The difference between a great game, a good game, and a bad game can be so minute.
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“You could try for the next year to analyze what it was that makes it great, but you’ll just keep coming back to the simple statement that if the industry knew exactly how to make great games, that’s all they’d make. “There’s something magical about that game,” Arnold says. Whereas most of his 20-year-old games will make a buck or two, his Addams Family always has “like $100 in it,” when he opens the till. Tim Arnold, owner of the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, says that his Addams Family machine is always busy. If they’ve just been sitting in a hotel arcade and not well maintained, some don’t play very well at all.”Įven non-collectors see the game’s value. “Some serious collectors say they’ve got to have an Addams Family, but it’s also not the easiest game to maintain just because there’s four flippers and turning parts in the hand coming out and a bunch of magnets. “Even though a lot were made, there’s only ever going to be less and less of them over time, unless it gets remade,” says Verwys. These days, a vintage Addams Family pinball machine will set a person back roughly $10,000 on the resale market-and that’s not including the cost of maintenance and upkeep owners need to spring for if they want to keep the game operational. “They might be married with some young kids, and they’ll think, ‘I’m going to buy a machine and put it down in the basement in my man-cave.’ And then of course they get another one because you never want just one.” “People who were in college 10 years before now have discretionary income,” says Sharpe. Now, much of the buying power in pinball is held by players with a bit of nostalgia. Manufacturers like Bally, who made The Addams Family, either closed down or started to restructure, focusing on casino games and slot machines rather than arcade fare. Venues decided they needed the floor space that pinball machines once took up.
Arcade games were replaced by flat-screen TVs and bar-top touch screen consoles. Soon enough, though, bar patrons who might have stopped into their local pub after work and to drop a quarter in a pinball machine grew more interested in pool and shooting darts. From about 1987 to the mid-’90s, Sharpe says, pinball “had somewhat of a heyday.” There were more than 3 million pinball machines in active operation worldwide, and manufacturers were pushing out about 100,000 new machines every year. Of course, it also didn’t hurt that The Addams Family was released at a time when arcade consumers had somehow found their way back to pinball.
Even movies that were way more popular at the time, like Terminator 2, didn’t produce such beloved machines. That’s a marvel not just because other “hit” games at the time were selling between 8,000 and 14,000 units, but because back then most pinball games were being sold to coin-op distributors or arcades rather than private collectors.īut why was The Addams Family such a smash? Sure, the film it was based on did well at the box office, grossing about $113 million in the US, but a hit film doesn’t always beget a hit game.
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Released in March 1992 by Bally Games and inspired by the 1991 live-action movie of the same name, The Addams Family is, to this day, the most popular and widely sold pinball machine of all time, moving more than 20,000 units. To game lovers, though, the best of all that ephemera is The Addams Family pinball machine.
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First introduced via a single-panel cartoon in The New Yorker in 1938, Chas Addams’ creepy clan has spawned multiple entertainment properties, including a surprisingly short-lived 1960s TV series, two beloved live-action movies from the ’90s, two recent animated kids films, an upcoming Netflix series based on the life of young Wednesday Addams, myriad books and collectibles, and even a Broadway musical starring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth as Gomez and Morticia Addams. For more than 80 years, the Addams Family has enjoyed a delightfully macabre existence.
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