Game of skills or evil gambling? It is hard to believe that there was a long period in the history of arcade games when pinball machines, these amazing mixtures of art, design, engineering, technology ...

An old electronic pinball machine is fascinating because it embodies complexity just within the grasp of a jack-of-all-trades hacker. You can learn how one works by visiting the open-source repository ...

Linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer analyzes the origins of words in the news. Read previous columns here. Just over 50 years ago, Atari, then an enterprising Silicon Valley startup, released an ...

FOR SOME, a pinball machine is just a pinball machine. But for veteran players like Andrew Armstrong, a good game means skillfully hitting targets, not just keeping the ball alive. “Some of them just ...