Monopoly game release

by Raad Cawthon (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Gary Stern is a nonpracticing attorney with silver, close-cropped hair, a booming tenor voice, and the infectious personality of a natural-born salesman. Sitting behind a desk with a heavily smudged glass top in an office for which "shabby" is an apt description, he looks nothing like the king of the pinball universe.

But he is.

"Within about 100 feet of you is where all the pinball machines in the world are made," Stern said.

That is not bragging. Since WSM Industries announced a few weeks ago that it would no longer make pinball machines, what Stern, 54 - a Philadelphia native and president of Stern Pinball - is saying is simple fact: The nexus of the pinball universe is now a couple of warehouselike buildings in a nondescript industrial section of suburban Chicago.

For anyone who has "played the silver ball," the thought of there being only one maker of pinball machines, and an admittedly small maker at that, is somehow distressing.

No more machines from Gottlieb, Bally, or Williams, three of the industry's former giants'

Stern feels your pain. After all, he grew up in the pinball business.

"We don't say we're the last pinball company," he said. "That makes us sound like we're going out of business. We say we are the only pinball company."

Stern's father, Sam, moved from Philadelphia to Chicago in 1948, three years after his son was born, when he bought half of the thriving pinball business of Harry Williams.

Coincidentally, that was the year when Gottlieb, the company that ruled the pinball roost for years, introduced "Humpty Dumpty," the first pinball machine with flippers.

Since then, through business ebbs and flows and the video-game revolution, Stern has been associated with making pinball machines. Not video machines or even hybrid, video-pinball machines, but real pinball machines with flashing lights, extravagant sound tracks, bumpers, flippers, and those one-and-one-sixteenth-inch, 2.8-ounce, shiny silver balls.

"I tell people I'm 54 years old and I've been in the pinball business 54 years," said Stern, who worked shoulder to shoulder with his father until Sam's death 15 years ago.

"We've done this forever, and now we are absolutely it," Stern said of crafting the loud, garish machines. "We shouldn't get too cocky. We're not the most important thing in the coin-operated business. But we do have a place."

Stern's business is new on paper, although the name has been around since the 1930s. Here is how it worked: Sam Stern became president of Williams in 1948, then moved to Bally before purchasing another company, Chicago Coin, that was absorbed in 1986 by Data East Pinball. That company, in turn, was bought by Sega Enterprises Ltd., the Japanese-owned conglomerate and video-game pioneer, in 1994.

In October, Sega, realizing the market for traditional pinball machines was shrinking, sold the pinball portion of its company to Stern. He immediately resurrected the name Stern Pinball.

Through all that, the vast majority of the world's pinball machines have been made at four factories in the environs of Chicago, long known as the pinball capital of the world.

Stern can talk about the style changes in pinball machines, from "barrel-type" score counters to "dot-matrix," and their history, offering that "Bally was the first company with a solid set of electronics." But when you melt it down, Stern seems to have only a couple of mantras.

One is: "These games are based on fun, not high-tech."

The other, borrowed from Harry Williams, his father's former partner, is: "The ball is wild."

But lest someone think that the pinball business is all double points and free balls these days, think again.

"It's a grind business," Stern said. "We grind it out. We are never going back to the level where there are two of us [making pinball machines] again."

In 1992, a good year, there were about 100,000 pinball machines made, and the company Stern now owns made 27,000 of them. Now, even though he is the last manufacturer standing, Stern expects he never again will sell 27,000 machines in a single year.

"If we sold 15,000 machines this year, we would be ecstatic," he said.

Stern's factory employs about 100 people, and turns out 45 machines a day, all of them moving on a simple assembly line from wiring - each machine contains a half mile of wire - to final testing.

"We have about the same man-hours in one pinball machine as the Ford factory out here has in a Taurus," he said.

Stern's business is seasonal. For example, operators do not buy pinball machines during the holidays. And, although the factory can ratchet production up to 75 machines daily, Stern said his production level would never achieve the 175 machines a day it once made.

Sixty percent of Stern's machines, which retail for about $4,500, are exported. Germany, Italy and France are all hotbeds of pinball, especially France.

"There is a pinball machine in every cafe in Paris," Stern said.

On the factory floor one recent day, the workers were making one style of machine, the popular Harley-Davidson. They will continue making that one machine until another is designed and put into production, a time period that varies depending on popularity. From the music (loud) to the graphics (lurid), Stern's machines are designed in-house.

"Pinball has always been about popular culture," Stern said. "Low-brow popular culture." For example, in a recent game based on the South Park animated television series, players scored extra points for "killing Kenny," the character who dies weekly in the show.

More thought goes into all this than one might imagine.

"We want to create Pavlovian pinball," Stern said. "Games have gone through cycles where they become too complex. We were frustrating people. Like any game, you want the players to get into the game deeper, but the operative word is fun."

So for the target audience, which Stern, though he admits to "no great market research," identifies as "guys from 18 to 35 or 40," the machines have to be difficult enough to attract the good player and simple enough to give the novice some success.

"We are selling time," he said. "We don't want a guy to put his money in, play each ball for 30 seconds, walk away, and feel like he looks stupid. We also don't want the really good player to play the game for 30 minutes."

Another part of the psychology is to design the machines so they do not to rob players of their pride.

"Pinball machines are staples of street locations like bars," Stern said. "Anywhere where games are an ancillary interest. Arcades are not as successful as they were in the past."

He suspects (and he visits bars to judge for himself) that, if a male player drops in his quarters and is humiliated in front of others, that player may never come back to the game.

Another variable is how to attract younger players to the games.

"People in their 20s see the romance in pinball machines," Stern said. "But they are intimidated by them because they grew up on video games." Hence, easier games and design themes, on the lines of South Park.

On one side of the factory floor, a worker tests a nearly finished version of "Harley-Davidson," bouncing silver balls off the bumpers time and again before the glass top is installed, while "Born to Be Wild" blares from the machine's speaker.

"This is still a manufacturing business," Stern said.

And yet, even in this nondescript warehouse, there is something about all these wildly colored machines with their winking lights, their "ka-ching, ka-ching" sounds, and their driving music.

"Ever since I was a young boy, I've played the silver ball," Peter Townsend of The Who wrote in his rock opera Tommy. "From Soho down to Brighton, I must have played them all."

Here, on the outskirts of Chicago, the only pinball machine company in the world is adamant about selling a product that is "retro," not "nostalgic."

And yet, there is something even here that conjures up memories of late nights in a hundred bars with smoke in the air, cold beer at hand, and the multicolored lights of a flashing pinball machine bouncing off smiling faces.

Stern may be more interested in "retro" than nostalgia, but he feels it, too.

"Mechanical-action pinball, that's what this product is," he said. "That's what we make. That's what my father made."

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