How pinball stayed illegal in Oakland for 80 years

Until 2014, if you played pinball in Oakland, California, you were technically a criminal.

To understand why, you have to go back to the 1930s, when pinball looked a lot different. Early machines had no flippers. You pulled a plunger, the ball bounced around, and you hoped. That made pinball less a game and more a slot machine with extra steps, and plenty of people were making money gambling on it. So cities across America banned it, Oakland included.

The most dramatic crackdown was in New York, where Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (yes, the airport guy, so he's now responsible for two of New York's most frustrating experiences) had police seize thousands of machines in 1942, then smashed them with a sledgehammer for the cameras.

Then, in 1947, someone invented the flipper, and pinball suddenly became a game you could actually be good at. The laws, however, did not notice. New York only reversed course in 1976, after a pinball writer (likely inspired by The Who's 1969 hit single "Pinball Wizard") named Roger Sharpe called his shot in front of the city council: he announced exactly where the ball would go, and it went there.

Most cities, deciding that ping-ponging little metal balls around themed tables was actually pretty cool, lifted their bans. Oakland did not. Its ban just quietly sat on the books for another 38 years. Bars had pinball machines. People played them. Even the founder of the Pacific Pinball Museum, right next door in Alameda, said he knew pinball used to be illegal but had no idea it still was.

What finally freed the flippers was, of all things, a crackdown on gambling. In July 2014, the city council was rewriting its gambling rules to go after internet sweepstakes cafes, and someone noticed the pinball ban sitting there. Now, I don't have the transcript from this city council meeting, but I can only imagine that the mayor looked up from finishing a record run on the Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom pinball table they got for Christmas and quickly said, "Yeah, we should probably get rid of that." And so they did. After about 80 years, pinball was legal in Oakland again.

Celebrating the news was Josh Sharpe, head of the International Flipper Pinball Association and, as it happens, Roger Sharpe's son, who compared the old law to "a 7 mph speed limit for a horse and buggy." Which is fair, although Oakland probably has one of those too.