About 8-9 years ago, I was managing a hip neighborhood coffeeshop. Down the street there was "arcade guy", who warehoused a lot of antique games in a little sad looking storefront which was only open by appointment or chance. He offered to put a pinball machine in the coffeeshop and he'd split the revenue with the shop. Sure, why not.
The game he rolled down the street into my coffeeshop was Funhouse. It features a creepy talking doll head, "Rudy", and it yells at you throughout the game. The point of the game is to advance the clock to midnight, at which point Rudy would fall asleep, and leave his mouth hanging open. If you could get the ball in his mouth, he would wake up, spit it back out, and then the game would go absolutely batshit and spit out like 7 balls at once and every light would be flashing. Rudy said odd things, like "You big sausage!" and creepy things like "I'm watching you." When he wasn't being played, sometimes he would randomly say something over in the corner, which was a bit unnerving when you're working alone. He had several phrase that he would say over and over, of course, but I swear, once in a great while, he would blurt out something that I had never ever heard before, which was also freaky.
I had never really played pinball before, so I wasn't that great at it, but I became obsessed with Funhouse. I would pick all the quarters out of my tip jar and play whenever the shop was slow, and when my shifts ended, and when the coffeeshop closed. I didn't have the key to the quarter slot so I couldn't just recycle quarters, I was actually spending my own money to play. Given that I was really, really poor at that time, spending two dollars a day, or five dollars a day, or more, on a pinball game wasn't really very responsible, but it had a hold over me.
Sometimes some of my employees or friends would stick around at closing time, and we'd turn off all the lights in the place for maximum effect, and play Funhouse. I got better at it, and I could get to midnight consistently. When that happened, I might as well have been skydiving, or having sex. It was THAT exciting.
The game required maintenance. "Arcade Guy" had to come over regularly to open it up and work on it. This first-hand experience is what made me realize that even if I ever was lucky enough to have the money to buy a pinball machine of my own, you'd better have an "arcade guy" of your own to call upon.
This documentary keeps mentioning how pinball is becoming a lost art, how there's only one pinball manufacturer left standing, how "kids today" don't get it. I don't buy that. I didn't grow up with pinball and I immediately "got it".
Earlier this year, I visited Canobie Lake Park for the first time, and was thrilled to see an arcade FULL of pinball machines.
I'm no natural. It took me a lot of time and a lot of precious quarters to master Funhouse. But I totally get it. You're never going to get anything like that from an iPad or Xbox game. It has that great taste of nostalgia, that whiff of seedy carnival atmosphere. The tactical feedback, the shaking and the vibrations, the clunks and clacks, the pull of the spring handle: those things can't be successfully digitized.
When I was a kid for some reason one of my dreams for future-adult-me was that I would have a treehouse with an espresso machine inside (I had a cool fort, but never a treehouse; I'm not sure where I got the espresso craving since I'd never had one). Now, a treehouse with an espresso machine and a Funhouse pinball would be the ultimate. If I ever make it rich....
See Rudy from Funhouse in action here.
