah.
(24:49):
Everything else is just kind of ornamentation or whatever. But
to play pinball, you need flippers and the ball because
the point of pinball is too score points using the
ball bouncing off of obstacles and all that stuff. And
then to prevent the ball from going down the drain
using the flippers. That's right there, you got flippers in
the ball. That's right. You've got your flippers, um, typically
(25:12):
at the bottom of the playfield, which is what it's called,
directly above the drain on both sides. Um. A lot
of games you'll see now have other flippers on the
upper right and upper left that also do fun things,
um like flip the ball. But you know a lot
of times the ones at the top will flip it
into the very special chamber where you can score tons
of points. We'll get to the scoring here in a minute. Um,
(25:35):
And you basically want to propel the ball up with
your little plunger and then all the bumpers and ramps
are there to score your points. And um, it makes
a lot of noise, it's a lot of fun, and
that's beIN ball. Yeah, I mean that's it for me.
This article on how stuff works pointed out, like you know,
when you're talking about scoring, which we'll talk about later,
(25:56):
that's like doesn't mean anything to people who are playing pinball,
most of us, because I'm just trying to keep the
ball from going down the train. Um. But the way
that pinball's arranged, as you get better and better at it,
you'll learn that, Um, there are all sorts of combinations
and tricks and stuff that you can do to really
score some points. We'll get to that later on. I
(26:16):
get ahead of myself. That's right. The ball itself, if
you want to just talk hardware, it's one and one
sixteen inches in diameter. It's steel in a ways, about
two point eight ounces and can reach speeds up the
ninety miles an hour when you see that thing shoot
out of a one of the little chambers that will
come back at you. It's going really fast, and that
(26:40):
is um. Sometimes it will use magnets underneath the table too,
because since it's a steel ball, you'll sometimes see a
game that has like a like a spinning disk, like
a vortex in the center of the table that will
start at any given moment and it can catch your
ball and keep your ball there with its magnet just
sort of spinning in place, which is no good or
it could be super good, depending on what you're after. Uh.
(27:03):
Sometimes they do use a ceramic pinball called the powerball,
and it is lighter and faster and immune to magnets.
So a lot of times when you'll have multi ball
going on, some of those other balls are ceramic, and
that's when things get crazy. So as the ball is
going around the table, um, it's hitting the bumpers, it's
hitting the targets, and they're sending messages to them. Well,
(27:27):
if it's post seventies six game to the motherboard that's
keeping track of your score and all that jazz, and
you've only got the three balls, that's that's a game. Yes,
But there are circumstances where you can get more which
will tell later. So Chuck, there's also another component you
don't have to have to play pinball, but all pinball
(27:47):
games have it now. It's called the black box. And
if you look at a pinball table, you've got the
field right, Yeah, the playfield, which is the board that
has all of the bumpers and the stuff and the
flippers and everything on it. And then at a right
angle to that, coming off of it, you've got what's
called the back glass. And connecting the two is called
the black box. And this is where all of your
(28:08):
electronics and your solid state stuff goes. Yeah, your backglass
is not only gonna have your scoreboard and your information,
Like they'll say things like aim for the aim for
the canyon. You know, they'll give you hints and little
tricks along the way. Look out for the t rex
look out for the t rex um. But it's also
to the backglasses where like, if you're walking through your
(28:31):
arcade in its that's where you're gonna see, That's where
your attention is gonna go. So that's where you see
the Playboy models on both sides of you Hefner or
kiss looking cool so it's it's sort of an advertisement. Hey,
come put your quarters into me. It's shiny, it's colorful.
It's been money designing those things, and uh, a lot
(28:52):
of those have become art. Now they'll remove them and
frame them and hang them on the wall, which would
be wicked cool, I think it would be. But I'd
rather have the actual pinball game. Yeah sure. Um. So,
like I said, back in the seventies, they they introduced
solid state electronics. Prior to that, all pinball machines were
(29:13):
electro mechanical. And at first, when I was researching this,
I thought like, well, okay, so solid state took over everything.
That's not the case. Solid state took over basically the
back class. Everything else is still electro mechanical, or it
was up until the very very very recent times, although
they still might be electro mechanical. So, um, when you
hit a bumper with your ball and it makes it
(29:36):
like bounce and vibrate and you get some points, that's
because you set an electrical impulse using an electro mechanical
assembly to the motherboard, the solid state motherboard that's keeping score.
So the motherboard is now keeping score. It's um. Now
they can use digital sounds, so they could add speakers
to the back glass and all the stuff, but the
(29:57):
actual function of the the pinball machine while you're playing
is still electro mechanical. Yeah, that's old school. Uh. And
there's about a half a mile of wiring in each one.
And um, if you come over to my brothers, he
will show you the guts. He has his rigged where
you can pull down the back back glass look under
the hood. Yeah, basically, and you know it just looks
(30:19):
like a huge mess of wires and half as a lot.
It's pretty crazy. Um does he wear like a chain
wallet when he works on his pa? I don't know. Maybe.
Uh So the playfield itself, which is what everything is on,
is tilted at about six to seven degrees towards you,
and it is made of wood. And it's also very
(30:40):
old school, you know, so at some point someone makes
this like a wood based like cornhole, and it's got
holes drilled in it, and it's got stuff painted on
it and a bunch of layers of finish to keep it,
you know, to protect it and to make that ball go. Yeah,
but I mean that's basically it. It's pretty simple. Yes,
some of the very newer ones um I guess from
the twenty for century replaced the wood playing field with
(31:04):
um uh, plasma screens or LCD screens. Yeah, but you
know kids today, no thanks, um. But other than that,
it's like screws and glue and would it's just it's
fairly old school. Yeah, and still like entertaining. Pinball's challenging.
(31:24):
That's why you hate pinball two thousand. Huh it was newfangled, Yeah, totally, like, hey,
let's take something awesome and make it new for everybody.
Like I hate that. You know, it's like taking some
classic drink. Like you're a cocktail guy, so you know,
let's add you know, let's had some some new oxygen
eated something to the Manhattan. You're like, no, Manhattan's perfect.
(31:49):
I don't know, oxygenated something. I just hate every Like,
some things are perfect the way they are, and I
think pinball is one of them. So, Chuck, you approached
the pin ball machine, you put your quarters in and everything, um,
and you either so you press the start button or well,
once you press the start button, a ball should fall
(32:09):
into the launch lane, which is the at the back
of the launch lane is the plunger and some of
the newer games, there's a solenoid which shoots it for
you like a like a gun handle, trigger and stuff,
instead of the plunger. Very clever, but again I'm into
the like the plunger. Um one way or another, you're
(32:30):
going to launch the ball. The advantage of a solenoid
that launches it for your with the press of a
button is that if you are playing a game and
you're pretty good and the pinball machine decides it wants
to see what kind of a wizard you are, it
will send more balls into action. The way it does
that these days is by using a solenoid. In olden
(32:51):
days before the solenoid, say the eighties, Um, it's a
little man inside. Well, you had to pull the plunger
back yourself, and that meant you had to take your
finger off of a flip for button. K man, Hey man,
you better be quick. I kind of forgot about that,
or you're dead. Yeah, that's why solenoids. That's the advantage
they have. Yeah, I'll take that umu advancement that passes
(33:12):
my bar. The solenoid is good. So let's talk about
actual pinball play after this message. Chuck okay, scoring in pinball,
like you said earlier, If you're a regular shmo like us,
(33:33):
we're just trying to keep that ball on the table.
But if you are a pinball wizard, then that means
you know the game within the game and all the
combination shots that you're specifically trying to hit in order
to rack up the big, big big points. This is
nuts to me. I have to tell you, I didn't
even know that this existed until Yeah, I knew. I
(33:54):
just you know, like, that's how poor my pinball playing is. Now.
I'm I'm not any good either, But you you is
your brother good? So you've seen him, Yeah, he's better
than me. So they used this um in this article
to use the example of a game called high Roller Pinball,
and basically imagine this. While you're playing high Roller, um,
(34:16):
you basically want to knock out some icons that are
associated with poker. Once you've hit all the icons with
the ball or something like that, so there're tiles that
you knock down or whatever. Once you've hit them all,
you've unlocked a game within a game. Yeah, and I
think it starts with poker, and all of a sudden,
(34:36):
you're playing pinball while you're also playing poker on the
back class. Yeah, so like you're trying to hit a
specific thing that will give you a specific card and
a poker hand, let's say, And like you have to
be you know, you have to You're trying to do
this with your flippers game of skill, like we said, right,
but at the same time, you're still playing your pinball
game too, right, Well, I mean it's part of the game.
(34:58):
So like you know, you'll know you've got the cards
up on the backglass and I'll say, all right, I
gotta hit that bumper to get a king. I'm aiming
for that king the whole time. Okay, So if your
brain hasn't melted yet, prepare for the finish. Once poker's done,
there's like four or five other casino games that you
play after that, and you play them in succession and
(35:21):
and as you win them, you get closer and closer
to this um special play mode called Casino Frenzy. That's
what it's called in the high Roller Machine. Yeah, that's
after you've won all the game, the poker games not,
but yeah, all the games, and so you're playing Casino Frenzy,
and that's what's called a Wizard Award where it's like, Okay,
(35:43):
this kid's good. Now we're gonna really let them or
her up their points by playing a special round. And
all of a sudden, the field is like flooded with
balls and every bumper you hit is worth like hundreds
of thousands of points and it's just scary and terrified. Yeah,
multi ball is stressful for a guy like me. Same here, man,
(36:05):
I just try and keep you know what happens to
me and multi ball is I'll usually lose them all
pretty quickly. Like I can't even hold onto the one
because it just it stimulates me too much. I'm like,
what what happened? Me too? And I'm like, as long
as I've got one, I'm break even. But with um,
with Wizard Award functions, um, that's when you start to
(36:25):
earn even more points. But imagine having like three or
four or five balls on the field and the computer
in the machine is telling you, like, hit this combination
and we'll give you like twenty million points. And um,
if you're even in Wizard Award ball, you're a pretty
good pinball player, I would imagine for sure. And that's
(36:46):
just the high roller game. But most games have a
couple of games within the game that you should look
out for and um, that's how you get your free game.
If you've ever uh locked up or been super good
and gotten um, you know, they'll tell you on the
backglass how much you have to have, like replay value
thirty million um. And that's what you're shooting for because
(37:06):
you want to get that free game, not just because
it's a quarter or whatever, but because it's like a
big award. You know. It's like entering your name on
the in the top ten in Galica. Right yeah, Um,
so I didn't understand this. When you get a free game,
is that like three free balls or one extra ball?
I think it's three. I think it's a full free game.
(37:26):
That would make sense. That's why they keeps calling it
doesn't like reset R. Yeah. You can also fall backwards
into a free game with something called match where I
had never heard of this. Every once a while, the
computer will just flash like a random number between what
zero zero and ninety I think, yeah, multiple of ten
and um, if the last two digits of your score
(37:47):
at that moment happened to match that number, then you
win a free game. It's like a little lotto game.
And I think I've gotten a free game that way,
because I remember getting free games before. But being like,
how did I get a free game? I must, I
must have hit the mat. You like just turned into
Christopher walking in the dead zone. I saw that not
too long ago. That holds up do um. But as
(38:08):
far as replay goes, it says that most machines are
set so you have to be in the top ten
to get a replay, and you can get a second replay,
but they have it maxed out at a hundred and
fifty of the first, so a double replay is tough. Yeah,
I mean you're Tommy at that point, or your last
name is Sharp Yeah, I guess so. Um. And then tilt, chuck,
(38:31):
you know, tilt, it's synonymous with pinball. Tilt is where
you are being well, basically where you've been punishing the machine.
The machine says enough, hands off, man, and basically, like
we were saying early pinball machines, Um, the only way
you can manipulate them before the flippers was to move
the machine. You can bump it. So the tilt mechanism
(38:53):
has been in place to prevent people from overly cheating
by tilting the machine. By it's really the old timey contraption,
and I guess it's still in use. It's pretty funny
how old school it is. Basically, they have like I guess,
like a copper copper wire with a circle on the end,
a ring on the end, and dangling in the ring
but not touching. It is like a metal ballast, right,
(39:17):
and it's connected to the machine. So as long as
the ballast is just swinging around freely within the ring,
you can tilt as much as you like, and a
skilled player knows how to tilt without getting caught, right,
it's part of the game. But once you tilt too
far and the metal ballast touches the copper ring, a
(39:38):
current is formed and all of a sudden it sends
that to the motherboard, and the motherboards is tilt. This
is your first warning, and apparently most modern games give
you two warnings, and then the flipper stop working and
you lose your ball, and that's just losing one ball.
If you really get upset, if your ball is stuck,
or if you're just having a bad day at the
(39:58):
office and you pick up the front of the machine
and slam it down, that's called a slam tilt. And
they have these little leaf switches inside the machine for
that and if they touch each other, that means you
have really taken things too far, and that is shut
it down. No game, not worth taking your ball. They're saying,
(40:19):
leave the machine. You're not gonna win any cigarettes doing
that exactly. And that's the uh, that's the slam tilt.
That's pinball, baby, Yeah, I got nothing else. I don't either.
This is very exciting. I'm glad we finally did it.
It's been on my list forever ever since I found
out it was illegal. Yeah, you're like, oh, I I
gotta get into that. But that was like a couple
of years ago. I feel like, yeah, when I saw
(40:41):
a special winlet, nice man, everybody go see that? Is
that on the old Netflix? I believe it is tilt?
Definitely is all right. I think special Winlet might be
to add that to the former queue, which they had
to change because Americans are dumb. What do they call
it now? It's not called a list because people are like,
what's a queue? Really? Why was it spelled like that?
(41:02):
I hadn't noticed that they did that. Oh my goodness, Yeah,
I've heard. That's the reason. It makes sense to me.
I can't verify that though. Uh well, if you want
to learn more about pinball, go check out special when
let go check out kill check out the popular Mechanics
article we mentioned eleven things you didn't know about pinball history.
It's pretty awesome. And of course check out the article
(41:23):
on how stuff works dot Com. Go to the search
bar and type in pinball and it will bring up
this article. Since I said search bar, it's time for
listener mail. Yeah, this is via Facebook. Actually, um, in
regards to our more Gallon's podcast, because one of our
is it funny? I think it's more Gelan's. But you
(41:43):
are literally the only person on the planet that calls
it that fine, Um, Tyler Murphy are one of the generals.
And the stuff you should know army and Facebook and
email friend uh pinged, I guess a doctor end of
his name, Chris Wells, and I was like, hey, dude,
check this out. Do you know anything about this? And
(42:04):
so he commented on there. I was like, hey, this
is a listener mail. Can I use it? And he
said yes. So he says he's only come across it twice.
In both cases they brought stuff in, telling me it
was eggs and bugs, eye along with my med technologists
reviewed it under a microscope and it was mainly lent
and hair follicles. One had some insight that it was
not an actual infection and felt relieved. The other was
(42:25):
very upset that I suggested otherwise, so he kind of
got both ends of the spectrum. I would never treat
um with an antiseptic I'm sorry anti parasitic med if
I didn't think it was a real infection. The risk
of causing harm versus fixing anything it's too high. Anti
parasit meds can have all kinds of unwanted effects, from
kidney and liver impairment, to lowering the threshold procedure to
(42:45):
potentially being carcinogenic themselves. For every case of monsters inside
me on TLC that goes undiscovered and later as found
to truly have a parasitic infection, there are many more
for there is no physical evidence of infection because they're
simply not one. Uh. You feel really crappy as a
physician though, when you have to tell someone that everything
they brought into your office is all dust and lent,
(43:05):
that there is no physical evidence for their ailments. The
most important thing for a clinician. To remember is that
even if this is all in their head or imagine
or however you want to word it, the patient is
still experiencing it, which is what we pointed out. So
you need to try and treat the root cause, whether
it be with continued reassurance in second opinion, within reason,
or cognitive behavioral therapy or other means. And that is
(43:29):
Chris Wells via our buddy Tyler Murphy. Cool. Thanks guys.
Who Tyler is a teacher and in the summertime he
works at the Big Putt Putt chain Putt Putt. No,
that's it's like the Big Adventure Land or what I
can't remember what it's called Hire Pirates Cove. Is that
a chain? I don't know, it sounds like a chain. Anyway,
that's what he does. Since it sounds like fun, It's like, man,
(43:50):
I could totally do that would be yeah. Well, thank
you very much you guys in uh, anyone else out
there who has any further clarification on any episode we've
ever done. We want to hear from you. You can
tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You
can join us on Facebook dot com slash You should
know you can Send us an email to Stuff Podcast
(44:11):
at Discovery dot com and it's always good. Check us
out at our home on the Web, Stuff you Should
Know dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics because at how Stuff Works dot com
Stuff You Should Know News
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Josh Clark
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