Pinball wizards

Brinkley Sharpe doesn’t want to think of how many quarters she’s spent in pinball machines around Birmingham. It’s all in pursuit of a high score — and a good time — as part of the Magic City Pinball League.

Sharpe, an investigator for the Jefferson County Public Defender’s Office, and Brendan Turner, a web app developer for Viva Health, joined the league about two years ago. It’s a niche hobby, and the Highland Park couple said at first they didn’t realize how much skill went into the game.

“Seventy-five cents and a minute and a half later, I had gone through all three of my balls, and then it kind of hit me. I’m a competitive person, so I wanted to get very good at this. But I realized that sometimes watching someone play, it seems like they have conjured magic in order to keep a ball in play,” Turner said. “I think pinball wizard is a good name.”

Chris Warren started the league in 2009, and it has three seasons per year. With about 25 players competing per season, Sharpe said it’s a diverse group brought together by the love of the old-school game.

“We said, ‘We don’t know how to play.’ And [Warren] said, ‘It doesn’t matter,’” Sharpe said. “Pretty soon into it, we realized this was something we were really interested in.”

“Part of the game is luck, so everybody has a good shot at having a good game or bad game,” Turner said.

Competitive pinball has its own set of rules established by the International Flipper Pinball Association, but much like more traditional sports, it boils down to keeping the ball in play and making strategic moves to get the most points. In this case, though, the field of play is covered in lights and decorated with movie characters or fantasy themes.

My only experience with pinball before hearing about the pinball league was the Windows “Space Cadet” computer game, but Sharpe and Turner played a few rounds with me on a “Star Trek” themed machine. I lost — very quickly — but I got to see firsthand why the game got them hooked. Sharpe said it’s easy to lose track of how many quarters she’s spent in a single practice.

Every game takes a dose of luck, but Sharpe and Turner also have developed plenty of skills as they’ve competed in the league. Turner said the basic flipper control to aim the pinball and keep it in play is built on “muscle memory and instinct,” but more advanced players also use the “subtle art of nudging” the machine as a whole to direct the ball where they want it to go.

“[It takes] a lot of concentration on multiple things and the ability to simultaneously block out everything. Especially playing in an arcade like this,” Sharpe said. “Anyone can come in. You never know when a child will try to climb on a machine while you’re playing.”

A couple of the league members are ranked on a national level, and Turner said it’s “mesmerizing” to watch them in action. Sharpe said pinball is the type of game that always leaves you wanting to play just one more round.

“The difficulty level becomes such … that the next thing you get to is just hard enough that you want to play again,” she said. 

While the pinball league’s official games and practices are at BumperNets in Hoover, Sharpe and Turner can also frequently be found feeding quarters into pinball machines at Buck Mulligan’s, Black Market Bar and Grill, Carrigan’s, Cahaba Brewing and Saturn. Like many others in the league, they also have a machine of their own in their living room.

Turner said they started with a cheap, older machine that he fixed up and sold, gradually moving up to better models. But right now their pinball machine sits untouched — living in a second story apartment, Sharpe and Turner said they try not to disturb their neighbors.

“I’ve kind of fixed it up almost like a classic car in the garage that you never take out and drive anywhere. So I’ve put a lot of work into it. It’s a gorgeous machine. I used to turn it on just to watch the lights,” Turner said.

But someday that’s going to change.

“We will definitely have an arcade in our basement, eventually,” Turner said.

Turner even helped develop an app called Pindigo, for pinball players to track and share their scores with other players. The app launched in June 2016 and is slowly building an audience.

“It’s such a niche kind of community that as a budding software developer, it’s the perfect size, and there’s also no competition in that area,” Turner said.

Sharpe, 25, and Turner, 27, are among the younger members in the league, but they said it’s as much about a group of friends swapping stories — and sometimes pinball machines — as it is about competition. They all share “this one obsession” with a game based on a set of flippers and a metal ball, Sharpe said.

“It becomes a pinball problem,” she said.

Find the Magic City Pinball League at mcpl.league.papa.org or on Facebook.