I think more broadly, arcades have been coming back in US. Part of it is the nostalgia aspect but I think more so, they have finally figured out a sustainable business model: become a bar.
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.
Yes, the barcade business model works. Mostly as a bar. Most often the machines are owned and operated by an outside contractor or dedicated hobbyist (who knows how to fix them.) The games make it a destination for families with kids, and the adults play some but really spend on food and drink. Same as how a tabletop game store is really making money on the food items, not the trading cards.
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.
> Yes, the barcade business model works. Mostly as a bar.
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.
Not the original commenter but pinball is huge in Seattle, they might be referring the Shorty's, which has been around for 25 years. They also have an arcade including an old school bowling machine and an awesome vibe even if you're not gaming. Just down the street there is Jupiter with even more machines. I'm not so huge on the arcade/pinball so there's more I'm missing too.
Way back when we needed practice we would put ashtrays under the front legs and slow the game down. It improved my game turning pinball from an exercise in futility to something fun. Getting close to knocking out the top players, FUK, DIK, and CNT became a goal. I so wanted my initials, TIT up there on the leader board.
Massive opportunity in Atlanta for any barentrepreneur.
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.
Like all things I worry about it being a fad. It’s big now but what’s to say these trends last? It can hard to maximize the investment it takes to make a great repeat experience.
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
Fetch is fantastic! For a long time my partner would bring our dog there on weekday mornings—when it is less crowded—and grab a coffee and work. They have bark rangers or whatever they're called to make sure nobody gets in a fight so owners can actually get work done.
I hadn't ever considered whether the place was a fad or not, but they are definitely benefiting from the trend towards WFH.
The dog bar thing is absolutely here to stay, and it's actually sort of crazy that it took this long. The one near us is more like a dog park that also happens to have a bar and a food truck and good wifi, but it's just such a big win as a dog owner. You get to hang out somewhere actually pleasant while your dog plays in a controlled space with folks watching and breaking up any major scuffles. For a reasonably well off- especially younger- dog owner it's kind of a no brainer.
I guess if dog ownership crashes that would be a problem, but I really don't see that happening any time soon.
The good part is if the fad dies - you still have a bar. one of those businesses proven to make money for hundreds of years (thousands? - I'm not up on my ancient history, but I suspect it was a good way to make money even in BC days). If the dog part fails, just remodel to whatever bar type will make money next. If you are running a business you should have a budget to do a significant remodel every 10 years anyway, 10 years from now you will know if the fad is still going strong to dieing.
It's been a "fad" for about 15 years or so and has a long history before that. I've personally been collecting for 25 years and pinball has never been more popular except in the 1970's.
Super popular here in Seattle. I was talking with a friend the other day about how to start a small metal venue in the area and their advice was to teach dogs to like metal because there's no way you compete with a dog lounge on revenue.
Yes. Rent will eventually approach the profitability of the most profitable business that can be put on that land. In a large and rapidly growing city, "eventually" is very quick.
> the machines are owned and operated by an outside contractor
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.
When real money is in the line, physics and real touch matter. They had to change roulette because certain players learned minor flaws delivered an advantage.
> 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.
"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.
Indeed. Certainly not arguing that point. The challenge is in seeing how close you can get, and if getting that close results in something that is a lot of fun and worth the effort. And of course, if you can get something that is very good, then the variety of the virtual approach takes hold: something like VPX can emulate everything from electromechanical machines to the latest creations, with all the classics in between.
Galloping Ghost outside of Chicago charges $25 for unlimited play. There is no option to pay any other amount and there is no food or drink. They have around 900 games going as far back as Pong.
It's a little weird to me to think of 50+ year olds hanging out at arcades.
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.
It was, but there were pinball machines at bars then too. Its not new. As an 18 year old we played pinball and drank the bar closed.
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.
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?
Dave & Busters’ arcade games are not real arcade games; they are more like casino games. There’s no Galaga, no anything that has levels or characters, it’s all giant wheels that you spin or darts that you throw or bags that you punch. It lacks all intellectual appeal, and honestly seems more like a gym than an arcade.
It's worth calling out for younger folks, or those who didn't visit them before that happened...
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.
I am pretty sure local game stores make money when they sell booster packs to a kid at full price, kid sells them the best cards at a 30% discount and then the store resells it for market value. Sure there is risk here but they make it very hard to lose. Running the store lets them have options to purchase cards at a discount every time the sell a booster pack.
> Yes, the barcade business model works. Mostly as a bar. Most often the machines are owned and operated by an outside contractor or dedicated hobbyist (who knows how to fix them.)
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.
It's way more than just the sphere, it's simulating all the surfaces and materials that the sphere interacts with. Particularly the mechanical pieces with their own movement as well.
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.
It is absolutely possible to model a pinball machine very accurately with existing CAD software, and for much less money than that.
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.
Is your CAD software simulating the increase in temperature as the coil fires frequently throughout a game, with the ensuing changes in coil strength and rubber resilience?
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.
> Is your CAD software simulating the increase in temperature as the coil fires frequently throughout a game, with the ensuing changes in coil strength and rubber resilience?
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.
I don’t doubt that these interactions have some minuscule effect on pinball performance, but I’m skeptical that you couldn’t get close enough with some relatively simple models. Eg count the lights on and model a draw in remaining power available to solenoids.
Are plane simulators really simulating fluid dynamics in hydraulics, during real-time simulation? Is that even doable (assuming the simulation wants to be realistic).
Boeing is likely doing that in their CAD - but these are tests they they can throw at a super computer of some sort and let run for a week.
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.
Of course we can simulate a sphere, but to the point of the well written comment you a responding to, the simulation models in pinball video games don’t even come close the the complexity of the physics of a real world pinball. I played a lot of pinball as a kid, and I’ve played many pinball video games since. I was recently at one of these ‘barcade’ venues and tried my hand at pinball thinking I would be good at it. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I lost all 3 balls immediately just about every game. It’s incredibly difficult and unpredictable. Go to your local barcade and try for yourself :)
I think it's also a subtle reaction to the false promise that we can wear an Oculus, live in a pod, and be happy. Turns out that just going out and doing things IRL is more consistently interesting and has fewer bugs than your typical AAA video game in 2023. Better yet if you can drink while you're at it.
> Also it is just me or do pinball games just never seem to get the physics of the ball right?
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.
There's also just the fundamental difference in motives— PC pinball is designed to be fun, while arcade pinball, at least historically, was designed to eat your money.
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 ;)
Mortal Kombat was designed to be Pay to Win. Someone reverse engineered the arcade version and later-stage opponents were programmed to strike you like 2 frames before you would have hit them, and there was a decay each time you put a quarter into the machine.
I liked the Fighting Game PvP model, where if you won, you play your next game for free. You could go to the machine with one quarter and play all night if you were skilled.
I don't think there's a single game in the MAME collection that truly can't be 1CC'ed. Of course what degree of expertise should be considered 'reasonable' is subject to debate and our expectations how enemy AIs should behave.
I'm pretty sure many games cheated or you could only truly master them after you had spent way too many quarters (enough that any casual player wouldn't have any fun with them).
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".
Pinball's great at eating the money of casuals, while letting even moderately-experience players have a pretty good time for very little money :-)
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.
> while arcade pinball, at least historically, was designed to eat your money.
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.
Instead of getting the balance right, the obvious answer is this is a business proposition, so cheat. Instead of having a fixed difficulty, you decide on a minimum coins-per-hour revenue, and tilt the table ever so subtley against the player if it looks like that revenue target isn't going to be hit.
If you'd ever talked to a pinball designer you'd know that their primary goal, without question, is making a fun game. No designer ever designed a game with coin drop in mind, except for things like appealing to a broad audience.
I've played pinball for most of my life, and definitely agree with this. At a certain point the physicality is not reproducible—there are too many layers to it. No two machines are identical, and they change over time. The state of the playfield, including when it was cleaned/waxed, the strength of the flippers, and everything else about the machine impact play in ways which good players can and do account for. For instance, it's possible to anticipate how much english is on the ball when it comes off a rubber at an angle and how it will react when it hits the next surface, but it won't be consistent between machines, so you need to play enough to get a read on it. Great players can do this quickly, and then adjust their play accordingly. It's bit like rebounding in basketball in that you have to anticipate where the ball is going to bounce based on very small trajectory deltas, but the advantage is you can move the machine.
Some indies still make arcade games - Killer Queens comes to mind, and I'm pretty sure Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge got a full on coinop release. Of course, Japan still puts out all manner of new machines with all kinds of creative gimmicks (especially music-based, or arena fighters), but they're rarely available stateside and they might not always be the vibe you're looking for, if you're trying to scratch a 90's nostalgia itch.
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.
Yes, but there's not nearly the variety. Mostly new arcade machines are either retro stuff, or real pinball, driving games or other large cabinet experiences, or fighting games. Not a lot of new standard sized standup arcades that aren't fighting games (or at least, I'm not aware of them). The reality is all these machines are basically PCs now, and where's the excitement from playing a PC based arcade game on a ~25" screen for 50 cents to a dollar when you could play it at home on your PC or your PC based console.
> The reality is all these machines are basically PCs now, and where's the excitement from playing a PC based arcade game on a ~25" screen for 50 cents to a dollar when you could play it at home on your PC or your PC based console.
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.
> The reality is all these machines are basically PCs now
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
Arcades are unfortunately slowly dying in Japan, but it's still a much bigger business there than in the states. Most new arcade machines since the late 2000s are off-the-shelf PCs with (already for its time) outdated graphics cards.
Depends on the location, many of the best arcades in Japan are multiple floors, and each floor usually has a theme, so like the ground floor is crane games, and then a floor for shooters/shmups, then a floor or two for fighting games, and then a floor or two for music games. Maybe a floor with card games or those giant horse racing games...
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)
The thing that baffles me is we're still stuck in these form factors that are mostly made for
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.
Video games have had a format like that, intended specifically for bars and restaurants, since pretty close to the beginning. They're called "cocktail cabinets".
> Video games have had a format like that, intended specifically for bars and restaurants, since pretty close to the beginning. They're called "cocktail cabinets".
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.
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
Well one of the reasons that a pinball video game is always going to be easier is that by their digital nature they're significantly more deterministic from a Newtonian physics perspective.
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.
>they have finally figured out a sustainable business model: become a bar.
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.
Part of it is the nostalgia aspect but I think more so, they have finally figured out a sustainable business model: become a bar.
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 would say the age factor is a decent issue. I remember the first of these style bars turning up about 15-20 years ago and while they had some reasonable amount of attention initially it wasn't sustainable. One's that came along in the last 5 years have stuck around for the long haul.
There is also a barcade near me that has a model I like (and is probably advantageous to them for staffing). It is a pour-your-own beer/wine/cider bar, so it isn't a full bar. But the RFID wristbands they give you for the pour-your-own also work on the arcade machines which is pretty slick.
I think you're spot on. Where I live there is a huge arcade in what's effectively an old millhouse in a suburb, over 3 floors, and has been selling beer for a while. It's so popular it's spawned a bunch of smaller arcade bars in the city centre.
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
The most realistic game of pinball physics-wise for me is Zaccaria. Its selection is of uneven quality. I recommend sticking to the historical solid state and electro mechanical tables, over the deluxe or remakes. My favorite table is probably Farfalla. VR mode is quite immersive. It has a free time limited mode for any table, and tables are quite cheap on sale.
I am on the East Coast and there are probably at least a half dozen places places to play in my area that have ten or more machines. Many bars now have at least a few machines. I'd say there is a large technical community here and pinball does really feel at home in nerd/tech culture.
>I think more broadly, arcades have been coming back in US. Part of it is the nostalgia aspect
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?
Do we have a word for "pining over something you never got to experience?" The whole born in the wrong generation effect. FWIW, arcades were always alive and well in movie theaters. Maybe not the big, expansive arcades, but <30 year olds at least understand the concept (also Dave & Busters, GameWorks, other similar outfits)
Which ones have you tried? My understanding is that the VPX physics engine is the closest to the real thing at this point in time.
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.
Yes, it's an idea, but in the 1980s when arcade games were common, many "normal" bars had video games and pinball machines in them. These days they seem absent except in those dedicated barcades.
Pinball has had a pretty interesting hacker-y sort of space for years, so I'm glad to hear this.
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.
I remember dropping in on a place that specialized in restoring old pinball machines oh say 10 years ago? They were just REALLY starting to pick up back then and already were swamped with work they were telling me. Some of their restorations were going for like 10k+$... They were also restoring one of those electromechanical dog racing games for a casino. Honestly if anyone wanted a job in working with these things there's probably really good demand for skills.
My gut says we're going to see a bit of a meat space backlash to the world of automation, remoteness, anonymity, and modern conveniences. The hipsters of the mid-aughts already did to some extent, but I think this will be far more mainstream than even the re-emergence of vinyl records.
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.
I think people want real, tangible things. They want to hold them and feel them and interact with them. They want real relationships in real places doing real things. The virtual world dominates many of our lives from how we interact with people, work with people, and socialize (like this forum). As the virtual world has replaced more and more of our time it makes sense that we crave a physical, tactile space.
While I agree that people generally want these things, not everybody values them equally, and aren't willing or able to expend the same amount of resources and effort to get them. Most people value local stores which sell damn near everything they need and are staffed by their neighbors... but for many, the resource and effort savings afforded by Amazon are more valuable to some extent. I think that these things, to some extent, have become a luxury.
Honestly, I wish I could. Given, it's anecdotal, but even in my comparatively educated and aware social bubble, anybody who isn't directly involved in tech just glazes over when I start to talk about it privacy and surveillance, government or commercial. They are all against it theoretically, but it's just too abstract for them to practically reason about out of context and doesn't have negative effects on them that they are aware of yet, so it's just too easy to shrug off. I just can't see regular people pushing back against that any time soon.
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.
The neat thing IMO about virtual pinball and real pinball is how they complement each other. I've yet to find a virtual pinball with really satisfying physics simulation, but that's ok, because for me the real benefit is being able to learn the rules without the pressure of dropping quarters. Thanks to the tutorials in Pinball Arcade (RIP), I was able to reach Final Frontier on TNG the first time I played a real one.
The Legend is well supported by the community. There are 3/4th replicas mass produced that I believe can be modded to run anything. Also produced with official licenses (Arcade 1UP).
Not exactly what your asking for, but VR pinball games are excellent. They also sell pinball controllers so you can simulate the same hand positions as a real pinball machine, so while you’re wearing a headset you’re looking down at the right angle and get the feel of real pinball.
I just saw this video of Ronnie O'Sullivan falling over due to trying to lean on a virtual snooker table, and I'm almost certain exactly the same thing would happen to me the first time I tried to nudge a VR pinball machine.
A few years ago, I found an old electromechanical pinball machine out for the trash. At some point, the back box connector (the part that connects the square top part with the scoreboard to the table) was severed.
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!
Slightly related but I once got a 'behind the scenes' of a bowling alley, I was amazed to see (not sure if still the case, could very well be) how 'analog' the whole machinery was, with a big wheel and lots of mechanical entrapments to pick/collect/replace pins. I think the technical constraints demanded a lot of ingenuity back then.
If I remember correctly they added digital score keeping as an afterthought using camera's (+ software + screens).
Unfortunately, traditional pinsetters are well on their way out. All of the chains now use new models with strings that are much cheaper to operate. Non-chain bowling alleys with traditional pinsetters almost all get displaced by competition from chains and other issues.
I was watching a hacking video on elevators, and some of them are still run entirely analog with no real computers, it's all relays and miles and miles of wire.
I’m 38 and I just learned that pinball machines have a script you’re supposed to follow. Like it plainly tells you do this then this then this to “beat” the game. Of course it just loops back to the beginning when you do. A lot of these machines tell you this on a little white card sometimes in the lower left of the glass top.
Also a lot of machines have midnight madness mode. If you’re at an all night arcade and it hits midnight, multiball!
At our local barcade, after years of visiting, I got really into Medieval Madness, and I got a good laugh at myself after reading that little card and thinking "oh, imagine that, there's actually useful information in the instructions."
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.
I haven't gotten into Black Knight so much, I need to give it a few more plays! All my quarters usually get pumped into Medieval Madness and (when it's rarely working) Banzai Run. I'm decent at MM, and just awful at Banzai Run - but the temptation of that upper (vertical!) playfield is too much to resist.
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've probably got similar taste to me—I like a table that's a bit relaxing to play, at least once you've got a feel for it. Black Knight (and 2000) are a lot more challenging than my usual sweet-spot, but do at least feel fair, which is why I still like them. Lots of alarmingly-fast losses when you're starting out or if you aren't really feeling it that day, but fun if I feel like being very engaged (and after a couple dozen games to learn how to not lose within seconds, LOL)
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.
> Monster Bash has a voice that sounds like Katey Sagal (Peggy Bundy, Leela/Futurama)
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 an awesome post, thank you for taking the time to type it up. You nailed where my tastes lie, so I'm really excited to put some time in on the tables you recommended. Theater of Magic and Attack from Mars are both at my local spot, so I'll definitely pump a few bucks into those the next time I'm there.
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!
One of the blogs that gets posted here a lot (I don't recall which) is someone who teaches some sort of history of video games. One of the things he has to convince his students of is just how impossible it is to figure out certain old PC games without reading the instructions (IIRC Ultima IV is one where students would just be 100% confused).
Even now, a little reading goes a long way. I have to constantly heckle my son while playing the new Zelda game - "hey, maybe that person is telling you something you want to know!"
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. ;)
That’s a great machine. I found it after playing through all of Attack From Mars, also by Bally. I really think those machines were the apex of pinball. Not too mechanical, not too digital.
One of the biggest steps on my pinball journey was an older player explaining to me that most machines (the ones that weren't super-ancient, anyway) had one or more "stories" or progressions of play, and that playing well required understanding those. From there, you kinda learn to "read" a table before you try it, between LED screen directions and printed directions under the glass and looking over the table layout & elements. Gives you a big advantage. I'd poked at pinball machines every chance I got (which wasn't that many) as a kid, but that part had somehow never clicked.
Another surprise was that about 50% of playing well is in the hips, not the fingers.
That card is relatively new. Back in the old days, I wrote in another comment here I started playing pinball before The Who penned the song Pinball Wizard, there was no card. You had to figure out the rules of the game by playing the game. Pay attention to the lights, they direct you to what you need to do. They don't always make it clear, but they give you an idea. Generally speaking, a solid light means you've already achieved that goal, and a flashing can mean many things but most often it indicates a goal that's available for you to achieve in a set timeframe, usually until you've lost the ball.
We had pinball machines at my last job, and it was the first time I’d ever realized that there were goals to achieve and modes you could intentionally get the machine into. It suddenly became a lot more fun.
If you’re in the Bay Area, you take part in the boom for a flat admission fee (all machines are free) at the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda. It started as a one-room collection and has since grown to have a big collection of really well maintained machines. They’re also affiliated with Free Gold Watch near Haight in SF, which has a good rotating collection of machines, both brand new movie tie-ins etc and a room of vintage electromechanical machines. It never gets old hearing the buzzing and bells from an old school machine…or putting a quarter into the Big Lebowski table and hearing “where’s the money, Lebowski!”
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.
Yes, I always love checking out a new one! I'll also recommend pinballmap.com as a good resource for finding pinball machine collections both large and small. I've used it traveling to find little arcades in old malls and great machines in laundromats.
About a year and a half ago I bought 3 pinball machines along with a bunch of arcade boxes (and a shuffle bowler) as a lot. Price-wise it was a pretty good deal on the pinballs with everything else thrown in free.
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.
I considered buying a pinball machine in my 20's. An older, wiser guy I knew told me,
"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."
Now that I've got a basement and am reasonably stable, the itch is coming back.
I've had the itch for over two decades at this point, but the prices of the machines I want keep inflating faster than my stomach/budget for spending money on pinball machines :-(
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.
The trick is to find a local repair person and vet them. If you buy a new modern pin by a company still around, you won't have many issues with a home use only pin.
If you buy them brand new, you will never put enough plays on them to get them to the point they'll break. They are well made.
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.
Do you know a good place to shop for new-in-box pinball machines?
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.
Everyone is mentioning Stern in the comments, but Jersey Jack pinball is superior in many ways (and costs more). Don’t ignore them if you’re looking to buy.
A local-ish distributor [1] of American pinball machines lists these: American Pinball, Bitronic, Chicago Gaming, Jersey Jack Pinball, Pinball Brothers, Stern Pinball.
€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?).
On a bit of a tangent, pinball was banned in NYC until 1976 - ostensibly because it was viewed more as a form of gambling then skill. A movie - "Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game" was released last year and is based on the efforts of Roger Sharpe, a GQ editor, to overturn that ban. [0][1][2]
And to mythbust here: The common legend and shallow wikipedia blurb goes that Sharpe called out one shot in the courtroom and made it ("the shot that saved pinball"), which astonished the jury into ruling that pinballs are games of skill.
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.
My family goes to Seattle Pinball Museum https://www.seattlepinballmuseum.com/ in International District. Play pinball for a while, then go out for Chinese or Sushi. All machines are marked with Fun/Grin factor on the scale from 1-10. First time I went there, they had this really unusual machine that emulated aircraft machine gun. It shot a neverending stream of pinballs at about 2-3 bps (balls per second) with hundreds of them flowing through the system at once and feeding back into the gun. You controlled it with two handles on left and right of the machine, like a gunner in the WW2 aircraft. You had to shoot out the target lights at the board to get the score. It was incredibly noisy, tactile and FUN. The label on it correctly stated that it was "14 out of 10" on the grin factor scale. The lady running that place told me they hardly ever turned it on because it was so incredibly loud, and it was gone next times I went there.
I went to Vegas' Pinball Hall of Fame a few weeks ago and it's a great place to go. I had one free day in Vegas before a work-related conference, so I took the morning and spent around 4 hours there.
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.
Various manufacturers have been listed, but there are actually several different companies building them currently:
- 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.
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.
Ah, I was recently shocked to see that a local arcade had a Mandalorian pinball machine. I couldn't believe something that new was being pinballified. It sits across from the old Simpsons arcade brawler that kids can't get enough of.
Chicago Gaming just announced a non-remake, Pulp Fiction. The designer and programmer are veterans from the Williams days (Mark Ritchie and George Petro)
I went casually looking around a couple weeks ago to see what a used pinball machine might cost. Down the rabbit hole I went until I landed on a subreddit where I learned that pinball absolutely exploded during the pandemic and the prices for both used and new machines nearly doubled. I also learned that there's a nontrivial cost-of-ownership at play, since (especially for older machines) it can be difficult to find replacement parts, and you need to be handy enough to diagnose and fix problems.
It's definitely never been a cheap hobby. A common folly that I heard from multiple people involved in the scene was that they would buy an old and broken game with the idea that they would repair it themselves, only to find that the cost for parts would greatly outweigh any resale value the machine would have. Fortunately some push through regardless simply because they enjoy the game itself.
That was never really true - I used to make plenty of cash refurbishing machines, playing for a bit, and selling them off. It can get pricey if you're trying to source unique parts for low-volume games but the vast majority of wear parts are generic and not that expensive. Mostly games are just dirty.
I worked in a video arcade in college, and pinball machines were the bane of my existence. They broke down easily 1000% more often than anything else. Data East pinballs were particularly shoddy.
I've been building my own pinball machine from scratch on and off for the last several years. What I love about pinball design is that it combines so many disciplines: woodworking, metalworking, CAD, electronics, low level & high level software, game design, storytelling, blinking lights, and competitive fast action play.
Neat! Building your own pinball game is 90% mechanical, 90% electrical, 90% artwork, 90% software, 100% labor intensive! Good luck in completing it, and maybe take it to a pinball show that features home-brew games.
Hey Randy! Love your work on Archer and wish Stern could have kept that theme instead of Iron Maiden. I was able to play Archer at some festival (maybe Pin-a-go-go?) and could tell it was something special right away.
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.
Lol! I'm reminiscing about Archer on Twitch this Saturday ( https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/archer-homebrew-tabl... ) with some obscure video and other crap. I taught KME all I know about pinball, right around his 10th birthday! All hail the GOAT!
Hey freezy! I'm amazed at what you've been able to build with VPE and appreciate the consistent push to bring Visual Pinball into a modern era. Seriously great job with untangling that legacy codebase and keeping the good bits (physics, existing tables), and replacing everything else.
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.
I grew up on pinball. My dad would buy/fix/sell pinball machines and jukeboxes as a side hobby - and of course we'd keep some for ourselves. I absolutely LOVED learning how these machines worked. Being able to go from a beautifully designed playing field to then flipping that up and seeing how it all worked on the underbelly. That trait of learning how things worked under hood has carried with me ever since (and as a SWE - I use it everyday!).
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.
The article is pretty brief, and doesn't get into what has been (to me, at least) the biggest surprise in recent years: the proliferation of new pinball manufacturers.
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.
wrote linked article, and it's truly been incredible to watch over the last few years. most times if a manufacturer can get a product to market (harder than you'd think), it sells pretty well.
If you live in the Bay Area, check out the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda. You pay an admission fee and then all the games are free play. https://www.pacificpinball.org/
I've been playing pinball since before The Who penned the song Pinball Wizard. A couple of things pop out. One, the game was $0.25 back then. It's a bit surprising to hear it's still $0.25. It should be roughly $1 per play to keep pace with inflation. Related to that is they were expensive to operate. It got to the point it was rare to find a machine that was 100% operating - and that was in the 70's! Once of the reasons they quickly went away in the 80's (to my dismay), was due to their expense in comparison to the digital arcade games. The kids were pumping quarters into both, but the digital arcade games required far less maintenance. So they made more money.
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.
> It's a bit surprising to hear it's still $0.25. It should be roughly $1 per play to keep pace with inflation.
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.
I played pinball at Berkeley bowl for 10¢ a game 3/25. I just played at another location across the island from Pacific and it was $2.00 for 3 ball game. Never going back.
Back around 2004 when we built the FlockBots, a small army of differential-drive robots, we needed a microswitch with an extra-long, 4-5", actuator arm that we could bend to form a bump sensor. There's exactly one place to get such a thing: the pinball machine repair industry. Pinball machines have microswitches with long actuators bent into all sorts of odd shapes to stick up out of the little divots in which balls fall and be triggered when they do so. There are so many obscure shapes that the industry just supplies long straight arms designed to be bent as needed into whatever shape you need for your unit. It's essentially a microswitch with a straightened-out paper clip welded onto the switch actuator.
Seattle area is blessed with a wealth of all ages and 21+ barcades. There's a great one less than 5 miles from my house. I've been a pinball fan for years and still play weekly, playing in a local league pre-COVID. About 2 years ago, I saw a machine with my childhood hero that I couldn't pass up buying. A year ago it finally got delivered. I play at home a few times a week. No big issues with the machine other than one dead "flashy" servo that doesn't work and a stuck target that doesn't impact gameplay. I'll get around to fixing them at some point. FWIW - Here's some info on my big toy:
My dad was gifted an old, defunct Globetrotters pinball machine in the 90s by a neighbor, and spent most of my childhood refurbishing it and fixing it up when it would break down. Lots of fond memories showing it off to my friends, and later pulling off the glass to get a perfect 99999 score!
Joined a pinball league last year after moving cities. Not only did I fall in love with pinball(didn't grow up with any machines in my hometown) its just a phenomenal community of people who get together each week. I highly recommend anyone reading this to look for any pinball leagues in your area. Its a mixture of all sorts of people from my experience and just a wonderful social/gaming environment.
Wonder if there is some lowres analogue revolution going on. I just brought a manual coffee grinder and a vinyl record player...loving them both for now.
Question, I played a pinball video game a while back (Demon Tilt). It was largely just a pinball machine. But it also let you nudge the ball and this was pretty critical to doing well. Are physical machines supposed to have this tilting mechanic? Because I’m vaguely aware that TILT is a thing you can be punished for. And I’m wondering how it is possible to avoid unlucky deaths otherwise.
Real pinball absolutely allows nudging. There is a sensor in the machine, a pendulum hanging within a ring so that it makes contact if you move the machine too far. The game software will assess you with a warning at first, and then if you go too far the penalty is to shut down and lose the ball in play.
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.
Not lifting, but you can push the machine horizontally from your normal position with your hands on the buttons. With your hands at the front corners, you can push north-south or east-west or on any such axis. The machines are designed to allow this; the legs and feet have some flex.
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.
If you're playing a pin that's sitting in "cups" (prevents it from sliding) a non-tilting shove on the side will in fact lift the corner slightly -- I measured with a 3-axis accelerometer back in the day. Rather surprising...
You can slap the buttons hard to get the table to wobble a bit, you can tap the cabinet with your wrists, you can grab the table tightly and move a leg or a hip in the opposite direction while keeping your body rigid, you can even slide the whole table if you're feeling desperate and want to burn a warning.
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.
Imagine you're gripping the handlebars of a bike - you can push it a little bit laterally, but much more by leaning into a turn. Gripping the side of the machine to nudge works in the same way - you can slap it a little bit to get the ball going off its designed trajectory, but you have to use your legs and core to get it to move a lot, and if the game is set tight that will usually set off the tilt warnings.
> Are physical machines supposed to have this tilting mechanic?
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.
I watched a video a little while back with a Pinball champion playing Creature of the Black Lagoon, and in his instructions hitting the side of the table to knock the ball some ways was part of his normal play through, even though it potentially risked a tilt.
There is a shop near me that posts pinball repair videos. They buy old machines and parts collections, then get the machines working. They also work on machines owned by nearby collectors, doing repairs and cosmetic upgrades. But they don't make house calls - you have to bring the machine to them.
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.
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.
Pinball is the best game. I used to play the Lord of the Rings machine when I was a kid. You had to collect the Fellowship to get multiball, although there were also a couple other ways you could trigger multiball (with a smaller number of balls though). I always considered controlling multiball as long as possible to be the "goal" of pinball, and of course getting as many free games from two quarters as possible.
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.
That's the Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield. They now have the largest collection of arcade videogames under one roof, and they're growing their pinball collection.
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.
Yes, and when you complete all three movie multiballs, you can then destroy the ring, which requires that you hit the ring to start the mode, make four shots and then get a perfect ring shot (which is way harder than just hitting the ring) to destroy the ring.
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!
Oh the dialogue line for that is, "You must destroy the Ring" spoken very urgently right? I think I remember getting to that a few times although yeah I NEVER managed to actually destroy it.
Hi, I used to be a partner in a now-defunct arcade bar. AMA.
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.
It’s not too bad on modern machines from established players. But those are $10k. The pins at auctions are much more affordable but quite likely have multiple issues — a troubleshooting nightmare.
it's stimulating in a whole different dimension. Hearing that steel ball smack the glass gives the thrill of being hit. Feeling real vibrations in the hands, lights hitting you from different angles, sound. Something akin to a hunters instinct using neural circuitry chasing and hunting and shooting things puts you in a deep in the zone mode at times.
All of what you said is absolutely why ePinball won't ever feel the same. It's a shame - with the price of a "real" machine being 5 digits (USD), I can't ever see myself owning one.. but damn, I want to.
5 digits? There are lots for 4 figures, going rate seems to be around $5k. And if you're willing to fix one up, they can be had for 3 figures instead of 5:
Sure, but everything I've seen in the 4 figures range is MUCH older than I'm looking for or needs MUCH more work than I would like to put in for my first table.
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.
there's an interesting middle ground virtual pinball case that's an approximation. This fella built his own case and everything in between. It was a fascinating project to watch
Who wrote this article? There isn't any mention of the marketing here past new IPs being licensed for machines. The headline doesn't mention the most surprising part of the article (that machines are now connected to the internet for global high scores). They call Rick and Morty a "bizarre cult cartoon". All this article does is talk about how pinball machine sales are up, concludes it's nostalgia, and then lets a guy who's interested in pinball serve as their anecdotal evidence for it being nostalgia. Then mentions some pinball history.
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.
It's a little more than just pure nostalgia considering that new games are being made, notably by Stern (https://sternpinball.com/) and several other smaller companies.
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.
It's interesting how all it takes for something sometimes to boom is to just make it available at a venue with food and alcohol. People mentioned barcades. This also goes for things like throwing axes at a plywood board. Swinging a golf club for people who have good odds of sendign the club farther than the ball. Throwing a duckpin bowling ball like its 1905 again. Shuffleboard is a thing among millenials now, sleepy old person shuffleboard! All because you can get a nice IPA with friends over it or some food. It's too bad a lot of cities are so hard up with liquor licensing or even make a racket out of granting the licenses. Stuff like this should be easy.
That's neat! Wish there was more gaming themed bars around where I live (South Florida) but for wider amounts of games, not just pinball (which is awesome).
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.
Neighbor down the street has 2 nice ones, in addition a basically full-on full size video arcade. During a block party, none of the kids cared about the video games. They were lined up to play the pinball.
For digital pinball, I'd highly recommend Pinball FX. (FX 3 is the old version). The game itself is free with a few included tables and then you buy dlc packs for the (many) tables they have.
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.
Growing up in Santa Cruz during peak arcade, the casino at the boardwalk was one of the best. Not only did they have just about all the arcade video games but also an incredibly deep pinball collection for when you needed something else. My favorite was a pinball machine with a baseball theme that was from the 30's. Most the antique pinball are no longer on the floor but they used to have such a cool collection that you could play.
I prefer Pachinko, a vertical wall of falling metal balls being shot upward and then fall down thru strategically placed studs, lighted barriers, and sometimes returned to the top with flippers, especially played for money.
As a pinhead I love this post and all the comments.
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?
Recently went to a pinball museum. Was awesome. $20 got you play for the whole day, and they had a variety of machines from the early days of pinball to the present. Really helped you see the evolution of pinball from then to now, and because it was a flat payment, I could experiment and play around without feeling like I was burning money.
The one in Asheville, NC? I'm glad it was a flat fee because some of those oldest pinball machines they have are just plain terrible game design. Very unforgiving if you make the slightest error, the ball is out of play.
Really cool place and I'm glad they are keeping those artifacts running.
My tip is to find an arcade hall that is specialized in pinball and that have both new and old games.
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.
Has anyone ever looked into if pinball can be used in the same way that Tetris can for PTSD? Several friends with (C)PTSD love to play pinball, so I wondered if the research supports the whole eye-movement desensitization aspect that Tetris has for trauma patients.
> Even now, in South Carolina, fans are still lobbying the state to lift a decades-old ban on people under 18 playing.
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."
My favorite pinball implementation was a PC game that was one of the first to use hacked VGA modes to get a better resolution. I don't know what I found more interesting, the game itself, or the mode tweaks :-). I'll need to dig deeper to find the exact name...
This would have been either Pinball Dreams, Pinball Fantasies, or Epic Pinball. All of them used the 256kb of VGA video memory to display a playfield several times taller than the screen (a 64kb bitmap), and could scroll instantly just by setting the start-position register each frame.
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.
When you do find one to restore, look up these resources to swap the old processor for an Arduino, download the framework with all the rules for missions and points and so on, and still emulate the old hardware interface:
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!
If you want a Star Wars machine that is reliable and cheaper, the best bet is the Home Pin edition from Stern Pinball. You can get these brand new, and they use modern technology that is much more reliable than older machines. MSRP is $4,999 and you may be able to find one for slightly less.
