Getting Tilted: Inside the high

Andrew Schenck, a league member, competes on 1970’s vintage pinball machines during a recent competition at Spinners Pinball on North east Street recently.

Andrew Schenck, a league member, competes on 1970’s vintage pinball machines during a recent competition at Spinners Pinball on North east Street recently.

Andrew Schenck is fairly new to playing pinball competitively. Or for that matter, playing it at all. But three months ago, he joined a competitive pinball league at Spinners Pinball Arcade on East Street in Frederick and hasn’t looked back since.

Schenck was first introduced to the sport while on a birthday trip to Astoria, Oregon. His buddies took him out to a “barcade” to play a little underground pinball, as he called it. For Schenck, the conversion was instant, driving him to go on the hunt for a pinball arcade back home in Maryland.

He didn’t have far to look. As luck would have it, Schenck lived just down the street from Spinners, home of one of the biggest competitive pinball leagues in the state.

“I didn’t know about leagues,” he said. “I’ve lived here for two years and didn’t even know.” He’s enjoyed it so far. “It’s pretty cutthroat though,” he added, cracking a smile.

That could be because competitive pinball is growing in popularity, and with highly organized league associations at the state and international levels hosting competitions where obsessive dedication and monumental skill along with a fair bit of luck combine to create a world-class base of competitors, competition can be fierce. But what is it about pinball that has people eager to dedicate several hours every week to compete in these cutthroat games?

“Thank you for reaching out to us and wanting to spread the sweet gospel of the silver ball,” reads the email I received after speaking with Spinners’ arcade manager, Cat Hodge.

Hodge, the quick-witted manager with a roller derby vibe that is very much at home in a pinball arcade, has played pinball for about six years. She was “just someone who hung out at stinky dive bars that had pinball machines,” as she put it, “then had friends that were into it and started to learn.”

Hodge said there are two ways to compete in Frederick. One is to join a league, like Schenck did, and dive right in the deep end. But the league lasts 10 weeks and is a big commitment, so last year, Spinners developed weekly tournament one-offs that are open to anyone, which provide a taste of competitive pinball at a lower bar of entry.

“We wanted to encourage people to come and play as many games as possible. And that’s always the goal — fit as many in as possible. No one is going to be picked last or kicked out,” Hodge said.

The message has been received. Between 20 and 30 people show up nearly every week for the open tournament each Monday, starting at 8 p.m. and often lasting until midnight. While anyone can play, these tournaments also give league members yet another competition to earn whoppers. That’s the main thing to know about the competitive pinball circuit: It’s all about the whoppers. That’s what they call the ranking points, which determine advancement into bigger tournaments with championship players.

Essentially, whoppers are earned through a complex combination of time spent playing in competitions and the relative success at victory at those events. Whoppers are awarded on a sliding scale based on how many competitors are at the tournament. This ensures that most participants get some fraction of points to add to their running total.

“For both the league and the tournament, people are working on points to go toward the International Flipper Pinball Association,” Hodge said. “That is what you need to be registered with to go to your state championships, your nationals and even your world championships, if you make it that far.”

Under the IFPA is the Free State Pinball Association, the regional umbrella to host tournaments and leagues. Yes, there are that many levels of competition or, said another way, a well-greased funnel for talent development. “It’s amazing we’re not on ESPN Sports at this point,” Hodge said.

Joe Said is the founder and executive director of the arcade’s nonprofit, Pinball EDU, which is the organizing force behind the tournaments and other events at the arcade. He is also, as the first ever IFPA state champion, as close to competitive pinball royalty in Maryland as it gets. His name, along with nine other champions that have been crowned, hangs memorialized from ceiling banners at Spinners, elevating the ambience from arcade to bonafide sports venue.

Said has seen up-close the growth of the pinball circuit.

“When I first started, there were less than 10,000 people playing, and now I think there’s more than 100,000 active players,” he said, checking a database on his computer that tallied the number of registered participants in an IFPA tournament in the past three years.

But it’s not all fun and games. These tournaments have an altruistic angle as well. When Said saw an autism awareness poster in 2012, a lightbulb went off for him.

“I needed to open a place that could cater to the mainstream public but would also be able to invite underserved populations,” he said. “That’s when I came up with pinball EDU. I just wanted more events, more people to get involved, and for the disability community to be able to engage in something that I thought would give them access to friends and things we maybe take for granted.”

Then Robert Emilio Gagno, a 27-year-old man with autism, won the 2016 pinball world championship, validating for Said the importance of establishing inclusive spaces and events for everyone who might want to participate.

“The competitive aspects are kind of crucial,” Said told me. “Play therapy and the competitive nature of things allows players to stretch their skills and to grow. Then COVID happened, and now kids need social opportunities more than ever.”

With a need for replenishing the ranks of competitors with fresh recruits, Hodge posts to social media frequently but also relies on word of mouth.

“Word of mouth is pretty powerful,” she said. “People will bring friends and then the friends get hooked,” she said. “The bigger our league gets, the more popular the tournaments get. The goal is to have the biggest tournament and the biggest league, so there’s always room for growth.”

The competition remains fierce, but Hodge said there is a code of conduct league members are expected to follow, and ultimately friendship and a sense of belonging can be the lasting prize.

“A lot of people like the league just for the sheer camaraderie, that you get to come and play against your friends every week for 10 weeks, and a lot of people go out across the street to Oscars [Alehouse] afterwards,” she said.

Many league members have forged friendships that have lasted years, regardless of what happens on the playfields of the pinball machines.

“A lot of these people go out of town together,” Hodge said. “People are forming friends here, and then that’s carrying on into other parts of their life. And then they have [pinball] to share as well.”

So how can it get so cutthroat?

Hodge goes straight to the data: “Out of the top 16 that go to state as of right now, I had one … two … three … four … five … six … seven playing on Monday, and then right below that I have quite a few more. There are probably 10 that were in the top 30 that were playing here [at Spinners] last week,” she said. “So we get some big players in here.”

That’s why having a code of conduct is so important.

“Generally people are there to have fun, however,” she said. “I mean, I want to win. Everyone wants to win! So you’ll get some frustration, you’ll get some shoving of the machines, you’ll get some cuss words.”

And if that doesn’t sound like any other sport, there’s also a major self improvement element to it. More than just a screwball of a time trying to get lucky pushing the flipper buttons fast enough to keep the silver ball in play, pinball league players view their game as a personal challenge to put their mind to something and steadily get better at it. For that kind of dedication to improve, you need competition.

“You want to play competitively where there's a little bit of stakes to challenge yourself and help yourself get better,” Said said. “Playing with your friends is just not the same as playing with some of the world’s best players. When you get deep in the game and have a good ball, it’s magical. You still have that superstition, you’re giving [your competitor’s] ball the evil eye, but ultimately you enjoy watching someone play at an amazing level.”

Those new to pinball quickly learn there’s a lot to learn, both in terms of skill and how the competition works, but also in the broader history and pop culture world pinball inhabits, itself a rich tapestry of art, intrigue, history and scandal.

“There’s a lot of game knowledge required, and it’s not easy to know,” Schenck said.

Walking through Spinners is as close to a time machine as you can get. Pinball machines, from brand new to ancient relic, are in near-chronological order. Many of the new machines are aligned with popular fandom today, with names like Avengers, Deadpool and Mandelorian. These state-of-the-art contraptions with LED screens and animated scoreboards feature a more complicated, engaging playfield with more bells and whistles and even more silver balls.

Of these, Schenck said Godzilla is considered one of the best games. The fun of newer machines, he explained, lies in the fact that they engage the player more and teach you how to keep playing in increasingly challenging ways.

Then it’s down through the 1980s and ’90s, with digitized but non-LED scoreboards and games popular still today, like the tornado disaster game Whirlwind and the Mad Max copycat Road Kings. The simplicity of the pinball machines from the ’70s are deceptively hard to win in the competition circuit. Usually containing just one ball, these electromechanical wonders are fairly rudimentary in mechanics, but in competition, therein lies the enduring challenge.

Shenck said the older machines have less things to do and are more straightforward, but that this in turn makes them more unforgiving. Games like Old Chicago — with a theme and back-glass art inspired by the gangster era of the 1930s and by famed gangster John Dillinger — and the very Conan-the-Barbarian-looking Paragon, are considered icons of the game, as well as equalizers among many competitors, bringing down the mighty and the novice alike. “Those two are frustrating,” Schenck said, while also singing their praises.

So much of pinball, particularly the upright back-glass around the scoreboard, has been the canvas for iconic art through the ages that was often pulpy, racy or futuristic. One would be forgiven for making comparisons between pinball machines and slot machines at a casino, especially since at one time, pinball was seen as a gateway to gambling, and indeed was utilized as such, often by the mafia in 1930s New York, where it consequently became outlawed for decades.

But even the most modernized games, despite having a glass top to protect the playfield’s various bumpers, traps and ramps, are different from playing a digitized game of pinball behind the glass top of a smartphone screen. The 3D component isn’t just a carryover from an older time; it’s what makes the game tangible and timeless.

Early into a recent competition, Schenck said, “It’s easy to get in your head with pinball.” This was in response to getting assigned to compete on a pinball machine he usually scores high with. He said it’s no relief when this happens, since in competition it can backfire spectacularly if you focus too hard on trying to make a difficult maneuver happen. He said sometimes the harder you try, instead of just playing the game and letting good things come to you, the harder it is to achieve it. “And then you get tilted the rest of the night.”

Getting tilted feels like very specific slang for the pinball subculture. It stems from a mechanism in pinball machines, especially the older ones, that senses when the user is tilting the machine to maneuver the ball, triggering a shutdown of play and a forfeit of bonuses for that round. So it’s an apt appropriation of the term to signal when the player is too in their head and can’t recover.

But is there another connotation, a positive one, that speaks to the pinball world as a whole? The near obsession and love of the game that comes from die-hard pinballers is hard to recover from. The only difference is they don’t want to. And why would they? Once someone’s obsession for pinball has tilted, it seems more often than not to turn into an abiding passion for developing skill of play and also learning about its lore, history and culture as an iconic American pastime.

That this pastime can seem antiquated with old games and mechanics still used in arcades and in competition today is no hurdle to overcome. The technological obsolescence of many pinball machines becomes a feature of the sport, not a bug, even as it keeps finding relevance and popularity.

With a glint in his eye, Schenk wanted to talk plunger mechanics when there’s a ball in captivity. How far do you pull back the spring-loaded rod to send that magic silver ball sailing through the chute to the board of pins and lights. “There’s just a little bit of skill in every detail,” he said. “What I like about pinball, it’s physical, literally, you being there with the thing. It’s real tactile.”

How ironic it is, then, in an increasingly digital society, that the tactile attributes of a thing become its remarkable characteristic of enjoyment. As more and more folks get tilted for the sweet gospel of the silver ball, the takeaway seems obvious: Pinball has lasting power. Pinball is here to stay.

Joseph Peterson can usually be found reading the weathered plaques of obscure monuments he sees while wandering the city. He counts public libraries, public lands and places where local community is fostered among his favorite kinds of places.

The Pinball League’s fall season starts Sept. 28. Learn more at spinnerspinball.org.

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