Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2009

Preserving Pinball, fans go full-tilt to keep games alive

If pinball is going to come back, to regain rock-opera level cultural primacy rather than more pizza-parlor corner dust, it probably starts with scenes such as this.

In the foreground there is a father, petroleum engineer Mark Henderson. "My son's Joshua," he says. "He is 11 years old. He's a pinball wizard out of Plainfield, Ill." In the background there is Josh, a tall, bespectacled boy, leaning into a pinball game with a NASCAR theme. His look is intent, his chest touching the table's end, his eyes over the top of the flippers.

When the ball heads up the table, nestling into some point-tallying nook or just rattling against bumpers, he takes the available seconds to remove his hands from the flipper buttons, roll the fingers, flex them, stretch them.

It is a move that is almost cocky. Josh, as he is mostly called, has been a champion before and is trying to be again.

He is at a Woodfield Mall adjunct in Schaumburg, Ill., standing in a GameWorks, one of those places that is all flashing lights and pleas for more tokens.

There are four games -- Ripley's Believe It or Not, Family Guy, the brand new Batman and NASCAR -- lined up on the center of the supersize arcade's main floor, liberated from their usual, much lonelier spot upstairs.

The games -- elaborately decorated battles against gravity -- are all made by Stern Pinball, a Melrose Park, Ill., firm that is the world's last manufacturer of pinball machines.

Gary Stern, who runs the company, will stop by later to offer support for this event.

Nobody wants a pinball revival more than Stern, who had to lay off some key employees in October, as the economy accentuated a steady decline in game sales from the 1990s.

He has high hopes, though, for a new game based on TV's "CSI." "It's great because it's got a skull" that becomes part of the gameplay, says Stern.

A group of young men, most in their 30s, is near Josh Henderson. They are trying to become champions, too, and many of them have credentials to back up those hopes: Three of the world's top 10 players, as ranked by the International Flipper Pinball Association, are on hand.

There's Trent Augenstein, ranked No. 6, from Ohio, who supports his competitive pinball hobby with a Pump It Up: The Inflatable Party Zone franchise and a tourist cave, the Olen Tangy Indian Cavern. He's 40 years old, soft-spoken,

wearing a fleece hat shaped like a jester's.

And there is also the first family of pinball, Roger Sharpe and his sons Zach and Josh. Roger wrote the definitive book on the game, 1976's "Pinball!" Josh and Zach are ranked Nos. 4 and 7, respectively, and they're running the tournament as well as competing in it.

With his boys and a colleague, Sharpe founded the IFPA, hoping to promote the game, make some sense out of a hodgepodge of tournaments and ranking systems, and goosing "the public's interest (in) and accessibility to competitive pinball." This three-day tournament, the first that the national GameWorks chain has sponsored, is one example, and it's big news in the pinball world.

'Spray and pray'

Although Chicago remains the world's pinball capital -- because Stern is there, other manufacturers were, and because so many top players are -- "there hasn't been a major tournament in Chicago in about 15 years," says Roger Sharpe, a onetime managing editor of GQ who dumped print journalism for pinball in the '70s, a move that would seem logical now but back then was more whimsical.

"The level of play has been exceptional." Sharpe is playing Josh Henderson in the first round of the finals, and for all his physicality with the machine -- he plays as if he's trying to load it into a narrow space on a moving truck -- he isn't having much luck.