Multiball: The Story of Pinball

There is a particular quality of light you only find in a certain kind of room. Warm, amber, coming from dozens of small sources rather than one. The light of incandescent bulbs in a pinball machine — not illuminating, but glowing. Present in a room the way a fireplace is present. Episode 6 is the history of how pinball machines have been lit, from the hundred small incandescent bulbs of the EM er...

My score was four billion, seven hundred million points. In the context of that particular machine, it was slightly below average. Episode 5 asks the question nobody thinks to ask: how did we get here? From bumpers worth ten points on five-reel displays that maxed out in the hundreds of thousands, to multiball modes that generate half a billion points and scores that need ten digits to express — t...

There is a particular shot in pinball that feels better than almost any other. The ball finds the ramp entrance, starts to climb, and does something that still feels slightly miraculous no matter how many times you've seen it: it goes up. Episode 4 is the history of the ramp — the inclined plane that became pinball's most satisfying shot type and one of its most consequential design innova...

Close your eyes. I'm going to describe some sounds, and I want you to tell me where you are. Episode 3 is a complete history of how pinball learned to speak — from the physical bells and chimes of the EM era, sounds produced by real objects striking real objects with no amplifier in sight, through the primitive bleeps of early solid state machines, the synthesizer era's first genuine music...

Before you play a pinball machine, you look at it. And the thing it shows you — most prominently, most insistently, from the greatest distance — is the backglass. Episode 2 tells the complete visual history of pinball's most prominent surface. From the hand-painted reverse glass panels of the EM era — a unique American folk art that glowed rather than merely reflected — through the silk-screen...

Every pinball machine ever made was flat — one inclined surface, one plane of play — until 1980, when Steve Ritchie looked at a playfield and asked: what if the ball could go up? In our Season 2 opener we trace the full history of the upper playfield, from the pre-ramp single-level machines of the EM era to Black Knight's landmark two-level design, through the DMD era's networked spatial systems a...

In 1999 the smart money said pinball was over. The arcades were dying, the manufacturers were closing, and a generation of players had moved on to consoles and home gaming. The arc of the story pointed one way. The smart money was wrong. In our Season 1 finale we trace the remarkable comeback nobody predicted — the barcade phenomenon that created a new kind of pinball customer, the internet commun...

In 1977, pinball stopped being a machine and started becoming a computer that happened to have a ball in it. Episode 9 is the story of the transition from electromechanical relay logic to solid-state microprocessors — the most complete technological transformation in pinball's history since the invention of the flipper. We dig into why the change was inevitable, what the first generation of solid-...

In 1999, Williams closed its pinball division. Gottlieb was already gone. Bally had been absorbed years earlier. Every major manufacturer in the history of American pinball had exited, collapsed, or been swallowed whole. One company kept building. Episode 8 is the story of Stern Pinball and the man behind it — Gary Stern, son of Williams' own Sam Stern, who looked at a collapsing industry and deci...

There is a sound no modern pinball machine makes. Not because designers haven't tried to recreate it — but because you simply cannot replicate a physical bell with a speaker. Not in a way that carries the same weight. Episode 7 steps back from the manufacturer stories to take the long view on the electromechanical golden age — roughly 1947 to 1977 — the thirty years when pinball ran on relays, sco...

Every industry has a company that understands spectacle better than its competitors. In pinball, that company was Bally. Episode 6 is the story of Raymond Moloney — the Chicago showman who named his first machine Ballyhoo and spent the next fifty years living up to it. We trace Bally's journey from the coin-op explosion of the 1930s through the licensed theme revolution of the 1970s, when the comp...

If Gottlieb was about perfecting what it had, Williams was always chasing the next idea. Episode 5 follows Williams Manufacturing from its founding by inventor Harry Williams through its transformation into the dominant force of the DMD era — the company that shipped the first solid state machine, assembled the greatest design team in the history of the medium, and produced a run of machines in th...

There is a particular kind of pinball machine that collectors will tell you represents the purest expression of the form. Warm incandescent light. Hand-painted backglass art. The sound of actual bells. Score reels that click through digits with satisfying mechanical weight. And somewhere on the cabinet, almost certainly, a small oval logo: D. Gottlieb and Co., Chicago, Illinois. Episode 4 is the s...

Before 1947, pinball was something that happened to you. You pulled the plunger, watched the ball bounce, and waited for it to drain. There was nothing you could do about it — and that, as far as city councils and moral reformers were concerned, made it gambling. Then a designer at Gottlieb named Harry Mabs built a small bat-shaped piece of metal on a pivot, wired it to a button on the side of the...

In 1942, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia posed for press photographs with a sledgehammer — and declared war on pinball. In our second episode, we dig into one of the strangest and most consequential chapters in the history of American entertainment: the thirty-four year ban on pinball machines in New York City. We'll explore why the city — and dozens of others across the country — genuinel...

Before the flippers. Before the arcades. Before anyone called it a classic — there was a wooden table, a cue stick, and a game played in the parlors of 18th century France. In our first episode, we trace pinball all the way back to its roots: the French game of Bagatelle, its journey across the Atlantic into American taverns, and the chaotic, coin-operated explosion of the 1930s that turned a parl...