
Chicago Has Become the Nerve Center of Competitive Pinball - bcaulfield
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/chicago-competitive-pinball
======
subway
Chicago has _nothing_ on Seattle (OK, except for a manufacturer, and the
Sharpe brothers promoting pinball).

Monday Night Pinball in Seattle now has 26 teams with 10 players each, plus a
massive pool of substitute players. We've grown to the point of splitting into
upper and lower divisions with promotion and relegation.

[https://www.mondaynightpinball.com](https://www.mondaynightpinball.com)

And that's just one weekly event. There are a _ton_ of events:

[http://www.skill-shot.com/calendar](http://www.skill-shot.com/calendar)

~~~
debatem1
I was about to say, the size of the pinball scene in Seattle is unbelievable.
Two of the top ten ranked players in the world live here, and probably 10 more
of the top 100. That's versus 3 in the top 100 for Chicago.

~~~
subway
Since the start of 2018 those numbers have gone down quite a bit, mostly due
to the shake out of "dollar gate", leading to some of the popular local
tournaments no longer reporting results to the IFPA. Despite the local
rankings dropping a bit, it feels like the community has grown drastically.

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nthitz
Shameless plug but there is plenty of competitive pinball in the Bay Area as
well!

Selfie leagues are fun for beginners, you can play at your own pace and snap a
selfie of your score and submit it online. There are selfie leagues in San
Francisco [1] , Oakland [2] and South Bay [3]

But that's just the tip of the iceberg! There's also a more competitive
league, the SFPD [4] as well as a fun team league style format [5]

It's a great community and there usually ends up being a tournament of some
form almost every weekend.

[1] [https://orangenex.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/san-francisco-
sup...](https://orangenex.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/san-francisco-super-selfie-
league/)?

[2] [http://oaklandpinballwarriors.com/](http://oaklandpinballwarriors.com/)

[3]
[https://www.facebook.com/BAPASelfieLeague/](https://www.facebook.com/BAPASelfieLeague/)

[4] [http://sfpins.org/](http://sfpins.org/)

[5] [http://baybridgepinball.com](http://baybridgepinball.com)

~~~
driverdan
To add to your comment there are pinball leagues in most cities now. Even if
you haven't played since you were young it's still fun to go check them out.

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centizen
It only makes sense really, Chicago has been the ground zero for pinball since
it's inception. Chicago Coin, Stern, Bally, Gottlieb and Genco were all
operating out of that area. Stern is still operating today and is the main
company pushing competitive pinball.

~~~
bluedino
Chicago has a ton of coin-op history as well. Midway made games like NBA Jam
and Mortal Kombat there.

Is game dev still happening in Chicago?

~~~
cableshaft
Nowhere near as much as it used to be. A lot of companies shuttered and talent
left the area a couple of decades ago. Off the top of my head, the main
companies that are still in the area are NetherRealm, Wargaming.net,
Barbaroga, WMS Gaming, JackBox, Iron Galaxy, and in the suburbs are Raw
Thrills, Incredible Technologies, Play Mechanix, and High Voltage. That might
be it.

Only a few of those companies seem to be actively hiring.

Midway closed (and part of it became NetherRealm), there used to be an
Electronic Arts office, a Disney Interactive office, Robomodo, Sega was around
when they did arcade games, Game Refuge might still exist but it's barely
still kicking, Yuke's used to have a satellite office here but that shut down,
probably a bunch of others, but nowadays it's difficult to be a game dev and
live in Chicago. Part of the reason I'm not in the industry anymore.

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tptacek
We also have (I believe) the largest arcade in North America, at Galloping
Ghost, which includes a bunch of pinball tables and also that terrible
hologram time travel game from the early 1990s.

~~~
honkycat
Logan Arcade has become a mecca for pinball/arcade enthusiasts as well.

I always maintain it is the best bar in Chicago, and EASILY the best arcade
bar.

edit: arcade/video games instead of pinball/arcade.

~~~
tehwebguy
Plus, Killer Queen!

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
I was at my local arcade and I was lucky enough to come across a group of
friends that met up every week to play Killer Queen. They had the full 10
people and someone asked me if I wanted to sub in while they went for a beer.
One of the most exciting arcade experiences I’ve had in a long time. You get
10 people hunched over that game and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen or
done before.

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reificator
Yeah, but can anyone compete with that deaf, blind, and dumb kid?

[https://youtu.be/4AKbUm8GrbM](https://youtu.be/4AKbUm8GrbM)

On a serious note, I played a lot of pinball growing up, it'd be nice to find
some old favorites and new tables to play on.

My family actually fixed up pinball machines/arcade cabinets and resold them
while I was growing up, so we had a bunch of them in the house.

If I had the space, and demand was still there, I'd probably have started
doing it myself by now.

~~~
jacobush
Demand is there

~~~
reificator
Perhaps. It wasn't in my area last I checked, but that was a few years ago.

Space, however, is not there anymore. I have more space than I strictly need,
but certainly not enough for cabinets and pinball tables.

------
Mtinie
“Belsito is hunched over the game. He’s just shot the right orbit, and if he
can hit all the major shots to fill Deadpool’s chimichanga punch card, he’ll
be able to fight the T. rex for a chance to shoot the scoop and win the mode,
bringing him one step closer to a Mechsuit Multiball. And then all hell will
break loose—in the machine and on the scoreboard. He’s engaged in a rare
three-way-tiebreaker to advance to the next round—one step closer to pinball
glory, a championship belt, and $2,500. Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies
is helping with play-by-play commentary and the room smells a little like a
middle school gym class.”

My inner (and outer) nerd loves everything about this paragraph. I’ve never
played a Deadpool machine but with my moderate knowledge of the comic and my
past experiences playing other pinball games I can imagine in my mind’s eye
what the sequence looks like.

Kudos to Lindsey Quinn.

------
Animats
Chicago was always the center. Stern is the successor to Chicago Coin and
Williams, having bought up the assets of those companies in bankruptcy.

~~~
subway
The history of Stern is a little crazy. Sam Stern founded Stern Electronics
with the assets from Chicago Coin and Seeburg. Seeburg had previously owned
Williams, but spun it off into its own company when Seeburg went bust. Sam
Stern had manged the Williams division, but didnt get the assets to it when
Seeburg went under.

Stern Electronics went under in the 80s and folks ended up at Data East, then
Sega. Eventually Sega got out of pinball and sold the assets to Gary Stern,
Sam's son, to form Stern Pinball. This was about the same time Williams got
out of pinball, and I think their assets ended up at a German company.

~~~
joezydeco
Pretty good synopsis, but a few things:

Gary Stern started Data East Pinball with the remains of Chicago Coin (and
then ripped off the electronic design from Williams). DE did indeed become
Sega and then became Stern in 1994.

Williams shut their pinball division down in 1999 and the assets have been
licensed out to various entities in the 20 years since. The remaining slot
machine company (WMS Industries) was purchased by Scientific Games in 2013.
SGI also owns...wait for it... the remains of Bally Gaming.

------
ada1981
I did a road trip back in 2003 with my Ultimate Frisbee coach and we stopped
in Chicago to visit his old CMU Roomate, Wes.

Wes was a pinball engineer at Stern and took us to the factory late night and
we played games for hours.

My coach and Wes were extremely impressive players — they would put in a
quarter and walk away hours later with dozens of free games racked up on the
machine.

One of my favorite memories from my early twenties.

------
meruru
How does pinball even have enough depth, with such simple controls, to sustain
a competitive scene?

~~~
asark
As far as depth, it's largely sequences. Most machines past the very early
ones have tons and tons of sequences of actions you're trying to take—hit that
ramp three times, then drop the ball in that hole over there, then the door
opens, put the ball through that hole three times, skill shot, now such-and-
such mode starts, complete it, now you've completed the first of eight parts
of the machine's "story" or whatever.

So you have any of several sequences available at a time, offering different
possibilities (advance toward multiball, set up a multiplier or bonus for a
later ball or even a later game[!], go for some really high-scoring combo,
activate extra ball, one or more "story" lines of actions to complete at any
time, and so on). You might go for high score, you might go for "finishing"
the story, some personal challenge ruleset. It'll affect what you're trying to
do.

But it's also a hand-eye coordination game, and one of carefully physically
manipulating the machine to bump the ball this way and that, so things don't
always go as planned and you're thinking of contingency shots, or just trying
to get the ball back under control, or shooting it one place because you need
it to be somewhere else to make some other shot.

Most machines have some tricks to discover. Intentionally "flub" your plunger
shot at the right time on Addams Family to lock a ball for multiball in The
Swamp, for instance. Better to wait out some mode to technically complete it
rather than trying to do what it wants for extra points, because it requires
some risky shots or puts the ball on a part of the table that carries a high
risk of a hard-to-stop drain. That kind of thing. Plus stuff you just have to
figure out by lore (hold the ball for a bit to stop temporarily stop The Power
long enough for one shot on Addams Family, say).

Then there's the feel. Every machine's different. Some have great flow (and
that might vary by player), some have awesome theme, some have an incredible
melding of theme and play—take Black Knight and its sequel, Black Knight 2000,
in which you're "dueling" the Black Knight, which is both a fictional robber-
knight and the machine itself, which taunts you ("give me your money!"), with
the board structured such that you're on the "offense" when the balls on the
elevated, upper playfield with a secondary flipper, and "defense" when it's on
the lower board and at risk of draining, but that's not explicit, it's just a
natural result of the theme and board design coming together.

So, for competition: physical skill, thinking on your feet, planning, knowing
_and_ having your shot timing down for the particular machine. And you can
still have an "on" day or an "off" day, just like anything else. I'd put it up
there in complexity with your average competitive FPS, certainly. Shares a lot
in common, in fact.

Plus, even on machines where the two flipper buttons are the only useful
inputs when the ball's in play, they don't always only control flippers. Watch
the lights :-)

~~~
MegaDeKay
Nicely written up! What would you say are some of the best tables out there
for depth of play along these lines? I hear Addams Family come up a lot, and
you mention that and Black Knight as well.

~~~
asark
Addams Family's great. Good middle-difficulty machine. I find the even-better-
loved and similarly-laid-out Twilight Zone to be much, much harder, for some
reason—I just don't get along with it very well. Some machines are more
n00b-friendly than others. Some take it too far and are too easy
(Frankenstein) but others hit a good sweet spot.

White Water mentioned by another poster down a ways is a decent starter
machine—complex enough, plenty to do to keep you busy for a good long while,
but not killer-difficult (Black Knight 2000 would... not be a good one to
start with). Depending on how the it's tuned it can have a couple "cheap"
drains but they're avoidable with good flipper handling—carefully catching
certain returns rather than letting them bounce, that sort of thing.

Theater of Magic's good. Fun theme, doesn't just _love_ to throw your ball
down the drain all the time, tons to do, but you still have to be aiming &
making shots or you won't get much done.

Medieval Madness has a nice, straightforward, fun theme and set of sequences.
It's a bit like Attack from Mars, actually, but I'd call it the less _fiddly_
of the two, if that makes sense.

------
olivermarks
[http://www.goldenstatepinball.org](http://www.goldenstatepinball.org) Next
month in Lodi California

[http://www.caextreme.org](http://www.caextreme.org) San Jose

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trw999
I wonder what the average age is for the people competing and if the sport
will go through a generational crisis as the people who presumably grew up
with pinball die off.

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KingFelix
I am pumped for the new Black Knight sword of rage, my local pinball bar is
getting one.

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joshdance
I read this as paintball and got excited. Pinball is still cool.

