At first, pinball was not welcome in New York, where the machines were illegal until 1976. In 1941, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia made headlines when he supervised the dumping of machines into the East River. As a younger generation raised on Nintendo and Sony PlayStation comes of age, it makes sense the very mechanical and comparatively old-fashioned pinball machine would lose its crown as the arcade game of choice. In 1992, the pinball industry was successfully fighting the video game challenge, selling 100,000 machines around the world that year. Seven years later, sales had plunged to 12,000.
Several theories attempt to explain the swift slump in pinball's popularity.
But they had games with very little soul. The new glitzy pinball machines required time-consuming, expensive repairs, while video games could be fixed with a simple tweak of a dial, or replacement of a computer chip. But in the end, the measure of a successful industry often comes down to money. But optimism remains high outside Chicago at Stern Pinball, the world's only remaining manufacturer of the game. Hope for the industry lies not in the United States, he says, but in Europe, where Stern sells 60 percent of the 10,000 machines it makes each year.