Vintage Flipper World 2018 - Tickets on sale

[Crawley]

Just sending out a friendly reminder that tickets for the 2018 Vintage Flipper World event are on sale:

– Friday May 4th, 2018, 4pm to 10pm
– Saturday May 5th, 2018, 10am to 8pm
– Sunday May 6th, 2018, 10am to 4pm

Can't recommend this show enough. 400 free to play pinball tables in the best condition you'll ever find at a show. And some amazing rare ones to play.

Each year they bring in some new unique pins. Including last year where they had a playable Williams Typhoon. What is that? Well it never got made. Harry Williams had designed it and created the playfield but never made it past the white wood design stage. Well it was built based on the designs specs and playable at the show last year.

You can see the entire list of tables that will be there this year with the link above. But here's some new rares that I noticed in the list for this year:

1986 Bally Bullseye - conversion kit game where only 150 were made
1985 Zaccaria World Defender - the only 2-ball multiball version of this
1988 Zaccaria Fast Track - only known one to exist

And of course they have the usual rare games to play like Big Bang Bar, linked Fast Breaks, BMX, Cactus Canyon, and my favorite Af-Tor.

They sell a limited number of tickets to keep the crowd low. The last two years were certainly larger crowds but still small enough the pins outnumber the people. If you want to play pins this is the show to go to.

 

[Heretic]

Wish i could dude i cant even make it toplayexpo blackpool ukin feb*sad but slightly angry face*

 

[Crawley]

So this happened this last weekend and as always was fantastic.

I'm only going to post pictures of things I found interesting since the venue doesn't change all that much since it's one persons collection - can see the previous threads for this event to paint a better idea of the place. But picture entering a large building. There's 4 rows of pinball machines, and each row you go down there's machines facing you on either side. There's probably around 250 pinball machines in this one building - all unique (except for the 2 linked NBA Fastbreaks). Then there's a second building with about 150 more pinball machines. And then another building with about 100 more. Total unique pinball machines this year was 410.

The crew here is fantastic too as all 410 pinball machines were playable on the start of the event on Friday and all 410 up and running on Sunday when it ended.

There's nothing like this show if you just want to play pinball.

So I'm just going to call out a few of the interesting machines that popped up this year rather than most of the common/popular ones.



Here's the line Saturday morning. The entrance is behind this small building here, which is where food was served (burgers, hot dogs, pulled pork sandwiches). The crowd was a lot large than on Friday but because limited tickets are sold there are very few problems playing any table. On the most popular ones you may have to wait for one person. Maybe two.

Luckily I had already picked up my wristband for Saturday on Friday so was able to skip the line and walk in through the side entrance.



This room housed a few tables other people brought. So there was a Iron Maiden, Houdini, JJ Pirates of the Caribbean, and my most wanted to play Defender.

I had only gotten to play Defender once before a few years ago when someone (same person?) brought the machine to the Chicago Expo. I loved it and still really had a blast playing it. And this time I could finally hear the classic sounds. The machine was in mint condition and played great. Everyone in that room was more interested in all the other games so on Saturday I played like 7 games in a row without a single person lining up to play next.



The aforementioned Iron Maiden - which I forgot to play! And a Spooky Pinball Domino's Pizza. Next to that was a Zaccaria Universe which was interesting. But there was another building that housed about 15 Zaccaria machines.

 

[Crawley]

But I was very interested in playing this machine. It's a Williams Firefly. It never made it in to production only the design documents were created. And someone ended up taking those and building the actual machine.

It's very unique in that it has 8 magnets on it, including one between the flippers. It gives a bit of a floaty feel to the gameplay when the ball passes over them. But my understanding is this machine is still being tweaked and was being built up to a few days before the show started. It was still very playable.



Here's a closer look at the playfield. Each of those metal circles are where the magnets are. Hopefully this one gets completed as I'd love to play the final version.

Something similar was done last year with another Williams concept EM called Typhoon. And that was playable at the show last year (and this). And is also pretty interesting. Can read a little about it here and see some pictures: http://vfwpinball.com/makehtm.php?game=1972 Williams Typhoon,wms_typhoon

 

[Crawley]

Each year I go to the show the first thing I do is play Algar. It's the unofficial sequel to Gorgar. It's a widebody machine and just has a bonkers layout. Very confusing. But I'll play several games of it and get a better understanding of it.

But the other thing I do is usually find a table that I hadn't played much before and just play a ton of games on it. Initially I thought it was going to be Truck Stop, which I hadn't played before. But I found myself continuing to go over to Atlantis which I've played a little bit last year and at some other shows. Wow Atlantis is a lot of fun! It's not a deep game for rules but the gameplay is decently fast, sounds are good, and a nice lite show. I'd label it a comfort game. But man I played that over and over again for the two days I was there.



Another one I kinda surprisingly played a lot of is Robo-War. Being a Gottlieb I kinda ignored it at most shows but figured I'd give it a shot. And it's kinda fun. Simple rules but I like the sounds and the play is fast.

Arena I've never seen before. It has a very interesting skill shot area where the ball goes in this circular area and rolls up and down a few lanes. If you're lucky it will land in the center lane which scores you the skill shot. Other than that though the table didn't grab me.



Fast track is another really rare game from Mr. Game - in fact this is probably the only one. But it was fully playable here with all the original sounds and voice call outs. The video monitor is like something out of the 80s. There wasn't too much too the game other than a bunch of ramp shots - so it was super fast. But was really glad I got to try it out.

 

[strells]

Unfortunately, all your photos are not displaying.

 

[Citizen]

The pictures are viewable if you click on the Photobucket replacement images. Lots of interesting tables there, nice to see. Thanks for posting them. Fast Track is the only pin Mr. Game made with a normal cabinet, with mostly leftover parts from before they changed their name from Zaccaria. The funny thing is, that probably makes the one Fast Track in existence easier to maintain than Mr. Game's later tables with those crazy cabs. I would also love to play Firefly some day, even though I don't really like magnets.

 

[Crawley]

Ah dang it. Photobucket is pretty much crap now. Will move to another image storage site and repost.