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.

Comments

fans of nerd face rejoice

[pezpunk]

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.

Pinburgh 2013 is this weekend!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget about Pinburgh 2013, which is happening this weekend near Pittsburgh, PA! http://papa.org/pinburgh2013/

Memories

[folderol]

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

You know what would be nice?

[MasseKid]

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 part of that in-between age bracket

[Rude Turnip]

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.

Pinball musuem

[Garion911]

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/