Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Pinball Works

Episode Date: May 26, 2018

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's your old pal, Josh. And for this week's SYS Case Selects, I've chosen How Pinball Works, one of my all-time favorite episodes. And it was recorded in September of 2014,

which seems like just yesterday, doesn't it? Well, at any rate, this episode has it all. Weird history, electro dynamics, the tilt, sign, everything. So I hope you enjoy it in good health. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

Do-do-do-do-do-do-do. And there's Jerry. Do-do-do-do-do-do. This is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. What was that? It was the news desk. Oh, yeah. I thought you were making pinball pings and bells

and whistles, no? Sounds like Vegas. Vegas is like one big pinball machine. It is, now that you've been to walk through those casinos. Yeah, you just made my neck muscles tighten. Oh man, I hate Vegas. I like Vegas. Yeah.

I wouldn't, I don't want to live in Vegas, or 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 done with Vegas. That's what you're saying.

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. When I'm like 60. Sure. Like pavement will have a residency in valleys. That's exactly, I think, what's going to happen.

Well, then you'll find me 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, 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. Yeah. So pinball machines actually find their lineage back in the 19th century. There were things called, I want to say baguette machines, but that's not correct.

The baguette table? Yes. The baguette table, thank you. They were basically a cross between pool and pinball. You use a pool cue and everything, and they sucked. And nobody liked them. I think it looks pretty cool. Does it?

It looks old-timey and boring to me. Well, I mean, yeah, if you're used to modern gaming, the baguette table is not going to thrill you. But I thought it looked kind of neat. So the baguette table was there. It was in place. And in the 1830s, a guy named Montague Redgrave came along. Like, you can't not say that guy's name like that.

No. He came along and said, you know what? People just invented a spring. How'd you say his name again? Montague Redgrave. Like he's on La Donham. Yeah. And he came along and said, somebody invented a spring recently.

I'm going to add it to this baguette table, make it less sucky. And then all of a sudden, we have the, what did he call it? The ball shooter, which makes sense. Sure. That's what you'd call it. And now we had the first introduced mechanism of pinball. 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, here's some money. Give me my balls and let me go play the game on the baguette table. Yeah. And the guy would be like, he would go, you know, it sucks, don't you? And you would say, yes, but it's the 1830s. Yeah. And if I play really well, then I can win free drinks and cigarettes.

I know. And they said, exactly. Can you see little 12 year olds winning cigarettes and then going back to play more baguette? Sure. So this is the way it went for many decades. People were miserable until the 1930s. And there was this enormous explosion of innovation and pool tablery in the 30s.

Yeah. Like just almost everything that you think of when you think of a pool, a pool, 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 pool table. No, I'm talking about pinball. Anyway, in the 30s, there was a huge explosion in pinballery.

Pinballery, yeah. And everything that you think of when you think of a pinball machine, almost all of it came about in the 30s. Yeah. Coin operation. Sure. The back glass, the thing that has like a kiss or Hugh Hefner on it or something like that.

Yeah. It stands up off of the playing field, the table. Yeah. Electric, well, I guess an electric current running through it. Yeah. Legs. Sure. The tilt mechanism, bumpers.

Yeah. Sounds. Yeah. Score keeping. And then. Bumpers, of course. I think I said bumpers, did I not? I don't know, maybe, but bumpers.

And then most of all, most importantly, Chuck, was the 30s led to a huge surge in popularity because you had the Great Depression. And pinballs were cheap entertainment that were widely available. You noticed the one thing we didn't say, though, and all that, innovation? What? Flippers. Because still, up until 1947, you just bumped the thing to make the ball move. Yeah.

There were no flippers. No. Which seems very counterintuitive to pinball. And the flippers really changed things. They fundamentally changed pinball. Heck yeah. Not just in the way you play, but in pinball as a game. Because before flippers, it was a game of chance.

It was the same thing as playing high, low, basically. Yeah. Like you had no way, really, of manipulating the movement of the ball. Well, you shake the machine. You could, but. Without tilting. I mean, that's what you did. Yeah.

That was how you did it. Even still, 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. Yeah. And then, but before that, like I said, things were popular. Get this.

In the early 30s, there were 145 companies making pinball machines. And the field became so competitive and ruthless that by the mid 30s, like five years later, there were 14. 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, I was trying to think of, like this, researching this, maybe want to go play pinball, like researching sushi, maybe want to go eat sushi. And I was thinking like, I have no idea where to go to play pinball. You know, 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 he have? He has a Tomcat F-14, which is the ripoff of Top Gun. I've seen that one. He said there's a lot, there were a lot of ripoff games for a while of movies and actual movie tie-in games. Yeah. He has Black Hole, but not the movie. Just another ripoff game.

Okay. I would love that one too. And those are both kind of old school. And then he has Jurassic Park, which is newer. I think, doesn't that have like a T-Rex that comes down and like eats your ball? I can't remember. I've played all three of them. But yeah, and he also get this.

He took an old video game, like stand-up video game console and removed all the guts, got a computer screen and computer and hooked it up in there to 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 Asteroids. Scott, invite me over. Please. And it's all free.

That's so awesome. It's pretty fun. Man, he's like Ricky Schroeder and Silver Spoons or something, but grown up. Yeah, pretty much. And I think the reason why I don't play more pinball over there is because 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. OK. We can do it right now. And if I collected pinball machines, it would definitely be mid-70s and mid-80s for me. Yeah, the heyday. Yeah, you know, all the bells and whistles and all that, the newfangled bells and whistles,

they're fine. That's cool. But not so old that it's like electromechanical, but not so new that it's like nothing but like plasma screens and stuff like that. Well, somewhere in the middle. Sure, sure. I'm the same way. My favorite game of all time, pinball-wise, favorite game ever, Gallagher.

But a 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 1991. Yeah, I think it was either Balli or Williams put that one out and they sold more than 20,000 units of it. Dude, it's awesome. And it didn't surprise me. And like I have no affinity 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 didn't play it because of the movie. I got you. I played it because it was an awesome pinball game. I got you. And they had one at the mall, not the mall, the bowling alley near me in Athens.

Bowling alley. That's where I could probably go find a pinball machine, huh? Yeah. I'll bet I could. Or maybe not, sadly. I'm starting a quest. All right. So tell me, let's go to my brother's house because we can have a scotch.

Okay. So anyway, 1947 is when they finally invented the flipper. Dee Gottlieb Company introduced a game called Humpty Dumpty. And that was where what most people say the first modern game came about. Right. They had the level flippers. All the innovations of the 30s and added flippers and boom, you got pinball, not pool table, pinball.

Pretty much. Although the flippers weren't the same. It was in the 1950s, the same person came up with SpotBowler and that was the first modern arrangement of flippers. Right. And they were longer with that introduction. Yeah. Or else a little later on, the first flippers they introduced were, they were shorter.

Yeah. And they didn't face this. They faced in reverse of the way they face now, which is weird. Yeah. It was like a... They were working it out. Yeah. Beta.

Pretty much. So it's funny that they introduced flippers in 1947 because 1947, by the time flippers came around, pinball was illegal in most of the major cities in the United States and had 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. Mayor LaGuardia, who you'll 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 thought it was a mafia racket. He thought that it robbed the, quote, pockets of school children in the forms of nickels and dimes, given to them as lunch money.

And he got it outlawed in New York 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 them up like in a raid style. Let's smash them with sledgehammers.

Let's dump them in the river. That's what they did. They dumped them in the river after they smashed them. That's a very New York 1940s thing to do. Right, exactly. You know, 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 were working off, in part, a really awesome article. They came up with 11 things you didn't know about pinball history. So from the 40s until the mid-1970s, if you wanted to play pinball in New York City and Chicago and LA, most cities in the U.S., it was illegal, you had to go to a pornography shop basically and go behind a curtain and play pinball. Isn't that weird? It's the weirdest thing we've ever said on this show.

Until the mid-1970s. And like there were still raids and pinball operators on the jail. Like me, dude. 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 nudie people. Did you really? No, of course not. Oh, I was going to say, man, you just blew my mind. No, no, no. And get this. The city of Oakland.

Yeah. Oakland, California. Oaktown. Just this past July overturned an 80-year ban on pinball. Free the pinballers. Yeah. Good for them. Yeah.

For pinballs ban, people are still playing it like crazy. 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 II, though, where things really slowed down, obviously because of the war effort. Right.

Pinball was, big dent was put in pinball manufacturing, too. Yeah. Like everything else. And then after the fifties, it took off again. And it also became kind of a symbol of rebellious youth, and this popular mechanics art, Oakle points out like the fawns played a lot of pinball. I never considered that. From Tommy, from the Who's Tommy?

Yeah. The Pinball Wizard and Tommy, both kind of rebellious, like stick 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, 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, Sajjah Bob said, television has ruined more young minds than pinball and syphilis combined. Right. 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 moral turpitude.

Yeah. I didn't get that one either. Yeah. But I do now. So luckily, pinball was still widely available, albeit in the backs of pornography shops. And the reason we say luckily is because somewhere along the way, a young man, I think in his early twenties named Roger Sharp, who is a magazine editor, 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 are being ridiculous. Because it's a bicentennial of this country and we need pinball. 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. Yeah.

So they brought in their pinball wizard. Game of chance is gambling. Sure. LaGuardia had a point. Well, sort of. I still don't get it. But this law was obsolete because they added flippers and now it's a game of skill, but the law was still around.

Yeah, basically. So they brought in their pinball wizard, Sharp, and 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 other game? The 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'd never played it before. Yeah. I'm a master at this one, but he was a pinball wizard. So I believed in him. Yeah. Even though I didn't know what happened.

Did you see the documentary, Special Wind Lit? No. Oh my God. It has footage of this happening. Oh, wow. It's amazing. An amazing documentary. Yeah.

All about pinball. I mean, all about pinball is not so awesome documentary. I think there's one called Tilt as well. There is. That's about a specific moment in history in pinball. I haven't seen that one, but it sounds pretty good too. Yeah. But see Special Wind Lit.

Amazing. Gotcha. NC Tilt too. What's the deal? So Roger Sharp's playing. He's not really impressing anybody and things are kind of going bad. Yeah. So 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 pull the plunger, it 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 and where it's going to start its descent back to me is going to be in a very specific place in the center of the board.

Yeah. Not on the left. Yeah. And he did it. And apparently right afterward, the city council was like, okay, we'll repeal it. Like it's obviously a game of skill. Yeah. Like Roger Sharp single-handedly, well double-handedly, because he was using the flippers, save pinball

from illegality. I wonder if they said, yeah, fine, good lord, just it's legal. Get those machines out of here. Yeah. Get this loser out of here. But he is not a loser because he is currently still the number 536th ranked player in the world. I'm surprised.

I thought he 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 lit. Oh 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, 2014, August, whatever it is, Keith Elwin of the

USA is number one. USA. Jorian Engel Brexton of Sweden is number two. Sweden. Zach Sharp, recognize that name? That sounds vaguely familiar. Roger Sun. Yeah.

He's the number three player in the world. That's awesome. Number four, Daniele Celestino Axiari. What was that? He's Italian. Oh, okay. He's number four. Jorgan Holm is also Swedish.

He's number five. There's a Canadian at six, a Swedish at seven, then eight through 20, save one are all Americans. Wow. And number 20 is Josh Sharp. So his sons followed in his footsteps. That's great. And are both top 20 ranked players. That is good.

And I bet Josh is jealous of Zach. Maybe Josh is also, he's like, I want to be a veterinarian. So I'm paying more attention to that kind of thing. Maybe so. So pinball was saved by Roger Sharp. Hooray. And pinball just kept going on and on. Apparently it had its golden age.

It's widely believed between 1948 and 1958, but it was also huge in the seventies, huge in the eighties. And then video games came along and all of a sudden pinball was like, uh-oh. And it started to decline, sure, and decline and decline and decline. And I think we were down to maybe five major pinball machine producers. And by major, I mean, the only ones. Yeah. They're all being minor pinball made in the future.

No, because I mean, it takes a lot of time and effort to manufacture a functioning good pinball game. So by the nineties, there were just a couple left. Everybody was selling off their pinball divisions and there was a company called Balli Williams, which were former competitors that emerged. And this is what the documentary tilt is about. They went to their pinball 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 going to do? Was that pinball 2000? Yes. They came up with pinball 2000. They said, we will give you a chance to save yourselves, figure out what will revive pinball for the 21st century. And they came up with pinball 2000.

Yeah. It's basically a hybrid of video gaming and pinball, where you have kind of a standard pinball setup, but a video screen that's interactive as the backdrop. No. On the playing field too. So like the holograms pop up on the playing board and run away from the ball and interact with the ball. Yeah.

It stinks though. And no one liked it. Have you played it? I haven't played it, but I've saw videos of it and it didn't look like fun and no one liked it. 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 pull it off successfully was really something. Well, they built only two games. Right. I think each one had a few thousand production run. Yeah. But there was Star Wars episode one, which here's my theory. The reason pinball 2000 went nowhere, Jar Jar Binks. Yeah.

I don't know about that. The other one was Revenge from Mars and you can still find those used today, but despite the fact that pinball 2000 was created, it was okay as far as successes go, Balli Williams pulled the plug. Yeah. Which left one company, Stern, there's a guy named Michael Stern, I believe, who inherited his father's business and became the only people making pinball machines in the world. Still?

No. Oh, is there a new one now? Yeah, man. Had we been recording this two years ago, we would have basically been saying like pinballs are 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.

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 two. 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 there's a pinball renaissance, a nascent pinball renaissance just beginning to bud that could happen. Well, pinball is definitely sort of an end thing now.

If you're super cool and you have some money, then you might have a pinball machine in your house like my brother. It is apparently Stern's ratio of home sales to commercial sales has risen from 35% to 60% of their total sales. 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 and wants a new one. Yeah, if you want a new one, it's going to cost you, but if you want a vintage one, it's

1,500 still. I mean, that's a decent amount of money, but the Adams family one's less than 5,000. Oh man, that's the one that you need in the house. I think my brother actually refurbished his, I think I'm right. I think they weren't even working and he was able to fix them. Very neat. Yeah, I imagine you can get them for way less because these are fully refurbished, polished ready to go ones.

A lot of them are starting to come from overseas because the demand in vintage collectors items are rising so much that 70% of them come from overseas. They're re-importing them back to America now. That's big in Europe because I mean, as evidence from that top 10, two or three of them are European. Swedes. Swedes, look at them. So we'll get into how pinball actually works right after this.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give

me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So we've talked a lot about the history of pinball, which is way more interesting than I thought 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 going to 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 1947. Flippers in the ball. Uh, yeah. Everything else is just kind of ornamentation or whatever.

But to play pinball, you need flippers and a ball because the point of pinball is to 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 go. Flippers in the ball. That's right. You've got your flippers, um, typically at the bottom of the play field, 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, uh, 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. Yeah. We'll get to the scoring here in a minute. Um, and you basically want to propel the ball up with your little, uh, 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 pinball. 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, 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 drain. Sure. Um, but the, the way that pinballs are 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, but we'll get to that later on. I get ahead of myself. That's right. Uh, the ball itself, if you want to just talk hardware, uh, it's one in one sixteenth inches

in diameter and it's steel and it weighs about 2.8 ounces and can reach speeds up to 90 miles an hour. When you see that thing shoot out of a, one of the little, uh, chambers that'll come back at you. Yeah. It's going really fast. Yeah, it is. And that 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 disc, 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, uh, with its magnet just sort of spinning in place. Yeah. Which is no good. Or it could be super good, depending on what you're after. Uh, sometimes though, they do use a ceramic pinball called a power ball and it is a 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. Yep. And that's when things get crazy. So as the ball's going around the table, um, it's hitting the bumpers, it's hitting the targets and they're sending messages to the, um, well, if it's post-76 game to the mother board that's keeping track of your score and all that jazz. Yeah. 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 we'll tell later. So Chuck, there's also another component. Uh, you don't have to have to play pinball, but all pinball 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 play field, 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 electronics and your solid state stuff goes. Yeah. Your back glass is not only going to 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, and little tricks along the way. Look out for the T-Rex. Look out for the T-Rex. Um, but it's also to, uh, the back glass is where, like if you're walking through your arcade and it's 1983, that's where you're going to see, that's where your attention is going to go. So that's where you see the Playboy models on both sides of Hugh Hefner or KISS, looking cool.

Yeah. So it's a, it's sort of an advertisement. Hey, come put your quarters into me. Right. It's shiny. It's colorful. They spend money designing those things and, uh, a lot of those have become art now. Yeah.

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 electromechanical. 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 glass. Everything else is still electromechanical or it was up until the very, very, very recent times, although they still might be electromechanical. So, um, when you hit a bumper with your ball and it makes it like bounce and vibrate and you get some points, that's because you set an electrical impulse using an electromechanical, um, 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 sound so they could add speakers to the back glass

and all that stuff. Sure. So the function of the, the pinball machine while you're playing is still electromechanical. Yeah. It's old school. Yeah. And there's about a half a mile of wiring in each one. And, um, if you come over to my brother's, he will show you the guts.

That's neat. He has his rigged where you can pull down the back, uh, back glass. Look under the hood. Yeah. Basically. And, you know, it just looks like a huge mess of wires and half a mile of wires. There's a lot. It's pretty crazy.

Um, does he wear like a chain wallet when he works? On his pinball machine? I don't know. Maybe. Uh, so the, the playfield itself, which is what everything is on is tilted at about six to seven degrees toward you and it is made of wood and it's also very old school, you know. So at some point someone makes this like a wood base, like cornhole and it's got holes

drilled in it and it's got stuff painted on it. Yeah. And a bunch of layers of finish to keep it, you know, to protect it and to make that ball go. Yeah. But that, I mean, that's basically it. It's pretty simple. Some of the very newer ones, um, I guess from the 21st century, uh, replaced the wood playing

field with, um, uh, plasma screens or LCD screens. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, kids today, no, thanks. But other than that, it's like screws and glue and wood. It's just, it's fairly old school and still, uh, like entertaining pinballs challenging. That's why you hate pinball 2000, 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 saying, let's add, uh, you know, let's add some, some new oxygenated something to the Manhattan. You're like, no, a Manhattan's perfect.

I don't know, oxygenated something. I just hate every, like, some things are perfect the way they are and I think pinballs one of them. So, Chuck, you approach the pinball 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 into the launch lane, which is the, at the back of the launch lane is the plunger. Yes.

In some of the newer games, there's a solenoid, which shoots it for you. Yeah. And it makes things like a, like a gun handle trigger and stuff instead of the plunger. Very clever. But again, I'm into the old school. You like the plunger? Sure. Um, one way or another, you're going to launch the ball.

The advantage of a solenoid that launches it for you 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 days before the solenoid, say the 80s. Um, there's a little man inside. Well, you had to pull the plunger back yourself. Yeah.

And that meant you had to take your finger off of a flipper button, which meant, 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, um, uh, advancement.

That passes my bar. Okay. The solenoid is good. So let's talk about actual pinball play after this message check, ding, ding. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Which episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s? Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God.

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you listen to podcasts, stuff you should know. Okay. So, scoring and pinball, like you said earlier, if you're a regular schmo like us, 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 this article. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, I knew. I just, you know. Like that's how poor my pinball playing is. No, I'm not any good either. But you, is your brother good, so you've seen him?

Yeah, he's better than me. So they use this, in this article, they use the example of a game called High Roller Pinball. And basically, imagine this, while you're playing High Roller, 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 are tiles that you knock down or whatever. Once you've hit them all, you've unlocked a game within a game. And I think it starts with poker.

And all of a sudden, you're playing pinball while you're also playing poker on the back glass. Yeah. So like you're trying to hit a specific thing that will give you a specific card in a poker hand, let's say. Right. And like you have to be, you know, you're trying to do this with your flipper. It's a 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. So like, you know, you'll know, you've got the cards up on the back glass and you'll say, all right, I got to hit that bumper to get a king, so 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 as you win them, you get closer and closer to this 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 poker games. Right. Yeah. But yeah, it's all the games. And so you're playing Casino Frenzy, and that's what's called a wizard award, where

it's like, okay, this kid's good. Now we're going to really let them, or her, up their points by playing a special round. And all of a sudden the field is flooded with balls, and every bumper you hit is worth hundreds of thousands of points, and it's just scary and terrifying. Yeah, multi-ball is stressful for a guy like me. Same here, man. I just try and keep, you know, what happens to me in multi-ball is I usually lose them all pretty quickly.

Like, I can't even hold onto the one, because it stimulates me too much. I'm like, what? Right, yeah. Me too. And I'm like, as long as I've got one, I'm break even. But with wizard award functions, that's when you start to earn even more points. But imagine having like three, four, five balls on the field, and the computer in the machine is telling you, like, hit this combination, and we'll give you like 20 million points.

And if you're even in wizard award ball, you're a pretty good pinball player, I would imagine. For sure. And that's just the high roller game. But most games have a couple of games within the game that you should look out for. And that's how you get your free game. If you've ever lucked up or been super good and gotten, you know, they'll tell you on the back glass how much you have to have, like, replay value 30 million. And that's what you're shooting for, because 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 in the top 10 in Galaga. Right. And 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. That would make sense.

That's why they call it a free game. And it keeps telling it doesn't like reset. Right. Yeah. You can also fall backwards into a free game with something called match, where... Yeah, I had never heard of this. Every once in a while, the computer will just flash like a random number between, what, zero, zero, and 90, I think?

Yeah, multiple of 10. And if the last two digits of your score at that moment happened to match that number, then you win a free game. It's like a little Lotto game. Yeah. 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? Right.

I must have hit the match. You like just turned into Christopher Walker in the dead zone. I saw that not too long ago. That holds up. Yeah, it does. But as far as replay goes, it says that most machines are set, so you have to be in the top 10% to get a replay. And you can get a second replay, but they have it maxed out at 150% 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. And then Tilt, Chuck, you know, Tilt, it's synonymous with pinball. Tilt is where you are being, well, basically where you've been punching the machine and

the machine says, enough, hands off, man. And basically, like we were saying, early pinball machines, the only way you can manipulate them before the flippers was to move the machine. Yeah, kind of bump it. So the tilt mechanism has been in place to prevent people from overly cheating by tilting the machine by... It's really old-timey contraption, and I guess it's still in use. It's pretty funny how old school it is.

Basically they have, I guess, a 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? 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. Yeah, 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 current is formed,

and all of a sudden it sends that to the motherboard, and the motherboard says, tilt. This is your first warning. And apparently most modern games give you two warnings, and then the flippers stop working and you lose your ball. Yeah, 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 office, and you pick up the front of the machine and slam it down, that's called a slam tilt, and there are 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 we're taking your ball, they're saying leave the machine. You're not going to win any cigarettes doing that. Exactly. And 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. Oh, really? Ever since I found out it was illegal. Yeah, you're like, oh, I got to get into that. But that was like a couple of years ago, I feel like. Wow.

Yeah, when I saw a special windlet. Nice. Man, everybody, go see that. Is that on the old Netflix? I believe it is. Tilt definitely is. All right. I think special windlet might be too.

I'll 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 is it spelled like that? 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. Well if you want to learn more about pinball, go check out specialwindlet. Go check out tilt. Check out the popular mechanics article we mentioned, 11 things you didn't know about pinball history. It's pretty awesome. And of course, check out the article on howstuffworks.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, in regards to our Morgallons podcast because one of our...is that funny? I think it's Morgallons, but... You are literally the only person on the planet that calls it that. Fine. Tyler Murphy are one of the generals in the Stuff You Should Know Army, and Facebook

and email friend pinged, I guess, a doctor friend of his named Chris Wells, and was like, hey dude, check this out. Do you know anything about this? And so he commented on there, and 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.

I, along with my med technologist, reviewed it under a microscope, and it was mainly lint and hair follicles. One had some insight that it was not an actual infection and felt relieved. The other was very upset that I suggested otherwise, so he kind of got both ends of the spectrum. Yeah. I would never treat 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 is too high. Anti-parasitic meds can have all kinds of unwanted effects from kidney and liver impairment to lowering the threshold for seizure, to potentially being carcinogenic themselves. For every case of monsters inside me on TLC that goes undiscovered and later is found to truly have a parasitic infection, there are many more, where there is no physical evidence of infection because they're simply not one. 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 lint, 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 imagined or however you want to word it, the patient is still experiencing it, which is what we pointed out. Yeah. So you need to try and treat the root cause, whether it be with continued reassurance and second opinion within reason or cognitive behavioral therapy or other means. And that is Chris Wells via our buddy Tyler Murphy.

Cool, thanks guys. To Tyler's a teacher and in the summertime he works at the big putt-putt chain. Putt-putt. No, it's like the big adventure land or what I can't remember what it's called. Pirate's Cove. Is that a chain? I don't know. Tom's like a chain.

Anyway. That's what he does. It sounds like fun. He's like, man, I could totally do that job in the summers. Oh, yeah. That'd be fun. Yeah. Well, thank you very much, you guys.

And 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 SYSK Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash W should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com. And as always, go check us out at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult-classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.