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A very interesting look at the last days of pinball.

It’s no secret that I’m not a big video game devotee. I fell off that bandwagon during the switch from the NES to the Super Nintendo systems. Before that, though, I was huge game junkie and if it was after 3 PM on a school day, you could rest assured I was down at the local convenience store playing the arcade games in the back corner. Still, while I haven’t played a game in about a decade or so now, I still have a bit of a fascination with them. I watch Angry Video Game Nerd religiously, and if there’s a decent game review to be watched online, I’ll watch it. By extension, the same goes for pinball machines, another childhood favorite, as they were more or less the forbearers of arcade games in many ways. So when Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball showed up for review, I had to check it out.

Tilt is a 60-minute documentary directed by Greg Maletic focusing on one of the last efforts to, as the title states, save the pinball game industry. After over a hundred years of the game being around (the doc goes into a short history of pinball at the beginning), pinball was all but dead in the late 1990s. Williams, one of the largest companies still making the games at the time, was turning their attention to slot machines, having not seen a profit from pinball in years. From there, we are taken on the journey of the Williams production team to try to create something new and exciting, leading to the “Pinball 2000” machine – one combining traditional pinball with video imaging.

While it is done in typical “talking heads” style as most documentaries are done, Tilt proves to be fairly fascinating and entertaining in its tale of a last-ditch hope to save the industry. It doesn’t give anything away to say that they failed (that’s brought up 10 minutes into the film before we go into the actual story of how it came about and why it failed), though it is sort of funny to learn that it was a Star Wars game that killed them.

The documentary itself may only be an hour long, but this 2-disc set features almost seven hours’ worth of extras. One of those seven hours is devoted to Maletic’s running commentary, which serves as a decent alternate track to the film, offering insight into pieces of the story that weren’t explored in the film itself. The second disc is bursting with special features, from additional interview footage, a look at how pinball machines are designed and built, publicity videos for the games, and all sorts of other bits and pieces. Virtually anything you would want to know about pinball can be found here.

Pinball may not have had online roaming artificial intelligence or whatever the hell they’re programming into the latest Halo game, but Tilt gives the phenomenon a bit of due respect. And while the end of the industry is interesting to watch, I wouldn’t mind a more in-depth look at the game as a whole throughout its history one day.

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