EXTRA LIVES Local Enthusiasts Keep Retro By Greg Roques
According to a 2017 Film Foundation study, half of all American films made before 1950 no longer exist. I reminisced on this during a recent visit to my local theater while taking a nostalgic stroll through the arcade.
Mike Perry, founder of the Mystic Krewe of the Silver Ball and Pin Church. 54
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As a teenager, my friends and I would kill time before a show pumping quarters into games too advanced to run on our home consoles. It was just how I remembered it—literally. The newest machines—House of the Dead and a Lost World: Jurassic Park pinball machine—were released when I still didn’t have a driver’s license and before the first Gen Z’ers were even born. The space I wandered, once a vanguard of futuristic spectacles, was now a mausoleum of elder millennial amusements. Its audience mirrored its maturity—a pair of dads whose thinning crowns and graying temples heralded the horizon of middle age, joyfully replaying their childhoods while their children stood aside gaming on their phones. It made me wonder where these two will go once the theater finally takes this fiscal appendage off life support; likewise, as with film, how many of these machines will end up extinct. Enter the Mystic Krewe of the Silver Ball. Modeled as a modern-day Social Aid and Pleasure Club, its membership is built around a common love of art, technology, and gaming, and, as its name implies, roots its foundation on a love for pinball. “I had a chance to pick up a game when I was young,” Mike Perry, founder of the Mystic Krewe, said. “It was in really bad shape, and there was nobody available to fix these things, so I set out to learn how to restore it myself. Once I learned these skills, I began picking up more games and restoring them—littleby-little over a period of decades.” The members-only group hosts events twice weekly in its secret space, the Pin Church, a renovated Church of Christ building left abandoned following Hurricane Katrina. While serving as a full-fledged makerspace—featuring everything from 3D printers and wood-working equipment to a cyber-
ALL PHOTOS: COURTESY KEBAB/ MYSTIC KREWE PINBALL PARLOR NEW ORLEANS
Gaming Going
