The Southern Fried Gaming Expo and Pinball

in and check it out. I really appreciate it. This conference, this convention, this gaming Expo is founded in twenty fourteen by a group of pinball and arcade enthusiasts, and it's an annual event in which gaming fans from across multiple platforms and genres all come together and they can trade and buy and sell and play games. That includes all sorts of games like you've got your pinball and your

arcade machines. Many of those arcade machines are quite obscure, like you could call them classic titles because they date back to like the seventies and eighties. But good gollie, I ran into ones that I had never heard of before. And I've played a lot of arcade games, but you

also have console games there, you've got tabletop games. It's kind of a mecha of gaming and a great community too, really interesting group of folks who are wandering around and playing different games, and the expo includes many different activities.

You know, of course, you can do all the playing and buying, selling and all that sort of stuff, but they are also panel discussions ranging from history lessons to advice on how to maintain a machine of your own or even design one if you were so inclined and like elements of game design, which is pretty cool. They had musical performances and occasionally professional wrestling. There are vendors selling game adjacent stuff like clothing or dice towers, or

source books or jams and jellies. It was a fun event. I really did enjoy my time there, but it got me thinking I should do an episode on the evolution of the pinball machine. Now I have done an episode about pinball. There was a classic episode of Tech Stuff where I covered it, but I feel like the subject actually needs a deeper dive and we'll need a couple of episodes to cover because pinball has a history that's

really fascinating. You've got the evolution of mechanical, like purely mechanical machines to electro mechanical pinball machines up to modern day electronic and computer based pinball machines. When I say computer based, I mean the micro controllers and stuff are overseen by a fairly simple computer, but a computer nonetheless in some modern pinball machines. But obviously you also have pinball games that are computer games, right, like simulations of

pinball machines. That's kind of a different thing. I'm not really going to talk about that. So let us dive into the fascinating story of pinball, because it's also got a lot of politics and crime and moral panic wrapped

up in it. Now. The story itself is tricky to tell because pinball is one of those things that evolved rather organically from other activities, and I maintain it's largely a matter of opinion as to what constitutes the first pinball machine, Like there are a lot of contenders that could potentially claim that title, and I think it all depends on what components need to be there for you to call it a pinball machine, Like what does a pinball machine actually need to have for it to be

considered an actual pinball machine. Would it need to have pins, not all pinball machines do. Does it need to have flippers? Does it need to have a ball presumably a coin slot like a score keeping system? What is it? But whether we can definitively proclaim a specific instance as the first pinball machine or not, we can still talk about its origins. So before there were pinball machines, there were

lawn games. Now, some of these games shared a resemblance to golf, which required an awful lot of land to play on. Most people did not have a lawn large enough to have a golf course on. Golf dates back as far as the fifteenth century, with King James the Second of Scotland famously outlawing the sport in fourteen fifty seven because he really needed to get the Scots, you know, trained up for war, but they were too busy golfing.

So golf was seen as a distraction and something that unseerious people would pursue, and Jimmy's ban on golf would serve as one of the earliest, if not the actual earliest record of the sp itself golf getting banned. So it really is like pinball, But that's that's getting ahead of myself. Anyway, lawn games became popular, and there were lots of different variations, like you had bowls, you had croquete,

you had baci. But these games still required you to actually have a lawn and they weren't great options if the weather happened to be unpleasant, which it could be in places like northern Europe. So what if you could create games that evoked certain elements of lawn games, but they were designed in such a way that they could be played indoors, Then you'd have a Eureka moment. This was what inspired the invention of parlor games like bagatel.

So in many ways, bagatel is similar to billiards or pool. It'splayed on a table. Those original tables were quite large, they were level, they were flat, right, they had no mechanical elements at all. So the table had little divots in it, and you would play bagatell with balls, and you would use acoustic similar to billiards or pool, and you would hit the ball toward these little divots, each of which had an amount of points associated with them.

In some ways, I think a bagatel is similar to darts. You've got a playing field with specific areas representing specific point values, and your goal is to accumulate points by firing a projectile at that playing field. Now, toward the end of the nineteenth century, a chap with the name Montague Andrew Elijah Redgrave came up with an idea to

enhance the old bagatel design and to miniaturize it. You know, not everyone had space in their parlor for a dedicated gaming table that was close to the size of a billiard's table that just wasn't within everyone's you know means. So Redgrave thought it might be keen to make a Bagatelle table that was small enough to fit on a normal tabletop, kind of like one of those small pinball kits you sometimes see that are like a fifth the size of a normal pinball table. Like a toy pinball

game is kind of similar to that. So this begatel board would be played on an incline, so the top of the playing field is an inch or two higher than the base of the playfield. So the player would need to shoot a ball, which would now be a little marble sized ball instead of like a pool ball

sized ball. Shoot a ball up the playfield and then the ball would naturally roll down this incline, and this time you would have little holes in the playfield that would represent points, but you would have pins pi ns pins surrounding these holes and only allowing the ball to pass through in certain points. Otherwise the ball would just

bounce off the pins and go somewhere else. So the pins are kind of guarding the holes, and only a ball coming in at the right angle is going to actually make it into the whole and thus score whatever the points happened to be. Redgrave created a plunger in order to propel the little marbles up the playfield, and he used a metal spring for the actual plunger. So if you pull back on the plunger, it would either compress a spring or it would stretch out a spring,

depending upon how you designed the plunger. But this way you store potential energy. Right once you release the plunger, the spring quote unquote wants to get back to its normal shape. It'll spring back to its normal shape and thus pull the plunger forward, strike the ball, and knock the ball up the playfield. These boards were very simple and purely mechanical systems. The only mechanical element actually was just the plunger. That you would use to fire the

ball up the incline to start the whole process. Everything else was passive. There were no flippers, there were no bumpers, there were no crazy gimmicks. There was no progressive score a keeping system. There was no way to manipulate the ball once you release the plunger, unless you were to nudge or tilt the table. You could do that, but you weren't supposed to, and so you could argue that

this game was largely a game of chance. Now you could have a general feel for how far back you should pull the plunger before releasing, so there was some skill involved, but that was the best you could do, and the wild wins of fortune would carry the game onward. Monty Redgrave would file a patent for his tabletop bagtel

game in the eighteen seventies. It would be a bit before we get to something really resembling what we think of his pinball, but some basic components, like the pins, the balls, the plunger, those were already present in this early, early, early iteration. Again, keeping score was the responsibility of the players. There was no progressive score keeping system, so you had to like write it all down because the wooden board

could not do that for you. One thing that would be a contributing factor to pinball eventually becoming a scandalous activity is that some bars and pubs and things of that nature, some shops would have bagatel boards where you could play and you would pay a certain amount of money and you would get a certain number of balls for however much you paid. Typically we're talking like pennies for like five balls or something, And if you were to rack up a high enough score, you might win

yourself a free drink. So you'd pay the bartender, get a bunch of balls, try and get your best score. And this element of chance in the game made it lean a little bit on the side of gambling. So, yes, there was some skill to this too. It wasn't entirely up to chance. Using just the right amount of finesse to plunge a ball so that it's more likely to go where you wanted it to go was part of it.

But a lot of that stuff really was up to chance, right, Like, you could be really careful and still things might go poor simply because of maybe there's a defect in the ball, maybe there's a chip in the playfield. There could be anything like that. So this means the games were tiptoeing up to being classified as gambling, just as slot machines would turn out to be. Okay, we're going to take a quick break to thank our sponsors, but when we come back, we'll talk more about the early days of

proto pinball. We're back now. I'm sure there were no shortage of folks who created variations on Bagatel, like there were probably lots of knockoffs and copies and iterations of Bagatel. But the next bit that I feel is really important for our exploration of pinball is the inclusion of coinslots.

So Bagtel for the longest time meant that you would have to go and pay somebody who would keep the balls like locked away, and they would give you the balls for a game of Bagatel, and then you would bring the balls back afterward, like you would write down your score, maybe bring the bartender over to see your score, and then try and get some beer out of it or whatever. But this was an activity that would benefit

from automation. We talk a lot about automation on this show and how it can be bad, but sometimes it's good, you know, if you don't want to have to keep track of a bunch of marbles while your clientele are playing Bagatel. Then this is a good development, which is that the introduction of the coin operated slot game. I did an episode about the history of vending machines which stretches back surprisingly far. There are records of an ancient design by Hero of Alexandria back in the first century

of the Common era. For example, a hero proposed a device that, in exchange for a deposited coin, would dispense holy water. Some pretty clever system of a pan and levers, and so when you inserted a coin, that coin would fall onto a pan and weigh it down, and this

would put pressure on a lever. The lever would open a valve and let the holy water out, but then the pan would eventually tip over far enough for the coin to slide off of it into a repository, and when freed of the coin's weight, the pan would come back up again and the lever would close the valve and the water would stop flowing, which is pretty neat. We don't know if anyone ever built one of those things,

but the design seems like it would work. But the real era of the coin operated vending machines would be the nineteenth century. The eighteen hundreds, folks began to build machines that would dispense stuff ranging from books to stamps to later on stuff like postcards and food. Finding a way to connect the insertion of a coin with the operation of the device was the real trick, but by the late nineteenth century it was really becoming a thing.

One company in the United States that was in the coin operated machine business was a Detroit Bay Least operation called Kale Brothers Manufacturing Company. That cillle So Kale became known as an amusements manufacturing company, building coin operated devices like test your Strength games, gum vending machines, slot machines, and yes, coin operated Bagatel tables. So again, early on we see an association of proto pinball machines and less

respectable means of amusing oneself. So the Kale brothers themselves, August and Adolph, they formed the company in the early nineteen hundreds, though August had previously operated his own company, and some of his work kind of bleeds over between these two organizations, including this Bagatel game. I'm sure they made many more models than just one. The one I could find was called log Cabin, which itself went through several iterations. The first version of log Cabin was kind

of boxy. It looks sort of like a picture frame, like it was a rectangle. Later versions, however, would have an arched upper border, so you'd have a curve at the top instead of you know, hard angles, and that curve was a nice curve that a ball could follow if you were to plunge it up the playfield. Now, the game was kind of like plinko. You know, you would launch a ball to the top of the table

and again the ball. The table was an incline so that the ball would roll toward the bottom of the playfield, and there were pins all along the way, which would you know, change the way the ball would fall. Eventually, a ball would nestle into a slot at the base of the board, and there was also a hole at the very top of the board. If you got a ball in the hole, you would win yourself a dollar.

The bottom pockets had values ranging from absolutely nothing up to fifty cents, and it cost five cents to play the game. You would get one shot per play. But we still don't have any flippers. We don't have any electro mechanical components to talk about. Heck, with log Cabin, it was a lot about luck, so we're definitely close to gambling here. What's more, this is how things would stay for around three decades. It wouldn't be until the

nineteen thirties when we'd actually get the word pinball at all. Like, you could argue that log Cabin was a pinball machine even though there was no like flippers or other mechanical elements. Besides, you know, the plunger and flippers would take like half a century to get there. So in the nineteen thirties we're skipping way ahead. Because while there were lots of other tables made over the following decades, they weren't different

enough to really merit inclusion. So by the nineteen thirties you get to a company called the Bingo Novelty Company, which produced a purely mechanical proto pinball machine called, fittingly enough, Bingo. The game had a coin slot, it had a plunger, It had no other mechanical components, at least none that I could see, And if you put a coin in the slot, it would give you the chance to shoot

five balls up the playfield. And these balls could settle into one of five holes surrounded by pins, so you had to have the ball land just right to go into these holes. Otherwise they'd bounce off and rolled down to drain at the base of the playfield and you would lose them. The promotional material for Bingo proclaimed it

to be a game of skill. I suppose if you were very, very good with the plunger, you could make the argument that it was a game of skill, and maybe you could shoot the ball so it landed in the appropriate holes. I assume those holes were associated with the letters of Bingo, and that the main goal was to get one in each hole. That's just a guess. The pictures I've seen have all been at an angle where I really couldn't see the playfield very clearly, so

it's hard to say exactly what the goal was. But it was a game that was rather popular that One interesting thing about Bingo is that the Bingo novelty Company would partner with a young manufacturer to produce the machine because demand was higher than what the novelty company could supply. Was a company called Gottlieb, which would become famously connected to pinball machines moving forward. It would become one of the big names in pinball production. Another early game was

called bally Who. This one also involved using a plunger to shoot a ball up a playfield, where it could roll down and hopefully land in one of the holes guarded by pins to earn a high score. Again, some proprietors would award prizes to those who achieved a high score you know that was above a certain given level

in the game. One neat component in bally Who is that upon receiving a coin, the floor of the playfield would kind of drop out, and that would allow the balls that were already nestled into these little holes to drop through and thus roll down and be ready for your next round of play. So I thought that was cool, Like it was a way of clearing the playfield without having it be open access. Right, the earliest Bagatel games

were into the air. You could reach in and move the balls around if you only wanted to, and then obviously that would lead to the potential for lots of hanky panky, Like you could just say you got a high score and all you did was put the balls there, kind of like in Young Frankenstein with the dart playing scene.

So that was something that had to be addressed. So you would typically have like a sheet of glass, a pane of glass separating the player from the playfield, and maybe in one little section you would be able to retrieve the balls, but otherwise you were not able to physically manipulate where the balls were got to make the cheating a little difficult at least. So there's a short video of bally Who in action. It's on YouTube if

you want to watch it. It's on a channel called Balin von Stahl b A L E n v A N S t a L. And the game again is called bally Who, so you can actually see it played and it's pretty simple, but it certainly is protopinball anyway. A ton of other similar games would come out in the nineteen thirties, providing entertainment to cash strapped folks who

were navigating the Great Depression. You might say, like, wow, these things seem really simple, but you have to remember at the time the number of outlets accessible to most folks was pretty limited as far as entertainment goes, and money was in tight supply for a lot of families. So finding something that was relatively inexpensive and diverting was

a big deal. Around nineteen thirty three, some designers began to incorporate electric batteries into these machines, and these would usually power pretty simple elements, a lot of noisemaker elements like buzzers and bells, that kind of thing which would signal scoring and draw attention to the table, but other than that, they weren't really powering any components that would materially affect the play. This was also around the time that the term pinball began to pop up and be

used to describe these machines. Gottlieb produced a table in nineteen thirty four called Register, which featured a progressive score counter. Finally, players would not have to keep track of their own scores and just add everything up in their heads. So the score was displayed as a kind of dial, and there was a needle that would keep track of the score. The needle will just physically point to whatever score value

the player had achieved at that point. Now, one problem that proprietors were running into was that some people were willing to break the rules in order to try and get a high score. They would bump or nudge a table, or they would outright pick the table up and tilt it to try and guide balls into the higher scoring sections. And considering some places were paying out for high scores, I guess you could understand why this was happening, but

it was a problem. So how do you make sure people aren't cheating in order to win a prize or even just to set a high score. Enter the tilt sensor. Now, some sources cite Harry Williams as the inventor of the tilt. His name is also associated with pinball because the Williams manufacturing company would end up making a lot of pinball machines, and in fact you hear things like Bally and Williams

and Bally Williams and that sort of stuff. But at least some pinball historians say that a game that came out of a company called Rockola may have been the first to have a tilt sensor. Others say it was Gottlieb's Broker's Tip game that had it, But all of them had very similar approaches to being able to detect a tilt, So the way the sensor worked was really genius.

It was a very simple mechanical approach. Typically, you would have a cup and inside the cup, you would mount a little pedestal, and this would be level to the floor. The pedestal would have maybe a little kind of shallow bowl at the very top of it, a very very shallow bowl into which you would place a ball, and if someone were to rock the machine, the ball would get knocked off of this pedestal, and that would indicate

that there was a tilt. Some of the games, the Rocola game in particular, had very very clever ways of doing this. With a Rocola game, the ball was actually being held against a little tab that connected to a sign that indicated the game was legit, and underneath the ball was a plunger, a spring mounted plunger that was keeping pressure on the ball, keeping it in place against this little plate that held the legit sign in place.

And if the ball were to fall off of that plunger because someone was shaking the machine too hard, then the ball would no longer be holding that play in place, and the little sign would switch to say tilt, which would indicate to the proprietor, oh, whatever score this person achieved is not legitimate because they tilted the machine in

order to do it. That was the whole purpose of these tilt sensors in the first place was just to indicate, hey, this is not a valid score, so do not award this yahoo a beer or a dollar or whatever it might be, because they cheated in order to get it. Now, as time would go on, this very simple mechanical approach would get replaced by electro mechanical devices, so often they

would use things like leaf switches. These are very lightweight metal contacts and if they come in contact with each other, if they touch each other, they complete a circuit and then you get a tilt or a tilt warning. That's usually for side to side or up and down. There's also another type, a pendulum type, where you have a pendulum rod and it's mounted in such a way that

it's inside the circumference of a metal ring. And typically the rod doesn't touch the ring, but if you were to shake the machine, the rod could start swaying, and if it comes in contact with the metal ring again, it completes a circuit and you get a tilt or tilt warning. Now, before I go on tilt, we need to take another quick break to thank our sponsors, and then we'll talk more about the evolution of pinball. Okay,

we're back. And at this point in our history, we've got plungers, we've got balls, we've got a tilt sensor, and then we would get bumpers. Still no flippers, but bumpers would come next. Now I cannot swear that it was the first machine to do so, but Bolo, a game from the Patient Novelty Manufacturing Company in nineteen thirty six, included bumpers. Now, these were passive bumpers, meaning they didn't

bump back like with modern pinball machines. These are the things that, when the ball comes in contact with them, will knock the ball in some other direction, typically with great force, assuming that the bumpers are tuned properly. But these bumpers, Bolo's bumpers, they were passive. They were spring mounted, so they would you give when't being hit by a pinball, but they would spring back too. These bumpers look like

bowling pins for Bolo. They are mounted on little rods that in turn were attached to the springs, so yeah, they'd move around if you hit them. A company that would be called Bally, this is also another big name in pinball, would essentially copy this idea for a game that they called Bumper, and like Register, Bumper would also have a progressive score component, but use light projection to

show it to the player. The score would remain on the back box of the machine after play, and it would only clear once a new game was ready to begin, so that way you could have a score stay up and show someone like if you hit a high score or whatever. This also says that we're at a point where we're getting backboxes on these machines, which was a

new development as well. Still no flippers though in fact, the first pinball machine record I could find that featured a pinball machine with player controlled flippers would be Humpty Dumpty, which was produced by Gottlieb and released in nineteen forty seven. So that's nearly half a century of these various amusement

machines before we would even get to flippers. And for those of y'all who have never played pinball, the flippers are little controllers that let you propel a ball back up the playfield, and good players can get a feel for where the ball needs to be on the flipper in order to direct the pinball to a specific target on the playfield. Great players can manipulate the ball and pass it from one flipper to another, assuming that it has multiple flippers in the first place, all in order

to get specific shots. Humpty Dumpty slippers, there are six of them, range from the top third of the playfield to the middle to the bottom third of the playfield, but they are not at the very base, which is where you would find them in modern pinball machines. Right. Most modern pinball machines have a pair of flippers at the base of the playfield, just above the ball drain, and they're spaced far enough apart so that the ball can pass between the flippers if the angle is right.

Humpty Dumpty has flippers facing toward the outer walls of the playfield, so kind of like in the opposite orientation of where you would expect them based on where flippers appear today. And like I said, there's six of them, and if the ball gets below your bottom two set

of flippers, you're pretty much stuck. An engineer named Harry mAbs gets the credit for thinking up the flippers, and these devices helped reinvigorate interest in pinball, but only in certain places, because by this time authorities in some cities were cracking down on pinball machines, saying that they promoted gambling and delinquency, that kids were spending too much time and money on pinball games instead of doing wholesome things

like studying, or running errands for their parents, or getting drafted and sent off to war. In fact, the trouble began pretty early on here in Atlanta, Mayor William B. Hartsfield waged a war on pinball. Now, if you've heard the name Hartsfield before, chances are you either live in Atlanta or you had a layover at the Atlanta Airport, which is partly named after him. It's also partly named

after Maynard Jackson, a different Atlanta mayor. So anyway, on June twentieth, nineteen thirty nine, the newspaper here in Atlanta, the Atlanta Constitution, reported that Hartsfield had outlawed pinball within

the city. Parent and teacher organizations had been pressuring council members for this outcome for quite some time, proclaiming pinball to be the source of all wickednesses children, which is only a slight exaggeration, y'all, Like I'm I'm poking fun here, But there was a lot of moral panic about pinball. One councilman named Ea Minor said, quote, these machines, which you can find on every corner in the city, are

tending to encourage a moral degeneration among our children. End quote starts to sound like the music man right where you're talking about how the kids are hanging out in the pool hall and becoming total degenerates. So yeah, pinball was viewed as a CD sordid distraction. Ea Minor would even get more heated about pinball in that article I was talking about. I swear I did not make up this next quote. It's actually in the Atlanta Constitution newspaper.

It goes, quote, these machines lead to gambling and stealing and killing and eventually to a rope around the neck for someone. End quote. Good golly, Ea, you thought pinball was the first step on a path that ultimately would

lead to capital punishment. All right, So what would happen if you happened to be the proprietor of an establishment within the city limits of Atlanta and you allowed one of these sin machines in your place of business, Well, you would face a fine of two hundred dollars, which was a heck of a lot of money back in nineteen thirty nine and also quote thirty days in the stockade for either owning or possessing a pinball or similar machine end quote. So this band didn't just cover pinball machines,

it also covered stuff like slot machines. Seventy five years later to the day the Southern Fried Gaming Expo would go live. So the Southern Fried Gaming Expo's first day of operation was seventy five years after pinball had been officially outlawed in the city of Atlanta. Clearly it has since been rescinded, but that's just at least now. Arguably the most famous war on pinball was what happened in New York City, and another famous mayor was behind that.

LaGuardia also a guy whose name is used for an airport in the city where he was mayor. So in January nineteen forty two, this is after Atlanta has already outlawed pinball. So don't say we're not progressive. We could be restrictive far before the Yankees get to it. But in January nineteen forty two, LaGuardia passed a ban on pinball machines in New York City and even directed police departments to raid various businesses that were known to have

pinball machines inside them. Now, whether you believe LaGuardia and other leaders around the United States genuinely felt pinball was an immoral invention that needed to be wiped out, or you happen to be a little more cynical and you think this was just a way for a politics to score points with their base without you know, actually doing anything really challenging, like facing down organized crime. Well, the end result was that pinball machines in many major cities

across the United States were made illegal. Now, this and the impact of World War Two, which required a lot of manufacturing companies to convert their operations to support war efforts, not to mention shortages on raw materials, would mean that very few pinball machines were actually getting made in the late thirties to mid forties. But even that didn't stop pinball manufacturers from making and innovating machines entirely. They still did.

The flippers being introduced in the late forties were a really big part of innovation in pinball machines because with more control, pinball could be positioned as a game of skill rather than as a game of chance. However, it would take nearly three decades for a definitive case to settle that matter, and we'll get to that one in the next episode. In the meantime, you had engineers like Steve Kordak, who would design pinball machines for multiple companies

throughout his life. He also introduced some new innovations in pinball. One of those was the drop target. So these are little physical targets. They usually look like things like white squares with a target painted on them, or like a decal on them or whatever. They're not always white, but

that's a very common coloration for these drop targets. And when they're struck, they drop down into the playfield and there's an electronic switch that causes them to pop up again, presumably when the player has achieved some task or when the game resets. Kardak also introduced multi ball play. This would be in the early sixties when he introduced this.

So multi ball is exactly what sounds like. It's when a player suddenly has to contend with more than one pinball in play at the same time, typically because they have done some sequence of targets that have unlocked. This multi ball. Cordeck may also be the first person to relocate the flippers to the bottom of the pinball playfield, just above the ball drain, which is again sort of

the standard location for most pinball machines today. At this stage, we're in the true electro mechanical era of pinball machines. More innovation would follow, so in our next episode, I'll talk more about the inner workings of these electro mechanical pinball machines, and we'll also transition toward solid state electronics thanks to a little invention called the transistor. We'll also talk about how the actual game elements of pinball would evolve.

Like early on, pinball games were all about just kind of random bouncing around with a ball, hitting various obstacles as it inevitably made its way toward a ball drain. But over time you would see introduction of all sorts of stuff like ramps and other elements that would would

allow you to strategically go about playing a game. And then in turn, the games became more sophisticated, where it's not just they had more features, it's that game designers would say, what if we made a mode where someone had to complete features in a specific order, and if they do so, they unlock a new element of play with this game. And then we eventually get to the

introduction of things like wizard modes. We'll talk all about that stuff in our next episode and kind of chat about how that evolved over time, and just like the pinball machines themselves, this evolution was very organic and gradual. I don't think you can point to a single pinball machine and say this is where it all changed. There are certain machines that are iconic and known for their modes, like Adam's Family is a great example, and I'll definitely

talk about that in the next episod. But I'm not sure that you can just easily point at any one machine and say this is it, because there's always going to be an earlier machine that had at least some of those elements present. And it becomes kind of a judgment called to say, all, right, at what point are we saying this is where mode play became a thing.

But it's led us up to modern day, where there's some pinball machines out there that on a mechanical level are not maybe that complicated, but if you're looking at gameplay level, if you wanted to maximize your score. They get incredibly complex, sometimes to their own detriment. But we're going to talk about that, and we'll also talk about the case that convinced New York City officials to reverse

their decades long ban on pinball machines. Other places would follow suit, although I think at least in a few regions laws about pinball are still technically on the books, they're just not enforced. But yeah, we'll talk about how pinball emerged from its reputation as being, you know, the dark side of the force, as EA Minor would have had us think. So that's it for this first episode about pinball. Like I said, Wednesday's episode will go further

into the pinball story. Thanks again to the Southern Fried Gaming Expo for having me out. I was there kind of low key. I wasn't like chatting with people. I was really in observation mode. But I was really impressed with what I saw. I got to play a lot of really fun games. Maybe I'll talk about some of those in the next one too. Also, if anyone from STERN is listening, how do I get one of those jaws pinball machines? Because good Gravy. That's like my favorite

film of all time, and that machine was incredible. All right, enough of that, Enough of that, That's not what this show is about. This show is about celebrating tech in all its forms, at least all the forms that are are worthy of celebration. I hope all of y'all are doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.