Aw I thought that said paintball museum, and I got really excited for a second…
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Looks amazing. My dad would have loved this place.
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New York CIty has a great place called Modern Pinball. One admission price for unlimited play.
the “pinball museum” in vegas also has a bunch of old arcade games:
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I’m planning to take Mr. Bells on a date to ours. If he doesn’t take me first!
https://www.seattlepinballmuseum.com/
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Did somebody say pinball?
If you’re looking for pinball to play in your local area, try https://pinballmap.com/, you might be surprised.
If you’re in the Kansas City area, I’d recommend checking out one or more of the following:
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403 Club
- Pinball bar with 11+ games. Frequently hosts launch parties for new releases.
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Pizza West
- 7 games plus excellent pizza and pasta.
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Knub’s Pub
- 7 games in a bar and grill atmosphere.
Not near me, but I haven’t seen them mentioned yet:
- The Texas Pinball Festival
- I’ve been the last four years. 400+ games under one roof and all on free play.
- The Texas Pinball Museum
- There’s a better overview here. I haven’t been yet, but it’s run by some of the organizers of TPF.
- The Roanoke Pinball Museum
- I haven’t been here either, but I’ve met the executive director a couple of times, and he seems nice.
I personally own two relatively obscure games:
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Space Gambler
- Manufactured by Playmatic, which was based in Spain.
- It contains pretty obvious rip-off versions of R2-D2 and C-3PO on the backglass.
- Almost no information exists among the pinball community about Playmatic or its games. If you have any information about them, I’d love to find out more.
-
Laser War
- This is the first game manufactured by Data East
- The backglass artwork is so 80s.
- The soundtrack is a banger. If you look in the right places on the internet, you can find video of my daughter singing the song that plays during the game over sequence.
That’s all I brought for show and tell today.
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I didn’t know about this place… IIRC there was a place like this in Georgetown a while back. In recent times I’ve visited some good arcades (with pinball and video games) in Austin TX and Delray Beach FL (the latter had Skee-Ball lanes from like WW1 or so). MOM’s (organic grocer in my area) put a pinball arcade in the store near me when it reopened last summer; they had a Concorde-themed game and I think maybe a few others with analog score counters, i.e. old enough where you really have to earn a good score.
I’ve got a Baby Pac-Man machine in the basement that needs a new MPC board; I’ve been putting it off for years and years.
yes! we’ve been there. it’s great.
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I highly recommend the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas: http://pinballmuseum.org/
Ground Kontrol here in PDX has quite a lot of machines as well: https://groundkontrol.com/
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It’s probably coming at some point in the future. Of course, it will only be fun if it’s an interactive museum, like this one!
But if you ever DO get down to Asheville, that is a fun place to go. That and the Moog factory are worth the time to get down there. Plus, some great book stores, including one where you can get a drink.
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Excellent video! It featured a couple of my all-time favorites, Fireball and The Addams Family.
Fireball was the pinball machine that my father (RIP) raved about because it had a feature he had never seen on any other machine: A spinning disk in the center of the playfield that caused the ball to do all kinds of crazy acrobatics. I was thrilled when I finally found it in the arcade at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk and got to play it. It absolutely lived up to his raves. Great artwork on the machine, too, as evidenced in the video.
The Addams Family would have been one of my favorites even if it didn’t have the licensing (although that added to its charm for me). It had a similar mechanic to Fireball with “The Power”. When you activated The Power a hidden disk under the playfield started spinning with an electromagnet to cause the ball to zig and zag in crazy ways. The sound effects and music for the game were top notch as well. Someday I really want to have that game.
My personal collection of pinball machines is limited to three: Williams’ Cyclone from 1988, Gotlieb’s Slick Chick from 1963 and Midway’s Flying Turns from 1964. My uncle gave me the '60s machines several years ago after owning them for decades. I purchased Cyclone, which was the pinball machine at the movie theater I started working at at 16. Pinball machines came and went but Cyclone was the one that the whole staff gathered around and played. It doesn’t have multiball or extra flippers but it’s a very solid, fun machine. The band Mr. Bungle even sampled the game’s sound effects on their song Carousel. I mean, who doesn’t love the carny yelling out “Hey, you with the face!” to get your attention?
I haven’t gotten to any of the pinball museums like the one in the video or the one in Las Vegas. They are definitely on my bucket list, though. The thing I love about pinball machines, even the bad ones, is the self-contained little world underneath the glass that you get to interact with.
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That.Pinball. Scared the hell out of me when I was a young kid. Growing up during the 80s meant to be exposed to tons of sex and violence.
Oooo - the Moog factory. That’s cool. I’ve been to the Spam museum… that’s all I got…
Well, I used to work at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Museum.
It’s like an Iron Maiden/Alien mashup. Yeah that would have freaked me out too.
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I would play that.
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That’s not a table…
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Meh it’s H.R. Geiger (well inspired by), everything is dicks with his art.
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I played the hell out of that game the summer of 1988 – that one and Pinbot. Before that, my friends and I played Comet (Cyclone’s “predecessor” game) every day at lunch (along with Super Mario Bros., which was in a side-by-side cabinet with Hogan’s Alley). Comet had a heckler’s voice, too (the guy in the dunking booth drop-target). I got pretty good at pinball, playing those particular games – anything older than that is (to me) very difficult, and it’s what I meant earlier about really earning one’s score.
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Giger. Also, vaginas.
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It’s fun and it’s free! It was cool seeing how these instruments are made and hearing about the history of the company.
That’s cool!
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