Walking through the Stern Pinball factory, you’re rarely out of sight of Angus Young’s sneering gaze. It’s the very same sneer that appears on the cover of AC/DC’s 1979 album Highway to Hell, only here it’s rendered in silk-screened and airbrushed paint on large wooden boards. Follow the boards down the assembly line and you’ll see Angus’s face become steadily more embellished with lights, bundles of wires, and complicated-looking mechanical assemblies before the board is fitted into a cabinet where it will become the playing surface of Stern’s current flagship product, a pinball machine dedicated in loving detail to this most massive and gloriously boneheaded of rock bands.
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Since at least as far back as the 1930s, Chicago has been the global capital of pinball manufacturing—home not only to Stern and Williams, but also the late giants Bally and Gottlieb. There doesn’t seem to be any one specific reason why the pinball industry made Chicago its home, although the local manufacturing infrastructure and the regional popularity of bagatelle (pinball’s flipperless, French-born evolutionary forebear) were certainly factors. Chicago remained the epicenter of pinball culture as it spread across the globe, even during a period when it was actually illegal to play pinball here.
Things are different now. There’s hardly any “each other.” Ritchie’s one of the last designers standing; Jersey Jack is the only other place that employs them.
“Licensing can mean everything for a company like ours,” he says. “We like to try to do what we call A-plus licenses, something that has a lot of history to it and has exposure all over the world, since we ship to almost every country. So it’s really important that something that’s popular here is popular in Australia, popular in China, in Europe. Superheroes work real well, big title movies, big rock bands, stuff like that.”
There’s another room where machines are tried out the old-fashioned way. The AC/DC Pro machine in that room is set for free play, and hip-checks and other physically intensive play are not only allowed but encouraged.
Correction: This story has been amended to correctly reflect that the band members of AC/DC aren’t signing our games. Steve Richie autographs the Limited Edition machines between playfield hard coats, and Gary Stern signs the Certificate of Authenticity that comes with each game.
