Pinball is the most romantic of arcade games. A bit of my belief in this comes from real life, but most of it comes from the movie Before Sunrise, which I spent my late teens and early 20s watching over and over alongside anyone with whom I shared an emotional connection. It's a 1995 Richard Linklater work, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, about two strangers who meet on a train in Europe, get off together in Vienna, and spend a night walking around. The entirety of the film is just the pair getting to know each other, building on their mutual attraction as they meander through one of the coolest-looking cities ever put to film.
They play pinball in a bar for about five minutes on screen, sharing a machine while they drink their beers. Every time one of them loses a ball, they do a very cute switch where the one at the wheel surrenders their position to go lean on the side of the machine, and vice versa. Each reveals something about their past while they do—the confusing intensity of Delpy's feelings for a bad ex-boyfriend and Hawke's petulant frustration at having traveled all the way to Europe just to get dumped. One line he says has never really left my head, about the unavoidable emotional power imbalances on our journey to find people we like: "You know what's the worst thing about somebody breaking up with you? It's when you remember how little you thought about the people you broke up with, and you realize that is how little they're thinking about you."
The pinball machine provides a subtle but valuable boost to this scene. There are some diegetic beeps and boops, which adds to its texture, but in a visual medium it's also a solution to the static nature of your average conversation. It's like when a TV show has characters walk and talk at the same time to provide the illusion of action, but much, much better. The ball dropping below the flippers provides an excuse for the two actors to periodically switch their roles—player to observer and back again. It allows for slightly longer beats of silence than would be comfortable in a conversation at, say, a restaurant table. There's this little engine humming beneath their words, diverting at least a fraction of their focus from the higher-stakes back-and-forth.
I've wondered if there's any arcade game that would work in this setting quite like pinball, and I'm pretty sure the answer is no. A driving game is out of the question. Something like Pac-Man would require too much attention, and cause too much stress if it were me at the joystick. Pop-a-shot is too physically demanding. Skee-ball comes closer, but its games are too short and repetitive to work for a long conversation. Pinball, on the other hand, is something like a relationship. Pinball is unpredictable. You can go on a long run, or you can crash out almost immediately. You can play without strategy, or by pushing both flippers up simultaneously on every hit, or while carrying on a conversation, and it's all OK. If you lose, you can just shoot the next ball. Nobody's really paying attention to your score.
A lot of the newer pinball machines are significantly different from the one in Before Sunrise—they've got a high-quality screen up top, a huge leap forward from the old LED boards that I grew up with. They usually play clips from the IP that the game is tied into, and they essentially serve to make the "plot" of these pinball machines more explicit, merging these games closer to video games by letting you choose a character or a mission. Here's an example from a machine I've played a number of times, a Star Wars game where there's always something happening above the action to distract you, and where sometimes your game just stops completely to direct all your attention to the screen.
It's getting harder and harder to find the older, LED-based models, which themselves replaced machines that had no screen at all. I was at a bar last week that was overflowing with arcade games, and something like six out of eight of their pinball set-ups were basically like the Star Wars one—mostly for nostalgia IP like Jaws, Jurassic Park, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Godzilla. The Foo Fighters even have a pinball machine; there's a whole animated story about them fighting aliens.
I can see why these look like an advancement in pinball technology. They add immersion to an activity that is otherwise simply "see ball, hit button." They give [shudder] brands more of a connection to a player, with their own music and voices and iconic video snippets. When I was a kid, it didn't matter all that much to me whether the pinball I was playing had South Park decor or a Simpsons theme. It was all basically the same experience. Ninja Turtles pinball, on the other hand, never lets you forget that you're playing Ninja Turtles pinball, which is different from Stranger Things pinball, or any other pinball. A row of machines no longer look pretty much alike, and I'm sure some people appreciate that choice.
But my desire for something simpler goes back to the platonic ideal of two-player pinball. When I've played the Star Wars machine alongside a pal, for example, there's a learning curve that never before existed: OK, um, how do I navigate this? Worse still is the simple fact that bright flashing screens inhibit conversations. Having your attention periodically and forcefully redirected to footage of the Death Star exploding makes the machine itself an extra person loudly inserting itself into your chatter. As these shiny games take up increasing space in the market, my interest in them wanes, and I keep thinking about if and how that scene in Before Sunrise would have worked at a machine actively trying to interrupt their flirting. Put Ethan and Julie on the Ninja Turtles pinball, and I'm not sure they even get to second base.
