WHEN MOST people think of pinball, if they think of it at all, they probably imagine an old, unloved machine, starved of coins and gathering dust in the back of a bar or pizza parlour as its lights and bells plead futilely for attention. Sure, pinball has fans: so do record players, British sports cars and tweed jackets with elbow patches. Some people simply appreciate bygone eras. Others enjoy being out of step with the times.
Yet in recent years pinball has quietly grown not just increasingly popular, but also lucrative. Some $55,000 will be handed out in prizes at the North American Pinball Championship on March 6th: far from football- or basketball-player money, but enough to justify modest hopes and hours of practice. The money comes from event fees and sponsorships; along with bragging rights, the winner gets a new machine from Stern Pinball worth $10,000.
The growth of competitive pinball is part of a broader revival of the game. The number of people playing in tournaments sanctioned by the International Flipper Pinball Association (IFPA), the governing body, more than doubled between 2015 and 2024, from 16,500 to almost 40,000. The number of companies making pinball machines has also grown, from just one—Stern, which stood alone for more than a decade—to about 20 firms around the world. Behind this renaissance lies a strategic change: after decades of being scared by video games, pinball manufacturers have worked out how to imitate them.
Pinball evolved from bagatelle, an 18th-century French tabletop game in which players used sticks to shoot balls around obstacles and into holes. American firms mechanised it in the 1930s, covering the playfield with glass, adding bumpers and requiring coins to play. Flippers were introduced in 1947 to keep the ball in action.
Not everyone saw pinball as a bit of harmless fun. In the 1940s several cities, including New York, banned it. Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor, believed the game led to juvenile delinquency, emptying the “pockets of schoolchildren in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money”. He also worried about its ties to organised crime. The ban endured until 1976, when a player named Roger Sharpe persuaded the city council that pinball was a game of skill; he did so by flipping the ball precisely where he said he would.
For most people, pinball remains a game of chance and reaction. They pull the plunger back to send the silver ball rocketing into the playfield, following it with their eyes as it caroms off bumpers, sails up ramps and flies down chutes. When it approaches the bottom, they flail at the flippers to save it. (Your correspondent, despite playing avocationally for around 40 years, remains a flailer.)
For skilled players, such as the 123 who competed at the IFPA’s Winter Bash, held in December at an arcade near St Louis, pinball is a game of dexterity akin to a fast-paced form of billiards. It requires precision, timing and planning.
When Keith Elwin, who ranks 31st in the world, stands over a machine, his concentration is absolute: the dozens of other games bleeping and bleating all around him may as well not exist. “I’m going to shoot for the castle,” he explains, the silver ball nestled in the corner of a raised flipper. “But if I miss, I’m going to hit either of those two targets, and it’s going to come flying back at me…It’s all about playing defensive, trying to read where the ball is going to go, and then predicting your miss.”
Mr Elwin was playing “Medieval Madness”, made by Williams in 1997. Formerly a pinball titan, Williams stopped production in 1999 to focus on slot machines; Bally, another big firm, was bought by Williams in 1988 and also halted pinball production. Stern became, and remains, the market leader, releasing around three games each year. That is testimony to how complex and time-consuming pinball manufacture is, especially as new games often include multiple levels, video displays and internet connectivity.
As games have grown more sophisticated in design, how people play pinball has also changed. The machines were once a mainstay of bars; today Stern sells 70% of its games to homes, according to Seth Davis, its chief executive. (The arcade gaming market, worth an estimated $13.7bn, is expected to grow to $16.3bn by 2029.) “It’s as exciting as an Xbox,” Mr Davis explains, “but those sit under your TV. You can’t show it off. Today, the 45-year-old with a home says, ‘I want to enjoy it with my kids; I have the space and the money.’”
And like Xbox games, modern pinball games are narrative-driven: people do not get high scores just by keeping the ball alive, but by shooting targets in the proper order—hence Mr Elwin’s intent to shoot the castle—and advancing through the levels. Also like modern video games, internet-connected pinball machines let players take on anyone in the world and store their high scores in the cloud for others to see. These changes have made pinball more competitive and international, with boasting no longer limited to an individual pizza parlour or arcade. The IFPA’s rankings include players from America, Australia, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Sweden.
Despite such developments, pinball remains relatively niche: the number of committed players is a fraction of the 3bn people who play video games. Still, the number of tournaments and players keeps growing. When asked what draws people to pinball, Mr Elwin hints at a pleasure that is nostalgic but enduring: “You’ll have to ask the eight-year-old me. There’s just something about it.” ■
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