The New Pinball: Music, Lights, Voices
TWO rolls of quarters into the Addams Family pinball machine at the Broadway Arcade, I knew something was horribly wrong. The ball was traveling too fast for me to keep up. I was spazzing out with the flippers. The constant backtalk from the machine, the flashing lights, the loud sound effects and the complicated "play field" were throwing me off.
My scores were so low I began worrying that some nearby teen-agers might notice and begin snickering.There was no getting around it. I was a middle-aged man playing a young man's game, and very poorly at that. I began to wonder if my driver's license should be revoked.
Once it was different.
In my early 20's, like many other college students, I invested too much time and far too many quarters following the trail of the silver ball. My wife was an enthusiast, too, battery and we would play together at a diner in Bloomington, Ind., that had some great machines.I'd take the left flipper, my wife would take the right, and we would spend blissful hours shooting down the horseshoe targets of the Sheriff or the very similar playing-card targets in Drop-a-Card.
For a change of pace, we'd steer the ball toward the thrill-packed elevated rails of Roller Coaster.In a way, pinball set the pattern for our married life. In an atmosphere of constant bickering and mutual blame, we lurched forward to ever higher scores.
One magic night, we broke the house record on the Sheriff. In addition to giving us a free hamburger, the manager put our names up over the grill along with the other record-holders. Life was sweet.In the last 20 years, however, pinball has changed almost beyond recognition.
Anyone who doubts this can drop in at any New York City arcade or visit the international tournament of the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association, more commonly known as PAPA, which will start next Friday morning at the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan.The bold can pay a tournament entry fee, step right up to the flippers and compete in the appropriate skill category. In the qualifying rounds, players will do their best against Judge Dredd, Jurassic Park, Tales From the Crypt, Indiana Jones, Creature From the Black Lagoon, Twilight Zone, Wipeout and Streetfighter 2.
In the finals, three new machines will be unveiled: The Who's Tommy, Popeye and World Challenge Soccer. The fourth machine in the finals will be one that is just now hitting the arcades, Star Trek: The Next Generation. The top prize is $4,000, making PAPA the most lucrative of the pinball tournaments.
Be warned.
Anyone who has been away from pinball for a while will find the new games bewildering. They are more complex, and the ball moves faster. In a terrifying mode of play known as multi-ball, as many as six silver orbs are released in a swarm.
The sport has succumbed to hyperinflation, with points now scored in the millions and even billions.The themes are different, too. Most of them are tied to films or television series, and they present a kind of story line."In Star Trek, I'm part of Star Fleet; I want an increase in rank, and I'm out there doing missions with storage the crew," explained Roger C.
Sharpe, the director of marketing at Williams, the largest of the three major American pinball companies. "With the Addams Family, you want to get the fortune, and you have to go through the vault. It's just like the movie."In pursuit of the Final Frontier, players of Star Trek undertake as many as eight missions, and the machine provides some serious hardware to carry them out.
Using Probe Launchers, players can fire balls and photon torpedoes to repel an attack by the Borg ship, a menacing presence at the top of the play field. A wire loop-the-loop carries balls at warp speed throughout the galaxy.There's a lot of noise and visual flash to go along with all this.
On the "back glass," the part of the machine where the score appears, dot-matrix displays generate scores, messages and dramatic scenes. The machines blast out music and sound effects. They also talk back. They cajole, applaud and taunt, often in strangely familiar voices.
That's Arnold himself saying "I'll be back" and "Hasta la vista, baby," as a skull with hellish red eyes flashes wildly in battery Terminator 2. In the Addams Family, that's Raul Julia saying, "Thank you, Thing," when a hand reaches out from a box, grabs the ball and pulls it back for storage. A CounterattackThere's a simple reason for the big conceptual change in pinball machines: video games.
In the 1970's, video swept the land, and for a time it looked as though pinball would disappear. From the outset, video games offered characters and drama, even if it was only Pac-Man eating little blips. The games played faster, so the customer had to feed more money into the machines.
In the early and mid-1980's, pinball's share of the coin-operated amusement market fell to as low as 5 percent.Faced with extinction, the pinball makers adapted. They cut back the number of balls per game from five to three, to shorten playing time, and offered one game for a quarter instead of three (the newer machines now cost 50 cents a game).
They introduced new technology as soon battery as it became available for more exciting sound, light and special effects. They began to weave story lines into game design and borrowed the video approach of having the player ascend through increasingly difficult levels of play.Gradually, pinball made a comeback, while the weaknesses inherent in video games became apparent with time.
"In 1988, attitudes changed," said Steven Epstein, the owner of the Broadway Arcade and the president of PAPA. "Video became stale and repetitious. The graphics were better, but the game play was stagnant."In 1992, according to Vending Times, an industry newsletter, pinball produced net revenues to their operators of $2.
26 billion, or a little more than a third of the coin-operated entertainment industry's $7 billion. In 1992, video accounted for revenues of $2.7 billion. Universe of ExcessIn today's pinball, the governing esthetic is more.
More lights, sound and action.
More stars, more special effects.
Take Tommy, an irresistible case study, because it's a pinball machine based on a musical about pinball.The manufacturer, Data East, packed in 21 pieces of music from the Broadway show, with vocals by members of the original cast, and elements of the stage sets, notably a World War II bomber and a motorized mirror. (When the ball hits the mirror, the machine goes deathly silent, and an eerie voice calls out "Tommy .
.
.
Tommy.
")The game has more than two dozen play modes, in which different features with different scoring payoffs light up. storage In Fiddle About mode, for example, the player tries to hit a flashing target that moves across the play field. The piece de resistance is Tommy mode, a clever reference to the fact that Tommy, the pinball wizard, is "deaf, dumb and blind.
" In Tommy mode, a metal fan pops out and covers the flippers, so that the player has to operate blind.There's some evidence that the designers went well around the bend on this one, and that too much thinking about pinball can do peculiar things to the mind."When you go into multi-ball, the game changes," said Joe Kaminkow, the vice president for research and design for Data East and head of the Tommy design team.
"It's like it morphs, and takes you back to a different era of pinball. You hear bells chiming and ringing."Small wonder that pinball machines now carry movie-style credit lines at the bottom of the play field for sound, music, art design, concept, software, dot-matrix display and mechanics. First, the ScriptThe development of the machines has an oddly Hollywood feel to it as well.
The process, which takes a year or more, begins with film scripts. Mr. Kaminkow says that he reads 15 to 20 scripts a week, looking for a good pinball story. (Needless to say, he is writing his own script as well.
)Once a licensing agreement is reached (with the studios and stars retaining strict control over the use of likenesses and voices), designers produce the equivalent of a rough cut, which they modify during the first testing phase. In phase 2, machines are placed in test sites at malls and arcades and, based on customer feedback, undergo further refinement. In Manhattan, the Broadway Arcade gets machines well before the rest of country because the companies use Mr.
Epstein as a sounding board.
Finally, the machines go into general release. "Think of it like a movie," said Gary Stern, the executive vice president and general manager of Data East. "We make positives of a game model and distribute it.
Each game, moving from location to location, has a four- or five-year economic life, and every three or four months we have another one."Some machines never reach the general public. Mr. Kaminkow has a sideline in making custom machines for favored clients, like Joel Silver, a film producer known for his high-decibel tirades.
Mr.
Kaminkow designed a machine that incorporates events from Mr. Silver's life and makes use of his famous voice."When you push the flippers, he screams," said Mr.
Kaminkow, who built one of Mr.
Silver's favorite lines into the soundtrack: "Repeat after me, '11 double E,' because you're going to be selling shoes in this town!" Effective BaitThe added complexity of the new machines makes excellent economic sense. Tantalized players wind up investing many quarters just to figure a machine out.On the Internet computer network, a pinball club of about 100 hard-core members devotes hours to arcane discussions of strategy for different machines.
Some members generate handbooks of up to 50 pages on a single machine.That way madness lies. I took the experiential approach. At the arcade, I bonded with Arnold, grew fond of the electric chair in the Addams Family and took manic delight in hitting the bloodshot-eyeball targets in Tales From the Crypt.But the machine that really pulled in my quarters was a humble little game called Tee'd Off.
It was a golf game, with an intriguing pitch-and-putt ramp and an exploding volcano. Its main character is a gopher that runs from hole to hole and taunts the player nonstop with remarks like "You look like you need some serious help," "Did anybody ever teach you how to play this game?" and "In case you didn't notice, you just blew it," or, succinctly, "You're lousy." After a well-executed shot, it would say, "Amazing," but the tone was sarcastic and, I felt, unacceptable.
The running commentary was punctuated by little nyuk-nyuk chuckles.I came to hate the gopher. As quarter after quarter disappeared, and the razzing continued, I made a vow: No matter how long it took, no matter how much money I spent, I was going to stomp that little rodent.It took about $40. Gradually, a few of my dormant skills returned.
I never figured out all the rules of the game, but with time, I began winning free balls with fair regularity. (New York law does not allow the awarding of free games.)Then, on one punishingly cold afternoon, I entered what pinball players call "the zone.
" As though briefly endowed with supernatural powers, I was able to keep each ball in play for several minutes, racking up big-time scores. In multi-ball, instead of flailing randomly, I would trap two balls on one flipper and play the third ball with the free one, a major strategic advance for me. In one blissful moment, I sent the ball straight into the hole where the gopher was hiding, evoking a startled cry: "Hey, you got me.
" In the end, my score was nearly half a billion points. Man had triumphed over machine, and over a darned annoying little pest.The funny thing is, two quarters later, the gopher hadn't changed his attitude.
Where to Insert the Coins and InteractHere is a sampling of pinball arcades and pinball events in New York City: Arcades BROADWAY ARCADE, 1659 Broadway, near 52d Street, (212) 247-3725. Hours: 8 A.M. to midnight, daily. PLAYLAND, Broadway near 42d Street, unlisted telephone. Hours: 24 hours a day, daily. TIME OUT FAMILY AMUSEMENT CENTER, Penn Station (near Long Island Rail Road ticket booths), unlisted telephone.
Hours: 24 hours a day, daily.
PETER PAN GAMES OF BAYSIDE, Bayside Shopping Mall, 212-65 26th Avenue, Queens, (718) 229-0064. Hours: 11 A.M. to 11:30 P.M. Sunday through Thursday; 11 A.M. to 12:30 A.M. Fridays and Saturdays. SUPER AMUSEMENTS FAMILY FUN CENTER, Whitestone Pathmark Shopping Center, off service road to Whitestone Expressway, Queens, (718) 961-6791. Hours: 11 A.M. to midnight, Mondays through Thursdays; 10 A.
M.
to 2 A.
M.
Fridays and Saturdays, 10 A.
M.
to midnight Sundays.
Pinball Rental PARAMOUNT VENDING, 587 10th Avenue, between 42d and 43d Streets, Clinton. Store rents two rooms filled with video games and pinball machines for private parties. The rate is $15 a person (a minimum of 20 in a group) for two hours.
The company also rents machines ($150 to $350 a day, delivery and pickup included) and sells new and used machine at prices ranging from $695 to $3,700. Information: (212) 279-1095. Exhibition "REMEMBER PINBALL," Park Avenue Atrium, 237 Park Avenue, at 46th Street. An exhibition of more than 50 pinball machines from the golden era (late 1940's to late 50's), as well as precursors and samples of pinball art.
Through Feb.
24.
Hours: Monday through Friday, 8 A.
M.
to 6 P.
M.
Free admission.
Information: (212) 850-9786.
Tournament PAPA 4 INTERNATIONAL PINBALL CHAMPIONSHIPS, Grand Ballroom, Park Central Hotel, 870 Seventh Avenue, at 55th Street, Manhattan. The championship competition for the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association. Qualifying rounds: Feb. 4, 11 A.M. to 1 A.M.; Feb. 5, 9 A.M. to midnight. Final rounds: Feb. 6, 9 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. How to enter: All adult divisions are $15.
Juniors division (age 16 and under) is $10. Players may re-enter as many times as they like, paying the entry fee each time. Qualifying rounds are open to the viewing public at no charge.
Information: (212) 247-3725.
Benefit "FLIPPERMANIA," Park Central Hotel, 870 Seventh Avenue, at 55th Street, Manhattan. A pinball party featuring members of the cast of "Tommy" and other Broadway actors, as well as anyone else who wants to compete on 75 pinball games. A benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, co-presented by the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association.
Feb.
6 at 6 P.
M.
Tickets: $30; $25 in advance.
Information: (212) 978-0208.
League Play LEAGUE NIGHTS, Broadway Arcade, 1659 Broadway, near 52d Street. The arcade sponsors pinball league nights that run for 10 weeks in the spring and fall. Spring leagues begin in mid-April, with Monday reserved for experts (singles only), Wednesday for "very good" players (singles only) and Thursday for beginners (singles and doubles).
If enough players sign up, Tuesday will be devoted to a women's league. Play begins at 7 P.M. and lasts about three hours. The cost is $5 to register and $3 a week for singles, $5 for doubles, which goes toward prizes, jackets and trophies. To sign up, go
My scores were so low I began worrying that some nearby teen-agers might notice and begin snickering.There was no getting around it. I was a middle-aged man playing a young man's game, and very poorly at that. I began to wonder if my driver's license should be revoked.
Once it was different.
In my early 20's, like many other college students, I invested too much time and far too many quarters following the trail of the silver ball. My wife was an enthusiast, too, battery and we would play together at a diner in Bloomington, Ind., that had some great machines.I'd take the left flipper, my wife would take the right, and we would spend blissful hours shooting down the horseshoe targets of the Sheriff or the very similar playing-card targets in Drop-a-Card.
For a change of pace, we'd steer the ball toward the thrill-packed elevated rails of Roller Coaster.In a way, pinball set the pattern for our married life. In an atmosphere of constant bickering and mutual blame, we lurched forward to ever higher scores.
One magic night, we broke the house record on the Sheriff. In addition to giving us a free hamburger, the manager put our names up over the grill along with the other record-holders. Life was sweet.In the last 20 years, however, pinball has changed almost beyond recognition.
Anyone who doubts this can drop in at any New York City arcade or visit the international tournament of the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association, more commonly known as PAPA, which will start next Friday morning at the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan.The bold can pay a tournament entry fee, step right up to the flippers and compete in the appropriate skill category. In the qualifying rounds, players will do their best against Judge Dredd, Jurassic Park, Tales From the Crypt, Indiana Jones, Creature From the Black Lagoon, Twilight Zone, Wipeout and Streetfighter 2.
In the finals, three new machines will be unveiled: The Who's Tommy, Popeye and World Challenge Soccer. The fourth machine in the finals will be one that is just now hitting the arcades, Star Trek: The Next Generation. The top prize is $4,000, making PAPA the most lucrative of the pinball tournaments.
Be warned.
Anyone who has been away from pinball for a while will find the new games bewildering. They are more complex, and the ball moves faster. In a terrifying mode of play known as multi-ball, as many as six silver orbs are released in a swarm.
The sport has succumbed to hyperinflation, with points now scored in the millions and even billions.The themes are different, too. Most of them are tied to films or television series, and they present a kind of story line."In Star Trek, I'm part of Star Fleet; I want an increase in rank, and I'm out there doing missions with storage the crew," explained Roger C.
Sharpe, the director of marketing at Williams, the largest of the three major American pinball companies. "With the Addams Family, you want to get the fortune, and you have to go through the vault. It's just like the movie."In pursuit of the Final Frontier, players of Star Trek undertake as many as eight missions, and the machine provides some serious hardware to carry them out.
Using Probe Launchers, players can fire balls and photon torpedoes to repel an attack by the Borg ship, a menacing presence at the top of the play field. A wire loop-the-loop carries balls at warp speed throughout the galaxy.There's a lot of noise and visual flash to go along with all this.
On the "back glass," the part of the machine where the score appears, dot-matrix displays generate scores, messages and dramatic scenes. The machines blast out music and sound effects. They also talk back. They cajole, applaud and taunt, often in strangely familiar voices.
That's Arnold himself saying "I'll be back" and "Hasta la vista, baby," as a skull with hellish red eyes flashes wildly in battery Terminator 2. In the Addams Family, that's Raul Julia saying, "Thank you, Thing," when a hand reaches out from a box, grabs the ball and pulls it back for storage. A CounterattackThere's a simple reason for the big conceptual change in pinball machines: video games.
In the 1970's, video swept the land, and for a time it looked as though pinball would disappear. From the outset, video games offered characters and drama, even if it was only Pac-Man eating little blips. The games played faster, so the customer had to feed more money into the machines.
In the early and mid-1980's, pinball's share of the coin-operated amusement market fell to as low as 5 percent.Faced with extinction, the pinball makers adapted. They cut back the number of balls per game from five to three, to shorten playing time, and offered one game for a quarter instead of three (the newer machines now cost 50 cents a game).
They introduced new technology as soon battery as it became available for more exciting sound, light and special effects. They began to weave story lines into game design and borrowed the video approach of having the player ascend through increasingly difficult levels of play.Gradually, pinball made a comeback, while the weaknesses inherent in video games became apparent with time.
"In 1988, attitudes changed," said Steven Epstein, the owner of the Broadway Arcade and the president of PAPA. "Video became stale and repetitious. The graphics were better, but the game play was stagnant."In 1992, according to Vending Times, an industry newsletter, pinball produced net revenues to their operators of $2.
26 billion, or a little more than a third of the coin-operated entertainment industry's $7 billion. In 1992, video accounted for revenues of $2.7 billion. Universe of ExcessIn today's pinball, the governing esthetic is more.
More lights, sound and action.
More stars, more special effects.
Take Tommy, an irresistible case study, because it's a pinball machine based on a musical about pinball.The manufacturer, Data East, packed in 21 pieces of music from the Broadway show, with vocals by members of the original cast, and elements of the stage sets, notably a World War II bomber and a motorized mirror. (When the ball hits the mirror, the machine goes deathly silent, and an eerie voice calls out "Tommy .
.
.
Tommy.
")The game has more than two dozen play modes, in which different features with different scoring payoffs light up. storage In Fiddle About mode, for example, the player tries to hit a flashing target that moves across the play field. The piece de resistance is Tommy mode, a clever reference to the fact that Tommy, the pinball wizard, is "deaf, dumb and blind.
" In Tommy mode, a metal fan pops out and covers the flippers, so that the player has to operate blind.There's some evidence that the designers went well around the bend on this one, and that too much thinking about pinball can do peculiar things to the mind."When you go into multi-ball, the game changes," said Joe Kaminkow, the vice president for research and design for Data East and head of the Tommy design team.
"It's like it morphs, and takes you back to a different era of pinball. You hear bells chiming and ringing."Small wonder that pinball machines now carry movie-style credit lines at the bottom of the play field for sound, music, art design, concept, software, dot-matrix display and mechanics. First, the ScriptThe development of the machines has an oddly Hollywood feel to it as well.
The process, which takes a year or more, begins with film scripts. Mr. Kaminkow says that he reads 15 to 20 scripts a week, looking for a good pinball story. (Needless to say, he is writing his own script as well.
)Once a licensing agreement is reached (with the studios and stars retaining strict control over the use of likenesses and voices), designers produce the equivalent of a rough cut, which they modify during the first testing phase. In phase 2, machines are placed in test sites at malls and arcades and, based on customer feedback, undergo further refinement. In Manhattan, the Broadway Arcade gets machines well before the rest of country because the companies use Mr.
Epstein as a sounding board.
Finally, the machines go into general release. "Think of it like a movie," said Gary Stern, the executive vice president and general manager of Data East. "We make positives of a game model and distribute it.
Each game, moving from location to location, has a four- or five-year economic life, and every three or four months we have another one."Some machines never reach the general public. Mr. Kaminkow has a sideline in making custom machines for favored clients, like Joel Silver, a film producer known for his high-decibel tirades.
Mr.
Kaminkow designed a machine that incorporates events from Mr. Silver's life and makes use of his famous voice."When you push the flippers, he screams," said Mr.
Kaminkow, who built one of Mr.
Silver's favorite lines into the soundtrack: "Repeat after me, '11 double E,' because you're going to be selling shoes in this town!" Effective BaitThe added complexity of the new machines makes excellent economic sense. Tantalized players wind up investing many quarters just to figure a machine out.On the Internet computer network, a pinball club of about 100 hard-core members devotes hours to arcane discussions of strategy for different machines.
Some members generate handbooks of up to 50 pages on a single machine.That way madness lies. I took the experiential approach. At the arcade, I bonded with Arnold, grew fond of the electric chair in the Addams Family and took manic delight in hitting the bloodshot-eyeball targets in Tales From the Crypt.But the machine that really pulled in my quarters was a humble little game called Tee'd Off.
It was a golf game, with an intriguing pitch-and-putt ramp and an exploding volcano. Its main character is a gopher that runs from hole to hole and taunts the player nonstop with remarks like "You look like you need some serious help," "Did anybody ever teach you how to play this game?" and "In case you didn't notice, you just blew it," or, succinctly, "You're lousy." After a well-executed shot, it would say, "Amazing," but the tone was sarcastic and, I felt, unacceptable.
The running commentary was punctuated by little nyuk-nyuk chuckles.I came to hate the gopher. As quarter after quarter disappeared, and the razzing continued, I made a vow: No matter how long it took, no matter how much money I spent, I was going to stomp that little rodent.It took about $40. Gradually, a few of my dormant skills returned.
I never figured out all the rules of the game, but with time, I began winning free balls with fair regularity. (New York law does not allow the awarding of free games.)Then, on one punishingly cold afternoon, I entered what pinball players call "the zone.
" As though briefly endowed with supernatural powers, I was able to keep each ball in play for several minutes, racking up big-time scores. In multi-ball, instead of flailing randomly, I would trap two balls on one flipper and play the third ball with the free one, a major strategic advance for me. In one blissful moment, I sent the ball straight into the hole where the gopher was hiding, evoking a startled cry: "Hey, you got me.
" In the end, my score was nearly half a billion points. Man had triumphed over machine, and over a darned annoying little pest.The funny thing is, two quarters later, the gopher hadn't changed his attitude.
Where to Insert the Coins and InteractHere is a sampling of pinball arcades and pinball events in New York City: Arcades BROADWAY ARCADE, 1659 Broadway, near 52d Street, (212) 247-3725. Hours: 8 A.M. to midnight, daily. PLAYLAND, Broadway near 42d Street, unlisted telephone. Hours: 24 hours a day, daily. TIME OUT FAMILY AMUSEMENT CENTER, Penn Station (near Long Island Rail Road ticket booths), unlisted telephone.
Hours: 24 hours a day, daily.
PETER PAN GAMES OF BAYSIDE, Bayside Shopping Mall, 212-65 26th Avenue, Queens, (718) 229-0064. Hours: 11 A.M. to 11:30 P.M. Sunday through Thursday; 11 A.M. to 12:30 A.M. Fridays and Saturdays. SUPER AMUSEMENTS FAMILY FUN CENTER, Whitestone Pathmark Shopping Center, off service road to Whitestone Expressway, Queens, (718) 961-6791. Hours: 11 A.M. to midnight, Mondays through Thursdays; 10 A.
M.
to 2 A.
M.
Fridays and Saturdays, 10 A.
M.
to midnight Sundays.
Pinball Rental PARAMOUNT VENDING, 587 10th Avenue, between 42d and 43d Streets, Clinton. Store rents two rooms filled with video games and pinball machines for private parties. The rate is $15 a person (a minimum of 20 in a group) for two hours.
The company also rents machines ($150 to $350 a day, delivery and pickup included) and sells new and used machine at prices ranging from $695 to $3,700. Information: (212) 279-1095. Exhibition "REMEMBER PINBALL," Park Avenue Atrium, 237 Park Avenue, at 46th Street. An exhibition of more than 50 pinball machines from the golden era (late 1940's to late 50's), as well as precursors and samples of pinball art.
Through Feb.
24.
Hours: Monday through Friday, 8 A.
M.
to 6 P.
M.
Free admission.
Information: (212) 850-9786.
Tournament PAPA 4 INTERNATIONAL PINBALL CHAMPIONSHIPS, Grand Ballroom, Park Central Hotel, 870 Seventh Avenue, at 55th Street, Manhattan. The championship competition for the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association. Qualifying rounds: Feb. 4, 11 A.M. to 1 A.M.; Feb. 5, 9 A.M. to midnight. Final rounds: Feb. 6, 9 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. How to enter: All adult divisions are $15.
Juniors division (age 16 and under) is $10. Players may re-enter as many times as they like, paying the entry fee each time. Qualifying rounds are open to the viewing public at no charge.
Information: (212) 247-3725.
Benefit "FLIPPERMANIA," Park Central Hotel, 870 Seventh Avenue, at 55th Street, Manhattan. A pinball party featuring members of the cast of "Tommy" and other Broadway actors, as well as anyone else who wants to compete on 75 pinball games. A benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, co-presented by the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association.
Feb.
6 at 6 P.
M.
Tickets: $30; $25 in advance.
Information: (212) 978-0208.
League Play LEAGUE NIGHTS, Broadway Arcade, 1659 Broadway, near 52d Street. The arcade sponsors pinball league nights that run for 10 weeks in the spring and fall. Spring leagues begin in mid-April, with Monday reserved for experts (singles only), Wednesday for "very good" players (singles only) and Thursday for beginners (singles and doubles).
If enough players sign up, Tuesday will be devoted to a women's league. Play begins at 7 P.M. and lasts about three hours. The cost is $5 to register and $3 a week for singles, $5 for doubles, which goes toward prizes, jackets and trophies. To sign up, go
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