full tilt
The last pinball factory in the world:
Being inside a pinball machine factory sounds exactly as you think it would. Across a 40,000-square-foot warehouse here, a cheery cacophony of flippers flip, bells ding, bumpers bump and balls click in an endless, echoing loop. The quarter never runs out.
But this place, Stern Pinball Inc., is the last of its kind in the world. A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000.
I'm surprised even that many are produced. And of those, half are sold to individuals.
I remember just a few other pinball manufacturers-Bally-Midway, Williams, Gottlieb-but all of them disappeared, merged or got out of the pinball business. Of course none of the pinball machines I played held my attention for very long, and I always returned to the video games that slowly took over arcades and bars and even 7-Elevens.
It's a safe bet that more people play pinball on their computers now than the real thing.