Play Meter

overnight. There were many factors which
contributed to this. Obviously flippers come to
mind, but things like free game mechanisms, as
opposed to payouts also came into play. People
don't realize that some of the pinballs of the thirties
and fortie were actually payout machines. They
had little cup or drawers on the bottom. Sure,
there weren't a lot of them, but because they did
exi t, you had the anti-pinball ordinance in areas
like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
PLAY METER: So many of the early pinball
machine were gambling machines?
KIRK: The trouble with matters uch as this is that
the re i n't a ignificant amount of documentation.
But from what we have been able to piece together,
from the general impre ion I got is that pinball did
not tart out intended to be a gaming device but
ort of evolved into it. First they started out with
each little hole being worth so many points. Then
the barkeeper would begin giving the player
another coin to play it again if he could make a
certain number of point. But after a while, it
became a gray area a to whether the player was
putting that coin in hi pocket in tead of using it to
play th game. 0 the game tarted getting into
automatic payout mechani m . There were mixed
fe ling abo ut that when it fir t came out, but
unfortunately once they did it, all the games had to
have it b cau e the people wanted to play the ones
with th money. Then in 1935, Harry Williams
introduc d the free play mechani m because he felt
the pinball indu try wa getting too much into
gambling. H wanted to turn the game back into a
pur amu ment device, and obviously the free play
m chani m h Iped achieve that goal.
PLA Y METER: 0, you're aying there was this
tr nd towa rd gaming, and then a reversal back to
amu m nt?
KIRK:
nfortunately, thing like that do not
chang overnight, and the problem became a
matter of di tingui hing which game were gaming
rna hin and which w re not. And many cities just
de ided to implify the whole matter by outlawing
all pin ball . Even though by this time there were
only a few games that were in fact payouts, they
au ed that kind of confusion. With the reversal
back to amu ement machine, you had the
chang over to replay machine in the late forties
and early fiftie . But the public and authoritie
w re till confu ed ov r the di tinction between
them. In fact. public entiment against coin -
ope rat d machine wa 0 trong that in some areas
v n vending machine were banned.
PLA Y METER: How do you account for the change
in the public's attitude toward pinball?
KffiK: The truth has been kind of forced out. I
think the fact that pinball is unmatched in its
entertainment value has caused many people to like
it and to question why it was made illegal in the
first place. The whole basis of the Los Angeles trial
centered around the fact that the game as it exists
now has no correlation to the game that was
outlawed decades ago other than the fact that it's
still called pinball. The laws that were written at
that time could not envision the later technical
improvements in the game. And the judge ruled in
PLAY METER , February, 1978
favor of the game, saying it was different and
indeed a game of skill. That same evidence was
used again in New York. And then when it came to
Chicago, they realized that there had been quite a
bit of legal precedence for overturning it; so they
just overturned it, period. They didn't even
challenge the question of whether or not it was a
game of skill because they said it was obvious.
PLAY METER: Do you expect the media's present
fascination with pinbaQ. to continue?
KffiK: I expect it to increase.
PLAY METER: On what do you base that
prediction?
KIRK: Not on anyone thing in particular, though
there are some obvious possibilities, such as
Columbia's owning Gottlieb and Warner Brothers'
owning Atari. But aside from that, the interest in
pinball is just enormous. For instance, one reporter
who had interviewed me on the topic a while back
called me three months later and wanted to
interview me again. I asked him why did he want to
do it since he had interviewed me just three months
before. And he answered, "Yeah, but pinball's hot.
Everybody wants to read about pinball." That
seems to be what it is. I like to draw the correlation
between the period that we're living in and the
period from 1947 to 1957, which you might call your
"golden age of pinball," because many of the
important design concepts occurred during that
time. But because of solid state now and because of
the increased interest in the game, I think we're
going to go through a second period of fantastic
technical and playfield development that will make
the games of the future vastly superior.
PLAY METER: Getting back to the area of media
attention, we carried a report on your doing NBC's
Tomorrow Show. In fact, we featured it on the
cover of our October, 1976 issue. Could you tell us a
little about what went into that telecast?
KmK: Only a few people know exactly what went
into that thing. How that thing started was that
they wanted to do a pinball show to correlate with
the legalization of pinball in New York. And they
had picked up some material somewhere where we
had done an interview and then they called us as
one of several prospects to do a pinball show. Later
they got back in touch with us and said they wanted
us on, though really it came at an inopportune time
because we weren't prepared to do it, and had very
short notice. But the original concept was that we
were going to play a contest between the people
that I took and Tom Snyder.
PLA Y METER: Who supplied the machines?
KIRK: At first they couldn't come up with
anything; then we said that we could get some
games there. Unfortunately, the games didn't
arrive there until about two hours before the show.
And so we were in a near-panic trying to get them
ready for the seven o'clock taping. Luckily, we
finally got a couple of them ready.
PLAY METER: Tom Snyder, I understand, is an
avid pinball player. Is that true?
KmK: He's not a bad pinball player. He kind of gets
into the game a little bit. But then we hit it off good
with him right from the beginning. He was very
nice and cooperative, and in fact after the show
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