Michael Workman

Gary Stern is the very last pinball manufacturer in the world. His office is filled floor to ceiling with posters for pinball machines, movie posters and game paraphernalia. One signed photo shows Stern posing with a cadre of Playboy bunnies at the old Hefner mansion. "If we ever quit," he states matter-of-factly, "that'll be the end of pinball."

The Stern Pinball factory is housed in an unassuming 40,000-square-foot squat yellow brick building in Melrose Park, about 45 minutes from downtown Chicago. A serene industrial corridor that's home to Giant Finishing and Alloy Welding, Stern Pinball seems mismatched among its neighbors. Assembly lines inside are warm with forklifts carting pallets of finished cabinets for the model they're currently producing, "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines." The sound of air drills, pinball bleeps, ka-chings and sirens fills the air. "What we're about here is fun. You spell fun capital F, capital U, capital N," Stern says, pointing out how everybody who works at the factory is assigned to play fifteen minutes every day. "Some champion-level players work here."

A prototype for Stern's new "Lord of the Rings" model sits outside game-designer John Rothanell's office, where he's crouched before a computer monitor. On the wall to his left, an exploded assembly design for "Terminator 3" is tacked up, displaying screws, mounts, every last electronic element radiated outward as if in mid-retreat from a blast still occurring. Much of what Rothanell's responsible for involves "finite elements analyses." This includes making sure all the components that little silver ball will encounter are surmountable--Rothanell explains, for instance, how the pinball cabinet sits at a six-degree angle, which means it will lose pitch on the playing field relative to its exact weight and potential travel speeds. If the ball encounters a railing or a chute, sufficient velocity must be achievable for it to remain in play.

Rothanell must also assure that a proper strength analysis of the gaming system's individual parts has been done. "Maximum stresses need analyzed, based on the material properties, so that we can predict breakage and fatigue." After completing a game design, Rothanell hits a button and prints up an instruction manual--the software does this all for him--with every last component numbered and accounted for. Then assembly begins.

On the factory floor, Stern tosses out what are obviously a few of his favorite statistics. "There are 3,500 pieces in a pinball machine. A half mile of wire. As much labor goes into assembling a pinball machine as a new Ford Taurus." "Terminator 3" has been no less challenging to manufacture and its success, as does Stern Pinball's, depends in part on celebrity name-recognition. "Arnold did all the voices for that game." Stern says. Have other celebrities made unique voice recordings? "Sure. We had the voice of the Crypt Keeper for 'Tales From the Crypt.' Slash wrote music for our Guns 'n Roses model, and we had the original voice actors for 'The Simpsons.'"

(2003-12-10)

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