TIers do amazing things every day at work and when they are out of the office. In our ongoing series, ‘Out of Office,’ we showcase the unique and fascinating hobbies, talents and interests of TIers all over the world.
There is something magical about pinball machines – the buzzers, bells, and bumpers – the flashing lights and glitzy artwork. Every game starts simply enough – the act of dropping a quarter in the slot and dispensing a small metal ball onto the head of the plunger. But what comes next, launching that ball into a captivating world encased in a wood cabinet with a clear glass ceiling, is quite complex. Index fingers rest on two plastic buttons controlling the flippers that decide the player’s fate between pinball wizard or pinball wimp.
This is the world of TIer Bill Morrison.
“Pinball machines are unique because of the randomness of the ball rolling, butalso the ‘mojo’ you get when you play. You can tell when things are going your way – when you have some control of that randomness, resulting in a good game. You are one with the machine. It is a very surreal experience,” said Bill, a TI DLP® Products package development manager.
Bill became one with pinball machines at 15 years old, working the food service counter in a Lincoln, Nebraska arcade. When he wasn’t making sub sandwiches and slinging sodas, he would apprentice with the man who worked on the pinball machines – cleaning the mechanical parts and fixing the electronic “backbones” of the games. Seeing the electronic innards of these mesmerizing machines sparked something in Bill.
“It’s the exact reason why I got into engineering,” he said.
Bill went to the University of Nebraska as an undergrad and Ohio State University for his graduate degree, majoring in electrical engineering. He joined our company in 1993, hardly thinking about pinball machines since his high school days. But that all changed in 1995 during a cursory search on this new thing called the Internet.
“A friend called me up and says, ‘you won’t believe it, but on the Internet you can actually buy pinball machines.’ That is when the bug hit,” Bill said.
Bill bought his first pinball machine in 1998. Then his second. Then his third. Then a shipping container from Europe filled with 45 pinball machines.
“Europe was 80 percent of the pinball market at the time. Between 1998 to about 2005, there was a big surge of everyone buying shipping containers of pinball machines, fixing the games up and reselling them,” Bill said.
Bill opened a small business to restore pinball machines. He would wake up early and come to TI for a full day of work, then spend three to four hours every night at his warehouse where a small team worked full time to restore classic games.
“I look back at that situation and cannot believe I could physically do what I was doing,” Bill said.
At the peak of his out of office business, Bill catalogued 260 pinball machines in his inventory. With the dueling jobs taking its toll, he shutdown the pinball restoration business in 2002, turning it back from a second career to a first hobby.
Bill focuses on games built between 1977-1983, meticulously restoring ‘solid state’ pinball machines. He now has a reputation for being one of the best at restoring these types of games, from the artwork to cabinet painting to fixing the electronics. His attention to detail and understanding of the big picture of the machines has served him well as an engineer.
“I’ve learned about system-level issues in pinball machines, and that helps me a lot at TI, because when I look at a problem, I have a much larger view of things even though I am a package development manager. A lot of my job is how the package of a DLP chip works in an entire projector [or projection] system, and pinball has helped grow that,” he said.
Bill isn’t the only TIer with a passion for pinball. Systems engineer Mike McCormick remembers pumping quarters into pinball machines at the local Italian restaurant as a youngster. From Kindergarten through high school, he would eat pizza and pound the flipper buttons with greasy fingers on a 1986 Pinbot machine.
Another colleague, Carl Betsch, is an avid pinball enthusiast. He recalls grabbing nickels, dimes and quarters and finding pinball machines wherever he could find them – with two particular favorites.
“Engineers tend to have this fascination with electronics and electrical things,” Carl said.
Bill routinely brings his pinball machines to the office for tournaments that raise money for the United Way campaign – enabling others to become “one with the machine” while also doing some good.
Bill gets just as much joy restoring the machines as seeing them in the hands of others. Whether at a United Way event or in the home of a new recipient, seeing the flashing bulbs light up a player’s face as they try to keep the pinball rolling through that complex and captivating world for just a little bit longer, is what keeps him going. For this out of office hobby, it’s far from “game over.”