Pinball is booming in America
economist.com
economist.com
For example I live in Denver and here we have a chain of popular Arcade bars called '1up'. I always find it a great place to go with friends or on a date because there's always something for everyone, machines of all types, photo booths, and if you just don't like arcade games they have a full bar as well. And as a result they attract a varied crowd and always seem to be making money one way or the other.
I wish game bars all the best, as a 90's kid I never really got to experience arcades like they had them back in the 80's, so it's awesome to see arcade bars make a comeback now.
Also it is just me or do pinball games just never seem to get the physics of the ball right? Every pinball game I've ever played always seemed way easier than playing "real" pinball.
And as for your last, yes, virtual pinball games don't come close on ball physics. Real ball motion is so much more than a pair of X-Y coordinates and velocities. A real ball slides and spins and scrapes across the playfield and the objects in all sorts of ways. A ball's motion is very 3d even on a 2d playfield - it can have a spin axis aligned anywhere on its sphere.
Flippers too. It's much more than one object moving at one velocity. There are really subtle details in the interactions with the rubber on the flippers - a real ball will sink into the rubber by a fraction of a millimeter and rebound in ways that depend on that. Flippers accelerate and decelerate on a time scale of single-digit milliseconds, with all sorts of subtleties that an experienced player can feel. Response time matters too - a computer platform is usually limited to 1/60 second input resolution by the host hardware and OS, while a real machine responds hard real time instantly.
And of course nudging - no virtual controller comes anywhere close to all the things you can do to a real machine, shoves and pushes and slaps. No game physics engine comes anywhere close to all that detail in all these areas.
In my city, there is one that is not only popular but has been in operation for 20 years or so. It has a couple hundred arcade machines, mostly pinball, and looks like that's their main business.
But the reality of the economics is proven by one aspect of how they operate: if you buy a drink at the bar, you get to play all the games for free. If not, they're 25 cents per play.
The main arcade on Edgewood ("Joystick") is super popular, but only has 8 or so machines. They're not in good shape either. People want to play, but it's too crowded.
The similar "adult dog park / bar" concept has been absolutely exploding. "Fetch" bar started just across the street from me a few years ago and they've since expanded to over ten locations in three different states. It's huge. And it's always packed to the brim with over a hundred people.
Plus you get to charge membership fees per dog in a subscription model.
People want to drink and bring their dogs.
If the west coast doesn't already have this, get on it. I can't imagine there's much moat apart from branding, but it's got huge growth opportunity.
I know that’s always the risk for sure, but I’d bet in a longer run of the barcade market than dog bars, but I’ve been wrong before
I hadn't ever considered whether the place was a fad or not, but they are definitely benefiting from the trend towards WFH.
I guess if dog ownership crashes that would be a problem, but I really don't see that happening any time soon.
The OP mentioned 1-Up chain in metro Denver. Their games are owned and serviced personally by the owner. He had the experience operating arcades and partnered with someone who had the restaurant/bar experience to make a very successful, multi-location business.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-how-to-beat-roulette...
"Anywhere close" might actually be a little closer than you think. Ever take a peak down the virtual pinball rabbit hole? The KL25Z microcontroller board at the heart of many visual pinball builds has an accelerometer to measure nudges etc. Most builds also have a real tilt bob if you get a little over exuberant. Then there are real shaker motors, surround sound feedback, multiple displays for the backglass and DMD etc.
Way of the Wrench on YouTube has the best set of videos I know of on the topic of building your own cab. It would really be a blast to build something like this.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrqlHbqP7FIO5P8e8HtrB...
> There's nothing better than real pinball and I would have to agree.
This model appears to work for them.
I was a kid in the 70s and 80s and pinball/video arcades were the domain of middle and high school kids, roughly 12-16 years of age. It was a place to hang out before you were old enough to drive. There were very few adults there, certainly nobody 50-60 years old.
Although I must say my older brothers friends loved Space Invaders. I don't know maybe the coke and pot led to arrested development. I never got into video games, whether it was Tron, Pac Man, or Pong.
This has been the model for bars for a long time I think everything from those bartop entertainment systems, jukeboxes, electronic dart boards, etc.
Does Dave & Busters fit into this category, or would you say they have the wrong focus? I've never been to a Dave & Busters, but they're a fairly large chain that long-preceded the current wave. Is Dave & Busters too much like an adult Showbiz/Chuck E. Cheese, rather than a more casual bar you can pop into?
They used to just have normal arcade games. I don't know when the transition happened, but I was stunned when I took my kids a few years ago and found it had transformed into what you're describing.
probably missing something but yeah it's everything and nothing at the same time.
To expand on this a bit, the actual maintainer of the machine is probably the most important factor of the quality of the barcade, at least if you're the type of person who cares about rulesets for games and will be irritated if something doesn't work because of a broken sensor. I like enthusiast owned/operated places because the owner who's actually playing the games will notice problems and fix them, as opposed to bars where any problems with the machine will either be broken until the maintainer gets around to it on their scheduled route, or possibly the problems never get reported at all. One possibly useful proxy for this is seeing where your local leagues play - in general they're more likely to be in places with well-maintained machines.
For San Francisco:
- Outer Orbit is my favorite place, even though they've recently removed a couple machines for more seating (more evidence that the bar/restaurant is the money maker). The owners met playing pinball, are heavily involved in the local scene, and do the maintenance themselves, so the machines tend to be in great shape. Decent Hawaiian food and a quite good beer list.
- Free Gold Watch is the place everyone always recommends because it has the most machines. My feeling is that they don't keep up on maintenance well enough because I always have trouble with tables always having enough small things broken about it that it's impossible to advance some modes. (On pretty much any modern machine every lane/ramp/hole is probably going to be required for some mode or another, so a single broken sensor breaks the entire game if you're trying for wizard mode.) It's definitely the place to go for the arcade experience with a lot of machines to choose from.
- the Alamo theater actually has a reasonably decent room upstairs from the bar, across the hall from the theaters. Doesn't seem to get rotated much and I'm not convinced it's maintained regularly, but it doesn't get much traffic so it doesn't seem like stuff breaks quickly there. A lot of people seem surprised when I mention it's there.
- Gestalt always has machines in decent shape, but the bar itself might close any month now.
- Emporium/Musee Mecanique - I don't go to them often, but they're both more generalist arcades, so they'll have a few machines at varying maintenance levels.
I'm not sure how often https://pinballmap.com/ gets updated or how its coverage is outside the SF Bay Area, but it looks pretty accurate for me.
The comparable level of detail to get pinball right would be something like simulating all the rubber gaskets and surfaces in the ailerons and elevators, all the fluid dynamics in the hydraulics, and so on.
If you invested something like the $100 million that Boeing or Lockheed must have done in their simulators, you probably could. Video pinball isn't exactly that big economically, though.
With GPU-powered physics, it might be possible to model this in real time. But if not, one could definitely run the simulations in CAD and export the results to a table (or fit to an equation) and use those in the game.
The limitation isn't technology.
Is your GPU accounting for millisecond-level fluctuations in power as more lights and flashers are on at any given instant so any coil receives a tiny bit less power?
Are you accounting for a tiny bit of residual magnetism left in the balls after they departed from recent contact with a magnet?
You are correct that the limitation isn't technology. All this is doable with enough specialized computation - but the reality is that it's vast avenues of effort that nobody has done or likely will.
Yes. That's a basic feature a professional CAE package. And the materials library includes a few hundred different rubber compounds and metals to model with as well.
Modern CAD is amazing. Back when I worked in the industry, we'd have customers whose simulations for jet turbine engines match the the sensor readings on the prototype almost exactly.
Would you?
No, and no.
Flight simulators that are used to train pilots are unlikely to have this level of detail. There is enough variation in things like wind turbulence that they can ignore a lot of the other effects as if you can handle turbulence you can handle smaller errors as well.
For a freeware pinball game? Maybe not.
It's always a question of money and time.
It sure seems that way, but I think it's more nuanced. With a top-notch video version of pinball, I don't they get the physics wrong enough to notice. But what they are is incomplete.
The physicality of playing a pinball game is an integral part of the experience. Standing at the machine, pressing the flipper buttons, feeling the vibrations of the ball and mechanisms, etc. If you don't have that stuff, then the game is going to feel wrong even if the physics of the playfield are 100% accurate.
But let me add the caveat that a lot of arcade videogames were designed to eat your money as well, something I always found infuriating as a teenager. Some were fair -- things like Golden Axe, TMNT or Sunset Riders can be won with a single coin if you know what you're doing. But plenty of arcades are unwinnable (or require unreasonable expertise) for you to have a good time without spending lots of coins.
Which is why I always ended up playing Double Dragon, TMNT or Sunset Riders ;)
There were also difficulty settings. I remember back then when we played TMNT (which mind you, it's one of the "fairer" games) we could tell which cabinets were "tweaked" at the highest difficulty level and avoided them. One tell was the highway levels, the way to truly win with one quarter was to avoid the helicopters instead of fighting them (which spawns more and more dangerous helis), but tweaked cabinets would spawn tons of helis no matter what you did, so it was best to avoid them. God I hated that.
Other games had similar problems, but sometimes you could tell "this game is set to impossible difficulty".
The games where your HP constantly dropped over time and was replenished by inserting more coins were the worst!
Machines I was good at, I used to not-infrequently leave with a credit on them, after paying for one game and playing two. And I am not a very good pinball player.
Fun games make money. That's all you need.
It is a nuanced tradeoff. You need to make it entertaining enough so that players will continue to play, but also difficult enough that they regularly lose and put in more quarters. Getting that balance right is hard.
https://sternpinball.com/ continues to make modern (awesome) pinball machines - I'm fortunate enough to work for a company that stocks a couple in breakrooms. They also usually have a big presence in the floor of California Extreme (https://caextreme.org/) which is totally worth checking out if you're in the Bay Area in August.
Edit: For a little bit more to search on in terms of Japanese stuff - https://arcadeheroes.com/2023/02/10/new-arcade-games-for-jap...
This is something that Michael Abrash hasn't really received proper credit for: he basically invented the model of using off-the-shelf PC components for videogames, which then spread to consoles and arcade games.
If it wasn't for Abrash's "mode x" we wouldn't have DirectX, then Direct3D, then XBox, then arcade games that are nothing more than personal computers.
At the time that Abrash came up with "mode x", there were basically two ways to play games on a PC. The first method was to use a PC that included a great graphics chip (like the Amiga), the second method was to add aftermarket cards. Neither method was ideal, because there weren't many Amigas in existence, and software developers couldn't maximize sales while selling software that required aftermarket hardware.
You could make the opposite argument back in the day. Arcade hardware was what home PCs, and consoles, tried to emulate. The truth is, these still use specialized hardware even if they end up targeting embedded Linux or embedded Windows (or a combination of the two). They are also incredibly efficient with their use of hardware
I was fortunate enough to go like 5 years ago, but I really fondly remember Taito Hey had a whole row of like 8 Super Sweet Fighter 2 Turbo machines which were basically continuously occupied, and then a floor down I watched somebody basically one credit perfect one of those Capcom Dungeons and Dragons side scrolling brawlers, and then on another floor was a widescreen Darius machine (which I'd never seen in the US).
In other locations there were floors of like card-based army formation strategy games, music games with circular screens, etc.
Pachinko is like its own thing, almost always in different buildings, usually like 3 times as loud as the arcades, and full of smoking. Strangely I don't recall seeing any western style pinball machines anywhere, though.
Basically, it was arcade nirvana for someone like me (born in the early 80's) I heard things got pretty bad during Covid, though, so I don't know how much it's regressed. I do have a friend who just got back from visiting the first time though, and he mentioned he could still find tons of competition in old fighting games and stuff. (Man I wanna go back, especially since the exchange rate is so good now)
Edit: typos
Another category I missed would be rhythm games. You can play those at home, but it's not as fun (unless you have a really nice setup).
a) standing b) in a group of 1 or 2
The cabinets don't have to look like this anymore. We don't need a CRT, we don't need the full size cabinets.
Seems like a real opportunity to design a more bar-friendly option, tables with multiple monitors that operate like the old desktop/seated machines or similarly.
Standing is fine but after awhile people don't want to smoosh next to each other and stand in front of a crappy screen. But most of these places are too attached to the retro aspect, imo.
I referenced them above (but gave them a different name, "old desktop/seated machines"). They're still archaic and don't fit well with modern bar seating nor gaming.
Playing on one screen split in half was sort of a necessity at the time but it never really worked that well.
Ahh, I thought you were referring to a different format. I forget what they're called (Cabaret?), but they're upright, short, and meant to be sat at.
You just need to find an arcade with some candy cabinets, those are seated. Also, most of them are set up for one player per cab with your opponent sitting on the other side of you
The "virtual solenoids" that control the paddles in a computer game are always going to exert the exact same amount of impulse on the ball each and every time they're activated. Contrast that with your average Addams family pinball machine that has been bruised and beaten have to death, and the flippers are practically flaccid.
The analog nature makes the game less predictable and therefore more difficult for players.
There used to be a bar in my town that I always thought was a great idea, but this particular bar was not in the greatest of locations. It was called Bar of Soap, and it was a bar in the front, but a laundromat in the back. I think this would be much better located in a college town, but this one was no where near a college, and not really near any kind of residential to speak of.
I’m not sure whether it took them so long to figure out the model, or whether society just had to wait for the first gamer generations to grow old enough to a) drink and b) become a little jaded with modern video games, so that nostalgia for the arcade classics would kick in.
I think part of it is also the hobbyist factor talked about in sibling comments. The first arcade owners were business owners, not hobbyists. They were not kids when the first arcade machines were coming out, they were just in it for the money.
Hobbyists and other nostalgia-driven folks feel very differently about these games. They take care of them and they enjoy talking to the customers about the games. The customers are older too, so they’re not like the little kids who used to beat the crap out of the machines. Everything about it is much better off.
I think another part of it is that as the highstreet moves away from appliance shops there'll have to be things to fill these places instead, such as these kind of entertainment venues.
I love arcades, so I'm hoping that they're here to stay :D
For it to be nostalgia, 30+ year olds must be going there. Anybody below that would have been like 10 when arcades were on their last legs, and wouldn't have been allowed to go there as a kid, right?
Of course, there also was a better future to believe in, instead of dwindling middle class, and increased insecurity, depression and loneliness.
I'm really tempted to build a virtual pinball machine. It would be awfully nice if the display of choice (42" LG C2 OLED) would come down in price a bit more first.
There are plenty of "real" pinball machines out there, seems that they keep making them.
I remember going to a few conventions pre-covid where enthusiasts would bring out their machines, often so old that they had to be completely restored under the hood, and there's a surprising amount of complexity that goes into them. Even simple games need each and every bumper to be wired up without obstructing the other parts and maintained such that they work every time. A player will notice when a bumper doesn't go off even once. More complex games that do fancier things with the ball need all kinds of interesting physical mechanisms to do so. Many games have multiball mechanics and there are multiple novel ways to tuck those balls into the board and route them back up after they fall out of play.
I suppose it's sort of a weird middle ground between watchmaking and car repair. Would love to see more novel ideas enter this space if it really is picking up again as the article says.
There's no doubt that AI and such will bring great benefit to our society in many ways, but I think people are already becoming a bit anxious about the cost, especially culturally. It's not new-- it's one step in a long trend of many things becoming more impersonal by design: Buying things from anonymous companies made in anonymous overseas factories delivered by a huge anonymous workforce. "Art" that was "made" by computers. Automated customer "service." Automated "therapy." Transportation hailed by, paid for with, and in many instances used for the entirety of communication with an anonymous contractor. Groceries, delivery food, and anonymously assembled meal kits dropped on your doorstep without the inefficiencies and possible tension of human-to-human interaction.
I don't think many people will forget the benefits we reap from modern technology or reject it outright, but I do think many of us will be less enthused to be a cog in our increasingly automated, anonymous, and efficiency-obsessed consumerist machine. I foresee many of us being much more interested in having in-person experiences and interacting with mechanical objects in many parts of our lives. Don't have a crystal ball or anything, but that's my prediction.
*Edit: I don't mean to be too negative about the tech. Many effects attributable to tech were because this tech made most of our lives more livable during the pandemic. I just think a lot of people are ready to shed a lot of that. Other random thought: it's quite possible, if not likely, that engaging in this lifestyle shift will be a luxury, at least initially, and involve some significant class tension.
don't forget to add surveillance to the list
Visual Pinball X ("VPX", see https://www.vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showcat=51) runs community authored recreated tables with ROMs dumped from the hardware. The physics engine has good performance and authenticity.
Another project, Visual Pinball Engine, ported the C++-based physics engine to Unity (https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine) through its DOTS & "HPC#" (C# with manual memory management extensions) approach. Unity adoption means you can play high fidelity tables right in your browser (https://appmana.com/watch/pinball).
Then there's commercial platforms like Pinball FX and people building VPX rendering in VR.
It's maybe the biggest simulation scene I know of. The community fills many niches. Rigs of Rods & Beam.ng for the idea, "Microsoft Flight Simulator, but for cars." XMage & Spellsource for "Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone but you write your own cards." Unreal Engine for Fortnite is a big entry for the open world community authored content dominated by Minecraft, with submarine stuff like Facepunch's S&box (think Garry's Mod 2.0) coming up.
Example: https://www.instructables.com/Virtual-Pinball-Machine-1/
I spent a couple of days tracing out the schematic and wiring everything up again, cleaning contacts and doing some basic repairs like changing lightbulbs and rubbers. By the end of the process, I had a playable pinball machine.
What was really an eye-opener for me was how the game was "programmed". Timing was handled by flashing lightbulbs and game state was maintained by relays and wheels that triggered stacks of switches. Really a different way of thinking about how to build up a game.
I didn't play game enough and want to spend the time to keep it running, so I donated it. It was really enjoyable to fix it up (once) and figure out how everything worked. I might do it again some time!
If I remember correctly they added digital score keeping as an afterthought using camera's (+ software + screens).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-bowling-is-in-a-knock-...
Also a lot of machines have midnight madness mode. If you’re at an all night arcade and it hits midnight, multiball!
Who'd have guessed?!
One of my favorites as far as merging of the form and the story is Black Knight (and Black Knight 2000). The machine itself is framed as your knightly opponent in this apparent duel (it even taunts you, LOL), and the table layout is such that you can be on offense—ball in the physically-elevated high part of the field, with scoring and mode-progress opportunities and basically no risk of losing the ball as long as you keep it up there—or defense, in the lower part of the field, where it's quite easy to lose a ball, and play's alarmingly fast & reactive, but there are also some good bonus chances or ways to set up your next play in the top field.
And that theme song on Black Knight 2000. Oh man. So good.
[EDIT] Oh and I forgot that the "knight" taunts you during that awesome song with "give me your money!" (among other taunts), which is another machine -> character connection. You are dueling the machine. It's basically a perfect fusion of story/motif and the form of the game.
Medieval Madness though just stands head and shoulders above every other table I've played. One of my favorite things about it is that in my opinion it's a really fair table - in that "Dark Souls" style, if I lose a ball, I almost never say "ah, bullshit" - it's almost always because I took a bad shot or whiffed on an easy save. I know these machines are designed to eat your quarters, but some of the Stern tables I've played seem to have a really high "that was bullshit" factor. (Although, of course, my own mediocre skill is more to blame than anything else).
You might like Attack from Mars, which shares the "knock down the barrier on a high-central target, hit it, move on to the next" thing from Medieval Madness. It has less fun with its theme and of the two I'd say MM is unequivocally better, but if you're out and about and run into one, might give it a try. I'd especially look for Theater of Magic, if you haven't played that one. It's not quite as clean as Medieval Madness, but in roughly the same difficulty zone and has a lot of fun shots and gimmicks, and really runs with the theme. Might enjoy Whitewater, too—it's in the same ballpark, difficulty-wise, but with a more complex playfield than MM despite looking fairly simple at a glance, but is still quite legible once you've given it a look over and a couple plays. Theme's less obviously-fun but I find it really nails a kind of kitsch appeal that works for me, at least. Both the Elvira games I've played have been in that zone, too—one's better than the other, IMO, but I forget which. [EDIT: Oh, of these, Whitewater probably has the most unfair-feeling losses when you're starting on it, just to calibrate expectations]
Oh, and find Monster Bash. Learn it. Get good at it. There are few things better in mid-difficulty pinball than finally getting the whole monster band together so they can rock :-) Fun, goofy theme like Medieval Madness.
A step up the difficulty level, I like Addams Family (doesn't everyone?) and Junkyard a lot. Everyone seems to love Twilight Zone but I can't get into the damn thing. It's got the same thing Addams Family does where if you don't have precise and well-planned shot control (looking a move ahead, if possible) you'll end up with lots of drains down the sides [EDIT: which is one of those things that feels unfair, because you can make an apparently "good" shot and lose the ball, but can be overcome if you learn the table's patterns well and keep things under tight control], but is just enough harder to learn that I've not managed to enjoy it yet.
There's another level that's easier than the ones I like, that I really despise. Like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I practically have to try to lose that one, to get the game to end. It's just boring and feels like it's patronizing me.
For random trivia: Medieval Madness has Tina Fey as a voice actor. Monster Bash has a voice that sounds like Katey Sagal (Peggy Bundy, Leela/Futurama), but I have only seen others speculating the same on Pinside. Do you have any idea?
You rarely see Junkyard (or ToM-- a top 5 IMO) mentioned, but it is a unique table. High Speed 2: The Getaway is another I would lump in top tier. Maybe toss in Hurricane as a throwback DMD table?
Space Station is the most infuriatingly "easy" table I have encountered.
No idea how I hadn't made that connection—as soon as I read that, I heard some of the lines in my head and went, "wait, that does sound like her!"
Dunno if it really was, though.
> You rarely see Junkyard (or ToM-- a top 5 IMO) mentioned, but it is a unique table.
I'd played a whole lot of Addams Family at a pizza joint that had it (also Johnny Mnemonic—a table I've seen a few times that has some really great, flowy ramp play, but always seems to have something broken), and some time later played a fair bit of Junkyard at a different pizza joint. I'd never really looked up any pinball stuff online, so didn't have any tips or clues about what to expect—the day I stumbled on Addams Family's Mamushka mode in Junkyard I just about died from joy, LOL. Totally unexpected.
This is like when you find someone else who digs the same three unrelated albums because they get the common thing you like about all of them. Thanks again for the recommendations!
I used to drive my own father crazy when doing computer stuff back in the day, though - clicking through menus at lightspeed and such. Guess it's karma. ;)
Another surprise was that about 50% of playing well is in the hips, not the fingers.
I never usually last long enough in real games to learn what I'm supposed to do to make progress.
And, coming up in august, California Extreme will take over the Santa Clara convention center with a truly mind-bogglingly massive collection of hobbyist owned pinball machines, arcade machines, and vintage gaming electronics. It’s a blast and always one of my favorite days of the whole year.
The pros:
* Pinball is very good at keeping the baby awake until bedtime, lol. I would sit him on the glass and he would be enamored by the sights and sounds. Screens don't catch his eyes, so the physicality was great. * Having pinball in the house is fun, and it makes parties better.
The cons:
* Turns out I'm not good at pinball! * My machines are older (mid 90's) and they are a TON of work. The arcades too. * One worked the morning I bought it and never again. Still working on it here and there. * The others have all sorts of gremlins big and small. * I have yet to find someone local who can repair them.
But, I've learned a ton about them and electronics in the meanwhile, so I no longer entirely regret jumping into this.
BTW, they sell new-in-box pinballs for almost as much as I paid for my whole 9 machine arcade, and you have to wait many months sometimes to get them. There's limited editions that are 2x-3x that, even.
"Do you like working on small gadgets and tinkering with lots of rubber bands and motors and solenoids?"
"Not really, but I love playing pinball."
"Don't buy a pinball machine."
Guess I should have picked one up back in high school. Would have been a lot of money for me at the time, but it'd be worth like 4-5x that now if it I'd kept it in decent shape. Moving it several times would have sucked, though.
But that said you do need a certain level of handiness unless you plan to call the distributor to come out and fix it if it does break, because even new games will break occasionally.
A few weeks ago I poked around on eBay and Google. And mostly found cheap digital ones or other cabinets similar to the arcades you can get at Walmart.
€5,000-€10,000 (plus taxes) seems the going rate, up to €20,000 if you want some sort of "limited edition" (but aren't they all limited now?).
[1] https://www.shop.freddys-pinball-paradise.de/index.php?n=99&...
Stern is the main one since Williams gave up. There are others, but Stern is the one people consider the most lately.
Has a dealer near me, no idea how good they are, but the 81 machines caught my attention.
[0] https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/did-you-know-pinbal...
The reality was that he did make the one shot (and later confessed that that one shot was half luck), but besides that also played for tens of minutes (and some accounts say on two different games), demonstrating all the things a skilled player can do, to such an extent that the outcome was beyond doubt.
https://vimeo.com/180067392 (~13:00)
A lot of good, working machines, nice staff, no tricks to keep making you consuming unnecessary stuff or stay there more than you would want to. Just a fun place to be -- if you enjoy playing pinball of course. Cheap too.
- Stern Pinball (sternpinball.com) - Great, modern themes, biggest manufacturer. Recently released The Mandalorian, Godzilla, Foo Fighters, etc. Easiest by far to find to play and / or purchase via distributors.
- Jersey Jack Pinball (jerseyjackpinball.com) - Tend to be more collector quality machines. Recently released Guns n' Roses (developed with Slash), Toy Story 4, and the Godfather.
- Spooky Pinball (spookypinball.com) - Initially home brew pinball, built into much larger company. Releases include things like Rick & Morty, Halloween, Ultraman, and Scooby Doo.
- Chicago Gaming Company (chicago-gaming.com) - Involved in many things, but from a pinball standpoint, mostly have made remakes of popular 90's games with more modern hardware (Medieval Madness, Attack From Mars, Monster Bash, Cactus Canyon).
- Multimorphic (multimorphic.com) - Advanced pinball system, designed to allow changing of games in the cabinet (ie partial playfield swaps). Large screen built into playfield, ball tracking, etc. Games have been mostly original themes.
There are other smaller manufacturers as well (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pinball_manufacturer...) that have made games of various types.
Typically each manufacturer will release a given title, at typically 2-3 "trim" levels (ie, Stern calls these Pro / Premium / LE, Jersey Jack has called them Standard Edition, Limited Edition, Collectors Edition). Price and features go up with the trim level.
https://www.chicago-gaming.com/coinop/pulp-fiction
The old System 11 look and feel...is kind of neat.
I've got some old photos of my build progress here: https://jherrman.com/gravity-pinball-public-build-log
I got to help building this one: https://youtu.be/mbntYbjoYk8
Tell your brother to stop being so good at pinball :-) I guess it's okay though since he keeps on popping out amazing designs, especially with Jurassic Park.
I also appreciate how you interact with the community. Every time I see a new post from someone announcing a new project to replace VP, you're there to gently point out all of the details they haven't encountered yet and why VPE is solving them a certain way already. Nice!
I do think there's a big need for vpx-js to make visual pinball more shareable in a browser, even if Unity offers a webgl export. Hopefully I can help with that soon!
I still want to bring vpx-js to a level where people can actually play a WPC table in the browser. That'd be really awesome and hasn't been done yet, at least not that I know of.
Well, maybe one day.
To this day - myself and my sibs each have one of our childhood pinballs at our homes. For me its 1980 Black Knight by Williams (one of the early pinballs to have "voice" sounds). It's in our garage now. It's pretty cool to watch my kids and their friends play it. A refreshing alternative to screens IMO.
After a wave of consolidation in the 90s and and eventual pivot in the 2000s to the more profitable slots market, Stern was for years the only company still making new pinball machines. That started to change in the 2010s, however, and there are now half a dozen names you’ll see at a contemporary barcade.
More here: https://www.kineticist.co/post/who-makes-pinball-machines
Discussed on HN two months ago: https://www.pacificpinball.org/
There are a few barcades in my city. Every single one is setup where digital arcade games are free with the purchase of beer. Pinball costs money. Many of them are $0.50 per game. A few are $1 per game. They're not free. Interesting to hear that's not the case elsewhere. Not sure how they're making the economics work.
Where are you playing?! Most places I go to are $0.75, except for one which is a bargain at $0.50. I probably wouldn't play a $1 game unless it's a game I know well.
https://www.pinballlife.com/sub-microswitch-with-4-straight-...
https://www.thisweekinpinball.com/spooky-announces-ultraman-...
https://digitalpinballfans.com/threads/was-nudging-always-co...
Nudging just enough so you don't trip the sensor, or deliberately going too far to incur the warning when you need to save a ball, is absolutely a component of skilled play.
What's different from people's experience of virtual pinball is that you're moving the machine underneath the ball, not the ball itself. The computer games like Space Cadet let you deflect the ball in open space anywhere on the playfield... that's not really how it works, Microsoft got that wrong, what you're really doing is pushing objects on the playfield either into or away from the ball.
It's a super physical game if you're taking risky shots and having to recover from bad situations constantly, and the pros make it look like they're barely nudging at all by taking safe shots and making minor corrections with nudges.
Yes, and "tilt" sensitivity can be adjusted. When I was a kid we called the machines that would tilt at the slightest movement "tight" and the ones you couldn't tilt without pushing them over "loose." The looser the machine, the fewer quarters you have to feed it.
Here is one of the owners, bringing back a partially stripped Williams "Lucky Seven". It was their second-ever solid state machine from 1978, and he talks about how nervous the companies were about stopping making electro-mechanical (EM) machines for fear of losing market share.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38snhEdcKgU
There's an entire industry devoted to keeping these machines running, supplying new equivalent circuit cards, solenoid coils, machine artwork & backglass, and more. But he does run into the occasional part that is unobtainable and no one is manufacturing replacements, like the glass cover over the slot reels in this game.
Recently I learned (through hn I think) that there's an arcade in Chicago that offers a relatively cheap play-all-day pinball arcade room, I'm thinking of trying to go down there some day.
Unfortunately I also remember that I got a lot of wrist pain from playing, and I'm a bit concerned about re-triggering that; it would be catastrophic if my typing were impacted, so unless I had some prolonged time off work I don't think I'd ever play for more than maybe an hour at a time, spread out over several months.
LotR has three different "main" multiball modes (one for each movie), as well as the Gollum multiball (just 2 balls, normally). The Fellowship multiball is the one that requires hitting essentially every shot on the table.
The particular thing about LotR is that the multiballs can be stacked with the "story" modes (from shooting the center ring). Depending on how flaily you are, this can make the story modes easier or harder, but generally I find that it makes them safer if you have enough ball control. When my overarching goal was to reach Valinor (which requires beating a certain number of story modes, as well as all the multiballs), the general strategy was to spam Two Towers multiball as much as possible on top of a story mode.
I've had my LotR pin for a year now and still haven't managed to pull off destroy the ring, but perhaps tonight will be the night!
We succumbed to a combination of COVID and rising rents. Retail margins are thin even with huge alcohol markups. The money we made on the games roughly paid the salary for our full-time tech.
Loved it. Might even do it again someday. But I probably lost $80k the first time.
https://pinside.com/pinball/market/classifieds?s=1&keywords=...
Every year, I go to an annual pinball convention in my area. The tables that are 4 figures are the old 70s and 80s tables. Hell, one I've had my eye on (Fish Tales [1] from 1992) is averaging about $5,700USD on Pinside.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxilHoceiNo&list=PLrqlHbqP7F...
I think there's a lot more that could have been said here, and a lot better people that could have answered a lot better questions. I doubt the average Economist reader even knows that pinball machines actually have objectives and games inside.
The history they highlight is a bit oddly framed. Based on some manufacturing numbers (https://pinballmag.fr/en/the-best-selling-pinball-machines-o...) it is true that the 1970s were probably pinball's peak decade, but there was also a smaller "bump" in pinball in the early-mid 1990s when the dot matrix display and increasing computer power transformed the complexity of the game (the best selling pinball of all time, Addams Family, was made in this period). My guess is if there is a nostalgia factor, it is probably driven more by those that discovered pinball then, instead of the 1970s.
My understanding is that the current resurgence in pinball is due to a combination of the "arcade bar" phenomenon and especially the home collector's market. Apparently there was a huge surge of growth in the pinball market during the pandemic (https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/coronavirus-leads-to-s...), this of course due to everyone being cooped up at home.
I remember going to arcades growing up in the 90s and early 2000s and would jump at the chance to be able to relive that nostalgia.
Themed bars are making a strong run here (there's a local mini-golf focused bar which is really fun, albeit expensive). Would love a bar with pinball machines, maybe some fighting games or 4-player co-op games, sports games and maybe even some rhythm/music games. Nothing too hardcore, but something easy enough for your average non-gamer to understand and still have fun participating.
They have excellent reproductions of many classic Williams tables, and let you choose between traditional PB FX physics or more realistic physics that correspond more to real world tables (I haven't played enough IRL to say one way or another how true to life those advanced physics are) The classic reproductions are a blast, much better IMO than the homemade tables with just a few exceptions.
The best thing is that with a > 24" monitor you can get a decent play experience even in landscape mode, and if you turn it portrait and tilt it back a bit then the game really shines. I have a 27" slightly curved monitor and the curve in portrait mode, IMO, improves things as well. Using left & right shift keys feels very natural for flipper control. A true IRL aficionado will likely disagree on that.
Making your own cabinet isn't that difficult either if you have access to a CNC. 1-2 weekend project, you can find designed online, and apart from setting up the PC & monitor the only more technical skill is wiring the buttons, which is straightforward with button kits and USB controller to receive their input & send to the PC.
A barebones 3/4 cabinet is very straightforward and can sit nicely in smaller places, though bonus points awards for setting up a second monitor for the back display.
It's not going to be cheap though. You'll need a decent monitor with wide angles of view, and a pc that has at least an entry level discrete GPU for optimal & consistent 60FPS Vsync play. Well, not cheap unless you have some old extra hardware lying around to save on cost and a very friendly CNC acquaintance who will help you get things cut as a favor & cost of materials.
I have a 3/4 digital table myself, though I went the lazy route: Waited to find one second-hand that was aesthetically very well produced but needed some TLC to refurbish it, especially some rather dangerous wiring that was supposed to drive a master power switch but instead sparked and sent surges through the PC that crashed it. But you can find these partial DIY projects if you keep an eye on craigslist for a while and are willing to drive a little bit to pick it up.
I sell pinball DVDs (a very boutique market) and our distributor shut down during COVID so I've been selling direct on eBay, very slowly. Except the past few months sales picked up. Not sure why since I don't advertise. Maybe some popular threshold has been reached so now pinball is the latest fad?
I hope this fad sticks around!
Really cool place and I'm glad they are keeping those artifacts running.
I have been to some of the museums that people talked about in this thread and I would avoid that. Better to ask around which games you may like and then find a place where you can play a set of them. Pay to play also assures you that the games are ok.
Fascinating. I had no idea the history behind pinball and gambling. Nevertheless that seems like the classic "ban the legitimate thing to stop illegitimate use cases."
What table themes do you remember? If it was Android, that's Epic Pinball; if it was Party Land (an amusement park theme), that's Pinball Fantasies.
I had a 1976 Williams EM that was fun to play, but definitely kept me busy working on it.
https://github.com/AmokSolderer/APC
There are a number of machines up for sale, priced at around $4,000:
https://pinside.com/pinball/machine/star-wars
https://pinside.com/pinball/machine/star-wars-trilogy
Might want to start with a cheap, older Bally or Williams machine instead of the late-model licensed Star Wars machines, but they can be found for a lot less if not (yet) in working order!
https://shop.sternpinball.com/collections/home-edition-colle...
Every now and then it pops up over, but for the most part, it's just under the radar.
It was probably a better bet to put your savings into pinball games in 2019 and selling them now then the market.