Oh look, another major news corporation is fellating Portland! How quaint!

According to CBS, Portland is to pinball what Brooklyn is to wishing it was Portland.

As videogame sales plummet (momentarily), CBS wants all of its elderly viewers to know that all the cool kids (that’s you guys) are spending their days getting sauced and playing with their balls.

Pinballs! (I don’t feel very good about that joke.)

The video, for those of you whose attention spans can’t handle three minutes of moving imagery, interviews local pinball sorcerers (is that right?) on why the game is seeing such a renaissance, and the answer is simple: “There’s something that is physically satisfying about hitting a shot in pinball that you don’t get from videogames.”

Oh, but it wouldn’t be CBS without bizarrely ominous warnings designed to frighten the old.

Did you know that Portland has “pinball gangs?” Yeah, that’s a thing now. Even though the bearded, bespectacled “gangster” they interview laughs at the concept, the tone used by the CBS anchor is forged from pure alarmist paranoia. He says “pinball gangs” the same way Joe McCarthy would say “undead cosmonaut army.”

Then, in a total thematic 180, CBS actually offers some salient information about the decline of the pinball biz. There really is only one real pinball company left. They got that right. Gold star for them.

Finally, the clip ends with the unnamed anchor saying “Pinball gangs in Portland. Who knew?” with only the slightest hint of old man condescension.

On a scale from 1 to The New York Times, I give this journalistic tongue bath a 5. The overall tone was appealing, and the report itself was informative, but I can’t in good conscience offer any more points to a story about pinball that completely fails to mention Ground Kontrol.

That’s like writing a blog post about a CBS story on pinball and not making childish references to male genitalia. It’s just not done.

Propers to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo for alerting me to this.

9 replies on “CBS: Portland Gangs Love (Pin)Balls”

  2. On the top of the scale of national publications who are totally in love with Portland? They want to put tiny dead tree babies inside of us.

  3. The ‘gangs’ accusation was obviously tongue-in-cheek, not sure how the writer of this article missed it. The ‘old man condescension’ was merely a smile and a wry ‘who knew’, that’s all. FFS man it was just a mild send-up no need for the hipster-doofus too-cool-for-the-room treatment.

  5. Actually they didn’t get the “there’s only one pinball manufacturer left” bit correct. There is another. Jersey Jack Pinball is making a (licensed) Wizard of Oz game. The team is made up of seasoned pinball designers and software engineers, and they have fully working prototypes up and running. It will be the first time there’s been more than one manufacturer in over ten years.

    I’m in that pinball gang. It’s been around for, uh… 7 years, maybe more. And my friend and I were the first dudes that cbs contacted with the idea of doing this story. And I directed them to the folks you see in the clip; they run weekly tournaments at rotating venues.

  6. Okay. ROM. Since you’re an expert maybe you can explain the appeal of the game to me. Or at least how to play it: is the point really just to hit the little ball around?

  8. Fruit Cup: No, like most games, in pinball you receive rewards (points) for playing well.

    There was recent post on metafilter giving an introduction to pinball thingies.
    http://www.metafilter.com/106402/Want-to-b…

    For me, the appeal is in focusing really hard on something, plus I find it physically satisfying. Have you played tennis or ping pong or golf or any other activity that involves an object reacting to your force and then bouncing off stuff with spin and velocity in a somewhat predictable manner and then sometimes coming back to you? Because pinball is like that, too, and it’s fun and addictive and satisfying.

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