Pinball is booming in America, thanks to nostalgia and canny marketing
On a Tuesday night at Logan Arcade, a bar on Chicago’s Northwest Side, Ian, a 57-year-old assistant manager, looks at the Rick and Morty pinball machine. “This is a frustrating machine,” he says. He steps up and takes his turn—one of a group of four, including your correspondent—bashing the flippers to try to direct the ball into the garage of a model house with a flying saucer at the top. A screen above records the scores and shows clips from the cult cartoon show. When you hit the target, the show moves along. Ian’s ball falls into the gutter. He sighs and shuffles out of the way for the next player. “I met the dude who designed this machine,” he says. “They take a lot of learning. They’re deep.”
Twenty years ago, pinball seemed to be circling the drain. In the 1980s and 1990s video games stole market share from the mechanical sort, and home games-consoles stole market share from arcades. By 2000 WMS, the Chicago-based maker of the Bally and Williams brands of pinball machines, then the biggest manufacturer, closed its loss-making pinball division to focus on selling slot machines. Yet today, pinball is thriving again, both at places like Logan Arcade and in people’s homes.
Sales of new machines have risen by 15-20% every year since 2008, says Zach Sharpe, of Stern Pinball, which became the last remaining major maker after WMS closed. “We have not looked back,” he says. Next year the firm is moving to a new factory, twice the size of its current one, in the north-west suburbs of Chicago. Sales of used machines are more buoyant still—some favourites, such as Stern’s Game of Thrones-themed game, can fetch prices well into five figures. Josh Sharpe, Zach’s brother and president of the International Flipper Pinball Association, says that last year the IFPA approved 8,300 “official” tournaments, a four-fold increase on 2014.
2023-05-14 11:32:53
Post from www.economist.com
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