Sports betting is legal, and therefore everywhere right now. But from the 1940s through the 1970s, it was a different diversion altogether that had people knitting their brows over gambling concerns: Pinball games.
In fact, pinball was banned in Chicago during this period.
“Initially I thought, well, that’s ridiculous,” said pinball aficionado William Pietri. “But when I saw some of the machines from the ’30s and ’40s, I was like, oh OK, they had a point. And as early as 1934, in the University of Illinois student newspaper, there’s an editorial that talks about students being ruined by gambling on pinball.”
Nevertheless, Chicago became a pinball manufacturing powerhouse and Pietri assumed there was an established museum somewhere in town owing to that legacy. He was surprised to discover that wasn’t the case.
So, in June, he opened a nonprofit museum of his own in the Loop called The Flip: Chicago’s Playable Pinball Museum. Not only a showcase for pinball history, it’s a place to play a few games yourself.
Located in the lower pedway of Block 37, between the Red and Blue Line stops, there are three machines out front. That’s an intentional strategy to catch the eye of commuters who might be compelled, on a whim, to stop for a quick game or two.
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“About 3 million people a year walk by,” said Pietri, “and some of them are like, ‘Yeah, I got a little time!’ and they’ll drop 50 cents in a play before going on with their day.” The price of admission ($20 for adults) covers the cost of any games inside.
Pietri started the project in gradual steps. “It’s easy to have a grandiose idea that seems awesome on paper but that fails in the real world,” he said.
He had already built up a collection of machines, many dating back decades. He beefed that up to create a permanent collection purchased out of “garages and basements. We find them mostly via Facebook Marketplace.” The museum also has games on loan from collectors.
Pietri wanted to make sure he could figure out how to repair any malfunctions, because there aren’t many professional pinball repair people still in operation. “And the ones who are still doing it are my age or old, so that’s one concern,” he said. As a result, “all of the repair work done at The Flip is done by volunteers who found us one way or another and thought, yes, this sounds fun. One of our goals is to train people in pinball repair and then eventually put together a curriculum so these machines don’t just get junked when they stop working.”
Two years ago, Pietri opened a small space in Pilsen to test the waters and see if enough people found the experience of playing games from different eras as interesting as he did.
“I started doing tours and seeing if I could build up a volunteer community. That went well enough that I got a second space, splitting it into a workshop and game room.”
A paid museum seemed viable, and he moved operations to its current space downtown, which benefits from foot traffic and is easily accessible for tourists and locals alike.
Around 30 machines are out for play, and a half dozen are in the back in various states of repair.
“So far, it’s been going really well; people’s response has been super positive,” Pietri said. “I really wanted to make it work for a variety of audiences.”
Especially kids. That’s because there are very few pure arcades anymore.
“The most common thing is called a barcade, where the games are free if you’re drinking beer,” he said. “So because most of the pinball venues today are barcades, kids can’t get that early experience. We don’t serve alcohol for that reason, we want to preserve the love of pinball for future generations.”
But it’s not just an arcade. Each game has a placard posted with it offering background information. “When you walk out, you know a lot more about pinball than maybe you did before.”
In a different era, Pietri might have been priced out of a prominent downtown spot. “But this space was a Pret a Manger (sandwich shop) that closed during the pandemic. It’s a very visible location, and they wanted something fun there, so we got a very preferable rate,” Pietri said. “The terms of our lease are if someone comes along and wants to pay full market value for it, we have 30 days to get out. Which is a gamble, but one that I’m willing to take because there’s not a lot of demand for restaurants downtown right now, so it’s worth a shot.”
Speaking of taking a gamble, Pietri is looking to collaborate with historians of pinball’s gambling roots for an exhibit about this aspect of the game. “I really want to tell that story of gambling in the 30s and how there was lots of debate of what was legal and what was not.”
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A related factoid: “It turns out that the zoning district we’re in, arcades are illegal because they used to be seen as part of a criminal element. So that’s why we only have three coin-operated machines up front. If you have four machines, you’re an arcade. But three is OK.”
At 57, Pietri’s own interest in pinball began in childhood. “My dad was on a softball team and they would go and get beers after a game, and he’d give my brother and I quarters to get out of his hair and we’d go play pinball. So I picked up a taste for it. Then in college, I lived in Ann Arbor and there’s a great arcade there called Pinball Pete’s, and that really cemented my love for pinball.”
What drew him in?
“Like all good games, it has elements of both skill and chance. I play less pinball now that I’ve started the museum, because I have all this museum stuff to do. But then I’ll take five or 10 minutes to play a game for a change of pace.”
A few years out of college, Pietri was shopping for Christmas gifts when he stumbled upon a 1992 Addams Family pinball machine being sold for $1,200. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I have $1,200!’ So I bought that in 1996 and I’ve hauled it around the country ever since.”
Pinball was ubiquitous throughout much of the 20th century, only to be replaced by video games. By 2000, the industry was a relic of an earlier era and on its last legs. “Basically one guy kept the manufacturing going here in Chicago from 2000 to 2010 or so.” That would be Gary Stern, of Stern Pinball.
But pinball has seen a resurgence. A renaissance, in Pietri’s words. “There’s a big collector market because people who played it in their youth, now the kids are out of the house and there’s room in the basement, so they might drop five or ten or fifteen grand on a pinball machine.”
Also, with so much of our daily life mediated by screens, people are looking for hands-on experiences as an alternative.
“I started this as an experiment,” said Pietri, “and one of my big questions was, would kids care? I was delighted to see that little kids and teens will come in and play energetically. It’s not just one game and then they’re back on their phones. Some will camp out at a machine for an hour. They like the experience, they like the skill improvement, and people have definitely said to me that they want a real-world experience that gets them off their phones.”
The games are themed, of course. The museum has “Indiana Jones” and “Twilight Zone” games from 1993, and “Star Trek” and “Incredible Hulk” games from 1979. But there are also more general themes, such as “Stock Car” from 1970 and “Derby Day” from 1956. The oldest games date from 1932.
Early on, the theme was limited to the back glass of the machine and maybe some of the playfield art. “There wasn’t a lot of depth in terms of the integration between theme and game,” Pietri said. “But as video games came along in the late ’70s and early ’80s, pinball had to up its game, so you see much deeper integration between intellectual property and the game itself.”
The Addams Family game, he said, was the best-selling flipper game of all time, and it came out a year after the Barry Sonnenfeld-directed movie, starring Anjelica Huston and Raúl Juliá, opened in theaters.
“There’s a tight integration there, where you’re achieving things that happened in the movie. Or objects in the playing field are from the movie. The goal is to tour the Addams family mansion, so the playfield has an image of the mansion with these windows, and each window represents something you have to do, like visiting the graveyard.”
The internal mechanisms of pinball machines remained consistent for many decades, even when the flipper was added in 1947. “Things kept improving and getting fancier,” said Pietri, “but remained a recognizable set of technologies until the mid-70s, when everything shifted to digital, so adding transistors and integrated circuits. At that point, there was a huge technological transition in the span of a couple of years. But there are some things that are basically the same as they were in the 1930s, like the tilt mechanism, which detects if you’re shaking it too much.”
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Pietri said he hopes the museum becomes a local fixture. “I hope to eventually just be the old guy who comes in and fixes things and nobody quite knows who he is anymore.”
For now, the administrative work takes up his time, with the ting-ting-tings and zaps and other sound effects from the games as the background soundtrack.
“I have a little office in the back and when I sit there, without looking, I can hear the difference between a new player and an experienced player, or I can tell when someone’s near the end of the game. It’s funny how rich the audio element is.”