New club to bring competitive pinball to Santa Cruz County ‘pinheads’

There’s a room in Harry Franklin’s house, deep in the forested hills near Aptos, that feels like a dream that a teenage boy in a 1980s movie might have. It’s full of ringing bells and colored lights and fantastical images. It’s a private paradise of pinball.

To anyone who grew up in or near Santa Cruz with ready access to the arcade at the Beach Boardwalk, the aesthetics of pinball are probably quite familiar, maybe even a part of everyday life. But for most people, pinball exists in a kind of nostalgic haze of teenage leisure time, or young-adult bar hopping, or rolls of quarters to spend and levels of skill to master. 

Would you then believe that pinball is a thriving subculture, something adults invest large amounts of money and time in, and pursue with passion and curiosity?

On Soquel Drive, between 41st Avenue and Rodeo Gulch Road, next door to The Treehouse cannabis dispensary, two pinball fans are sometime this month opening a new membership club to be called “Nine and Three Quarters” (or “9¾”) designed to cater to those who have made pinball into a lifestyle. The club — named for the in-between train platform to take students to Hogwarts in the Harry Potter universe — will feature other indoor game activities, table tennis and a golf simulator, for example, but pinball in all its loud and garish glory is going to be the star. 

Harry Franklin, for one, is likely to be a regular customer. Franklin, 51, is not part of the 9¾ venture, but the club owners call him a friend and an inspiration. Franklin, 51, keeps six full-scale pinball machines in his home, five of which he owns, and another that he’s holding for a friend. The machines go from a 1969 classic to modern and popular mainstream games like Medieval Madness, as well as Godzilla and Deadpool. He’s excited at the prospect of a new place for pinball locally. 

“It’s a long time coming,” he said. “If I were more motivated, I would have started one myself.”

Franklin has always loved pinball and has played regularly since his teenage years. But he slipped deeper into the pinball rabbit hole several years ago after a divorce, when he purchased his first machine “for my mental health.” He then not only indulged his love for pinball by buying more machines, he began to embrace the fine art of becoming — a reference to a famous rock song from more than 50 years ago — a pinball wizard.

“I kinda describe pinball in three phases,” he said. “First, it’s just keeping the ball from going down the hole. And I did that forever. But once you realize that the machines are very precise and well-engineered, you can predict how the ball is going to move at a given speed or a given angle. So once you make that connection, you can start hitting your shots. Then, once you get to that point, you can go to the next phase, which is strategy. You begin to see how that there’s a puzzle that needs to be solved, and there’s different ways of going about a mission, if you will.”

Yet, for all his time and energy (and money) spent pursuing the Zen of pinball, Franklin still does not consider himself a great player. 

“I would call myself functionally illiterate at pinball,” he said. “I mean, I would call myself a good player. But I haven’t transcended into really knowing the strategies and skills. I just realized not long ago that that was a thing. So, I’m just now barely catching up with the lingo.”

He knows his place in the pinball universe, because he engages with others who are even deeper down the rabbit hole. Franklin is a regular visitor to Lynn’s Arcade in Seaside, about 30 miles south of Aptos. Lynn’s attracts pinball lovers from all over the Monterey Bay, as well as the greater Bay Area, to participate in various tournaments organized and conducted by the Monterey Flipper Pinball league. 

Lynn’s is, in fact, a model for 9¾ on Soquel Drive, set to open by the end of April. Partners Dean Roblee and Will Bernardi are hoping to convert a multistory industrial space less than 2,000 square feet into a members-only arcade. “We’re going to start out as kind of a private club, speakeasy style,” said Bernardi in the reception area of the new club, three brand-new pinball machines behind him, still under wraps. The club will open with just five machines, but it’s hoping to expand to 12 by the end of the year. Monthly memberships, said Bernardi, will come in at around $60, with day passes also available.

Pinball machines come in hundreds if not thousands of themes, many of which are drawn from popular culture. Among the new machines to open at Bernardi’s new club include machines branded with themes from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, famous illusionist Harry Houdini, and “The Godfather.” When I visited the not-yet-open club, the owners were expecting delivery of a new “Baywatch”-themed machine.

Pinball is one of the few totems of American pop culture that transcends generational nostalgia. Machines are much more sophisticated than they used to be, with more bells and whistles (often literally), more skill levels, more technological advances, more complex architecture, and more intricate and state-of-the-art graphics displays. But the basics — the plunger launching the ball in play, the sloped table, the twin flippers — have remained consistent over the years, from the old electro-mechanical models to the more recent computer-animated ones, allowing boomers to play a game millenials love, and vice versa. And, despite the enormous advancements in computer graphics, pinball machines still rely on analog effects such as balls striking rubber bumpers and the force of gravity that video games can’t match.

As for those who want to bring the arcade into the living room, a full-sized pinball machine can run anywhere from around $7,000 to north of $10,000 with collectible, rare or restored vintage machines reaching as high as $30,000. “I’ve sold a couple of games,” said Harry Franklin, “and I’ve always made money off them. They’re a better investment than my Bitcoin.”

Franklin developed his love of pinball as a high-schooler at the long-defunct Attic Arcade in Soquel. Today, he has an app on his phone known as Pinball Map that informs where he can find an available pinball machine. 

Pinball even has an origin story that places it in the realm of contraband going legit. When it was first developed back in the 1940s, pinball was illegal in many states by the justification that it was a game of chance and thus subject to bans on gambling. It wasn’t until the 1970s that that justification was challenged in court when an avid player demonstrated at a New York City hearing that pinball was in fact a game of skill. That story has been turned into the 2022 comedic drama “Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game.”

Pinball machine designers long ago came upon a form and an aesthetic feel that makes pinball the kind of thing that can occupy a player for hours. One of Santa Cruz County’s most devout “pinheads” believes that a game many dismiss as a symbol for misspent youth is capable of engaging competitors looking for ever-evolving levels of complexity. And that pinball can still deliver old-fashioned fun, just as it always has.

“They are a lot of fun,” said Franklin. “You’re high on dopamine when you’re playing and it’s exciting, even though you’re just whacking a little ball around. It’s really that expectation and the satisfaction of it. It’s equally frustrating and upsetting, sometimes. You just know you can hit that shot.  And every time you see it coming down the hole, it can be very frustrating. It’s an emotional game.”

The plan at 9¾ on Soquel Drive is to, after its opening, develop some tournaments (maybe in table tennis and virtual golf as well) and a pinball league. Food and drink will evolve, said Will Bernardi, but in the near term, they’ll bring in some food trucks. The next-door Treehouse dispensary has begun participating in the monthly First Friday event, and the pinball club is looking to join in the First Friday fun. 

“The Boardwalk is a different dynamic,” said Bernardi. “It’s more of an amusement park feel. Where this is going to be more like a private club for the serious gamer. And we’ll have a lot of fun too.”

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