Flipper Fanatics

"The ball may die, but if the player's performance has exceeded certain required levels of quality, he can bring it back for a new life and the opportunity to strive for yet another rebirth, in an endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth similar to the Zen Buddhist concept of Samsur."

When Polin and Rain published their players' guide in 1979, pinball was the game. The Who had made the central character of its 1969 rock opera "Tommy" a pinball wizard. Today, only one company, Chicago-based Stern Pinball, produces new games. It releases three to five new titles and manufacturers about 12,000 machines a year. By way of comparison, the defunct pinball-maker Williams Gaming produced more than 20,000 copies of its 1992 hit The Addams Family.

The collector's market soared after Williams closed its pinball shop in 1999. As a result, a favorite like Medieval Madness (which would have cost an arcade $3,200 when it was brand-new in 1997) now goes for $5,500, even in fair condition, says Sanderson, who has purchased and sold 200 pinball machines over the past six years.

It's not uncommon for collectors to have dozens of pinball games, but after amassing upward of 200, the 46-year-old Eric Sciuto is feeling a little overwhelmed. "This is my love," he says dryly, as he surveys his overstuffed basement in St. Peters. Some of his pinball specimens belong in a museum's collection. Sciuto has Grand Slam, a baseball-themed game from 1934. He has Carnival Queen from 1958, which is essentially a mechanical version of Bingo, swallowing as many nickels as a player wants to gamble. At one time he even owned Humpty Dumpty, the first pinball game with flippers.

One wall of the basement is lined with games from the 1970s. These were carefree years for this Sciuto and his friends from the Hill, who often spent weekends playing pinball at his family's country getaway. "If it was raining, we'd play pinball constantly," he says. Sciuto turns to Hit the Deck, a 1978 game that features a bikini-clad woman perched on the bow of a dinghy. Neptune rises out of the sea, upsetting the card game in progress aboard the little boat. "The artwork was so cool," he says.

On the opposite wall is a row of games from the '50s and '60s, in which the artwork features more conservatively clad women. "Look at that," Sciuto says. "They were all smiling, happy, having fun. It was a different time."

Sciuto has owned pinball games since he was seven years old, and started fixing them when he was nine. Periodically, he walks the aisle of his pinball stable and pulls the plungers. Then he listens. Each turn of the scoring wheel makes a different-sounding "ding." "If it misses a beat, I can tell," he says.

His tinkering skills enabled the obsessive collecting that took hold later in life. "I really went crazy in '90," Sciuto says. He was fresh from a divorce and earning plenty of overtime pay at a printing shop. On weekends he'd drive to Detroit or Philadelphia, just to buy and restore broken pinball machines. Then he started farming them out to businesses where they could earn some coins. Beatnik Bob's, the carnival midway-themed lounge inside the City Museum, is one of Sciuto's top earning locations. The rest are an odd assortment of places where people might have some time to kill. Sciuto's quaint pinball machines — complete with dinging sounds — from the '60s and '70s can be found in a Chinese restaurant on Chippewa Street and at Hampton Car Wash.

Most vendors who supply games to bars no longer bother with pinball, as all those moving parts mean continual maintenance. As a collector who has spent hours laboring with sandpaper and a soldering gun, Sanderson has great admiration for those who literally keep pinball alive. "In the hobby," he says, "the guys that can fix them are the kings."

When pinheads talk shop, it's like a gathering of car nuts or comic-book geeks. Such a scenario develops as Chuck Sanderson explains why he decided to use a Western-themed game called Frontier in the mini-tournament that will close out the evening. Sanderson borrowed Frontier from his friend Brian Bannon, a meticulous steward of pinball. Bannon took the 26-year-old machine apart and sent its wooden playfield to a specialist, who applied a protective layer of automotive clear coat. Now the ball rolls so fast on the high-gloss surface, Sanderson says that no one can play it for more than a minute. "It's just a real lethal game."

That proves to be true, even for the game's owner. Bannon squeaks into the tournament after arriving to the arcade late. He came straight from the airport after a business trip to San Antonio, Texas. First he squares off against John Miller, his old nemesis from the bowling-alley circuit. Bannon wins the best-of-three round and advances to the single-elimination final.