Last Manufacturer

by Mike Conklin (Chicago Tribune)

It seems unthinkable.

And only a few months ago it would have been.

Here was a stranger being ushered into a pinball manufacturer's innermost sanctum, its design room.

And next thing you know, the top programmer at the firm, Stern Pinball Inc. of Melrose Park, was explaining in extravagant detail the theme and particulars of the company's next game, which is currently under development.

Ever since you were a young man/woman, pinball manufacturing has been a ruthlessly competitive, hush-hush business, worthy of an espionage novel. As in the auto and fashion industries, one's plans were always kept under the tightest of lids, while information about your rival's latest game was as coveted as gold.

But that was then. The fact is that the pinball industry, Chicago's unique contribution to the world of coin-operated amusement, is close to "tilt."

A few weeks ago, Chicago's WMS Industries announced it was discontinuing production of the flipper-style machines, leaving Stern Pinball as the world's lone manufacturer of what once was a consuming consumer passion and one of America's signature products.

Suddenly Gary Stern, president of Stern Pinball, doesn't have to sweat giving away trade secrets.

As recently as 1975, there were four Chicago-based pinball manufacturers supplying an eager world market with up to 500 units units a day. The games had names like "Hot Shots," "Captain Fantastic," "Galaxy" and "Alien Poker" and they flashed and blinked and made ka-ching ka-ching noises that were the sound track for many of our childhoods.

Who hasn't, at least once, slipped a coin into a machine, pulled the plunger back to shoot a metal ball into the playfield, bounced it off bumpers with the flippers, and added lots of body English before eventually losing the shiny, silver spheroid down the drain'

Apparently, not as many people as there used to be.

Assaulted by arcade video games in the 1980s, mugged by CD-ROMs and other home entertainment options in the '90s, and endangered by advances in "virtual reality" technology, old-fashioned pinball games now are making their last stand at Stern's plant in Melrose Park.

"We're a small fish in the big pond of coin-operated games," said Stern, "but at least we're still swimming."

Mark Marfalcon, an analyst for Bear, Stearns in New York who monitors the gaming industry, said a combination of factors hurt pinball gaming. Not only does the public have more choices, but the large, publicly held firms, which absorbed the smaller pinball manufacturers in the 1970s, '80s and early '90s, see better profit margins in the other equipment they make.

"These companies always put a lot of costly research and development into their games, but the bottom line is that it is the public who makes or breaks them as to how popular they will be," said Marfalcon. "Maybe one day they hit a home run with their pinball games, but it gets expensive to keep coming to the plate."

WMS, or Williams as it has been known for decades, was the largest maker of the games at the time of the announcement, with approximately a 70 percent share of the market. The last unit, coincidentally called "Star Wars: The Final Episode," rolled off the assembly line of its Waukegan plant in mid-November.

"Our company has evolved over many years and, by far, our largest segment now is in casino equipment," explained Kevin Verner, CEO of the large, publicly held firm's gaming division. "We made a last, great effort to change technology and add excitement to the (pinball) games, but the demand still remained small. We weren't willing to continue losing money.

"This company came out of the coin-operated area, and we owe everything to the innovativeness that went into those machines," added Verner. "You can't go through something like this and look at the roots and the culture and history of our company and not feel sadness."

Chicago has long been the hub for pinball, which was developed here by pioneers Harry Williams, David Gottlieb and Ray Moloney.

Gottlieb's 1931 "Baffle Ball" is regarded as the launch pad for games that quickly followed, with names such as "Bingo," "Whirlwind," "Rock-Ola" and "Five Star Final." Williams, in later years, added concepts such as electricity, free games and a tilt mechanism. Flippers saw the light of day with the new "Humpty Dumpty," introduced right after World War II.

Roger Sharpe, author of "Pinball!" a book that many consider the definitive word on the amusement, says the peak probably occurred in the late 1970s, when Chicago's Big Four of Williams, Gottlieb, Bally and Stern ruled the pinball universe.

"Through the entire history of pinball," said Sharpe, "whether the names have been Sega or Premier or Williams or Gottlieb or Bally, the one single, constant element is that Chicago has remained the birthplace and center. It's just like Detroit and the automobile. Some day it'll be gone and we'll wonder what happened. That'll be a sad day."

Sharpe can become almost poetic talking about pinball. "There is something eternally fascinating about a little silver ball -- a one-and-a-16th-inch sphere that only weighs 2.8 ounces," he rhapsodized in a 1994 interview, when pinball was enjoying a brief resurgence. "How do you control it' How do you follow it' When you play everything else washes away. You become one with the machine."

Oddly, Stern Pinball is, on paper, a new company in the field despite a name that has been in the business since the 1930s. Stern's father, Sam Stern, once was president of Williams before moving to Bally and, after that, purchasing the assets of Chicago Coin.

This company became absorbed by Data East Pinball in 1986, which sold it to Sega, the Japanese-owned conglomerate, in 1994.

In October, Sega spun off the pinball portion of its company and sold it to Gary Stern, who promptly gave it the familiar industry name of Stern Pinball.

"I tell people I'm 58 years old and I've been in the business 58 years," said Gary, a lawyer. "After all that time, I'm finally No. 1 even if it isn't the way you'd expect. I don't know how to take this. I don't want to get cocky."

The company has circled the pinball wagons around its two warehouse-style buildings, totaling a little less than 70,000 square feet, in an industrial park just south of O'Hare Airport. There is a third building in the vicinity that, if everything goes well, will become part of the complex.

"It's not exactly the Taj Mahal," said Stern. "We're little and we're not like the big, publicly held gaming companies, but there's still enough left for one manufacturer. These things go in cycles."

Whether he can prevent flipper-style pinball games from simply becoming antiques with a cult following will be the challenge. His production rate was about "40 to 50 per day" before WMS' announcement and he's hopeful, with the void, this can increase to 70 by harvesting Williams' old customers.

Stern plans to keep designers and programmers busy with "three or four" new models each year. The goal is to produce something as popular as the "Addams Family," a Bally game in 1992 that, according to Sharpe, was part of a "brief renaissance" for the industry.

Licensing will continue to play a large role, as the company will lean heavily on popular icons as game themes. "We always have to keep our demographics in mind," said Stern, "and it is basically young males, 20 to 30 years old."

In the past, such themes have included popular movies, such as "Lethal Weapon II," "Star Trek" and "Jurassic Park," as well as TV shows, athletes (Muhammad Ali, Pele), sports (pro wrestling, Indy car racing, basketball) and musical groups (Guns n' Roses). Some oldies, such as "Harley-Davidson" and "South Park," will be re-introduced.

The first game to be introduced next month, according to Lonnie Ropp--the programmer who gave an advance peek to a stranger--will have a soccer theme. A special feature will be a magnetized receiver in a netlike device, and players will shoot balls at it for "saves." Soccer, like pinball, is very popular in Europe.

It is not likely any of Stern's new machines will feature the advanced graphic-oriented technology of "Pinball 2000," which was WMS' last big effort to stir new interest in their games before pulling the plug. This was introduced only 11 months ago.

"That was a hybrid of several games you find in arcades," sniffed Stern. "We don't want to get too far from what we're supposed to be and what people expect when they want pinball.

"We're the last dinosaur."

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