Chicago Has Become the Nerve Center of Competitive Pinball

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/chicago-competitive-pinball

by bcaulfield • 7 years ago

101 42 7 years ago

nthitz• 7 years ago

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...?

[2] http://oaklandpinballwarriors.com/

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

[4] http://sfpins.org/

[5] http://baybridgepinball.com

driverdan• 7 years ago

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.

centizen• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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?

dvtrn• 7 years ago

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 :)

sct202• 7 years ago

Jackbox is in Chicago.

cableshaft• 7 years ago

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.

njepa• 7 years ago

It only makes sense really

Surprisingly few places seem to culturally benefit from the presence of companies. But I guess selling heavy equipment for public use helps.

tptacek• 7 years ago

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.

vanadium• 7 years ago

Correct. And it has _both_ terrible holographic Sega games. Galloping Ghost Pinball just opened up the other week down the block a bit.

Can't wait to see the new Stern tables at the Midwest Gaming Classic in Milwaukee this weekend.

korethr• 7 years ago

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.

jandrese• 7 years ago

There was apparently a home version of that hologram game. It has a dubious honor.

  The DVD version of the game was the only title to receive a 0/10 score from Official UK PlayStation 2 Magazine.

honkycat• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

Plus, Killer Queen!

kasey_junk• 7 years ago

If you ever find yourself near McLean IL stopping at Arcadia is a must. Old bank full of pinball machines.

drcode• 7 years ago

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)

Animats• 7 years ago

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

subway3• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

olivermarks• 7 years ago

http://www.goldenstatepinball.org Next month in Lodi California

http://www.caextreme.org San Jose

reificator2• 7 years ago

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

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• 7 years ago

Demand is there

reificator2• 7 years ago

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.

subway3• 7 years ago

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

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

http://www.skill-shot.com/calendar

debatem1• 7 years ago

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.

subway3• 7 years ago

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.

tjr225• 7 years ago

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!

joshdance• 7 years ago

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

meruru• 7 years ago

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

asark2• 7 years ago

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• 7 years ago

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.

dasil0032• 7 years ago

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.

magicalhippo• 7 years ago

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.

KingFelix• 7 years ago

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

ada1981• 7 years ago

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.

Mtinie• 7 years ago

“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.

trw999• 7 years ago

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.

Chicago Has Become the Nerve Center of Competitive Pinball

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