I'll skip the suspense - "Xenon" is my all-time favorite pinball machine, a great Bally machine from 1980. I remember playing it only at one place - many, many times - a bowling alley in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. I worked in Bartlesville four summers for Phillips Petroleum as a summer employee there in the late 70s and early 80s. Being away from graduate school, those summers allowed me a lot of free time, and of course, I was making reasonably good money, especially by graduate student standards.
My first summer there started off pretty bleakly. I had an apartment that would best be characterized as grim. The shower actually had a plant growing in it, as well as several Oklahoma-sized spiders. The rest of the apartment looked like something out of a 1930's dustbowl nightmare. Housing in Bartlesville that summer was incredibly tight, so I took it anyway - the kitchen and bed were serviceable. I took showers in the local YMCA, which was two blocks away, and got into really good shape at the same time as a by-product. The landlord eventually had pity on me and found me a much better place before the summer was over. Still, the bad apartment, which I now look on with some fondness, set the tone for how that and future summers were to turn out. When I was in Bartlesville, I generally wanted to be out and about, as much as possible.
I slowly built a social life that first summer, which progressed nicely with each additional summer I spent in Bartlesville. Bartlesville didn't have a lot going for it back then. The malls closed most nights at 6 pm, as did most of the stores. Future summers were better, with stores switching to 9 pm closing times and all-night grocery stores arriving. But the first summer I was pretty much on my own, with a great desire to get out, and not many places to go.
Bartlesville did have a bowling alley, not too far away. Sometimes I would bowl there, but usually I dropped by to play pinball. That first summer, my favorite machine was a Bally "Star Trek" machine. Sometimes I played other machines, but I can't remember them.
Williams "Firepower" arrived at the bowling alley in the summer of 1980. It is another favorite of mine, but truthfully, I didn't even remember it until I started doing the research for this column. Firepower was the first I remember of a new generation of pinball machines featuring faster and more powerful flippers, which led to faster gameplay, computer-controlled lights, digitized sound, and LED scoring.
The next summer, 1981, Xenon arrived. Xenon was one of the first machines with a voice. Firepower had one the previous year, but the voice of Xenon was female; that was a first. Susanne Ciani provided the voice (for some reason, I had thought it was Laurie Anderson, but the web corrected that misconception.) You can find her side of the Xenon story at www.suzanneciani.com/early_ciani/ciani_xenon.html.
Many pinball machines have sought to appeal to young male hormones, and Xenon might have been the most successful of all. First, you had the female voice. When you put your quarter in, it cooed "Welcome to Xenon!" During play, it "ooh"ed and "aah"ed and invited you to try all sorts of actions that might be a pinball goal, but a little teenage imagination might think of something else. When the game was over, the machine said in its most suggestive tones, "Try Xenon again." Xenon's backglass and table art was beautifully executed - most other machines of that time look rather crude compared to it. The art work was quite explicit, too - not R-rated, but not far from it. It was a most interesting example of high-tech manipulation of the fancies of young males. I wasn't a prime candidate for such tricks, being in my early 20s, but I wasn't entirely immune to them, either.
What I really liked about Xenon was that it was an incredibly fun machine. While Firepower had many of the same technological advances as Xenon, Xenon took maximum advantage of them. The entire visual presentation of the machine was outstanding. Various lights, combined with mirrors, glass coatings and computer control provided a strange and beautiful lightshow which intensified as the game progressed. The audio effects were also synchronized with the lightshow and game events. If you were doing well, you not only got a high score, you saw and heard the fruits of your efforts - a crescendo of lights, sounds, and points. Visit www.dreamstasys.com/xenon.htm to get a bit of a feel for what I'm talking about. You can also find out how major an undertaking a pinball restoration is from this page (and why I'll probably never own a pinball machine).
Xenon was a popular machine. There seem to be many web pages that mention Xenon, and a fair number devoted to it. The Internet Pinball Database entry for Xenon is at www.ipdb.org/pinball/IPD/machine.cgi?2821. It has a great deal of technical and design information, including many detailed photos, advertising brochures, links to Xenon movies and even a link to Bally's technical manual for Xenon.
Xenon was special for another reason. A great blow was about to befall the pinball world. About this time, the first classic video games, like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, began to arrive. Pinballs were rather rapidly pushed to obscure corners of game rooms at this time. Development of pinball titles became uncommon and funding of such efforts suffered drastically. Nothing like Xenon would be seen for many years. By the time pinball recovered somewhat, the technology was even better, but later designs weren't nearly as innovative and frankly, beautiful as the Xenon-age machines. The wonderful imaginations that created it and similar machines moved on to other ventures. The brief golden age of the high tech pinball machine was over.
CATBAR - Brain Candy #67 - "Welcome to Xenon!"/ Brian Rock / Mar 03 2003