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Why i'm into pinball.

The seeker

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Oct 13, 2015
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Northumberland
Having just bought another machine I'm now in the waiting on a delivery limbo - a thing that in the past i used to despise had now become something to savour! you know you have the machine now its just a matter of time before you get it. Ive had a few hobbies over the years started with air fix then computer games, a band then girls then mountain bikes then girls - again, the cars- never buy boxster- people do nothing but take the ****!, then a band again! then out of the blue arcade machines , just the one, I'd always hankered after a neo geo after buying one a white van came up the drive to deliver said neo geo.I could'nt help notice the 5 or so pinball machines next to my neo geo upright. HELLO you can buy these ? you delivered these? since that day I've sucked up every podcast and read every forum on pinball I guess I've owned and fixed around 8 machines but i'm down to a nice three RFM GNR and EATPM - four soon J*B along with couple of cabs the best part is that this hobby is something you can do at home, others can appreciate and enjoy and its kind of a savings scheme??? best of all its simply a lot of fun. what's your story ?
 
Played pinball as a kid in the 80s and 90s in France. Plenty of arcades at the time and you could find a machine in most cafes too. I remember skipping our 2hr lunch break at school every day when I was 12-13 and using our dinner money to play.
At the time haunted house was the most hyped game then.
My brother and I bought our first EM when i was about 16. We paid roughly £50 for it then. And i thought we had been ripped off. I can't remember what it was. I saw the same at the NLP a couple of years back but still can't remember the name.
Continued to play as a student. Clearly remember playing Excalibur then (which is why I have one now) and checkpoint.
Then I came to the UK in the mid 90s. I first moved to Oxford and I remember finding one or two pubs with a game in (road show springs to mind). Then moved to the Midlands in 97 and looked around but found nothing at all. I stopped playing as the games were not available.
It wasn't before 2002/2003 that I realised that you could buy games for not too much money on eBay. My first game I bought then was R&B for 300 I think and DW for 400.
And then it expanded from that.
That's my story. Can't remember how old I was when I first played but probably less than 10. I am now 47. Bloody hobby.
 
I always love to hear people's stories regarding their passion. I can talk to anyone for hours about anything if the person in question has enthusiasm and genuine joy about their hobby.


Not quite a background story from me but I was just thinking about this a few nights ago.

I'm fairly new to Pinball (2 years) so missed out on the golden age of cheap pins. I am also a fairly young chap (35) with a young family. So my spare pinball buying cash isn't as free flowing as many on here. It is hard when you see some guys buying all the latest pins (usually later on in life with no mortgage etc) and I do get jealous. Especially when money I have saved for a pin then has to go to something important regarding family life.
But here comes the point of this,
Pinball is one of the only hobbies I have had (I've done everything) that there is no real rush to get involved. Having been a Retro games collector, the longer you waited to buy something, the more expensive it became. It would gather a reputation and prices would rocket.
The same with Classic cars.
But with Pinball, the amount of new and better games coming out is spectacular. With companies remaking classic machines and themes being re imagined. There isn't that urgency in buying things. Seems the more popular it is becoming again the more parts are being reproduced too.

Sure it will be sad and hard if in 10 years time there's only 2 known locations of a certain pin. But when you can buy a modernish stern for 2.5k now, then games like BK3000 will be just as cheap in 10 years time. Will they last as long as some of the Alpha numeric games, probably not.
Pinball seems to be here to stay for a while.

I guess what I am saying is. It's nice to know that I can focus on important things in life and Pinball will always be there for when I need it. Unlike Arcade machines. They are drying up quicker than a Nuns......
 
For me, growing up in Australia in the 80s it was all about the arcades. I would drag my poor parents ino whatever dingy backalley arcade I could find. Fondest memories are of Ghosts n Goblins, Double Dragon, 1942, Rygar. Hanging around arcades meant you would get exposure to other, more sophisticated amusements too. I distinctly remember a multi coloured shot arrangement that could only have been a Pinbot. My balls didn't last long. I was better at double dragon.

Fast-forward to living in Bondi in the early noughties. Beach Road Hotel with friends every Friday and Saturday, drinking coopers green and generally being lazy and wasted. In one of the back rooms they had a STNG and a TOM, and we got thoroughly addicted, especially to Theatre. The same year I threw a massive house party in my ramshackle group house by the beach, invited everyone and hired a TZ and a Creech from a poor bloke who had to lug them up a flight of rickety stairs. The next day, hungover and in PJs, I played Creech till I got RSI. Hitting the whirlpool shot for the first time that day gave me such a buzz.

42 now and in London with my lovely wife and kids. The pins are back.
 
My first experience of pinball was when I was about 6. Me and my parents would always go to holiday camps in the summer like Havens or Westar. One year the one we stayed at had a WCS in the arcade and I remember spending all the money I had saved for the holiday just on that single machine... I had no idea what was happening but I loved it.

Then when I was 13 I got my first job at a bowling alley changing shoes etc. and in the arcade they had a Roadshow which I remember getting paid my wages and straight away putting the majority of it into roadshow, I was completely obsessed with it big time!

After a few years they moved the Roadshow on and I probably didn't play pinball again for quite a few years. I would occasionally play one in Southend if I was there and fancied it. Then one day I just thought "yeah a pinball machine for my flat would be cool" so bought what was supposed to be a fully working Queens Castle from eBay, turns out it was completely dead, I knew nothing of the forums back then and didn't even know a pinball community existed so the only way to get it working, was to just tinker and learn what everything was supposed to do. I got it working pretty quickly and soon missed fixing and restoring it. So I would then look for project games on eBay. 11 machines later and I'm still doing it and must say I enjoy fixing machines more than I do playing them.

I soon realised that pinball repairs was something I wanted to do job wise in the future, I created a Facebook page to use as a sort of portfolio and named it after my late grandfather's pride and joy showman's steam engine 'The Majestic'.
 
Fascinated by them as a kid, the mid 70s and beyond, before video games took a foot hold in the market and my interest.

I took a bit of a hiatus growing because I was so busy developing video games and besides I didn’t have space nor a female that would approve one at home. As all that happened, pinball took a bit of a background in the 90s.

Finally, happily divorced 6/7 years ago and with space to call my own I indulged, slowly at first, then with a passion until I’d got 18 or so. Then scaled back and climbed up again to 10.

Funnily my creative/building side has made seen me mod my machines and it’s an element I love, with most of my machines are packed with extras.

Currently recovering from stroke, my playing took a bit of a beating, as my right hand is currently unresponsive but I’m working on it eventually coming back. I’ve still managed to mod and maintain, albeit slowly.

Currently planning a home pin room at long last, out of my office building finally,
 
I'm I right that you were co founder of Team17 @Spadge?
If you were, then you are probably responsible for my lack of social life and separation from many a girlfriend when I was younger due to a certain little title called Worms. Me and my 3 best mates must of sank years into that game.
So if you were, I thank you 👍
 
I'm I right that you were co founder of Team17 @Spadge?
If you were, then you are probably responsible for my lack of social life and separation from many a girlfriend when I was younger due to a certain little title called Worms. Me and my 3 best mates must of sank years into that game.
So if you were, I thank you 👍

That’s me, glad you enjoyed.
 
Alien Breed and Superfrog also took a lot of my time Spadge, on my A500 and A1200.
Happy Days
Thanks @Spadge

+1 hats off to you @Spadge

Worms was timeless. From the countless hours I spent on it as a teenager on my Amiga to the great memories I have of the worms battles with uni housemates while mostly under the influence of alcohol. Over 3 years at uni other games came and went but worms and Tony Hawkes 2 were a constant 😀
 
+1 hats off to you @Spadge

Worms was timeless. From the countless hours I spent on it as a teenager on my Amiga to the great memories I have of the worms battles with uni housemates while mostly under the influence of alcohol. Over 3 years at uni other games came and went but worms and Tony Hawkes 2 were a constant 😀

Alien Breed was the dogs.... to be fair it was only EVER eclipsed by one other.. Sensible soccer!! :D

Nice one @Spadge 🙌
 
I still play Project X never mind all that I did play way back when - my hat's off to you sir.


I'm a weird one as far as pinball is concerned. I never really got a chance to play pinball properly when younger, and on a lot of broken/mute machines so I never had a real chance to make it 'click'. The only pinball I ever remembered for any sort of 'gameplay' reason outside of gimmicks everybody remembers at least superficially like TAF's Thing / multiball-onset and A13's crazy multiball, was F14 Tomcat because it was in the basement of a Blackpool hotel our family stayed at once, and my dad played the ever-loving crap out of it - though not very well! - while we played a bootleg upright version of video game Cabal. I eventually started wondering what on Earth all of the Yagov noises were about and was pretty entranced by the taunting game. The one time dad managed to actually score a Yagov kill, and get the oh-so-satisfying death scream sound sample, he shortly afterwards got the ball hung up in the rails as the VUK was getting hilariously weak, and he tilted the machine trying to free it up to no avail so had to turn the machine off and lost the high score he set. I'm still trying to work out how this was really possible on a machine that's close to sanely set up... but maybe it wasn't. But that lost high score and open taunting from that game stuck with me where other pinballs didn't.

After that, nowhere I ever went really featured pinball machines, and I started to get even more heavily into video games. Pinball not a part of my life except for Pro Pinball: The Web, and Timeshock, being amazing, but somehow I hadn't quite realised that these games were slavishly copying game design that existed all over the place already in pinball. I knew they were trying to be as real as possible but I guess I thought the real games could not be as deep or exciting.

Fast-forward until recent years where for reasons I've totally forgotten, I remembered that pinball machine and had a bit of nostalgia about it and tried to find out the name of it. Eventually found it again and landed on this infamous PAPA finals video on the game. Being very much into my ultra-hard video games and music games, I was amazed to see that the game was supposedly so difficult - just made the appeal of that memory of lost glory of beating Yagov even more intense. Setting me a gaming challenge as high as Everest is just a red rag to a bull for me.

I wondered if anybody had actually tried to do the 'impossible' and made a simulation of pinball I could play a la MAME, and stumbled on The Pinball Arcade, and was astounded to see F14 in the game list. Bought all the tables (starting with Tomcat of course...) Went crazy into pinball at long last and made up for the lost years of not being into something that, by all rights, I should have been massively into since I was a teenager.

And because over the years I became a major tinkerer and got myself into what I could only describe as a Lazarus resurrection of a Mazda MX5, I wondered if there was such thing as a cheap, broken F14 machine... and here I ended up on pinballinfo where I got myself one. With current pinflation I wouldn't be able to afford getting even a beater machine, so I remembered pinball just in time.

Nowadays I'm fixing other people's machines more than playing pinball, almost... and polishing up my game to a frankly stupid sheen
 
Getting back on topic, I grew up in Lowestoft, which had at least 4 arcades back in the 80s/90s. I was mostly into the vids and 2p fruities but I eventually started playing the pins. My best memory was playing Police Force and attracting a crowd. It was playing Timeshock! on the PC that made me want to actually own a machine but when I saw the prices online (Pinball Heaven's machines were about £2K at the time), I thought I would never be able to afford one. I eventually called one of the arcades in Lowestoft about their broken Star Wars that I had spotted and ended up going up with a mate to get Star Wars, Twilight Zone and Lethal Weapon 3 for under a grand :). I've had various machines over many years now but usually only one at a time due to lack of: space/money/wife who wants to manoeuvre around big "ugly" machines. I'm currently enjoying Tron.
 
When I was a kid arcades were THE most exciting thing. Every Saturday we'd gather around Street Fighter 2 and wait our turn, winner stays on with strangers. I played pinball a little but always felt uninspired by it compared to the flashy arcade graphics of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat etc. Pinball seemed kind of outdated to me back then. Shoot forward goodness knows how long to a couple of years ago and a terrible, overpriced pub next to my house that I rarely frequented got an Addams Family. That was it, fed about 20 quid into it whilst getting p1ssed and a few SHOWTIMES later I said to my mate, I'm going to buy one of these. 2 or 3 years later, loads of pins later and I'm hooked.
 
Like many it sounds, I was a kid in arcades in the late 80s early 90s but played mostly video games and only sometimes pinball, It wasn't the first pin I played ever, but the first I can actively I remember playing at an ice rink in Swindon in the early 90s, and I'm not totally sure but I think it was Black Rose.

From the times the arcades died off I was into games on the Amiga/PC (including Pinball Dreams) and Mame (and SNES/Megadrive round my mates) and didn't play much in the way of real pinball other than when I came across one in a pub in the late 90s/early 2000s, that and the built in pinball game in Windows 2000.
Then in 2010ish I got back into Mame and build myself a cabinet and the forums for that tended to have a sub forum for Pinball where I discovered Pinball Arcade pretty much as it was being released on the Xbox 360
That got me hooked properly and from there I ended up building a digital pin to go alongside my mame cab, and about the same time I finished that I heard about the first London Pinball Championships and from there the SE league, so a mixture of TPA and @Matt Vince are the reason I got into it properly!.

Although having moved out of London to the south west I don't get to play as much as I did :(

And @Spadge - Team17's games were a huge part of my 90s gaming, Alien Breed, ProjectX, BodyBlows (which was the amiga owners answer to SF2/MK), and of course Worms (btw always wondered if the DOS 5 QBasic app where there were apes throwing bananas at each other was an inspiration for Worms?) so thank you :)
 
Team 17 were the dogs ******** back in the day, lost a lot of hours on my Amiga’s. Even had a 68060 in mine☺️.
 
Always loved pinball from being a kid and bought my first around 1993 when we bought an house at 26..... But kiddies came along so the pin went (Jokerz) paid £300 for it and sold it for £300 a year later..
Around 3 years ago I bought an EM (Royal Guard) which I love because of all the constant tinkering with relays & contacts...

Problem is now that said kids are 25 & 20 with the oldest having moved out into her own home that she's buying and youngest at Leeds Uni I've now got the space but the prices have gone crazy so unless O inherit some coin or when a lottery I'm priced out.. :(
 
Always loved pinball from being a kid and bought my first around 1993 when we bought an house at 26..... But kiddies came along so the pin went (Jokerz) paid £300 for it and sold it for £300 a year later..
Around 3 years ago I bought an EM (Royal Guard) which I love because of all the constant tinkering with relays & contacts...

I have a Royal Guard! :)

You are a braver man than I on the tinkering side of things. Reading through @James 's recent shop thread makes me realise that my simple EM remedies are only scratching the surface of these beasts.
 
I have a Royal Guard! :)

You are a braver man than I on the tinkering side of things. Reading through @James 's recent shop thread makes me realise that my simple EM remedies are only scratching the surface of these beasts.
Cracking machine if you agree.. :thumbs:
I love the 4 bumpers and that ground breaking at the time moving targets going from side to side.. :thumbs:

When I say tinkering it's very slight contact adjustment and cleaning... The guys that do total stripdowns on these are geniuses.
 
I agree! However I have to say yours looks in considerably better nick that mine.
 
I only played pinball once as a kid. I must have been under 10 and only got one ball on the game.

I genuinely can't remember where it was apart from it was at a train station or motorway service station between London and Cornwall. I was walking around with my parents and these older kids were playing it and I was captivated to the point I didn't see the rest of my family walk off.
For some reason the kids playing it had to run off mid game and I took over on the last ball.
I played that like my life depended on it and it seemed like an eternity until my joy was interrupted by my worried parents returning.

Pinball dreams on the Amiga took many hours after that.

In the last few years my boys who are only 4 and 6 got me involved in real machines. They saw one on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and wanted to try one. I got a toy one, that led to me getting an 60's EM, then MMPM, Firepower, yada yada, you know how it goes.

The best thing for me is the fixing them up. It's something I can do with my kids and with my dad and the lady folk in our lives don't mind, well not so much.
What else is there that can bring three generations together that involves electronics, engineering, logic and process along with those magical lights and sounds.
Just wish I had more space and time.
 
Also I forgot to mention that my wife upgrade doesn't mind whatever makes me happy unlike wife #1 who wouldnt have one in the house. Within a couple of weeks of getting my own place post split, I had 3 incoming. my lovely new wife is into other 4 legged cash convertors - horses, so its give and take, usually out of my wallet.
 
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