At Mom’s Organic Market, saying goodbye to ‘Mom’s Organic Pinball’

There, players enter a pinball paradise where they can sidle up to around 40 machines for as little as 25 cents per play. (Most pinball proprietors charge $1, players said.) Many machines bear the names of intellectual property that the pinball industry licenses: “Avengers,” “Lord of the Rings,” “AC/DC.” Some are decades-old classics familiar only to the initiated. And those who don’t favor pinball can play “Ms. Pac-Man” or “Street Fighter.”

For about five years, this unusual symbiosis — organic produce meets flashing lights and flippers — has persisted at Mom’s thanks to the pinball enthusiasm of its founder, Scott Nash. But in the coming weeks, Nash said, the pinball room will close to make way for a business perhaps more essential but way less fun: an urgent-care center.

Nash said he moved part of his collection of around 70 games into the back of the store in 2018.

“I was competing against myself in my basement,” he said. “I wanted to compete with the world.”

He knew the arrangement wasn’t permanent. Pinball, even at higher prices, isn’t a revenue generator, he said; the machines require expensive weekly maintenance.

But since his landlord didn’t have a deep-pocketed tenant ready to move in, what regulars call a “pinball speakeasy” opened.

“It was sorta like: ‘Hey, I’ll put my games here until they find something,’” Nash said. “Now they found someone to pay more rent … I don’t really blame them for doing what every business does.”

Nash said he’s looking for another short-term space in the same shopping center as Mom’s but has not found a new home yet.

CDG, the landlord for the store and shopping center, did not return requests for comment.

Competitive pinball is having a revival. This time around, women want their turn.

On Wednesday evening at what’s dubbed “Mom’s Organic Pinball,” those who showed up for weekly league play were in mourning. Sitting in the Mom’s cafe area outside the pinball hall, Dan Northover, a retired sheet metal worker from Greenbelt, Md., said he’d played at the store since the machines first arrived. Few places offered as many games or were as diligent about their upkeep, Northover said.

A new business that displaces “Flash Gordon” and “Creature From the Black Lagoon” would not be welcome. “We’re going to boycott whoever goes there,” he said.

Dave Hubbard, a 49-year-old software engineer and Maryland’s current pinball state champion, was also reluctant to say goodbye. He knew the league would likely have to take a season or two off as Nash found a new location for his machines, but he hoped this wasn’t the end. His preferred term for the coming closure: “hiatus.”

Hubbard, like many players at Mom’s, said he was attracted by pinball’s physical element. Many video games depend on memorizing patterns — once players learn the pattern and successfully execute it, the game is effectively over. But pinball machines are unpredictable, the bounce of their metal balls changing with each tilt or press of a flipper.

“In theory, you could play a pinball machine forever,” Hubbard said.

Stephanie Traub, an attorney at the State Department and a deputy commissioner of the Mom’s Organic Pinball League, paused her game to explain the league’s somewhat arcane point system. While talking, she let a ball come to rest on a flipper, then held the flipper’s button to prevent her ball from “draining” — that is, being sucked into the machine’s innards.

The loss of the Mom’s space was “a major loss for local competitive pinball and local pinball in general,” Traub said. While bars or restaurants in the area might have some machines, the sheer variety and volume of Nash’s collection was unmatched for miles, she said.

And Mom’s hours couldn’t be beat.

“This place opens at 9 a.m.,” she said. “I don’t necessarily want to play pinball at 9 a.m., but it’s nice to know that there’s someplace I could go.”

Joysticks, trackballs and the appeal of old-school video games

The closure of Mom’s pinball speakeasy comes despite boom times for the game. Zach Sharpe, director of marketing for Stern Pinball — manufacturer of “Venom,” “Stranger Things” and “Elvira’s House of Horrors,” among many other machines — said in a statement that the business has grown by up to 30 percent annually in recent years. Stern even doubled its manufacturing space earlier this year, he said.

“Pinball has never been hotter!” Stern’s statement said. “We will continue creating compelling entertainment that inspires a lifetime love of games, sparks passion, forges friendships, and connects people everywhere through fun, innovative, technologically advanced pinball games, and experiences. After all, pinball is the universal language of fun!”

Though pinball existed long before “Pong,” “Super Mario Bros.” and first-person shooting games, Nash described the 21st century as “peak pinball.” Even as his machines, worth up to $10,000 each, rise in value, he is reluctant to part with them. He has some available for play at another Mom’s location in Abington, Pa., and plans to put others in storage as he figures out his next move.

“I might sell off a few of them,” he said. “But most of them that I have, I like. I’ll keep them.”

Sandro Fouche, who teaches computer programming at Montgomery College, came to Mom’s Wednesday with his wife, Kimberly. Though the couple used to live with their four children a few blocks from the grocery store, Kimberly got interested in pinball only after they moved to Kensington, Md., about five years ago.

“My wife got into it during the pandemic,” he said. “A lot of people got into it during the pandemic.”

Rather than trek to College Park, the couple usually relies on the machines in their home to get their pinball fix. Fouche declined to specify the number — but said he once convinced a roommate to keep a pinball machine in their apartment in lieu of a dining room table.

Mom’s is “the absolute best place to play” in the D.C. region, Fouche said. Soon, players will have to play somewhere else.

“We’re here to say goodbye,” he said.