Museum Review
The Old Bing, Bing, Bing, at Full Tilt
Philip Scott Andrews/The New York Times
National Pinball Museum Vintage machines, some dating to the 1930s,
lined up at the museum, in a shopping mall in the Georgetown section
of Washington. More Photos »
lined up at the museum, in a shopping mall in the Georgetown section
of Washington. More Photos »
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: June 30, 2011
WASHINGTON — After Monday it may no longer be possible to slip between the two enormous flippers that frame a doorway in a shopping mall in Georgetown and bounce around in a strange world of sleekly raked playing boards, gleaming silver balls, rubber-wrapped pins, jittery bumpers and raucous bells. It looks as if the National Pinball Museum, which opened here only in December, is about to close, almost before an out-of-town critic could offer it the ringing approval it deserves.
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There may be a last-minute reprieve extending its lease until September. But that would only be like getting a bonus ball in a too-brief game. David Silverman, a landscape gardener and artist, spent $300,000 to get this 14,000-square-foot space ready to display part of his collection of nearly 900 pinball machines.
He created a vivid opening gallery painted to resemble the playing field of a dinosaur-theme pinball game. He built a small theater for lectures and films. And he mounted a miniature history of the game in dioramalike galleries, one of which has a floor resting on water beds that sway underfoot to mimic the rocking of an 18th-century French vessel on which pinball’s ancestor, bagatelle, a mutated version of billiards, is being played.
All of this will have to be dismantled. But fortunately, as Mr. Silverman demonstrates, the history of pinball has as many sudden rescues, exuberant bounces and sweeping surprises as one of his favorite games. Why not the museum too?
He is vowing to resurrect it if he can find an affordable space for this nonprofit tribute. May his flipper fingers flourish!
For now, though, maybe we can just pretend that the ball is still leaping around the upper part of the playing board without rolling near the alleys and channels that guide it downward to oblivion. Visit before the museum is gone (even temporarily). Not just because one of the galleries allows you to play a range of games that span a half-century, but also because Mr. Silverman has created a museum in which he has illustrated pinball’s history with more than 130 restored and rare machines, and drawn attention to the companies and designers that for much of the 20th century defined the hypnotic lure of the arcade.
It is a tradition that, at first glance, bears little resemblance to virtual worlds conjured by PlayStations and Wiis. And it doesn’t take long before the machines packing these rooms begin to seem like wooden coffins, charmingly interring an earlier era’s tastes and technologies. Here is a primitive, flipperless 1936 evocation of a Yale-Harvard football game (Hold ’Em), using curved wire as bumpers; the 1952 game Coronation, which displays the newly crowned Elizabeth II as a bikini-wearing beauty-pageant winner; or the 1961 Space Ship game, whose artwork portrays babes in globular headgear soaring over the Moon’s surface. Surely an element of nostalgia is being put into play here.
Maybe more than an element. The golden age of pinball was, the museum tells us, from the 1940s through the ’60s — roughly when these electrical and mechanical contraptions reflected the cutting edge of gaming. In 1947, for example, the notion of connecting a button to a mechanical relay was still a novelty, but it led to the flipper’s invention, shown here with the first pinball game to have some, Gottlieb’s Humpty Dumpty. Even if we extend that golden age into the era when first Pong and then Pac-Man invaded the arcade, the pinball machine still seems like an artifact of gaming antiquity.
A time line here titled “The Building of an Industry” could as well have been called “The Demise of an Industry.” Beginning in the ’30s pinball companies proliferate; in more recent decades the proliferation is of their disappearance, purchase or conversion to “gaming” (gambling). Only one company still makes pinball games, Stern Pinball.
So pinball isn’t just associated with an earlier time; it is only associated with that era. Players of a certain age will look around and recall the atmospheric minutia of that lost world: cigarette burns on the games’ wooden rails, rings left on the glass by beer bottles, and lines of nickels or quarters arranged on their edges by waiting players. Now such players are collectors of these games and proselytize for their revival. Pinball museums have opened in Alameda, Calif.; Asbury Park, N.J.; Las Vegas; and Paris. The game has its own journal, resources, repair sites and an online database of 5,348 games.
Original pinball players are the main audience for his museum, Mr. Silverman said. But they also have their families in tow, and one point of the dinosaur gallery is to corrupt the young with the lure of the silver ball.
That lure is considerable, but one aspect requires some explanation: There has always been a hint of the forbidden associated with pinball. As we learn, pinball got its name from a game that involved pins stuck in a tilted board. Balls would be released (or shot upward by a plunger) and knocked about, landing in slots at the bottom or falling into holes with differing values. An 1898 game, Log Cabin, is displayed here as if in a California saloon, where a period photograph shows it, inviting competition and betting.
By the 1930s preflipper pinball gambling was big business, inspiring gangster involvement. The museum’s wall text recalls a 1936 film, “Bullets or Ballots,” in which Humphrey Bogart begins his career as a hoodlum who forces merchants “to accept his pinball machines.”
In 1941, we learn, the mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia, began a campaign to ban any coin-operated gambling machine within city limits, including pinball. A blown-up news photo on one wall shows him theatrically pushing over Bumper (1936), while an actual example of that game sits below the photo, having the last laugh.
But the New York ban lasted until 1976, when the City Council received a demonstration that pinball was not a game of chance. Again we see a photo: Officials watch as an expert player catches a ball on the flipper and announces where he will shoot it. And below the photo we see that very game.
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Despite sordid historical associations with gambling, though, most of these games could hardly appear more innocent. What could be more commonplace than a silver ball rolling down an incline, knocking into obstacles? In its path there is no hint of moral degradation, no sign of debauchery. It is amazing that so many themes could have been draped ornamentally over such rudimentary elements. But here we can see it happen.
In the early years pinball games tapped into familiar games for ideas, particularly those that, like pinball, mixed chance with skillful manipulation: card games and competitive sports. Then pinball grew more elaborate, alluding to the circus or the city, where events are sharp and quick, and later, more ornately, to the worlds of films and television. In much of the artwork sexual allusions are playfully formulaic: pin-ups coaxing men into flipper action.
But a sheen of innocence remains even on the raciest game here, Gottlieb’s 1954 Dragonette. Ostensibly an allusion to the television show “Dragnet,” it is actually full of references, Mr. Silverman points out, to drag outfits and sexual confusion. Its bumpers and painted numbers are strategically placed in suggestive locations. Only in more recent games does the artwork become more explicit, importing the style of the graphic novel.
Finally, after spending time looking at these games, it comes time to play. Visitors buy prepaid cards from the museum and can swipe their way through pinball history. I like earlier games — the golden age — before the industry felt it had to compete with video games: the logic is clearer, the game play straightforward. You know when you win and why. Sensations are different in the ’90s games — The Addams Family or Twilight Zone — which are almost baroquely extravagant with their moving creatures and exotic effects. Sometimes so much is going on, you can even lose track of the ball.
But in playing any of these games the lure is the same. They invoke the anxious thrills of an adolescent in a darkened room, illuminated with the blinking of multicolored lights, each machine the center of a group’s attention, each group focusing on the fate of a gleaming ball going almost too fast to track, as it teases and taunts or promptly sweeps downward to its death, daring you to try again with another coin.
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