Pinball isn’t just for wizards | News

Pinheads have a language all their own. Draining, callouts, nudging, outlanes: These are the words that people who play competitive pinball use when they are jiggling the pinball machine and pressing the flipper buttons. 

They’re serious about it and have rankings and tournaments and pinball machines in their homes, but more than that, they simply love to play the game

“I totally love pinball,” Ben Clement said.

He loves pinball so much he has a national ranking. He’s ranked 171 in the world, according to fellow pinball enthusiast Derek Jordan.

It’s tempting to say there’s nothing to do but if you have a quarter — or lots of quarters — there’s always a pinball game waiting to be played and somewhere there’s a league waiting for you to join. In fact, there’s a league right in Marana, The Marana Pinball Social League.

Head down North Camino Martin, turn left into an industrial park, then behind an innocuous-looking door is Catalina Brewery. In the front when you first walk in there’s a bar, some stools and a few tables. Behind that is the actual brewery where beer is magically made. It’s in a spacious, darkened side room where a dozen pinball machines blink and whir and call out for players. According to brewery owner Brian Vance, someone always answers the call.

“We get people coming in here to play pinball seven days a week,” Vance said. “Every day there’s somebody here, at least one to five people.”

Patrons will find the most pinball machines in Tucson inside Catalina Brewery.

Although there are pinball machines of old, driven by electro-mechanical works, there are also the latest games, with themes such as “Jurassic Park,” “Pokémon” and “Star Wars.” This is a new day with new technology. Today’s pinball machines are all electronics and computer programming. They are expensive, complex machines, not unlike a laptop, requiring regular maintenance and program updating. 

That is where Clement comes in. Along with pinball enthusiasts David Vasquez and Dan Gauthier, he owns Marana Pinball Collective. They own the league and the machines and keep them in tip-top order. This is why they even started the business: to place pinball machines in Catalina Brewery when Vance expanded the business, taking over the room next door. 

“Something that we encountered at the time, we’d go to bars in town that would have pinball machines, and they generally were not well maintained,” Clement said. “Because it’s such a physical, mechanical device, it needs regular maintenance. If the games aren’t maintained well, they don’t work like they’re supposed to and it can be an unsatisfying experience.”

The three wanted more people to be interested in pinball, so they decided to take over the job themselves.

“We control the quality and we can give users the best opportunity to have a positive first pinball experience,” Clement said. “We really try hard to provide a variety of machines from all different eras …  and then we try to keep them in the best condition that we can.”

The Marana Pinball Social League has four nine-week pinball seasons during the year and if you have $10 and a lot of quarters, you can join. The league has had 17 seasons since it began. The next season begins the first Tuesday in August. 

However, “If someone finds out about our league in the middle of the season, they can still join,” Clement said. “You don’t have to be there the first week.”

Walk into any pinball parlor and you will hear voices coming out of the machines in an attempt to entice players. Those are callouts. If a ball goes down the middle to the exit, it’s called a drain.

It turns out things are not as random as they seem. There are pinball skills such as using the flippers to control where the ball goes in order to stay alive, accrue points and release multiple balls. There’s also a knack to nudging a machine to control a ball. Unlike old-school machines, the new ones give a tilt warning.

“Be careful.”

However. If serious players are at the machine, there can be a lot of kicking the air to get the ball to roll into place. Some skills transfer between machines and sometimes users have to study videos to learn how to use a game. 

To watch Jordan play is to be impressed by how he controls the flippers and machine. He can shoot that silver ball into the tiniest openings on the board and more than once in a game can get multiple balls in play. He’s played since he was about 12; that was a few decades ago. One of the aspects of pinball that Jordan likes is how physical it is.

“It’s not like a video game where you can sit at a desk and not move,” he said. “You have to physically do things to make the ball do the things it’s supposed to do.”

He likes modern machines best.

“They flow, the flippers are so strong, there are ramps, multiballs, jackpots,” Jordan said. “It’s a light show.”

There is one thing that can improve the game, however.

“Pinball is great,” he said. “It’s better with beer.”

Two other pinball enthusiasts are Bill and Angie Cohen. Angie admits that Bill is the better player; she plays just for fun, not in the league. 

“She tags along with me,” Bill said.

One of their favorite games is Jurassic Park though Bill has a complicated relationship with it.

“It’s a love-hate relationship,” he said. “It can get frustrating, but it takes you away from daily life. You’re in the zone. You’re out of the stresses of regular life.”

Then, too, the game is something they share as a family.

“It’s multigenerational,” Angie said. “Our son was playing in the league until he moved to Phoenix and he was doing better than Bill.”