LAS VEGAS — Tim Quintana hunches over a pinball machine and stares down Spider-Man's archenemies: Kingpin, Lizard and Scorpion. He pulls the plunger and a silver ball shoots onto the playfield, a maze of brightly lit bumpers and targets.
The ball darts over a comic book-style drawing of Spider-Man reaching for his lady love, Mary Jane. The machine beeps: Blip-blip-blip-blip. The ball clangs off two mushroom-shaped bumpers. It plows into three square targets. Blip-blip-blip-blip.
With each blip, Quintana's score rises: 448,400. 448,500. The ball bumps a target decorated with a small spider web. A green dot lights up. More blips. More points. More blips.
Silence. The ball is stuck.
It shakes Quintana out of his pinball trance. A welfare caseworker, he whizzes through his lunch breaks in this dim strip mall storefront called the Pinball Hall of Fame.
"It makes you feel like a kid for an hour," he says. "Forget work, forget everything for one hour."
Quintana seeks out the games of his youth -- like The Amazing Spider-Man -- among the 200 machines belonging to a pinhead named Tim Arnold. People come to his arcade to relive childhood afternoons. His Hall of Fame has also become a memorial for a pastime upstaged by Xboxes, PlayStations and Wiis.
Pinball, once a pop-culture touchstone, is sputtering. Only one manufacturer remains -- Stern Pinball Inc. in Illinois. In the early '90s, the company made up to 40,000 machines annually. Today, it turns out just 10,000, and about 40% of them are sold directly for home use.
Roger Sharpe, co-director of the International Pinball Flipper Assn., blames the decline on the machines themselves. The newer ones have a half-mile of wiring and about 3,500 parts. It's inevitable something will break.
Arnold's arcade is a throwback, with Mike and Ike candy machines, mismatched carpet, change machines rescued from dumpsters, and posters for mid-'90s games such as Congo, whose slogan is: "Hippos, Snakes and Killer Apes. (And that's just the first ball)." The Hall of Fame is open daily for at least 12 hours, and Arnold is there much of the time. There's no phone: He fears pinball fanatics would take up his days with stories.
The customers, about 300 daily, are mostly male and middle-aged. Some are recovering gambling addicts who find the lights and pings a substitute for slot machines. They gawk at a slick Wheel of Fortune and an eerie Pinball Circus, which has a clown with an exposed brain and a figurine twisted like a Cirque du Soleil performer. Only two circus games were made.
