MILTON — Looking at the front of James Edes’ Milton home, you’d never guess what’s inside. Living room and kitchen give no clue to Edes’ consuming electronic passion. But head downstairs, and you might be overwhelmed by what you see and hear.
“That’s how we keep the harmony in our marriage,” said Edes’ wife, Janice, during a recent tour. “We keep all his stuff downstairs.”
“All his stuff” is Edes’ collection: more than 70 classic and newer pinball machines. And turning on even a few of them at the same time produces a cacophony of mechanical plinks and pings and electronic beeps and blips.
“I just love them,” Edes said. “I’ve been playing since I was a little kid, and I’m pretty much addicted.”
Although the best in the world play “at a whole other level,” according to Edes, he does play competitively and late last year won a spot to play in the recent International Flipper Pinball Association tournament in Las Vegas.
He calls the opportunity “a lucky fluke” and credits snowy weather in Vancouver, B.C., (the tournament’s Northwest tryout location) for keeping better players away and giving him a chance to win.
He placed in the low 50s out of about 100 competitors in the March IFPA tournament but said just being there added fuel to his collector’s passion.
Edes, whose father was in the military, grew up playing pinball at recreation centers on Army bases around the country. He started collecting the machines when he found a broken one left on a California highway. He can play for hours on just about any of the machines at his home. But even more important, he said, is the ability to restore and repair individual machines.
He’s always had a mechanical aptitude, he said. From the time when he was 3 years old and “backwards engineered” (i.e., took apart) his tricycle, to his present job as an appliance technician for LG, he has always enjoyed taking things apart and figuring out what makes them work, he said.
Edes has representative pieces from the three main eras of pinball history in the United States: the purely mechanical era, the electromechanical era and the digital era.
His oldest machine is a mechanical baseball game from the 1930s. Although it is a pinball precursor, its mechanical complexity is amazing, he said. Once a steel ball is launched, it bounces among hundreds of metal pins.
Players score points depending on where the ball lands. A “hit” places a ball on a rotating baseball diamond. Without any form of electronic memory, the machine keeps track of balls, strikes, walks, outs and runs.
It wasn’t until much later that manufacturers began adding electronic lights and sound to their games. Today, Stern, currently the country’s only major pinball manufacturer, uses digital computer technology to control dozens of moving parts. Edes’ favorite machine, a 2003 “Lord of the Rings” game, features a digital display screen along with several ramps and tracks and buttons that trigger story-driven events such as the Gandalf’s fight with the Balrog and the destruction of the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom. Digital sound and the images on the display screen tell J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous story as players rack up points in the game.
“Machines like this just have good flow,” Edes said. “There’s always something going on. There’s always something more to shoot for.”
Many modern games are easy to upgrade, Edes said. Often, it’s just a matter of downloading programming code from a Web site, saving it to a thumb drive and then uploading the information directly to the pinball machine. This is one way to fix bugs or add new features to some games, Edes said.
The most Edes has ever spent on a machine is about $3,800 for a new game still in the box. But he’s always on the hunt for rare and limited- edition machines. Many pinball machines sell for around $600 to $800 on eBay, he said.
Edes is a member of the Vancouver Regional Pinball Association, an organization that hosts tournaments and doles out regulation points that apply toward World Pinball Player Rankings. As of April 15, players from the United States held 10 of the top 12 spots on this year’s WPPR master list.
Edes and his wife often travel to the country’s largest pinball expos. While he’s always on the lookout for good deals, Edes said he also enjoys meeting the “pinball greats” that frequent these events. Just ask him, and he can rattle off the names of his favorite designers, the machines they made, the years they made them and the companies they made them for. And, chances are, he has their autograph on one of the many posters or flyers that line the walls of his playroom.
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