ORBITOR 1

Manufacturer: Stern Electronics, 1982

Type: Solid State

Alchemical Element: Moon

Aura Color: Lavender

Oh, precious cadet! You know not the spellbinding enticement of your beginner’s mind. To touch, but never taste–such is our state. This tome will tame and transmute your lurking, latent flare into a commanding cognoscente that will impress women tattooed with exalted fauna and little kids–at the mere cost of your merry ignorance. This, once a means of modest amusement, shall consume and transmogrify your waking mind! Never again will you know the blissful fog of stupefaction for a quarter!

Hey, come on: it’s not that bad, really.

Are these not favorable terms for the acquisition of attainments that will allow you to entangle and influence your interpersonal intercourse with something other than some shit someone said on twitter?

Really: it’s gonna be fine.

You’ll face a much fairer fate than Stern Electronics, who, after releasing their moonscaped magnum opus Orbitor 1 in 1982, succumbed to the video game crash in 1985. At least the employees and their families, who depended upon the sustainability of the video game industry for their livelihoods, did. Gary Stern had himself a dandy do-si-do going from Pinstar Inc to Data East to Stern Pinball, where he now oversees wretched realizations ripped right from the darkest caverns of our collective 16-year-old’s diary: Metallica, AC/DC, Transformers.

Twenty years from now when we’ve dumped the newest Call of Duty (ah? ah?) in a derelict sand dune in Utah and My Chemical Romance is getting a pinball machine that costs $4 a game, we’ll have no one to blame but those same assholes again because bankruptcy doesn’t put a bologna & cheese sandwich in their hands.

When I was a girl I had a trampoline. I would wait ’til night and firewalk along my mother’s bedroom window and slither onto the cold taut canvas so I could be just a little closer to the pale bright marble mothering the sky above me. Sometimes I would sleep there–to both escape the trapped heat of my sunset-facing bedroom and evade my father’s rules about not dressing like a woman “under his roof” on the runaway minecart of minor technicality.

I would gaze and illustrate myself, graceful in my gay-ass gait, grazing the shimmering silver surface of the moon’s face with my space boots. I would leer at that luminescent blue-green blemish–with its tiny abusive girlfriends and tiny abusive alcoholic fathers, reaping tiny tumultuous loves, tainted–and I would shrug off my space helmet and space socks like some vexatious Randian heroine and take my place in mother’s algid and tranquil embrace.

Orbitor 1 is not so quieting in its lunar sea. A smooth, grooved playfield overlays fiery, coarse canyons of a cratered moonscape, giving–well, illusion may not be the best word here, because “illusion” implies you think you know what you’re looking at. Forces–the sort that go to work while we are sleeping–seem to compel and contort the ball to the tune of an immaterial whim, forging many a steel-eyed glaze in first time players. Is it a magnet? Are they magnets? Mom, I think they’re magnets! I think they’re magnets!

The notion and idea of 3D is triple diminished in this, our Steam-powered age. If you had bought your little brother Donkey Kong Country for his birthday and then, at twelve or thirteen, were gifted Final Fantasy VII for a whole summer of babysitting because both your parents had grown up poor and struggled to realize the concept of “allowance” then you might not knock knees together at the idea of the first 3D playing field. And we really shouldn’t be tracing our fingers along its corporeal concave because the fried chicken and peach rings that I totally saw you not wash off before you came in will cut right through the wax we spend our Wednesdays putting on these things, but I need you to know, to grasp. 7 years before the Nintendo Cereal System, 25 years before Nubuo Uematsu tried wringing virgin tears over the murder of a bunch of boxes stacked in the faint shape of a feminine love interest, Joe Joos Jr designed a curved playfield in a time when people still thought heterosexual women could not contract HIV and then immediately lost his job because some asshole thought I’d want to play as E.T.

Orbitor 1 has a “minimum time” feature: every game must last at least five minutes. If you drain all of your plays before the time runs out, the machine will continue to feed your fumbling hands extra balls until it reaches the 5 minute mark.

This, coupled with the curved playfield and other variances, might suggest that Orbitor 1 is an imperfect premier to a series of reviews of pinball machines.

But, in fact, this makes it the only legitimate candidate.

Precious cadet, you are applied to ponder this pillar of truth: pinball is all in your mind.

We are sans canon here in our coin-operated convent. There are no commandments, no rules for what makes a pinball machine, or what is required to construct a “game” of pinball. Pinball machines didn’t even come with flippers until Humpty Dumpty in 1947. Any pin you could play in some Portland movie theater will surely have multiball: that shit didn’t start until 1956.

To know pinball is to intimately entwine yourself with five, ten, or even a hundred spring-loaded lovers (or squishes, if you don’t experience romantic or sexual attraction, cadets of all kinds are welcome here). Each machine, while adhering to an abstract set of arbitrary trends weathered by the whim of white men with money, is singular in its intersection of design, execution, and intent.

There is no “good at sex”: you’re either capable of listening to your partner when they tell you what they need, or you’re not. Experience can help you become better at anticipating people’s needs and executing them with less coaching, but in the end fucking 1 or 100 people has the same effect on whether this date will turn out well or not. In the same constrained vein, there is no “good at pinball”. You either take the time and energy to learn how 4 Roses likes to be touched, or you don’t.

Take it from the second high scorer on Capcom’s Flipper Football.

Lay your lazy juggalo jokes and japes in the basket before you

proceed further. You sure that’s all of them? If one of them goes off while I’m completing this tour you’re gonna write “Worshiping white guy rappers who dress like clowns is sorta stupid but not any more than worshiping brightly colored ponies aimed at little girls or adopting an identity based entirely around the consumption of media and then being angry when that identity does not entail or include my specific intersections of personal experience” like, a lot of times.

The spinning bumpers that serve as the swirling centerpiece of Orbitor 1 are not, in fact, made of magnets. As if it fucking mattered. I know it’s not magnets, the Internet Pinball Database knows its not magnets, and even the placard above Orbitor 1 written by PPM’s curator, the sole purpose of which is to explain IT’S NOT A FUCKING MAGNET, also knows its not magnets. But any and every day that someone plays Orbitor 1 for the first time–all right fine okay so like the playfield makes a lip around each of those bumpers, kinda like a crater, okay, and so when the ball goes over that crater and then hits the spinning bumper, it goes in the direction that the bumper is spinning because of physics and actions and reactions but the spinners being solid colors don’t appear to be moving so it looks like a moving object being pushed and pulled by the attraction of a stationary object, okay, does that make sense–anyway, when someone plays Orbitor 1 for the first time and sees the ball wavering wildly between these illusory spinning bumpers, it’s magic.

And that is not to say that it’s merely sublime and whimsical–I mean it’s the power of influencing the course of events through the implementation of mysterious means. Precious cadet, you already have the means to make magic, mischievous, magnanimous and malevolent. You make it every day. By loving someone who struggles to love themselves or cooking a meal for someone that reminds them of home though you’ve never rode their tire swing or snuck out of their house to drink beers at the high school baseball field. Magic is not in the methodology of moving parts. If you took Orbitor 1 apart, down to its single bolts and screws and soldering points, you would not find one iota of enchantment. But there is no other meaningful way to describe that connection that people feel with machines, some they’re seeing for the first time, some they play every week.

Let no dude with a ponytail trying to sell you a big black wax candle cock tell you otherwise: you cannot add or subtract your potential for magic. It’s all a matter of focus.

Like, for realsies, focus.

You see the way the lower playfield by the outhole curves up, towards you? If the ball goes behind the flippers, it will roll alongside that basin and when it comes back, if you time your flipper movement right–no, don’t hit both at the same time, you need to hit one and leave the other still to create a path for the ball to reenter the playfield, otherwise it will just roll alongside the backs of both flippers–you can guide the ball back into the playfield and keep playing.

You’ve almost spelled out “Orbitor” on the back bank of drop targets. This is the merciful moon of my girlhood in camera: inviting yet strange, loving yet enigmatical. There are no words in space; vivid celestial giants silently wading through infinite blackened fathoms.

Perhaps, precious cadet, upon meditating on these machines and the full motion of their might, both material and immaterial, we can prime our minds for the meticulous observation of space, both outer and inner.

Blessed be, ya filthy animal.