Earlier this year, I set out on a mission to play as many public pinball machines as I could in the five boroughs. I planned to catalog my travels in an epic GONY piece. After three locations, I cut the project short because it was depressing. There were too few machines and they were in too poor shape. I hated to see my beloved game suffer so.

The place that made me give up was Ace Bar, a pub in the East Village. It’s the type of bar that’s referred to as a “dive” by people who have never been to an actual dive.¹ I’d heard that Ace had Spider-Man and Family Guy machines, so I grabbed a roll of quarters and headed there, arriving in the early evening, so I could play before it got crowded.

Not only was it uncrowded, it was empty. I got a Bombay & tonic and fired eight bits into the Family Guy coin slot and the machine came to life, sort of. Don’t get me wrong, it was in good working order. The trouble was I couldn’t hear anything. The dialogue, the music, the quintessential bells and whistles of the pinball experience were all a muted whisper. Somebody had set the machine’s audio levels close to zero.

I was lucky, though, because the service guy was right there, checking up on the Spider-Man machine while his colleague installed a new Big Buck Hunter Pro virtual-hunting rig. I went to the bar and asked the manager, jerking my thumb toward the Family Guy machine, if I could have the tech raise the volume a touch.

“Oh! I’m so sorry about that!” she said. I was relieved. A kindred spirit! Or not. She waved her hands at the bartender, who cranked the alt-rock radio station beyond the point of distortion. Fearing that the Ace Bar staff was about to blow out its tinny speaker system, on which they undoubtedly lavished dozens of dollars, I explained that NO, UH, I MEANT THE PINBALL MACHINE. CAN I HAVE THE GUY TURN THE VOLUME UP ON THE PINBALL MACHINE? The music went back down.

“Oh, the pinball machine!” she said. “No.”

“Really? You can’t even hear it.”

“There’s no volume control on a pinball machine.” Lies!

“Of course there is.” She bristled when I called out her bumbling prevarication, but I forged ahead. “It’s right inside the coin door. If you get the tech to open it, he can show—”

“Look! It gets really loud in here. The last thing we need is a pinball machine making noise.”

It was an interesting argument, and not just in light of the fact that moments ago, she had fallen over herself to flood the place with a sensory overload of FM radio. I wonder, if I were the manager of a loud bar, and I wanted something that didn’t make more noise, what would I buy? Here is an abridged list of possible choices, in order of preference:

NON-NOISE-MAKING BAR ITEMS
1. Cigar-store indian
2. Humorous wall plaque
3. Fish tank
[…]
32,455. Pinball machine
32,456. Live shooting range

You do not get a pinball machine and tell it to shut up. The manager ultimately relented, and as the technician boosted the volume, he whispered, “I agree with you. It’s too low.” He then gave me 14 free games, and we grinned at our furtive rebellion against the Ace Bar powers-that-be. Here was my kindred spirit after all.

I’m gratified that places like this are still buying pinball tables and supporting the industry (i.e., supporting Stern, the only pinball manufacturer left), yet it’s hard to get too excited when pinball is treated as nothing more than a set piece. Pinball machines have always been part novelty and part game, and after my night at Ace, I felt like only the former part was surviving.

There remains hope, however. More TK.

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1. Actually, people around here are more likely to use the term “dive bar,” which sounds redundant to my ears—“dive” alone seems sufficient—but that’s common usage. I’ve even heard a friend say they wanted to go to a “dive-y bar,” which made me want to knife someone—specifically, the person who said it. Also, for the record, I’m not looking down on people who have never been to an actual dive. I don’t like dives. ↑