How did your love for pinball begin?

[Ark Malmeida]

I poked around different arcades when I was a kid both on vacations in the summer down at Cape Cod and at the local bowling alley every Sunday when my dad worked. Like a few others I just poked around at the pinball machines occasionally and instead concentrated on the video games - didn't have a lot of money to burn so I would try to find games I could play the longest, or would just watch others play (Dragon's Lair comes to mind).

It wasn't until I worked at a movie theater as a teen that I really started getting into pinball. We always had one machine at a time that would get swapped out every once in a while. I think the order was Pinbot, Terminator 2, Cyclone (Ride the Ferris Wheel!), Star Wars (Data East), and then Indiana Jones. I spent the most time by far on that Star Wars machine. I loved how it counted the number of times you went around the main ramp and how certain things would be triggered as the count went up. I also remember being absolutely terrible at the Indiana Jones table even though I really liked it. After playing those machines I would always try to seek out machines at other places, like the local bowling alley. Others I remember playing are Taxi, Funhouse, Junkyard and Fish Tales.

Don't have any arcades that close to where I live now (western MA) although I've checked out Funspot arcade in NH and would love to find the time to get to Pinball Wizard.

 

[sotnwaffle]

I think my earliest introduction to pinball machines was at an arcade called Yellow Brick Road. Possibly one of the earliest ones I saw was a surfing one whose name I don't recall. This would've been in the '70s. I played various pinball machines as a young child and was pretty bad at them, but I played them anyway. Genie, Solar Ride, Gorgar. It was interesting to me how arcades had both different video games and different pinball machines. Only one place had Xenon and one of the Fireball games, for instance. Another place had Paragon.

I remember seeing Atari pinball machines such as Middle Earth. I think that came out around the same time as Bakshi's Lord of the Rings and I felt the name was used solely because of that, even though the theme itself had nothing to do with it. I don't really know, though. I played it anyway, just for the name. I was always bad at Bally's Lost World, but I tended to play that for the name alone as well.

When the Flash Gordon pinball machine came out, I remember one of my brothers, who happens to be pretty good at pinball machines, invited me over to the machine cabinet, because he thought it was so interesting how the machine laughed at you when you put a quarter in.

I remember someone being an ace at Black Knight and, over and over and over, he would send a ball back into the multiball container when a new ball was released. I remember hearing the bonus tally for Space Invaders going off for such a long time I became interested in seeing what the player's score was like. I heard *bang bang bang* as he managed to get the high score.
That machine had been there awhile.

I occasionally saw pinball machines I either never actually played or only played once or twice when visiting arcades I seldom went to, and this usually made me more interested in them.

I was playing Williams' Grand Lizard and, while an attendant watched, the ball ricocheted around wildly and did something useful.
"Ooh," he remarked.
"Yeah... I meant to do that."
"Yeah, I saw you aiming for it."

The Yellow Brick Road eventually got a Big Bang Bar and Kingpin near the end of its existence.

This turned out to be more of a trip down memory lane, maybe. But all of that shaped my current interest.

 

[Moon Jump]

When I was little I used to play Video Pinball on the family Atari 2600 along with the other arcade ports. I had a lot of arcades near me when I was growing up. I didn't often play pinball unless the theme threw me in. It wasn't till I was in the 4th or 5th grade when a huge arcade called "Space Plex" opened up. They had a sick line up of pins. They'd get the newest Data East machines but they also had a row of classic Bally/Williams like Banzai Run, Black Knight 2000 and Cyclone. It was playing with my dad that got me hooked. When Back to The Future came out my dad and I were hooked, then TMNT and after that we played the living hell out of Star Wars. Even though I'd go and play the newest fighting games I'd always come back to play the pinball.

Sadly when the arcades shut down I lost the best places I used to go to. Now I pretty much have to hunt to find them, hence why my friend Gerard and I came up with Arcade Hunters. It's always great to find places that are passionate about arcade gaming and pinball. I've got a lot of places I need to visit, like the Silverball Museum, Pinball Wizard Arcade and the Pinball Museum in Baltimore. I play the tables up at FunSpot, but since people don't play them they don't fix the games often. When they do the machines get beat up fast. So they have them, but their not in the best shape.

 

[WilliamPorygon]

I've had lots of experiences over the years that have piqued my interest in pinball.

My earliest recollection of pinball is when I was very young -- only 3 or 4 years old -- I have vague memories of my dad and I playing Baby Pac-Man at an arcade. Because I was so young I really didn't remember much about it; for years all I could remember was that there was some hybrid video and pinball game that I had played at one time. Until the Internet age came about and I could actually track down info about it, I wasn't even sure my brain hadn't just made the whole thing up.

Aside from that, most of my exposure to pinball over the years has been in various video game forms. Throughout my childhood I had birthday parties at Putt-Putt annually, and I sometimes put in a few games on the pins there, but at the time I tended to gravitate more towards Skee-ball and the ticket redemption games. I'm honestly much better at properly-made video game versions anyway; I'm very timid and on a real machine I tend to be much too shy about nudging even when it's necessary. But if it's a virtual table that can't really be damaged and doesn't require me to actual physically shake anything, I have no problem doing it.

As a video gamer who enjoys pinball games, I've owned quite a few I've liked over the years. My dad had both Video Pinball and Midnight Magic on the Atari 2600, the former of which I remember best because of an incident where I was in the middle of a really good game when my dad activated the smoke alarm for a family fire drill. Between pausing not existing on the 2600, having a very high score on the board and being a young, naive kid who didn't really understand how serious it could be if there were in fact a real fire, I kept playing until my parents came and got me. Then I didn't get to play again for awhile.

The next big pinball event for me was when I got the NES version of Pin*Bot. If I had to pick just one thing that made me a pinball fan, I'd have to go with this. Honestly, it was pure luck that I got this game -- my dad wanted to buy me a game, I didn't want any game in particular, and between looking at nothing but the titles, wanting to get home as soon as possible, and having never heard of "Pin*Bot" before I asked for Pin*Bot thinking it was a bowling game. The initial disappointment on finding out it wasn't didn't last too long, though, because it was (by NES standards) an awesome pinball table. The one thing I really hated was the video gamey stuff that was different from the actual table -- I'd try to deliberately avoid collecting the solar value because I didn't want to deal with the crap like the ghost that eats your ball or the missiles that destroy the flippers. When Game Genie came out I fell in love with the game all over again because I'd turn on infinite balls and actually have fun getting through all those annoying levels. Even though I still have some issues with the table design (particularly how easily the balls fly into the outlanes from most shots), it's a table I love mainly due to my experiences from back on the NES.

There's been several other pinball video games I've really enjoyed since then, particularly Pokémon Pinball (both the original and Ruby/Sapphire versions) and the Microsoft Pinball Arcade collection. I used to enjoy 70s/80s machines the best because I felt 90s machines were too complicated, largely because I enjoy the game more if I understand the rules and what I should be aiming for to achieve the goals rather than just shooting the ball around randomly. When I can see about all the rules and goals in detail ahead of time (which PHOF and Pinball Arcade do very well) I find the 90s tables much more enjoyable and are definitely some of the best pins I've ever played.

 

[RetroBlast]

In 1986 I headed off to college and lived in a dormitory. In the main lounge stood PINBOT and right next to it the video game VANGUARD. It was the only time in my life I had access to a pinball machine at any frequency.

Pinball was always intimidating ... to begin with, I never knew the rules so my plan was always to just keep the ball alive. Most times the rules were written in such small text on the lower right and left corners of the tables, right where people, including me, would put their cigarettes while they were playing and that resulted in burn marks all over the rule sheet. Even playing PINBOT, I wasn't exactly sure of all the rules. Anyone who has never played PINBOT, it has a large wide open space down the middle so you have to be careful while playing. It doesn't have as many targets as the machines that came after it, so you really had to aim.

Pinball was intimidating because a bad run and your quarter was gone in minutes. Quarters were not easy to come by those days, besides, I needed them to buy cigarettes and beer! Even though I could last a lot longer on Vanguard, I played PINBOT just as much. Unlike a video game, pinball has no real beginning, middle, or end. If you play a video game, in many cases, once you have played a particular part of it, you have seen that part and done it ... the next time around its the same and yet, even though the pinball table remains a constant, each time you play it, it is different and there is always the fear of loosing your ball the entire time you are playing it.

In short, pinball is a panic, and it is more difficult than most video games these days. Its that twitch game-play that used to be in video games that keeps me coming back, its the fear of death, its the electronic sounds and pings and pangs, clings and clangs, clinks and clanks, and the robotic chitter chatter jibber jabber.

20 years after college and my love of the game is resurrected with The Pinball Arcade! There are no burn holes in the rule sheets but quarters are still hard to come by so thank God there isn't a quarter slot in my PS3 or PS Vita ... it gives me the opportunity to keep on playing and learning the ins and outs of the tables. My love of PINBOT is still with me today and to think next month I will be able to spend some quality time with his wife, The Bride of PINBOT, and ravage her, with my balls flying in all directions - now that has got me excited! After picking up TPA, and looking at all the tables, I think I concentrated on the BLACK HOLE because just as PINBOT had a large open area down the middle of the table, so too does the BLACK HOLE.

This game has inspired me to pick up Zen and Pinballisitik Pinball but the beauty of TBA is the fact that they are recreations of real tables and to me that means authenticity and traveling back in time and resurrecting memories and feelings from a past long gone.

In the words of Gary Stern of Stern Pinball, the only existing pinball manufacturer today, “The thing that’s killing pinball,” is not that people don’t like it. It’s that there’s nowhere to play it.” “This is a ball game. It’s a bat and ball game, O.K.?” ... now we all have a place to play pinball, and place to talk about it too ....

 

[Tabe]

For me, it was visits to my grandparents' house. They had a "Mystic Marvel" table in the basement that they'd bought for my mom and her brother in the 50s. It was a big treat after dinner was over to race to the basement and play pinball with my brother. That would have been mid-1970s. From there, it was "Video Pinball" on the Atari 2600, followed by my parents buying a "Strato-Flite" machine for OUR basement*. After that, it was "Night Mission Pinball" on the Apple IIe and "Pinball" on the NES followed by a billion other video pinball games on just about every console. I never spent much time playing pinball in the arcade as a kid - the machines were too hard, poorly maintained, and so on. In 1990/91, my freshman year in college, I rediscovered pinball at the student center and local arcades. This continued when, that summer, I got a job at a video game store and we had a "Funhouse" machine in the store. Still my favorite table 20+ years and one that I *WILL* own someday.

Tabe

* - My parents bought the machine for Christmas and actually got it like a week before the 25th. They put it in our (unfinished) basement where my brother & I never went. Then, every night after we went to bed, they went down into the basement and played the game, all the while laughing that we didn't hear them or find out about it.

 

[Bahamut X]

Hard to recall the first table I ever tried to play as a little kid. On the other hand, I have had the time to enjoy how pinball tables played. But I have seen a few tables that I really loved playing and wish I could play them again, or for the first time if I haven't. Some tables I was amazed due to the age for the first time seeing an old electro-mechanical table in a store that had already been spoken for and compare it to something like the newer tables with the dot matrix displays.

Oddly enough the first table I actually fell in love with was Taxi by Williams. I had first played it in a convience store which had a nice little section for arcades at the time. Usually I'd spend some time and a few coins when I had them at the time. At the time, the only other pin at the store for a while was Terminator 2; which was also quite fun but didn't hold a flame to the memories of trying to max out the skill shot on Taxi.

 

[DarkAkatosh]

I got one of those little TOMY machines as a kid and played the living **** out of it and have fallen in love with the game since.

 

[Baintz]

Pinball in the Uk has never been as big a deal as in the US, so even though I spent a massive amount of my teens in arcades (this was the 90s), the majority of them had no pins at all. There was one big arcade that did have a few pins that got the odd play from me here and there, but I never knew about all the complicated rules, I just tried to keep the ball in play and shoot ramps a lot.

Then the local video rental store in my village got four tables, the best by far being Space Shuttle. My friends and I spent HOURS on that thing (10p a play!), gradually working out the rules for ourselves. Around the same time, Pinball Dreams (and later Pinball Fantasies) hit the Amiga, so these also got played to death. I still wouldn't consider myself a pinball fanatic at this time, I spent way more time on video games. Then when I hit 18 and went to college, video games and pinball sort of hit the back burner for a few years.

Fast forward to now (I'm 35), and I'm still massively into video games, and pinball was largely forgotten. I was browsing IGN a few weeks ago and saw a review for TPA, and immediately tried to snap it up. Frustratingly, it wasn't out on PS3 in Europe yet, but during my googling, I saw that the same company (Farsight) had released a disc version of classic Williams tables last year. Whilst browsing the review of it, I saw that it included (OMFG) SPACE SHUTTLE!! The nostalgia wave hit me like a sledgehammer, and withion seconds I had found a used copy on amazon for £10.

That arrived about 10 days ago, and I have been playing it to death since (just finished all wizard goals (except Jive Time) today!) . And although it's only been 10 days, I have completely fallen in love with pinball. I've found myself browsing sites like ipdb.org and pinball.org, watching videos of tables from the Willimas HOF game, even watching videos of tables I've never heard of, just to appreciate the tables, and the incredible skill of some of the players. That Bowen Kerins dude is really good at explaining his play and his vids are highly watchable.


Now I'm just refreshing this site every hour or so praying for the announcement of the EU release.

 

[shutyertrap]

Fast forward to now (I'm 35), and I'm still massively into video games, and pinball was largely forgotten. I was browsing IGN a few weeks ago and saw a review for TPA, and immediately tried to snap it up. Frustratingly, it wasn't out on PS3 in Europe yet, but during my googling, I saw that the same company (Farsight) had released a disc version of classic Williams tables last year. Whilst browsing the review of it, I saw that it included (OMFG) SPACE SHUTTLE!! The nostalgia wave hit me like a sledgehammer, and withion seconds I had found a used copy on amazon for £10.

I know of exactly the sledgehammer you speak of! It's actually hit me a coupla times. I got really into Virtual Pinball and downloading all the tables I could find back in 2004. After a while, the lust to play faded, other things and games came to the forefront (I'm looking at you Guitar Hero!). I was looking up some info on Zen Pinball and Pinball Hall of Fame kept being mentioned. I knew of the Gottlieb collection, but as I am not a fan, I never checked it out. Then I noticed mention of the Williams collection, and my interest was piqued. Finding out that Whirlwind, my absolute fave, was on the disc I immediately sought it out. 2 months later TPA was announced.

I feel your pain waiting for the PS3 versions, but trust me when I say they're worth the wait and oh so much better than the disc. Nice story by the way.

 

[Richard B]

Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter II, Samurai Showdown, and their sequels / updates, among others, caused me to miss out on a lot of great pinball. It wasn't until I got a hold of the SNES ports that I started getting into pinball in the mid-90s, right around the decline of arcades (largely because many of these games were well-ported to the SNES, and later the PS). My enthusiasm didn't really take off until VP, PHOF, and, of course TPA, which sent it into the stratosphere. Machines are so much more enjoyable when you can practice at home, learn the rule set and commit it to memory, then play it IRL.

 

[jaredmorgs]

It's hard for me to work out what the origin of my pinball obsession was, however I think it might have been a pre-90's Playboy pinball down at my local bowling alley in Milton, Brisbane. This was when I was about 10 or 12. This would have been my gateway drug into Pinball.

I found a couple of orphaned credits on the machine, and began to play it. I sucked, but there was something about it that made me not care.

Unfortunately the "parents" of the orphaned credits came back and being duckheads, they switched the machine off while I was playing it. This kind of made me shy away from pinball, because I associated the conflict experienced with the pinball game with negative feelings.

Then when I was in junior high school, we had a local sports outing to the same bowling alley, and they had Fish Tales there. I *invested* $1 for a game, and was caught "hook, line and sinker" (pun intended).

In pinball's heyday of the 90's (well at least the heyday of my generation), you couldn't walk two blocks in Brisbane's CBD without stumbling across the cacophony of sound that was a "Family Entertainment Centre". There were two major ones in my town. PlayTime (about 6 locations), and TimeZone (1 location).

My friend stayed down at the Gold Coast for a bit, which had the largest TimeZone in the southhern hemisphere. There was a huge array of pinballs on display, but one he was raving about was a game called "Judge Dredd". He was into comics, and loved the franchise. What impressed him the most was the fact the music sounded so realistic (Judge Dredd being the first DCS title released by Bally).

That cemented it for me. Why would you want to be a Street Fighter "Joystick Jockey"/"Button Masher" when you could interact in such a physical way with a game. Nothing came close.

Then I discovered the holy grail of pinball. A passionate operator opened an arcade almost solely dedicated to pinball machines up on a local enterainment strip called Petrie Terrace in Paddington, Brisbane. I gazed longingly through the window at tables I'd never seen anywhere before. This operator had a Big Guns table, and a Whirlwind table, which in the more modern inner-city arcades just were't being operated. I introduced myself to the operator as he had his head buried in the guts of a malfunctioning machine. He kindly explained basic electro-mechanical theory to me, and that was my start in the amusement machine industry. I was 14.

I worked for the operator for about 10 years on and off as a counter attendant. Playing the games during the down times. Learning how to fix and strip tables.

At one point I actually worked for a rival arcade restoring the sadly neglected pinballs to full operational glory (early 2000s). It was so incredibly satisfying to take a totally stuffed table and repair both the electro-mechanical components, but also replace bridge rectifiers and re-plug cable looms to get playfield GI working again.

My passion for pinball runs deep. Runs long. I will never lose it.

 

[jaredmorgs]

... I've found myself browsing sites like ipdb.org and pinball.org, watching videos of tables from the Willimas HOF game, even watching videos of tables I've never heard of, just to appreciate the tables, and the incredible skill of some of the players. That Bowen Kerins dude is really good at explaining his play and his vids are highly watchable.

http://www.youtube.com/user/CaptainPinball/featured has an awesome collection of Pinball Promo videos, which in your youTube "research" I'm sure you stumbled across.

It's quite astounding to review the promo videos for those tables included in TPA, and just see how photo-realistic they are. I could sit for hours and pour through these promo videos.

 

[brakel]

Before arcades sprang up in the midwest, my brother and I got our pinball fix at campgrounds. My parents had a pop up camping trailer and later a pick-up bed camper. Our family was not into the camping scene but we were into traveling. My parents both worked for the school district and we spent many winter, spring and summer breaks traveling the U.S. and staying in campgrounds. We stayed at KOAs mostly and almost all of the KOA campgrounds had a pinball table or two. You'd find them at other campgrounds but you could pretty much count on seeing one at a KOA. This was during the '70s. Later when arcades started springing up in the area some of the local stores started having video games and pinball machines in their stores. One old pharmacy in town had 2 video games and 4 pinball machines in the back. Unfortunately it was not to be enjoyed for long. Our village board passed an ordanance barring gaming arcades from the village. The ordinance limited stores to having 2 or fewer games. Some just removed them altogether and others removed the pinball and kept the more popular video games. An arcade did eventually open up just a few feet over the village line but they did not carry a single pinball game. My pinball days were over by the time I was in High School as my parents love of traveling faded as they grew older (I was the last of 6 kids). In college I found pinball machines much more accessable and started playing a lot more. Although there were no arcades near my school, the school itself had a half dozen machines scattered around campus in cafeteria lobbies, the Union and other social gathering spots. Also the town had plenty of bars with tables in them.

I would bet that the village ban of arcades would have been unconstitutional but no one ever challenged it. Ah, so many games I could have played!

 

[Jay]

When I was a child, I used to watch a game show called The Magnificent Marble Machine that featured a 25-foot long pinball machine. I think that's what got me hooked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU7n6Ncojx8&feature=youtube_gdata_player

When I was in college in the late '70s, there was a small arcade next to the cafeteria. I spent a lot of quality time with Fireball and Gorgar. When I graduated, I got a job running rides at an amusement park, and every break I'd head to the arcade to play Space Invaders (the pinball machine), Black Knight and Flash Gordon. At the time it seemed like there was an arcade in every town. So I got to play lots of different machines. At the time, my fave was probably High Speed. In my travels to amusement parks, I've found lots of frozen-in-time arcades with old EM machines in good condition. Then I got some of my own. (For those who travel: Canobie Lake Park in Salem, NH, and Cedar Point in Sandusky, OH, have some great old arcades. And each of them also have the legendary Hercules!)

I'm glad that pinball is now so popular in digital form, but nothing beats the feel of a real table!

 

[Matt McIrvin]

(For those who travel: Canobie Lake Park in Salem, NH, and Cedar Point in Sandusky, OH, have some great old arcades. And each of them also have the legendary Hercules!)

Unfortunately, the machines at the Canobie arcade are now in a terrible state of disrepair. I was just there a few weeks ago, and the situation hadn't changed from last summer: the only one I could find that was really playable was their Lord of the Rings, and even that had a droopy flipper. On many of them, the flippers are too weak to make most of the important shots.

 

[Matt McIrvin]

I'd been vaguely interested in pinball in my childhood but hadn't spent much time trying to play it, unless you counted plastic toy bagatelle games and Atari 2600 Video Pinball, neither of which bore much resemblance to the real thing.

I got hooked in the course of typical graduate-student work-avoidance behavior during the 1990s golden age. I had a friend who was much more into it than I was, and we spent a lot of time hanging out in the arcade of the Lanes and Games bowling alley in west Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also at a nameless, shady arcade near Downtown Crossing in Boston that had a lot of good tables. I never got that good at pinball, but I loved playing it and managed to evolve a little beyond the random-button-spamming stage.

After that stage of my life, I didn't get the chance to play real pinball that often, but when Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection came out for the Wii, it reawakened my interest. The tables there were mostly a little before my heavy pinball-playing time; they were ones I'd seen as a teenager and wondered about, or briefly and unsuccessfully attempted to play. It was great to get to know them. But if/when Farsight ever releases sims of Twilight Zone and Star Trek: TNG, that will be a major-league Nineties nostalgia experience for me.

 

[Matt McIrvin]

...Oh, yeah, and before PBHoF, I'd gotten briefly addicted to the free sim of Royal Flush for classic Mac OS, a port of the Broderbund PC game that had been released by its author when the commercial project died. That gave me a hankering for realistic sims of real tables that PBHoF and PA eventually satisfied. Unfortunately the switch to Mac OS X and Intel gradually killed the Royal Flush port.

 

[shutyertrap]

Shady arcades were the best! Dark rooms, the glow from the machines, disgusting floors you'd have to think twice about picking up a dropped quarter from, that smell. It pretty much was a nightclub for those that were too young to get into real clubs! Now if you're lucky enough to find an arcade, they're lit up like a Vegas casino, filled with redemption games that are only slightly different than their Vegas counterparts.

 

[mmmagnetic]

I had this little thing here! I just recently remembered it, no longer have it, but I remember it took several batteries, at least two of these really big ones for the motor that shook the "bumper" on the table and a different set of batteries to power the scorekeeping and such. Considering how much batteries cost I might as well have played a real pinball instead

And actually, I can´t really remember when I first got interested in pinball machines. Thanks to german overregulation arcades for young people never really existed in Germany, but we had some pinball machines at a restaurant where my aunt lived - no idea what that machine was because I got to play it so rarely. I´m sure pinballs must have always drawn my attention as a little kid - these things look like huge boxes full of blinking Lego pieces, oversized dioramas of wonder. And actually, that´s what I still find so incredibly cool about them!

I also once visited a very old vacation park in Bergen, northern Holland. They mostly had huge trampolines and stuff like that, but I distinctly remember a corner with REALLY old arcade games. No pinballs as far as I can remember, but old electronic games where you would control a little bike over an obstacle course - everything controlled electro-mechanically, this thing must have been from the 70s.

I have a soft spot for old arcade stuff in general, a sense of nostalgia for a phenomenon that almost entirely passed me by. It´s a shame, really, I would have loved it so much.

What got me into pinball properly, however, is indeed the pinball arcade. I didn´t really like all these older pinball videogames, they always looked to dull to me and lacked the spark that the real tables have. Now I finally have the chance to sink some more time into these machines and actually understand how to play them. And it´s quite ironic it took so long for videogames to recreate pinball in a relatively realistic fashion - I remember that weird alligator pinball game for Gameboy, man, I´m almost certain I played that game even less than Tetris (which I HATED as a kid).

And really, I´m sure TPA will relight gamers interest in pinball - I can only see the fanbase for these old machines growing. Sure, you can´t walk easily into an aracade anymore and choose between three dozen new machines - but now you get to pay a couple of bucks on your console or smartphone, play with these tables a little bit, and hopefully be engaged enough to do some deeper research into the genre. I don´t think pinball will ever REALLY die