How This Pinball Collector is Saving the Game

Pinball's a great equalizer.

You don't have to be a brainiac.

You don't have to be a muscleman.

Anybody can play it.

I'm Michael Schiess.

I'm the founder of the Pacific Pinball Museum.

[Host] Long before Apex Legends and Fortnite

became synonymous with gaming, there was pinball.

And while pinball is experiencing a bit of a comeback,

Michael Schiess worries that some of the classic machines

are being forgotten.

To make sure that doesn't happen,

he spent thousands of hours

collecting and repairing machines from just about every era.

These things are amazing pieces of engineering,

history, and art.

It didn't feel right just seeing them disappear.

I grew up in the age of video games and arcades,

but I never liked the video games because

when I saw people playing it and they looked like

monkeys on too much coffee, they were just.

I didn't want to be that person.

The guys playing pinball were much cooler. [laughs]

This is the first machine I got as an adult.

It's the one that started this whole collection

and whole museum.

It's a Williams Gulfstream.

That was good for quite a while.

Then I got another one.

[Host] And another and another and another.

I really love my wife.

There's no way in hell would I subject her to

a bunch of pinball enthusiasts coming over

on Friday or Saturday night to our house.

I think I got up to four pinball machines in our living room

and I decided I have a problem,

but it wasn't a problem that I wanted to cure.

So I just [laughs], I just found a bigger space

for the pinball, and I kept collecting.

So we are in the Pacific Pinball Annex

where we house the majority of our collection.

[Host] An engineer and artist by trade,

Schiess founded the museum back in 2004

with just a few dozen games.

And thanks to many generous donations,

the collection has grown to more than 1700 machines.

They span 130 years of pinball history

and include everything from tabletop games

to electromechanical marvels

to the fully computerized machines we think of today.

One thing they have in common,

they all have to be maintained.

You are literally beating the crap out of them

every time you play a game.

People shove them around, people will kick them,

that's hard for me to talk about.

Poor pinball machines.

There's always lights going out,

there's coils burning out.

These things get loose because remember,

this thing's just pounding constantly.

I used to worry about it.

It's an artifact

and we're letting people play these artifacts

but pinball, it'll take it.

And if it breaks, you fix it.

Pinball's always evolving,

that's the other cool thing about it.

It hasn't remained stagnant.

There's a lot of interesting stuff here.

This is one of the earliest examples

of a commercial pinball.

The term pinball came from games like this

where nails are driven into the play field

for the ball to bounce off of.

So the pins, pinball.

1869 is when these were made

and it's based on the French game of bagatelle.

You try to land the ball into those little saucers,

those little pockets in there.

About 60 years later, somebody came up with the idea of,

wow, if I put glass on it,

then people can't cheat when the bartender's not looking

because people would be playing for drinks or gambling.

[Host] That's right.

Before there were flippers,

which gave players a fighting chance,

pinball was considered to be a form of gambling,

and that's what caught the attention of Fiorello LaGuardia,

the mayor of New York City from 1934 to 1945.

So Mayor LaGuardia hated gambling in general

so he'd already eliminated all of the slot machines

that the mob was running in New York City.

He actually did clean up New York City.

[Reporter] In his first year in office,

LaGuardia destroyed 25,000 slot machines.

But the thing that was left and the mob loved it

was pinball.

He actually bragged about taking the wooden legs

and fashioning them into billy clubs

to beat these people with,

beat the operators who operated these horrible machines.

LaGuardia would love to get journalists

to shoot pictures of him with a sledgehammer

smashing these machines or pushing them over.

One of my favorite photos of LaGuardia is

he's in his white suit and he's pushing over a Bally Bumper,

which is this machine here.

And it was pretty obvious that

he really hated this machine in particular

because it was really popular and it was so easy to play.

When we entered the war in 1942,

he used that as an excuse to finally kill

the manufacturing of pinball machines in America

by saying, Hey, it's using wire, glass, steel,

these are all materials we need for the war effort.

He was successful.

He made it illegal to manufacture pinball machines

during that era.

And they didn't come back until after the war in 1945.

[Host] While technically it was still banned

in New York City until the mid-70s,

pinball only grew in popularity in the post-war era.

The next evolution is when they got flippers

and that was after the war, 1947.

Gottlieb came up with, Humpty Dumpty was

the first machine to actually have flippers.

There are six flippers.

There's three on this side that all operate at once

and three on this side.

Eventually, they came down to the bottom.

[Host] Over the next few decades,

machines went from wooden frames to steel.

The artwork and play fields got more complex and noisier.

But all of that was incremental

compared to the next big change,

going from electromechanical to computerized.

The brain of the machine is right here.

They took all that electromechanical stuff

that was in the bottom of the cabinet

and the scoring system's electromechanical

and the controls for those, all that's gone.

At first, I wasn't thrilled.

I really liked electromechanical pinball.

[Host] But eventually he came around to it.

The main difference was they played faster

and you got more points because

it takes time on an electromechanical machine

for it to make those 5000 points.

It's gotta engage the score motor and go,

dun-dun-dun dun-dun five times.

On an electronic one, it's instantaneous.

[Host] So not only are the computerized games faster,

they also opened the door for new bells and whistles.

So you got all sorts of toys, noises, flashing lights.

It's crazy.

They've gone further and further and further with it.

It looks cute and everything,

but when you consider the purpose of it

and the purpose of things like chimes

and lights flashing and things like that,

really it's to distract a player.

So computers came in about 1978,

they started producing computer controlled pinball machines

and that changed everything.

And that's how it's been ever since.

They started going to dot-matrix display with scoring.

Then eventually, nowadays they have a flat TV screen

for scoring, for visuals, et cetera in the back glass.

The other big change,

one that still doesn't sit right with Schiess,

was the industry's embrace of TV and movie licensing.

The main thing about pinball that I love

that first drew me to it is the graphic art.

Back glass is the artwork

on the glass on any pinball machine.

So that started in about 1935,

they started making little short ones

and they got bigger and bigger.

This is another one of my favorite back glasses.

Williams stayed away from doing scantily clad women.

They instead did kind of scientific achievements

and things like that.

This is the first supersonic jet to fly.

The one next to it here, Wizard,

is the first machine to actually use licensing,

and the movie Tommy had come out.

So they got Roger Daltrey and Ann-Margret,

signed a license agreement with them,

and they got Elton John this time and licensed him

to be Captain Fantastic, like he was in the movie.

After that, I think Evel Knievel, Harlem Globetrotters,

they just started doing it more and more.

I really love the original artwork.

They came up with some crazy concepts.

And I much prefer that than licensing a movie or a TV show.

[Host] Even if he doesn't agree with

all the ways the game has evolved,

he says pinball still offers something

that video games can't.

The video arcade died out because

the games were better on your home computer.

But people are longing for

interactivity amongst themselves in a social environment

and they also like the tactile feeling of pinball.

It's definitely gonna survive.

Where's it gonna go?

I don't know.

I see an incredible future for it

because I think there's so much more you can do

with gravity and a ball and a play field.

You've barely scratched the surface.