Did pinball machines come before arcade games? Was the disastrous “TILT” warning a precursor to “GAME OVER” in all its forms?

Be a pinball wizard of life. Shoot balls for the sky. Kiss the balls with your flapping pedals. Only then will you see that you can’t miss. This is a sure thing.

I never played a lot of pinball as a kid. Midway Games never enamored me sufficiently. When I was young, there were still arcades, where arcade games and pinball machines shared an uneasy coexistence among the dim lights of the pandemonium-space.

I can still recall one arcade game, similar to Pac-Man, with munching Ladybugs and chasing insects. It fucking terrified and drew me to it.

Of course I played pinball at times. It seemed to be a second-class citizen of the game auditorium. All the pinball machines were shoved over to one side.

The kind of pinball wizard who could play for hours would have been a legendary figure at our arcade. I strongly suspect the grimier industrial cities of the Anglosphere held the most pinball wizards. Places where a quarter was real money, sacrificing a frosty glass of Coca-Cola so you could play a handful of games on your route to amnesiacal oblivion.

The pinball wizard, driven to succeed, must have sensed his own mortality in the flapping of the flippers, like the metallic last breaths of a robot lying on its side in the muck. He would have understood that the pinball machine was not just a time-stealer and quarter-devourer, but a gateway through time to get to know his own adult self.

It seemed that few adults played pinball machines. It was as if they already knew. The teenager who would make the expert player was a few years from abandoning the game. The tug of life — of girls and young family, of work and bills — would drown the pinball machine in a blizzard of paperwork. No more fun allowed. No more edgy excitement. The drill was down and set. Let’s all be responsible and mature, now, shall we?

One wall of the arcade had a long, thick stripe running a few feet above the floor down one entire side of the building. Maybe it wasn’t an isolated arcade building, but an arcade that adjoined a bowling alley in the middle of nowhere. Maybe the “TILT” light would come on too easily at the slightest jostle of the machine. One archway, leading to the bathrooms, was an open space beckoning one to explore.

Outside, it would be frosty cold. The cold of November, not yet freezing December. But a bite. A real bite in the air.

You might need gloves, if you were a pussy, but pussies don’t play pinball machines, it’s a rule.

The thunderous, rapturous observation of bystanders too poor to play would be your reward if you were a god of the steel-ball-machine. They would hold their breaths as you played. And when your score was a high one, it would blink on and off hypnotically, saying YOU WON, YOU WON, YOU WON… Why kowtow to infinity? Because infinity rewards you with a silken blowjob back, silly.

And the pinball wizard walks away.