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The Lone Survivor Chicago has long been the center of pinball. Stern would keep pinball alive for more than a decade, even as the game threatened to disappear entirely. And SEGA sold its pinball division to Gary Stern, who rolled it into his existing Stern Pinball company. But Williams’ next release, Star Wars Episode I, sold only 3,500 Williams cut its pinball division, and focused production on casino slot machines, which offered a much larger return on investment. Revenge from Mars, the platform’s first game, sold almost 7,000 units.

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Williams, the manufacturer of the lauded The Addams Family, took one last shot with Pinball 2000, a platform with the body of a pinball machine and a full video display projected above the playfield. The players who grew up with the game began moving on, and the next generation of young gamers gravitated towards cheaper and flashier video games. Companies rarely sold more than 4,000 units of a table as the 1990s came to an end. The game had a tangible appeal, but machines were expensive, bulky, and required extensive maintenance to survive. But despite popularity surrounding tables like The Addams Family, pinball began losing momentum as the 90s drew to a close.

For a time, pinball was a cultural phenomenon, born from a mix of the past and future, with equal parts nostalgia and curiosity. “We don’t see those kind of numbers anymore,” Saucier says. “The Addams Family’s release in 1992 was pinball’s peak. Fans of the licenses found a new outlet for their admiration, while fans of pinball had more of what they already loved. Pinball companies capitalized on major licenses, leading to the creation of hugely successful tables like Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure, Twilight Zone, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. They were taking cues from video games, looking at what the digital medium had to offer them.” In the 1990s, elaborate video dot matrix displays (DMD) and complex rulesets attracted fans of video games, along with many who had never entered an arcade before. “Designers started trying to make blockbusters, these variants with two play fields, or multiple balls in play. “When video games came along, pinball had to retract,” Saucier says. He’s studied the game’s history, including its birth, evolution and initial decline.

“Jeremy Saucier, the assistant director at the International Center for the History of Electronic Games in Rochester, N.Y., is a pinball historian, and curator of the museum’s pinball collection. Pinball manufacturers like Gottlieb, Williams and Bally applied more complex rules to the traditional formula, reflecting the leaderboards and depth of video games. The 1980s video game boom should have hindered pinball’s popularity, but the pastime adapted and actually managed to thrive - at least initially. As observed by the documentary Special When Lit, pinball made more money than American films from the 1950s to the 1970s. Across the oceans, France, Sweden, Australia and Italy reflected the trend. The same happened in Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and multifarious cities from coastline to U.S. Pinball became so pervasive, in fact, that major cities banned it, threatened by what they felt was a form of gambling.

And then, in the 1970s, the introduction of microprocessors brought pinball into a new era, attracting customers with new sounds and digital displays. Over the next century, pinball made its way to the U.S., undergoing numerous mechanical changes and innovations, until it was more than a game - it was big business. A Pillar of Pop Culture It all started in Western Europe in the 19th century, when French billiards players introduced spring launchers and inclined tables to modify their pastime. With more advanced technology, cheaper mechanical parts, and a longing for the past, pinball is officially back from the dead. That mechanical ding (well, more of an electronic ding now that computers provide the sounds of modern machines) can be heard again in gaming bars and basements all over the world. Factories are coming alive as companies like Jersey Jack Pinball (The Hobbit, Dialed In!), Spooky (Rob Zombie's Spookshow International), and Dutch Pinball (The Big Lebowski) have arisen to compete with Stern. Adults are seeking alternatives to their screen-based lives. People are returning to arcades (and more adult-oriented bar arcades) again.

But now, something is happening that hasn’t occurred in a long time.