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.
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.
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.
Huh- a few hours ago I was just playing some pinball at my local watering hole and noticed a zine on top of the change machine promoting Seattle's pinball scene!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Midway Games is still around actually in its new and evolved form: NeverRealm Games and Mortal Kombat 11 is coming very soon. Their offices are a short bike ride away from where I live on Chicago’s northwest side.
Happy to report they’re doing very well and releasing as great of fighter game as they did back in the good ol days :)
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.
Galloping Ghost is a treasure! They have TONS of games that are the only exemplar in existence (The world's only genuine Beavis & Butthead prototype arcade cabinet, for instance) and the owners are true gameplay connoisseurs- There is almost no game in history with decent gameplay that cannot be found at Galloping Ghost... they are true completists for everything that is actually fun to play (the main things they're missing are the expensive early collector games from the Pong era, but those were mostly uninteresting from a gameplay perspective)
And here I was, beginning to think I had imagined that (incredibly cool looking) thing into which I sank far too many tokens trying to understand what the hell I was supposed to even do.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
This is all true but I’ll add that the charm and subtle skill of pinball comes from its physicality. Flipper skills alone will boggle the mind of beginners: drop catch, live catch, post pass, loop pass, tap pass, alley pass, dead bounce, slap save, death save, bang back, two-staging multiple flippers. Not to mention all the ways you can move the machine. Video games have nothing equivalent, and video pinball is not pinball.
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.
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.
Twilight Zone from 1993 was long considered one of the deepest games and it’s still amazing. The new Sterns have much more complex rule sets though, and firmware that is initially sparse and gets refined to add a lot of depth. Probably the deepest and most diverse players game at the moment is Iron Maiden, it was designed by Keith Elwin who is widely regarded as the best pinball player of all time.
But just walking up to a game will not reveal the depth to you. I suggest playing a game, the look up a tutorial from Bowen Kerins on YouTube and prepare to have your mind blown (both the rules/strategies and his skills). In fact, if you have the time, first watch Bowen’s tutorial for Star Trek (https://youtu.be/wYZuLK6ShUk) and then watch Elwin achieve the impossibly difficult final wizard mode “5 Year Mission” (https://youtu.be/3xXkefqUlnw)
The newest star wars pin seems to have a lot of sequences, I'm not sure how many but I feel like I find new ones every time I play. Monster Bash, and lord of the rings are pretty in depth too.
The latest addition to my collection is from 1976 and I have yet to do all the sequences, which is pretty impressive as it's an EM(electromechanical) machine. Ive spent at least 12 hours trying.
Japanese candy arcades are fun to collect and play also.
Technically you could implement chess with a single button per player[1], yet it has plenty of depth and a rich competitive scene, so the simplicity of the control scheme is not a good measure as such I think.
That being said I've never heard of competitive pinball before, and it surprised me as well.
[1]: Robotic arm traversing the squares sequentially, press button to pick up piece and press again to release.
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.
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
And that's just one weekly event. There are a ton of events:
http://www.skill-shot.com/calendar