Hey, everybody, it's your old pal Josh. And for this week's s Y s K Selects, I've chosen How Pinball Works one of my all time favorite episodes and it was recorded in September of two thousand fourteen, which seems like just yesterday, doesn't it well at any rate? This episode has it all weird history, electro dynamics, the tilt sign, everything, So I hope you enjoy it in good health. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Do Do Do, and there's Jerry T Do and this is Stuff you Should Know the podcast. What is that the news? Oh? Yeah, I thought you're making pinball pings and no bells and whistles. No, it sounds like Vegas, Vegas like one big pinball machine. It is that you've been to walk through those casinos? Yeah, you just made my neck muscles tight. Man. I hate Vegas. I like Vegas. Yeah I wouldn't. I wouldn't. I don't want to live in Vegas or like go to Vegas every weekend or anything like that. Going to Vegas once a year once every couple of years. That's fine with me. Yeah, not for me. I mean I've been a bunch and I'm just I'm done. Oh you're done with Vegas. That's what you're saying that I don't see any reason to go back. I guarantee somebody you want to see, we'll have some sort of residency out there, and you will be back in Vegas when I'm like sixty. Yeah, like pavement will have a residence valleys. That's exactly I think. What's going to happen. Well, then you'll find me in living in Vegas, my friend. There you go. Yeah, see, I got your back on the Vegas train. But that sound yeah, it's like a million pinball machines that take your money. Yeah, faster than pinball machines. Yeah, And that was an early worry about pinball. Actually, as we will soon see, because I say chuckle, let's dive right into the history of pinballs. So pinball machines actually find their lineage back in the nineteenth century. There were um things called or what were they. I want to say bagat machines, but that's not correct. The bagate table, yes, the bagatel table, thank you. Um they were basically a cross between pool and pinball, use a pool queue and everything, and they sucked and nobody liked them. I think it looks pretty cool, does it. It looks and boring to me. Well, I mean it's if you're used to modern gaming, is not gonna thrill you. But I thought the look kind of neat. So the Bagatel table was there. It was in place, and in the eighteen thirties a guy named monte Redgrave came along, like, you can't not say that guy's name like that. Um. He came along and said, you know what, people just invented a spring. How did you say his name? Again, Montague Red like he's on lad on um um and uh. He came along and said, somebody invented a spring recently. I'm gonna add it to this Bagatel table. Yeah, make it less sucky. And then all of a sudden we have the the what did he call it, the ball shooter, which makes sense, that's what you'd call it. And now we had the first introduced mechanism of pinballs. Things are starting to take shape a little bit here. Yeah, but you didn't stick a coin in the game. What you would do is kind of like pool tables these days at a bar, you would go up to the keeper of the balls and say, here's some money, give me my balls, and let me go play the game on the bag of tell table. Yeah, And he would go, you know it sucks, don't you And you would say, yes, but it's the eighteen thirties. Yeah, And if I play really well, then I can win free drinks and cigarettes. And they said, exactly, can you see a little twelve year old winning cigarettes and then going back to play more bagatel? Sure, So this is the way it went for many decades. People were miserable until the nineteen thirties, and there was this enormous explosion of innovation in pool table re um in the thirties, Like just almost everything that you think of when you think of a pool to a pool um. We've been saying, we've been saying pool table just for the last like minute. Why didn't you correct me? I thought you were talking about bull tave, I'm talking about pinball anyway. In the thirties, there was a huge explosion in pinball. Pinball, yeah, and um, everything that you think of when when you think of a pinball machine, almost all of it came about in the thirties, coin operation, the back glass, the thing that has like kiss or q hef neuron it or something like that stands up off of the playing field, the table um electric well, I guess an electric current running through it. Yeah, legs um, the tilt mechanism. Bumpers yeah, uh sounds yeah, score keeping, and then bumpers. Of course I think I said bumpers, did I not? I don't know, maybe, but bumpers. And then most of all, most importantly, chuck was the thirties led to a huge surge in popularity because you had the Great Depression and pinballs were cheap entertainment that were wide, widely available. You notice the one thing we didn't say though and all that innovation flippers, because still up until nineteen seven, you just bumped the thing to make the ball move. Yeah, there were no flippers, which seems very counterintuitive to pinball. And the flippers really changed. They fundamentally changed pinball, not just in the way you play, but in pinball is a game, because before flippers, it was a game of chance. It was the same thing as playing like um high low, basically like you had no way really of manipulating the movement of the ball. Well you shake them, sheen, you could without tilting. I mean that's what you did. Yeah, that was how you did it. Even still it the amount of skill it took was minute compared to the skill that could be used. Once flippers were introduced, pinball wizardry and it became a game of skill um. And then but before that, the like I said, things were popular. Get this um. In the early thirties, there were a hundred and forty five companies making pinball machines, and the field became so competitive and ruthless that by the mid thirties, like five years later, there were fourteen. Yeah, and most of those were based in Chicago, which became sort of the pinball capital of the world. And I've never been there, but I bet you anything, Chicago still has a lot of a lot more pinball machines than elsewhere, you know. I was trying to think of like this, researching this made me want to go play pinball, like researching sushi. Maybe we want to go eat sushi. And I was thinking, like, I have no idea where to go to play pinball, you know, And we'll go to my brother's house. Does he have one? He's got three oh, I love your brother even more now, dude. He built a whole game room, of course, because that's what my brother does. What does he have he has? Uh F he has a Tomcat F fourteen, which is the rip off of Top Gun. I've seen that one. He said. There's a lot. There were a lot of rip off games for a while, of movies and actual movie time games. Uh. He has black Hole, but not the movie, just another rip off game. I would love that. Uh. And those are both kind of old school. And then he has a Jurassic Park, which is uh. I think didn't they have like a t Rex that comes down and like eat your ball? I can't remember, I feel like all three of them. But yeah, and he also kicked this. He took an old um video game like stand up video game console and removed all the guts, got a computer screen and um computer and hooked it up in there too, where you can play all the old school games, you know those programs they have now, and change the screen vertically so it just looks like a regular arcade game. And you can go up and play Frogger and Space Invaders and Scott Bite Me Over and it's all free. That's so awesome. Man, he's like, um, Ricky Schroeder and silver spoons or something. But growing up yeah pretty much. Um. And I think the reason why I don't play more pinball over there is because, um, we're always playing ping pong. Yeah that's a game of skill, and I love ping pong. But I'll try and get in a pinball game. Man. I want to play some pinball so bad. Let's just go out to Roswell dude, Okay, do it right now. Uh. And I if I if I collected post, it would definitely be mid mid seventies and mid eighties from me. I would think, yeah, you know, all the bells and whistles and all that, the new fangled bells and whistles. They're fine, that's cool, but I like, uh, not so old that it's like electro mechanical, but not so new that it's like nothing, but like, um, plasma screens and stuff like that. Well we're in the middle. Sure, I'm the same way. My favorite game of all time pinball wise, Um, favorite game ever, gallagha. But a favorite game pinball wise was Adams Family Pinball. And then I learned in this article that is the top selling game of all time from Yeah, I think it was either Bally or Williams put that one out and they sold more than twenty thousand units of it. Dude, it's awesome and it didn't surprise me, and like, I have no affinity for the Adams Family, but it's the best pinball game I've ever played. And when I saw it was number one, I was like, well, of course it is, because it's the best one. You don't like the Adams Family, No, I mean I like it fine, but I don't. I didn't play it because of the movie. I played it because it was an awesome pinball game. And they had one at them all, not them all the bowling alley near me and Athens Bowling Alley. That's where I could probably go find a pinball machine. Huh yeah, maybe or maybe not. Sadly, I'm starting a quest, all right, um so telling you let's go to my brother's house because we can have a scotch okay. Uh So. Anyway, is when they finally invented the flipper. D Gottlieb Company introduced a game called Humpty Dumpty, and that was where what most people say the first modern game came about. It took at the lower flippers, all the innovations of the thirties and out of flippers and boom you got pinball, not pool table pinball pretty much, although the flippers weren't the same. It was the nineteen fifties the same person and came up with spot bowler and that was the first modern arrangement of flippers, right, and they were longer with that introduction or else a little later on. The first flippers they introduced were um, they were shorter, yeah, and they didn't face this They faced in reverse of the way they face now, which is weird. It was like they were working it out, yeah, beta pretty much. So it's funny that they introduced flippers in seven because seven. By the time flippers came around, pinball was illegal and most of the major cities in the United States, um, and had been for several years. I never I think I had heard this once and forgotten it, but pinball was totally outlawed because they equated it to gambling because it was not a game of skill, which and I guess because you've got prizes. Yeah. Um. Mayor Lea guardia Um, who you will remember from the Burlesque podcast, was a bit of a moralist. Although he was a wet politician, he was in favor of repealing prohibition. He hated pinball, hated it. He he thought it was a mafia racket. He thought that it robbed the quote pockets of school children. The forms of nickels and dimes came to them as lunch money. And he got an outlawed in New York. And once it was outlawed, he ordered like really dramatic raids. Yeah, right after Pearl Harbor, he said, you know what we need to do. The Japanese have just bombed us. We need to get rid of these pinball machines. And so let's go round them up, uh, like in a raid style. Let's smash him with sledgehammers. Let's dump them in the river. What they did, they dumped them in the river after they smashed. That's a very New York nineteen forties thing to do, exactly. I bet you they're still pinball machines down there, if anyone's brave enough to get into the East River. I don't think they are. Now we should say also give a shout out to popular mechanics who, um, we're working off in part really awesome article. They came up with eleven things you didn't know about pinball history. Um. So, from the forties until the mid nineteen seventies, if you wanted to play pinball in New York City and Chicago and l A most cities in the US, it was illegal. Um. You had to go to a pornography shop basically and go behind the curtain and play pinball. Is that weird? It's the weirdest thing we've ever said on this show. Until the mid seventies, and like there were still raids and pinball operators. A little five year old chuck, Yeah, I would have been dropped off at a porn shop to play pinball, which I'm sure your parents would have been happy to do. Well they did, and I played pinball. I didn't look at nudy people. Did you really know? I was gonna say, Man, you just blew my mind. No, no, no, And get this, The city of Oakland, Oakland, CALIFORNIAWN, just this past July overturned an eighty year ban on pinball. Free the pinballers. Yeah, good for them. Yeah, so pinball's band people are still playing it like crazy. Um. And apparently the manufacturers realized this as well, because they're still innovating and adding and making new games and machines and all sorts of stuff. Yeah. Well this is after World War Two, that where things really slowed down, obviously because of the war effort. Pinball was big. Dent was put in pinball manufacturing too, Yeah, like everything else. And then after the Fishies it took off again, and it also became um kind of a symbol of rebellious youth. And this popular Mechanics article points out, like the Fonds played a lot of pinball. I never considered that from Tommy Um from the Who's Tommy the Pinball Wizard? And Tommy both kind of rebellious like stick it in your ear LaGuardia. Yeah. I mean it seems silly now to think about that, But when Tommy came out, it was illegal, so pinball was sort of uh yeah, I guess it was just the rebels. Yeah, you're anti authoritarian if you played pinball, it was just an image of it. Yeah. And then the great Simpsons quote Sideshow Bob said television is ruined more young minds than pinball and syphilis combined. That one flew right over my head when I heard it the first time. I just thought, oh, that's silly pinball, but I didn't think about like moral turpitude. Yeah. I didn't get that one either, but I do now. So luckily, pinball was still widely available, albeit in the backs of pornography shops. UM. And the reason we say luckily is because somewhere along the way, a young man I think in his early twenties named Roger Sharpe, who is a magazine editor, UM, was called upon to save the pinball world. At a New York City council meeting. Yeah, they finally said, hey, city council, can we get a hearing on pinball machines? You guys are being ridict because it's a bicentennial of this country and we need pinball. It's as American as America gets as pornography. So they said, sure, we'll have a hearing. Because their intent was to prove that it was a game of skill and not chance, which was the whole rub in the first place. He brought in there a pinball wizard, game of chance is gambling. Sure, LaGuardia had a point, well sort of. I still don't get it, but this law was obsolete because they added flippers, and now it was a game of skill, but the law was still around basically, so they brought in their pinball wizard Sharp and Um. They brought two machines because if one broke down, they wanted to have a backup, and some jerk councilman, when he went to play the game, said no, no, no, no no, why don't you play the other game, the backup one? Yeah, the backup game. And Sharp started sweating because he was like, oh, I'm not very good at that game. Yeah, he never played it before. I'm a master at this one. But he was a pinball wizard, so I believed in him. Yeah, I didn't know what happened. Did you? Did you see the the documentary special Winlet No, Oh my god, it has footage of this. It's amazing and amazing documentary. All about pinball. I mean all about pinball is not so awesome documentary. I think it's one called Tilt as well. There is that's about a specific in history and pinball. I haven't seen that one, but it sounds pretty good too. But see Special when Let amazing, um n C Tilt two. It's what's the deal? So, um, Roger Sharp's playing, he's not really impressing anybody, and things are kind of going bad, and he decides to do a Babe Ruth call. He pulls back the plunger and before he releases it, he goes, I'm going up the middle aisle here. Yeah, And just so you know, if you've never seen a pinball game, you you pull the plunger, it shoots the ball up the right hand side through a trough and then it spits it out at the top. And what he was trying to prove is where I'm going to spit it out and where it's going to start its descent back to me. It's going to be in a very specific place in the center of the board, not on the left, not on the right, right up the middle. And um, he did it. And apparently right afterwards the city council was like, okay, we'll repeal it, like it's obviously a game of skill, like Roger Sharp single handedly, well double handedly because he was using the flippers, um, save pinball from illegality. I wonder if they said, yeah, fine, good lord, just it's legal. Get the machines out of here, get this loser out of here. But he is not a loser because he is currently still the number five hundred and thirty six ranked player in the world. I'm surprised. I thought he went on to be I think at the time he was number one, which is why they chose him. He probably was, but he's been falling ever since. Man, that's another thing in special win let Man. There are some like really good pinball players. Well, I've got the list. I'll quickly go with the top five. Number one in the world as of today, two thousand, fourteen August whatever it is. Keith Lwyn of the USA is number one. U s a Urian Ingle Brixton of Sweden's number two. Swede dimn Zack Sharp recognize that name that sounds vaguely familiar Roger's son. Yeah, he's the number three player in the world. That's awesome. Number four Danielle Celestino AXIARTI what was that? He's Italian, he's before. Jorgan Home is also Swedish. He's number five. There's a Canadian at six, a Sweet at seven. Than eight through twenty save one are all Americans and number twenties Josh Sharp. So his sons followed in his footsteps. That's great and are both top twenty ranks players. And I bet Josh is soups jealous Zack. Maybe maybe Josh is also He's like, I want to be a veterinarian, so I'm paying more attention to that kind of thing. Maybe so. Um So pinball was saved by Roger Sharp and um pinballs just kept going on and on. Apparently it had its golden day age. Um. It's widely believed between nineteen fifty eight, but it was also huge in the seventies, huge in the eighties, and then video games came along and all of a sudden, pinball was like uh, and it started to decline and decline and decline and decline and all I think we were down to maybe five major pinball machine producers, and by major, I mean the only ones um by Minora, because I mean, it's all it takes a lot of time and effort to manufacture a functioning pinball game. Yeah. So, um by the nineties there were just a couple left. Everybody was selling off their pinball divisions, and there was a company called Bally Williams, which were former competitors that emerged and this is what the documentary Tilt is about. They went to their pinball division and said, hey, you guys, are great in the pinball world, but the pinball world sucks. We want more money out of you guys. What are you gonna do that pinball? Yes, they came up with Pinball two thousand. They said, we will give you a chance to save yourselves. Figure out what will revive pinball for tree, and they came up with Pinball two thousand. Yeah. It's basically a hybrid of video gaming and pinball, where you have a kind of a standard pinball set up, but a video screen that's interactive. Yeah, as the back um backdrop no on the playing field too, so like holograms pop up on the on the playing board and like run away from the ball and interact with the ball. Yeah, it stinks though, and no one liked it. Have you played it? I haven't played it, but I saw videos of it and it didn't look like fun, and no one liked it. So the thing is is, like this one article I read pointed out like it wasn't given a chance to flourish, Like the idea was great, and the fact that they pulled it off successfully it was really something. Well, they built only two games, right, and I think each one had a few thousand production run. Um but there was Star Wars episode one, which here's my theory the reason Pinball two thousand went nowhere charge our biggs. Yeah, that the other one was revenge from Mars and um you can still find those you was today. Um. But despite the fact that Pinball two thousand was created, it was it was okay as far as successes go. Um. Bally Williams pulled the plug, which left one company Stern. Uh. There's a guy named Michael Stern, I believe, who inherited his father's business and um became the only people making pinball machines in the world. No. Yeah, man, had we been have we been recording this two years ago, we would have basically been saying, like, pinball's dead, it's on its last leg. There's one company making it. They've started to lay off their designers because of the economic crisis. Some of those designers went on, some of the Stern vets went on and founded a company called Jersey Jack, and for the first time in many many years, there are more than one pinball manufacture. There's two, right, But the competition has caused Stern to go back and rehire some of the people they laid off come up with new designs, and um they are. There's a pinball renaissance and nascent pinball renaissance just beginning to bud that could happen. Well, pinball is definitely a sort of an end thing now. Um, if you're super cool and you have some money, then you might have a pinball machine in your house like my brother. Um it is Apparently Stern's ratio of home sales to commercial sales has risen from thirty five percent to sixty of their total sales. So the market now isn't for arcades, because what are those. The market is for the person who has enough money to buy a pinball machine. Yeah, you don't have to. Well, yeah, if you want a new one, it's gonna cost you. But if you want like a vintage one, it's I mean it's hundred still. I mean that's a decent out of money. But the high like the Adams family one's less than five thousand. Man, that's the one that you need in the house. Yeah. So, um, I think my brother actually refurbished his. I think I think I'm right. I think they weren't even working and he was able to fix them very neat. Yeah. Um, yeah, I imagine you can get them for way less because these are like fully refurbished, like polished, ready to go one um, and a lot of them are starting to come from overseas because the demand in vintage collectors um items are like is rising so much that like seventy of them come from overseas. They're re importing them back to America. Well, and it's big in Europe because I mean, as evidence from that top ten, uh two or three of them are European Swedes. Swedes, look at them. So we'll get into how pinball actually works right after this. All right, so we've talked a lot about the history of pinball, which is way more interesting than I thought it would be. But um, we haven't talked about the game because I assume everybody has played pinball, But if you haven't, we're gonna break it down. Yeah, and it's actually it's pretty simple if you really think about it. There's two real components to the game. Now. Ever since time before, you seven flippers in the ball. Uh yeah, everything else is just kind of ornamentation or whatever. But to play pinball, you need flippers and a ball because the point of pinball is to score points using the ball bouncing off of obstacles and all that stuff, and then to prevent the ball from going down the drain using the flippers. That's right there, you got flippers in the ball. That's right. You've got your flippers. UM, typically at the bottom of the playfield, which is what it's called, directly above the drain on both sides. UM. A lot of games you'll see now have other flippers on the upper right and upper left that also do fun things, um, like flip the ball. But you know a lot of times the ones at the top will flip it into the very special chamber where you can score tons of points. We'll get to the scoring here in a minute. UM. And you basically want to propel the ball up with your little plunger and then all the bumpers and ramps are there to score your points. And um, it makes a lot of noise, it's a lot of fun, and that's pin ball. Yeah, I mean, that's it for me. This article on how stuff works pointed out like you know, when you're talking about scoring, which we'll talk about later, that's like doesn't mean anything to people who are playing pinball, most of us, because I'm just trying to keep the ball from going down the train. Sure, um, but the way that pinball's arranged, as you get better and better at it, you'll learn that, Um, there are all sorts of combinations and tricks and stuff that you can do to really score some points. We'll get to that later on, I get ahead of myself. That's right. The ball itself, if you want to just talk hardware, it's one and one sixteen inches in diameter. It's steel in a ways, about two point eight ounces, and and can reach speeds up the ninety miles an hour. When you see that thing shoot out of a one of the little chambers that will come back at you, it's going really fast, and that is um. Sometimes it will use magnets underneath the table too, because since it's a steel ball, you'll sometimes see a game that has like a like a spinning disk, like a vortex in the center of the table that will start at any given moment and it can catch your ball and keep your ball there with its magnet just sort of spinning in place, which is no good or it could be super good, depending on what you're after. Uh. Sometimes though, they do use a ceramic pin ball called a power ball, and it is lighter and faster and immune to magnets. So a lot of times when you'll have multi ball going on, some of those other balls are ceramic, and that's when things get crazy. So as the ball is going around the table, um, it's hitting the bumper, as it's hitting the targets, and they're sending messages to the um. Well, if it's post seventy six game, to the motherboard that's keeping track of your score and all that jazz. Yeah, and you've only got the three balls. That's that's a game, yes, but there are circumstances where you can get more, which will tell later. So, Chuck, there's also another component you don't have to have to play pinball, but all pinball games have it now. It's called the black box. And if you look at a pinball table, you've got the field right, yeah, the playfield, which is the board that has all of the bumpers and the stuff and the flippers and everything on it, and then at a right angle to that, coming off of it, you've got what's called the back glass. And connecting the two is called the black box. And this is where all of your electronics and your solid state stuff goes. Yeah, your back glass is not only going to have your scoreboard and your information. Like they'll say things like aim for the aim for the canyon. You know, they'll give you hints and little tricks along the way. Look Out for the t rex look out for the t rex um. But it's also to the bad classes where like, if you're walking through your arcade, that's where you're gonna see. That's where your attention is going to go. So that's where you see the Playboy models on both sides of you, Hefner or kiss looking cool. So it's it's sort of an advertisement. Hey, come put your quarters into me. It's shiny, it's colorful. They's been money designing those things, and uh a lot of those have become art. Now they'll remove them and frame them and hang up on the wall, which would be wicked cool, I think it would be. But I'd rather have the actual pinball game. Yeah sure. Um. So, like I said, back in the seventies, they they introduced solid state electronics. Prior to that, all pinball machines were electro mechanical, And at first, when I was researching this, I thought like, well, okay, so solid state took over everything that's not the case solid state took over. Basically, the back class everything else is still electro mechanical, or it was up until the very very very recent times, although they still might be electro mechanical. So, um, when you hit a bumper with your ball and it makes it like bounce and vibrate and you get some points, that's because you set an electrical impulse using an electro mechanical assembly to the motherboard, the solid state motherboard that's keeping score. So the motherboard is now keeping score. It's um. Now they can use digital sounds, so they could add speakers to the back glass and all the stuff, but the actual function of the the pinball machine while you're playing is still electro mechanical. Yeah, it's old school. Uh. And there's about a half a mile of wiring in each one. And um, if you come over to my brothers, he will show you the guts. That's he has his rigged where you can pull down the back backglass look under the hood. Yeah, basically, and you know it just looks like a huge mess of wires and half a mile's a lot. It's pretty crazy. Um does he wear like a chain wallet when he works on his pinball machine? Don't know. Maybe. Uh So the playfield itself, which is what everything is on, is tilted at about six to seven degrees towards you, and it is made of wood. And it's also very old school. You know, so at some point someone makes this like a wood base like cornhole, and it's got holes drilled in it, and it's got stuff painted on it and a bunch of layers of finish to keep it, you know, to protect it and to make that ball go. Yeah, but I mean that's basically it. It's pretty simple. Yes, some of the very newer ones, um, I guess from the twenty one century replaced the wood playing field with um uh, plasma screens or LCD screens. Yeah, but you know, kids today no thanks, um. But other than that, it's like screws and glue and wood. It's just it's fairly old school and and still like entertaining. Pinball's challenging. That's why you hate pinball two thousand. Huh it was newfangled, Yeah totally. Hey, let's take something awesome and make it new for everybody. Like I hate that. You know, it's like taking some classic drink, Like you're a cocktail guy saying let's add you know, let's add some some new oxygen eated something to the Manhattan. You're like, no, Manhattan's perfect. I don't know oxygen neated something that is. Hey, every like some things are perfect the way they are, and I think pinball is one of them. So, Chuck, you approached the pinball machine, you put your quarters in and everything um and you either so you press the start button or well, once you press the start button, a ball should fall into the launch lane, which is the at the back of the launch lane is the plunger. In some of the newer games, there's a solenoid which shoots it for you. Yeah, I see other things like a like a gun handle, trigger and stuff instead of the plunger. Very clever, but again I'm into the like the um One way or another, you're going to launch the ball. The advantage of a solenoid that launches it for your with the press of a button is that if you are playing a game and you're pretty good and the pinball machine decides it wants to see what kind of a wizard you are, it will send more balls into action. The way it does that these days is by using a solenoid in olden days before the solenoid, say the eighties. Um, it's a little man inside. Well, you had to pull the plunger back yourself, and that meant you had to take your finger off of a flipper button. Man, hey man, you better be quick. I kind of forgot about that, or you're dead. That's why solenoids, that's the advantage they have. Yeah, I'll take that. Umu advancement that passes my bar. The solenoid is good. So let's talk about actual pinball play after this message, Chuck, Okay, scoring in pinball, like you said earlier, if you're a regular shmo like us, we're just trying to keep that ball on the table. But if you are a pinball wizard, then that means you know the game within the game and all the combination shots that you're specifically trying to hit in order to rack up the big, big big points. This is nuts to me. I have to tell you, I didn't even know that this existed until Yeah, I knew. I just you know, like, that's how poor my pinball playing is. Now. I'm I'm not any good either, But you you is your brother good? So you've seen him. Yeah, he's better than me. So they used this um in this article to use the example of a game called high Roller Pinball. Yeah, and basically imagine this. While you're playing high Roller, Um, you basically want to knock out some icons that are associated with poker. Once you've hit all the icons with the ball or something like that, so there are tiles that you knock down or whatever. When you've hit them all, you've unlocked a game within a game. Yeah, and I think it starts with poker, and all of a sudden you're playing pinball while you're also playing poker on the back class. Yeah, so like you're trying to hit a specific thing that will give you a specific card and a poker hand, let's say, and like you have to be you know, you have to You're trying to do this with your flipper. It's a game of skill, like we said, right, But at the same time, you're still playing your pinball game too, right, Well, I mean it's part of the game. So like you know, you'll know you've got the cards up on the back glass and we'll say, all right, I gotta hit that bumper to get a king. I'm aiming for that king the whole time, Okay, so if your brain hasn't melted yet, prepare for the finish. Once poker has done, there's like four or five other casino games that you play after that, and you play them in succession, and and as you win them, you get closer and closer to this um special play mode called Casino Friends at that's what it's called in the high Roller Machine. Yeah, that's after you've won all the game the poker games, right, yeah not but yeah, all the games, and so you're playing Casino Frenzy, and that's what's called a Wizard Award, where it's like, Okay, this kid's good. Now we're gonna really let them or her up their points by playing a special round. And all of a sudden, the field is like flooded with balls and every bumper you hit is worth like hundreds of thousands of points and it's just scary and terrifying. Yeah, multi ball is stressful for a guy like me. Same here, man, I just try and keep you know what happens to me and multi ball is I'll usually lose them all pretty quickly. Like I can't even hold onto the one because it just it stimulates me too much. I'm like, what what happened me too, and I'm like, as long as I've got one, I'm break even. But with um, with Wizard Award functions, um, that's when you start to earn even more points. But imagine having like three four or five balls on the field and the computer in the machine is telling you, like, hit this combination and we'll give you like twenty million points. And um, if you're even in Wizard Award ball, you're a pretty good pinball player, I would imagine for sure. And that's just the high roller game. But most games have a couple of games within the game that you should look out for, and um, that's how you get your free game. If you've ever uh locked up or been super good and gotten um, you know, they'll tell you on the backglass how much you have to have like replay value thirty million, um. And that's what you're shooting for because you want to get that free game, not just because it's a quarter or whatever, but because it's like a big award. You know. It's like entering your name on the in the top ten in Galica, right yeah, Um, so I didn't understand this. When you get a free game, is that like three free balls or one extra ball. I think it's three. I think it's a full free game. That would make sense. That's why they kin keeps taling. It doesn't like reset, right. Yeah, you can also fall backwards into a free game with something called match where I had never heard of this. Every once a while, the computer will just flash like a random number between what zero, zero and ninety. I think, yeah, multiple of ten and um, if the last two digits of your score at that moment happened to match that number, then you win a free game. It's like a little lotto game. And I think I've gotten a free game that way, because I remember getting free games before. But being like, how did I get a free game? I must I must have hit the match you like just turned into Christopher walking in the dead zone. I saw that not too long ago. That holds up, Yeah, it does. Um. But as far as replay goes, it says that most machines are set so you have to be in the top ten percent to get a replay, and you can get a second replay, but they have it max out at a hundred and fifty of the first, so a double replay is tough. Yeah, I mean you're Tommy at that point or your last name is sharp yeah, I um. And then tilt chuck, you know. Tilt it's synonymous with pinball. Tilt is where you are being well, basically where you've been punishing the machine and the machine says enough, hands off, man, And basically, like we were saying early pinball machines, um, the only way you can manipulate them before the flippers was to move the machine gonn bump it. So the tilt mechanism has been in place to prevent people from overly cheating by tilting the machine by It's really old timey contraption and I guess it's still in use. It's pretty funny how old school it is. Basically, they have like I guess, like a copper copper wire with a circle on the end, a ring on the end, and dangling in the ring but not touching. It is like a metal ballast, right, and it's connected to the machine. So as long as the ballast is just swinging around freely within the ring, you can tilt as much as you like. And a skilled player knows how to till without getting caught, right, it's part of the game. Yeah, But once you tilt too far and the metal ballast touches the copper ring, a current is formed and all of a sudden, it sends that to the motherboard, and the motherboard says, tilt. This is your first warning, and apparently most modern games give you two warnings, and then the flippers stop working and you lose your ball. Yeah, and that's just losing one ball. If you really get upset, if your ball is stuck, or if you're just having a bad day at the office and you pick up the front of the machine and slam it down, that's called a slam tilt. And they have these little leaf switches inside the machine for that, and if they touch each other, that means you have really taken things too far, and that is shut it down. No game, not worth taking your ball. They're saying, leave the machine. You're not gonna win any cigarettes doing that exactly. And that's the Uh, that's the slam tilt. That's pinball. Maybe, Yeah, I got nothing else. I don't either. This is very exciting. I'm glad we finally did it. It's been on my list forever ever since I found out it was illegal. You're like, oh, I gotta get into that. But that was like a couple of years ago. I feel like, wow, yeah, when I saw a special winlet nice man, everybody go see that? Is that on the old Netflix? I believe it is tilt, definitely is. I think special Winlet might be to add that to the former queue, which they had to change because Americans are dumb what they call it now it's not called a list because people are like, what's a queue? Really? Was it spelled like that? I hadn't noticed that they did that. Oh my goodness, Yeah, I've heard. That's the reason. It makes sense to me. I can't verify that though. Uh well, if you want to learn more about pinball, go check out special win Let. Go check out Tilt. Check out the popular Mechanics article we mentioned eleven things you didn't know about pinball history. It's pretty awesome. And of course, check out the article on how stuff works dot Com. Go to the search bar and type in pinball and it will bring up this article. Since I said search parts time for listener mail. Yeah, this is via Facebook. Actually, um in regards to our more Gelon's podcast, because one of our is it funny? I think it's more gallons. But you are literally the only person on the planet that calls it that fine um Tyler Murphy are one of the generals and the stuff you should know army and Facebook and email friend uh pinged, I guess a doctor friend of his name Chris Wells, and I was like, hey, dude, check this out. Do you know anything about this? And so he commented on there and I was like, hey, this is a listener mail. Can I use it? And he said yes. So he says he's only come across it twice. In both cases they brought stuff in telling me it was eggs and bugs along with my med technologists reviewed under a microscope and it was mainly lent and hair follicles. One had some insight that it was not an actual infection and felt relieved. The other was very upset that I suggested otherwise, So he kind of got both ends of this spectrum. I would never treat um with an antiseptic I'm sorry, anti parasitic med if I didn't think it was a real infection. The risk of causing harm versus fixing anything is too high. Any PARASITGA meads can have all kinds of unwanted effects, from kidney and liver impairment to lowering the threshold for seizure to potentially being carcinogenic themselves. For every case of monsters inside me on TLC that goes undiscovered and later is found to truly have a parasitic infection, there are many more where there is no physical evidence of infection because they're simply not one. Uh. You feel really crappy as a physician though, when you have to tell someone that everything they brought into your office is all dust and lent, that there is no physical evidence for their ailments. The most important thing for a clinician to remember is that even if this is all in their head or imagine or however you want to word it, the patient is still experiencing it, which is what we pointed out. So you need to try and treat the root cause, whether it be with continued reassurance and second opinion within reason or cognitive behavioral therapy or other means. And that is Chris Wells via our buddy Tyler Murphy. Cool, thanks guys who Tyler is a teacher and in the summertime he works at the Big put put Chain Putt Putt. No, that's that's like the Big Adventure Land or what I can't remember what it's called. Hire pirates Cove? Is that a chain? I don't know. It sounds like a chain anyway, that's what he does. Since it sounds like fun, It's like, man, I could totally do that job. Summer would be fun. Yeah. Well, thank you very much you guys in uh, anyone else out there who has any further clarification on any episode we've ever done. We want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com, and, as always good check us out at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does It how Stuff Works dot com