99% Invisible - 135- For Amusement Only

Episode Date: October 8, 2014

Everyone has tried it at some point. The authorities started turning a blind eye years ago, but it wasn’t officially legalized until the summer of 2014. Finally, after more than 80 years of illegitimacy, the City of Oakland has legalized…pinball … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Item 4 is actions on special orders of the day that typically proceeds with the Council member announcements. What you're hearing is an Oakland, California city council meeting that took place in July of 2014. There's a whole bunch of different issues on the agenda, everything from allegations of funds being misused. We know that there was a lot of manipulation of funds, okay? And there's been a big ripoff with those funds to announcements of neighborhood parties. Basketball, pickup game, field game, space painting, zoom dancing. And producer Mickey Capra sat to the entire meeting like a good reporter does.

To hear them say this. Move the item president moved by vice mayor read second by miss mackle handy and by consensus will adopt the items in the consent count so they never actually say it directly but by adopting the items in the consent calendar what happened there is that the city of oakland finally legalized for the first time since the 1930s. Pinball machines. I'm Michael Shees on the founder and executive director of the Pacific Pinball Museum.

The Pacific Pinball Museum, which is a collection of really cool, mostly older machines that you can still play, is in Oakland's neighboring city, Alameda. Until recently, coin-operated pinball machines were also illegal in Alameda. And it's the reason that we started out as an admission-based establishment and everything was on free play. Most of the museum's pinball machines look a lot like the ones you've seen before in your local bar. But there are a few really old ones that look completely different. And pinball's design history can help explain why it was illegal for so long and why after nearly 80 years of being a slightly sketchy leather jacket wearing Nurdwell, Pinball can now go legit and claim its place with Pac-Man as good clean family fun.

Pinball evolved out of a game that was also played in a tilted cabinet, but was a bit more like Billiards. You'd shoot the ball onto the field with a pool stick. In the 1860s, the pool queue turned into a spring loaded plunger that you'd pull and release to launch the ball. They were simple wooden boards with glass tops, no electricity, no flashy art or colors. And the game was made small to fit on top of a counter at a bar or drugstore. The mechanics of the game were simpler too. You basically did one action, pull the plunger. The ball would shoot up the rights of the board

and onto the play field, where there were. Little pockets that would catch the ball, and then they were usually stamped with the point value. And there were pins, which looked like tiny nails that obstructed your way into the pockets. That's where pinball came from, was the nails or the pins that were driven into the board.

And the first games weren't coin-operated. Bars would buy one. And they would rent it out to people that wanted to play it and gamble with it. It was kind of like renting out the card table. By the 1930s, Pimmel games were coin-operated. And you'd find these little countertop games all over the place. And bars and drugstores. You know, you'd buy an egg cream to drink and some horrible tasting elixir at the local drugstore, and you'd use your change to play some pinball. And maybe

you'd win a pack of gum or cigar, and you'd have fun doing it. Then it moved to just straight up gambling. Where instead of being awarded a prize, you were given cash. And it's around this point that Pinball became electric. Lights and buzzards started showing up, along with other stuff like bumpers that you could bounce off of to get more points. Points that needed to be tallied up on a scoreboard, which led to what is now referred to as the back glass, that's the part of the pinball machine that faces you as you play. And the art on the back glass became one of the most iconic things about the pinball machine.

On the newer games, a lot of the art is licensed from movies, like the 1991 hit blockbuster The Atoms family. But if you go into the pinball museum in Alameda, almost all the old games from the 30s and 40s were done by one of two artists. So George Mollentin and Roy Parker. The art was meant to appeal to men and boys. So a lot of it features pictures of pretty ladies. The back glass of a game called marble queen

depicts a group of women in swimsuits and high heels gathered around in a circle, plain marbles. They're surrounded by a big tall fence, almost like they're in a clubhouse. You see the guys that are picking through the fence and it's pretty funny. The ultimate fantasy of a boy from the 1930s was women in their bathing suits, playing marbles. The lights and buzzers and women in bathing suits just made you want to put more and more money into the machines. Sometimes people were just playing a win-a-free game, other times there was a bigger payout, but it all added up.

These things made a ton of money. I can't emphasize enough of that because the mafia got involved it was all cash. With so much money disappearing into pinball machines the authorities started cracking down. It really got heated in the forties. More and more laws were being enacted to make pinball gambling harder. Manufacturers would try to get around this by labeling the machines. It says right here, for amusement only, no prizes, no wagering. I mean, they put that right on the machine, and everybody knew that, well, that's exactly what it was for. By the end of the 1940s, pinball was banned in most major cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles. But perhaps nowhere was the pinball crackdown so extreme as in New York City, where in

1942, Mayor LaGuardia ordered the NYPD to round up all of the machines. Then, in a press event, the mayor personally shattered some of the machines with a sledgehammer and had them dumped into the Hudson River. LaGuardia later reported that 2000 new police Billy clubs would be made from the wooden legs of old pinball machines. Perfect for knocking the heads of pinball plane hooligans. Mayor LaGuardia did not succeed in ridding the world of pinball entirely, though. It was still legal in some cities, and even in New York, it didn't totally disappear.

It just moved into CD underground establishments. Meanwhile, the game designers were still developing new features. The most important of which were the flippers that first appeared in 1947 that allowed you to swap the ball around the playfield by pressing two buttons on either side of the machine. In other words, the flippers gave you some control over the outcome of the game. Remember, when pinball machines were first banned, the games were considered a game of chance.

You'd basically put your quarter in, pull back the plunder, and hope for the best. When the flipper was added to the pinball machine, it should have changed the game's legal status. It wasn't a game of chance anymore. You could finally control the ball. If only they could find some way to prove it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Roger Sharp. I guess at one point I was considered to be, if not the best player in the world, one

of the best players in the world. Nearly 40 years after the introduction of the flipper, in April of 1976, Roger Sharp was called upon to prove that pinball was a game of skill before a meeting of the flipper. In April of 1976, Roger Sharp was called upon to prove that pinball was a game of skill before a meeting of the New York City Council. On the day of the hearing, tensions were high. It was packed, a lot of camera crews. The New York State Coin Operated Amusement Game Association had arranged for the hearing and they'd hauled two pinball machines into the meeting room. One that Sharp was to play and another that would serve

as a backup in case the first one suddenly died. And I started going over to the game that had been designated. The council had been pretty antagonistic to Sharp. They thought he would cheat. And right before he was supposed to play, a council member stopped him. He said, no, not that game. That game over there.

I think that the head of the city council thought that that game was somehow rigged. Let's go with the game that's been turned off that nobody's paid any attention to. That's over there in the corner. The council session took a 20 minute recess so that the camera crews could change the lighting from the original machine to the new machine.

And then Roger Sharp steps up and starts playing. Back then I was able to really show off. So it was very nice to be able to call my shots and just do whatever I wanted to do. Baking back hands and shots for right to left to right. And then for the grand finale, Sharp wanted to prove that even the first shot, the one that involves just pulling back the plunger and letting go, that even that shot can be perfected with skill. So he turns to the council members and says,

If I do this right it's going to land right down the center. Pull back the plunger, it went up and blown straight down the center. And the guy was out of the seat and kind of threw up his head. That's it. And I was right, I was ready to keep on playing. I was having fun. City Council voted 6-0 to pass the legislation. Sharpe has said in the past that he got lucky with this shot.

But now he says that he was being modest, that his blunge was not luck. To do what I did, that was skill. To have done it the way that I did it was pure naivete. Within a year, pinball was legal again in most places across the country. But not in Oakland and Alameda. Where as we heard in the beginning of the show, pinball just became legal in 2014. Even with the rise of video games,

the pinball industry continued to experience waves of success until the 1990s, but over time, people lost interest. The last big corporation to manufacture pinball machines lost millions of dollars on its pinball division and decided to shut down in favor of a more profitable operation, making slot machines for casinos. After decades of fighting to prove that pinball could be a game of skill, it turned out that the most lucrative bet for game makers was on games of chance, gambling machines. You know, ballies casino, they used to be in the pinball business, and they took their name from their first hit pinball machine manufactured in 1932 called balliehoo. Welcome to the 21st century.

In 1999, Pinball tried to make a comeback with a game that integrated a video screen on the back glass with a mechanical play field. Welcome to Pinball 2000. Welcome to the new image in Pinball. Welcome to the 21st century. That was a promo video for Pinball 2000, despite the reverb and the medicine ticking clock and the mountains of hyperbole heaped upon the promotion of the game it never really caught on.

Which is probably because if Pinball still has any appeal, it's actually the vintage, analog nostalgia feelings it brings up in people. We like it because it's not the future. It's the past. Back in the Pacific Pinball Museum, Mike Shease thinks Pinball is making a bit of a comeback and it's because people are longing to get away from screens and from games that they play at home alone. So with Pinball, you can kind of gather around and watch your friends suck. And that's the other thing that's really cool, is that anybody can suck at pinball.

I mean, it's a great equalizer. You don't have to be smart, you don't have to be physically an athlete. I think what he means is that anybody can suck and anybody can be great. It's a nerds game, a rebels game, an underdog's game. One of the best pinball players in the US right now is a young guy with autism who can memorize the geometric patterns that the ball makes on the play field. And then of course there's that deaf dumb and blind kid I heard about once. Never saw him play, but I heard he was really good.

99% Invisible was produced this week by Mickey Kapper and Katie Mingle with Sam Greenspan, Avery Truffleman and me Roman Mars. Mickey did another piece about pinball and its roots in Chicago for a program I love called Curious City. It's not really like just a show, it's this news gathering experiment based at WBEZ where people submit questions about Chicago and Curious City investigates and imports it's genius. We'll have a link on a website. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW

in San Francisco and produced of the offices of ArcSign and architecture firm in beautiful downtown, always law abiding Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook. All of us are on Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify, but to find out more about this story, including cool pictures and links and listen to all the episodes of 99% Invisible, you must go to 99pi.org. Radio Tapio.

From PRX.