Member-only story
Pinball Wizardry? Not Quite
More jiggery-pokery than flipper finesse
In the town where I live, there is a patch of grass where there once stood a wine bar that mysteriously caught fire one night, and burned down. When I was a child, that building had been a furniture showroom, but by the time I entered my teens it had transformed into a brightly-lit amusement arcade called The Leisure Centre — and I became an eager habitué.
The centre comprised a prize bingo at the rear, a snack bar in the centre, and at the front a collection of coin-operated amusements, some of which wouldn’t look out of place on Antiques Roadshow. A cassette tape of Elvis Presley’s early hits played almost constantly, and the centre was a great attraction for local skinheads, which made it a great attraction for me. There were one-armed bandits, a huge table football game with a glass lid, and a wall-mounted electronic penalty-kick game. Best of all though, there was a row of pinball machines along one of the walls.
A Lucky Bop
These were Gottlieb machines that were two pence a shot. Over time, my friends and I got to grips with the finer points of these machines; how to trigger the specials and rack up a replay or two. If we couldn’t earn a replay via a high score, there was always a random number match at the end…
