NOW GARY STERN IS KING OF PINBALL-MACHINE WORLD
KA-CHING! JUST ONE MANUFACTURER LEFT.
by Raad Cawthon Philadelphia Inquirer

No more machines from Gottlieb, Bally, or Williams, three of the industry's former giants?

Stern feels your pain. After all, he grew up in the pinball business.

"We don't say we're the last pinball company," he said. "That makes us sound like we're going out of business. We say we are the only pinball company."

Stern's father, Sam, moved from Philadelphia to Chicago in 1948, three years after his son was born, when he bought half of the thriving pinball business of Harry Williams.

Coincidentally, that was the year when Gottlieb, the company that ruled the pinball roost for years, introduced "Humpty Dumpty," the first pinball machine with flippers.

Since then, through business ebbs and flows and the video-game revolution, Stern has been associated with making pinball machines. Not video machines or even hybrid, video-pinball machines, but real pinball machines with flashing lights, extravagant sound tracks, bumpers, flippers, and those one-and-one-sixteenth-inch, 2.8-ounce, shiny silver balls.

"I tell people I'm 54 years old and I've been in the pinball business 54 years," said Stern, who worked shoulder to shoulder with his father until Sam's death 15 years ago.

Stern's factory employs about 100 people, and turns out 45 machines a day, all of them moving on a simple assembly line from wiring - each machine contains a half mile of wire - to final testing.

Sixty percent of Stern's machines, which retail for about $4,500, are exported. Germany, Italy and France are all hotbeds of pinball, especially France.

"There is a pinball machine in every cafe in Paris," Stern said.

Back to Top