Dark Pinball Wizards

One of the great things about being into retrogames in the present era is how many surprises are continually being unearthed - their digital spectral forms ripped from dwindling (and sometimes literally rotting) physical media, given new life via patches, translations, or undubs, and set loose in the unseemly back alleys of the internet. One such feat of gaming necromancy was revealed to the world earlier in this Spookiest of Months: an English version of the notorious (for anyone that's even heard of it) "first-person surrealist horror pinball game" Paranoiascape, originally released in Japan in 1998 for the original Playstation. To my (probable) shame as a fan of bizarre and creative titles from a more "Wild West" era of gaming, I was previously unaware of it. To my (certain) shame as a fan of genre film and 90s music videos, I was also unaware of the game's creator, one "Screaming Mad George," who has credits as special effects and makeup artist on Big Trouble in Little China, the original Predator, several Nightmare on Elm Street and Re-Animator movies, the video for "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails, and even the album cover for X-Japan guitarist Hide's solo debut Hide Your Face - an album I had been coincidentally listening to just before I learned about this game!

Now, let's be fair - this is far from the first, and certainly not the last, intersection of pinball and horror on digital (or even physical) tables. If anything, mid-century electric genre cheese was part of video games from the medium's very beginnings thanks to inherited pinball DNA. And while the relationship between the two is twisty and complicated, with video games offering some home version of pinball since 1980 (and even earlier in arcades) and pinball machines not only getting screens and displays of their own, but also benefiting from the technology driving video games to create fiendishly complex tables, I think we can safe say that, by the time we hit the late 90s and the fifth console generation, things had reached a whole new level. Not only was 3D modeling possible, even in games that only presented an ostensibly 2D top-down perspective, but physics engines were complex enough to make a game as realistic (or unreal) as designers wanted. Not to mention all the other developments in graphics and music that were elevating games in general, but were especially evident in pinball, games, ironically because there was such a limited range of ways that they could be use - so each improvement stood out all the more. Mobygames lists 80 pinball titles that released between 1995 and 1998 alone - many were of classic designed, and many were themed for science fiction, fantasy, and, yes, horror.

To get into the why of it all, let's talk about a fifth-generation console game of very similar provenance to Paranoiascape, one that also brought creepy visuals and a metal soundtrack to the (pinball), and even had a similar fate of being only released in Japan despite being entirely in English: Digital Pinball Necronomicon for the Sega Saturn, with a soundtrack by none other than Dream Theater's John Petrucci. It's much closer to a "standard" pinball video adaptation than Screaming Mad George's creation, albiet one with exceptional visuals (it's one of the few Saturn games that runs at 480i, clean enough to be mistaken for something from the next console generation) and excellent physics. Necronomicon convincingly does exactly what we expect of both horror and pinball: it presents a world in miniature that operates on its own rules, a bubble existence where the raw physicality of the audience/player stand-in literally crashing into the symbolic and representative. Themed (and even narrative) pinball like Necronomicon exists in a space of cognitive dissonance - there are the elements of a thing going on, a story being told, a setting and disparate events, but their connection to the gameplay itself, of ball, flipper, and target, is tenuous and ever-shifting. It's an abstraction that can only hold together through the kind of emotional logic that I consider one of horror's most essential elements. It can't make sense, it obeys none of of the rules of our own world, yet there it is before us, in miniature. When it comes to horror or pinball, we have to approach it on its own terms if we want to get anything out of it.

And people certainly do! Pinball, like horror, is one of those niches within a nice, where participation requires learning specific terminology and concepts. where learning about what went into the creation of a work is as important as what it actually contains and engaging on all these levels simultaneously. (It feels a lot like SHMUPs in that way, come to think of it.) Enthusiasts will be able to name the people who worked on not only their favorites, but all the common points of reference, and to follow these creators fixations, techniques, and quirks. In the capitalist hellscape all our art must be made in, this can even include deep working knowledge of the business practices and financial histories of publishes, film studios, or manufacturers, depending on the medium. (I witnessed plenty of that firsthand when I was still going to horror conventions, and am doing myself with SHMUPs, learning the histories of various companies, the titles they put out, and the people that worked for them.) It's the kind of thing that most fandoms don't require, so it's natural that the ones that do would natural come together.

Even in this environment, though, Paranoiascape is both an oddity and, ironically for something so strange, deeply nostalgic for me. It feels distinctly late 90s, like the amalgamation of all the era's industrial music videos and album covers, of edgy comics and cartoons, and, naturally, of video games. It's like hanging out in the room of that friend who loves Doom and Ministry and "blood book" comics and KMFDM and cheesy horror on VHS and... It feels like the kind of game Beavis and Butt-Head would have loved. But in a way, this, too is appropriate. It's said that science fiction (and industrial music) is nostalgia, and the same could be said for a lot of horror and certainly all of pinball. The kinds of things things that don't make sense in today's world and never fit into the era in which they were created. It's the kind of weirdness that feels, at least to this weirdo, like home. As the world around us offers a new horror every day, there's something to be said of finding your place in the ostensibly horrific and strange. If you find. If you're reading this, I'm sure you have your own examples, not just sloppy horror and pinball. Halloween is upon us, and it's the perfect time to find inspiration in the strange and inviting. There's always a place for us, even if it's under the glass tabletop as we fight our hardest to keep from disappearing down the gutter into oblivion. And as long as we're willing to keep at it, there's always another quarter to drop in the slot. 

- B

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