Pinball Museum welcomes visitors who touch (and jolt) its treasures

By Grit BuettnerPinball requires full body involvement. You need to jolt, tilt and manhandle the table to get the ball to go where you want it to go.“The flow has to be right to give the ball the right drive,” says Arne Hennes, a 49-year-old German computer-science graduate who can get steel marbles to hurtle up ramps, spin around roundabouts and disappear into holes at will.Hennes has collected historic table games from around the world in his pinball museum in Schwerin, northern Germany.In the games you hunt dragons, Vikings and monsters, extinguish fires and hit basketball hoops. You can win points, free rounds and extra balls, but never money.Computer games killed off the once hugely popular table games from the 1990s onwards and the machine manufacturers went bankrupt. Table games, once found in cinemas, pubs, cafes, laundromats, supermarkets, sports halls and swimming pools, disappeared from public space.But fans saved the last pinball tables from ending up on the scrapheap and set them up in cellars, garages and small private museums. Including the one established by Hennes, Germany has three such museums.Although only open at weekends or for pre-booked school classes or tourist groups, Hennes estimates that up to 4,000 visitors come every year to his remodelled rooms in a former vocational school.“We have adult regulars from Hamburg or Berlin, fans, experts, nostalgic people and dads who want to show their kids the culture of their youth,” he says.All the exhibits can be played without coins. Over the old-time American game Fire! one visiting couple first got to know each other and years later found the same game again in Hennes’ museum.“Such private collections of exotica are not museums in the classical sense,” intones Steffen Stuth, chairman of Germany’s national association of museums. “But such exhibitions are part of the heritage of a country and make the cultural landscape richer.”The Schwerin Pinball Museum — which is staffed entirely by volunteers — has grown rapidly in recent years.It started out with just two games tables but then acquired a large private collection of 90 of the machines, all in working order.A handful of enthusiasts contribute countless hours of their free time to replace broken springs and lights, touch up paintwork, fix rusted relays and broken knobs and so on. The decades-old machines are very susceptible to breaking down, Hennes says.The machines range from century-old wooden ones that use glass marbles — the precursors of the larger games to come — to sparkling, flashing high-tech wonders with imaginative painting, various game levels, and sophisticated features and effects.“Pinball games tell stories of travel, dream worlds, the deep sea and the universe, sporting events, car racing, action, fantasy and films,” Hennes says.The bulky machines take up a lot of space with some weighing up to 200 kilograms. Most of them were manufactured in the United States.The boom years of the games tables began in the 1930s and reached their high point in the 1970s.In the late 1980s, digital games consoles heralded the death of the pinball industry.They were popular in Germany as elsewhere. In 1979 there were 200,000 pinball machines in then West Germany. A few even reached communist East Germany, where the exotic American imports were mainly familiar at fairgrounds or in holiday resorts.But pinball culture never really took off in East German, Hennes says.However, towards the end of the ‘80s the East developed its own gaming machines with games such as “Rabbit and Wolf” and “Burst Water Pipe.”One of those machines is now in the Schwerin museum, requiring skill and concentration to play it till the inevitable announcement of ”Game over!” rings out.   —DPA