Multiball: The Story of Pinball

S2E1: A History of the Upper Playfield

Every pinball machine ever made was flat — one inclined surface, one plane of play — until 1980, when Steve Ritchie looked at a playfield and asked: what if the ball could go up? In our Season 2 opener we trace the full history of the upper playfield, from the pre-ramp single-level machines of the EM era to Black Knight's landmark two-level design, through the DMD era's networked spatial systems and into the multi-level architecture of modern machines. Along the way we examine what makes a great upper playfield work — the five design principles that separate the machines that got it right from the ones that didn't. It's a story about space, ambition, and the moment pinball stopped being flat.

S1E10: The Modern Renaissance — Season 1 Finale

In 1999 the smart money said pinball was over. The arcades were dying, the manufacturers were closing, and a generation of players had moved on to consoles and home gaming. The arc of the story pointed one way. The smart money was wrong. In our Season 1 finale we trace the remarkable comeback nobody predicted — the barcade phenomenon that created a new kind of pinball customer, the internet communities that connected a scattered global fanbase into something powerful, and the boutique manufacturers who rebuilt the industry from scratch on entirely new terms. Jersey Jack. Spooky. American Pinball. And the competitive community that turned a casual amusement into an organized sport with world rankings and tens of thousands of registered players. We close with a question worth sitting with: in a world that is increasingly mediated by screens, why does a steel ball and two flippers still matter? The answer, it turns out, is the same one Roger Sharpe gave a city council chamber in 1976. Some things are irreducibly real. And real, it turns out, never goes out of style.

S1E9: The Solid State Revolution

In 1977, pinball stopped being a machine and started becoming a computer that happened to have a ball in it. Episode 9 is the story of the transition from electromechanical relay logic to solid-state microprocessors — the most complete technological transformation in pinball's history since the invention of the flipper. We dig into why the change was inevitable, what the first generation of solid-state machines got wrong, and how the microprocessor unlocked a design vocabulary that the EM era could never have imagined: multiball, modes, digitized speech, dot matrix displays. We also meet the designers who understood what the new technology made possible and built careers out of pushing it as far as it would go. The ceiling that EM machines had reached was gone. What replaced it was human imagination.

S1E8: Stern — The Survivor

In 1999, Williams closed its pinball division. Gottlieb was already gone. Bally had been absorbed years earlier. Every major manufacturer in the history of American pinball had exited, collapsed, or been swallowed whole. One company kept building. Episode 8 is the story of Stern Pinball and the man behind it — Gary Stern, son of Williams' own Sam Stern, who looked at a collapsing industry and decided it wasn't over. We trace the brutal wilderness years of the early 2000s, the licensed titles that kept the lights on, the barcade boom that changed the demand landscape, and the gradual, hard-won revival that proved Gary Stern right. It's one of the great acts of stubborn cultural stewardship in the history of American entertainment — and almost nobody outside the pinball world knows it happened.

S1E7: The EM Era — A Golden Age Retrospective

There is a sound no modern pinball machine makes. Not because designers haven't tried to recreate it — but because you simply cannot replicate a physical bell with a speaker. Not in a way that carries the same weight. Episode 7 steps back from the manufacturer stories to take the long view on the electromechanical golden age — roughly 1947 to 1977 — the thirty years when pinball ran on relays, score reels, chimes, and hand-painted backglass art. We look at how EM machines actually work, the landmark machines that defined the era across all three major manufacturers, the largely anonymous artists whose backglass paintings were small masterpieces of mid-century commercial illustration, and what was genuinely, irreversibly lost when the microchip arrived. This one is a love letter. Fair warning.