Just like Star Wars fans, pinball can't let the past die

I should be clear that I like Fall Of The Empire, which I played a lot of (albeit not very well, per usual) over the course of the press day. Designed by longtime Stern designer John Borg—who’s famous enough, among the fairly small set of pinball enthusiast publications I was rolling with for the day, that I frequently heard him affectionately referred to as “Borgy”—the table possesses a clarity that some modern tables lack, employing its large stretches of central open space to clearly label which shots build scores, advance modes, or prime the player for multiball carnage. (The addition of a large number of voice barks from periodic C-3P0 voice actor Chris Bartlett, supplied by Disney and powered by Stern’s new SPIKE 3 hardware, helped the clarity.) As a guy who came up playing pinball in the ’90s, my tastes run to a bit more clutter than Fall features. (Give me a big dopey Soprano‘s safe or a Theater Of Magic rotating cube any day of the week.) But when you actually pass through the playfield’s vast central expanse and nail one of its many ramps, the results are deeply satisfying: Jumps, corkscrews, and a circular feature—subbing in for Return Of The Jedi‘s Sarlacc pit—that one designer affectionately referred to as “the toilet bowl.” In terms of physics, and the all-important “flow state”—a phrase I probably heard a dozen times over the course of the day—it’s a great machine, with a lot of entry-level appeal.

Where Fall Of The Empire is going to struggle, I suspect, is that it’s a Star Wars table, and Stern already has quite a few of those. You’ve almost certainly played the 2017 one, if you have any interest in pinball at all: It’s in pretty much every arcade in the country, and is currently the flagship product in the company’s push to market “budget” tables, at $5,000 a pop, at Costco. I’ve never loved that table. (It uses a too-complicated character selection mechanic, and I’ve never clicked with its basic play.) But it’s both ubiquitous and “modern”-feeling, sporting the same LCD screens that pretty much every modern pin does, playing tiny clips from the movie when you hit your targets. Fall Of The Empire has a prettier, bigger screen, and a more robust selection of clips (mostly culled from Empire and Jedi). And it is, at least in my novice hands, a better pinball table. But it’s still aggressively rooted in the exact same source material, sporting the iconography of what is, essentially, the ultimate signifier of a particular breed of unflagging nostalgic allegiance. Even as Star Wars has bizarrely faltered in theaters over the last six years, its recognizability still sits comfortably at “cultural maximum.”

There’s a palpable sense that Stern knows it’s treading into brackish, over-familiar waters here. When some of the company’s PR folks pulled me aside for an interview about my experience with the new table, the last question they asked me was how Fall differentiated itself from Star Wars 2017, which I mostly mumbled some polite non-answers to get through. In his presentation, Davis noted that he’d actually had to fight Disney to let the company give the table its subtitle, rather than just call it Star Wars again. There are only so many pop culture touchstones buried in 90 percent of Americans’ brains, and Stern seems to know it’s tapping a very similar button to one it hit less than a decade ago—if not engaging in outright self-cannibalization. 

When I asked Davis why the company was rolling out a great table, on state-of-the-art hardware, all in the service of blasting 48-year-old movie clips that every human being on the planet has already seen a thousand times, he was clear-eyed and unabashed. “That’s the market,” he stated, freely admitting that there’s an unavoidable nostalgia element in Stern’s entire business. “You want new, but not too new,”  he added, noting that Stern had kicked around the idea of pitching an original Star Wars story for players to play through, but ultimately decided that it wasn’t worth losing access to five decades of iconic characters and brand recognition. Davis suggested we might be many, many years out from the days when fans who grew up with The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi would have the kind of resources to be Stern’s target audience; years from now, will anyone recognize the irony of Adam Driver croaking out “Let the past die, kill it if you have to” from the back of an arcade screen?

The fact is that Stern is in a position where it has to give people what they want, whether that’s giving the best presentation possible to Obi-Wan and Vader’s hoary old lightsaber duel, or hewing to Disney’s “buttoned-down” approach to licensing its properties. (One designer noted to me that there’d been a pitch for an edited video of a pinball being shown detonating the Death Star—the sort of thing it feels like you’d see in dozens of different configurations back in the days when tables were dominated by LED screens—but Lucasfilm shot the idea down.) Modern tables, powered almost relentlessly by existing video clips, leave little room for that kind of expression, although Davis did provoke the day’s loudest round of applause when he made a pointed note that none of Fall‘s (lovely) cabinet art had been touched by AI. Hilariously, Davis also told me that, while bands tends to be a lot more chill about the licensing stuff, working with rock stars does produce other concerns; he said he’s had to field calls from undisclosed members of certain unnamed rock bands pissed that they got less coverage in their table’s video clips than some of their fellow members.

Pinball is a unique artform, and a beautiful one. No other medium requires the consumer to interact with it in such tactile, visceral fashion: the play of the balls off the flippers, the erratic interactions with basic physics, the sudden shock as an unexpected hit sends the ball crack-ing up into the glass. The tables that Stern and its various rivals produce are form and function intertwined, assembly line-produced consumer machines that are nevertheless works of art. They are the products of intense testing, design philosophizing, gaming debate, restless tinkering, and more, all beholden to an install base that knows precisely how it should be catered to. As objects, seeing them constructed only makes me lust for them more; as products of game design, it makes the obvious compromises come into sharper contrast. 

Every person I talked to at Stern clearly loves pinball, not just as it exists in some distant, nostalgic past, but as an active and developing branch of game design. I asked all the Stern folks I talked to what their favorite tables were; almost uniformly, they cited pins produced in the last 10 years, citing the elegance and flow of modern table designs and rulesets. But every artist is, ultimately, working at the mercy of their patrons. When it comes to Stern’s, those patrons clearly have a hankering—or are at least perceived to have a hankering—for the movies of their youths, presented in ever-louder volumes and higher resolutions. So if the clockmakers have to attach a giggling Salacious Crumb to their smoothly flowing wonders to keep the whole factory moving, then that’s exactly what they’ll do.