Inflation of pinball machine scores

People have complained about inflation for a long time. However, I'm going to be talking about a new form of inflation which not many people have realized exist: pinball machine scores.

Pinball machines in the 60's and 70's were entirely mechanical and had physical numeric reels to display the score. Most of the scores on such machines were five digit numbers, between 0 and 99,990. Back in those days, the "bonus" at the end of a given ball was actually a significant portion of the player's score -- likely an attempt to make the player feel he or she was doing better.

Pinball machine scores are just like personal finance in that it's just one person against the system trying to maximize a score. As a result, people are going to do whatever they can to get higher and higher scores. For finance, it's to feel more comfortable. For pinball, it is to make the people feel like their game has been a success.

With the advent of digital displays, it became easier to put more digits on the backboard of pinball machines. And this started the inflation craze. The first digital pinball machine I ever played was one called Xenon, a science-fiction themed machine named after an noble gas. I remember being astonished when I got 100,000 for the first time. I thought it was a major accomplishment. This machine had room for six digits in the display.

When I arrived at MIT, in 1990, I found a pinball machine in my dormitory. One of the major attractions of this machine was a 10,000,000 point shot. It was extremely difficult to hit. However, in those days 10,000,000 was a fantastic score. Nothing came close. Even jackpots rarely made it past a million.

Fast forward to the mid 1990's. One of my favorite games at this time was the Addams Family machine. This machine had "skill shots" -- shots the player could only hit once, when he or she shoot the ball into the playfield for the first time -- worth 3,000,000 points or more. Jackpots routinely ran into the 30,000,000 point range or more. Things were getting out of control.

A couple of years ago (it is now 2007) I bought a simple CD which allowed the user to play several different pinball machine tables on the computer. Typical scores now range in the 100,000,000 to 200,000,000 range. I recently got a billion on one of them.

What on earth do those extra zeroes do? Getting a billion points doesn't mean much anymore if all of the other machines give you a billion points. Just like in the financial world, multiplying your income (and costs of living) by 10 doesn't make you any richer than your neighbors or better off.

Unlike in the financial world, people can survive and still have a good challenge on a new machine with most of the zeroes lopped off the score. True, your score will rarely exceed 50,000, but when replays are at 30,000 and 80,000 you don't need to worry about getting an astronomical score.

It kind of makes want to play one of those old clunkers again, does it not? Especially since the old clunkers benefit from the second form of inflation: hardware rigged for two plays per quarter instead of two quarters per play.