Pacific Pinball Museum

Tilt!

October 12, 2014

It was a change of pace weekend for me this weekend.  I had to stay close to home, so I decided that I'd spend the early afternoon at the Pacific Pinball Museum.  It's in Alameda three miles or so from my house.  I love this place.  The only way it could be improved would be if they sold beer.  I'll probably never leave if they ever make that move.

The museum has about a hundred pinball machines on display, all but a few of which are playable.  The oldest machines were built in the 1930s.  the ancestors of pinball date back to eighteenth century Europe, but the story told at the museum is purely twentieth century American.  These old games look more like Japanese pachinko machines than American pinball machines.  The balls are shot to the top of the tables then roll down, bouncing off nails until they either fall into scoring holes or fall out at the bottom.  There are no flippers.

The wood rail machines from the forties and fifties are modern machines.  They have lights, bumpers and flippers.  All of the machines are slow and rolly.  I think that has as much to do with how the museum tunes their older machines as anything.  Even machines from the seventies and eighties play slow, much slower in some cases than the same machines I played when I was a kid.

The games from the sixties and early seventies are generally straight-forward.  There are usually targets to be knocked down to advance the score.  Some of these machines are a lot of fun because there are obvious goals to achieve.  A good set of challenges always trumps gimmicks like multiple flippers and levels in my book.  Well, almost always.  I can fall for a really good gimmick.

I also like the lower scores on these older machines.  Rolling numbers are so much cooler than digital numbers, and for whatever reason a final score in the hundreds or thousands somehow seems more honest than the scores that end up being in the millions.  These are merely matters of aesthetics, obviously.

Companies went a little crazy with their designs in the seventies.  Games like Genie and Captain Fantastic are loaded with flippers and things to hit.  They can be a mess to play, though.  I tend to prefer the simpler machines from this era.

Disco Fever was a game I played a lot when I was a kid.  It has curved flippers.  I don't think the funky flippers have much of an impact on game play.  The table itself is pretty simple, the kind of older machine I find very playable.

To me, Black Knight has always been the Babe Ruth of pinball machines.  It was the first multi-level and modern multi-ball machine.  The machines I played when I was a kid were usually very fast.  I think owners usually tilted it steeply to make for quicker games, which obviously created more opportunity for more money.  It was an exciting game.  The machine at the museum is slow and rolly.  It wasn't as fun to play as I recall.  There's not a whole lot to shoot at.

Fun House has to be my all-time favorite machine.  It's perfectly balanced when it comes to gimmicks, playability and goals.  I can play this machine for hours.  I have played this machine for hours.  We had one at the office for a few months earlier this year.  I'm pretty sure my productivity dropped a bit over that time period.

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There's an entire room of more modern games at the museum.  They don't interest me as much as these older machines.  Too much silliness, not enough game play in a lot of those machines.  They're not all bad, they just don't interest me as much.