Arnold sometimes open up his pinball warehouse to allow people to play and raise money for charity. Photo byWilliam O'Bannon Pingames...or pingambling? While many consider pinball the poster game for wholesome entertainment, the 60-year-old diversion has a long history of straddling the line that separates gambling from game- playing. In their earliest incarnations, some pingames (so named for the pins that dotted the playfield, guiding the ball into holes with point values) such as Bally's 1933 Rocket offered cash payouts to the player if he landed the ball in certain holes. It wasn't unusual to see such payout pingames taking their place next to conventional slot machines. The advent of payout machines, vs. nonpaying "novelty" machines manufactured by many of the same companies, raised some sticky questions about this new form of entertainment: Was pinball a game of skill or luck? The answer would mean the difference between a harmless game and a form of gambling--even if the "payout" was a free game. Some states decided the latter. In January 1942, for instance, New York Mayor Fiorello Henry LaGuardia banned pinball as a form of gambling, smashing several machines in a publicity stunt. Also, the passage of the Johnson Act in 1950 outlawed interstate shipping of certain types of pinball machines, as they were deemed gambling devices. Pinball manufacturers such as Williams and Gottlieb responded by mounting a campaign of their own under the aegis of the Coin Machine Institute; these pinball makers eliminated payout machines and sought to show that pinball was a wholesome pastime that had no connection to gambling--especially with the advent of flippers in 1947, which turned pinball, more than ever, into a game of skill. Still, the ban in New York lasted until 1976; free games in the form of awarded replays are still illegal in New York and in other cities, though the laws are rarely enforced.--Andrew Kiraly

Thursday, March 28, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Cover story: Day flipper

Collector envisions player-friendly pinball museum in Las Vegas
BY ANDREW KIRALY
MERCURY

When Tim Arnold hits the switches on the fuse box, it sounds like an army of clunky steampunk robots is coming to life--a chorus of bleeps and buzzes, sighs and clanks, digitized shouts and electronic purrs fill his cavernous backyard warehouse. Backglass displays flicker alive, and the final ka-chunk ka-chunk of machines fussily resetting themselves is a sort of coda to the strange music of 400-odd pinball and video games getting juiced up on a Friday afternoon.

Arnold cocks his head, listening to one particularly high electric whine coming from the north row of machines. "That," he says, "is a busted needle-bearing."

He should know. Not only is Arnold the owner of these machines, he's their repairman, historian, restorer and interpreter, a consummate "pinhead" who dropped out of college for the sake of smacking a steel ball around a plastic, rubber and Plexiglas playfield. But perhaps most of all Arnold--who dubs himself "the guy with too many pinball machines"--is a low-key madman who envisions all these machines--from Gottlieb's 1931 Baffle Ball, the countertop runt credited with launching the pinball craze, to 1991's Addams Family, considered one of Midway's great, last gasps in the pinball biz--someday filling the Pinball Hall of Fame.

Where, exactly, is the Pinball Hall of Fame? It doesn't exist. Arnold wants to build it.

"It's not this yuppie thing about me-me-me and all my stuff, with a dozen games behind some velvet ropes and 'Do Not Touch' signs," Arnold says, gesturing toward the machines. "It's about me and a few fellow pinheads changing the world in our own small way. And why not the Pinball Hall of Fame? I mean, they got the Bowling Hall of Fame in Reno, and that's the dumbest sport ever invented."

If anyone's ideal for the job, it's Arnold, a charmingly slouchy hippie type given to rants about hot-button issues ranging from the unjust treatment of the homeless to, well, his favorite topic, pinball.

"Every video game comes down to rote memorization of patterns," he says. "But with pinball, no one can predict what the ball can do. It's crazy. It's random. There's a freedom to it that few other games can offer."

If pinball is freedom, then Arnold's backyard warehouse at his 2 1/2-acre spread in southeast Las Vegas is the promised land, a pinhead mecca that draws scant local attention but is a famous blip on the global pinball radar. It's not unusual for players and collectors to come from as far as Japan for a glimpse--and a game or two--of his collection, which includes one of every Gottlieb pinball machine ever made.

"There are people out there with more machines, but his is certainly the world's largest restored working collection," says Jim Schelberg, editor of The PinGame Journal, a magazine for pinball machine collectors. "And from his background as an arcade owner, his attitude is that these thing are not made to just be looked at, but they were made to be played. He's really big on that, and I think he's absolutely right."

"If you want to watch classic TV, you've got Nick at Nite, you've got Turner Classic Movies," Arnold says. "But what if you want to play classic pinball? There's no place you can go to do that. I used to think there was a room in the factory where they kept one of everything, you know, just in case. Then I met a guy who worked at a pinball manufacturer. 'We don't keep everything!' So [the Pinball Hall of Fame] is the kind of thing you would be absolutely unable to duplicate, a truly one-of-a-kind place."

Indeed, Arnold's place might turn out to be just that mythical factory.

Press to start

Arnold's teen years embody the quintessential pinhead's tale. Growing up in Lansing, Mich., Arnold first got hooked on Gottlieb's 1966 Mayfair. His obsession with the game was matched only by his passion for tinkering, and by the time he was 14 Arnold was buying beater machines at $50 a pop, restoring them with brothers Tom and Ted, and placing them in pizza parlors, frat houses, laundromats and apartment buildings. The income was modest at first--$25 to $30 a month--but the Arnold brothers soon administered a pinball empire that included more than 60 machines. At 19, Arnold dropped out as a liberal arts major at Lansing Community College to devote himself full time to the pinhead faith.

"It was simple. I hated school, but loved pinball," he says. "School to me was just memorizing things in order to pass tests, and why bother with that when when I was making $30,000 a year hustling pinball?"

In 1976, he opened his own arcade, Pinball Pete's, which is still open today. "I became a collector by default. Instead of trading in old machines for credit, I'd just warehouse them." His packrat approach eventually resulted in the collection he has today, which includes almost 400 working pinball machines and nearly 600 more that Arnold has yet to restore--as of now, dust-encrusted boxes, legless and often headless, stacked to the ceiling like coffins.

As the end of the Me Decade neared, the Arnold brothers watched as pixels began nudging aside steel balls: the video craze had officially begun. Sure, the ensuing years of '79 to '82--with its onslaught of Space Invaders, Asteroids and Pac Men--would signal the slow death of pinball as the arcade mainstay, but that brief era, dubbed "The Money Hose" by Arnold, would also allow him to shore up enough capital to eventually find a home for his collection in Las Vegas.

"Those were the Money Hose years," Arnold recalls. "We went from 80 percent pinball and 20 percent novelty and video games to 80 percent video games and 20 percent pinball. In two years, the tail was starting to wag the dog. Our overhead stayed the same, but our profits began to double and triple, and every week we were hitting a new record." The Arnold brothers income peaked at $4,800 a week; they had so many coins, they sorted through the stuff with silo shovels and regularly overheated the coin counter.

"It was like I was Scrooge McDuck," he says. "You could practically swim through the money, though it wasn't exactly a liquid like on the cartoon."

All along, however, Arnold knew the boom was part of a larger cycle. But this cycle was different. "The business had always been cyclical," Arnold says, "but the video boom was pushing pinball off to the side." For good.

Pinball wizard dead; video suspected

The truism that video killed pinball is about as well-worn as an easy drop target. But is there any truth to it? It's an issue that raises the eyebrows--and the sometimes the ire--of pinheads everywhere.

"This is discussed back and forth to no end," says Schelberg, "But I think the same things that made pinball great and unique are what killed it. And that is that it's a very physical game. It's not something you can just plug in and not touch until the coin box is full. They tried very hard to eliminate the mechanical downfalls, but you can only do so much. If it's dirty enough, the ball doesn't roll fast. If the rubber bands aren't fresh, you get no bounce."

Joe Kaminkow, a former game designer for Williams, Gottlieb and other companies, says the problem was more than just upkeep; it was changing times.

"We became the buggywhip of the game industry," says Kaminkow, today vice president of game design for International Game Technology. "Between things like bartop trivia games and the changing social environment--I mean, kids don't hang out at arcades anymore, they go home and talk on the Internet--at the end of the day, pinball turned into a poor entertainment value for the time. And with many operators not servicing the machines as scrupulously as they should, the game became even less attractive."

Still others say pinball lost its grip on its market; in its chase for the almighty youth dollar, pinball--once a preserve where game and pop art struck a stylish balance--turned into little more than, as Arnold says, "tits and fire."

"When video games came around, the pinball makers suddenly started pandering to the typical male fantasies, flying planes, getting chicks, killing Russians," says Arnold. "And they killed off half their audience in their process. They killed themselves by trying to follow what the video games were all about."

Theories vary. But what's not in dispute is that by the mid-'90s, many pinball manufacturers were gasping for air in a sea of Playstations and PC games; Gottlieb/Premiere made its last machine, Barb Wire, in 1995; after buying out Bally in 1988, Williams came to a whimpering end with its ill-fated "Pinball 2000" concept, a pinball-video game hybrid that took form in Revenge From Mars and Star Wars Episode I (in 1999, the company announced it would discontinue pinball production due to "a prolonged period of weak demand and ongoing losses," according to its website). The sole surviving pinball manufacturer is Stern Pinball, which holds its own quite admirably with a back-to-basics approach that focuses not on pinball wizards but average players; Stern, based in Chicago, is responsible for popular titles such as South Park and Harley-Davidson.

House of style

So what exactly happened? It would be easy enough to judge for yourself with a simple stroll through Arnold's warehouse, where the machines are squeezed together by decade and usually topped with cartons brimming with circuit boards and wiring, and where the sleek "wedgehead" models that reigned from the '50s to the '70s--at their worst, flirting sportively with sex and violence--give way to the parade of cleavage and guns of the '80s.

Make no mistake, Arnold would be the last one to defend the aesthetics or playability of all his machines. Many of them--such as those manufactured in the later years when Gottlieb "began signing up for shitty licenses"--are, in his blunt estimation, "horrible pieces of shit." But just as quickly, Arnold can pivot back to his wedgeheads--1961's Flipper Parade with its jaunty drum majorettes, or Foto Finish with its comical horse race, or his beloved Mayfair (the last game with artwork by famed backglass artist Roy Parker) and start waxing nostalgic.

In fact, he can't help but put a quarter into the Mayfair slot and play for a bit, something Arnold does a few times a week, ranging from 20 minutes to a few hours. "It depends," he says, "on how much clothes I have on. If I'm naked, it's only like a half-hour."

Watching Arnold play makes for a lesson in calm, control and patience. As he expertly works the flippers, the Mayfair seems to jiggle constantly. Some kind of manufacturing defect? No. Rather, it's Arnold playing the subtle isometric tug-of-war that makes up half the strategy of any pinball game: guiding the ball where you want it without tilting the machine. It's really not just about slapping flippers.

"It takes a good 15 minutes to a half-hour to really become one with the machine," he says. "That's when you hit that Zen state and really start kicking the machine's ass."

Indeed, gameplay and not just prettiness count for something; Arnold does admit to a few faves past the '79 mark. Take 1980's Black Knight by Williams, which introduced the "Magna-Save" button, multiple levels and multiple ramps.

"This was Mr. Excitement at the time," Arnold says. "Black Knight was the tricked-out Honda to your father's Oldsmobile. The ramps changed everything."

It's a comment that leads into the topic of What Makes a Good Pinball Game.

"A good pinball game is more than about skill and strategy," Arnold says. "It's a really good mindfuck by a simple mechanical device. It's not like one of those claw machines where they turn down the voltage knob so the claw slips at the last second. That's a bad mindfuck. A good pinball game--with a lot of good shots to line up and clear goals--will take you just up to the point where you think you've got the machine beat, and the next thing you know, you're screwed. That's a good mindfuck. No video game can give you that."

Not even, say, a pinball simulator?

Arnold shakes his head. "That's like kissing your sister. Pointless."

The Hall of Fame

After selling off his interest in Pinball Pete's to his brothers, Arnold came to Vegas in 1990, where he began filling out his Gottlieb collection with machines from the '40s and '50s, and holding occasional "Fun Nights," donation parties where he and some friends would shoot some pinball, eat some pizza and hand over the donations to Salvation Army; his latest Fun Night, held earlier this month, raised more than $10,000 for the charity. It's that mix of public service and hardcore pinheadship that accounts for Arnold's dream of opening the Pinball Hall of Fame--a dream that fellow pinheads applaud.

"It's a terrific idea," says Nick John, a fellow Las Vegas collector who himself owns 368 Williams machines. "Nobody else in the world is doing this. There are a lot of people with massive collections out there, but nobody has ever spent the time to do anything with it like Tim is."

The "anything" Arnold has in mind is opening a nonprofit center that would showcase, ideally, his thousand machines, with all profits going back into upkeep and staff.

"We'd own the building, so we wouldn't be tied to a big lease," Arnold says. "Our overhead would be so low we couldn't fail. And to make sure all the machines get played, there'd be a reward for those people--and there'd be a lot--who could beat every machine, whether that reward's a satin jacket or their name on the wall. You really don't know the history of pinball until you've played your way through."

Through donations, sales of pinball repair videos, books and even refrigerator magnets, Arnold already has $45,000 in the building stash. It may take $1 million to secure the right property, but Arnold is undaunted, and his supporters are enthusiastic.

"Who knows if it would support itself?" says Schelberg. "But a few things are certain: Tim ran a very successful business in Michigan for years, and he's always done the things he's said he'll do. When he said he was moving to Vegas, we said, 'Yeah, right. How many games is he gonna get there?' Next time I visited him [in Vegas], he's got 500 machines standing on end in his tennis court."