By MONICA DAVEY

MELROSE PARK, Illinois - Being inside a pinball machine factory sounds exactly as you think it would. Across a 3,700- square-meter warehouse here, a cheery cacophony of flippers flip, bells ding, bumpers bump and balls click in an endless, echoing loop. The quarter never runs out.
But this place, Stern Pinball Inc., is the last of its kind in the world. Many companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000.
To most, the story seems familiar - of a craze that had its moment, of computers that grew sophisticated, of a culture that started staying home for fun, of being replaced by video games. But to pinball people, this is a painful fading, and one that, some insist, might yet be turned around.
“There are a lot of things I look at and scratch my head,” said Tim Arnold, who ran an arcade in the 1970s and recently opened The Pinball Hall of Fame, a nonprofit museum in Las Vegas . “Why are people playing games on their cellphones while they write e-mail- I don’t get it.”
“The thing that’s killing pinball, Mr. Arnold added, “is not that people don’t like it. It’s that there’s nowhere to play it.
The pinball buyer is shifting. In the United States, the company’s president, Gary Stern, said, half of his new machines, which cost about $5,000 and are bought through distributors, now go directly into people’s homes and not a corner arcade. He said nearly 40 percent of the machines - some designed to appeal to French, German, Italian and Spanish players - were exported, and he added that he had been working to make inroads in China, India, the Middle East and Russia. Along the factory line in this suburb west of Chicago, scores of workers pull and twist at colored wires, drill holes in wooden frames, screw in flippers and tiny light bulbs and assorted game characters .
These are by no means simple machines. Each one contains nearly a kilometer of wire and 3,500 tiny components, and takes 32 hours to build - as Mr. Stern, likes to say, longer than a Ford Taurus.
Some workers are required to spend 15 minutes a day in the “game room” playing the latest models or risk the wrath of Mr. Stern, 62. “You work at a pinball company,” he explained, grumpily, “you’re going to play a lot of pinball.
Mr. Stern’s father, Samuel Stern, spent his life in the pinball business, starting out as a game operator in the 1930s - when a simple version of the modern mass-produced pinball machine first appeared. Dozens of companies were soon producing the machines, said Roger Sharpe, widely considered a foremost historian of the sport after the 1977 publication of his book, “Pinball!
The creation of the flipper transformed the activity, which went on to surges in the 1950s, ‘70s and early ‘90s.
“Everybody thinks of it as retro, as nostalgia,” Mr. Sharpe said. “But it’s not. These are sophisticated games. Pinball is timeless.” Perhaps, but even Mr. Stern acknowledges that demand is down.
Ask him about the future and he offers a rare pause. In 10 years, he said, pinball will be fine. His company will be here, making pinball machines. Fifty years hence- It is too far away to think about, he said.
But pressed to ponder it, he said he was certain of one thing: Pinball will be around.
“Look, pinball is like tennis,” said Mr. Stern, noting that a tennis court could never, for instance, be made round and that certain elements of a pinball play field are equally unchangeable and lasting. “This is a ball game. It’s a bat and ball game, O.K.?”