Is Pinball Down For The Count?
Posted in Sports on January 3rd, 2011 by Ross Everett – 9 CommentsFor most of the 20th century it seemed that pinball was sort of the ‘cockroach’ of the amusement industry–just too tough and/or too adaptable to kill. It survived wars, economic downturn, moral outrage and most recently video games. Despite the changing cultural climate, it was still a shock when WMS Industries, the dominant player in the industry for the past decade and the maker of Williams and Bally machines, announced that it was getting out of the business several years ago. WMS wasn’t in any sort of financial peril, but rather they wanted to focus on their more lucrative slot machine and video poker business.
At one point, pinball dominated the arcade. During the mid to late 1970s and on the heels of the movie version of the Who pinball themed rock opera Tommy arcades nationwide featured row upon row of gleaming new machines from one of over a half dozen US manufacturers (with many others made worldwide). The first salvo of the video game industry was fairly innocuous”Pong didnt do much to dent pinballs popularity since it didnt exactly offer the same immersive challenge. Besides, it took two to tango when it came to Pong, so that game and its progeny had more of an impact at the home level (and paved the way for what would become a huge industry). The first challenge to the popularity of the pinball machine in the arcade began with Midways Space Invaders and Ataris Asteroids. These games could be played alone, and offered the same sort of escapism that pinball provided. For the arcade owner, these games took up less space, required less maintenance, and offered a higher customer turnover.
Pinball hung in there, however, and through the early eighties continued to make some solid games. The ones that come immediately to mind are games like Firepower (which helped launched the now ubiquitous multi-ball feature), Black Knight (offering an early version of the looping ramps found on many modern machines) and a couple of fun machines from Bally Paragon and Flash Gordon. Several games were spun off from video games, including a couple of good ones”Spy Hunter and Space Invaders and a number of not so good ones based on the Pac Man video games. Bally even made a game called Baby Pac Man that was a video/pinball hybrid. For awhile, the choice between pinball and video games was similar to the choice between Pepsi and Coke: both were equally pervasive and it was simply a matter of personal preference.