There aren’t any 18 year olds regularly posting here because of the price of pins - not nostalgia.
@MajesticPinball, you’re in your twenties, aren’t you? And got into pinball through EMs (which are cheap-er…)
Erm, I first played a full-sized pinball machine in 2021… The pinball machine I played in my youth, I already owned, and has - sadly - been broken by my sons (it was a little plastic thing, after all).
There are people coming into pinball. Mostly, I admit, in the States. People on the forum keep complaining about us, often because we’re blamed for not understanding value and driving up prices. I’ve just explained why. I have no nostalgia because I never played pinball in the 90s. I’m not in my 50s either (although, admittedly, I’m not as young as
@David_Vi,
@Lecari and
@MajesticPinball). Some of us got into pinball through Zen Pinball, Pinball Arcade and so on. I had a slightly more circular route - I actually owned a bunch of dexterity games (like crokinole and Tumblin’ Dice) before I bought my Fish Tales.
If you imagine someone coming into pinball through a computer game, playing Twilight Zone, playing Fish Tales, looking up the prices and realising that there is a nearly 3x difference in the price of these two pins, can you imagine why the prices seem off to me? I must have played Fish Tales on iPad hundreds of times before I bought one with the topper missing. To me, Fish Tales is a mobile phone video game that happens to have a seriously fun physical version.
@Sgt GrizZ, I’ve had our Fish Tales for more than two years now. We’ve had a bunch of pins come in and out, in that time, and I’ve probably played 100+ pins on location. It’s not going anywhere and, in fact, it probably gets played more than our other pins put together. As I say, a dexterity-based mobile phone app that happened to have a seriously-fun physical version. And, no, never watched an episode of Twilight Zone. It‘s about as familiar as Tudor cooking or Roman bathing practices (in fact, probably less so).