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It's painful to compare this with something like the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, which is like a Mecca for gamers.

I know too many people that have collections like this in their basements. Which probably is dating myself.

i love pinball, but finding a machine is rare! let's hope bars/arcades start stocking them instead of that stupid bowling/golf thingy

Pacific Pinball Museum
Pinball Hall of Fame
Silver Ball Museum Arcade
Pinballz Arcade
Seattle Pinball Museum

Plus there are annual shows all over the country.

For pinball fans that happen to make it to Vegas, there's a pinball 'museum' a few miles from the strip on the Tropicana. Might not be as many machines as this, but fun nonetheless.

http://www.pinballmuseum.org/

We have one here in Las Vegas called "The Pinball Hall of Fame" that is a beloved destination by all: http://www.pinballmuseum.org/

Definitely check it out sometime :)

I'm curious if anyone knows how it compares to the National Pinball Museum, recently reopened in Baltimore, MD.

There seem to be a few places like this now. There is the one in las vegas: pinball hall of fame
The one in Baltimore you mentioned: national pinball museum
One I just found in California
The one the article mentions in Seattle
another I found in NJ
An article about several of these opening up around the country.
And if you are interested in playing I found a place in St. Louis CP Pinball.
Any other places people have found that are worth noting here?

Should you find yourself in Las Vegas (as I will this weekend), make sure you check out the Pinball Hall of Fame - several hundred games from all eras, all playable (many for $0.25). It's an amazing place.

Yes it is still there, and have sense moved to a better place sense the last time I was there. They got a few prototype games in there. http://www.pinballmuseum.org/

If you love pinball you should check out the Pinball Museum if you ever go to Vegas. It a pretty awesome way to spend several hours without losing tons of cash (unless you suck at pinball). :)

http://www.pinballmuseum.org/

There's actually a pinball museum in Las Vegas. It's worth a trip if you're ever in Sin City.

http://www.pinballmuseum.org/

The Only place for Pinball. Over three hundred games on site, over a thousand in the worlds largest collection. The proprietor has been in the biz for almost 40 years and can tell you anything you want to know about any game you can name. http://www.pinballmuseum.org/ And for you youngsters he has twenty or so classic videos.

Sounds very similar to the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas...http://www.pinballmuseum.org/

I second the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.

Everything from a working Difference Engine to the Crays and Connection Machines that we kids dreamed about in the 80s. A fully-functional PDP-1; it still plays Slug Russel's "Space War". Within an hour's drive of anywhere in the Bay Area.

I'll see your computers and raise you some nukes. Next time you're in Vegas for some trade show or conference, take a day and see the Atomic Testing Museum, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Thankfully, there's nothing fully-functional here, but there lots of fascinating artifacts nonetheless. Everything from Einstein's letter to Roosevelt, to bits and pieces of a NERVA nuclear rocket prototype, to engineers' notebooks filled with humorous mementos of projects they'd worked on, to Doc Edgerton's impossibly-fast cameras. Within a 10 minute cab ride from the Strip.

Although both museums have material suitable for laypeople and/or children, they're targeted primarily at adults with engineering backgrounds. Expect to spend at least 3 hours at each of 'em.

Nukes are pretty cool, but you can have a lot more fun with a bunch of used pinball machine parts. And everything is fully functional in the Pinball Hall of Fame. Hey, you're already in Vegas -- flashing lights and wacky sounds are what it's all about. You won't need a DeLorean to go back in time, and it'll cost a lot less per hour than the blackjack tables.

So how do we archive all of the fantastic hardware that the likes of Sega and Atari produced? What about pinball games and crane sandboxes? What about the machines that would cast a souvenir for you out of plastic on the spot? There is a lot of gaming history that is sadly endangered.

Coin-op hardware-wise, there's the annual California Extreme event in San Jose. There's also a good vintage console selection (as well as computer selection) at Vintage Computer Fest, which has both an East Coast and a West Coast show every year.

Pinball-wise, we have the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, and the Lucky JuJu in the SF Bay Area. (And these are museums, not shows.)

Pinball show-wise, a bunch of Bay Area pinheads also put together the Pacific Pinball Expo, which features a lot of fully-restored electromechanical machines from the 50s-70s, and even a small selection of flipperless / woodrail / bumper games from the late 20s-30s. (If you ever go to the expo, play these games. They're surprisingly fun!)

There's a preponderance of "shows" over "museums" here, but that's because games are interactive (and old electronic/mechanical hardware, even if engineered to take the abuse of an arcade environment, can be fragile), and the risk to the artifacts over the long term is enough to discourage most museum curators from having lots of hands-on exhibits. Building a sufficiently large collection to warrant a museum, leasing a permanent space, and then opening that collection up to the general public on an ongoing basis is a prohibitive amount of time and money for all but a handful of people.

Crowdsourcing the collection process (by having a few hundred people haul in a couple of their own personal games for a weekend), by contrast, works very well. The downside is that you can only attend the event one weekend a year, but the upside is that it's a very well-populated event. And because you've also crowdsourced the repair/maintenance (each exhibitor is responsible for the upkeep of only one or two games on the show floor, and no individual collector's entire collection is at risk), you can let the general public show up and play the games.

So that's how it's done in the coin-op amusement community (and the crane sandboxes and plastic mold-making machines would probably be welcome at either CAX or Pacific Pinball Expo). Anyone got any links for other museums or shows featuring other forms of cultural ephemera?

I managed to get a couple days in Las Vegas just to visit that place. http://www.pinballmuseum.org/ Its well worth it. Pinballs packed nearly wall to wall with a few classic video games mixed in for good measure. They currently have a one of a kind prototype Williams game. They spent 2 million R&D and made two machines for testing. Feedback from the operators was "Why would I spend $10K+ for a game that makes the same as that new $5k game." After the testing, it was shelved and the two machines was warehoused and never went into production. The owner of one of them lent it to Pinball Hall of Fame for the public to play. :-) *searches....* Found it. Pinball Circus http://www.marvin3m.com/arcade/pincir.htm

No need to bring them back, we have a nice one here in Las Vegas ^^

http://www.pinballmuseum.org/

"I started playing pinball (which is now again on of my favs, currently restoring a 70's Playboy pin)"

While it may be slightly off topic since I doubt they'd compare in any sense, but one thing I like about pinball is it -forces- you to be absolutely creative to accomplish what you're trying to get through in the game. Kinda like a movie where if you want something to happen, you have to find a way for it to happen, whereas with a cartoon you just make it happen. That's the way I see the difference between games and pinball, somethings are actually impossible in pinball, so it limits what you have to work with, so if you get an outstanding result its due completely to your own skill. In video games you can make anything happen.

That being said, I was never a real FAN of pinball, more of a console gamer, had a pinball machine at one time which was fun and all, but nothing spectacular. Recently I found (I live in Vegas) a pinball museum/arcade with about 250 games (and old machines, like Robotron you mentioned) which, with being able to play these things, machines from the 40s up to some brand new games, I've really grown to appreciate pinball as more of an art, and it's nice that it's different every time you play it. (oh and not to whore out an advert or anything, but more information is at http://pinballmuseum.org/ hey, it's for charity!)

And for some ON topic ranting, I love a lot of the new games, they're a lot of fun, but I always loved the old sierra games. Hero's Quest I, Space Quest, LSL. I loved those ones. They were tougher in a sense that you had to really think about stuff to know what to type where "pick up rock" "throw rock at target" "make thieve's guild sign" or whatnot, that and you couldn't just google "qfg1 walkthrough" if you got stuck either. I think the old games and the new games all have a lot of merit, there's a lot of genius in some of the old games, then again, some of the new stuff is a whole lot of fun and some require the same amount of thinking and puzzle solving, I think God of War had a lot of that to it.

The home video game console is what killed aracades.

But it is not what killed pinballs. There could be more large pinball arcades. Part of the reason there isn't is that kids today have been taught to like playing more violent (and much less skillful) games -- and now, thanks to first person shoot em ups we have new "games" like paintball, a truly barbaric thing to introduce children to. The (electronic) game times have changed, for the worse.

By the way, props to Radica "20 Q", that has done an amazing job with a handheld version of a classic game. We use it all the time when driving in our car, the game's amazing algorithms get what we thought about 80% of the time, interface is simple and easy to use, and some of the remarks it makes are funny. All that computing power for under $20 -- it renews my confidence in the human race.

Also while you're in Vegas, the Atomic Testing Museum.

(There's a Back to the Future joke in here somewhere, but both museums are fantastic and worthy of at separate 4-6 hour visits.)

Next time in vegas

Sometimes, it's good to get back to your roots.

Absolutely. A friend of mine and myself recently came across This place in Vegas (well, Henderson.) which has become a savior of mine lately. After a stressful week (or day) sometimes nothin' feels better than to get out to the pinball arcade for some SFII (pinball) or Addams Family being our chosen games... Place is awesome though, 150+ pinball machines (NFP, proceeds go to the salvation army) and it's just -relaxing- .. somethin' about it just puts me at ease, i'm like randal with the go karts in clerks2. The pinball arcade just centers me ;)

Anyone in the area I highly suggest you give it a try. It just has a certain charm about it. :)