Before there were arcade games, or home video games, or video slot games, there was pinball. For some of you, playing pinball games was an expression of your rebellious youth (at least in the movies it was.) For some of you, these games are ancient history, older than your parents. But for all of you, if playing vintage pinball machines sounds like fun, and if you are in the Bay area, you really should visit the fabulous Pacific Pinball Museum at 1510 Webster in Alameda, CA. There you’ll find the largest collection of vintage pinball machines ever housed under one roof. For a mere $15 cost of admission, you can play nearly 100 vintage slot machines for as long as you like - all on free play. No quarters needed.

The museum has grown so popular that it soon will be moving to larger quarters in the former Carnegie Library site. There are nearly 1,000 machines in the Museum’s collection and it currently has room to display about 100 of them. In addition the Museum will be creating a room in its facility for teaching science through pinball. Visitors will be encouraged to perform experiments in electricity, physics, and statistics while learning principles of electromagnetic, engineering, and geometry. The exhibits are included in the regular price of admission which gives you unlimited pinball play.

One exhibit you might want to look for at the museum is the “Visible Pinball Machine”: a prototype translucent machine in a clear cabinet so players and spectators can see how the machine works. Another that seems designed for unskilled players like me is called “Conical Slices.” It uses geometric shapes - the parabola, the ellipse, and the hyperbola - where a ball is aimed to reflect into a hole and it goes in every time, no matter where you aim it. “These are quite satisfying for the inept,” says directer Michael Schiess, ”because you can’t miss.”

Here’s a little history of pinball play from the internet for those of you who care. (You can skip it if you don't.) The original pinball game was based on improvements made to an old French game from the 1700's called Bagatelle by a British inventor (and the patent holder) Montegue Redgrave in 1871.

The game was banned from the early 1940’s (when I was born) to the mid-1970’s (when my children were.) The stated reason for banning the game was that pinball was a game of chance, not skill, and thus was a form of gambling. This is partly true, because the flipper wasn’t invented until 1947, five years after most of the bans were implemented. Until then players would bump and tilt the machines to sway the ball’s gravity. Also, many lawmakers believed pinball to be a mafia run racket and a time- and dime-waster for impressionable youth.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor was attacked, NY Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia declared rounding up pinball machines and arresting their owners was a police top priority, and thousands of the games were smashed with sledgehammers and dumped into the city’s rivers. Although illegal, the games did not disappear. They merely moved underground to seedier locations. During WWII much American manufacturing switched to the war effort, and suppliers began selling conversion kits, allowing operators to transform a machine’s artwork to a fresh theme, often using wartime motifs.

Pinball became a symbol of youthful rebellion in movies, TV, and musicals. The Fonz is regularly seen playing pinball in Happy Days episodes. Part of his “bad-boy” appeal. When the pinball-wizard themed rock opera Tommy came out in 1972, pinball was still banned in much of the country. And in the Simpsons, Sideshow Bob once proclaimed: “Television has ruined more young minds than pinball and syphilis combined.”

In 1976 the NYC ban on pinball was overturned when a 26-year old magazine editor Roger Sharp demonstrated to the city council that it truly was a game of skill, not a game of chance.

A few bits of trivia: The best selling pinball machine of all time is still “The Addams Family” which came out in 1991. Hugh Hefner is a huge pinball fanatic, and there are three playboy themed pinball games. In 1999 “Pinball 2000,” a hybrid game combining pinball and video games featured holographic characters that would interact with the flying ball. Two versions were produced, before the company pulled the plug on the games.

The video game boom of the 1980’s signaled the end of the pinball game reign as games like Space Invaders (1978), Asteroids (1979), and Pac Man (1980) marked the beginning of the digital age.

You can learn more of the history of pinball machines at Pacificpinball.