Oh boy oh boy, do y’all love pinball? I sure hope so because I’m gonna give you some spicy extra information on some of the material we covered this week and I hope you’re ready for it.
Steve Ritchie
We briefly mentioned the designer in class, but the “master of flow” Steve Ritchie deserves our full attention. As the best selling pinball game designer who ever lived, Ritchie defines the medium. His work laid the ground for many of the modern era pinball machines. Throughout the late 80s and early 90s Ritichie proved himself a master of design during his time at Midway Bally. With games like High Speed, Terminator II, and Star Trek: The Next Generation his level design and method of communicating a story through the machine were immaculate and done on a level never seen before. Since the downfall of Midway, he’s continued making pinball machines for Stern. All in all, he’s a noteworthy designer and I hope we discuss him more in class.
New York I Love You, But You Don’t (Didn’t) Love Pinball
As we discussed in class, New York, and many other states following the example, banned pinball in the mid-20th century. Pictured above is Police Commissioner William O’Brien smashing an illegal pinball machine. While this image is very striking, I don’t think it does the whole ordeal justice. When they rounded up these machines in the early 40s they didn’t mess around. NYC Mayor LaGuardia issued a mandate for the NYPD to round up pinball machines and arrest their owners. Thousands of machines were rounded up in a matter of days. Then they were smashed them with sledgehammers. Then the machines were dumped in the rivers. This moved pinball to its underground days, where you would have to go to backalleys and questionable stores to get your “fix” if you were in an illegal state.
Collector Pinball
We discussed very briefly the rise of pinball of a collector’s market rather than an arcade market. To recap, we essentially discussed that collectors arose in 70s and were a market of necessity as Pinball was banned in arcades, making selling to a large portion of that market untenable. Manufacturers identified an opportunity with collectors who played pinball privately.