Silver Ball Gardens

A pinball arcade on Durant Avenue in Berkeley that opened in the early 1970s. Founded by Byron Won, it would later be purchased by Masayoshi Son, more famous today as the founder of SoftBank.

• Address: 2518A Durant Avenue, Berkeley
• Year established: 1973
• Original owner: Byron Won
• Other owners: Masayoshi Son and Hong Lu

“A new kind of place”

1975 Exterior Photo

The below photo of Berkeley from 1975 is the earliest image I’ve found of Silver Ball Gardens. It shows the south side of the 2500 block of Durant Avenue. Near the center of the image is a sign with a pinball and an arrow pointing upstairs (Silver Ball Gardens was in a second-story loft).

Excerpt from “Public Works: Beyond the City (The Second of Two Parts).” Kathie Wagner and Lori LuJan, The San Francisco Examiner, September 28, 1975.

Outer space and surreal landscapes are also the subject of Eugene Legend’s many murals in Berkeley. A vegetarian, herbalist, and occult expert, Eugene finishes paintings only on eclipses and does his work in 7’s or multiples thereof. To assure himself the strength to complete paintings, he says, “I eat myrrh and do 60 to 100 push-ups a day when I work.” That he’s in tune with mystical forces seems convincing when you see his paintings. …

Even more enigmatic mystical paintings surround pinball machines at Silver Ball Gardens (60).¹ As you enter a city floats in the stairwell, a hand paints upward and a youth saunters beneath an astrologically significant ball suspended from the sky. At the top of the stairs an amazing expanse of space opens out from an illusionistic balcony. On the left is an apparition of Buddha; on the right, a man meditates. In the next painting, a deep sky shows semi-transparent figures wandering near a mystical window floating in the clouds and symbolizing a space that opens to allow for change. On the next panel a man wearing a denim suit and head phones relaxes in front of flaming clouds within which “angels bound like Olympic hurtlers,” Eugene says. Finally on the far right is a somewhat abstract yellow collage representing jazz musicians like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Weather Report and Tina Turner.

Excerpts from “Flipping Out.” Howard Rheingold, Penthouse, September 1977.²

Tommy, the rock opera and film about a pinball messiah, turned the tide of antipinball sentiment during the early seventies. In 1977 CBS took prime-time viewers into a Berkeley pinball emporium for a peek at the “latest fad.” …

The era of the sanitary pinball parlor is upon us. The granddaddy of the new-style establishments—Silverball Gardens³—is barely four years old. …

A major shrine on any pinball pilgrimage is located in the special state of mind known as Berkeley, Calif. The portals of Silverball Gardens demand attention even in that overamped environment. Just off Telegraph on Durant, rising above the sun-numbed, schizophrenic traffic jam that perpetually clogs the neighborhood, is a triple-life-size portrait of Tommy straddling an airbrushed silver ball that is four feet in diameter.

Tommy points up a long flight of stairs. The distant ring and clack of pinballs in motion beckons as the visitor ascends. At the top of the steps he finds an L-shaped landing, lighted only by a mirror ball. If he takes the last turn, he enters another world.

Arrayed along three walls of an airy, pleasantly lighted room are thirty-five of the finest flipper games available, at least half of them in use at any time: Captain Fantastic, Old Chicago, Bow and Arrow, Ro-GO, Satin Doll, Freedom, Space Mission, Aztec, Fireball, Star-Pool, Pinball Wizard, Flip-Flop, Knockout, Hokus-Pokus, Blastoff, Oh Boy. The best efforts of Bally, Williams, Gottlieb, and Chicago Coin are there, sparkling and fine-tuned, ready to animate at the drop of a quarter.

The jukebox blends with a chorus of bells, gongs, and buzzers. Johnny Cash and The Grateful Dead play counterpoint to the ratchet of score wheels and involuntary vocalizations of the players. No spectators are found here, only participants. Everyone in the room is totally involved. When I inquired about the owner of the establishment, the manager pointed to a young man playing Fireball.

There are wild-eyed pinball evangelists, but Byron Won, the owner and founder of Silverball Gardens, isn’t one of them. In his down jacket, slightly faded blue jeans, and track shoes, Byron looks more like a standard California graduate student than a pinball entrepreneur. He revealed shrewd public-relations instincts from the start, granting me half a dozen free games on my favorite machine before we sat down to talk. His manager and his mechanic joined us at a burger stand only fractionally quieter than the Gardens.

Byron admitted that his indoctrination into flipper sports came as an unexpected result of his quest for spiritual peace: “I didn’t catch the pinball bug until I went to Spain for a Transcendental Meditation teacher’s training course. We sat quietly with our eyes closed all week; and when the weekends came around, the pinball machine seemed to draw us to the local bar. We didn’t drink or smoke or take drugs, but the sensory stimulation of pinball was an acceptable kind of high. When I returned to Berkeley, there weren’t any non-sleazy places to play pinball in the campus area. I had the idea of providing a nice, clean place, because I knew the image of the pinball player was bound to move beyond the creepy guys with the bacteria-infested hands.”

All three of the Silverball crew are enthusiastic players despite their constant exposure. As manager, John O’Donnell has been on the front lines of pinball hysteria for the past three years; he’s the one who hands out the quarters and keeps the clientele in order. Tony Steffenich considers himself part of the unofficial guild of pinball mechanics, an elite subculture in the world of flipper addicts. He works for the distributor, who owns and services the games at the Gardens; so Tony spends the major part of his working time there.

Each one of the Silverball crew has a different theory about the attraction of pinball. “It’s a turn-on, turn-off entertainment,” Byron offered. “It’s popular with students because they are working toward goals far in the future; yet they face pressures on a daily basis. They play to take themselves away from the pressure and serious thinking for five minutes or an hour. Pinball is an excellent way to attain symbolic success quickly, an instant rather than a delayed gratification.”

John O’Donnell watches pinball players all day and still steps up to a free game or two himself, but he now regards his addictive period as an unhappy part of his past: “When I first came to Berkeley, I was fresh out of a boarding school for boys and weighed 230 pounds. It wasn’t the most socially successful period of my life. I’d start thinking about school or girls, and I’d end up at a pinball machine. I remember a feeling of satisfaction when I beat a game, a kind of satisfaction I wasn’t able to find anywhere else. It wasn’t exactly sexual, but it was the most available substitute and a pretty good one.”

When “Sixty Minutes” peeked into Silverball Gardens, Tony Steffenich was one of the experts interviewed. One thing he likes to discuss is the sexual component of pinball, a topic that inevitably surfaces when motivations are discussed. “You don’t have to watch very long to notice that pinball players like to make suggestive moves. A lot of people tell me they like to screw and play pinball at the same time. Some of these people … well, you tend to believe them when you see them,” Tony confided.

“Silver Ball Gardens—a new kind of place.” Dave Cheit, Berkeley Gazette, October 18, 1977.⁴

When Byron Won decided to go into business, he also decided to do something nice for his home town.

A Berkeley High graduate in 1968 and a UC zoology major, Won also happened to be a pinball nut. So he hit upon the perfect business: a pinball parlor, but not the kind which would automatically bring to mind words like “seedy” or “Skid Row.”

Thus was born the Silver Ball Gardens, perhaps the nation’s best-known establishment dedicated solely to the good old pinball machine and its newer relatives, including Fussball, air hockey and more than a dozen electronic games.

“I wanted it to be a different kind of place,” Won says. “I don’t know of any other pinball place that is run as well as this one. We’re concerned about the kind of people who come here.”

Silver Ball Gardens occupies a dark second-story loft once occupied by Leopold’s Records, on Durant Avenue above Telegraph. Won opened the business four years ago and immediately set about creating a place which not only would attract University students, but which also would have what he calls an “other-world” ambiance.

“Being up the stairs really helped that,” says John O’Donnell, a UC grad and pinball nut who discovered Silver Ball Gardens shortly after it opened and was hired by Won to manage the place.

“We’re away from the street, and we keep the windows covered so we can create our own atmosphere,” he says. “I think people like that, because they really feel like they’re getting away.”

Much effort has gone into that ambiance. For starters, the entryway has been painted in bright, garish designs. The stairway itself is ominously steep and dark, and at the top one is dazzled by swirling patterns of light tossed at the walls by a rotating glass globe on the ceiling.

A right turn, a few steps, and there it is: a long, clean room, with two other rooms off to the side, lined with machines of almost every kind. Here the visual art gives way to the musical; the room is dominated by the pounding rhythms of the Commodores or Earth, Wind & Fire blasting from the juke box.

What is most important to the management—the place is clean. It closes at midnight to keep out the late-night Telegraph people, restricts entry to anyone under 18 and does its best to be attractive to the University students.

“You’d be surprised how many girls come here,” O’Donnell says. “That’s important to us, because we want a place that people aren’t afraid to come to.”

Silver Ball Gardens isn’t the only pinball parlor in town, but it is the largest and the best-known. Both Penthouse magazine and CBS’ 60 Minutes have singled it out in feature stories on pinball.

“I must know hundreds of people who play here regularly,” O’Donnell says. “They come from all over the Bay Area.”

O’Donnell plans to attend law school next year, at which time he may end his career at Silver Ball Gardens. “But I’ve learned a lot about business,” he says. “That is bound to help me.”

The Lost 60 Minutes Segment

As alluded to in the previous two articles, Silver Ball Gardens was featured on a 60 Minutes segment on February 6, 1977.⁵ This may have been the only video footage ever taken inside the pinball parlor. Unfortunately, the segment is nowhere to be found online.

The only trace of it I’ve ben able to view is the introduction, which was included at the beginning of the movie Special When Lit: A Pinball Documentary:

Tantalizingly, the segment was once apparently uploaded to YouTube at this URL; unfortunately, that video has since been taken down and it was never captured on the Wayback Machine. I only know of the URL because it was once posted on a pinball forum and the subsequent discussion implies that it was the full segment, not just the Dan Rather introduction.

Advertisements from The Daily Californian, February–June 1978

During the first half of 1978, Silver Ball Gardens advertised heavily in the UC Berkeley newspaper.

“Pinball wizards beat system by the quarter.” Alexa Garbarino, The Daily Californian, October 10, 1978.

The room is almost completely dark except for flashing scenes of big-breasted women, racing cars and dragons.

He tests the flipper buttons on the side of the box and checks his positioning before slipping a quarter into the slot. Taking one last look at the course in front of him, he gives the lever a quick snap, shooting the silver ball silently to the top of the machine.

The ball hits a bumper, a bell rings, the scoreboard cranks out numbers and another player adds music to the pinball symphony that fills the room.

Almost everywhere you find pinball machines—penny arcades, movie theatres, all-night food stores—you’re sure to find pinball wizards hovered over them. The wizards all have different playing techniques—some pound machines, some pat them, but almost none of the wizards will walk away if they still have money in their pocket.

Charles Glass and Billy Kemp, sophomores at UC Berkeley, doubled up on the Evil Knievel pinball machine in the ASUC recreation center.⁶

“This is a man-against-machine strategy,” said Glass, as he sent his third ball to the top, “to outplay the machine you’ve got to out-think it.” He studied the ball as it glided around the board, knocking down a few markers until it reached the bottom.

Concentrating his force into his fingers, Glass lunged at the machine, jabbing in the flipper buttons to hit the ball. His move was too soon and the ball barely reached the middle of the board.

“I’m losing the momentum on the ball now,” Glass said, “I’ve got to get it back to the top so my sub can come in.” Before he finished the ball rolled weakly between the flippers.

Kemp played the next ball. “The thing is, you’ve got to try not to lose poise—like when you’ve got the ball on the football field. The whole thing is poise under pressure,” Kemp said.

The two watched the ball and alternated positions when Kemp shot it to the top. “The only thing a pinball machine player lives for is to hear the ‘pop’ at the end that means you get a free game,” said Glass, “but I don’t think we’re going to hear it.”

Greg Larson, also a Cal student, fared better at the Sinbad machine. “This is the hottest I’ve ever been,” Larson said, after winning 12 free games. “It doesn’t happen all the time. One quarter might get you two or three free games before the machine beats you.”

Most of the ASUC basement players are students fooling around between classes. The hardcore pinballists hole up in the annex of The Silver Ball Gardens on Durant Street.

The dim room has more than 30 pinball machines and on a Friday or Saturday night the Gardens is packed with people from ages 13 to 30. Even from the street you can hear bells and bizarre noises that sound like something out of Star Trek.

Terry Noriye said he goes to the Gardens almost every day to “take out my aggravations or just to play well.” As he talked, the ball escaped through his flippers and he slammed the machine. “This is where the addiction comes in,” Noriye said, dropping in another quarter.

Anyone with a quarter can play a pinball machine, but you have to be a pro to beat it.

Punk Rock

As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, Silver Ball Gardens became a location of minor importance in the Bay Area punk rock scene.⁷ The below flyers from 1979 reveal that it served as a venue for local bands Psycotic Pineapple, Novak, and The Blitz.⁸

The back of one of Psycotic Pineapple’s singles even featured a photo of the band at Silver Ball Gardens:

A colorized and uncropped version of the same photo surfaced years later on Facebook:

Two members of Intensified Chaos, another Bay Area punk band, posed for a photo at Silver Ball gardens in the early 1980s:

Silver Ball Gardens was also briefly mentioned in a 1993 issue of the punk zine Cometbus:

Much later, some Bay Area punk scene members reminisced about Silver Ball Gardens in a 2009 oral history:

Excerpt from Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day. Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor, Penguin Books, 2009.

Rachel DMR: We hung out a lot. It sounds hokey now, but we were just kids. Durant and Telegraph was our stomping grounds. Silverball was the center of it. On the second level above Leopold’s Records, La Val’s Pizza and a coffee shop.

Jason Lockwood: Runaway kids would hang out at La Val’s and eat leftover pizza. The girls’ bathroom was destroyed, almost solely the work of DMR.

John Marr: Silverball Gardens was a pinball hall. A lot of punk rock kids worked there.

Kate Knox: My boyfriend Dave Chavez, who played in Code of Honor and Verbal Abuse, he worked at Silverball. I remember sitting behind a desk with him and all of a sudden he ran out from behind the counter and busted this little kid. He had a quarter with a string on it, trying to play extra games. That was the first time I remember meeting Noah.

Noah Landis: Basically I had drilled a hole through a quarter and attached it to a piece of thread. In some of the machines it would work. One time it got stuck and I was sitting there struggling with it—it was a lot of work to drill a hole through a quarter, I didn’t want to lose it. The guy busted me. Kate pointed at me and laughed. She just thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen.

John Marr: Apparently you could buy controlled substances from the change guy.

Noah Landis: He carried it in those little fuse boxes. He would sell us the trimmings that came off the sheets of acid for like 30 cents a hit.

The Buyout

In 1979, Masayoshi Son and Hong Lu bought Silver Ball Gardens for $9,000. At the time, Son was a UC Berkeley undergraduate and Hong a recent graduate.¹¹ Today, Son is better known as the founder of SoftBank, and Hong as the founder of Unitech Telecom (today UTStarcom).

Excerpt from The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion.¹² Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, Crown Publishing, 2021.

Aided by cash from his father—who regularly sent him money over the next few years—Son urged Hong Lu, his friend and one of the few other undergraduates at Berkeley from Japan, to become his business partner instead of taking a job he had lined up with an ice cream company. … In increasingly grandiose terms, he outlined how much money Lu would make in a yet-to-be-determined business endeavor.

One endeavor involved putting arcade games like Space Invaders that Son imported from Japan, with help from his father, in restaurants and bars all over Berkeley. Soon they were generating so much cash that Son and Lu bought their own arcade, Silver Ball Gardens, just off campus.

Excerpt from Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank Group, and Disrupting Silicon Valley. Atsuo Inoue, Hodder & Stoughton, 2021.

During his multiple trips to Japan and back, Son had caught wind of a boom occurring in this market in Japan, with Space Invaders becoming incredibly popular between the months of March and August 1979. … Son was obsessed with the game, although not as a player—it had caught his eye for business instead. … He arranged a meeting with a Taito manufacturer and started negotiations regarding buying a cabinet. … It bears noting that Son was only 22 at this point, and yet he was getting up to things quite far removed from your average young person. …

When Son got back from Japan, Hong looked surprised at his latest venture. After all of the hard effort he had put into graduating from a first-rate university, he was going to be shifting video-game cabinets? He was beside himself. …

Son started looking at restaurants catering to the lunch crowd as sites where he could set up his Space Invader cabinets. … Even though Son Masayoshi had already distinguished himself as a top-class businessman in 1979, he was only starting his fourth year at Berkeley’s Department of Economics. He was still to graduate. … Ultimately Son had gone from being a university student with zero capital to recouping what he’d spent purchasing the machines and having them flown over in roughly two weeks.

Half a year on, he had imported 350 cabinets and had turned a profit of over a million dollars. … There were two specific things about Son which made him stand out. The first was his uncanny ability to get to the very root of problems whenever they emerged, meaning he could then address them very quickly. The second was that he—quite simply—worked stupidly hard. In addition, he was able to synthesise a number of different viewpoints, one after the other after the other.

A good demonstration of Son combining these talents would be in his takeover of a video game arcade near the Berkeley campus, proving the perfect place for students to escape the rigours of university life for a minute. It was in the same area as book and music shops—a prime location for an arcade—and the location is still a favourite haunt of students. Students are notorious for being skint and yet Son managed to purchase the site for $9,000¹³—with a little help from the bank and Hong Lu mortgaging his house. The bank, in fact, were so impressed with Son’s detailed business plan and sheer enthusiasm that they gave him a prime rate: truly exceptional conditions for a loan for a university student. …

Within three months business profit had tripled and Son had thoroughly streamlined operations, having analysed what each machine was pulling in. Detailed, in-depth research was important to Son and he was able to identify various trends amongst the games on offer, such as those which punters didn’t care much for in the first place, or those which had been popular at the start, but people had since cooled on. Every single day, Son was looking at each machine, seeing what it was pulling in. This was his first business strategy. He prepared detailed graphs for each cabinet so he could tell at a glance the exact day each machine hit the break-even point, with cash flow being a constant priority. He set a target for each unit and then worked steadily towards achieving each one. …

When recruiting part-time staff at the arcade, Son would only hire Americans, as they were the target audience for his business from the very start. It was the 1970s in California and hippie culture was in full effect, with a considerable number of the potential employee pool being given to selling weed and taking on other similar dodgy odd jobs. At the start Son was quite indiscriminate in his hiring policy, resulting in a number of people displaying utter incompetence and total slackers ending up on the books. Son would observe all of his employees on their third day at work … if an employee’s attitude and general competence hadn’t improved by the third day, then they would promptly be given the pink slip. Son set his sights on students who needed a part-time job and liked computer games: the sort who you wouldn’t have to keep an eye on and would do their job properly. Pursuing these strategies, the arcade Son had bought out recorded three times the profit every month, the end result of his remarkable business mind. …

In March 1980, Son graduated from Berkeley. More than a school, it was a place where he’d learnt almost everything he needed to know about life, and marked a starting point for him. His time in America had been formative and profoundly influential, but in March of that year, Son went home to Japan. His goal now was to be the best in all of Japan, the only outstanding matter being which exact field he would set out to dominate.

It’s interesting to contrast this laudatory biography’s description of Masayoshi Son’s discerning hiring practices with the previous section’s firsthand accounts of Silver Ball Gardens’ atmosphere during the same time period. One interpretation is that despite his lofty goals, Son’s management was more hands-off than Byron Won’s had been, and wasn’t able to preserve the wholesome atmosphere Won had sought to curate. But the sources we have to go off of don’t even confirm whether Won remained in charge of Silver Ball Gardens’ day-to-day operations or not. Ultimately, with so few records to go off of, we’re limited in the conclusions we can draw.

As reported by Aiming High, Son headed back to Japan in March 1980, apparently less than a year after buying Silver Ball Gardens. As of August 2022, his net worth was $15 billion, making him the world’s 109th-richest person.¹⁴ It’s interesting that Silver Ball Gardens helped him get his start.

It’s unclear what happened to Silver Ball Gardens after that. The last mention of it I’ve found in the historical record comes from the October 19, 1982 meeting minutes of the Berkeley City Council. It’s a brief mention in the “Public Comments” section, saying that a Berkeley resident asked the council to “look into conditions at Silver Ball Gardens.” No further information was given.

2518A Durant Avenue Today

Today, the second-story room that once held Silver Ball Gardens is used by a UC Berkeley Christian group, who refer to it as the “Durant Loft.” Images of the loft reveal no trace of the arcade that stood there in the past, but in its own way, the location remains a hangout for Berkeley students.

Notes