"Looking back on my boyhood and adolescence in South Texas," "I spent an incredible amount of time in gas stations, honky tonks and other off-the-beaten-path places, trying to appear cool while obsessively following the descent of a steel ball down the playing surface of a garishly lit machine." "A pinball machine." "I came in with my grandfather, standing on pop crates to play pinball." "I was about eight years old." "I used to hang out at the corner store." "And my parents were always looking for me." "I would go away with my grandparents every summer." "They'd say, "You're in the arcade, here's a roll of quarters."" "All these backlot mom and pa stores had one or two pinball machines in them." "Apartment houses had them in the laundry rooms." "A gas station where they weren't doing car repair any more, they'd take service bays and fill 'em with pinball machines." "Playing at our local bowling alley." "It was the place where parents told you not to go." "I guess it was the kind of age when you don't want to do things with your parents." "My parents thought I was going to church and I'd be playing pinballs." "I also remember my father dragging me out by my ears, saying that I spent too much money." "I used to sneak down without telling anybody, on my own, and practise like crazy." "A crowd hung around the machine and you had to wait to play." "You'd line up your coin And you'd know which one was your coin." "I started playing at the local café." "Took my books to study there." "It was a great break from studying." "Sometimes it replaced studying." "I used to steal pop bottles from the back of the gas station and trade them in for three cents and when I had enough dimes to go play pinball" "I would wander all over town just putting dimes in pinball machines." "On a Saturday I'd run it up to the highest amount it could win, which was about 15 games." "I would sell them for 50 cents." "Sell them 12 games." "Tell them to leave me three." "They'd lose them in about 30 minutes." "They'd leave me three, I'd run it back up to 15 again, sell 'em again." "That's how we'd spend Saturday afternoon." "If you say pinball, people are like, "What?" "What's that?"" "(Pinball machine noises)" "There are many kids today that don't know what a pinball machine is." "(Slot machine noises)" "If you were growing up in the '60s, '70s and '80s, you could go to the movies, listen to the radio and music and you could play pinball." "And now here we are 20 years later and if you wanted to relive a song that you remember from your youth, you can put it on your iPod." "If you remember a movie that you particularly liked as a kid, you can get the DVD of it." "But when it comes to pinball, since it only exists in the real world and can't be digitally duplicated, there is no place to play pinball and yet in everybody's mind they remember those games from their youth." "And they come in here and they see something that they haven't seen in 25 years." "Something that was a major part of their youth." ""The first time I kissed a girl I was playing this machine."" "And they see that and they just get this look on their face of pure nostalgia." "(Rock music)" "Kids today don't really understand pinball." "They come in looking for the Dance Dance Revolution machine or the fighting video game or the really fast driving game." "And all they see are these slow pinball machines that just go bing bing and they don't understand it." "(Bell rings)" "You look around, all you see is old farts." "You don't see the kids that were playing pinball when I was growing up." "The kids today, between the computer games and the home games, and the Nintendos and the Sega systems and Gameboys, they just won't play pinball." "I can remember when I was growing up we used to eat all our meals at home." "And we used to go out for entertainment." "We'd go to the movies, we'd go bowling." "We'd go outside the house to have our entertainment." "And now everybody eats out." "Everybody always goes to restaurants." "They don't cook at home much." "But they get all their entertainment at home through their big screen theatre room or their game room that they've got in the basement." "Public places of amusement have been falling by the wayside in America like crazy." "You can't find a pinball machine." "There's no more arcades in malls." "Even bars." "The bars today have a Megatouch, a jukebox and a pool table." "But no more pinballs." "Very, very few." "Pinball is finished in France." "In England it's finished long time ago." "Right." "In Italy you can't find one pinball." "In Germany no one pinball." "In Holland no pinball." "Even in Belgium, it was a pinball paradise." "No pinball." "It's finish." "They said pinball was dead." "It's not." "I was surprised other people were like this." "I thought we were crazy." " It starts with one." " Buy another." " Then another one." " Then four." " I was outgrowing the family room." " I'd buy 20 here, 30 here." "Then your wife starts to say, "What's going on here?"" " We got enough." "No." " Yes." " 60 games." " 350." "400." " 600." " 1600." "It was a very rapid decline into obsession, I think." "Come on this way." "Show you some more." "We have about 150 in here." "Once you get the lure of the silver ball in you it's like an addiction and you can't stop and I just kept, you know." "It's like you gotta have 'em all cos they're all beautiful pieces of art." "You remember buying every one, where you got it from." "One time when my addiction was bad I bought a Barb Wire on eBay." "I thought it was a great deal." "I thought, Gee, what am I doing?" "This is crazy to drive 24 hours to go get a pinball machine." "And just as I'm thinking maybe I'm not gonna do this," "Pinball Wizard comes on the radio and I think, no, I'm goin'." "That was my longest haul. 26 hours later I'm finally home, exhausted." "Ended up coming home with three machines." "They're on this upper deck." "This was the first deck I built to get some room." "Pinball machines seem to be alive." "They really don't seem to be machines." "They're almost like they're alive." "And the way they talk to you, you find yourself talking to it." "Extra ball!" "Sometimes I just look at them." "You don't have to play them." "You just come in and admire them." "It's just a tribute to man's creativity, I tell you." "This was like a guest bedroom but I had to squeeze more pins in here." "My theme, though, I've kind of dreamed it might happen." "But I really want to do The Passion." "People say you're crazy." "You see, I was a youth pastor." "And so I love the Lord and I just can picture The Passion Play in a pinball machine." "?" "Shine a light" "?" "Down on me" "?" "Shine a light" "?" "All to see" "Hallelujah, the ball is saved!" "?" "Shine a light" "?" "Down on me" "?" "Shine a light ?" "(Raphael Lankar) All my life it was pinball." "It is very good game." "When I am with the pinball, I look the pinball, everything." "I am in love." "It's my life." "It's better to collect pinball than to take cocaine." "Yes?" "Like some people." "Or to spend the money to drink." "Or to eat." "I don't like to eat." "I like pinball." "Pinball and girls." "But girls is finished. (Laughs)" "I will not sell one." "I like them all." "But is like my children." "I like some of my children better than the other!" "Of course." "We're in the area that actually enjoyed pinball." "We all kind of hooked up." "And the heart of the group plays every Thursday and they don't miss." "Hey, look at these guys!" "These people, all they care about is pinball." "I got girls, I got dates, I got concerts." "You meet all these people that are into it." "They'll all come over and have a big party every week." "Steve's still kind of the centre." "He's kind of like the leader. (Laughs)" "1972, my dad bought one for my room." "I was like, I'll do my homework if I have a pinball machine." "That didn't work out." "From there on, it just got pretty wicked." "I've had 70." "I think I'm down to around 50 now." "I've got them in every room in my house." "We have a New York Jets pinball machine." "And in here we have Maverick, which is a Western theme, Mel Gibson." "OK, now we're in another room of this crazy house." "The pinball dungeon." "This actually is being sold because I need to make room." "In here we have some more pinball machines." "Surprise." "We call this our Pirate Shed because we have a bar in the back that's pirate themed." "I never knew you could own your own pinball machine." "As soon as I found out that, that's when my whole life changed." "You'd see my bedroom, at times I had 1 4 pinball machines." "The things I like I'm very obsessive." "And I'm a perfectionist." "These are the barrels from Jaws." "When I collect something, whether it be pinball machines, Jaws memorabilia, I gotta have it all." "Like it says, I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day." "(Pinball machine noises)" "It was during the depths of the Depression, the late 20s, early 30s, where the coin-operated amusement game industry kind of got birth." "Out of that came pin games." "It literally was a name because there were various pins that were hammered into a wood surface." "Using a little ball." "Here's the trap." "The games were evolving in the 1930s." "Companies just mushroomed out of nowhere." "Most of them located in Chicago." "The end of the 1930s, beginning of the 1940s, there was an over-proliferation of games everywhere and there becomes an outcry." "Children are spending their lunch money." "We have to outlaw it." "We have to regulate it." "We can't control it." "(Siren blaring)" "(Newsreel) In Chicago, confiscated pinball machines get a police escort to theirjourney's end." "They have had this coming for a long time." "It was seen as a game of gambling." "And there was a group of machines created that were pay-out machines, so there was some relevance to that." "But the majority of product that was out there was for amusement only." "In the case of New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, being three major metropolitan areas, as well as other areas around the United States, pinball was banned." "It was this one." "Humpty Dumpty." "This was the first pinball with flipper." "I've seen so many changes in pin games." "But when those six flippers came out on Humpty Dumpty," "I said, I gotta do something like that." "But me, I was always taught never to put too much money into a game." "I ain't gonna go putting no six flippers on my game." "So I put two of them at the bottom of the game and that's approximately where they've been ever since and that makes me feel very good." "When we put flippers on the game, you got a tremendous amount of skill into the game." "Before that it was nothing but chance." "You were lucky." "You pushed the game, kicked the game to get the ball where you wanted it to go." "But when the flippers were there, now you get a certain amount of skill." "Gottlieb ruled in the '50s and '60s." "They were coming out with new machines every three weeks." "Generally speaking, the pinball arcade which then turned into the video game arcade was the sort of logical descendant of the coffee bar." "It's hard to remember this but in the '60s coffee was considered the major social threat." "Because they were thought of as places where kids got hyped up and they acted out in some sort of manic way." "Boys were thought to be flirting with waitresses and waitresses were jumping on the tables and dancing." "Before the City Council in April of 1976" "I was enlisted, if you will, by the New York State Association to testify." "Offered whatever expert testimony I could." "As well as a demonstration of pinball being a game of skill, as opposed to a game of chance." "Suddenly you could find pinball machines legally." "(Rock music)" " We were rock and roll in the '70s." " Business was booming." " Profit margins were huge." " Unbelievable." "Demand was sky high." "Distributors were ordering it by the truckload." "When we started solid state electronics on pinball machines we were on the leading edge of technology." "It was an incredible cross section at that time of people playing pinball." "Diana Ross, Paul Simon, Lou Reed," "Matthew Broderick, studio musicians, politicians coming in." "Limo pulls up and four crazy-looking guys come out and it's Kiss." "Very nice people are coming here." "You'll find business people coming here." "You'll find musicians from the shows." "Managers from the different restaurants and the Broadway crowd." "The thing I'm the most proud of is the fact that we created this environment where you had different social stratas all coming in, standing next to each other, playing and interacting with each other, and walking out and going their separate ways." "Never to really meet anywhere else." "But in the arcade this was sort of an environment that allowed a diverse amount of different people to come." "Kids always want some place to go, something to do." "And at that point in time there wasn't a lot of options for that teenager, whether it was just pre getting their driver's licence." "So their lifestyle had to be within walking distance or a bicycle ride or something." "I think that's what gave growth to the arcade business." "Arcades had this air of certainly not approved by your parents." "Naughty or whatever." "Cos they could go in there and they could smoke." "It was usually dark." "You could kind of do what you wanted." "It was a very male crowd." "It was all young males, 1 4 to 25." "It wasn't like going to a Walt Disney movie, where the whole family could go along and feel happy about it." "It was more like hanging out with your friends." "Doing bad things." "I think at that time it was considered rebellious." "I think this was a bit of a Fonz type activity." "Sort of downward mobility." "Wasting time." "Developing highly refined skills in an area that was going to be relatively useless in adult life." "Half of our production went over into Western Europe." "Container loads of games." "(Coins dropping)" "I was astounded to find out that the first runs of games even in the heyday went to Europe instead of the United States." "The market was bigger in Europe." "And at that time I think the pinball machine was highly Americanised and people were proud of that." "Proud to have in a French bistro in Paris an American machine." "Everything came from the United States at that time glowing success." "Because people mentality is United States is paradise of the world." "And everybody understood the language of pinball." ""Game over." "Tilt."" ""Special target." You know." "(Gunshot)" "(Whistle)" "(Cheering)" "(Rock music)" "What is it that makes you stop and play one machine?" "What makes you think "I'm going to put my money in this one"?" "And so you come up with rock and roll, you come up with sex, you come up with all the things that young teenage boys wanted to be." "You can look at the art." "It's something that's pitched towards young males." "There's not really a lot of female-friendly images on these." "Part of the adolescent male fantasy is guns, women with large breasts, magic spells." "Any violent misogynist thing you want is there on pinball." "A lot of these machines have love scenes on them." "You don't suppose there's any connection there?" "I'm not in the supposing business." "What do you think?" "I don't know if you've followed the motions of people's bodies while they're playing." "But you might draw a connection there." "You'd have those centrefold images of young, rather buxom ladies, usually blonde, staring out of the machine at you, to inspire you." "It's a sexual release, I really don't understand why." " But you believe it is?" " I know it is." "No question about it." "Sexually frustrated people play pinball a lot." "And that's sort of captured in that noise that's made when you win a free game." " It was that clunk noise." " (Clunk)" "Which is supposed to alert everybody in the environment that you are the man." "And if you can do it repeatedly, or get clunk clunk, everybody notices that." "And even if they don't show it, their admiration for you increases." "Guy has a hot ball and it's just flying." "You're getting ready to become ruler of the universe." "You might have been playing by yourself and not many people watching but when they hear those sounds, you'll see people gather around to see that great ending of that ball." "(Woman on machine) I knew you'd come back." "(Cheering)" "Number 1 7 4 with a circle." "Says "Williams Perky 10 24 56"." "Well, it's been in my blood since I was 12 and I'm 59 so pretty major." "Should have known I was going to be a collector and I didn't start collecting until I bought this house in 1976." "And the first game in my collection is my favourite game of all time." "Gottlieb's Slick Chick, April of '63." "It's in my bedroom up right now." "It's been up since I started my collection and it's never gone down." "I have a kind of what I call my bible." "Whenever I go to shows, and I've been doing that for a long time," "I always copy down serial numbers and I have a binder that I've hand-typed since I don't do computers yet." "To me I think it would be interesting," "I have 300 games, where they were at one time." "Egghead, Flipper Clown, Tropic Isle, Fashion Show, Cover Girl." "Were they in Joe's Bar and Grill or somewhere down the street or at a show?" "I have a column for the date." "The game number." "The players." "Notes." "Because I think people would like to know where their Twilight Zone was or Addams Family or whatever game it happens to be." "It's interesting to me." "I worked in the bowling industry for a lot of years." "And the last bowling alley I worked at closed down 12 years ago." "And so I get up and work on my collection every day." "I'm in it for the history of it too." "That's why I collect flyers." "That's why I collect what they call press photos." "Spider-Man, Circus." "They're chronological." "That's up here all my photo albums." "I have about 6,000 pinball negatives." "This is Bally parts catalogues." "And then this over here is schematics." "There's a lot of games are missing scorecards." "How they get lost over the years, it's hard to believe, but they do." "I have 1 1 comic book boxes full of scorecards." "In the front closet, there's lots of binders in there also." "I was blessed with an unbelievable memory." "I mean, records, pinballs." "Jokes." "Did you hear about the Polish car-poolers?" "They all met at work." "Isn't that good?" "This front bedroom has 26 wood railed pinball bodies, all stacked, 24 and two." "And approximately 250 back glasses." "Isn't that awesome?" "I don't think about what it's worth cos I don't want to sell it." "I want to play 'em." "I want 'em to play like they did when they were coming out the factory." "That's why I spend the 40 hours and do the job right." "Rebuild the bumpers, rebuild the pop-bumpers, rebuild the slingshots." "Rebuild the flippers." "Lot of work and when you're done and you turn it on and it doesn't blow up, you feel real good." "I sort my parts out of the parts catalogue by part number." "You never know when somebody's gonna need something." "I really need more room. (Laughs)" "I'm a people person, I like people." "When I worked it really wasn't work." "I looked forward to seeing people on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday." "I never had any brothers or sisters." "I was an only child." "And my mom and my real dad got married and divorced twice." "And they say it's kind of hereditary but my real dad smoked and drank and he was an alcoholic but I never did drink or smoke." "Been an individualist, always been proud of." "I get high on life." "Not on anything artificial." "Only hundred thousand away from a game." "Oh, I didn't get it!" "I had 10,000 away from a game." "The rush of being able to play any game you have at any given time by pushing the button, you can't explain it to people." "It's something you like and it's fun and it's enjoyable." "I don't know why some people have the bug and some people don't." "But I'm one of the ones with the bug." "I wake up and do it every single day." "Part of my life." "Like an extension of my hand or something, I guess." "There's a joke that we have in the business which is "How hard can this be?"" "People look in the box." "They'll be in a bar, with their friend." "They'll say, "How hard can it be to build a pinball machine?"" "And we like to just smile." "We just smile." "Chicago is the pinball capital of the world." "The people who understand how to make it are here." "The tooling is here." "We live here." "We need to have that fast turnaround." "It's all in Chicago." "I tell people that I've been in the pinball business for 61 years because I'm 61 years old." "This is where my father started me." "Understand that even today with solid state electronics, we have 3500 pieces in a pinball machine." "Over half a mile of wire." "There's a lot that goes into making one." "There's more labour in a pinball machine, more man hours than in a Ford Taurus which is built not far from here." "It's a progressive line." "Each person does a little part of it and passes it along." "Much like automobiles." "But by hand." "The volume of the game business as a coin-op business is significantly down from what it was." "'92/'93 there were 100,000 pinball machines a year made and there were four or five different companies or brands." "Today, we're the only company making pinball machines and we strive to have 10% of what that market once was." "Then we'd have a nice small business." "If you drive a 1978 Super Beetle convertible it's very cool but that's nostalgic and not a great car." "If you have a new Beetle convertible, that's retro." "It's a modern car that has some of the look and feel and coolness of it and it's retro." "We don't make games from the '60s, we make games of today that are retro." "We don't talk about being the last pinball manufacturer." "That sounds like we're gonna get out." "We're the only pinball manufacturer." "We intend to remain in the business." "Every game designer who's worth anything will tell you that what you're really trying to build is a carnival game." "You're trying to build something that's easy to learn, easy to play, and hard to beat." "You want to create hooks in a game to hook them in." "To keep them interested." "(Machine) Destroy the saucer!" "Something that's out there on the edge of their ability that they can see sometimes and achieve, you know, less times that erm... that keep them playing." "(Machine) Superjackpot!" "It's implanted in your head that you wanna hear that." "This is Pavlov." "We're teaching you that when you hear a thing in a game it means something." "The best games are always the games that left you one shot away." "Gee, if I had just one more shot," "I know I would have gotten it this time." "I had two balls locked and I just got that last ball locked cos I did it last time." "Or I did it two games ago." "I just need to do it one more time." "One more time." "To design a pinball machine, basically you start with a theme." "You then begin the process of how do I lay out an interesting pinball machine with the flippers and things that represents where I'm trying to go with this?" "The right lane feeds back to this flipper." "We build working models of things and then we play with it." "But it tells us whether what we're doing is going to work or not work or be fun or not fun." "OK, this shows how we mock up what we do and then here's the final game." "This is what the final version of the game looks like when it's finally produced." "(Machine) It's just you and the track now!" "Each one of these games is a year of your life." "In that year of your life, you always put your best effort forward to make the game fun." "What you think will be fun." "OK?" "And you don't always hit it." "No game designer would tell you they always hit it." "You don't always hit it." "The guy whose games I play is one of the legends of the business." " Steve Ritchie." " Hi, my name's Steve Ritchie." "(Rock music)" "(Tyres screech)" "It's not so much what I wanted to be." "It's what people said I was going to be." "They said that I was going to be a mad scientist in a toy factory." "Even in grade school." "And that's what I am." "I never thought I would get to meet Steve Ritchie." "It's awesome." "I'm on cloud nine!" "(Laughs)" "It's definitely an art." "Just to know the science of it is nothing." "You have to understand how the ball moves but it's also curves and things that the ball does that make you feel satisfied." "A nice sound." "You send a ball through the hole and it goes "thunk!"" "Locks in, stays solid." "Doesn't bounce out." "Make a sound at the same time." "That's art." "It is a work of art." "Being a programmer by trade" "I can appreciate this is a large 3D program to me." "All event-driven then as soon as an event happens, you can picture the electricity flowing through and different things happening." "I mean, for me this is like a little mini world." "So when the ball's bouncing around inside, it's having fun inside its own little world and you're helping it along." "Maybe I like it cos I enjoy aquariums." "Little fish in the tank having fun." "The ball's having fun in here." "If you chart the history of pinball, you'll see things go in and out of style." "Pinball went through a growth spurt when it went from lights in the back box to the score reels." "From score reels to displays." "From displays to alpha numerics." "From alpha numerics to dot matrix." "Pinball lost a market of players because of their technologically enhanced games." "Video mode is a feature that allows me to play a video game within this pinball machine." "The machines went a little haywire with their toys and all the different things they felt had to be on a game." "It was the biggest division among pinball players in my generation." "Most of us would refuse to play the new highly electronic pinball games." "They've made the games so complicated that 5% of the people that play 'em understand the rules." "I've always been into rules." "I'm into board games." "I love strategy." "So to me it's about rules." "It's about achievement, it's about goals." "You start learning about a game that you've never played before." "And you go, "Oh, I see, if I do this and this, I get one of those." ""And three of those gets me a multiball." "I can do that." "Piece of cake."" "And then you play it ten times in a row and you don't do it." "And you're like, "Oh, I can do that."" "For instance, in Pirates a very obvious strategy is to get time lock lit." "You get time lock lit by shooting balls into the disc up the left ramp." "The ball will bounce around for three seconds while the post is up." "The post comes down and it still may bounce around." "And all the while you complete these lights." "You get the light to the end and that will light time lock." "Once time lock is lit, I know that I'm good to go there." "So then I get the ship multiball, which is the ship." "I get the ship multiball one shot away from starting." "So you shoot the ship, you shoot the ship." "The ship will start to rock and you know when the ship is rocking you're one shot away from starting that multiball." "And if I succeed I have a four-ball multiball of Tortuga running and the ship multiball is one shot away." "Then I try and shoot the ship with that fourth ball starting that multiball and I like that a lot because then I can try to lock balls back into the disc to get my multiplier up while I'm collecting jackpots and super jackpots." "I find that very satisfying." "So that's sort of a low-level goal that I think anybody can achieve once they figure it out." "What we do is a business." "And what we build is fun." "It just happens to come in a box." "The pinball machine is a revenue-earning piece of equipment." "Like a slot machine." "Money goes in." "An operator comes along and collects the money." "The player is entertained." "He can win a free game." "He can be satisfied or have a great time for a short time." "Even with a little glory." "The knocker goes off in a crowded bar." "I did that, I made that go off, OK?" "When you hear them cussing sometimes, or trying to kick the game to get some action, you know you're getting the results that you want, you know." "And you see them putting more coins in and you say, "I made it." (Laughs)" "?" "Put another quarter in the pinball" "?" "Another way to lose" "?" "You put another quarter in the pinball" "?" "Another way to lose ?" "There's collectors and there's players and then there's people that just like to talk pinball." "They are almost every kind of person you can talk about." "Everyone jokes about there's some sickness, there's some insanity." "I don't know if any of them are really cool." "But it's kind of like a geeky thing is probably the way pinball's perceived by the outsiders." " How do you perceive pinball?" " I'm an insider, so I think it's really cool." "Hello." "We are from Tokyo, Japan." "We are pinball lovers." "And then now it seems almost like a definition of a nerd or a weird and marginal person to be caught playing pinball." "But maybe there's something attractive about that." "I'm the Jim Morrison of pinball." "They either love me or hate me." "I think it's great for pinball." "I think the Pingeek is good." "I haven't met anybody like him before. (Laughs)" "I'm not a businessman." "I'm just a hack carrying around a camcorder." "All my DVDs here are ten bucks." "I wanna start with this one because it is very hard to find." "I don't know if anybody has this except me because this was ten years ago." " (Man) I've got it." " Who?" "I love pinball." "I love the hobby." "My main objective here is to document every pinball machine that is in existence up and running." "I wanna show this one." "This is my biggest seller to date." "Cost me $22 to make and gas." "96% of my ideas pan out to money." "I have years of sales and marketing experience." "Who would dream to take video of a pinball show ten years ago?" "I didn't know this stuff would sell." "Did anybody else?" "(Pinball machine noises)" "(Man on DVD) Then when you drain the ball it kicks up over the switch, this relay disallows the switch, and then..." "I could watch it over and over again myself." "If I had the time." "I'm here to save a hobby that saved my life." "Music has saved my life." "I collect records all the time." "I love music." "I love the movie Tommy." "That changed my life cos it was music and it was about pinball." "The arcades kept me going." "I was pretty much raised in arcades, because of divorce issues and just a mess." "My whole life up till the past couple of years was a nightmare." "And now I'm getting recognition as this Pingeek character with a camcorder." "Hold on, I've got to check my camcorder cos I think I got a bad angle." "I'm showing my butt." "Hold on." "I'm single and you've got to be because if you have a family, forget it." "You can't be married and have kids and do this." "It will kill you." "You know, you can't do it." "If you met the right woman, would you give up pinball for her?" " Absolutely not." " (Laughs)" "I guess it would depend on what type of woman it is." " You want Pinball Fantasy?" " Sure." "That looks cool." "What would make me happy?" "I'm Elton John at a baseball stadium by the show or something that I can go in a glitter outfit and hop up on the stage." "And say, "Hey, I've arrived for the show." "And guess who my ride is?"" "This hot chick in leather pants and I'm on a Harley." "She drops me off." "She goes, "You're Pingeek." I go, "Yeah."" "Elton John was the ultimate showman in the '70s." "I want to be like him." "I want to be a showman." "I might be pinball's biggest fan, I don't know." "But it's going out having fun, saving a game from being thrown in the trash and bringing it back." "You could call some of us geeks, even me, because we're all into the game." "And maybe that's not the coolest thing." "But, hey, we're having fun with it." "You know, everybody tells me what to do." "Everybody tells me to take these drugs, I should be in an institution." "I should have kids, I should be doing that." "I get so much crap advice that I'd be dead and bankrupt if I listened to it." "And, you know, I do my own thing." "People need to slow down and get back to basics." "Talk to each other and there might not be all this fighting and shooting." "Whatever happened to just going into a bar like John Wayne." "Somebody said something to you, you punch them out." "And then you have a drink over it later." "I've given up on mankind." "We're all gonna die." "It's inevitable." "And the air's not getting any better." "One person cannot save the world, I've found that out." "But I can try and save this industry and this hobby and do my best." "I'm definitely misunderstood, you know." "Here's this landscape of things that are happening." "And I can effect that change by the simple manipulation of pressing a button." "By pressing a button at the right time, that ball is going to be propelled into something that's gonna hit something, knock something, do whatever." "You are the person that is in some ways controlling your own destiny." "I used to think that it was man versus machine." "But I tended to back away and said it's not really man against machine." "It's man with machine." "(Siren)" "If I can sense the rhythm of that game, the tempo of that game, I wanna be working in tandem with it." "I'm not fighting it." "Not fighting against it." "I'm working with it." "You have to be in sync." "I want to give to that game and it's gonna give back to me." "(All groan)" "(Applause)" "I guarantee you it's chemically similar to that of athletes." "When athletes get in the zone, they feel as though they're watching themselves run the ball down the field." "It is transcendent." "Pinball reminds me of like dreaming." "Because like when I'm playing the game it's like er..." "I'm not really with like reality." "I'm just kind of watching this ball float around." "It's like being in some place where you don't know what you're doing." "But yet you're watching what you're doing and trying to concentrate." "And it feels like a dream." "It really is a unique feeling to become one with the machine." "So to tell that ball where it's gonna go and have your fingers and your flippers and your shaking ability put that ball where it's supposed to go." "It's sort of a zen where you're sort of meditating and that's all you're concentrated on is the pinball." "You forget everything else." "It just feels like, you know, here's the flippers." "The more you get in the zone it feels like the flippers are together." "You can't lose the ball out the middle." "You've built it up and now comes the big multiball, the one you've been trying to get for 20 games." "And you play that for all its worth." "And you stretch it out and you embellish it and you let all the people watching know that look at this person, this person's just done a very difficult thing." "He must be..." "He must be special." "(Woman on machine) Uh-oh." "When you get to put your initials on it's like, "There I am." "I own this game."" "I put a lot of play time in on this machine." "I try to defend it." "That's my home territory." "So try to make sure people see my name on as many games as possible." "One particular day when I was playing," "I was just simply ahead of the machine." "The machine couldn't keep up with me." "I was accumulating so many free games." "And I could not leave cos I did not want to lose these free games." "And eventually after about three or four hours I had to go." "So in a sense there is a possibility you have the illusion that you've won." "There is something inevitable about losing at pinball." "I think that's a blessing." "Because there is a feeling often when you're playing pinball that the machine decides when you need to go home." "And if you're tired enough, you'll start playing poorly and the machine notices that and it wipes you out and sends you packing." "(Newsreel) The object of play in pinball is a high score." "If you score enough, you win a free game." "The way to win is to control the ball." "Either with the flippers or by careful nudging of the entire machine." "When you see a truly skilled pinball player, you realise it is a game of skill, not a game of chance." "When I started, we started with small flippers." "You basically play, you know, gun and run." "Run and gun." "Ball's coming down." "Boom." "You just pound away and just do it." "It's pure adrenaline." "It is pure reflex." "It is the spontaneity of that reflex." "Now what you have are players who control the tempo of the game." "I see it with my sons, in all honesty." "There are times when I stand back and marvel at the fact that they have the ability that they have." "One of the ways I've become a better player, and I think it's the difference between how I approach a game of pinball and our dad approaches a game of pinball," "I look at a game, I try to find a weakness and exploit that weakness for my own game." "Whereas my dad will sit and shoot a ramp over and over again for no points." " Because the shot feels good." " (Laughter)" "It's very serious." "They train and they have training sessions." "(Applause)" "This is a sport." "You're gonna work a sweat." "I've seen some players playing where their entire body floats up from the game." "Argh!" "You know, you're down there playing for five or six hours." "To stand and stay focused for that long, it's pretty draining." "I'm sore in my legs." "I'm sore in my shoulders." "Underneath my arms." "My calves." "You wanna build up those pinball muscles." "It know it sounds crazy but we are athletes." "I've always wanted to be champion of the world in something." "I had to figure out what it was going to be in." "And then I figured out it was gonna be pinball." "(Cheering)" "(TVhost) And later on tonight, Rick Stetta." "He's been crowned the new pinball wizard of the world." "It was really in 1991, I think," "Rick Stetta became our first really recognised world champion." "Rick Stetta. 32." "Sunnyvale, California." "World's best pinball player." "Well, I don't really have a job." "I was the same person I always was before I got all my publicity." "Just a guy that went out and liked playing the machines." "And you know, nobody..." "Nobody thought that much of me, you know." "They thought, you know, pretty much just some weird guy that was out doing stuff by himself and just out of touch with life." "I started playing when I was ten years old." "When I was 15 I decided to dedicate my life to it and become the best in the world." "I practise three to four hours a day on the average." "And that's almost every day." "I miss about one day a month." "It's addictive and you start thinking about when you're going to get your next one, where it's going to be from and what it's going to be like." "Yeah, it's the whole thing." "Pinball's gotten a lot more complicated nowadays." "It's becoming more and more unclear to me how people are getting big scores." "I was trying to see if my name was still on it too." "But mine had actually fallen off of the number one through 25 list." "It's all the world really wants to know." "Who's in the top ten." "Yeah, sometimes you see it all when you're playing really well." "I can see a ball going towards the out lane at 12 inches away and know to do something right away." "I'll nudge the machine and when the ball gets there it just does this thing off the post and rolls in." "Like I knew I could see it." "When I watched him he does the routine where he's like, you know, just..." "You know, like a mime or something like this sizing up the game." "He tips it a bit." "Respects the game." "Wipes it off with whatever." "He's got this routine that's only his." "Nobody can do it." "But the body English and everything, he's one with the game." "I wanna do what he's doing." "The way I play I've got this dance thing going on." "And I could be like on one hand and one heel." "And then I'm making my decision how to hit that machine." "From that odd pose." "But I would be in that spot because the way I play it was determined that's where I was supposed to be before that ball was there and then I'd pop it and change my stance and watch the ball roll in and play the ball." "I'd be amazed no matter how many times I'd see something odd like that." "Each time that I would see it I would be amazed." "I would hate to be 95 years old and look back on my life and say," ""You know, what I really wanted to do" ""was play pinball but, gee, my mom told me that I should get a career."" "Pinball makes me feel very special." "Because I have pinball as my own world." "Always something that's there for me." "Pinball is a prize." "A diamond in the rough that I have personally shined." "Pinball's something that's done something for me that I had to discover for myself." "That was already there in a world that gives us all kinds of input about stuff that we don't even want to hear other people's input about." "The input I got about pinball was that it was something negative." "And I knew that all that input was mistaken." "Pinball is a world of special rules and unique opportunities." "And entertainment coming out of seemingly nowhere." "I would even go as far as say I am special because of pinball." "I've always played pinball." "My friends and I were always into it but we never had any idea that there was pinball competitions." "Wow!" "We've got to go to these things." "I'm gonna go and annihilate everybody." "We went to our first show and your heart would be pounding and you'd be shaking a little and so nervous that it was difficult to play." "You'd choke, you wouldn't do well, and you'd have to wait a year to try again." "There's like ten women and, you know, 200 men." "But pay no mind to it." "It's not as popular with girls as with boys but we play just as well." "(Applause)" "There's a strong mental component to remain calm and in control." "The best players never do something that affects the ball unless they do it for a purpose." "And ball control doesn't mean always catching the ball, it means putting the ball where you want it so you know where it's going to be next, not just where it is right now." "People in A Division, it's just amazing to watch them play." "They do stuff that sometimes you would think was not possible." "I think that it's special to see incredible play." "It combines chess with true physical interactivity." "And people who have the ability to hold their concentration, have the reflexes, know how to dissect a play field and the objectives and the rules into something that is as elegant as watching a ballet." "(Classical music)" "Most of my vacation time is pinball shows." "My mother lives with me in New Jersey." "When I tell her I'm going, she said, "Go ahead and enjoy yourself." ""You've gotta have some fun so go enjoy yourself."" "Six million!" "Basically I'm a synthetic organic chemist actually working on trying to find a treatment for Alzheimer's disease." "15 million!" "I like chess, I like to solve math puzzles." "You know, I like bowling." "I'm a big rail fan so I like to ride..." "I like to ride subways." "I really haven't made it to finals in a major tournament in a while." "I did it once in '99, but I got eliminated unfortunately." "I'm hoping to actually win a major tournament." "?" "A storm is brewing along the horizon" "?" "Clouds get darker but my sun is still rising" "?" "Surprising villages, flooding cities and towns..." "The Storm is my nickname." "I came up with it myself." "?" "To rectify, electrify your brain..." "I was born and raised in Manhattan." "I started playing pinball when I was four years old." "So pinball and I kind of grew up together." "I want to win." "And I want to beat the best." "I don't go day to day thinking that I'm second best." "It makes it much easier to live thinking that I'm the best and I just haven't had my moment." "What's really important when you play pinball at the world championship level is to get your mentality straight." "To be sharp and have a killer instinct." "Get in there!" "Because everyone is so good that you need the mental edge." "I deliberately pump myself up to bring that killer instinct up to the highest level." "So that's where it's a storm because you got two totally conflicting things." "You've got this placid, Buddha, meditative state and you have this devilish fire screaming madman state going on at the same time." "And if you can balance those two things you'll be unbeatable." "Sometimes I am." "And I feel like an outsider." "I feel kind of like... someone that they all think they're better than." "And I know for a fact that I can beat them." "I haven't proved that yet." "There is enough of a skill element that the best players always rise to the top." "But there's enough of a luck element that everyone should have their day and I haven't had mine yet." "One of the gentlemen here, Neil Shatz, has been in the finals three or four times." "And it's like if there is a pinball god maybe they're cursing him because he's second or third place, and he's so great he deserves to win finally and so if I were to pick someone to win," "I'd pick me, but if I were to pick two people to win, I'd pick him." "I've taken second at PAPA, I've taken second in Pinburgh, and second place in Arizona, second place at the Pinathon in Roseville, second at Expo I believe three times in A and then I won the B Division." "I started the competitive circuit in 1992." "And when I went to that first tournament I took second behind Rick, and got a book for it, and then I realised I was hooked at that point." "Sometimes I've made mental mistakes and then it's really tough." "It's frustrating but other times I think I've played to the best of my ability, not made any mistakes, and the pinball can deal you bad breaks, and it's no one's fault that..." "I think helps me deal with a lot of situations." "But sure, yeah, it's tough but I enjoy just the thrill of competition." "So I think that just keeps me coming back regardless of the result." " What can we expect this morning, guys?" " Trying to last-minute qualify here." "And another thing is just happening to have my competitive career when some true giants of the game were also in their prime." "I mean Bowen Kerins, Keith Elwin, Lyman Sheats Jr." "Absolutely I think those guys are simply better players." "Maybe none better than Lyman Sheats." " Lyman Sheats." " Lyman Sheats." " Lyman Sheats." " Best player in the world." "I'm a game programmer." "I programme pinball machines." "I work with designers and basically make the game do all of what it does." "I was in college, it was around 1986." "Being in college, it's a kind of low-pressure fun environment, and I don't know, I took to it as a very inexpensive form of entertainment." "It was about five years after that that I started competing." "There are a couple of techniques I try and teach at first." "The easiest thing is to hit the flippers individually." "You know, just at separate times." "I don't know..." "I see a lot of people hit both flippers at the same time." "The other is, it's pretty easy to just not do anything... in terms of when the ball's coming down." "I always like try and stress ball control to people who..." "You know, when they first play." "Try and get the balls under control." "Multiball here." "Going to try and get one of the balls over the other flipper to make a shot." "Score some points." "Sort of like that." "Lyman Sheats, never had seen him before." "And I watched this person methodically do a passing shot over, make the shot, kick down, go up, passing shot, over." "So I bounce the ball over to the other flipper, now it's under control." "And I just watched in disbelief." "I said, "This is amazing."" "I never thought of playing pinball that way." " The what?" " The what?" "Don't know nothing about it." " You say a pinball?" " Pinball?" "Play pinball?" "World pinball championships?" "Here we are." "World pinball championships." "I didn't know they were having a pinball championship here." "PAPA was actually started by Steve Epstein in New York City." "He did the first six of them." "What exactly is PAPA?" "PAPA is the Professional Amateur Pinball Association." "And Kevin got the rights to take it over." "And then he built this place." "This is about 30,000 square feet of space for about 350 or so pinball machines." "It was built in 2004." "It was finished about one day before the actual tournament." "We had the tournament, everyone came here, had a great time." "And within one week there was a hurricane named Ivan that came up the East Coast and the little creek in front of here overflowed its banks." "The flood was five feet high in some places." "And I was out here when it was happening." "And there was nothing to be done." "It destroyed 240 pinball machines and about a dozen video games." "All the machines were taken out front and basically smashed for parts." "It was heartbreaking." "Everything we had just finished was washed away." "We call it the graveyard." "You never know when you need a part." "I was just frustrated and wanted to get the place cleaned up so I could decide if I wanted to try again." "It did prove possible to clean up and rebuild." "Kevin rebuilt it and purchased all the machines within a year." "We got it open again about one day before it was ready to go last year." "We were ready to go again." "That's what I want to do and I'd barely really gotten started." "It seemed silly to only do it once." "You can have a great game." "Next game look like you never played in your life." "There are a couple of people who are high-quality players." "Very focused when they play, tough to beat." "When they have an off day that's the day you hope you have your on day." "Because they don't have off days very often." "In the final rounds, players put up huge games." "Just because of the situation, they rise to the occasion." "Anything can happen." "One slip and the ball goes." "And that's it." "(Man) OK, the first-placed winner and new world pinball champion, the incomparable Lyman Sheats!" "(Cheering)" "It certainly presented an entertainment option that was awfully compelling." "As much as pinball was sort of man against machine, your ability to catch and move that ball around and hit those targets, video offered a completely new dimension." "(Beeping)" "In 1980 you could not possibly build enough video games to saturate the market." "It was impossible." "Little by little the interest in playing the pinballs went down and of course the videos came up." "And all of a sudden our income doubled and tripled overnight." "Then Pacman hit." "I couldn't believe how much money they'd take in a weekend." "It just blew me away." "And then the pinball sat there almost forlorn-looking. "Come play me."" "When video came in it was such a big deal." "The people that had been playing pinball got squeezed out." "What can you do in a video game?" "You can't see anything except the screen." "When you play pinball you're playing a piece of equipment that you can move around and control." "Video games, you can play a few times, learn the patterns and beat 'em." "Beat 'em endlessly, beat 'em into submission." "Pinball machines you can't do that." "You can go so far and it dominates you." "So you always lose in the end." "There's not a closed end loop here." "It's a pinball machine." "There's a beginning but it's endless." "A video game, I got to the end." "I finished it." "It took me 42 months." "And ten hours a day but I finished the game, it is now done." "Pinball machine you're never done." "The real backbreaker came when home video finally hit the marketplace." "When you could go out and buy your Atari console where you could pop in the various games and play right on your set." "Now kids weren't collecting in one spot and having that social interaction." "They were now breaking down into sub little groups." "Of either myself playing at home or me and my buddy playing at home." "But it really spelled the end of certainly the pinball era." "It was widely believed at the time that video games had usurped pinball and there was no longer a need for pinball whatsoever." "And then one day people got bored with playing all these video games." "And the industry imploded on itself." "Pinball was back on the map again." "(Newsreel) After a decade of decline, flippers are flapping." "Bumpers are thumping." "Pinball is bouncing back." "The last coming of pinball would have been 1992/'93." "In those years we built somewhere around 120-130,000 pinball machines that year." "I've had a steady connection to pinball for the last 50 years." "I had a lot of life tied up in it." "It was sort of an identity that I grew and I didn't separate very well the identity of me as the Broadway Arcade and me as Steve Epstein." "Took me a few years after we closed the arcade to really..." "I had a pretty big long funk." "It wasn't a monetary thing that I lost a big income." "It was really a presence and just the daily interaction of the world that I had at my doorstop that I knew I was never gonna have again." "It was a life-defining moment that saddens me and still saddens me actually." "(Man) Big smile, Steve." "That whole '70s into the '80s into the early '90s, was a time when the magic of pinball was out there." "The magic of pinball still exists." "It just has to reconnect with the people." "I go out now and I see some of my old friends and I play pinball and that's nice." "But having the Broadway Arcade was a unique and incredible experience." "That's just never gonna happen for me again." "One of the most difficult things that anybody might encounter in their lives is to be somewhat helpless in the inevitability of an outcome." "So if you look at the downside of it all, pinball deserves a better fate than what it currently has." "In truth it isn't a big part of our culture any more." "In truth..." "You might not wanna print this but..." "pinball's slowly dying." "It is an American invention." "It has been a big part of American pop culture." "But I'm not sure that anyone will care in 10 to 15 years." "That's my thoughts." "But I don't know." "Were pinball not to survive, the world would continue but a little bit of the fabric of life would be gone." "I don't know if we can get to a point where there is a precipitous need and desire by the general population for pinball." "I think that there is a fleeting sense of one's naiveté and innocence that games bring out." "And as we get older, for many of us, we step away from doing those things that gave us joy when we were younger." "And I think that that loss of innocence is tough." "And that is the tragedy of it." "Because there is still something that is just marvellously entrancing about pinball." "And everybody should try it at some point in time." "Pinball is a game that adds more to life." "I think it is definitely more than just a game." "It is such a unique experience that you cannot replicate anywhere else." "You have a universe in a box." "Under glass." "And every time you enter that universe it's different." "You never know what you're going to have or what you're going to experience." "But whatever that experience is, the frustration, the anxiety, the pleasure of making shots and scoring," "I mean, it's all part of what life really is." "And I equate it much how life is." "You never know what's around the next corner but you gotta go and be involved in it." "I still get calls." "People still walk by and they look for it to this day." "It's very strange, very strange." "That was a great 35 years." "?" "Pinball" "?" "Pinball" "?" "Pinball" "?" "Pinball" "?" "Pinball"