Silver ball thrill

Videogames may have put the tilt into the very machines that gave life to them, but for the pinball faithful at Melbourne’s Bumper Action Amusements, the party goes on.

Caught in a riot of lights and fairground noise—out of my depth, and nearly my mind—I go into battle with The Sopranos for the fifth time.

As before, it was never going to be a fair fight. No matter how many times I repositioned my feet and shook out the tension in my fingers, my attempts remained both feeble and unrealised.
    The result? So far: Pinball machine, four. Me, zero.
    But hang on a second—how the hell did someone as unfamiliar with the ‘silver ball thrill’ (that’s industry talk, folks) as me find herself at a pinball night in the first place?
    Then it all came flooding back. About a week ago my editor was on the phone asking if I was free the following Friday night. We’ve known each other long enough for me to figure out that this wasn’t an invitation—it was a test.
    ‘There’s this Pinball Faith Night in South Melbourne,‘ he said all sweet and sugary. ‘You’ll love it.‘
    ‘But I can’t play pinball.‘
    ‘Even better.‘
    He knew he almost had me there (my masochistic streak was no secret between us). His trump card however was the fact that the venue, Bumper Action Amusements, moonlighted as a gallery space for the vigorous and undeniably idiosyncratic pinball back art. Unlike arcade games, the art game was something I did know a thing or two about.
    If my interest was roused then my curiosity was doing laps—I mean show me a writer who can resist an opportunity of hanging out with a bunch of ‘fanatics’?
    Situated in the semi-industrial part of inner city Melbourne, Bumper Action Amusements shares the busy strip with a couple of small factories, showrooms and a pizza shop (vitally strategic, as I found out).
    The building’s fairly bland façade doesn’t trick me. I know what lies in wait.
    As it happens, the minute I walk through the large front door one of the first fanatics I come in contact with is Del Reiss, owner and boss of Bumper Action.
    While his 11-year-old son Billy energetically chews up the air, Reiss and I adjourn to the clutter of his memorabilia-laden office and try to talk over the din of activity buzzing around us.
    ‘So what’s going on with this place?‘ I probe. ‘I mean how is it that it’s way past home time and your staff are (a) still here and (b) still smiling?‘
    ‘It’s the party,‘ says Reiss, who’s got the family-friendly Hugh Hefner thing going on. ‘They were even happier when we served alcohol.‘
    ‘Party’ is as good a word as any to describe the faith nights. Held on the first Friday of every month, the nights have been going strong since 2002.
    For the price of a pub meal, punters get unlimited use of all arcade-style games, including at least 15 new and vintage pinball machines, as well as their choice of pizza (yes, locally produced), soft drinks and chocolate.

    But the attraction for the night’s patrons goes beyond the glittering glasstops and junk food buzz. For some it’s a chance to ‘reconnect’.
    ‘It all began probably when I was a teenager, playing pinballs in milkbars and that sort of stuff,‘ the dauntingly tall Bevis explains while patiently waiting for The Simpsons to become available. ‘And then going down to pubs and playing pinballs there.‘
    ‘We just love pinballs,‘ adds his wife Annette, a 29-year-old criminally perky accountant. ‘And it’s good to see the latest machines. The Sopranos is a brand new machine and you wouldn’t get an opportunity to play that anywhere for a long time, because the ones they have in the pubs are often older machines that have been beaten around.
    ‘We get the opportunity to have a bit of competition and some pizza, a couple of drinks and meet up with people we haven’t seen for ages.‘
    Mingling around, I’m happy to see that there’s plenty of serious, longstanding pinball wizards in the mix, like Arch and Peter, both in customer service.
    While they remain cagey about their age, they’re more than happy to disclose their passion for the age-old game.
    ‘We come about six times a year,‘ says Peter. ‘We grew up playing these games as kids.‘
    ‘It reminds me of my teenage years,‘ adds Arch. ‘I grew up in Brunswick (in Vic.). There used to be a lot of cafes with pinballs but they’re all gone now. That’s why we come here.‘
    Of course, the night is just as successful at pulling in the nosy and the curious.
    ‘This is my second time,‘ says pinball newie Chantelle, 21, a student. ‘It’s nice and relaxing and you can play whatever you want to play.
    ‘Elvis is my favourite pinball…but I don’t know what I’m going to do tonight,‘ she adds, looking mournfully at the ‘out of order’ sign defacing the King. ‘It’s a tragedy.‘
    Thankfully, for Reiss and the Bumper Action crew, the night is anything but. The ‘faithful’ keep on streaming in; with some making a bee-line for their favourite machines seconds after paying their entry fee. It’s like a scene straight out of Happy Days.
    ‘It’s been pretty steady since we changed the kind of party it was,‘ says Reiss. ‘We get at least 30 or 40 a night. We used to get more when we served alcohol, although there are probably more families who come now.‘
    Having strangers (okay many have since become regulars) periodically invade his showroom and wilfully punish his machines has made Reiss one happy man. But what else could you expect from a self-confessed retrograde who fell hopelessly in love with his first ‘amusement machine’ at the age of 12?
    Back in his office Reiss regales me for close to an hour with stories of the heady days of pinballs (circa early- to mid-1970s), when pinball machines evolved from electromechanical (EM) machines to ‘solid state’ or electronics-based units. It was also a time when machines were falling out the back of trucks; sometimes quite literally.
    Reiss adds, ‘So all I did was buy these things, do them up and sell them to private homes. In Australia it was a boom business.‘

    But what goes up, of course, must…well, burst. And when a little blocky videogame character was launched onto the world scene in 1979, Reiss says pinball machines had little resistance.
    ‘Space Invaders was a fever,‘ he says. ‘Pong and then Pac Pong really captured the imagination of the world. And basically from that year onwards pinballs went into serious decline.
    ‘By 1985 the industry had gone bust and by the late 1980s videogames had just rocketed. Pinball machines were virtually worthless.‘
    It is with a certain delicious irony that pinball machines started making a comeback in 1991 with the release of the Terminator II machine. I’ll Be Back indeed.
    ‘It hit the market and the pinball industry here took off again,‘ says Reiss, walking me around his showroom.
    ‘By 1992 pinballs started escalating again in a huge way and by 1995 they had saturated the market. Bally-Gottlieb and Williams (pinball manufacturing heavyweights) were producing anything from 11,000 to 18,000 of each model.‘
    Built to last, both on the floor and figuratively speaking, the pinball machine is nothing if not resilient. The collectors’ auction held at Bumper Action recently certainly showed that there’s still life (and plenty of interest) in the old machines yet.
    ‘A 1950s Wagon Trains in good condition can sell for up to $3,500. And people have paid $5,500 for The Addams Family,‘ says Reiss.
    An oversized toy? Or, as Reiss believes, a valuable form of entertainment and art? Three years ago he put his theory to the test by holding what he believes was the ‘world’s first Pinball Art Show/Kinetic Pinball Pop-art exhibition’ at a gallery in Melbourne.
    On show were 95 pinball back glasses including rare collector pieces such as Captain Fantastic (1975), Kiss (1979) and The Simpsons (1990). A considerable number of the 95 works were sold, with prices ranging from $50 to $495. It was, by all accounts, a great success.
    ‘The artwork side of it is totally undiscovered,‘ Reiss says.
    ‘Only a few people have one of these gallery pictures of their wall, so we thought we’d reproduce the back art and make prints out of them, and we’re still selling those today.‘
    For Reiss, pinball back art as immortalised by seminal artists like Leroy (Roy) Parker, Christian Marche and Dave Christensen, has a dynamic kind of timelessness that’s impossible to replicate.
    ‘When I first entered this business what got me was these naïve beautiful scenes,‘ he says. ‘They’re innocent; they portray happy innocent scenes. The pinball machine was something you lost yourself in.‘
    Today some of the collection adorns the walls at Bumper Action but that’s as far as Reiss has gone in capitalising on the exhibition’s success.
    ‘We were caught up with what we were doing here,‘ he says harbouring what sounds suspiciously like regret. ‘We should have tried to get distributors to sell the artwork in art shops and so on. But I still don’t think it’s too late.‘
    Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about the terminal deficiency in my pinball wizardry.
    Back to my face off with The Sopranos. As the sound of my own defeat at the hands of the machine blings and dings for the fifth and last time, the announcement we’ve all been waiting for is made; hanging in the air like a threat.
    ‘Let the Sudden Death Knockout Pinball Competition begin.‘
    With that, I happily slip back into my journalistic role. I don’t need a death knockout to tell me that my flipper action needs a smidge more…well, everything!

Words: Jen Vuk
Photography: Drew Taylor
Art: courtesy Bumper Action Amusements