Cover Story: Pinball Wizard, Mike Schudel

PINBALL WIZARD, MIKE SCHUDEL,

KEEPS PINBALL CLASSICS READY FOR ACTION!

By Dave Person david.r.person@gmail.com

It started 26 years ago with the thought that it would be “really cool to have (a pinball game) in the house” and developed into a pretty busy retirement gig for Mike Schudel. He now owns 65 of them, 35 of which he keeps in an outbuilding behind his Cooper Township home, 25 that are available for public use at a microbrewery in Portage and fi ve located in an arcade in Allegan The funny thing is, Schudel really isn’t into playing pinball. “I get more enjoyment out of working on them than playing them,” he says. Schudel, 58, says he spends three to four hours a day in his pinball building, which he originally intended to be a wood shop, “usually fi xing and repairing.” The popularity of pinball has ebbed and fl owed over the years, Schudel says. Popular through the 1970s, in the 1980s it took a backseat to the video-game craze, then bounced back in the early 1990s before almost dying out in the early 2000s. Now, thanks to Covid-19, which required people to fi nd activities to do in isolation, there has been another resurgence, he says, with its popularity tripling in size. “Now I think there’s a lot more people into pinball than there has been in the last 20 years,” Schudel says. Fortunately, the cost to play most of the coin-drop machines is still a quarter, he says, while many of the newer ones cost $1.50 to $2 and take credit cards. An electrical engineer who is retired from the Eckert Wordell architecture fi rm in Kalamazoo, Schudel wasn’t really that interested in pinball in college, but sometime afterward he noticed pinball machines for sale at the Tilt arcade in the former Westmain Mall. That started him thinking how much fun it would be to have one at home. “When you get something (like that) on your mind, you can’t shake it,” he says. Sometime later he acted on that thought, purchasing his fi rst machine in 1996 from Star World Amusement

on Harrison Street. That machine entertained him for fi ve years. But playing the same game day in and day out “kind of gets boring,” he says. When his collection grew to four machines, however, the house started to get crowded with them and Schudel’s wife, Barb, suggested he move them to the empty building out back. It was then that the collection really took off. “Once you’ve got a barn like this, what you do is get more and more games,” he says.

“I went from one to four to 65 in a matter of 21 years.” The machines he keeps at home have names such as Bow & Arrow, Bronco, Galaxy, Godzilla, Meteor and Metallica. They include Fast Draw, Pink Panther, Royal Flush and Twilight Zone. The oldest is Subway, an electromechanical machine from 1966, and the newest is Rush, a 2022 wifi model with an LCD screen that updates itself with new codes. In between are solid state and dot matrix models. One of the most enduring is The Addams Family pinball machine, which came out in 1992 during the pinball resurgence of that decade. “It’s still a very popular game,” Schudel says. One Well Brewing, on Portage Street in Portage, has 25 of Schudel’s machines, along with several others, making it one of the largest pinball locations in the state, he says. “One Well has probably the biggest (league) in the area,” with 50 to 60 competitors taking part on the second and fourth Wednesday of each month, he adds. The fi ve games in Allegan are at the Regent Arcade, which is open on weekends, with Schudel helping to oversee it. Most players, he has found, are near his age. “The kids do come and play, but it’s mostly a 40-, 50-, 60-(year-old) range sort of thing,” he says. But of the younger players who do give it a try, he adds, ’they seem to get the hang of it and seem to get hooked on it.” The International Flipper Pinball Association sets the rules for competitive pinball playing, Schudel says. In addition to leagues, there are 1,000 sanctioned tournaments in the United States. Schudel hosted and directed the Michigan IFPA Tournament two years in a row. He also hosts smaller tournaments at his home, mostly for friends. “That’s where I get a lot of my enjoyment,” he says. Schudel says his older son, Joshua, who now lives in Ann Arbor, never showed much interest in pinball and his younger son, Matthew, of Minneapolis, played some, but it was his daughter, Sarah, who really took to it. “She started playing competitively,” he says, and as a student at Michigan State University she participated in a pinball league in Lansing. At one time, her proud father says, she was the fourthhighest ranked female pinball player in the world. Now working as a police detective in Kentwood, “she’s still pretty good, even though she doesn’t play as much,” he says. Meanwhile, Schudel doesn’t plan to expand his collection of games anytime soon, but will enjoy maintaining the ones he has now. “These are like classic cars,” he says. “Don’t get one if you’re not going to be under the hood everyday fi xing it.”