Deep in the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, past the bustling Oculus demo booth and the frenzied whirring of the Drone Corral, people are playing pinball. Seven tables—all dishing out endless free plays—ding and whistle, the red dot-matrix lights of their attractor screens flashing high scores and retro animations. Even in a building full of 2016's hottest gadgets, there is no shortage of pinball players.

This is nothing new for Stern Pinball, which traces its roots as far back as the 1930s. The oldest and largest producer of arcade-quality pinball games in the world, Stern has been putting out its specific form of consumer electronics for longer than the Consumer Electronic Show has existed.

It's just not CES without a new Stern table, the same way it's just not an arcade without at least one pinball machine. Last year it was Wrestlemania. The year before that it was Star Trek. This year, it's the Spider-Man Vault Edition table, a refreshed version of a 2007 machine that was pegged to the now-finished trilogy of films starring Tobey Maguire. The new table mixes brand-new art with the 2007 machine's tried-and-true field of play. At this year's booth, the refreshed table sits next to a wholly new one—a Game of Thrones table worked up from scratch.

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Stern cranks out new tables like it's no big deal, but bringing a pinball table into the world is no small feat, Stern Pinball's director of marketing Jody Dankberg tells me. "It's not an easy thing to do. It takes us about 12 months. We'll probably invest at least one million in research and development to bring one to market."

In many ways, that process is the same as it's always been. Stern employs three internal design teams, each charged with leading a project from its vaguest beginning—a license, an idea of "oh wouldn't it be cool if"—through exhaustive testing of an art-free mechanical design, meticulous construction of the scoring rules, the creation of illustration and custom-made statuettes, and the brute-force work of just screwing all the stuff together.

Even in 2016, making a pinball machine is an artisanal process. Hundreds of workers screw bespoke rails and springs and plungers into countless tables by hand at Stern's plant in Chicago. "This is a made-in-America product," says president Gary Stern, son of founder Sam Stern. He jumps at the chance to stress that fact any chance he can. He's understandably proud. Stern Pinball directly employs hundreds at its 110,000-square-foot factory in Chicago, and thousands more in the local industry devoted to producing its unique components. These machines are the product of hundreds of human hands, and a cohesive community of artisans. "Chicago is pinball," Dankberg says.

The gameplay at the heart of Stern's most modern tables is still very traditional—"It's a ball-and-bat game," Stern stresses, and for good reason. Dankberg boils it down to a single maxim: "Gravity is the ultimate randomizer." It's a mantra you can immediately identify as well-worn, but mostly because it's true.

Beneath that traditional surface, modern technical advances improve the new tables in mostly unseen ways. Revamped guts allow tables that look and feel like they stepped out of the mid-1990s to be more robust and capable in subtle ways you'd only really notice if you tore one apart.

"We redesigned the electronics of pinball."

"It's what's underneath the hood," Dankerberg says. "We redesigned the electronics of pinball. Pinball was built the same way for about 30 years—big relay cable that went down the middle that controlled all the switches lights and coils." Nowadays, the innards have been squished down, condensed into chips instead of a rat's nests of wires. "It's a fully modern electronic system," Dankberg says. "A bus system that allows the game not to be made from scratch every time."

Stern Pinball's designers considered flashier implementations of modern tech—LCD screens under the glass, for instance, instead of (or in addition to) good old-fashioned blinking lights. "It's been done before," Dankberg says. "If it adds to the gameplay, we're all for it." But clearly the real enthusiasm is for how tech can enhance the periphery of the traditional game, everything around the ball and bat. "'We're going to be in the cloud one day. Games will be connected to Wi-Fi. Automatic updates. That's where you want to be."

"We love digital pinball. It lets people know pinball still exists."

Stern isn't shying away from full-on digital pinball either. Later this year, the company plans to launch its own app. Made by developer FarSight, the app will include simulations of dozens of Stern machines, bringing them to every gadget you could imagine: iPhones, Android devices, Xboxes, Playstations, PCs. Stern's digital pinball will even be available in Oculus Rift. But while Stern has affinity for the digital game, it's only the appetizer, never the main course. "We love digital pinball," Dankberg says. "It lets people know the rules of the game. Lets them practice up. It lets people know pinball still exists."

Meanwhile, in the South Hall, players vie for time on seven more direct reminders.

Eric Limer

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