I remember playing pinball when the state-of-the-art video games were such Atari 2600 titles as Adventure and Yars' Revenge. Pinball, even then, could not compete. They are as obsolete as 78 RPM gramophones.
Incorrect. The high water mark of pinball was 1993's Twilight Zone. Aside from the physicality of it which still hasn't been equaled by digital games, the ruleset complexity of late 80s and early 90s pins started to explode. An order of magnitude more complexity than any Atari 2600 game; several orders more than Yars' Revenge (ugh that game was boring).
Pinball may have been more popular pre- (and during) the transition to arcade games, but arguably the /best/ pinball came in the early 90s with the advent of better processing power and more complicated electronics allowing more complex gameplay. Twilight Zone is one of the most complex pinball rulesets I've ever seen, and The Addams Family (from 1993 also I think) was and still is the best-selling machine of all time.
I collect pinball machines; I have 11 of them crammed into a house not designed to hold that many large machines. It's an interesting amalgamation of physical and electronic skills to repair and restore them, it's possibly more fun to restore them than it is to actually play them.
