Any PINBALL players or collectors out there?

Delt31

Delt31

Member
With the latest pinball theme being an absolute monster hit (HARRY POTTER), I thought I would take a pulse about how many play pinball here. Trailer below:



Bought my first pin in 2015 and addicted ever since. Curious how many gamers here are also into pinball?

Usually the reaction from people is surprise as they thought pinball was no longer being made. Then I tell them the price and they go into shock (10k is pretty normal….. and that Harry Potter machine goes up to 15k for the collectors).

So if you're a collector, what do you have? Favorite games? Excited about the new Harry Potter? I'm excited about the new dune. My favorite game is stern's Jurassic Park and JJP's Pirates of the Caribbean (super rare game now, has gone up in value almost 8k to 20k which is nuts).

And if you have never heard about this website, it's great to get a good intro into pinball.

www.Pinside.com
 
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I'm fortunate to have a few really good local pinball places to get to play all the classics and the newest tables. I mostly do vpin though. Would LOVE to get some real cabs some day, if I ever get a clubhouse to store them :P
 
I wish I had the space for a full sized pinball machine. I remember sinking soany quarter into the terminator 2 pinball machine back in the days
 
I had one as a kid growing up and we loved it. Great to play when friends came over. WE got a pinball machine a NES and remote control cars all for one Christmas in like 85 or 86. It was a good year.
 
That Harry Potter pinball looks really swell. I would pay 5, maybe 6 hundo for it.

Oh it's 15k? Well, guess I won't be a pinball collector even if I did have room for these things.

How many machines do you own mister OP?
 
I've got a Twilight Zone which I bought about 25 years ago for £900. I'm not a huge fan of the modern stuff with LCD monitors in the backboxes, but I'm glad people are still making them at least, even if they've lost the plot regarding pricing.

For me the early 90s was the best era. Pat Lawlor was like the Miyamoto of pinball back then, he designed my three most played games from my student days (Funhouse, Addams Family, and obviously this one).

NeoGAF image upload isn't working for me right now, but I'll post a few more pics if anyone wants to see inside this monster. I need to open it up to change the rubbers soon (one of the slingshot rubbers has completely decayed, haven't changed them in 15 years). Just waiting for a new set to arrive.

pin.jpg
 
bender said:
Don't forget bout the maintenance required.
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I would imagine they are a maintenance nightmare with so many moving mechanical parts, especially the older machines.
I was never really a pinball guy, despite growing up in 80's/90's arcades where there were always a row or two of them.
The arcade in my local mall had a great selection, but they were right next to a sit down vector graphics Star Trek game that I probably fed enough quarters in to buy 20 times over.
 
Succesfully replaced all the rubber parts today - the first time I've actually done every single one of them. That's a good couple of hours work, with a bit of soldering to fix a dodgy connector too. Maintenance on these things is fun.

I took a few pictures. Twilight Zone is known for being possibly the most complex pinball ever made, and getting to some of the perishable rubber parts means disconnecting and removing the mini playfield, which I'd never actually done before.

nkGDXXCTDsqeOQkJ.jpg

^ The mini playfield with its magnetic 'flippers'. There are rubber parts underneath, as well as some on top which were extremely tricky to put on and required dismantling it.

Ne94kGlFb9Mf3MXa.jpg

^ This is what it looks like underneath. The wiring harness for that mini playfield is on the left edge, near the lowest yellow flipper coil.

backbox.jpg

^ The CPU board, sound board, dot matrix controller, power driver board and flipper controller in the backbox. This stuff is beyond me, so if any of it goes wrong it's time to pull the board out of the machine and send it to an expert.
 
Never had one. Our fam grew up on consoles and Apple II. But my bro's friend down the street had one. Nothing fancy like a pricey arcade machine. I faintly remember it being pretty plasticky so probably a machine bought for a couple hundred bucks somewhere buying one meant for families.

I played it a bunch of times going over to their place and thought it was the best thing ever. And as a kid, I sure sucked at pinball. Even as an adult. Was never good at that shit. But my older brother was awesome at it. Still is. One time, we took our nieces to Chuck E Cheese maybe 10 years ago. I killed time dabbling in the arcade and lost my tokens on some pinball machines fast. My bro played the same machine and lasted on one token. I'm at a table not far away eating and glimpsing over and the guy is standing there like a statue playing forever. lol
 
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Nice to see tables are still being made! I've given up on owning one, too much maintenance and the space required for them. The fix for me was getting
I've got all the original tables, over 100 before they lost some licenses. It still has a good amount, but not like it used to.
 
I've been on the fence about getting a digital pinball machine. Apparently you can mod them and use pinball fx3 and coinops.
 
MrTroubleMaker said:
Nice to see tables are still being made! I've given up on owning one, too much maintenance and the space required for them. The fix for me was getting
I've got all the original tables, over 100 before they lost some licenses. It still has a good amount, but not like it used to.
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Pinball arcade is ancient software. It's all zen with pinball FX now. I love the vr version they have. Though the fan made stuff on VPX and FP is usually superior.
 
El Muerto said:
I've been on the fence about getting a digital pinball machine. Apparently you can mod them and use pinball fx3 and coinops.
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I've tried various emulators, but compared to the real thing it's like a light gun game vs an actual shooting range. The gameplay is all there but there's something fundamental missing from software reproductions.

No matter how good the ball physics can be, it never fully replicates the randomness of an actual pinball table. You can feel all the mechanical parts moving as you play. Simple things like the knocker in the backbox - a coil that fires a bolt into a metal plate when you score a 'special'. It's like an explosion, loud enough to startle you, and you feel it through your whole body.

I'd be interested to hear about the modern games from Delt31 Delt31
 
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MrTroubleMaker said:
I don't like pinball FX, its too gamey. Pinball arcade is closer to actual tables with accurate physics.
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IIRC Pinball arcade are ALL real tables. Pinball FX has a bunch of ones they invented (which I agree tend to lean too heavily into animations and movements a real table could never do) but their williams tables and whatnot have pretty good physics if you tweak the settings.

Alas, all the Stern tables are on Pinball arcade and I think ghostbusters is the most recent one there. Good thing VPX and FP have renditions of almost everything up to the past few years. Can't wait for a DnD conversion.

The other problem with Pinball Arcade is that it doesn't have a 'free' cab mode. I think you can still pay $150 to unlock it but thats lunacy for a game that old. At least the zen programs and zaccaria have that as a base option.
 
I've been collecting/playing/repairing pinball machines for 20 years now. Unfortunately the pricing of the games has gotten out of control, it's not nearly as cost effective as it used to be. Used to be you could buy a broken used game for $1000, fix it and repair it so it would be worth $1500, then hold and play it while it slowly increased in value over time (like classic cars). Covid caused prices to get out of control and now the whole market is a mess, prices are falling for the first time ever on the older games.

It doesn't help that new in the box pinball buyers can't control their FOMO, they buy all these new games before the software is even remotely close to finished, leading to games that are out for years that aren't complete. It's like every new pinball machine is released on early access and people scoop them up for some reason.
 
AJUMP23 said:
I had one as a kid growing up and we loved it. Great to play when friends came over. WE got a pinball machine a NES and remote control cars all for one Christmas in like 85 or 86. It was a good year.
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Daaaaaang! You're rich rich!!!! Can I hold $5
 
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I love pinball and have a few really good places near me that I can play. I've wanted my own machine for so long but the prices are just way to high.
 
I would buy an Addams Family or Attack from Mars machine if I had the space.

There's a big arcade at the mall near me that was previously Gameworks. Downstairs is all prize games while upstairs is traditional games, including pinball. They do release parties there for new pinball machines. The last one they did was John Wick. Pretty neat.
 
MrTroubleMaker said:
I don't like pinball FX, its too gamey. Pinball arcade is closer to actual tables with accurate physics.
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I too much prefer pinball arcade. I own some of the Williams tables on both pinball arcade and Pinball FX and can confirm they play better on Pinball Arcade.
 
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Days like these... said:
Tut tut, I am disappointed my brother in Christ. He's brown he must not be American. Go to church to tomorrow ask for forgiveness, pray 50 hail Marys and 100 lashings and you're good. It's ok if you're not Catholic
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You are brown? Is thought you were a caucus with a giant head.
 
AJUMP23 said:
You are brown? Is thought you were a caucus with a giant head.
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I got to learn you on geography and ethnicities too? Not just jeebus and religion. The Caucasus mountains are between the black sea and the Caspian sea intersecting Europe and Asia. People from the Caucasus region are known as Caucasian mainly Georgians, Azeri, Armenian. But no one is Caucus

Here is some nice Azeri music


100 hail Marys, 200 Our fathers and 500 lashings now
 
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Some interesting comments on this thread - love it. Appreciate all the input.

As someone that has 12 machines, mixture of old and new, the newer ones certainely have longer staying power b/c the code is so much more involved. One thing I noticed about the majority of non pinball players is that they don't even understand that there are objectives to pinball game, besides just keeping the ball alive!

On the flip side, regarding the older games, yes the code is much more shallow but there is a certain charm to them that makes things interesting to come back. A lot of the magic now is done on the LCD for newer games where in the 90s, with the dmd and competing against arcade games, the magic was in mechs on the playfield. So it's really cool to see the hand from Addams Family grab the ball, the ringmaster from Ciquis Voltaire come up from the PF, the genie in Tales or the castle go down in Medieval Madness. Things like that have you coming back to see again and again.

Regarding virtual vs real thing - there has been a significant amount of progress made in the virtual space but imo, it's exclusive to VPX. Homegrown program that is LIGHT YEARS ahead of Pinball FX. The physics on VPX are very realistic and combine VPX with VR (using quest 3) and a pinball controller that feels like you're using the real thing with haptic feedback, and it's a great alternative.
 
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I love VPX but setting it set up is brutal. The baller installer makes it a lot easier but it's still a mess with all the options, monitors, resolutions, toys, light's, etc there are a lot of options making it hard to have a "standard" install. Not to mention all the media packs, tweaked playfield, and the fancy video clip DMDs and what not.

Really fun when all up and running but it feels like a job at times :P

PFX, for all its limitations, is an easy 85% solution.
 
Delt31 said:
As someone that has 12 machines, mixture of old and new, the newer ones certainely have longer staying power b/c the code is so much more involved. One thing I noticed about the majority of non pinball players is that they don't even understand that there are objectives to pinball game, besides just keeping the ball alive!
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Game room pics please!

One of the criticisms of Twilight Zone back in the day was that the ruleset was too complicated for new players to understand. You can activate multiple simultaneous modes for super high scoring, and even though they gave it an extra wide body to accommodate even more toys, it's so densely packed that there are counterintuitive things like shooting the middle right side of the playfield to load the gumball machine in the upper left.

So while it had a lot of appeal for expert players, it didn't necessarily succeed in holding the attention in arcades, beyond the initial wow factor of its looks. Still the second biggest selling game of the 90s, though.

I guess modern pinballs that aren't intended for arcades can go all out with difficult rules and wizard modes.
 
There's a place within an hour of me that has many classic and modern machines. I go about once a year and it's $20 for unlimited play so a decent value.

One day I'd like to own a refurbished machine like maybe Diner or even something older. Newer machines are fun too, but there's something simple and charming about some of those unlicensed machines from the late 60s through early 90s.
 
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