"My strange inclination and fascination at watching marble runs as a child somehow developed into a love for pinball. A REAL love for pinball. We didn’t go to arcades or bowling alleys very often, so it wasn’t frequently that I got to play the real things, so my parents had gotten many computer based pinball games to try satisfy the need.
Whenever we did stumble upon a real machine though, I’d beg my folks to let me try it. This one time, I’d found myself in front of the game we’d stopped to play the most at a bowling alley we'd visit from time to time. I’d of course played real machines before, but I was still barely tall enough to have my chest above the glass to see what was going on, but I didn’t care.
I started the game like any other time, and played went pretty much as you’d expect a young child’s pinball game to go – terribly, with flippers flailing away mindlessly, not really caring about what I aimed at or hit. On my third and final ball though, something happened… I shot the ball somewhere and the machine began to act strangely. The lighting became flashier, the sound wound itself up and then…
“M U L T I B A L L !!!”
Hell began to break loose on the world I was looking at beneath the glass. Another two chrome pinballs launched into play, and there I was, frantically juggling all three with the flippers, whilst ecstatically listening to the increasingly intense music that blasted through the game’s speakers as the chaos unfolded on the game before me.
Yeah, multiballs aren’t a big deal, but at that moment in my young mind? I was a wizard."
