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.

Pinball in the Wild: Part 3 - The Pacific Pinball Museum!

I'm not sure The Pacific Pinball Museum counts as "in the wild" because their collection of games is carefully curated, their old woodrails have been meticulously restored and all the games are perfectly maintained.  It is without a doubt one of the great pinhalls out there, and no trip to the Bay Area is complete without visiting this fine establishment!

So I walk in the front door and the guy behind the ticket table is reading Drop Target #4!  I said to him, "I'm Alec Longstreth!  I make that zine with my buddy Jon!"  The guy (whose name I have forgotten - sorry!) asked me to sign the copy, and as I was doing so he said, "You'll never guess who's here... Keith Elwin!"  This was especially cool, because Jon and I had interviewed Keith in DTZ #4 and reviewed his Pinball 101 video.

I introduced myself to Keith and asked if I could get a photo with him, which he said was okay.  I'm glad I wasn't the only one wearing a pinball shirt at this place!

I guess there was a big pinball festival somewhere North of the Bay Area and Keith was in town for it.  I didn't have a car, so I couldn't get up there, but I still got a pinball fix at the PPM.

The cover charge is now $15, so I was determined to get my money's worth.  I play a lot of the 80s and 90s machine in the back room, and then when I started getting burned out, I moved to the quieter front room to play some older machines and read the historical info on top of each one.

When I caught back up with Claire, she was having an awesome game of Road Show.  At the end she got to enter her initials for the #2 score.  We were both kind of amazed by this.  Don't get me wrong, Claire is a pretty darn good pinball player, but #2 at the Pacific Pinball Museum?!

It turns out that it was the #2 score of the day.  A feature I didn't even know existed!  Now I want to see if I can turn that on for my Medieval Madness.  I like the idea of more people getting the thrill of entering their initials into the machine.

After hours and hours of playing these machines on free play, I dropped a few quarters into the pay machines in the lobby.  I tried the new AC-DC machine (with dropped playfield!)  It was a lot of fun.

NEXT UP: The Musée Mecanique!

DTZ Shipping Delay Notice

PLEASE NOTE: Alec is currently moving from Vermont to California.  He will not be able to ship out any new orders until Monday June 11th.  Thank you for your patience and sorry for the delay!

Pinball in the Wild: Part 2 - Santa Cruz Boardwalk!

Last week Claire and I went out to the Bay Area to find an apartment.  It took us about three days total to track down a place which was great, because we had left ourselves a whole week to accomplish this task. With a signed lease in hand, we had a few days to just have fun in the bay area before we had to head back to Vermont for the rest of our moving madness.  For me, this meant playing as much pinball as possible.

For starters I hit up the Bay Area section of PinballMap.com  456 machines at 217 locations?  Yes please!  The closest pinball I could find to where we were staying was at the Heart and Dagger Saloon.  They had a Medieval Madness, Theatre of Magic and Simpsons Pinball Party.  I was able to get replays on all three.  They played decently, except for a few weak flippers and not one of the games was level (all tilted to the left, which was frustrating).  Also, there was a CFF high score on Medieval.  Out-of-state intimidation!

The next day our hosts Kettner and Lacy drove us down to the Santa Cruz boardwalk, where I was told there would be plenty of pinball.  Our first stop was into Neptune's Kingdom which had an arcade on the ground floor.

I searched around, but alas, all I could find was video arcade games and digital photo booths.  Just as we were getting ready to leave, Lacy found some pinball up on the second floor!  It was a pretty impressive line-up:

From left to right that's Lord of the Rings, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Terminator 3, Pirates of the Carribean, Tron Legacy, AC-DC (brand new but somehow missing the rubber on the right flipper!?!) and then after those stupid shooting games there was also a Stern Spider-man and Batman.

The upper floor is mostly pool tables, so this was a nice quiet place to play.  Some foolish pinballer had also loaded up four player games on Spiderman and Batman, so Kettner and I got to play a lot, for free. This Tron also had the crazy neon lights along the ramp shot (LE?) which I had never seen before.  The AC-DC didn't have the dropped playfield, and it was too heartbreaking playing it without the flipper rubber.  Next time!

Next we went off and rode the Giant Dipper.  I've found that as I get older, I have less of a stomach for roller coasters, so afterwards I just took it easy... and played some more pinball!

A little farther down the boardwalk was the Casino Arcade.

This was a huge, crazy arcade, with tons of kids running around.  They mostly had video games (including a "classic corner" with games from the '80s) but tucked away in one corner there was a nice lineup of pins:

From left to right that's Ripley's Believe It or Not, Stern's Indiana Jones, Simpson's Pinball Party, Wheel of Fortune, Attack From Mars and Addams Family (switched off).  Indy was super broken and after watching three people dump their money in and get robbed, I switched it off (is that the right thing to do in this scenario?)  Claire and I both got replays on Attack From Mars and we played some Wheel of Fortune, which was crazy.  I got two replays on Simpsons thanks to my warm-up the day before.  I really wanted to play Ripley's but it was so crazy in the arcade, I never got a chance.  There were all these kids running around and it was so loud, we decided to head back to Neptune's Kingdom.  I'm glad I did!

I ended up having my best game ever on Spider-man with 109 million, which scored me a number two spot on the high score board!  I gotta say, this is the ideal scenario when playing pinball in the wild.  You scope out the scene, see which machines are in good shape.  Then get warmed up and hopefully score a couple of replays (it's so much more of a thrill to get a "KNOCK" in a crowd, instead of at home by yourself) and then before you take off, you leave your initials in one of the machines.

NEXT UP: The Pacific Pinball Museum!  No trip to the Bay Area would be complete without a visit to  this fine establishment.  And wait until you hear who I ran into whilst there!