Everything I know about The Sopranos I learned from Sopranos pinball

As the groundbreaking HBO series celebrates its 25th anniversary, let's toast one of the single dumbest ways to experience it via cultural osmosis

By William Hughes  |  January 11, 2024 | 4:00pm
TV Features Pinball
Everything I know about The Sopranos I learned from Sopranos pinball
The Sopranos (HBO) Graphic: Karl Gustafson

This week marks the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos, a show whose influence on the modern TV landscape probably can’t be overstated. At least, not by me. Because, uh … I’ve never actually seen it.

A terrible confession, I know. Possible grounds for dismissal from the Formal Association Of Online Television Cranks, etc. But I’ve managed to simply fake it ’til I made it with David Chase’s groundbreaking drama series, largely through cultural osmosis. The fact is, it really wasn’t possible, from 1999 to 2007, to be present in any serious way on the internet in America without picking up some of the basic plot beats of this series, its most shocking moments, the bits that had the water-cooler buzzing. I had one secret ally in my corner, though, from 2005 onward, one that I now firmly believe is the single greatest way to learn as much as you can learn about The Sopranos without actually bothering to watch The Sopranos: The Sopranos pinball table, by Stern Pinball, an invaluable trove of detailed Sopranos lore.

This might sound like a joke, but I’m being entirely sincere: Produced in between the show’s fifth season and its extended final sixth one, the Sopranos pinball table is one of the most info-heavy, spoiler-filled pinball tables I’ve ever played, attempting to incorporate as many plot beats, episode ideas, and sexually explicit boat antics as designer George Gomez and his team at Stern could reasonably fit into it. Certainly, it’s one of the only pinball machines that I know of that can get you dirty looks in a quiet arcade by activating a bonus mode where the game constantly spouts profanities at the player, or loudly spoils the fate of Steve Buscemi’s character on the show. As one of my favorite tables to play, it’s a gold mine of semi-random references that have now been permanently burnt into my head, giving me an extremely weird set of touchstones for the series—and I thought it might be worth exploring everything a dope like me can learn by taking their prestige TV entirely in pinball form. Like, for instance…

Every single major character who dies in the first five seasons of The Sopranos (including the horse)
The Sopranos - Tony and Pie-O-My

The single most hilarious, and bizarre, aspect of The Sopranos (the pinball table) is one you’ll run into immediately after pulling the plunger: the R.I.P. display, a series of three rollover lanes near the back of the playspace that also serve as the game’s skillshot (i.e., a target the ball gets sent toward when you begin, that pays out extra points if you hit it within the first few seconds of a ball). In The Sopranos Pinball, lighting up all three letters of R.I.P. grants you one of eight dead characters from the show, lighting up their sad little pictures on a sad little board at the back of the machine, and each carrying a bonus to your end-of-ball multiplier. Not that all dead mobsters are created equal: Burying Buscemi’s Tony Blundetto (“He was like a brother to me!” the game yells, each time you light him) gets a far smaller boost than whacking Joe Pantoliano’s Ralph Cifaretto. (And the horse he road to hell on, with beloved equine Pie-O-My sitting in perpetuity next to its alleged murderer on the board of remembrance.) Completely unapologetic about spoilers, this feature manages to ruin episodes even I know are big deals—good luck getting through when you’ve just picked up an extra 1X multiplayer for putting Adriana La Cerva in the ground. An incredibly odd design choice.

Tony has a boat called The Stugots, and that boat is for doing it
The Sopranos Episode 18 Tony Grabs Russian Dude By the Balls

One of the strange, thematically rich (?) elements of the Sopranos pinball table is that its two easiest multi-ball modes are both based, pretty clearly, around fucking. Sure, you can work your way up the ladder to “Under-boss” mode, which has its own game-ending multi-ball to reward the diligent. But “Party At The Bing!” and “The Stugots” are by far the easiest ways to get a good stream of balls flying around the table, racking up a ton of simple points and lazy jackpots. The latter is especially easy: All you have to do is fire a few hits up the ramp to Tony’s beloved boat, and then stand around for 10 seconds while the machine makes fake sex noises and “permission to come aboard” jokes while LCD images of bras go flying on the screen. (Do not play The Sopranos pinball table around children.)“Party At The Bing!” is harder, but more rewarding: You’ve got to hit the table’s tricky left ramp a number of times, ultimately sending the little pole dancers next to the ramp spinning, and getting a three-ball multi-ball in the process. You can even get both of these modes going at the same time: Congratulations on staging your nautical Mafia pinball orgy. (Do not play The Sopranos pinball table around children.)

Safe-cracking is involved…somehow
Chris, Matt and Sean crack a safe - The Sopranos HD

Almost everything you do in the Sopranos pinball table is crime-themed: shooting the table’s outer orbits initiates truck heists (complete with a cheeky little “Chase” trucking company logo on the in-table trucks), hitting the pop bumpers performs a shakedown where mobsters demand “Where’s my fucking money?!” from the guys they’re kicking the shit out of—and your basic goal is to rise through the ranks of the DiMeo crime family by collecting tributes and kicking them up to your bosses. At the center of the table, though, is a big mechanical safe that will serve as both players’ primary target, and one of their greatest banes. Hit it enough times and the thing will, in a very fun effect, explosively pop open, allowing you to get a precious free rank increase by slamming the ball inside it. But smacking a flat object that’s dead center in the middle of the table is also a good way to get balls firing straight back down the drain very quickly, and so the safe can kill you with a quickness. You’re pursuing advancement, sure, but it’s just as likely to kill you for getting overly ambitious.Which leads me to surmise, as I’m writing this, that your player character in The Sopranos (pinball edition) pretty much has to be Michael Imperioli’s Christopher, who a.) a cursory Wiki search confirms was involved in safecracking activities in the show, and b.) even I know is often drawn into self-destructive behaviors by his desire for recognition. (Somewhat amazingly, The Sopranos pinball table does not model an increasingly bleak spiral into dog-crushing drug addiction due to the pressures of mob life as one of its mini-games; no table, apparently, is perfect.) But the safe remains a potent, narratively rich metaphor; truly, The Sopranos (pinball version) has much to tell us about the pressures of modern Mafia life.

You don’t want to go to the Meadowlands
Christopher Dig Up The Body - The Sopranos HD

The pinball table’s “Meadowlands” activity doesn’t go into a lot of detail about what happens in that particular part of the New Jersey wilderness; it just shows you dumping a shovel, a bowling ball, and some luggage in what appears to be a barrel of radioactive waste. (It’s also an absolute pain in the ass to pull off, with a vertical loop ramp you have to accurately drill to get into, but that’s neither here nor there.) The point is, you don’t want to go to the Meadowlands. You know why.

Vesuvio burns down, cards get played, and Mikey Palmice gets whacked
Silvio burned Vesuvio - The Sopranos HD

Like many branded pinball tables of its era, The Sopranos has an “episode” mode that lets you trigger an additional set of minigames more closely linked to the show’s events (all of which, hilariously, open with the old HBO “static” logo and sound effect). That means you can play out some very oblique versions of burning down Artie Bucco’s Vesuvio restaurant, sweeping the Bada-Bing for bugs, and even playing an executive game of poker. (That one’s not pinball, even; you play a hand of Texas Hold ’Em on the machine’s screen, wagering points with the flipper buttons on a single hand—although at least Tony Soprano doesn’t come by and kick the shit out of you if you lose too much.) The most elaborate of these is the one labeled “Satisfaction,” which, I’d go so far as to venture, may be the single most accurate recreation of the ever printed on a grainy dot-matrix screen, complete with his final moments spent weeping in a puddle.

There’s a talking fish
There’s a talking fish
The Sopranos pinball table Image Stern

Chase’s use of figurative visuals and dream-like logic to power The Sopranos’ storytelling is one of those things that percolated up to the general population pretty much from the moment it first started airing—and none of those dream visuals caught more attention than the talking fish. Symbolizing the betrayal, and incipient death, of Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero (worth an extra 3X multiplier once you put him in the ground, by the way), it’s one of those images that’s been tightly associated with the show for decades, standing in for so many of Chase and his team’s stranger, more mystical flourishes.Very little of that more heady part of the show makes its way into the pinball table, which, like so much of the surface-level appreciation that greeted The Sopranos, is largely focused on the show’s sex, violence, and creatively deployed profanity. (Did I mention there’s a mode that makes the table give you extra bonus points while screaming “Fuck!” every time you hit anything? You have to be playing on a version of the table that doesn’t have any of its censorship flags turned on, but it’s there, and it’s profanely delightful.)But while Dr. Melfi and elaborate dream sequences didn’t make the cut, the fish did: He’s hanging out on the left side of the table, flapping his mouth and giving you some bonus money every time you fill in all the letters of “FISH” on the flipper lanes. Big Pussy might sleep with the fishes, but he’s apparently still willing to hand over an envelope and pay out from time to time.

 
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