Can This Man Save Pinball?

The last guys who tried to save pinball bet all their quarters on a bunch of 3-D aliens. With sales of new machines dwindling in the late 1990s, the top execs at Williams, the company that controlled 80 percent of the worldwide market, called on their designers to reinvent the game. They emerged with an arcade centaur—the head of a video game on the body of a pinball machine—in which pixilated, holographic-looking Martians marauded among the mechanical gewgaws. “Pinball 2000” was a technological marvel. It also nearly killed pinball forever. In October 1999, not long after Williams introduced Pinball 2000 in a promotional video featuring clips of the moon landing and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the company shuttered its pinball division. As the excellent documentary Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball explains, Revenge From Mars, the initial Pinball 2000 ...