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400 Pinball Machines and Counting at the Texas Pinball Festival (Video)
Yes, folks. Step right up. It's the 2013 Texas Pinball Festival, except... Whoops! You missed it. But don't despair, because Tim Lord was there with his camcorder to interview organizer Paul McKinney and to point his lens lovingly at pinball machines new and old, complete with whistles and bells, oh my! It was a riotous time, with players of all ages. Pinball machines were played, bought, and sold. There were plenty of exhibitors, including some with shiny-new machines. The most interesting of these may have been Multimorphic, which is making "the world's first modular, multi-game, pinball platform." In other words, one machine that can become many games, sort of like a video game console. There's a separate, short, "bonus video" about Multimorphic (with no transcript), for anyone who is interested in their open source, "open platform" pinball machine concept -- and that may not be just old fogies trying to recapture their youth, when they had the high score on the Evel Knievel machine at a local pool hall, because McKinney says the people coming to the Texas Pinball Festival are younger every year.
the producer here decided to show us this guy's mug for 90% of the run time. i am struggling to understand, though, why it was interrupted with occasional 3-second snippets of PINBALL MACHINES, though.
i could live a little longer in this prison
Pacific Pinball Museum is a great day in the Bay Area. I go up twice a year (as much as my wife can stand)
http://pacificpinball.org
They usually organize a similar event Pacific Pinball Expo
Don't forget about Pinburgh 2013, which is happening this weekend near Pittsburgh, PA! http://papa.org/pinburgh2013/
Used to be a nice little earner for me repairing these in the late 1960s - the real ones. All electromechanical, none of your wimpy solid state rubbish.
sigh
he IS the pinball machine
Taxi 'nuff said! :)
If we heard about this before the festival? I have to think a lot of the people who would be interested in actually watching this video who live in Texas would have been interested in going to this festival. I understand it's not SXSW, but do you think we could squeeze an article between the global warming and slashervertisements for neat things like this so we could go to them instead of watching a video about someone else having all the fun?
I'm old enough to remember pinball machines having their own prominent corner in the local video arcade (and old enough to have had local video arcades), but too young to have experienced pinball in its prime. The big hits in pinball when I grew up were Addams Family, Terminator, and Playboy. Not too long after, when arcades started closing, pinball went into a downward spiral.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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/
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
pinball is back right now!!
http://www.pinballarcade.com
Did you make it to Zapcon? (http://www.zapcon.com>)?
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
Roblimo is trying, but failing as a video producer. He goes onsite to Texas locales without any preparation, research, etc. and spontaneously attempts to conjure up questions to ask people about the event.
Most of what he asks the people could be found on any flyer about the event. Better questions would have been:
1. Is a pinball renaissance afoot? 2. Why wasn't the kid from Kaine's Arcade invited?
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I finally got a twilight zone a few months ago. It needed only minor repairs. Good fun.
If you like pinball, and are in Austin, look up pinballz http://www.pinballzarcade.com/. It totally old school, they have pinball machines from the early 60's that don't even have transistors (think lots of relays) to modern ones and everything in between.. I've been going there on an off for a couple years, and lately the place gets really busy in the evenings/weekends. For a while almost all the machines were for sale, and a lot of really cool ones have apparently been sold, but they still have ~100 on the floor.
Nuts. I was flipping forward to get to an actual video shot of the game for the 2nd video... The rest was marginally interesting...
...you may want to stop by Ground Kontrol ( http://groundkontrol.com/ ) in Portland, it's very old-school and totally awesome. I visited there all the way from Scandinavia, and I have to say, I've never seen a more enthusiastic old-school arcade crowd somewhere since the 80s, and that place was like the 80s all over again. Tons of pinball machines, go nuts! :)
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
No kidding, electromechanical pinball machines are the heaviest things I've ever lifted.