Same Player Shoots Again

A Biography of the Pinball Machine

By: Andreas Bernard, Valentine A. Pakis (Translator)

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Hardcover | 24 March 2026 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
112 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.84 x 14.22 x 1.78

Hardcover

RRP $72.95

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This is an ode to the lost golden age of the pinball machine. These vivid, flashing portals of entertainment were mainstays of nearly every bar, pub and amusement arcade from the 1960s to the 1990s, but today they have all but disappeared. While the films and novels of Fassbinder, Modiano and Murakami testify to their past ubiquity, they are now mostly collected by private owners as souvenirs from a bygone age. Andreas Bernard, looking back on his coming of age as an avid pinballer, reflects on what the disappearance of pinball machines tells us about the modern transformation of leisure time and public spaces.

The demise of pinballing at the end of the 1990s converged with huge social shifts which eroded the distinction between work and leisure. Now we use the same screen to organize work and leisure, and games have been absorbed by a professionalisation of daily life that is impossible to escape. Is our free time, as we know it, really free? Bernard also shows how the replacement of pinball machines by pocket-sized vessels of distraction was accompanied by the ebbing away of social critique. Playing pinball and the critical discourse of alienation came to an end at the same time.

At times nostalgic and lighthearted and at others bitingly astute, this book will appeal to all pinballers, past and present, and to anyone interested in the changing world of culture, gaming and entertainment.

Industry Reviews

"Part memoir, part cultural history, Same Player Shoots Again beautifully evokes a lost world through a single object. It offers an illuminating window on that strange and unknown land, the very recent past."
Joe Moran, Liverpool John Moores University

"Charming... often poignant... Reading this book was like my experience of playing pinball: it was all over much too quickly."
Will Wiles, Literary Review

"Touchingly Proustian... Bernard's genius is to communicate something of his life's grand obsession, while recognising how pinball machines are emblematic of an industrial culture that was slain by digital in the 1980s."
Stuart Jeffries, The Spectator

"The German writer Andreas Bernard is right: a pinball machine belongs to the bar, the arcade, the pier and other places of ill repute and misspent youth."
Will Hodgkinson, The Idler

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