The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a “clever” scheme, if your tolerance for cleverness incudes a proclivity to sell human beings into endless torture. The British, as usual, were very cheerful about their great imperial cleverness, just as they were cheerful to indulge in anything sinister and cruel, as long as it benefited either themselves or the Empire.

The slave trade, by the seventeenth century, was a system that had become satanically efficient, a near-perfect economic triangle: a British merchant ship sailed to Africa, to pick up human product from the slaver scums’ concentration camps on the coast. Then they crossed the Middle Passage of the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, their load lightening and profit pouring into the sea, as the human capital below deck deteriorated in the nightmare conditions of the hold.

The ships would next hit all of the Crown’s colonies in the Americas, trading people as if they were livestock, for goods both legal and contraband. Finally, they would return to the Imperial Core, laden with bloody treasure to unload, so they could immediately begin the journey again.

Generally, one only sees the clear issues with this system if one possesses basic human decency.

Britain began to fully invoke this wicked machine in the early 16th century, using it to build up their American colonies in preparation for the full and final extraction that every tributary must endure. As British sea power came into prominence, they quickly proved to be the most successful and enthusiastic – but certainly not the only – European empire engaged in the endeavor of slavery.

After the Restoration, dominating the global slave trade became the top priority for the Crown, which was desperate for cash to build up its somewhat grim and crumbling inner lands.

Britain and It’s business concerns on the Atlantic went on to sell millions of human beings of all ages into the endless brutality of colonial chattel slavery, and killed millions more through the monstrous barbarism of Middle Passage travel, and no Oxfordian History Professor with or without an OBE can diminish that endless stain on their nation’s soul. 

And though his Cambridge confrere may become red-faced in his denial, the Transatlantic Slave Trade was the economic engine that funded the initialization and perpetuation of the great institutions of Great Britain, such as Oxford, and Cambridge, and the Royal Mail, and all other grand Inner Core works of the Crown. 

Feel free to laugh at someone who tells you slavery as an institution wasn’t crucial to fund the incredible costs of constructing the chassis of the Industrial Revolution, a feat that would be the Crown’s most efficient engine of economic soft power. 

Blithely ignore those who claim that Britain’s abolition of slavery in all of Its colonies had more to do with altruistic love of freedom than simple racist economics and eugenics.

Punch someone who tries to downplay the actual institution of “quiet” slavery within England itself, a practice that would traffic tens of thousands of Africans into the inner core for a lifetime of white servitude.

Burning Hammer them, Kobashi-style, if they say there weren’t Victorian newspapers running advertisements for runaway black “servants” well into the 19th century.  

It wouldn’t be ethically or materially correct to talk about the history of the Royal Mail, or anything else Imperial Britain was proud of, in the wake of the slave trade, without speaking about the African lives that funded and fueled it. Institutions that eventually became “self-functioning” didn’t get there on their own, and nothing that Britain accomplished in its long and abominable ascendancy to momentary world domination could have happened without the genocidal torture and death of millions of real people.

 Slavery was, indeed, the primary funding for the Crown’s 18th-century bloodlust for Eastern expansion and extraction in the Indies, even while they were forced to violently shed the husk of their Atlantic campaigns. The idea that the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the subjugation of the Indian subcontinent aren’t linked in a direct cause-and-effect way is ahistorical, racist, Tory propaganda, and can be easily placed in the festering, burning, open dump of history along with all of the other trash that facilitates the formation and spread of Tory “ideology.”

“Hey, look, the Kid’s clever plan to be an annoying dickhead worked, somehow,” Picky says, lifting herself off the pinball machine with a slight late-30s groan. Indeed, the frat boys have re-acclimated themselves around the DMB pin, and now there’s a clear path out of the Rock Room, as if we’d just completed some puzzle in an ‘80s DOS game designed by Roberta Williams, (who didn’t even scold us for our language!)

We pass by with zero fuss, of course of course, I didn’t mean to overplay the danger I sense here, since it’s usually restrained by what remains of our frayed social contract…

…Look, maybe I am a little paranoid, sometimes, but I think there’s a certain Nirvana song that has a response to this. Wait…  I think it’s Nirvana.  Why am I thinking of the Youngbloods, I don’t even know who the fuck the Youngbloods are…

Our little bande à part breaks into a quick trot, suggesting that I’m not the only one pleased to leave the literal and metaphorical stench of the Rock Room behind. We’re still deep inside of the Logic Gate, thousands of meters away from the Cathedral; a cavernous chamber up front that contains thousands of video games, row after row of cabinets, set in a formation that seems to create a literal labyrinth on the floor.

The Cathedral is where the salt-of-the-earth spend most of their time. Although the Logic Gate is the heart of the Drop’s pinball-addicted community, most of the General Public simply know it as a massive video game arcade, with maybe some pinball or something in the back.

There are actual arcades out there that are so much better than the brewing shithole of the Cathedral, despite its intense game selection. If they didn’t have all this pinball, I wouldn’t spend a single fucking moment here.

Jesus, I feel like I’m starting to sound like a certain racist writer going on for paragraphs about the “base hill people and their corrupted genetics.”

I try pretty hard not to be a GP hater (especially since I’m very much a GP myself.) But there’s something rotten about a crowd, especially in a place dominated by probably-awful men, ruled over by definitely-terrible men, filled with half broken games, low light, loud music, and plenty of contraband booze, speed, coke and GHB (ugh.) It’s heaven for a certain sort of Asterias-coded dude, but a nightmare for most of the rest of us.

The local fighting game scene – the only reason I might spend any time up front, – is total trash. There’re only a handful of people who are actually decent who ever come to play here. These guys are fun to watch, but they’re really just here due to a dirty Pull; one might call them enlightened trolls, weird guys who get weird jollies by crushing the scumbag pubstompers who make up the majority of the Cathedral’s fighting game community.

This behavior toward the pubstomper trash is fun to watch, and totally justified, in the ultimate subjective sense. Pubstompers… those players who possess just enough knowledge and skill to troll the fuck out of the usual General Public suckers that are always passing by.

That endless river of potential chumps offers these cowards – and they are cowards, you never see them in the real FGC hot spots – a constant stream of new men – almost always men – who remember being “good” at Burning Fire EX when they were iterating (they very much weren’t.)

Once they convince a mark to play, by just sort of button mashing, putting in that mark’s brain an evil seed of “showing this pawn how to play,” Keeping in mind, they do not know how to “play” Burning Fire, even if they know the basic moves. Fighting games are obnoxiously deep, and even most people who play them don’t understand that you’re taking turns, not just fighting in a disconnected way from the opponent (anime fighting games being the exception that proves the rule.).

Man, I love the genre, in spite of its players.

The ‘stomper sandbags hard for a few games, keeping the mark on the hook by playing like trash and assuring that games stay close, maybe even throwing a round or two to sweeten the coming ego crushing. Maybe they give them a game where they let them think they’ve figured out a winning strategy.

Now, lots of times these bad cats are doing this for Pull reasons, and often they do it out of pure fun. But if the fellow (almost always a fellow, as Pubstompers love nothing more than to immediately crush a woman just looking to have fun with a game,) proves to be a betting man, that’s where the serious shit starts.

When the ‘stomper suddenly start to incrementally improve, the anxiety-induced cortisol spike from the challenger these creeps find so delicious becomes immediately palpable.

Even though the mark can’t win, they almost always keep playing, keep upping the bets, keeps plunking tokens into the machine, continuing to believe they’ll figure out a way to work around this sudden onslaught of gimmicks and hax, all while growing deeper in their frustration, not understanding until their breaking point that they were just being fucked with the whole time.

These dickheads really get off on this shit, and those who get embarrassed by them usually don’t take the trolling well, especially if they’re way down in cash money tickets.

This not considered a problem, but as another part of the ‘stomping these dudes (all dudes) really enjoy, If the opponent gets frisky and provocative, the winner of the con and his couple of friends respond in kind, in a way that suggests they have more bark than bite.

Just as the opponent begins to cross the final razors edge from man to beast, there are suddenly ten more black-hoodied bastards pouring out from the shadows they’ve been inhabiting, revealing far more scary-looking dudes than the three that were around just a moment ago.

Sometimes, the mark clocks the danger and runs away. With these insufferable pricks being so closely connected to the Junta, it’s always better to run away. Those who don’t tend to learn a valuable, traumatic lesson or two.

And there are often times where the violence comes suddenly but also expectedly. The most certain way to immediately piss a poor sod off is to “lock” them into the game system’s universal throw trap glitch, a vicious and deeply unfair throw loop that feels impossible to escape, unless you know the easy counter.

Any time you feel like you aren’t even allowed to play the game, it becomes a painful sort of anti-fun. Every player, from lowly neophyte to grandest of champion, hates the feel of pressing buttons and getting no response. Most people play video games to move their guy around and do stuff, and if that’s taken from them, their stress level increases by orders of magnitude, and things can get nasty quick, Knife-nasty… Bullet Lust-nasty.

But even without glitches, throws have always been serious, potentially fatal business in public play.

God damn, everything about this place just absolutely reeks of male fragility.

That world is still far away, however, and I hope it stays there, although since some of us do not know where they are going, there are clearly no promises (“I never promise anything” is a lie Picky likes to tell about herself, and she tries to make it true by being a dick.)

We’re in a wider hallway, with zero games, but hundreds of Gates lining each side (goddamn it’s so easy to slip into the local slang.) It’s long, probably a couple hundred meters, and all of the Gates… doors are unlabeled, I’m guessing in an attempt to make places like the Rock Room harder to locate for out-groups.

This area in the back is known as the Forecastle, although most people who come here have no idea that it’s the front part of a below-deck ship (and why should they, really?) I’ve heard more than one person comment on the nautical theme with puzzlement – like, where’s all the castle stuff? 

The closer you get to the Cathedral, the more prevalent the theming becomes. Back here, the décor is… more subdued is probably a better thing to say than cheap, but then again it’s the Junta, and we know they’re cheap bastards that do not deserve any benefit of the doubt.

The most nautical part of the theming in this hallway is a series of fake portholes affixed to the wood paneling every ten meters or so. They used to feature hi-res, round screens that offer a view of a deep ocean, teeming with life.

They’ve all been smashed, of course, and have been for years. Some of them still flash and twitch with static, so I guess that’s kind of a solid theme: existential simulacrum at sea. Probably not what the philosophical geniuses in the Junta were going for, but since they don’t replace broken shit back here, that’s kinda on them.

 Most of this hallway’s Gates dead end, and are filled with an eclectic and varied grouping of pins, with an excess of doubles and unpopular games – basically, garbage time for pinball. I always love these little nooks and crannies, with the exception that this always nearby hallway is usually populated by the kind of dude who’s headed to the Rock Room, or the Stadium, (another “clubhouse” where the Sports pins are gathered, natch.). You never really feel alone back here, and not in a nice way.

The carpet, which wouldn’t look out of place in an early 90’s arcade, with its fluorescent planet-and-star pattern – absolutely nothing to do with the sea, in another brilliant nod to Baudrillardian recursion – hasn’t been changed… maybe ever? That makes the populated areas pretty easy to find, as the desperately worn strip down the middle of the hall acts like a guide straight out of a seventh-gen console game.

Picky stops for a minute, counting doors, obviously trying to get her bearings straight, keeping in mind that we all have pretty easy access to thousands of maps, including the Logic Gate’s, thanks to our slightly cybernetic brains. She claims she doesn’t trust maps, and to be honest, there’s a trauma-related reason for that. Still, I’m not really an advocate for AR rejection; it’s just a thing we deal with, and you make of it what you can.

Picky does come here with me quite a bit, and her memory is pretty sharp, which makes her current predicament a bit unusual. But there are a fuck ton of doors in this hallway, and I don’t think she’s looking for a Gate with worn carpet leading from it.

Her concentration gets blown by a group of dudes coming out of a passage about thirty meters down, if her muttered curse words suggest anything. But then she kinda does an “ohhh”, which I suspect means they’re coming out of the place she’s been looking for.

These fellas all look and smell like stoners, with the kind of ‘90s aesthetic that lands somewhere between the Grateful Dead and Korn. Several of them carry lit bats which, by their heady smell, must be Real Grass, an incredibly expensive commodity on the Drop. They’re in a good natured haze that puts me quickly at ease. I know these guys, not specifically but universally, and to be honest I used to kind of be one of them during my early iterations.

The one with the biggest fattie and a dope Coal Chamber hoodie carries a case of Younglings (a beer brand that has only just started being available Drop-wide, featuring child-like drawings of the dead padawans who Anakin murdered in that terrible movie) as they no doubt make their way to the Rock Room to kick back some beers and smoke more grass (drinking and all drugs are – of course – banned in the Logic Gate, but the further back in the place you get, and more affinity you have with the Junta, the more the rules get relaxed, until eventually, they don’t apply to you at all.)

As we pass them by, with polite “‘’sups” exchanged, the smell of grass on the fellows is palpable enough for Picky to get her own vape out, unconsciously sucking on it.  For a moment she sounds like a baby with a pacifier, and then whatever’s left in the chamber flows into her lungs. She blows out a sad, small puff of vapor, and the rest of the exhale is dreadfully clean.

“You’re out of grass?” I say, pulling my half-full vape from my pocket, and worrying I’m going to be forced to share for the rest of the day, since I’m dead broke and unconvinced there’s going to be a treasure-laden end to Picky’s supposed plan.

“Yeah, don’t worry, something will come along, it’ll be fine,” Picky says, in a rote way that suggests she’s literally not worried about either the situation or my pain. She throws her own empty unit onto the ground, giving it a hard spin that causes it to bounce thirty or so meters down the hall. Then she takes my vape and indulges in an extra long drag.  “I remember the way now. Fuck I could smoke a jay… I bet that guy would’ve given me a couple drags.”

“Where are we going?” I whine, still worried about having to endure the Cathedral or ending up in the Backwoods, where a saw might pop out of the wall and slice me in half like something out of ‘Evil Dead Trap.’  “What the hell are you up to, anyway?”

“She’s here to buy drugs,” the Kid says.  “…buy more drugs.”

“If that’s all, then why the fuck did you help her B&E on camera?” I retort.

“My precious,” he replies, only half ironically, as he gently pats his pocket.  “But I’m still trying to get a line on her real machinations. Eleminate the impossible and whatever’s left…”

Good ol’ Sherlock Holmes fallacy,” Picky retorts. “About as useful as a CSI department without a DNA kit.”

“Well, you’re clearly angling for some type of confrontation,” the Kid says, suddenly doing a terrible impression of Basil Rathbone. “Note the forced entry and camera, the pass through the Junta connected Rock Room, and that Hans Gruber line, even going so far as doing the bit with the voice…”

“Holy shit, I can’t throw out a line from my fourth favorite copaganda flick of all time without getting the business from you squares?” Picky hollers.

“What are your top three?” Etch interjects, in a droll, dry voice that crackles with some form of delight. For a moment, Picky’s eyes go wide, welling with eager hope, as if someone is actually interested in her Nick Hornby list shit. You can practically see the word Pelham forming on her lips. Then her face sinks as Etch’s wry smile gives away the game. “Why are you bullshitting them? They deserve to know what they’re getting themselves into.”

“They know what they’re getting into when they tag along with me,” Picky says.

“Tag along? Tag along!” the Kid moans. “You had to sweet talk me for like… wait, you told Etch the plan before you told me?” 

“No, you idiots,” Etch says, letting a drop of frustration into her demeanor. “As I’m almost certain I mentioned, I actually pay attention to past behavior and current circumstances, which makes it trivial to reliably predict future events. How long have you dipshits hung around this disaster piece over here when it seems like you don’t know her at all?”

“Always appreciate you defending me, Etch,” Picky rasps. “Especially with such aggressive ableism.”

“Believe me, this is not a compliment. You’ve somehow literally brainwashed the paranoid guy and “tell it how it is” guy into not seeing the danger in front of them.”

“There’s danger in front of us?” the Kid asks.

“Holy shit, you helped her break in here! I don’t even think you remember that, I think you’re dangerously obsessed with your magic egg.”

“Do not talk about my egg, Etch,” the Kid says, real slow.

“I’m just saying, if you aren’t looking for some kind of fight, then you came to the exact wrong place with the exact wrong person. I’m here because I understand the stakes, have already processed them, and through my personal autonomy, decided to stick around even though I have a way better danger sense than you fucking crybabies.”

An unusual quiet descends upon our crew, and for a brief moment I tell myself that it must be from my thoughtful consideration and the Kid’s boiling scorn. Yet when I look over at him, he seems blankly placid – his normal expression – and I’m the one who feels a lil bit pissed off. Etch has been in Picky’s life for about a third of the time I’ve hung out with her. It’s just… shitty to try and ego attack me into some sort of fucked up intimacy war… you know what, sometimes I’m just not super fond of Etch. 

Picky, well known for not enjoying it when other people talk about her right in front of her, has rapidly picked up her own pace, and we follow along for a couple dozen meters, from where the Slipknot-Phish stoners had emanated, then pass through the Gate that Picky’s already tramped into.

This Gateway is so much nicer than the wood paneling and fluorescent lights of the corridor behind us, although I suppose I’d find any room more pleasant with pinball than without it. This hall is one of my faves, full of ‘80s tables from Angel Pinball Co., when the company was attempting to stay competitive with the pre-eminent stars of the industry, BobsyHewer.

In the 80’s, as pinball neared it’s final zenith, Angel didn’t have the liquidity to make their games as solidly as their formerly-close Chicago competitors – Angel was now located in Ashland, NC – so they endeavored to make their games jollier, giving them humorously ostentatious and imaginative visual designs – wacky games splayed with goofy cartoon scenes.

These pins also have super fun names, like Lodge Bums, Safari Party!, and The Midnight Special Squad. Compared to the staid product of ’80s BobsyHewer, who were all about designing games around the mass market, Angel tables felt like the Mad Magazine version of pinball.

In this 30m-long, 15′-foot wide chamber, the walls are at least covered in drywall, cheap as it may look. The top of the wall is painted a kind of sickly yellow, while the bottom is sponged with a somber blue. These colors are separated with an aggressively- jagged pattern running all the way down the wall, once bright red but now more a pallid pink.

This rather striking piece reminds me of nothing so much as an impressionist take on The Mountains of Madness by my favorite racist writer (Look, we’ll get into it, at some point we’re gonna deconstruct that motherfucker to his rotten core) or maybe a sharpened pair of teeth, barely hiding a deep and bilious gob.

The fact that this was someone’s vision of “the Eighties” is hilarious, and it totally fails on that level. But the actual tableau, while primitive, shows an eye, a “folk art” (Jesus that phrase is classist as fuck, innit, ) strain of outsider-ism that suggests the tortured nature of the painter ( keeping in mind that I don’t really know what I’m talking about, like Bertie Wooster commenting on a bit of art’s patina.) 

 The Gateway’s lighting is a simple row of 80’s wall sconces, those multi-color eggshell-shaped fixtures on hinges that were every mall’s best friend. The glow they give off is warm and dim, just like it should be in an arcade, ever since we finally accepted how much predators, both the CSA wrong-uns and those fond of larceny, used the lack of light in their targeting.

The Junta are one of the view who keep their arcade in near total darkness anymore, because, y’know, they’re classic crypto-fascists who like to maintain a general vibe of patriarchy on the Cathedral’s floor. They absolutely know that the dark brings out a minacious element in a bunch of coked-up, drunk videohead creeps who actually are half as dangerous as I make everything else out to be. 

The carpet is on point for the era, at least; that dirty red, black, and brown shag polyester that’s less an ‘80s thing than a late ‘70s thing that was rarely updated in a house until the current occupant died. It’s a nice detail; reminds me of that one Stranger Things episode I watched (love that Barb, I bet she’s the protagonist by the end of the show (don’t write in).)

When we recreate “the 80s” we’re actually, of course of course, regurgitating the aesthetic of the early 90s, further proving the fact that we’ve brainwashed ourselves into imagining that “time” has any actual delineation.

  The music is on point, with Cyndie Lauper belting out lyrics that don’t seem to have much to do with the Goonies, but are still pretty dope. I turn down the Cattle Decapitation I was playing in my head, as Good Enough is my jam, one of like ten songs I can actually play on the geetar.

RD Ichi 

As for the ’80s, Angel games that stuff this hall, they have a full set of 17, including the two rarer dot-matrixes. It’s slightly surprising that these DMs are actually allowed on the playfloor, but then again, the first one is unloved despite its rarity, and the second only has cache for its licensed theme. 

These two pins are noticeably more run down than most of the other tables in the hall, however, which suggests to me that there just might be a more pristine version of the latter, at least, in the Junta’s special showroom. Or maybe that table is just so valuable that it can only be part of the wealthiest collectors, the shitheads on top of the shitpile. No price is too high for these dbags, who get off on hoarding of the rarest tables, and keeping popular games out of circulation. Sucks for the poor person with a Rare Pull like this.

All of the tables, save for the DMs, are festooned with the extremely caricatured bits of cartooning all around the backglass and playfield, hiding gags within gags, along with some underwear-level cheesecake antics for the fellas (sigh.) The pins are stuffed with wild characters in crazy situations, giving these games an overall impression of delightful ‘toon chaos.

In contrast, the BobsyHewer tables of the era were known for their solid build quality, which made the sharp and fast gameplay of their titles possible. Their pins were quite expensive, even adjusting for inflation. Generally they cost almost two-thousand bucks more than an Angel game.

They were also heavy as fuck, weighing in at 230 pounds, on average. Their shape and size made them awkward to ship, they took up twice the space of video games that might each make twice as much, and their themes and designs had the stuffy feel of old craft.

But the recently paired up pinball juggernauts had a reputation of quality that preceded them, and arcades were willing to pay the premium to get their newest games. Many of the BobsyHewer pins in the ’80s paid for themselves within a few months, if the arcade had brisk foot traffic.

The 80s Angel tables, in contrast, feel cheap and light, almost like toys. The digital tilt sensors are much too generous, even on their highest setting. The gameplay is more floaty than a BobsyHewer, and sometimes it feels like the flippers are underpowered on purpose. 

This combination of factors are precisely what makes these games so goddamn fun. You can put a lot of english on them, thanks to the general failure of the digital tilt sensors, which were designed in-house and absolutely suck (one of the biggest mistakes the new platform designers made.)

By using a little light force on the table, you can fuck with the game’s physics in a massive way, essentially “choosing” which way the ball will roll. Now, admittedly, this type of of play is not as impressive as someone who plays a zero-nudge “clean” game.  But it is absolutely not cheating, no matter what your local pinball proprietor screams at you.

This wonkiness on the ’80s Angels gives players a huge boost of ball control and manipulation. Although their flipper gap is still dangerous – it’s slightly wider than the other company’s product – you’re safer from STDM tragedy, and from draining the ball down the outlines, with a bit of graceful shuddering.

It’s just so fuckin’ tip-top-notch, so long as you have a basic understanding of what you’re doing when applying a bit of action: rather than moving the ball around the machine, you’re moving the the world underneath the ball, which remains generally static,

These machines are super fun to play and own on the Drop, where pinball technicians are… maybe, like… a dollar a dozen? Being a game technician is a job that’s pretty much always available here, since the millions of games that stuff this Devil’s Cum Drop are at least half-broken more than half of the time.

The backside of this situation is that the pay is shit, since the market is so wide open. It’s not an easy job, and you need to understand complex mechanics and engineering. But the genius room is crowded on the Drop; sometimes i feel like I’m suffocating against the wall from the press of all those very clever bodies.

The Kid claims he can make ten times as much sucking coins in the same amount of time a “game janitor” does, which may be true, but… you know…. the token sucking.

RD ni

In the Reality of the 80s, technicians were rare, and destined to become rarer as the home market ravaged the arcade scene. Some of them became quite wealthy in the endeavor as more and more people who remembered how to do this complicated shit died.

The 80’s Angel tables were difficult on-location machines to operate at a profit. The tables constantly broke, partially the result of poor build quality, which exacerbated the wrecker situation – and there will always be wreckers, will always be people who hate the world – who inevitably fucked these toys up.

Wreckers are the worst, in the Genuine Human Trash sense. These dangerous monsters don’t use a little “light” english – which again is less impressive than a clean game but is not cheating – but a true violent disrespect, slamming the machine around like they’re fist-fighting with it. Not only does this kind of truly antisocial bullshit behavior expose the wrecker’s hatred of pinball, but it lays bare their own intense self-loathing. Seems to me, anyway.

As part of an on-going business concern that was now on life support, the corners Angel cut on the factory floor built to an eventual and inevitable catastrophe.  But as a swan song from the first victim of the corporate pinball wars, I think they’re totally fucking fantastic.

RD: san

 Angel & Sons Pinball Co.’s immense fortunes had started to reverse in the wake of Old Man Engel’s lethal stroke in 1959. Hagen Engle lived to be 71, and died almost immediately afteer his deteriorating health and mind finally made any real work impossible.

When his son, Conrad, took over, the business was still gangbusters, Angel was in first place by a country kilometer, and the sixties were looking bright, even if some folks down on the factory floor grumbled about him knocking off the “& Sons” portion from the company name so soon after the funeral, grumbling that it was pure disrespect to the memory of his Old Man and war-hero brother.

 Conrad wasn’t bothered; in his eyes he was finally getting his due for all the difficult and complicated administrative work he‘d been toiling over for years now, to cover for his very stubborn and steadily dementing papa.

In his youth, Conrad Engle had been an advocate for change, for trying to stay ahead of the market by attempting to innovate new concepts for the EM platform. He was certain that it was capable of so much more than it was currently presenting. 

Meanwhile, his arch-conservative father had become deeply resistant to change in the final decade of his life. Inventing pinball with flippers had brought him his enormous hoard and made him the first pinball millionaire, and since the technology of the machines had barely advanced since then, he was happy to stay that course. Angel & Sons dominated the market, after all, remaining as the number-one pinball manufacturer in the world during the mid-century.

Now that Conrad was less young and foolish, and finally had access to all of the books, both cooked and clean, he could much more easily see the wisdom of his father’s hypervigilant approach to the business and the market. Change, after all, was expensive, and his father had firmly predicted that the technology of pinball probably wouldn’t advance much until after the year 2000.

 Conrad wasn’t as much of a technology skeptic as his father had been, so he had no illusions that the tech wouldn’t be moving briskly in the coming decades, thanks to World War 2 and the Cold War race to space. His father’s relative disinterest in the Space Race likely related to his inability to understand sophisticated concepts anymore. When the old man started ranting about the subject, Conrad truly believed that his unsound papa was expecting two rockets to drag racing around the moon.

Conrad, in contrast, understood the general idea of what might be crucibled in a barely-cold tech war between two massive empires, willing to throw endless resources at a patriotism-fueled competition, in order to win absolutely. Such a masive endeavor couldn’t help but drag all of technology forward, since technicians and engineers on both sides were forced into constant states of invention.

For example, the humble transistor had been invented in 1947, as an emergent property of a total war tech jump. Now, in less than a decade, it was starting to enter the mass market after sophisticating, by orders of magnitude, during the multi-decade Space Race, forming the bedrock of the powerful calculating units that would inevitably be created out of sheer necessity. Multi-transistor machines pointed to a different kind of pinball, and a very different sort of world.

But Engle felt that the platform base and factory floor would hold up through the end of the decade, at least, and he soon started to find himself repeating the old man’s shibboleth that he’d once so intensely loathed, telling anyone who insisted he innovate or adapt that it was “pissing money into a bucket with a hole in it.”

Unfortunately for his predictions, pinball innovation in the early 60’s turned out to be the most boisterous moment of development since the machines first went electric in ‘33, and prophesied the revolution that the game would soon undergo.

By the end of this process, pinball oldheads would whine that their hobby was leaving them behind. That’s usually a pretty good sign; whenever the old timers are whinging about whatever thing they get a kick out of, it all adds up to their disdain for that once-holy domain, which had been all theirs just moments before, becoming more accessible and less idiosyncratic for all.

These old coots’ days of playing the glorified, mildly interactive form of pachinko they adored were coming to a quick end. 

As a foolish kid, Conrad had been right about trying to get more out of the EM platform, and as a foolish adult he’d taken after his father’s antique beliefs of resisting change. The problem with this outlook is that, in material reality, things never stop changing, ever.

So, pinball innovation progressed rapidly in the early 1960’s. In ‘62, Hewer first unveiled the drop target, in their title Happy Hobos. These are the little rectangular tiles that resemble a row of teeth. The tiles collapse into the table when hit, and when the whole row is knocked down, they all simultaneously pop up with a satisfying series of clicks, ready to be knocked down again. This added a flashy new aspect to both scoring and movement, and players immediately clocked that the drops made for more dynamic play.

Angel’s entry into the innovation arms race came in 1963, with their introduction of the spinner, in their title Dip Drop ‘n Lift. As a prototype, Angel’s designers had been working on the spinner for more than five years, with a firm belief in the last three that the component was ready to ship. 

Engle had kept a leash on the project, thinking that it would be the trump card for whenever one of the other companies might release a table with a new fad. The spinner, which was posted in the middle of the playfield, twirled around when the ball passed through it, pumping up the numbers on the scoring reel. It was a fun gimmick, perfect for the table’s swing-dance theme, adding to the multi-action movement of the game.

But when compared to drop targets, one might call the spinner a nice little compliment. Drops produced a real, tactile feel, strengthening the player’s physical bond with the machine. The spinner could only offer a bit of whimsy; important, to be sure, but not a key development.

Ultimately, Angel would make several of these spinner-centered machines, each of them less successful, before having to admit that the prominence of a mid-playfield spinner actually deadened play. Spinners were here to stay, but they were quickly relegated to orbits or other shots that had more vital functions. It became another minor element on a table stuffed with superior toys.

Conrad’s clever plot to change the narrative back to Angel after Hewer’s first shot had middling success at best, but he wouldn’t have to wait long for the topper to come along, one that would ultimately consign Angel to third place in this particular battle, in a preview of the shitstorm that would swell in earnest in a few short years.

It was Bobsidy who took the whole game, in terms of early ‘60s technological escalation, by introducing a true and fearful violence into pinball, one that would sate the bloodlust of the modern player, and deliver on their constant desire for more robust physics. The sentiment had been bubbling up that there was something more than the modern game needed, and Bobsidy came up with a pretty good answer: the pop bumper.

Y’know, the kind of thing old timers might bemoan once the change becomes inevitable. They aren’t wrong, exactly, especially from the context they exist within. It’s just that they’ve simply been alive for far, far too long.

Bobsidy’s ebullient Fantastic Canasta!, was an absolute sensation when it released in early ‘64, mere months after Conrad Engle’s lame attempt to splash the pot. The pin was themed around a modern-era game show featuring the titular card game as it’s basic conceit.

Game shows of the ‘60s were desperate to separate themselves from the boilermaker quizzers of the ‘50s and the controversy they had created. In their grim wake came the era of the wacky, fun, low-stakes version of the genre, courtesy of hit-making producers Goodman and Toddman (hopefully referred to in their time as “the two mans”.) 

Pinball, of course of course, had a massive advantage when it came to the aesthetics of the televised game show. TV production designers would try to find ways to make the colorful live sets translate onto the black and white televisions that dominated the day, using gradient and shade in attempt to convey the necessary joy-level to activate whatever chemicals that caused people to watch this shit.

Those results were always middling, but Bobsidy had none of these restrictions, exploiting color in theming and illumination, creating an environment of vitality that the televised game show was robbed of, until the mass adoption of color TVs in the later part of the decade.

The imaginary game show featured one of the most popular card games of the ‘50s, although that had turned out to be its final heyday. At this point, interest in Canasta was quickly waning in the middle class living rooms of America, dying a slow death thanks to it’s lack of mechanics in a further cyberizing world.

It was the more sophisticated game of Bridge that took over the swelling empire of the United States, which was becoming more desperate to find ways to sophisticate itself now that it was on the top of the heap. As a simpler, easier to understand game, Canasta was becoming the thing that kids played before they learned the difficult nuances of Bridge.

It was no coincidence that the main layer of complication that placed modern bridge-whist above other, similar tarot-likes was bidding, thus adding an element of capitalist market strategy to the game.

Still, many waning card games were still popular amongst the great unwashed, salt-of-the-earth general public, and likewise they hoovered up these new wacky gameshows like they were trying to get the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act signed.

Both of these factors contributed to Fantastic Canasta! being a huge hit, one of Bobsidy’s biggest. But it wasn’t the theme that caused pinheads – who will play any old slop if the gameplay is fun or introduces new elements -to keep feeding their quarters into that annihilating slot. 

Bobsidy’s “mushroom” pop bumpers, first released on Fantastic Canasta!, were the potent new element the sickos had been craving. They were presented in a tight triad formation, injecting a near lethal dose of frenetic chaos into the game.

The Pop’s punchy response was due to the tight rubber rings wrapped around the bottom of the bumper. Even the humble rubber band was swiftly innovating due to the tide of Middle-Stage Capitalism. These were newer, tighter bands, bands that created extreme tension down in the guts of the pops, and then reacted with violent reaction whenever the ball dared to careen into them.

As a gameplay element, they’re actually kind of awful.  Pops are never something you want to shoot into purposefully, especially if you give a shit about having a successful ratio in shot selection. Pops are contradictory to pinball skill, which is mostly a process of trying to eliminate disorder by holding together, for as long as you can, the entropy that will eventually crush you. 

When modes came along in the late seventies, the pops and all the other recently invented gimmicks would often be vital to completing certain tasks of a given mode’s completion requirements. Thus one had to evolve their game to deal with the pops and their hungry, punchy nature.

But just after their debut, whether or not you were a kid first starting out, or a more enlightened old-timer hanging on, there was something extremely satisfying about the ball getting caught up in the knot of pops and staying there, creating a moment of illusory containment that ratchets up the anticipation of release the longer it continues.

It will come out, it has to come out, but it hasn’t come out, not yet. If the ball stays there long enough, you might enter a light f l o w state that helps release that sweet sweet combination of dopamine, serotonin, and kuro juice when it roars back onto the playfield.

The mushroom pop bumper itself would get upgrades, becoming hard plastic and fully-lighted, and growing lower to the table. Their rubber bands pythoned around their base at higher, tighter tensions, creating even more explosive reactions. This style of bumper quickly became universal, and were so standard on most games that their absence became notable. 

Over the years, the only machines which didn’t have pops were very purposefully – one might say religiously – made that way, mainly by one of the few designers given the special dispensation to do so. Rick Steves (no, not that Rick Steves) was famous for it, even though neophytes found his games “hard” because making shots is hard, and pops are both fun and actually do increase playtime for the beginner. 

But Steves was more or less the ur-example of being the exception that proved the rule. His career was very long and mildly successful less due to the fact that his games were (and still are) legitimately great, and more for being your favorite pinball designer’s favorite pinball designer. 

It’s only been recently that mushroom bumpers have started to vanish into obscurity, either by their absence or relegation to contained areas, which makes the action far less dangerous. The newer style of pinball play emphasizes skill and playtime, further suppressing chance after the silve age of pinball began the binding of homoginziation.

Longer per-ball playtime is a requirement for the flow chart gameplay of the modern pin, where modes lead to other modes, and wizard modes take can take an hour to trigger. This type of nuanced, some might say over-tweaked, gameplay only makes sense if you’re given a corresponding boost in play time, in order to discover its secrets.

This sophistication is one of the more significant changes that catering to the home market has wrought, as these games don’t require foot traffic or player overturn for the constant token swallowing that a business would require. Public, on-location games have specific perimeters of design, which facilitate a quick and flashy experience, where the lights and toys and vibe of the table are supposed to overwhelm your senses so much that you forget about the tokens you spent two minutes ago.

Home collectors expect every modern b&w to be attended to, including more complicated toys, better screen integration, longer playtime, and esoteric rulesets that both hew to the theme and keep people busy, while the games take players through a larger narrative than just ‘outrun the police.’ This style of game is the primary thing keeping the industry alive.

So, back on track… Bobsidy had sewn up the early part of the decade-long pinball tech war. Hewer, however, had a far better factory floor than legal department, and they would land the final blow in the battle of the ‘60s. The ramifications of that victory were profound for the industry, not the least Angel, which would face a typhoon of tiny cut circumstances that would ultimately destroy both the company, and the man.

Ever since Hagen Engle had (according to legend anyway,) invented the flipper, that gameplay element hadn’t changed much, but the philosophy around their potential utility in overall design certainly did. Early on, the flipper had simply been a randomizer that slightly elevated the possible skill level of the game, turning it from American Pachinko into it’s own branch on the bagatelle line,

The first Angel & Sons tables to have flippers were so successful that they essentially put three other companies out of business almost immediately, and had the rest scrambling to reverse engineer the device in order to stay afloat in these now roiling waters.

There were usually, no shit, six to eight flippers on those early tables, which may sound nice in the imagination, until you see their implementation. They aren’t in random places so much as unhelpful ones; many of them are in the middle of the playfield, and usually none at the bottom. Compared to the games of today, they’re a primitive experience.

As the game designers, over the decades, started placing flippers in more strategic positions, the game slowly but inevitably streamlined toward the more skill-based play that would soon emerge from this creative soup.

Hewer’s late sixties’ alterations were essential in creating the blueprint for the basic format we use today: two flippers at the bottom of the playfield, buffeted by large bumpers that regularly ping pong the ball over the death hole (a fraught experience no matter how much skill you possess,) flipper lanes cheek by jowl with the ball-murdering outlanes, which are svelte compared to the old double wides, but are still hungry, so hungry, so ravenous for that apple of Eris that gravity must provide.

With the dawning of the first true sense of control in pinball, there quickly came a lust from players to sophisticate the medium to an even more skill-based degree. Hewer’s final answer changed pinball completely: they added an extra inch to the flippers, bringing them from two inches to three.

Hewer’s flippers had been, like the rest of the industry, only two inches long for decades. The shift to three inches was radical and profound, and exponentially multiplied the myriad circumstances of the game: easier ball catching, faster shooting (strong enough to get up the ramps that would soon be universal,) better aiming, and an all-around more tactile connection to the machine.

(I refuse to make the joke that you, desperately juvenile as you are, are waiting for, although I acknowledge that by pointing this out, I have essentially made the joke in a more slippery way.)

The pinball flipper is essentially a lever, and adding to its length adds to its corresponding force, at least according to my deep research on Archimedes (mostly New Yorker cartoons.)

Pinball was a brand new game, and by this time, it was a successful one, so the larger outfits could weather the storm of a sudden platform shift without going under. Sacrifices, of course, would have to be made, to money, to capital, to Mammon.

It was, from a business perspective, a three-inch sea change that could only be brought about due to vicious capitalist competition amongst the already wealthy in order to increase their hoard: the American way. 

Hewer’s first pin in the 3″ format, was also the first direct sequel in pinball, taking after their 1960 title Ace of the Air, which had been their most successful table for years. Hilariously for the bastards at Hewer, that game’s theme had been a direct rip-off of what Bobsidy had been planning, in a history portending moment that can only be brought about by the foolishness of men.

Hewer’s fortunate “early discovery” of Bobsidy’s ’61 title gave Hewer a chance to make aviation-based cosmetic changes to the next game going on the line. Beating Bobsidy to the market, in this case, made a huge difference, as their competitors looked like a copycat trying to snatch some heat from the hot new game.

There were, you see, cunning layers of boyish taunting wrapped up in Ace of the Air II; the wounds from the first game were still pretty fresh in the long-memories of the assholes at both Bobsidy and Hewer. The sequel to a game that was ripped off was also ripped off, and that didn’t bother the boys at Hewer, already known for their amoral shenanigans… but it bothered them that, after hearing about the prank, Bobsidy was so bothered, and this fully unleashed their cheerful viciousness.

Something about those calculations just don’t seem to add up, but I’ll let you discern your own reason for feeling the incongruity. Unless you don’t!

When Hewer’s Aces of the Air II released in late ’69,, their “apology” was clear to insiders, Wrapped up in a shiny box that metaphorically said “FUCK YOU GUYS,” with the bright blue skies and patriotic hues of the valiant western jet planes, as they chased off and took down the fleeing red bogies.

This backglass was specifically arranged to be an updated version of Bobsidy’s Red Baron Blitz!, the game that Hewer had crushed a decade before, through corporate espionage, in an amazing display of pettiness that simply must be respected by haters around the world.

Introducing a revolutionary new element on a trollish rip-off theme was the most pointed jab at their next door competition, y’know, to really hurt their feelings in that mid-century way. If this plan had backfired, and Bobsidy had released first, it would be a spectacular backfire. But sometimes, the most childish plans do come to fruition.

Bobsidy had already been experimenting with 3-inch flippers for the better part of a year, after catching wind that other companies were toying with the idea. They whipped up a successful prototype in a few months, and set to trying to perfect the physics before they shipped.

Apparently their focus on the project and its secrecy meant that they had to slack in other areas, especially the regular “peeking” that took place between the literal conjoined rivals.

Bobsidy’s mistake was frontloading their intelligence work, which was fairly shoddy, and they really should have kept digging. But the only part that they could focus on was the trollish nature of the design (in fact, the theme had been a honeypot trap that worked spectacularly.)

The nasty teasing definitely pissed the Bobsidy boys off, but only wasn’t terribly motivating for them, as they all agreed that it was best to ignore this kind of playground taunting. Sometimes, responding to a mean-spirited poking by being the bigger men is absolutely the wrong decision.

Bobsidy found out three months before shipping that Hewer was already prepared to ship a three incher, and they did it in a particularly unethical way, if the rumored are true. Bobsidy’ had to shut down the production floor, and quickly figure out a way to quickly convert Rocket Attack! – if their mortal enemy was gonna do planes, they’d top it by going to space – into a three incher.

Since they’d been protyping already, it turned out to be a relatively simple fix, especially with the help of Avic Ziemianin, who offered a few ingenious ideas that took months off development. At one point, after hearing Hewer was having serious production issues themselves, the boys at Bobsidy started to believe they could catch up to, and even surpass, Hewer’s release

The ‘chaos at Hewer’ false flag certainly helped, but in reality Bobsidy would have had to work around the clock, and hire a whole bunch of new technicians to boot, to even get a sniff of Hewer’s release date, They didn’t possess nearly enough capital to do that, and who knows if they would have gone that route if they did, as the actuaries predicted the success of both games.

By the time Bobsidy were ready to ship, Hewer had beaten them to the market by three months. 

Ultimately, the childish antics and release date warring didn’t matter to anyone beyond those two adjacent factories on Chicago Street. After a disappointingly slow start for both machines, word of the new games and the amazing play they offered spread rapidly, and both titles went on to be wildly successful after a few months of sluggish sales.

Three inch flippers changed the game so utterly that, by 1970, both Hewer and Bobsidy had fully incorporated them, while folding in the previous decade’s creative progression. All of the new gimmicks from the early ‘60s were enhanced by the massive increase to ball control and shooting power.

But Engel still wasn’t convinced, even though the open conspiracy of modernity was coalescing four blocks down and around the corner. Angel were slowly adding the newer elements to their pins, when the designers begged hard enough for a budget to do so.

Conrad was very impressed by drop targets, as it reminded him of an element he’d imagined 20 years before; one of his last fancies of invention before he grew fatigued of his dad’s constant rejections and clammed the hell up.

He had no issues with making the drops a universal part of their games, but Angel’s bumpers were proprietary, and had worked fine for decades. Engle wasn’t going to kill his company’s identity for a new toy.

In the aggregate, Engle’s single biggest mistake of his life was focusing on the wrong toy. He was, absolutely, firmly, no-shit sticking to two-inch flippers, while other companies around the world began to standardize the three-inchers, which had overwhelmingly proved to drag a musty boardwalk amusement into the modern, increasingly digitized world. Here, Engel saw another opportunity to retain Angel’s unique play feel while everyone else chased the “silly new fad.”

Conrad Engel, in a classic second-generation fuck up, had transitioned from an unrespected nepotistic middle manager to The Big Boss, taking over a company with a dominant market share, and then convincing himself that he was the one who had brought the company to that position.

In truth, that feat was achieved by his father’s invention of the flipper, and in an odd reversal of that moment, that two-inch millstone was now firmly wrapped around the company’s neck.

 When he was still an apprentice with stars in his eyes, young Conrad had told himself that he would invent something monumental and game changing, as his father had done.  But in his dotage, once he’d inherited his father’s invention and all of the wealth that it had generated, he’d become obsessed with legacy rather than creation.

It was in late 1970, after the entire company had pleaded with him to update their tables into something at least resembling the new style, that Engel finally experienced the system shock of terrifying realization: both Hewer’s and Bobsidy’s explosive growth in the market had come at Angel’s expense. Conrad Engle had been focused on legacy and wealth to the point of obsession, and that fantasizing was threatening to run his company into the ground.

Engle could change. He would change. The company would get back to its roots of innovation, and he would lead the charge. They would claw back every scrap of market share, and then some, from the interlopers who basically only existed because of his father’s bright idea. And he would do it with this amazing thing he’d recently come into contact with, that brought him back into a world where he could do anything.

And so, Conrad Engle started making changes. Bold changes, risky changes, changes that immediately fucked up the factory’s production line. He was fueled by the cocaine that had started to flow in earnest into the United States from the global south, “ironically” at the same time the government was arming and funding the fascist entities in Middle America who controlled the flow of coke from south to north.

With a lot of sweat, blood, and unpaid labor hours, Angel managed to release THEY’RE HERE!! in late 1972. The theme was, overall, unclear, but it seemed to center around the idea that aliens might not blow us up if we could get them to play pinball, and also that 3-inch flippers were a really neat idea.

THEY’RE HERE!!! stubbornly refused to catch on, at least in Engle’s opinion. The general public didn’t totally reject it, but had to note its confusing theme and odd gameplay feel, significantly askew from the more polished games by Bobsidy and Hewer.

Although the remaining designers that hadn’t jumped the sinking ship begged him not to do it – dealing with management at Angel involved a depressing amount of begging – the game had ultimately been plotted by Engle and the mirror in his top desk drawer. He “designed” everything but the hard parts, parts that involved any math. Of course they’d complain, he’d think, they’d soon be out of jobs, while he took over full design duties.

This was one of those unfortunate “half-right” situations.

People in the pinball industry found it wild that Angel was putting out a celebration of a major pinball milestone, while being the last company to adapt. But then, the company had always arrogantly portrayed itself as the hero of pinball, which was the kind of carny ballyhoo that fooled the rubes, back when Angel was an unstoppable, first-place juggernaut. Now that they were on the skids, that kind of talk sounded like the hokum it was.

To add to the grim schadenfreude that the rest of the industry was thoroughly enjoying, Angel had no choice but to dust off the previous two games they’d completed. Engle had mothballed them, warehousing the lot in order to get THEY’RE HERE!!! out the door. These were games that had previously been finished and in condition to ship, and now they were molding in storage due to all hands being on deck for his current (second) obsession.

Engle had planned to strip the games for parts after THEY’RE HERE!!! revived the company to a new, higher glory, but when that fantastic plan somehow didn’t pan out, the two former games were pulled out of their filthy repositories and given full shops: an expensive but necessary restoration to get them back to shipping shape. 

Both Angel Pinball Co. and Engle desperately needed an infusion of capital, as economics had more-or-less forced their hand. But these titles, St. Louie 1903 and the aggressively hippy-themed SUMMER LOVE, were two-inch flipper games, which in the present moment, felt fully ancient and by-gone, especially next to all of the new and fun tables dominating arcade floors. They sold poorly, and for the first time in their 80 years in business, Angel & Sons Pinball Co. faced insolvency.

It was in early July, 1973, when Bobsidy took over the market, one that Angel had dominated for over 30 years, and then in late ‘74, Hewer passed them by.  Angel as a company was collapsing, and Engle was a man in the depths of a blow addiction, spending nights fast and loose at the new discotheques popping up everywhere, while his company, his marriage, and his life all spun into freefall.

It didn’t really matter that Angel had made no real plans to move to solid state by 1975, as there weren’t enough staff and infrastructure to support the transition anyway.

On the first of January, 1976, Conrad Engle was found splayed out over his desk, dead.  He’d died early the previous morning, and no longer had any employees or loved ones or friends to notice, save for the weekly janitor who came in a day later. Next to Engle, on the desk, was a revolver, still fully loaded and unfired. There was no significant amount of cocaine found anywhere in the office

The cause of death was a massive heart attack due to purposeful overdose, and it was clear to everyone that Engle had gone into that office intending to never come out of it.

As a company, Angel was an empty shell, basically unstaffed, currently incapable of producing new machines. Engle’s long suffering wife and daughters didn’t really want anything to do with it, but found if they disassembled what remained piece by piece, they could get a bit more money than trying to sell the whole shop. That would mean long hours dealing with Conrad’s financial fuck-ups, but they did want to recover some of the enormous amount that had gone up Conrad’s nose.

But it was a letter that Conrad’s mother had received, only to be delivered after his death, that revealed a “shocking” family secret, which convinced the whole family to sell the lot and be done with it.

Angel was sold to a holding company, back before they all turned into vampires of “equity” and weren’t only about draining a dying company of all of its value. Money and structure were put into Angel Pinball Co, which would keep its name going forward, but would now be run as a corporate venture within an anonymous conglomerate system. Angel’s board of directors, working with what little money they got from upstairs, leaned into the strategy of making fun, modern games that people might actually want to play.

The new Angel did well for the next decade, and even though they were in a distant second place in the solid state era (BobsyHewer’s mid-’80s marriage at least limited one spot on that list,) the industry was so hot while approaching its apex that being in distant second place meant something.  

When the dot-matrix age came sweeping in, and again changed the entire industry almost overnight, as the 3-inchers had, the boardroom overlords at Angel knew that their current factory platform couldn’t handle the tech. It may have been a sentimental nod to the company’s history as a Pinball Institution to put forward the money in an attempt to adapt, although that kind of talk seems ludicrous these days. 

 Angel did manage to make the switch, although they had to cut some major corners to do so. They produced two dot-matrix pins, both of which were production nightmares. These tables also happened to be the last two pinball tables that the Angel Pinball Co. made.

These games felt less like toys than bricks, they were nearly as heavy as a BobsyHewer and had proper, physical tilt sensors (there’s actually a little thingie hanging inside the machine that calls a tilt when it jiggles too much. Analog tech fucking rules!)

So they tolerated almost no english at all, which meant that now only the wreckers could use physical force to save the ball from a SDTM. The gameplay, however, had remained a facile, slow affair, and without being able to manipulate the physics in any safe way, they were a much more inert experience.

A major element that Angel had to cheapen out on was the dot matrix display; unfortunate since it was the whole point of upgrading. Angel’s was about half as tall as BobsyHewer’s and only slightly wider. And Hewer, under their old name, probably for some tax scheme, had just released Home Alone, the most successful pinball machine in history, to this day.

Home Alone was designed by Mike Dundee, who had been steadily iterating his games’ idiosyncratic playstyle, ever since being given his first director’s role on the title Volcano Chicago! which is about, well… the titular event, I suppose. Dundee’s design philosophy, his dedication to making progression a robust affair, his specific table elements and ramp placement, his dynamic bonus system… They were all there, from the beginning, in their natal form.

At this point in pinball’s state of play, it became less difficult for pinheads to discern the rules, which were at that point still fairly esoteric, made more so by the limited information the simple LED screens provided. Yet through the consistent repetition of playing a well designed game, you’ll find it’s actually teaching you how to play.

The general public, on the other hand, had almost no idea what they were doing (certainly not stopping that god damn volcano sprouting from Lower Wacker.) But they still didn’t hate it, as it offered an easy-to-understand spectacle, along with a new element, one that wasn’t game changing, but was certainly novel.

The Shaker Motor introduced on this pin made the table vibrate at different levels, from the subtle trembling of the first small pile of hot rocks, to the full, growling shuddering that sounds like a revving engine as the Volcano begins to destroy downtown Chicago. If players obviously couldn’t make it that far, the game would at least give the beginner a short taste of the full wizard mode shaking at the end of their game.

Dundee’s next few games were also disaster based, although the shaker motor was tossed out of his tool bag when he realized how much wear and tear his first game was enduring from the violent vibration. In it’s place, Dundee focused on gimmicks and toys; not because the company was pushing for them but because Dundee really liked them.

Mike Dundee had that reach/grasp thing going on; he wanted to integrate “toys” and “gimmicks” fundamentally into the machine, turning them from gags to legitimate gameplay elements,- like, people thought magnets were silly gags because no one had yet used them properly – and ascending beyond a point where elitists could find these things contemplable had they any spine. Dundee hated elitists of all kinds, or at least imagined he did, being ultimately a pinball libertarian.

His last game with no dot matrix was his most ambitious yet. Slippery Slides! which was about exactly what it said on the tin, provided that your particular experience with a water park is getting locked in after-dark with the murderous ghost of the previous park mascot, who’s maybe a little over-obsessed with the fact that he drowned in the shallow end.

The Mascot’s name is Sloppy, and Sloppy’s head, which is a major physical element that dominates the playfield, looks like a cross between a satanic Mr. Met and Hannibal Lector, what with the evil grin and opening and closing bite mask. This creature taunts the player constantly, swiveling it’s head and opening it’s maw with sinister call outs and an annoying shrill laugh. It’ll also give you hints about what you might want to do next, if you listen for them in between the taunts.

(It’s never made explicitly clear exactly who the ghost is in this situation; is it the person inside Sloppy who got killed, or did the actual mascot get killed, conceptually? The game played with this in the narrative. But if you asked Dundee about it, he was accuse you of worrying too much about a bullshit plot point in anything lease of all pinball.

Occasionally, if you piss Sloppy off enough through mode completion, its eyes glow red and it opens it’s mask and mouth wide. If you manage to shoot it into the head’s mouth before it’s shrieking ends, you’ll get your bonus multiplied by ten right then, which is potentially a huge score, now saved from a tilt kill (tilts traditionally ignore your bonus and jump right to your next ball, as punishment for your overzealous sins.)

Also, It’s pretty satisfying to shut Sloppy up for a minute by doing so.

The pin sold well, based on the same principle of giving the kind of people who might play for lark a bunch of fun stuff in their very short games. Pinball players also liked the machine a lot, but some were bothered by Dundee overcomplicating on his own design… all of his signature elements were mostly there; low, easy ramps that lead to a shot on a drop hole that activated the modes, a third two inch flipper at the exit of the left orbit, which gives you the chance to shoot into the right wall saucer lock.

But many of these elements had been a bit mixed up, and the playfield itself was much more busy and complicated than Dundee’s usual spaciousness design. To more seasoned players, who already knew of the coming dot matrix revolution, this game felt less like a genuine artistic statement than a warm up for something else.

In reality, that informed guess was exactly what was going on. In fact, Dundee knew before he started Slippery Slides! that BobsyHewer had, through some sort of miracle, acquired the license to the one of the hottest movies of the decade, one that was so popular that it had smashed through demographics on it’s way to becoming, adjusting for inflation, the 43rd highest grossing film of all time.

And so, his design for his last pre-DM game was a sort of frantic kitchen sink effort, his one last chance to perfect his craft, to nail down what he would want out of Home Alone: a rich, colorful, and, most importantly insanely violent cultural phenomenon, especially with a brand new screen to sell the sizzle while also actually being useful to convey information for players. By the time Slippery Slides! was finished, Dundee could see his next game almost completely in his mind.

If you play Slippery Slides! enough along with its follow up, you’ll notice they’re completely different beasts. The former has the all the physical gimmicks and tricks, everything an LCD pin could want. The latter is surprisingly sparse and reserved in playfield design, but integrated with the screen and the call-outs and the modes in an outstanding package that truly captures the spirit of the movie. It’s clear after extended play that the Slippery Slides! was a solid game, and that Home Alone was a pretty clear masterpiece.

Now, there are thousands of men (always men) who would totally disagree with that assessment. Some of them will tell you that screens were a gimmick that ruined pinball, some will just tell you how Slippery Slides! is obviously the superior work, or that Dundee is a hack, and some people are radical enough to reject Chris Columbus and everything he stands for. That’s just pinball and male opinion, baby!

A major reason for Home Alone’s success was the high quality of pre-production that had been occurring while Dundee powered through his old new game and pondered over his new new one. He kept several artists on retainer, and as he locked down Home Alone’s gameplay elements, he worked with them constantly to develop a consistent style, pulling the most readable art out of them, rather than the “best.”

Dundee’s already lengthy career had given him some decent industry contacts, and he hit these hard, not caring which branch he burned as he climbed the tree of getting to do what you want. He was spending every last unit of his luck in trying to find that one seemingly-inconsequential thread, one that would eventually unravel the big fluffy comforter of not getting to do what you want.

Turned out, Daniel Stern was a huge pinball fan. Once Dundee clocked that fact, he honed in, working his way up the quickly ramping difficulty that exists between “trying to contact a movie star” and “actually managing it.” When he finally got Stern on the line, the actor had been expecting the call, and in fact, was eager to be in a pinball game, especially one based on the most successful movie a character actor could ever hope for.

Would he help in trying to convince his castmates to do some callouts? Serendipity struck again (you get some luck points back if the original expenditure produces concrete results,) as the cast had grown close over making two movies with little time between the first movie’s release and the second entering production, so he was still living in that lovely glow of being able to pick up a phone and (eventually) talk to Catherine O’hara.

The end result of this brutal charm offensive reaped rewards well past what Dundee had expected. Stern, who was by far the most affordable, was happy to do a couple days plus pickups, and Harry was made the game’s narrator, not unlike Sloppy except without the big plastic head on the playfield.

They even put in a fun secret call-out, triggered, like many other games of the era, by a ridiclous amount of button-pushing to enter the code on a creditless machine. In it, Stern uses his Wonder Years voice to recount a quick version of the Home Alone story. It was an old gag for Stern by that point, but well-seasoned rather than half-baked.

Catherine Ohara was a regular visitor to Chicago, and agreed to give them an afternoon, being a game actor (in the traditional meaning of that phrase,) who enjoyed new and possibly fun experiences. She insisted her pay go to her favorite charity, some feed the kids shit she didn’t know was a grift, which was fine for everyone because her residual checks from the two Home Alone movies would likely be orders of magnitude more than what chump change they could offer.

They even managed to get McCulkin, for two hours, desperately close to the end of development. It was a fraught situation for a couple reasons, the main issue being that his callouts might be off time from the finished art, which then would necessitate a ton of dreary work, digging into the artwork and manipulating it, pixil by pixel, screen by screen, until it was ready to ship or they toppled over and died. These people who were already at their physical and mental limits being pushed too hard honestly not unusual situation when producing a Mike Dundee game.

But there was a reason Columbus had ultimately hired this kid to yolk a franchise to. Although McCulkin was rigid about the two hour time-limit (kid knew his value,) he was extremely professional, did what was asked, never minded multiple takes to get things right. gave some good feedback, and then immediately at the two hour mark, right in the middle of a line he was speaking, took off the headphones, and politely excused himself.

Dundee got the sense that the kid was carrying around a lot of weight… a good kid in a situation impossible to understand externally. He was also a good kid who’d done his job with no fuss (O’hara was ultimately a sweet and funny woman, so her medium level fuss had been all right to take.) Dundee could have asked for no more.

For one quick minute, they thought they were gonna get Pesci… lol they were never gonna get Pesci.

Home Alone, no matter where or when you’re reading this, is still the best selling pinball table of all time. The capitalist pressure cooker that always required intense and unnecessary material output wasn’t unique to Earth or any other place where conscious entities gather for “fellowship.” But Humans were especially good at it, and no one else in all of spacetime has found a reason to build 25,000 pinball machines (including the two special editions) all at once.

There’s no best pinball table outside of the subjective. Likewise, there’s no pin that is “perfectly homogenous” in the sense that it could appeal to every level of play. Many of the higher-skilled players felt the latter, that they felt locked out and held down by how easy it was, let alone it’s kiddie theme that brought kiddies to their side of the arcade, which they found particularly odius.

For a while, maybe a long while, most of these loathed the game on some sort of primeval level, as if it wa token fetish, portending the end of all which they loved. (this was before they knew this kind of language was dicey, so we must somewhat forgive them.)

For this group – who I hesitate to call elitists because you’re allowed to not like something if you don’t get a kick out of it – only nostalgia of the property or a deep love of Mike Dundee design would keep them playing, barely tolerating its stripped down, almost de-evolutionary version of what Dundee had seemed to be working up to his entire career.

Some people have an amazing ability to get things exactly wrong.

But the kids, as the say, “dug it the most, dude.” Dundee truly had leaned hard into some zen core of design, where everything just worked; it was a clean table that featured most of his old elements, save for the few that he was growing to dislike, combined with a coherent and exciting screen with tons of fun call-outs. Medium level play was rewarded quickly and pointedly, and once you learned the basic layout, it was very much a fun game for people who liked a lot of scoring.

And man… once you pull that plunger back and shoot it, and you’re greeted on the first ball with that iconic shot of Kate McCallister rising out of that plane chair, her eyes opening wide from the deep chill of a horrific realization, her actual voice providing the self-loathing terror of the moment, you’re right in there as she screams, iconically, the name of her son, who has indeed been left home alone. You can probably hear it clearly in your head, if you’re able enough to do that sort of thing.

The rest of the game felt on point, with that Chris Columbus upper-class suburban set design, and modes that took you upstairs and downstairs., complete with rotating toys and opening new passages that indicate the level you’re on.

These modes are considered “complete” once you start them, so even if you don’t finish the mode, you still get the plot coupon you need for wizard mode., Complete them fully, and you” get extra rewards that make the gameeasier to complete

For example, if you finish the “Rockin’ ‘Round the Christmas Tree” mode, and convince the Wet Bandits that a Holiday party in full swing, you’ll get bonus time for the wizard mode. If you make friends with the kindly town pariah in the “Old Man Marley” mode, he comes earlier than normal in wizmode, and it takes three less kills to finish the game.

Dundee’s design was clearly weighted to make wizard mode easy to trigger, and he considered that mode to be the actual game, featuring the full, final, brutal battle through the house, where Kevin McCallister kills the Wet Bandits about nine times, maybe twice-at-once with the vicious bucket braining.

On-site testing down at their usual arcades and other areas of high foot traffic showed that almost exactly 3% of the players activated Wizard Mode, which gave Dundee a few more sleepless nights. That number never got higher than 5% on the test machines, but it hardly seemed to matter at all. Casual players loved the game, and found the “start” of the game good enough that they didn’t need anything more.

And although they might protest about the kiddy theme and the low difficulty, most pinball players of any skill do like playing games where the wizard mode activates easily, and some of the grumbling regulars began to understand the philosophy around Dundee’s bisecting design.

Home Alone was a massive pinball hit, the most successful table ever produced. It vaulted Mike Dundee from “Promising new guy whose maybe running out of steam,” and into the pantheon of Pinball Gods, along side names like Gary Garcia and Donny Cremoxanis, and Avic Ziemianin. The game improved upon DM integration and sound design, propelling, again, things to a whole new level; a level which players, going forward, were going to start expecting from any new pin.

Angel’s designers, along with any other company not named BobsyHewer, were spooked by this unexpected masterpiece and financial juggernaut, but reacted to this development in a fairly prudent move for a now clearly inferior technology. Yes, Home Alone gave the flash, the full bells and whistles treatment to their screens, but in the end, they were just fancier versions of the same old pinball game design.

Angel, however, would offer a more connected experience to make up for the lack of screen space, by visualizing the game in the least abstract way they could. They attempted to convey narrative progress via real-time simulation, with the main tableau always staying on the screen, giving these pins a bit more of a “video game” feel; a divisive issue, but one that edged toward appreciation, if, for nothing else, their big-swing attempt at successful novelty.

Angel’s first DM title was THE BRIDGE, which has a deep back story so fucked up that of course I’m gonna get into it…but I’ll save that one for a more appropriate time. THE BRIDGE was Angel’s third horror-themed game in the decade, although their earlier titles, VAMPIRE HIGH and SLIMETIME, still had a good deal of whimsy and silliness, being throwbacks to the ’50s and ’60s horror the designers had grown up with, and no doubt missed terribly.

With THE BRIDGE, Angel went full dark. It was questionably the first “hard horror” pinball table, as several fly-by-night Italian pinball operations put out a few tables nominally based on giallos in the 70s. But even though the generous blood on the backglass was always profondo rosso, the games themselves couldn’t have been more generic, with no real connection to the genre beyond the explicit gore staring players in the face.

I feel like I’d argue that those games, despite their carny promise of reeking carnage that doesn’t deliver, are the technical winners (those backglasses feature some remarkably heinous shit.) But THE BRIDGE was certainly the first table designed t-to-b to fully incorporate the grim narrative into the gameplay itself.

And in another pinball first, by almost 20 years, it was the first table to feature zombies. They weren’t called zombies, but although these mutated humans were named by the game as “Freakers,” zombies they were indeed.

It would be nearly a decade before the zombie, as a concept, was considered anything but drive-in trash,. THE BRIDGE was a game in many ways ahead of it’s time, undermined by a 90s Grimdark asthetic so heavy, it became ironically comical. This is a weird one… kinda fun to play, sometimes.

The player’s job is to lead the last of humanity over (wait for it) THE BRIDGE, and then blow a TAC nuke to end the Freaker threat forever.  It very much does not mean to be silly, which gives it a real sheen of awkward goofiness…  To be honest, I quite like playing this one once in a while…. Yeah, I quite like it.

THE BRIDGE was a flop, and now Angel needed the next game to be a hit to avoid going under.  And a hit is what they got; a real blessing from the irony gods, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Most pinball players know that there’s a The Saga of Sylvia pin out there, and if they’ve played it, they probably know it plays kinda garbo. Also, they probably do not give a fuck.

The strength of the Sylvia property (known as Shōnen wa Shōjo o Sukuu (lit. The Boy Saves the Girl) in the east,) can’t be underestimated. Despite its middling play, facilitated by Angel’s middling platform, the pin is actually well designed to match both the aesthetic, which was massively improved by the help of the fine Nintengen artists, and the strong integration of the property with the gameplay elements that Sylvia fans would expect.

Nintengen had been easy to deal with during initial development, and even sent video game rock star Nokemono Sasaki, creator of both the Sylvia series and the even more popular Growing Roman, to pay the factory floor a promotional visit.

After looking over the design documents, Sasaki flashed his huge, goofy grin while giving a big thumbs up (which, in true Japanese fashion, was either a totally earnest gesture of support, or the meanest sarcasm anyone in the room had ever experienced (look, the Japanese aren’t “inscrutable,” they’re just unsubtle dicks when trolling westerners.))

Buoyed by an exciting property that hit every demo they were hoping for, Angel had its biggest success in 30 years. The industry had been impressed when Angel managed to get a license to one of the world’s key video game properties, and doubly so that they’d manage to turn it into such a popular and well-liked game. Most folks were honestly just glad to see that Angel had once again crawled back from the brink, and would hopefully survive for at least another game.

Angel was not among them.

It turned out that Nintengen’s shark tank of lawyers had been very busy in the background of the deal.  As production ramped up, Nintengen kept altering the specifics of the agreement, and without the strangely absent legal support from above to push back for Angel’s sake, the accordance was starting to feel less like a bargain and more like performing indentured servitude for a cold and distant company.

There were spiteful conversations toward the end of development, and moments of madness (they discussed in earnest chopping up the finished games and telling Nintengen to burn in hell.) But at last it was clear that the concessions had to be indulged, and Angle had to ship, as it was necessary to keep them solvent as a company.

 The major problem was, according to the math, that Nintengen, who had not acutally worked on the game, was making most of the up-front profit off of Angel’s machines. There was something slippery about actually using Nintengen art that hadn’t ever been teased out on Angel’s side during bargaining. That part of the deal had seemed vague and almost unimportant, but it was turning out to be a butcher’s knife right in the heart of Angel.

During the cold and unsentimental autopsy of the project, Angel’s board figured out that they’d been targeted by the Japanese company, which deemed them to have a more squeamish and sentimental leadership with less connection to the conglomerate higher-ups, and much more importantly, a weaker legal team than any other serious Pinball concern.

As for why they did it… sometimes Nintengen just likes stirrin’ the shit, to see what comes out that they might use for themselves and their philosophy of “lateral thinking with withered technology.” It was a vicious move, but very much in line with Japanese corporate culture and it’s quixotic lust to bring back the roaring eighties. For a Japanese toy company to last over a century, they kinda gotta be a dick about everything.

Anyway, even if the profits hadn’t been steered toward Nintengen and its frightening lawyers, it wouldn’t have made up for the large deficit, mostly garnered from the failed investment on the tech update Angel had been forced to endure, along with the pricy nature of the Sylvia property to begin with.

Further pre-production issues on the third hypothetical game gave the upper board a clear view that keeping the tiny subsidiary alive seemed like pissing money into a bucket with a hole in it. The administrative capos of the old money were ultimately uninterested in reviving the company for a third time.

Angel was once again put into holding, which by now had gone full into it’s true form of “extraction equity”, after realizing no one cared anymore. The age of corporate colonialism had fully manifested into it’s final eldritch form, developing into a sick and parasitic game for obscenely wealthy investors, aa basic goddamn rich man’s wager, one that isn’t legitimate unless it fucks with people’s lives: who among them could most efficiently harvest the hard work of other, mostly impoverished people? Who would suck up the last of the blood and gore from the husk of mid-century capitalism, shitting out nothing less than social disintegration?  

It quickly became official; in April, 1996; Angel & Sons Pinball Co., the first true dominant of the pinball industry, was also the first of the Chicago Three to succumb to corporate colonization in a swiftly contracting empire…

…We walk slowly, reverently, through this pinball church aisle, flanked by it’s mechanized pews – come in, friend, and pick a table! This room is saturated with the reek of carny joy more intense than the mixers, as if there’s a censure in here that pours forth the vinous incense of an accidental positive outcome, delightfully ass-pulled due to corporate desperation.

I guess Etch isn’t feeling much beyond their handphone – this kind of thing isn’t really their shit, as far as i know – but the rest of us are lulled into a state of minor ecstasy produced from the fun fun fun pins and the human emptiness within the room that suggests we wouldn’t be bothered here if we play them.

Not that we’re going to be allowed to, of course, thanks to Picky’s relentless and temporally convenient desire to move forward.

As the consecrated rows of pews pass, I can feel a sense of need welling up in my guts, the kind of competition horniness that we all love and hate. Sometimes I forget that I play THE BRIDGE most of the time I come here, and that it causes a  legitimate Pull when I’m near it that shivers in my gut. As we walk forward, inching closer and closer to the machine, this sudden-onset Pull gets stronger, more vice-like.

I’m starting to feel beyond the borderline, and am ready to announce that I don’t give a fuck what the plan is, I have to play this game… we’re almost there and I need it so bad… Thump. With my compromised attention, I manage to run into Picky’s back, Three Stooges style.

“That shit is gonna get you killed one day, for really real. You Pulling or writing?” she giggles, turning towards me. Generally, when when I smack into her or the Kid or the wall (she always finds the last one a laugh riot,) she knows I’m in Feed Haze or the Pull.

“I don’t do it in unsafe situations,” I reply, ignoring Picky’s stifled snicker. “And I was doing both, actually.” I talk with my voice of authority, which sounds like I’m best boy of the whole first year class. “I just wrote the later history of the Angel Pinball Company in my head, and now I wanna play this wonderful, fucked-up game.”

“Yeah, there’s no way you could have written a history of anything, as thorough as you like to think you are, in a minute and a half.” Picky’s still laughing, but at least it’s more playful than caustic. As long as she doesn’t start accusing me of using AI to write… as that is one of the most disgusting things I can imagine doing, even including some really terrible stuff.

“I know you think my brain shorthand somehow doesn’t count, just because I can’t write out every single word, while also actively experiencing the world,” I sigh, really enjoying having this conversation for the eight-thousandth time. ”But the information is all there, impeccably retained,”

“If you’re actively trying to process two attention-sucking things, then that information is profoundly corrupted by the time it even gets close to your brain, ” Picky says. “ Doubly so after it’s filtered through your idiosyncratic subjectivity. The only reason you record what we’re saying is because I made you… real dick move, forcing me to actually make you appreciate the already thin-ice you were on regarding privacy and general creepiness..”  

“To be honest,” she continues, “I’ve never held you accountable for that.” She then sighs, doing a lengthy gag of pretending to deeply consider something she’s already made up her mind about. “And while my forgiving nature is impeccable, and I’m okay with letting that situation go, the guy who weighs your heart at the entrance to Egypt-heaven might have a thing or two to say.” 

During this monologue, she slowly but deliberately turns toward the game she knew I was fiending for. Then she swivels her head to me, cringing her teeth in a mock-apologetic way that reminds me of that one Survivor .gif, (you know it, although half of you are thinking of a different one and that’s ok.)

She positions her token at the bottom of the slot, holding it there with her index finger, letting it sit fast. She’s taking this bit pretty far. “As they say in Egypt, eye for an eye… sowwy mommy.”

She rips her hand away, and the Token slides into the slot. It bounces down the glissade and stumbles quickly past the credit button, then plunges into utter darkness.

Now I know we’re all having fun here, carrying on with the jousting and jesting and good-time jokes. But we both know the game doesn’t actually start until you actually hit the start button, it just sits there with latent promise and one credit. She’s not gonna press that button and steal my Pull, she’s not that much of a dick….   

…hold on, wait a minute, she’s totally that much of a dick.

But there’s still time, even though she rarely shares her tokens with anyone, because she’s a greedy little witch, there’s still time for her to bail out of this duel-worthy offense she’s about to perpetrate (dueling isn’t technically legal, but legality has little to do with occurrence in the Junk Arcade.)  

Her face starts to get more strained as her hand starts twitching, and begins to “walk” toward the start button, making it seem like it’s getting harder and harder as she nears her monstrous finale of being a goddamn asshole game thief.

You’re gonna steal my Pull and not even drop in another token for your favorite player  2?” I say, in a disbelief that’s only 1/5ths of a put on. 

“Yeahhhh,” Picky says in that low drawl she uses when she’s being half-serious. “Sorry, I know we’re in a hurry, but I gotta play this single player, right now.  If anything, you were trying to steal my Pull… from a certain point of view.”

Fuck off, Obi-wan,” I shoot back, still reflexively doing gags. “Your rule isn’t recognized on the outer rim, and anyway ACAB includes Jedis.”

“Jedi,” Picky says, her hand now hovering above the start button, and I almost believe that her shaking fingers are signs of a legit Pull.

“What?”

“The plural of Jedi is Jedi,” she replies, turning her head back toward the table after giving her neck a few stretches. “I don’t even really like that shit and I know that. Plus, you’re as good at this game as I am, so both of us playing would take way too long.” It’s an insane statement, and I do not think I’m being ableist here. 

While I am ok at this game, and actually score a bit higher than her on average, she’s one of the best on the Drop when it comes to actually dominating it. Her thing is that she doesn’t, hasn’t, never will, give a single fuck about the score.

“Anyway, you’re only in this distressing situation because of your own foibles,” Picky says, her head turning back to me, locking me into some kind of stare-down. “Also, I’m kind of a monster.” 

My ex-friend Picky (Etch can have her!) cruelly slaps the start button and immediately no-look launches the pinball into the playfield, hitting a blind skillshot by shooting the lock ramp (but not the lock itself, as that gives a double skillshot 2-ball multi on the first ball. Picky loathes 2-ball multis, and that’s not  just a great gag, but the Gods’ honest truth!)

She hits it in less than a second (technically you have 5), and the ball loops around to where the ramp ends at a drop hole, down into the left flipper lane. She catches the ball on the flipper with a slight bounce, and holds it, all while still staring at me, now with a bonus sarcastic lip pulled out in “tribute” to any sadness or anger I might confess.

“Sorry, kids!” she quickly swivels her head the other way and calls out to the others. “I gotta play this! Puil and all, innit?”

“I’d expect nothing less,” Etch says. “And I still think you’re using that word wrong.”

“No, goddamnit Etch, that’s why it’s so appropriate… you know what, fuck this, I’m done trying to free you from your anti-anglophile bias…”

“Yeah, I’m just super fucking eager to fall in love with the British,” Etch replies.  “Anyway, play your little game. We all “get” the Pull.”

“Wow, I’m finding a lot of common ground with Etch in the last few minutes,” the Kid says. “Hey, Picky, once you’re done with that game, can we chat some actual business?”

“Sure, the Kid! I’ll do my best to keep the ball going forever!” Picky says. Her body starts to relax, as she begins to sink fully into the Pull. She will soon liquidate into human silence as she pours her soul into the game’s, their spirits blending in an indescribable harmony of f l o w.

Yeah, fuck all that. Steal my Pull, I’m gonna bother ya, son.  I’m gonna be a downright pest.

 I am not going to let her just slide into f l o w after such treacherous behavior. An act of such sacrilegious blasphemy demands retribution, and I’m gonna take back my pound of flesh. I’m going nuclear on this one, kids: I’m going to make her talk about my writing. 

I was certain I wasn’t going to broach the subject today, since it’s an alienating endeavor even for people who read your work and like it a little, but… here we are. In the perfect spot for it, in a moment she deserves the alienation.

“So…” I say, in a way that somehow exposes my entire game plan.

“Oh Christ,” Picky says, lowering her head as her first ball threatens to drain straight down the middle.  She puts just the right amount of English on it (no mean feat considering the updated tilt sensors,) and she executes a perfect dead stop ball catch save on the flipper.

“You didn’t even know what I was going to say,” I insist. 

“Right, because you’re an unknowable cipher,” Picky says. “Not a histrionic anxiety bomb whose emotions are always clear as a bell to anyone paying attention.” She’s now toying a little too loosely on the flipper, not ready to put the ball in play yet.  “Plus, the way you say “so” is pretty useless for subterfuge.”

“Ok, so…” I repeat.

“So what? What is it you want to know?” Picky sighs, shooting for the lit orbit. It hits the edge of the lane and the ball goes crazy for a moment, bouncing off the flipper bumper and careening into the pops.

“I just wanna know what you think,” I say, although the current situation doesn’t make me feel great about what she might want to say.

The ball spits itself so fast out of the pops, right into into the left outlane that Picky has no time to react. She hangs her head and sighs.  BALL 1 DEAD, the screen flashes, and then starts to total up the bonus, what Picky calls the “boring numbers” part.

“All right, you wanna get into it?” Picky says, as her current pathetic score flashes on the screen. That same screen then announces the arrival of the second ball.  “Let’s get into it.”