Theatre of Magic: My Time Machine

Imagine with me, if you will.

You stand in the arcade, light filling it through its admittedly comically sized windows, almost as if an entire wall was made of crystal. It’s well into the afternoon, but the Sun has yet to begin to set; it’s rush hour, and by that it means that the place is populated by you, your friends, and another 4 or 5 people at most.

To be fair, it’s not like you’d prefer it to be anything more; you have yet to step into another arcade, but you can tell that comparatively, this isn’t exactly that ‘‘much’’ of a place. It’s no bigger than a particularly large living room, and the machines that extend across it are the same they always were, which is to say, not that many. The Time Crisis cabinet is still blasting its intro way too loudly, the red gun of the Jurassic Park’s machine is still held together by duct tape and on constant peril of breaking apart, and both the billiards and table football stood in the same corner you and your buddies would eventually gravitate towards. It wasn’t much. You knew it full well, you could tell.

But it was more than enough.

It had been a while since you came here. The place hadn’t gone anywhere, always on its little but special corner of the small commercial complex near the train station, resting here since you had use of memory. You used to frequent it quite a bit, a common visit you and your father would make after going to the theater on its left, a tradition of sorts that got lost the moment the latter shut down for the better part of 5 years.

Now, every time you stepped into it again it felt as if that time never passed, maybe a machine or two were added as the years went, but seeing something out of its place was an impossibility. Like a time capsule where time stood still, a corner that seemed eternal, a bastion where you and your friends got to laugh like yesterday and the day before it. By this point, you had meddled with every single game the arcade had to offer, y’all got to experience what it meant to suck complete ass at Sega Rally Championship, mastering Air Hockey to the point of doing 1v2s on the days one of you couldn’t go and still making it feel evenly matched. Everything that there was to try, as few as it may have been, you can be damn sure you tried it.

Well… no. Not all, actually.

Right besides the counter, tucked in the dingiest part of the whole locale, there lied a pinball machine.

Art at the very center of Theatre of Magic's table, taken straight out from the promo video you can see here!.

Never had you even touched one of these, at most, you were able to toy with the GBA version of Pokémon Pinball, but the act of playing one physically was foreign to you. You never paid much attention to it, really, you could hear the tenuous sounds and low music playing everytime you entered the arcade, but they were quickly drown by the behemoth that were the Time Crisis speakers. You spotted it from the corner of your eye, always the same: alone. Nobody was ever playing it, not a soul. It was probably the only machine that you hadn’t seen ANYONE on along the years. Sometimes, the thought of trying it out passed by, but the chance never arose; why bother when you could be playing something with your friends, instead of making them stare at something they or even you may not enjoy.

But today was different. Y’all had spent like, what, 2, maybe 3 hours playing the longest yet most cathartic game of billiards of your lives? You were all tired to play anything else, but also with enough energy to stay for a little longer. And once again, you saw it in the corner of your eye; that pinball machine, alone.

You mentioned you wanted to try it out, that we could play one time each and see if it was any good. They were all fine with the idea, and so you went there. Your feet were probably the first pair to step onto the metal floor right in front of it in a loooooooong time, the entire machine surrounded on all sides for. You had always seen the art at a distance, the captivatingly funny tiger carriying a comically large saw, or the ‘’table’’ itself, filled to the brim with props and rails that you couldn’t even begin to imagine the purpose of. But now, right in front of it, you are able to take it all in. And one coin is all it took.

You stepped right into the Theatre of Magic.

The most positive thing that could be said about Theatre of Magic from the get go is that, in spite of the sea of colored lights, despite being something that should be and IS hell for pinball newcomers, it is immediately readable. The machine is in constant movement, cardboard cutouts jiggering up and down, lights flickering along rows of signs and flyers, the ball disappears at every opportunity it gets, and yet you never lose track of it. Every single moving part, every ‘‘trick’’, is brought to your attention; throw your ball into the void and it shall reappear out of nowhere as the sound of metal and music announce its return. It’s one of the most involved and realized pinball presentations eyes have laid upon even to this day, and nothing gets compromised because of it.

To the eyes of a novice, the promise of magic seems like it’s actually delivered; it’s impressive beyond words just how well it plays with space to grand something that feels massive , as if the game was grander than the table itself. You could play this for years, and still be surprised by it. I know it full well. The right combos at the appropriate time, the right action at a different sequence, it all can lead to different results, even if it’s something as simple as a different voice from the showmaster or the magician. Like an endless well of surprises, it’s one of the few machines of this ilk that can truly bewilder you if you let it do so.

But even if you don’t, what you have here is an incredibly strong package, a fun as the devil pinball machine that makes discovering opportunities for combos and keep a single ball alive a thrill. This is a tag line that could be employed to describe many machines, but Theatre of Macgic truly makes it count. It is not revolutionary by any metric, but it blends the fun factor of pinball with the limits a system like have with it looks and sounds. And it works.

And it definitely worked for you.

The ‘’magic cube’’ .as you took a liking to call it, alone represented this whole thing better than words could. For the longest time, you have no idea how it actually worked, how to really take advandtage of something so prominent. But you knew well you could use it, you were astonished every time you got it to work. It was wild, strange, fun.

And you knew damn well you were gonna learn it.

By this point, you were hooked. A new tradition arose; giving Theatre of Magic a go every time you went to the Arcade, be it just after arriving or right before leaving. Your friends tried it as well, but it never clicked just as much with them, they were, however, more than willing to watch you play for those quick runs, all together cheering every time you got to reach a new high score or discover something insane within the machine, and when it wasn’t that… it was a moment of peace, were you got to relax giving the game another go. ‘’This time for sure’’ would be when you reached the leaderboard, filled with names of players that very likely put their names in before you were even born. It never was, but you improved, again and again.

Nothing will quite match the feeling you got when you achieved your first multiball, something so simple and common, yet it felt so… important.

In that corner that stood still in time, you somehow found something new, something you wonder how you weren’t willing to give a chance before. It was always there too, after all. But even if it took long, there it was now, not in the corner of your mind, and even beyond a main attraction.

Something to get marveled by.

It must have been a summer Saturday when you and your friends arrived again, and noticed the Jurassic Park machine was out of order. Nothing too surprising, that thing had been fighting like hell for way too many years and it’s kinda impressive it hadn’t broken down before, and in just a matter of days, it was up and running once again.

But then it happened again. And again. And again. And not only to it.

One day, the House of the Dead machine had vanished. You never played it much, but it still felt… weird. The space it once filled was empty. Dust forming and covering the ground as if it was never there.

The Time Crisis machine stopped as well. There was never an out of order sign. But the screen went black, never to light up again. So did that strangely modern looking combat plane. Those did stay right where they were, but too still, a plastic carcass with the promise of maybe one day turning on again. The arcade got a little quieter, and you missed that Time Crisis music you once wished could be turned a little bit down.

Other machines broke, only to be fixed, again and again. As if death had come for them all, but they still had fight within them. One of the air hockey machines would stop blowing air, but only sometimes. One of the billiard tables began to not respond as well, until one day it was gone. Only one was left, and you feared the next day it wouldn’t be there, too.

By next year, speaking anything but quietly will give you echo in response. There were still some left, but it was… emptier, in a way that felt antinatural. A lot of the machines that filled the space were inert, no light coming off the screens. Yet you still held on.

You had Theatre of Magic, after all.

You stood in front of it again. That metal floor now well too familiar with you at this point. You put another coin in.

It spat it back.

It would get fixed within the day, and you played, as if nothing happened. It didn’t take long for the same thing to repeat. After a while, they wouldn’t even try to fix it, why bother after all. But they’d still turn it on manually. It was still kicking, alive. Time was there, yet.

One day, the light was gone.

Music came out of it, quieter, but there still was some. Light, however, had vanished. The ball moved in darkness; you could barely see it at times. But even when you could, it wasn’t impossible to miss those old timey colors, that charming flashing, letters readable against the yellow lighted background.

The box stopped moving, the showmaster’s voice disappeared. Soon, it just stood there, in its dingy corner besides the counter, motionless, soundless. With a sing in front of where once that drawing, where the tiger with a saw, was.

You watched that machine die. Time had to finish catching up.

Two weeks later, the arcade close down. Its giant windows still letting onlookers’ eyes in, letting them watch as the few machines left one by one, as if the walls were slowly breaking apart, the whole establishment destroyed to leave room for the frozen goods section of the supermarket that would be built on top of it. Until one day, there were no more windows, either.

It’s a feeling impossible to put into words, something that should be dumb to outsiders, but it isn’t to the self. The feeling of meeting reality and watch as you saw as a temple that would last forever disappear, even if it’s something as small as your local arcade. The heartache of watching something that you were lucky to derive so much joy from with you and your friends slowly die, even if it’s a pinball machine.

Imagine with me, and perhaps I’d be able to communicate it. Hell, who am I kidding, maybe you once felt it as well.

I sometimes walk past that corner and cannot fight off remembering, how the last days are the first one that pop to mind… to then lead to those happiest times in a corner that seemed eternal.

Our time capsule.

To desire something to be eternal is to be unwilling to move beyond the past, but it’s also to deeply missed. I didn’t cry or get sad for days on end when the arcade closed, but it still felt… wrong. Like something that I never could have even pictured, even after all the signs. And now I am in front of where it once stood, asking why those days had to go.

And maybe that’s ok.

There’s no real answer that would satisfy my past self and in some way, my own inner part of me that misses those weekends spent with friends trying to properly end a billiards game. The answer that are are as obvious as they are cold… but I don’t really need them. I don’t need to ponder on what could have been when, for I already have the memories of what it was.

Truth is, I still have that time capsule. It’s still there everytime we reminisce of those times, still there every time I even think about it. The laughs, the hype moments, the chill ones. And all of them are beautiful, no matter when they were. Birthdays spent on that place, entire afternoons trying to reach at least one game’s ending, those moments after me and my father got out of the theater and proceeded to be terrible at the Jurassic Park game. Those moments trying to understand Theatre of Magic . I remember them all and the smiles, specially those in which we didn’t get out of a plan as much as we wanted.

I never got to learn how the ‘‘Magic Cube’’ worked. And that makes some of the magic it had eternal.

And who knows. Maybe one day, I’ll get to.

Originally uploaded to Backloggd on May 05, 2025, corrections made for this upload for a better reading experience.

Thank you so much for reaching this point.