San Francisco Zine Fest this weekend!

Pinball people!  I am settled on the West Coast, and will be tabling this weekend at the San Francisco Zine Fest.  I will have copies of all four issues of Drop Target, so if you are in the area and would like to save on shipping, swing on by.  You can also just hang out and talk with me about pinball if you like!  I'm into that...

I will also have copies of Phase 7 and The Dvorak Zine, plus I will be tabling with the inimitable Tugboat Press.  And that's just at table 56!   There will also be gazillions of other amazing zines and minicomics at the event.  I hope to see some of you there!

One Last Pinball Hurrah!

On June 1st I drove cross country in a moving truck with my girlfriend Claire, our two rabbits and all of our stuff.  Then, about a week later, I flew back to Vermont, where I have been all summer, to teach the CCS Summer Workshops.  Well, this Sunday I finally fly back to Oakland for good, which means that Drop Target is going to become a bi-costal zine.

Jon and I have worked out all the logistics (he'll handle printing, I'll handle shipping) and really, the zine is laid out digitally, so it will be a cinch to put the issues together from across the country.  We still have another three issues planned, so fear not, Dear Readers, this move will not effect our publishing schedule (approx. two issues per year).

The move will, however, mean that Jon and I will not be able to play pinball together any more, which is a real bummer.  To counteract this situation, we decided to make one last trip to the Pinball Wizard Arcade together yesterday, even though we are both super busy right now.

We had a nice long talk on the drive down and back (2+ hours each way) and played about six straight hours of pinball.  By the time we left, our arms were like jelly.  I especially enjoyed playing Space Shuttle, Black Knight 2000, Tommy, Addams Family and Tron.  Sadly, the Episode I pin2k machine was out of commission, but it was still a great time.  Sarah was getting all the machines ready for the 2nd Annual PWA tournament, which is this weekend.  I can't speak highly enough of that arcade.  It is truly one of the best.  If you are in the area, you should swing by today to register for the tournament!

Anyway, It's been a wild ride these past few years getting into pinball, buying a machine, learning how to fix it, and starting the zine.  A big part of that fun was getting to share everything about this new hobby with a close friend.  So I just wanted to say publicly, Jon, I'm going to miss you dude!  Thanks for all the good times, and I look forward to working on whatever we come up with next!

Blogging Here, Blogging There

Yikes, two weeks without a post?!  I can offer two explanations: 1) Jon and I have been super busy wrapping up the CCS Summer Workshops, which, although it is incredibly fun, is still technically our "work"  2) I have been busy posting pinball related stuff on other blogs!

The first is a new comic strip I started over on our Stern Blog called "Flipper Funnies."  I have brainstormed out a bunch of goofy pinball related gags, so I will be having a lot of fun with this in the weeks and months to come.

The other is a recent pinball-related illustration that I painted for my illustration blog.  Warning: it's kind of a bummer!

Fear not, dear readers, Jon and I have another pinball adventure planned for later this week, so I will dutifully report back with all the details.  Until then, get out there and play more pinball!

Belgium Pinball Adventure!

Well, I returned to the United States on Wednesday after a ten-day trip to Belgium, where I pretty thoroughly scoped out the pinball situation.  I am happy to report that pinball is alive and well in Europe, though in some unexpected ways...

On my first day in Brussels, my gracious host Max de Radiguès led me to a café/bar called "Zebra" where he had played pinball before.  He said there was a fair amount of turnover at this location and when we walked in, there was a Tron machine.  It was filthy but it still played great.

I'm not going to lie, I got a pretty big kick out of seeing the pricing card and dot matrix text in French!

Max put in a 2 euro coin, which gave us 4 credits, and we played for a while.  Then I put in another 2 euros and we started to get warmed up.  I got a replay, and then later had my best ever game of Tron (68 million, I think?).  

We continued to walk around the city and came upon a Medieval Madness!  Sort of...

There was some sort of massive Renaissance Faire going on, with fully armored knights who were tilting in the middle of the city.  I only mention this because off to the side there were some old medieval games for kids to play, including something that looked an awful lot like an early ancestor of bagatelle, which of course turned into pinball:

The next day we were heading off to Bruges, so on a whim, I thought I'd search to see if I could find any pinball there.  Google lead me to FindAPinball.com, a site which I had never heard of.  I looked through its dropdown menu of cities and found places all over Europe, but not the USA.  I went to the about page and found that the creator of the site, Colin, was in fact, from Brussels!

I shot him an email to say that I was in town for a week and would he like to get together to play some pinball.  He emailed me the next morning, and it turned out that he knew my friend David Liben's wife, Eirene.  It's a small world after all, eh?  Alas, it didn't work to meet up because Colin was going out of town for a business trip, but he said I should look him up next time I'm in town (which I will, in January) because he had some friends with "private game rooms."  (!!?!)  

Anyway, Bruges was a bust, as was Amsterdam a few days later (only in terms of pinball! everything else about these cities was totally amazing).  But a day or two before I left, Max used FindAPinball.com to locate some more machines, which we drove to using his brother's car.

At a go-kart racing place on the edge of town we found an NBA machine which worked well and a Big Buck Hunter that was broken.  We played NBA for a while, which I got the hang of pretty quickly (another replay, but alas no "Haut Score").

This is all pretty straightforward.  You are probably reading this, thinking "Brussels sounds a lot like my city - there are a handful of machines scattered around at various locations."  That's true, but only for actual pinball, what the French-speaking world calls "Flipper."  Where things start to get weird is with a game that the French-speaking world calls "Slots."  These games are in every neighborhood bar that I saw in Brussels, and they look like this:

Every time we walked by a bar, my inner pinball alert went off - PINBALL!  But no, Max told me, these were just shaped like pinball machines, they were not pinball at all.  Check it out, they don't even have flippers!

Old school, right?  I didn't play, because I learned years ago that I don't do well with gambling.  But basically, you pick your numbers on the screen in the backbox and then launch your balls and try to nudge them into the appropriate holes.  This seemed so crazy to me! In America, we have spent years and years trying to distance ourselves from pinball's gambling past, but in Europe (or at least in Belgium) that past is thriving!  Max said that every bar had one of these machines and that there was usually an old drunk, plunking his last few Euros into these machines, in the hopes of winning enough money to buy himself another drink.  We even walked by while one was spitting out coins for a winner (the highest award possible is 20 euros).

I can't overstate how commonplace these machines were.  In 10 days I saw hundreds of them!  We even drove by a repair shop that only serviced these machines.  Crazy, right?!  Now if we could only replace them with "Flipper" machines...

Anyways, thanks for Max for taking me all over the city to find some pinball.  I can now proudly say that I have played pinball on another continent!  Thanks too to Colin for his great site.  If you are playing pinball in Europe, you should set up an account so you can add new locations and update others.  I'll add a link to our sidebar.  

On an unrelated side note, I have a new pinball comic up over on the Stern blog, about something funny that happened to Jon and me before I left on my trip!

Belgium Bound!

Oh man, have you read Jon's latest post on the Stern blog yet?  I'm so jealous that he got to do a factory tour!  He gave me the COMPLETE (2+ hour) rundown of his whole trip, and it sounded pretty amazing.  He had his tape recorder with him, so get pumped, because we have A LOT of awesome content for the next couple of issues of Drop Target Zine!

Tomorrow I'm heading to Belgium to visit our old pal Max!  Readers of Drop Target Zine will remember Max from his many appearances in From Zeros to Heroes, his "Zine King" center spread from DTZ #3 and some of the cool posts he shared with us about his Dad's 1935 Par Golf and his Carcassonne Pinball Adventure.  Fear not, Dear Readers, I will keep an eye out for pinball machines during my travels, and have a write-up prepared about the European Pinball Scene upon my return!

Pinball in the Wild: Part 4 - The Musée Mecanique

The last stop I made to play pinball in the Bay Area was at the Musée Mecanique in San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf area.  This is one of Claire's all-time favorite places to hang out.  It's got anything and everything coin-operated.  Fortune tellers, nickelodeons, player pianos, photo booths, and pinball machines!

I have been here a few times, and I quickly found their Indiana Jones, Addam's Family and Pirates of the Caribbean pinball machines, which I have played before.  I found two older machines that I don't ever remember playing here.  One was a Sing Along (Gottlieb 1967):

And the other was an Olympics (Gottlieb 1962)

I was running dangerously low on quarters, so I took a spin around the room to see if there were any other games or attractions I wanted to try before I ran out.  And that's when I found a HYPERBALL tucked in the corner (!?!)

I can't even remember where I heard about Hyperball, but I never thought I would see one that worked.  This game (designed by Steve Ritchie and manufactured by Williams in 1981) is not technically a pinball machine, because there are no flippers.  Instead you have two handles which pivot left and right to aim a small cannon at the base of the playfield.  Instead of standard 1 1/16" pinballs, it fires 3/4" balls, and a lot of them!  Maybe 50 or so?  The ipdb.org page says it can shoot 250 in a minute!  There are 26 targets around the playfield (A-Z) and you try to shoot your balls at whichever one is lit.

If you look closely on the left here, you can see all the balls lined up.  Crazy right?!  Sadly, I only had enough change to play two games, and I was not very good at it.  But I will be back!  Oh yes, I will be back with change to spare and then many a game of Hyperball will be played!

Jon and I have one last summer to play some pinball together in New England while I am at CCS teaching some of the summer workshops, and then I will be in Oakland for good starting in August.  I'll continue to let you all know what machines I find and play in my new surroundings.