Going out on the town has always been a mixed bag for me.  I like music; I like to see and to be seen; I like to be where the action is.  Here’s the catch: I don’t drink or smoke.  So evenings out always end up feeling unnecessarily long and drawn-out, with a lot of unfilled interstitial time and a lot of worrying about what to do with my hands.  Thankfully, I recently discovered that, all along, I’ve been nursing an addictive personality that was just waiting for the right vice to come along!

Now I’m a pinball addict, and while my loose-change lunchbox has never been emptier, I couldn’t imagine giving up the game now.  I love pinball machines – the over-the-top art and sound, the loony mechanical gimmicks, and most of all the rushing, crazy physics of the ball in motion, ricocheting off a thousand things and pushing my brain to levels of alertness it never achieved when I was in college.

It didn’t take long for the pinball dreams to start, and that’s about the point at which I decided to launch my mad pinball quest: to find and play every machine in Athens, Georgia - or, now, Columbus, Ohio.  It’s been an interesting ride, one that’s taken me to a number of out-of-the-way (or just out-of-my-scene) bars that I never would have frequented otherwise.

In fact, I’d recommend a pinball quest to others for that reason alone – even though this is possibly the worst time in the last fifty years to undertake such a quest.  The pinball industry is in severe decline; there is now only one manufacturer of tables in the world, and there is some concern that this uniquely American pastime is on the verge of vanishing from the world entirely.

Thankfully, Columbus entrepreneurs (at least at bars that don’t change hands ever two years) haven’t given up on the genre.  I confess one of my loftier ambitions in writing this article is to inspire a local pinball craze, putting enough quarters in slots to somehow, indirectly, re-ignite the pinball world as a whole.  Okay, maybe that won’t happen, but there are plenty of surprisingly cheap tables on the secondary market, and if my efforts can convince one bar owner to buy (or repair) one more table, it’ll have been worth it. 

One twist: I’m terrible at pinball.  My scores vary wildly from game to game, and the most advanced training I ever received was when I was 11 and my dad taught me to catch the ball in the crook of the flipper.  Some more serious pinball junkies (wizards, if you will) might dispute my qualifications for writing a review of every pinball machine in town.  But if I don’t do it, who will?