“When I was a young boy, I played the silver ball. From Soho down to Brighton, I must have played them all.” — “Pinball Wizard”, The Who We didn’t have video games when I was a kid. We had pinball — the gravity game. Not the steel and chrome, many-level, holographic, multi-ball, digital-voiced pinball machines of today mind you, but the wood and glass, single-level, five-ball, electromechanical pinball machines called ‘woodrails’.