Pacific Pinball Expo 6: Day Two!

This morning Claire and I woke up early and headed out to San Rafael via public transportation.  It was slightly confusing (a bart trip and then two buses) but in the end we made to the show.  I already had my weekend pass for volunteering, so I went in to set up, while Claire waited in the considerable line.

The Marco Specialties guys had been busy last night, setting up their booth, which was pretty awesome. There are four brand new X-men machines, two of which have overhead cameras which are being shown on GIANT monitors mounted on a huge truss system:

At one point in the afternoon things were kind of slow, so I hopped on and played a game.  I got a replay on my first try!  24 million with three separate multiballs on ball three!  That felt pretty good.  Anyway, there was a table off to one side, where they let me carve out a foot of space for the Drop Target Zines:

This is all made possible because Jon and I blog for Stern, and because Stern also works a lot with  Marco Specialties.  We had our contact at Stern call in a favor, and the the Marco guys have been super cool.  They really went out of their way to make sure that I had everything I needed and were very cool to hang out with today.  I feel very lucky that everything is working out so well.

Eventually, Claire got her wristband, so she and I walked around the floor for a bit.  We had a very serious discussion in which it was decided that I WAS allowed to fill out one ticket each for the X-Men, 2001 and Slick Chick pinball machines that are being raffled off at the show on Sunday (though heaven knows where we'd PUT one of them if we won!).  Also on the raffle table was a now-rare copy of the sold out first printing of Drop Target #1!

Also while walking around, I ran into the TILT guy again today and he showed me his original copy of the script for the movie!?!  I had to get back to the table, so I didn't have time to play another round on the Koala game, but I will definitely hit it up again before the expo is over!

It seemed a little slow today, (probably because most people had to work) but I still sold some zines and got to talk to a bunch of interesting pinball people.  In the afternoon, Claire watched the table while I went to go see Gary Stern give a talk about growing up in the pinball industry and some of Stern's business philosophies and plans for the future.

After that, Claire and I packed up the table and then hit up one more panel, with Clay Harrel, talking about various different pinball projects he has worked on over the years.  When that was over we caught our two busses and the bart back home.

I have high hopes for tomorrow, as it seems like the day that will be most packed.  There are also some panels that I'm REALLY excited to see.  We'll see how it goes!