![]() ![]() "'Buy a pinball machine.'" The family found a 1990 Fun House machine. "I told him, 'You don't go out with your friends anymore you just work and take care of us,'" Nancy says. Jeff was working, then shuttling home to care for his family. In 2000, Nancy was bedridden with what was later diagnosed as lupus. They immediately had something in common - she grew up in small-town West Virginia, where one of the only forms of entertainment was an Evel Knievel pinball machine. Jeff and Nancy met while they were students at the University of Central Florida. From that point, I would look for more pinball machines out at skating rinks, malls, bowling alleys." "Those would have been the games from the mid- to late '70s. "Fast Draw, Joker Poker, Paragon," he says now, listing classic pins. His own dad played, and he introduced his son to the game. Jeff first fell in love with pinball back in the glory days, when he was growing up in Virginia. Already in 2014, 718 tournaments have been held. In 2006, there were 50 pinball matches worldwide. Under the new worldwide ranking, players flipping at IFPA-sanctioned events could earn points and track their progress against players everywhere. There was no way to know who was good or bad." "Back in the '90s, there were pretty strong tournaments in Sweden. "Before that, there was no real way to connect players from across the globe," explains IFPA President Josh Sharpe. The master stroke came in 2006, when a reignited IFPA began ranking players worldwide. The internet helped collectors sniff out old machines. All the major pinball producers shuttered save one.īut there's an unwritten rule that forgotten fads once beloved by nerds will one day rise again. The parent organization that ran international tournaments, the International Flipper Pinball Association, went inactive in 1995. But by the mid-1990s, videogames - both in the arcade and at home - delivered the KO punch. The 1970s and '80s were the classic period of pinball, with companies such as Bally and Williams filling bowling alleys and pizza parlors with the machines. By the time the Who's rock opera Tommy hit in 1972 with the tale of the "Pinball Wizard," some bans were still in place, but the game's popularity had exploded. Pinball became a wink-wink backroom pastime. In 1942, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia personally ordered raids of pinball parlors to destroy the damn machines that were stealing nickels and dimes from "the pockets of schoolchildren." But by then, most major American cities had outlawed the game as another form of gambling. The flipper wasn't introduced until 1947. The first mechanical pinball machines were largely games of chance you shot a ball and tilted the machine to control its trajectory. Now, five months into 2014, Florida has already seen ten.īack in the day - before Xbox, Nintendo, Donkey Kong, or even Pong - there was only pinball. Last year, 13 tournaments with 168 competitors were held in Florida. Fueled by the internet's enthusiasm for all things retro and a new world ranking system, its popularity is surging across the United States. The Palmers' pin success comes amid a pinball resurgence. "He's going to be playing against literally the elite people from the United States." "You have people who are flying in from all over the country," Jeff says. Atticus will be the youngest competitor at the event. And this week, the whole Palmer clan is heading off to Lyons, Colorado - just outside Denver - for the International Flipper Pinball Association's U.S. He clinched those bragging rights at a nail-biter tournament at Club 66 in Boynton Beach in February. The younger Palmer is currently the Florida flipper champ. "We're not," says mom Nancy, "like the other families in the neighborhood." See also: Atticus Palmer Is a Pinball Wunderkind (Slide Show) Put them together and you're looking at Florida's first family of pinball excellence. His only son, Atticus, is a cheery 15-year-old with a Nicolas Cage fixation who likes to dress up like Doctor Who. The man of the house - who, thanks to a Duck Dynasty beard and shoulder-length hair, looks like he could be hauling around guitar cases for Metallica - is a friendly engineer named Jeff Palmer. Another 11 rigs are tucked away in the garage. It's Mayberry 2.0, a David Lynch movie before shit goes bad.īehind the front door of one such modest suburban house - a three-bedroomer on NW Tenth Street - is a living room like a million others, except this one is lined with five blinking pinball machines. The boxy patch of West Broward is made up of neighborhoods of modest ranch homes planted evenly on shady, manicured lawns. Suburbs don't get much tidier than Coral Springs. ![]()
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