‘There are entire life stories, fraught with unforeseen twists and turns, in which pinball machines remained the one great constant,’ Andreas Bernard writes in the first chapter of Same Player Shoots Again. ‘Biography, in such cases, is a series of pinball-related events.’ His own life is one of those cases. Even today he recalls the topography of his hometown, Munich, as ‘a trip from one pinball machine to another’: 

From the game Pharaoh in a pub by the roundabout whose name I’ve forgotten, the path leads to Medusa, which we played in a seedy drinking hole called Dudlhofer, to Time Warp with its banana flippers in the Herzog Siegfried pub (or was it called Herzog Anton?), and on from there to Gorgar in the Wasserturm, and finally to the Panthera game, which was in the very back of a Western-­themed bar called Oklahoma. Not one of these places still exists today. 

Pinball is a lost world. Each of the ten chapters in this short, charming book – translated from German by Valentine A Pakis – is devoted to a particular machine, and a particular moment in Bernard’s youth, which happened to coincide with the final flowering of pinball culture. 

Bernard first