As a Gen-X kid, I grew up spending my allowance in arcades. And as much as I loved playing Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, I loved pinball machines even more.
With pinball there’s depth and texture; it’s not just images on a screen. Seeing the ball bouncing off pads and bands trying to escape me, slamming the paddles, watching my score climb, it’s pure joy. The bleeps, bloops, bangs, bells and whistles of pinball is a symphony to me – which is why I was so excited to learn that Pawtucket is home to the Electromagnetic Pinball Museum. It boasts over 100 pinball machines, with about 70 to 80 of them in working order at any one time.
“One thing I say to everybody when they walk through the door: it’s going to break, okay? Machines break here all the time. It’s just a fact of life. The oldest one we have working for you today is a 1963 Preview,” said Michael Pare, one of the co-founders of the museum. “I’ll plug it in and turn it on for you in a little bit. Second oldest is a 1968 and another 1968 over there.”
Artscape producer James Baumgartner and I met Pare at the museum earlier this week. Walking into the main hall, there are rows of pinball machines on either side, roughly in chronological order, from the 1960s to the 2020s. Michael took us through the rows, sharing some of the highlights from pinball history. He said the companies that made the machines sometimes played fast and loose with intellectual property – like the Eight Ball game that has a drawing of a man who looks a lot like a young Henry Winkler as “The Fonz.”
“Of course it’s ‘Happy Days,’ but they didn’t want to pay for ‘Happy Days,’ so they didn’t. They just stole everybody’s face, called it a day, and moved on,” Pare said. “Mata Hari was deceased, so she didn’t get paid. Ann-Margret, Roger Daltrey, Wizard. These two pinball machines, Captain Fantastic and Bally’s Wizard, came out of the musical ‘Tommy’ from the rock band The Who.”
After the double row of working machines, Michael took us upstairs to what he calls the overflow area. It has several working arcade video games from the 80s and 90s.
“Behind you is a six player X-Men donated to us by the town of Coventry,” he said. “They had to close their teen center for COVID, so they gave us all their stuff.”
The cavernous room also has Ice Ball – a knock-off of Skee-Ball – air hockey, and a couple dozen pinball machines in various states of disrepair. One of the oldest machines is from 1947, the year that pinball designers added flippers to a machine for the first time. This changed pinball from a game of chance to a game of skill, though some cities in America still classified pinball as gambling until the mid-1970s, when a court case in New York City featured a demonstration where a pinball player “called his shot” while playing.
The museum buys some of the games, but some of them are donated.
“We get two to three machines a month now, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it,” Pare said. “Some people will call me and say, ‘Hey, I just bought a house. Get this thing out of my basement.’ Or, “I’m selling my house. Get this out of my basement.’ The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in column number three was found on the side of the road three days before Christmas, four years ago.”
Emily Rose is one of the other co-founders of the museum.
“I’ve been interested in pinball and arcades my whole life. It really wasn’t until we got the Addams Family about 12, 13 years ago that I got really hardcore into pinball,” she said. “We had a mechanic come in, and when the glass came off, you know, I got very interested. I was big into these exhibits at the Boston Children’s Museum. They had this little thing where you took a ball bearing and you could put it through little brio paths and everything, and you could test at different points how the ball would react to it.”
The Addams Family pinball game came out in 1992 and was a tie-in to the movie from the previous year. It’s the most popular pinball game of all time, with over 20,000 tables made. It features the voices of the movie’s co-stars, Angelica Huston and Raul Julia. There’s a rotating vault, and Thing’s disembodied hand emerges from a box and picks up the ball.
Pinball had waned in popularity in the 1980s after arcade video games became popular, but the Addams Family game helped spark a pinball renaissance in the 1990s. It was a good first game for Emily and Michael’s collection, which soon started to grow.
“We had too many pinball machines in our house. We were overwhelmed,” Emily said. “Cat hair and pinball does not mix. So we were looking for a spot. We came and took a look, and then we all came and we saw it, and the landlord was willing to give us a shot. So we took it. And it was right before COVID, so we were only planning on opening up as a club. Then COVID hit.”
“During COVID, we had nothing but time. So we came here, we worked on what we had, we got things up and running,” Emily said. “I looked on Facebook, I looked on Craigslist. Everybody was selling, people were selling, some places were going out of business.”
Before long, they had 30 machines working.
At that point, they thought “we have enough stuff to do something,” Emily said. “It would behoove us to just say, ‘Hey, come play games and see what happens.’ And that’s kind of what we did after COVID. We were just like, all right, let’s just try this. And everybody was so supportive. This community was supportive. The mayor was supportive. The city council. It was just great. So we just kept going and people kept coming and it kept building, and there were more people wanting to learn and help.”
So why have a museum instead of just an arcade?
“Oh boy, well, let’s just talk about the cultural relevancy. You can look on the back glass, and I don’t think you’re going to get a better picture of what was going on in America than what is being displayed. Pinball is unique,” Pare said. “I don’t think you’re going to find a better example of controlled chaos than in a pinball machine.”
The museum is closed on Mondays when Michael, Emily and others work on repairing the machines. They also have a week-long summer camp where kids get to look inside the machines.
“We love pinball because it’s real. Underneath there, it’s real. A digital pinball machine isn’t going to give you the same experience,” Emily said. “A teaching experience that I love to do with our summer camp is, you get a kid, any kid comes up to you, ‘Oh, why does this break? Why does this break?’ They’re really smart. You take the glass off and you hand them the pinball – wide open eyes. Because that’s a ball bearing. And that’s a rough thing. You’re flapping a ball. That action in the flipper. What happens in a split second, you know, under there, to the eye is just a visceral thing.”
The Electromagnetic Pinball Museum is located in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Pawtucket. You can find hours, events, and more information at electromagneticpinballmuseum.com.
