The Force is strong with Tracy Lindbergh when sheâs playing pinball. Thatâs what the 40-year-old Chandler resident is doing at this exact moment â and doing it phenomenally. Lindbergh hunches over the controls of a high-tech Star Wars pinball machine at StarFighters Arcade in Mesa on a recent Saturday and is on target like a proton torpedo fired from Luke Skywalkerâs X-wing.
Her hands repetitively tap and slap on the flipper buttons on either side of the game as a silver steel ball ricochets around a playfield adorned with pictures of Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Darth Vader. The dramatic strains of âThe Imperial Marchâ roar as a cannonade of multicolored lights flash and Lindbergh racks up millions of points. Every so often, she uses her diminutive frame to give subtle nudges to the 280-pound machine for some extra English to get the ball to roll her way.
A few minutes of intense action later, the ball slips past the flippers and into the drain. Game over. Final score: 256,960,850.
âIâll be honest, I couldâve done better,â Lindbergh says sheepishly. Not many players, male or female, can. Lindbergh is at the forefront of a surge of interest in pinball â especially among women. Sheâs currently one of the top 10 female players in the world according to the International Flipper Pinball Association, one of the organizations overseeing competitive pinball. Sheâs also the founder of the Phoenix chapter of Belles & Chimes, a worldwide womenâs-only pinball club. Her Star Wars game today is part of a monthly tournament she organizes at StarFighters. (She finished second.)
For Lindbergh, an assistant to the president of the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine, pinball isnât just a hobby, itâs a lifestyle. In addition to overseeing Belles & Chimes Phoenix, she runs a few other local tournaments each month and travels to competitions around the country with her husband, Mark, two or three times a year.
This weekend, theyâll be at ZapCon, the annual arcade and pinball convention at the Mesa Convention Center from Saturday, May 4, to Sunday, May 5, where Tracy will help run IFPA-sanctioned tournaments for women. As many as 50 female players are expected to compete. Sheâll also be competing in two other tournaments at the event.
It will be just another pinball adventure that theyâve experienced during their relationship. They even bonded over pinball early on, she says. âWhen Mark and I met, we started going out to bars and trying to find pinball machines, since we both liked playing,â Lindbergh says. âIt was just this fun pastime for us.â
Theyâve also become collectors. Their Chandler home is outfitted with more than a dozen different machines theyâve purchased over the last decade.
âI sometimes even dream about playing pinball,â she jokes. It seems fitting, considering sheâs had a dream career as a competitive pinball player. Last year, she tied for fifth place in the IFPA Womenâs World Pinball Championship in Las Vegas.
Not bad for someone who only got into competitive pinball six years ago. In 2013, the couple had a chance encounter with IFPA menâs world champion Andrei Massenkoff at the Pacific Pinball Museum in San Francisco. He got them hooked on competing at the highest levels.
âHe chatted with us and told us all about it, and I was fascinated,â Tracy Lindbergh says. âIâd played in high school and was always drawn to it, but we never knew competitive pinball even existed. I donât know how we missed it. We were always playing pinball, but somehow we never realized there was this whole other world.â
She immediately dived in. The couple began making monthly trips to Tucson to play at D&D Pinball, Arizonaâs only exclusively pinball joint at the time. They also began attending ZapCon, the annual arcade game and pinball convention, which had launched the year before.
Lindbergh is also helping other women seek pinball glory. Belles & Chimesâ Phoenix chapter, which Lindbergh launched in 2017, currently has more than 25 members â and theyâre a diverse bunch. Teens, millennials, Gen-Xers, middle-aged women, and even retirees participate in the club.
âWe have a wide variety of women that come out to play pinball with us,â Lindbergh says. And theyâre learning the finer points of the game while doing so.
âA big part of Belles & Chimes is helping you play and learning what the rules are and how to become a better player,â she says. No one has to worry about being embarrassed by poor performance. âItâs a really encouraging environment while getting you used to the competitive nature of tournament play,â she adds.
Phoenix Mirrors a National Trend
Pinball has been experiencing a major resurgence in popularity, and not just in cultural hubs like L.A., New York City, or Portland, Oregon. Pinball fever has spread to the Valley in recent years, and signs of the outbreak are everywhere. Participation in local pinball leagues and tournaments has increased severalfold. Owners of local arcades and game bars tell Phoenix New Times theyâve seen a major spike in pinball participants.Hundreds of people flock to StarFighters, the retro-themed Mesa arcade, every weekend to play pinball, for instance. According to co-owners Steve Thomas and Mike Lovato, the turnout has increased steadily since they first opened in 2014, and thereâs been a larger number of people playing their 45 machines. As a matter of act, he credits pinball with helping fuel StarFightersâ popularity.
âRight now, pinballâs pretty hot. Itâs palpable. When people come in, theyâre coming in to play pinball. Our pins are normally very busy for the entire [time] weâre open,â Lovato says. âThe rising popularity of pinball has really helped us with our growth. If pinball had not come back [into style], I donât necessarily know that we would see the turnout weâve been seeing, because it adds a whole other element to the arcade.â
Nightspots like Cobra Arcade Bar in downtown Phoenix have also seen more pinball fanatics. âItâs been huge,â owner Ariel Bracamonte says. âEver since we opened, people have been demanding more pinball so we added some. At our Tucson location, we took it a step further and have about 10 games there ⌠and they definitely get played.â
Other arcades have taken similar actions. Many offer pinball in their mix of games and attractions, ranging from a modest selection (like Golfland Sunsplash in Mesa) to a staggering number (like StarFighters and Tempeâs Tilt Studio, which features 22 machines). Geeky businesses like Jesse James Comics in Glendale also have added pinball games in the last year.
And new pinball-friendly joints are also springing up, like Electric Bat Arcade in Tempe, which was opened last fall by local artist and ZapCon co-founder Rachel Bess and features 12 machines. (Itâs also the only female-owned arcade in Arizona.) Later this year, Cobraâs owners are planning to open a pinball-centric nightspot called Stardust Lounge adjacent to music venue The Van Buren in downtown Phoenix.
âPinball has really blown up in the Valley, and actually, all over,â says Bess, who also works for pinball supply company Marco Specialties. âI travel a lot to pinball shows and just in the past year or two, you can see how much itâs increasing, compared to where it used to be.â
And where it used to be was a couple of decades of ignominy. Pinballâs modern heyday peaked in the â80s and â90s, when arcade game manufacturers like Bally/Williams and Data East released dozens of titles each year. In the aughts, home gaming consoles like PlayStation and X-Box decimated the arcade and pinball industries. Companies like Stern still produced a trickle of pinball games, but the pursuit was exiled to the back corners of neighborhood bars, the occasional bowling alley, or in the homes of private collectors.
âPinball machines pretty much disappeared for awhile. When we started ZapCon in 2013, it was because there wasnât much of anything going on,â Bess says. âThere werenât many arcades in the Valley other than Castles ânâ Coasters. Tilt [Studio] wasnât there yet. Cobra wasnât there yet, StarFighters wasnât there yet. We were all playing in living rooms at collectorsâ houses.â
What brought back pinballâs popularity? Bess says itâs a byproduct of the rise of arcades and nightlife-oriented game bars in recent years, as well as a cool factor with pinball and its more social aspects.
âThe renewed interest in pinball is sort of twofold: Part of it comes from people getting exposure to barcades,â Bess says. âBut the other part, I think pinball offers something more physical in the way that consoles and arcade games [donât]. Itâs just so different from other types of games weâre used to playing. Thereâs an actual ball being propelled by flippers, itâs hitting actual targets, and making it fall. Itâs something just more kinetic and fun than [pixels on a screen].â
Lindbergh says that the opening of StarFighters in 2014 and Tilt Studio in Tempe in 2016 were also game-changers for Phoenixâs pinball scene.
âAll the places opening up ⌠have helped. Itâs become location pinball,â she says. âI think the ability to play lots of different titles in all these arcades has brought people out of the woodwork who always liked to play pinball but didnât really have a place to play. But now thereâs a social aspect, too, like with all the leagues; so many people come just to hang out with friends and play pinball now.â
Millennials are also discovering pinball for the first time, Bess says.
âI think itâs one of those things that older people gravitate toward because they remember pinballâs peak. Gen-X people are somewhat the same, but for us, it wasnât that long ago. We mostly remember it from the â90s when pinball was really big,â she says. âBut the millennial kids, they never saw it. Now theyâre old enough to go to bars and theyâre starting to get into it because itâs something new, so for them itâs like a first-time excitement.â
Women Are Becoming Pinball Wizards, Too
In a 2017 Washington Post article on womenâs pinball, IFPA President Josh Sharpe estimated that more than 11 percent of IFPA-registered players are female, which is an increase from 8 percent from a few years before. Lindbergh says that membership in the Belles & Chimes Phoenix chapter has almost doubled, going from 15 members in 2017 to more than 25 people today.âIt used to be pretty much all dudes who were playing,â Bess says. âWhen I started playing in high school, it seemed like it was myself and a few other women out at arcades.â
Things have changed, however.
âThereâs still more men at pinball and arcade shows, but not by much,â Bess says. âWhen we started ZapCon, the joke was that whenever people were looking for me, Iâd say, âOh, youâll know me, Iâm the female.â That wasnât too terribly long ago, and now there are significantly more women, not just at ZapCon but at other pinball shows.â
Itâs a change from pinballâs heyday, when the game largely targeted men.
âI think itâs because pinballs were in bars and most of the machines were catered more toward men, especially with all the sexy artwork from the early days of pinball,â Lindbergh says. âIt seemed like it was all meant for bars where guys were smoking and drinking and playing pinball.â
Misogynistic art on pinball machines was the norm from the â70s onward, often with illustrations of well-built women in revealing clothing or various states of undress.
âThe art on the games was so bad back then, but itâs been changing because manufacturers have been realizing what a huge market women could potentially be,â Bess says.
The sexist imagery has been largely ditched by pinball manufacturers, but it hasnât been completely excised. In 2015, Stern released Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons with artwork of buxom farm girls and loads of double entendre. Last year, American Pinballâs Oktoberfest game depicted a cartoon monkey feeling up women.
âWomen freaked out, because it was like, âOkay, that kind of stuff existed in the past, but the world is different now. You just canât do that. You canât have women being groped on a backglass,â Lindbergh says. âItâs just not appropriate anymore. So they changed it. Women are speaking up now where they maybe wouldnât have before.â
Theyâre speaking up about condescending encounters with men while playing pinball, too.
âGuys donât always know the right thing to say. Sometimes itâs malicious, sometimes itâs not, but they have a tendency to say, âWow, you play really good pinball for a girl.â And girls donât like that,â Lindbergh says. âWomen want to just be seen as a pinball player and not just a female pinball player and they donât want you to assume youâre going to beat me because Iâm a girl when you walk up. For the most part, we donât see it here much, but itâs out there.â
Itâs one of the reasons why she feels groups like Belles & Chimes are important.
âThe more women we have playing, the less people notice, which is one of the reasons I started our chapter,â she says.
Besides giving women more opportunities to play, Belles & Chimes also offers them to chance to learn the game and to play competitively.
âThereâs an opportunity just for us to compete against each other,â Lindbergh says. âAnd what I found, a lot of women donât necessarily care about that, theyâre not trying to become the next world champion. When women get together to play, itâs a different experience than co-ed. Itâs very supportive and Iâve structured it that way. Our intention is for us to get together to learn, to become better players, and have fun.â
But this weekend at ZapCon, when sheâll be competing against men, too, is about more than just having fun.
âAs Iâve gotten better, itâs been interesting watching guys [act surprised] when I started beating them,â she says. âAnd Iâve been beating them a lot more than I used to.â
ZapCon 2019. 9 a.m.-11:30 p.m.; Saturday, May 4; and 9 a.m.-6 p.m., Sunday, May 5, at the Mesa Convention Center, 263 North Center Street; zapcon.com. Admission is $20-$40 via the event website.