That it used to be illegal. People love that.

I did a presentation at my work, and brought a machine in with me, and let it make its random callouts.

Most people ask how much a game costs. I usually reply: Pinball machines are like cars, you have your Mustangs and your Pintos, and your Mustangs and your Rustangs. You could use other cars as examples but you lose conciseness and they usually find the Rustang analogy as funny.

No pinball presentation would be complete without the story of Roger Sharpe's "perfect shot".

Dont forget to Bring your boombox and play the Pinball Wizard song as loud as you can!!!!

Please don't.

Maybe also include that there are leagues and tournaments (maybe compare it to bowling? Or maybe not...), a surge in barcades, and various shows with hundreds of machines every year all over the world.

Tell them the story of the Star wars with autographed translite!

Read out loud some of the posts about whether pinball is a sport.

Every time I tell a person that there are specific shots you are supposed to shoot at spectofic times, they are blown away. Every noob just assumes you're supposed to keep the ball from draining and that's it. No strategy, no rules, just lights, flippers, and things for the ball to hit and run across. Haha

That it used to be illegal. People love that.

Actually some cities still have laws on their books that make pinball illegal or limit arcade activity. In San Francisco, Free Gold Watch had to go before the city board to have more than 10 machines on site. They successfully changed the SF law in 2014 and are going strong.

Sorry was trying to include Iron00monkeys quote correctly. But it is a fascinating part of pinball history.

Wait, what?

I was just at an end of tax season work party that we had at a barcade. I was teaching a lot of people how to play, and outside of the one guy who used to own a pinball machine, there was about 10 people that had no idea there was any strategy or rules involved.

Definitely mention how it was illegal in certain parts of the country. People generally find that, and pinball's backstory really fascinating. I like to add in that when it was illegal in places like New York, there were police raids for secret pinball parlors all the way up to the 1970s. During WWII, a lot of the manufacturing went into war efforts, so little new games were produced--most were conversion kits. This can be seen on IPDB if you do an advanced search only including the years of 1941 (year of US involvement) to 1945. Most of the games were conversions, and most have a propaganda wartime message.

Here's a snipped from a newspaper published in TN regarding their laws on pinball: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=266&dat=19811021&id=4fYrAAAAIBAJ&sjid=HG0FAAAAIBAJ&pg=2595,5916305&hl=en

The law regulated pinball machines like alcohol in the early 1980s, thus outlawing minors (under 18) from playing them. According to other sources, that law was recently (within the last decade) overturned, therefore allowing minors to legally play pinball again.

Another source claims that it is still illegal in Ocean City, NJ to play pinball on Sundays, but I couldn't verify it's veracity.