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Introduction to Pinball Machines
Home » Game Rooms » Pinball Machines » Introduction to Pinball MachinesMaybe you grew up on pinball machines. Maybe you’ve never seen a pinball machine. Perhaps you’ve only played pinball games on an Atari video game machine. Perhaps all you know of pinball is “Pinball Wizard,” the song by The Who about a boy who was dumb, deaf, and blind, but “he sure played a mean pinball.” Regardless of your interaction with them, however, people who know arcades know that pinball machines are the original arcade game.
Basic pinball includes a slanted surface, a pair of flippers, a set of targets, and the pinball itself. A plunger and a coiled spring, or alternatively a button and a solenoid, fire the ball from the holding area into the playing field. Players then earn points by using the flippers to hit the ball into and over the targets. The targets may be bumpers, ramps, are simply specific spots on the game board. The slanted surface keeps the ball moving at all times, and the game continues until the player loses three balls through the drain between the flippers.
In most arcades, all this fun costs only twenty-five or fifty cents. True pinball wizards, however, sometimes spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars purchasing their own machines. These serious pinball players know all about the International Pinball Database (http://ipdb.org), the most comprehensive source of pinball information on the Internet.
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