Once they were so cool an entire rock opera was written for them. Now they’re relegated to The Repair Shop. Whatever happened to the pinball wizards, wonders Will Hodgkinson?

On a recent trip to Paris, I found a bar in Pigalle that was completely unremarkable in every way apart from one. Les Oiseaux is the kind of place you’d find on any corner of the city: little tables on the pavement, steak frites on the menu, a curving zinc bar with a handful of regulars, muttering into their bière pressions and pastis about the state of the city. Yet Les Oiseaux held an irresistible pull on me for one reason: the pinball machine in the corner.

Built by premier pinball makers Williams in 1997, Medieval Madness features ramps, pop-up trolls, and a drawbridge that comes down if you hit enough targets to reveal a portcullis that you must shoot your ball into. Should you achieve this penetration into the throbbing heart of the machine, there will be an orgasmic explosion of flashing lights and cries of joy from a damsel in distress voiced by one Tina Fey, later to find fame as Liz Lemon in the sitcom 30 Rock. That millisecond of ecstasy, which God willing can be achieved before your last ball goes down the hole, makes Medieval Madness a classic of its genre. So much so that in Les Oiseaux it took me ages to have a go because an emaciated man in black Chelsea boots was variously swearing, tilting and generally going to war with it for over an hour. It was only when he went outside for a conciliatory cigarette, spent and deflated, that I managed to get on the thing.

The sadness is that two decades previously, every other bar in Paris had a pinball like this. Now they are extremely rare.

What has caused the death of the pinball, an encapsulation of all that is great about post-war American pop culture, with its emphasis on fun and fantasy, its brightly coloured playfield, its exotic themes of rock’n’roll, sex, gambling, comic books and other unwholesome pursuits? Pinballs go against all the apparent conveniences of the digital age. They are large, heavy and difficult to maintain. They offer no opportunity for self-improvement, they give you nothing to show off about on social media, and they’re not even particularly collectible because they’re so cumbersome. But they are magical.

There’s the crazy thrill of watching a little steel ball ricochet wildly between the bumpers before bouncing free. What could be better than hitting the flipper at just the right moment, sending the ball shooting up a ramp, traversing the distance of the playfield, or in the case of Medieval Madness, making Tina Fey yelp in joy as you enter her yielding portcullis? What sweet devastation there is in watching helplessly as the ball rolls down the hole between your flippers, although hope springs eternal as you sink another pound coin into the slot and start all over again, convincing yourself that this time things will be different. The pinball is life itself: a brief burst of noise, colour and distraction before the inevitable end.

A dissolute life too, given pinball’s less than respectable history. Originally associated with the gambling dens of 1920s America, prototype pinballs, or “electric bagatelles”, gained in popularity during the Great Depression, when penny arcades provided cheap distraction for millions of unemployed across the country. The success of the arcades made them a target for thieves and bootleggers, furthering pinball’s connection with crime, although a Chicago businessman called David Gottlieb pushed the game’s slow crawl toward respectability by setting up the Gottlieb company in 1927 and promoting pinball machines as a source of extra income for shopkeepers and a cheap way of socialising. It took a long time to get there – American companies like Bally, Williams and Gottlieb had to give themselves over to manufacturing munitions during World War II, and from 1942 to 1976 pinballs were banned from New York City due to gambling laws – but in their golden age, from the early sixties to the early eighties, pinball machines were everywhere.

Not that pinball was ever entirely respectable. In the 1970s, the German sociologist Berndt Warneken saw the game as symbolic of “the industrialisation of leisure time”, a mindless pursuit for factory workers, the unemployed and the alienated, designed to distract them from an otherwise miserable existence. But in looking down on the humble pinball, academics failed to see the freedom and community it fostered. In Same Player Shoots Again, a memoir and cultural history on pinball, the German writer Andreas Bernard argues that, now we have the same screen to organise both work and leisure, the public spaces that pinballs were once such an important part of have been eroded. “Since the disappearance of pinball machines, cities have changed,” he writes. “They’ve become glassier, more transparent.” Pinball, in other words, belongs to a world of subterranean excitement; of hidden corners, illicit thrills.

Many pinball machines are works of art in their own right. Bally’s Rolling Stones machine from 1980 features a sweetly terrible rendition of Mick Jagger in all his bare-chested, rubber-lipped glory on the backglass (the top part), some quite eccentric interpretations of Keith, Ronnie and the gang on the playfield, and “Get off My Cloud” and “Gonna Miss You’ written on the troughs running down the sides of the flippers. Bally’s 1979 Kiss pinball machine is another gem: Kiss may be one of the worst bands of all time, but their gaudy comic-book image is ideal for a game in which the Starchild, the Demon, the Spaceman and the Batman, aka band members Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss, each get their own bumper.

As for Tommy, Pete Townshend’s 1969 rock opera about a deaf, dumb and blind kid whose pinball wizardry turns him into a false messiah, it didn’t get its own official machine until 1994, oddly. But in 1976 came Captain Fantastic, based on Ken Russell’s glam-saturated 1975 film adaptation, which features a colourful rendering of Elton John as The Champ in his preposterously oversized Dr Martens boots. And in 1975 Bally made Wizard!, a pinball machine featuring a drawing of a man who looks a bit like Roger Daltrey’s Tommy with a scantily clad Ann-Margret on his knee, which is a bit disturbing given that she played Tommy’s mother in the film. It’s one of the all-time great pinball designs, and although manufacturers rarely credited their artists, this one is known to be the work of Dave Christensen, Bally’s in-house designer and one of the greatest pinball artists in history. “Your senses will never be the same!” went the official advertisement for the machine, which Ann-Margret, good sport that she was, agreed to promote by posing provocatively on its metallic contours.

Pinballs have deep personal resonance for me. When Tom and I were little our father got hold of a pinball machine called World Fair; a Gottlieb model from 1964, themed around the Chicago World Fair of 1893 where the world’s first Ferris wheel made its debut. There was a circle of bumpers on the playing field, a disc that spun in the centre, and a Ferris wheel on the backglass: the goal was to light up the Ferris wheel in its entirety by collecting numbers on the disc as it spun around. How wonderful to have a father in possession of such a thing! After he joined an Indian spiritual sect and left behind such material fripperies, World Fair ended up in my bedroom. Then it was lost to the great pinball in the sky after our parents divorced. But when the ball shoots up, it never entirely comes down.

When I was 30, my best man bought me the ultimate wedding gift: Doodle Bug. The backglass of this 1971 pinball machine by Williams features a bunch of far-out sixties hippie types (pinball manufacturers tended to be late to the game) having a groovy time on an insect-like car whose eyes flash as the ball does its thing. Hitting a series of targets gets a second ball, trapped in a glass cabinet under the playfield, bouncing back and forth frantically as the machine buzzes like a fly trapped on the wrong side of a window. I love Doodle Bug. As I write, it sits in a little room in our house, waiting to be mended by Pinball Geoff, Britain’s premier pinball restorer.

Pinballs have long past their glory years, with Bally’s production reaching a peak in 1978 at 86,000 units and dropping off to 4,706 by 1983, and Gottlieb going out of business entirely in 1996. But there is hope. In 2024 a company called Stern introduced a modern classic called Jaws, which demonstrates just how far pinball machines have come since the days of World Fair and Doodle Bug: there are video screens, multiple levels, mini-flippers, and a scary shark that pops up when the tension really ramps. Jaws is the work of Keith Elwin, the Leonardo Da Vinci of contemporary pinball design: his Godzilla and Jurassic Park models have inaugurated something of a pinball renaissance. Modern models have complex rules on which targets to hit in order to get a top score, but you can also just bash away at them without really knowing what’s going on and still have the time of your life.

You can buy a Jaws, a Godzilla and many other new pinball machines for around £8-10,000. But why would you? I could never part with Doodle Bug, but the German writer Andreas Bernard is right: a pinball machine belongs to the bar, the arcade, the pier and other places of ill repute and misspent youth. Somewhere to hang about with the local toughs, play with friends, or become one with the machine as you enter your own pinball satori, with people drinking, talking and getting on with life around you. Maybe we’ll see pinball machines coming back into public life. Who would have thought darts, another pub pastime in danger of dying out, would roar back into fashion? Play pinball and the world slips away. And who doesn’t want that to happen every now and then?

Same Player Shoots Again: A Biography of the Pinball Machine by Andreas Bernard is out on Polity.

The above article appears in Idler #108 March/April 2026.

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