The past, present, and future share a show floor at Pinball Expo 2026
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
https://pinside.com/pinball/machine/beat-the-clock
I liked several others too, I'm old enough I recall the time before video games being born in 1968. Pinball has the visceral feel once you master the gentle nudge and flipper skills.
This machine's "grin factor" was marked as 11 (naturally!!) and yeah, it was tremendous fun. It felt like I imagine it feels operating a seriously big machine gun! There was momentum of the heavy steel balls in the feeder so one couldn't swing it around willy nilly, so one had to really put some force into it. It was also really loud, and the feedback from the pusher vibrating through the handles was very visceral. Loved that machine!
I've been fortunate enough to come across it a couple times, it's pretty cool.
Indeed it is. I've been a pinball enthusiast since the 90s and in recent years pinball is seeing a truly incredible resurgence. In the early 2000s the number of places you could play pinball was lower than any time since the 1930s and the world was down to one (barely) surviving pinball manufacturer who very nearly went bankrupt in 2010. Yet in the last decade the number of manufacturers, new titles launched and machines sold has kept increasing fueled by a new generation of barcades and a flood of new home machine owners and collectors driving creativity and new technologies into the hundred year-old hobby.
One thing TFA didn't mention is that even small towns now have growing hobby communities based around leagues and tournaments. Tournaments are usually at barcades or local pin shows and weekly league nights are held at private collector's homes where all the machines are on free play. We've lived in our suburb for years with no idea there were nine houses within a mile of ours with 10+ pinball machines hiding inside. It's not uncommon to walk into a league night and get to play a rare, lovingly restored, museum-grade classic pin you'll never see in a barcade.
Local leagues are welcoming to newcomers, can be very social and are the closest I've felt to the vibe of my dad's bowling league or my mom's bridge club. A few years ago my wife joined a league and now dozens of 'Pin Neighbors' we never knew existed are new friends. It's also the best way to play a huge variety of machines and get better at pinball. Plus, if you're interested in getting your first pinball machine, there's a mantra in Pin culture to 'Keep good pins in the community', so the best machines for sale your area are offered on private local community forums first. Outside of the rare garage find, most of what's on local CraigsList or FB are considered 'trash machines'.
Our game room collection of 7 pins was acquired gradually over the last 20 years as my wife and I fell in love with various titles and found one at a good price. It's diverse with machines built in each decade from 1970s EM to 80s & 90s solid-state to 2020s ARM CPU, IP networked machines. Interestingly, every decade is fun in different ways because pinball kept evolving. Older machines tend to play slower and focus on making precise shots while newer machines have deeper rules with combos, stackable modes and rare but massive bonuses.
I look up from my beer, which I kinda don’t want, and say to my friend, “there’s gotta be something better to do than sit here getting drunk..”, and as I say it, I look over his shoulder, my eye caught by the glint of some shiny thing. Looking closer, it’s a sticker on the divider of our booth, ‘Pinball Crew Vienna’ .. “like .. we could find and then play pinball, for instance!”, I exclaim, kind of half assed.
My friend looks over his shoulder too, and takes a picture of the sticker, and goes quiet for a moment while he looks things up .. “well, there’s a tournament tomorrow, and its in our neighborhood .. I’ve never played pinball, whats it like?”
What?!! Where?!
“In the IKEA building at the Westbahnhof”. A building I had, to that point kind of despised, because I loathe IKEA in general.
Nevertheless, the next weekend, we put away our aversions to global particle board distribution, and make our way to the Westbahnhof .. Jo+Joes, a hostel I had no idea existed, occupies the 5th floor. The elevator opens, and it is like the pearly gates spreading wide, disco balls for miles to see, a joyous bright and pastel atmosphere, people laughing everywhere, smiles from wall to wall .. and oh, so many pinball machines!
“VIENNA IS LIT!”, scream the posters, and the immediately recognizable sound of flipping spinners, drop target resets, inevitable drain lanes and bumpers galore, greet us.
I immediately sign up for the tournament. I haven’t played pinball properly - for fun or for competition - in 40 some odd years. I’d grown up on a beach esplanade in Australia, my Dad’s burger shop, where I’d witnessed the many much loved pinball machines of my distant memories, slowly at first, and then suddenly like a fever, be replaced with Breakout and Space Invaders, the first ‘real computers’ I’d ever seen as a small kid.
All the memories come back. The love I had for that one drop target that’d get a free game, the shock of the bump targets, perfectly aligned, sending another coin into the slot. Straight down the middle. The strange, delightful whiff of solenoids and window cleaner. The internal wiring I felt in myself, changing, adjusting to new things learned. That old familiar hacker vibe, at its root, analog and perfectly shaped.
So, I played for 6 hours straight, just blistering everything I could extend .. and I came 63 out of 65 competitors, and it was a BLAST!
Just walking past the 30 or so machines, crammed into this crazy hostel I’d not known even existed due to my prejudices and bigotries, replaced now with curiosity and a kind of relief .. all the good times came flooding back - and now, as a seasoned systems engineer in his 50’s, it was just the right time, too. Newly divorced, trying to find myself a bit, in a city that will eat you alive slowly, this was the perfect new (old) hobby for these weary bones.
I play every week. I joined a pinball club, started my own team, made us t-shirts. The weekly journey to FlipperAsyl (perfectly named) injects life and joy and vigor into things again.
The IKEA building is our meeting point now, they have two tables permanently installed .. Wrestlemania and Avengers. We only play Avengers, our little group have a competitive edge, and every month one of us takes the throne, having learned some new tricks or two. Eventually we connect with the other folks in our neighborhood .. slowly all our high scores are erased by one FLO, who we track down and invite and challenge, on the regular.
Pinball is a quantum machine for calculating fun and disappointment, but mostly fun. It is powered by human soul.
Play it with your friends, teach each other things as you learn them, get to know the table and get to know yourselves. Make new friends - you inevitably will.
Each table has lessons to learn, the generations themselves visible in every machine. The soul of thousands of fun-seekers, if you pay attention to the quirks and rhythms. The spirit in the machine is really there, I promise. You can feel it. Really.
Had Barracora at home for a few months, she felt positively possessed, and for many weeks, was our little shrine. Got Swords of Fury at home, now. My pinball club leases tables to trusted members - a solution to the GAS that afflicts the pinball-collector crew. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome - i.e. too many tables not enough room). We all have our favourites - some prefer newer tables, I like the oldies of course. The ‘narrative tables’, with stories, the ones which saved pinball from oblivion. The older tables, parlor games with very simple, often very frustrating mechanics. Until you master them, of course. I know a kid who didn’t know what JAWS was until he played the table, learned the story a bit, and finally had what he needed to understand the movie. Game design, in pinball: an utter necessity for user experience designers, software developers, cucked AI coders, alike. There are PhD’s to be had on the subject, ffs!!!
There’s another twist. Pinball is a male-dominated sport. Our little team of discarded men, new fathers, old fathers, some of us recovering addicts, some just in it for fun - we have bonded over the tricks and details, this past year. It has been a truly unifying experience for our little club of men. But FlipperAsyl has ladies nights too - necessary because we men do tend to dominate - and that is also fun to observe at a distance. There is cross-pollination too of course - I regularly learn major things from some of the nice regular ladies in the Asyl. It has been soothing and healing.
We’ve already mapped out all the pinball machines we can find in the city, before one of us discovered the pinball map .. so now there’s a day trip planned, to the Pinball Museum Budapest, and our little merry crew of pinball misfits will make that train journey some day soon. It’s gonna be GREAT.
So .. yeah .. “VIENNA IS LIT!”, is happening again this year, in case any HN’ers are in town and want another GREAT hobby to apply themselves to .. hey, if you’re out of town, maybe get yourself a plane ticket, get yourself booked into JO+JOES, and get ready for 2 days of PURE FUN.
https://events.eventjet.at/e/vienna-is-lit-wiens-groesstes-f...
See you there!
In our area we now have a women's league and women's tournaments. My wife and teen daughter are both serious competitors each with a growing shelf of trophies. My daughter is currently ranked in the top five in our large state and wife is in the top 20. While I love playing pinball, I've never been more than an average player and don't really enjoy playing competitively. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to engage with pinball and no one minds when I tag along to league nights and competitions since my pinball knowledge and repair skills are always in demand. My wife jokes that I'm the live-in repairman for her pinball collection :-).
As a long-time collector of vintage 8 and 16 bit computers of the 80s and 90s, it's easy and fun to work on pins made between ~1980 and ~2010 (the Solid State era). Almost all of them are based on 80s 8-bit CPUs and have an architecture not much different than Commodore 64 / Atari 800 era home computers. When I first opened the back box of a pin and looked at the boards, I was surprised to realize I recognize all the chips! For example, our Simpson's Pinball Party made by Stern in 2003 has the exact same CPU as my first computer from Radio Shack made in 1981.
I've played some pinball when visiting Europe and found it interesting the mix of vintage machines has a different flavor. Although machines of the last ~20 years had good global distribution, pre-2000 the major manufacturers were all based in Chicago and selling mostly to North America. However, in Europe I've noticed 1960s to mid-80s machines have a heavy Gottlieb influence as Gottlieb was the only US manufacturer with a strong European distribution partner.
One of the fun aspects of early pinball history is that pre-1980s the business of pinball was a different world than after. From the 1930s to 1970s, pinball was incredibly popular in bars and pubs because it could be used for illicit gambling, with winnings unofficially paid in drinks or under the table cash. Being illegal in some states and cities led to lots of interesting shady, mob-adjacent characters being in the business of pinball and there are rumors Gottlieb's European business thrived in part because it was a conduit for money to move from the continent to the Chicago mob. Looking at photos of Gottlieb's 1970s management, they may not have been mobsters, but they definitely look like guys who knew mobsters :-). Of course, pinball changed dramatically once Pong, Pac-Man and Space Invaders showed "Amusement Machines" could make a billion dollars in quarters without the risk of prison or mob turf wars.
When visiting Zurich a couple years ago, through a friend I met a local pinball collector with a stunning private collection of well over a hundred machines from the latest releases to perfectly restored 60s, 70s and 80s machines, some of which I've never seen in person but immediately recognized because they're historically notable and extremely rare. All lovingly displayed in museum-grade themed rooms inside an unmarked office building. I spent over three hours with him just walking through his collection and talking about the machines. It was especially cool to discover and play some vintage Italian and Spanish machines which were never exported to the US.
Nice one! :)
Yes, as an avid retro-collector who is also a bit of a synth nerd, I also have a great time when I encounter a pinball machine with an AY-3-8910 chip in it, or so .. okay its not the sexiest of the synth chips, but it sure is nice to hear some of the early sound design for pinball which pushed it to its limits.
I think you're accurate in your assessment of Gottlieb/Europe .. and also that pinball seems to have been one of the places that a lot of old 8-bit chip inventory ended up .. its a lot of fun seeing System 3 and System 7 boards and making the same kinds of comparisons we've been used to doing in computing ..
Those 8-bit CPUs didn't end up in pinball machines because they were old or cheap, they got there back when they were brand new, bleeding edge and very expensive. The history behind how pinball machines became CPU powered in the mid-70s is surprisingly interesting. Starting in the 1920s as simple boards, with pins and balls which incrementally evolved over decades to include mechanical score-keeping mechanisms and then electro-mechanical bells, lights and coils, pinball had never been a "tech" business. Yet the need to attract players and keep them pumping quarters had gradually turned pins into fantastically complex electro-mechanical computers. They were essentially state machines with layers of conditional branching logic and computed score tallies which made them increasingly hard to design, manufacture and repair, causing prices to spiral out of control and margins to shrink.
By the early 1970s this arms race was already a serious problem on its way to being an existential threat. Dave Nutting, a consulting engineer and erstwhile entrepreneur with an interest in transistors had been trying to apply discrete solid state parts to make non-pinball amusement machines with marginal success when he saw an ad for the first commercial microprocessor, Intel's 4-bit 4004, and immediately ordered one of the first development kits. He thought the integrated processor would be much better than stringing together dozens of separate logic chips and maybe powerful enough to replace the state machine logic in a pinball machine. He successfully pitched Bally on funding a proof of concept based on an existing Bally EM machine. Although it did eventually (mostly) work, there were teething pains and it was unreliable. Being unfamiliar with bleeding edge R&D, Bally quickly lost interest but never asked for their EM 'donor' machines back and Nutting used them to try to interest other pinball manufacturers, sending one to Mirco Amusements in Arizona. Mirco had just a hired few engineers away from a nearby Motorola office and on seeing the Nutting prototype, those former Motorola engineers realized the new Moto 6800 8-bit CPU might be even better and quickly produced a 6800 CPU version of a Mirco EM machine which Mirco showed at the 1975 Amusements Expo. Although Mirco did manage to ship some CPU-based units of that EM, they too were notoriously unreliable, making "Spirit of 76" CPU machines extremely rare today.
While the first two attempts at CPU pinball weren't successful, others in the industry including Williams saw the 6800-based boards in the CPU few units Mirco shipped and quickly set to copying the design (copying designs was rampant in pinball), then other companies copied William's copies. And that's how almost the entire pinball industry ended up using the Motorola 6800 family of CPUs for the next 30 years. Interestingly, the only major manufacturer who didn't was Gottlieb, who instead adopted a strange, little-known Rockwell CPU largely because Rockwell created a pinball CPU board based on their dev kit and licensed it to Gottlieb for free to get the design win (a common practice in the defense industry).
It's a testament to the power of inertia that for over 30 years CPU boards and code were incrementally improved the minimum amount necessary and incessantly copied back and forth between manufacturers. Stern made the last pins based on the Motorola 6809 around 2007 and they only stopped then because the chips were finally discontinued and couldn't be ordered anymore. Weirdly, Motorola's 6800 CPUs weren't chosen because they were cheap since they were actually the most expensive 8-bit CPUs when they launched (about 8x more than the later 6502 which powered the Apple II, C64 and Ataris). It was just that the 6800-based design existed and it was easier to copy something that worked than hire engineers to design something new. It's fortunate that the 6809, a much expanded and improved 6800 which launched in 1978, turned out to be a CPU now widely regarded by experts as the fastest, most powerful 8-bit CPU of the 70s or 80s (largely because is was partly 16-bit). That plus the fact pinball machine logic doesn't really need more than 64K of RAM or 16-bit processing meant manufacturers had little reason to develop something new until they were finally forced to.