Has Pinball Gotten Too High-Tech?

Wandering pinball’s time capsules at Osaka's Silver Ball Planet reveals a game confused about itself

By Diego Nicolás Argüello | October 20, 2025 | 1:00pm

Photos by Diego Nicolás Argüello

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The pinball machines at The Silver Ball Planet are grouped together by themes. This means that, such as the case of X-Men, you sometimes get two tables side to side that represent completely different philosophies and trends pertaining to their times. Such contrast can be quite stark; near the entrance to the arcade, 2012’s X-Men pinball machine represented a modern yet retro depiction of everything I love about pinball. 2024’s Uncanny X-Men, however, was a shocking demonstration of how the passage of time has started to morph the very concept of it.

The Silver Ball Planet is located in Osaka, Japan. It’s a place that’s lived rent free in my mind ever since prolific video game developer Yoko Taro sung its praises during an interview with Archipel ages ago. In order to get to the arcade, you first need to get through the labyrinthine architecture of Shinsaibashi Big Step, a mall located mere six blocks away from the iconic Dotonbori area. The streets surrounding the mall are filled with somewhat touristy thrift stores, but also izakayas with massive signs promoting cheap beer that seem like they’ve been there for decades. In just that small area, the sleaziness of Osaka, a trademark of the city, contrasts the clear intention of Big Step to embrace flashy, modern trends. Staircases and benches have RGB lighting inside of them, making for quite disorienting ups and downs, and the bathrooms have different decorations, from a light blue and white pattern that looks like waves of painting to what feels like stepping inside a gaming PC case, with black walls and thin RGB light paths intersecting it. Even the food options available seem to encapsulate trendy and gentrified vibes with high prices despite the fact that you can find traditional and affordable options in every other corner.

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The lead up to the arcade is strangely fitting to the X-Men machines comparison. The older game places all its bets on the playfield, as it should. You find bash toys of Wolverine and Magneto underneath the glass, paired up with old school illustrations of other iconic characters, including a set of villains that stand as the main objectives to tackle. The display is bright red and makes the most out of its pixels to show illustrious yet classy depictions of characters and certain actions. Sounds and music both fit the game perfectly, and there are small touches that add to it, such as Magneto mocking the fact that you’re using “steel” against him when hitting the bash toy with the steel ball. It is the definition of cool, and also maintains what I like the most about pinball in general: the physicality factor, and how each machine responds to your actions.

When I switched over to Uncanny X-Men, the tonal difference was immediately apparent. It has the flashiness of a machine that has been newly released, but the playfield is surprisingly lacking. There’s a bash toy of a Sentinel head that basically carries the whole thing, as the playfield heavily relies on acrylic stand-ins of characters otherwise. The focus, then, seems to be on the display itself, which is something I also noticed from most new machines I tried, from Foo Fighters to John Wick. It’s a massive screen that’s constantly displaying animations, and from where you can select different modes, storylines, and operations. Saying that it feels video game-coded is probably an oversimplification, but it’s not far from it, especially when you can scan a QR code on the table to create a Stern account and track your progress online, achievements included, as well as press buttons on the machine to perform attacks that only happen on the display.

My biggest gripe with this concept of pinball is that it takes away attention from the playfield. It communicates to me, the player, that the action itself isn’t the main event, and that my eyes should instead be looking at a screen, which is exactly the opposite thing I want to be doing while standing in front of a pinball machine. Granted it was my first time playing it, but I got distracted by the display quite a few times, which led to me losing a ball because I shifted my attention away from the playfield. I wasn’t a fan of the art style either, which didn’t help things.

John Wick was an even more drastic example, basically showcasing entire clips of the film on its display. It fits more thematically, sure, but it’s equally distracting. Foo Fighters does a similar thing, yet it carries the benefit of being music-centered. Each credit begins with an animation of a hand picking up cassette tapes from inside a box, which is how you select a song. Then, as you make progress, there are paths displayed on screen that show different objectives to take, as well as cities for the band to tour. There’s also a UFO element related to the band’s name, but I was able to just focus on the playfield most of the time while tapping my foot to the beat of the song I chose. In comparison, the Metallica machine (an earlier music pin from Stern) didn’t have all of these modern touches to it, instead showing the title tracks on its display, but the playfield had so many interesting features that it was easy to get lost in and keep on putting quarters just to continue experimenting with them.

I’m based in Argentina, and pinball has lost the presence it used to have back in the day. While you can still find some machines in specific bars or the odd remaining arcade, I haven’t been able to keep up with the trends and changes of the scene over the years. When I visited Barcade in New York a few years ago, the selection at the time mostly involved older machines, with only a few outliers like the Iron Maiden game. The Silver Ball Planet, being a place that proudly displays machines with a “new release” tag on them in almost every row, left a different impression.

I tend to favor and embrace new technologies when they make sense, as long as they’re serving a clear purpose. I don’t think adding RGB lightning to bathrooms and staircases falls into that category, needlessly adding a distracting factor to a traditional foundation that is there solely to get your attention. I feel the same way with how modern pinball tends to take away the protagonist, and the ethos of what pinball is, to pack it all up inside a screen. Due to how inherent nostalgia is in the medium itself, I don’t think we’re going to see places like The Silver Ball Planet shift away from classic machines to new ones entirely anytime soon. But my time in that arcade, as well as the streets surrounding it, showcased a worrying sign of the things we’re progressively losing as time passes by, and how companies allow for certain trends to percolate to the point of losing what once was part of an identity.

At least some things don’t ever seem to change, as the South Park machine was out of service. Why is it always broken regardless of where you go?

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist from Argentina who has learned English thanks to videogames. You can read his work in places like Polygon, the New York Times, The Verge, and more. You can also find him on Bluesky.