Makers of pinball like Stern fostering the creation and participation in leagues and pinball events.

Operators keeping pinball on the street in the face of some challenging economics.

People in the tertiary pinball business like Levi keeping up the number of playing machines going around.

Players getting out and playing locations. And, following the "treatment of machines" thread, not destroying them and making them a money sink so the operators can keep them on the street. This is that thing we can all do, even those of us without pinball at home.

Introduce young people to the silver ball. Listen to old pinball people like Steve Ritchie in interviews. They'll say the problem is there's a generation that grew up not caring about pinball. But then we have world champions who are 13-year-olds.

Accepting a legitimate place for video/virtual pinball. It's not and never will be a physical pinball machine. But for newcomers to pinball it's a way to get into it. For people like me, it's a way to better learn rules to games, including those I don't "like" at first flip. Then I go out and seek locations with those games, which helps operators and proprietors of pinball locations keep pinball on the street.

I hate to use a tired word like "synergy" but there's an element of that when it comes to these points.

I don't think anyone seriously sees pinball going back to its short-lived high of the 1990s, where over-the-top toys and other novel technology quickly reached a point of no return, where designers like Pat Lawlor could do no more. It was only in that short segment of time that a game like Twilight Zone would get put to market. And it definitely would not reach the peak of the late 1970s, when solid-state was emerging and video games had not yet taken over. Video games have minimal maintenance in comparison to pinball, and it's been looked at as a loss-leader in general for operators since then because people were interested in playing.

One thing that's different now is free-play venues are becoming a relative norm to paying per-game with tokens, though there are places that still charge per game for (usually) new releases. This is a good way for a new player to learn to play, without risk of burning through balls doing nooby stuff and getting frustrated about losing their money and quitting the game. You take the bad (i.e. people camping on the most popular games) with the good, but this is something that's very good.

Williams System 11 era is pretty much the childhood-pure form of pinball for me. I think of something like High Speed or Taxi the way people from a generation earlier thinks of EMs. I can play for high scores as much as I can play to further some storyline and deep code. Not everything has to be complicated. But for me there's a nostalgia factor worked in there with it that's lost on a 21-year-old who goes into a barcade and his first pinball was Stern Star Wars.

At the same time, the lack of complicated stuff in these older games are perfect for people new to owning and maintaining pinballs. There's simply less to go wrong in Gorgar or Space Shuttle than there is in Star Trek: TNG or any game made this century, some sparse Stern designs notwithstanding. So demand goes up with them as they do for DMD-era games.

It sucks for people trying to get into the pin collecting hobby now, but it beats the game dying out completely and games getting tossed for nothing and forever. At the very least they have the status of a collectors item with a fixed number in existence, rarely exceeding 10,000 and often far short of that. You figure there were a lot of tables parted out, scrapped, thrown away etc.

It was and wasn't at the same time.

TAF/TZ's success really rode the resurgence of arcades that Street Fighter II kicked off. TAF did just about as well, but TZ's production numbers did not indicate its poor location performance. TZ is a game that's far too complex for the casual arcade patron and is better suited for the HUO environment of collectors who can put all the time they need into learning how to play a game that punishes newbie playing habits even more severely than the average pin.

I should get to play TNA for the first time in Chicago when I get shifted over there. It's nice to hear about games I don't need to read up on to feel like I know what I'm doing. Shoot, score. Games like that are built for location play like the old days. Deep code and deep modes are for collectors springing nine grand for NIB.

The man does have a point.

After all, there's good reason why there's been cleavage somewhere on just about every other pinball translite for the last 60 years, even when it has to be forced into the theme (e.g. ToM's magician lady).

Magic: The Gathering people though. Especially the Standard tournament crowd and the 40-somethings who bought a bunch of packs in 1994 and obsess over the "reserved list."

Stern growing pinball, ca. 1977

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