Michael Moon, left, Chris Newsom, Scott Sidley and Jeff Brocketti during a recent meeting at Northern Virginia Community College. (Frank Johnston - TWP)

That moment of pinball Zen arrives for Michael Moon when he becomes one with the plastic flippers and the steel ball ricochets around the table for minutes on end. The "Attack from Mars" machine he is playing comes alive with gaudy effects -- zapping, tabulating and erupting with robot-like digital exclamations such as "Jackpot!"

"When people see you're still playing and it's getting more noisy, sometimes crowds gather around," said Moon, 32, of Alexandria. "It's a great feeling to have people clapping for you when you're done."

For pinball, though, the applause has died off.

Blame the stunted attention spans of children. Blame the Internet. Blame Bill Gates and his little X-Box. Whatever the reason, pinball is vanishing from America's cultural landscape, and a handful of pinball fanatics think that's a shame.

In the basement vending room of the Northern Virginia Community College cafeteria building in Annandale, Moon and others in the Free State Pinball Association take turns hunching intently over four machines. Members of the group, created in Maryland in 1995, work magic with the flippers -- using spins, traps, nudges and a bump transfer between flippers equivalent to basketball's crossover dribble -- to keep the ball going and to run up obscenely high scores such as 156,613,020 on machines with names such as "Monsters Bash" and "Medieval Madness."

Once the star of the arcade, pinball is fading. The new generation of gamers, by natural selection, has banished pinball as too old, too difficult and too boring.

"A lot of kids feel pinball is nowhere near as stimulating as Doom, Quake or a lot of games they are playing these days," said Robert Nideffer, a professor at the University of California at Irvine who studies computer gaming.

The number of pinball machines nationwide dropped from 1 million in 1989 to 360,000 in 1999 and revenue slid from $2.4 billion to $1.08 billion in the same period, according to the trade publication Vending Times.

An effort to keep the game alive, the association started at a sub shop in College Park that was a haven for pinball players before closing in 1999. The association now has three chapters that meet weekly in the Washington area, and it is one of the largest, most organized pinball leagues in the nation. Many members compete in national tournaments such as Pinburgh, in Pittsburgh. And they got game.

"It's an athletic strategy game," Moon said. "I think pinball is going out because it is not really understood by most people."

And being misunderstood is nothing new for pinball. Take Fiorello LaGuardia. The mayor of New York smashed pinball machines with a sledgehammer in 1941, because he thought the machines, before they had flippers, were games of chance, not skill. He also believed they contributed to gambling and iniquity. New York legalized pinball again in 1976, decades after it had become popular nationwide.

Fast fading into relics, pinball machines are turning up in the home game rooms of sentimental baby boomers willing to spend $5,000 a pop.

"You used to see them everywhere," said Free State member Jessica Harrison, 39, of Arlington, who owns four pinball machines. "They used to be at the laundromat, the college game room, airports. You just don't see them anymore."

During the golden era of pinball, between 1970 and 1990, a common scene of the local dive bar was men, wearing mullet hairstyles, cheering for a skilled player. Pinball was such a part of pop culture that the Who incorporated the hobby into its rock opera, "Tommy," with the song "Pinball Wizard," which describes the "crazy flipper fingers" of "that deaf, dumb and blind kid" who "sure plays a mean pinball."

Fun houses and boardwalk penny arcades are a fondly remembered part of many Americans' childhood, with games such as Skee Ball, shooting galleries and pinball. University of Miami professor Eugene Provenzo said the arcades were intensely physical spaces where youth could "smell the park cotton candy and hot sugar waffles, and hear the sounds of the roller coasters and different pinball machines" -- an atmosphere modern games lack.

Before the funeral begins, though, Henry Jenkins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology points out that pinball machines paved the way for modern video games. And although video games siphoned off the fan base from pinball, Jenkins said, "I don't think they will ever succeed in killing it."

But a renaissance looks doubtful.

A main manufacturer, WMS Industries Inc., discontinued producing pinball machines under the Williams and Bally labels in 1999, citing "a prolonged period of weak demand and ongoing losses."

Now, Chicago-based Stern Pinball Inc. has the market to itself. Company President Gary Stern, who comes from a family of pinball machine makers, said his company survives by shipping two-thirds of its products overseas. Gary Stern is, Vending Times publisher Vic Levay said, "about the last of the Mohicans."

To stay alive in the vending world, companies had to make the machines less cheesy and more sexy, linking them to movies and pop culture. One company made "Dirty Harry" pinball machines in the mid-1990s with Clint Eastwood doing the "Go ahead, make my day" voice recordings.

Stern is following that path, cranking out about 10,000 machines a year with modern or R-rated themes, including "South Park," Austin Powers, Playboy and Harley-Davidson. By contrast, four companies made 100,000 machines a year in 1990.

"It's an American icon," said Stern, ever the salesman. "Pinball is cool because it is retro. It's a Volkswagen bug, a PT Cruiser, khaki pants."

Pinball was a twist on the late 1800s French game called bagatelles and developed into its modern form in the 1930s with tabletop machines such as the Bally Hoo. Computer chips made the games more intelligent, but they remained pure and unpredictable.

"The ball is wild," Stern said. "Unlike a computer-generated game, a video game or a touch-screen game, you have a ball that you don't know exactly what it will do."

Pinball association President Bernie Kelm of Glen Burnie said that "little bit of randomness" makes the game's appeal last longer than a game that can be absolutely mastered.

Arcade operators say youngsters like to master a game and move on. They don't like games like pinball that are impossible to defeat.

ESPN Zone, Steven Spielberg's GameWorks arcades and 8,000 other vending operators turned a collective gross profit of $7.1 billion last year, according to the trade publication Playmeter. The most popular games are virtual reality games, pool tables, shooting games, racing games and hip-hop dancing games -- not pinball.

Moon and others said they welcome new members to help revive the sport. A season in the league, they said, can turn a pinball klutz into a wizard.

"People just don't know how cool pinball is," Moon said.