# Episode 63 - The Pinball Map

**Source:** Wedgehead Pinball Podcast  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2024-12-30  
**Duration:** 46m 30s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** Buzzsprout-16296833

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## Analysis

Alan from Wedgehead Pinball Podcast interviews Ryan and Scott, the creators of Pinball Map, a free crowdsourced resource for locating pinball machines globally. They discuss the platform's origins in Portland (2008), evolution from a local spreadsheet to a worldwide website and mobile app, technical architecture, funding model, and the tensions between operators and location players regarding machine condition reporting.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Pinball Map launched in late 2008 in Portland with 43 locations and 133 machines — _Scott and Ryan confirm they launched the map in late 2008, starting with data from a Portland Pinball League spreadsheet containing 43 locations and 133 machines_
- [HIGH] The first version took about three months of intensive software development — _Scott states 'the first one took about three months of pretty intensive software development'_
- [HIGH] Pinball Map expanded to other cities around 2010 via regional administrators without aggressive outreach — _Scott: 'around 2010, people started coming to us and asking if we could cover their area' through word-of-mouth and existing communities like Rec Pinball and CFF_
- [HIGH] React Native app redesign occurred around 2018 to unify iOS and Android versions — _Scott mentions Beth created a new iOS version in React Native around 2018 that compiles to both Android and iOS, replacing separate codebases_
- [HIGH] Current server costs approximately $60/month (half for server RAM, half for database) — _Scott: 'now it costs like 60 bucks a month. And half of that is the server with like four gigs of RAM'_
- [HIGH] App and desktop web traffic is roughly 50/50, not the predicted 80% app dominance — _Ryan and Scott discuss traffic split being closer to 50/50 between app and desktop, surprising to Alan and hosts_
- [HIGH] Pinball Map receives new location submissions every day, many per day — _Ryan: 'we get, like, new location submissions every day, many, many every day. And people are constantly leaving comments'_
- [MEDIUM] Operators sometimes attempt to clear negative comments by deleting and re-adding machines — _Ryan: 'for a while we had people deleting comments or, I'm sorry, deleting machines and re-adding the machines in order to clear out the comments on condition'_

### Notable Quotes

> "if you're a pinball player, the pinball map is the single greatest resource available to you"
> — **Alan (host)**, opening
> _Sets the foundational value proposition of Pinball Map to the audience_

> "I'm a big fan of this podcast listen to every episode of it. So it's a real thrill to be on here."
> — **Scott**, early
> _Shows genuine enthusiasm and establishes credibility of guests within the community_

> "Ryan and I were actually roommates at the time. And Ryan's the one who got me into pinball."
> — **Scott**, origin story
> _Establishes the personal connection that sparked the project_

> "we didn't want to just like barge in and be like hey use our map ours is you know we have a better interface or something like that"
> — **Scott**, expansion
> _Reveals community-first philosophy when expanding regionally_

> "we don't do the greatest with looking at metrics or tracking anything. Like we don't even have a counter on the website."
> — **Ryan**, analytics discussion
> _Demonstrates volunteer/grassroots nature of the operation_

> "Ryan is absolutely relentless with this code... just has never stopped"
> — **Scott**, technical discussion
> _Credits Ryan's sustained technical effort as key to platform longevity_

> "they kind of think we're a business. They treat us like we are a profit-generating business that is hurting their business. And at the end of the day, we're not a profit generating business."
> — **Scott**, operator tensions
> _Central tension in the platform: misalignment between creator intent and operator perception_

> "We're just reporting the condition of machines as the public reports them to us. That's it."
> — **Scott**, operator tensions
> _Core philosophy of Pinball Map's non-curated approach_

> "I have pretty thin skin. I don't love getting upset messages."
> — **Ryan**, operator tensions
> _Reveals emotional toll of operator complaints on volunteer creators_

> "I spend every day working on our games to make sure that we're offering the best quality playing experience... players don't know"
> — **Alan**, closing
> _Operator perspective on the information asymmetry problem Pinball Map creates_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Pinball Map | product | Free, crowdsourced online platform and mobile app for locating pinball machines globally, launched 2008 in Portland |
| Ryan | person | Co-creator of Pinball Map, software engineer, originally from Portland currently based in Los Angeles, primary technical maintainer |
| Scott | person | Co-creator of Pinball Map, Portland-based, handled initial architecture and design decisions, responds to operator complaints |
| Alan | person | Host of Wedgehead Pinball Podcast, co-owner of Wedgehead pinball bar in Portland, Oregon |
| Alex the Waterboy | person | Co-host of Wedgehead Pinball Podcast, not present for this episode due to water-related emergencies |
| Wedgehead | organization | Pinball bar in Portland, Oregon owned by Alan and others, namesake and original venue for the podcast |
| Portland Pinball League | organization | Early Portland pinball community organization that maintained the initial spreadsheet of 43 locations and 133 machines that became Pinball Map's seed data |
| Crazy Flipper Fingers (CFF) | organization | Portland pinball street gang/community group in 1990s-2000s that played location pinball and was categorized as a gang by Portland Police Department |
| Beth | person | Portland-based developer who rewrote Pinball Map's iOS app in React Native around 2018, unifying Android and iOS codebases |
| Frank Michael | person | Developer who created the second version of Pinball Map's iOS app |
| Isaac | person | Referenced as tall and handsome, created first iOS version of Pinball Map, featured in earlier Wedgehead episode about Portland pinball tournament history |
| Johnny | person | Managed pinball machine locator website for Bay Area Rec Pinball community, whose data was ported into Pinball Map's Bay Area regional map |
| Patreon | product | Platform providing recurring donations to fund Pinball Map operations |
| Ko-fi | product | Platform providing donations to fund Pinball Map operations |
| Rec Pinball | product | Early online pinball community platform/resource for sharing machine locations, referenced as pre-Pinball Map solution |
| Pinball Rebel | product | Early pinball machine locator system, still operational as of podcast recording, predates Pinball Map |
| React Native | technology | Cross-platform development framework used to unify Pinball Map's iOS and Android apps around 2018 |
| Portland Mercury | organization | Free weekly newspaper in Portland that featured Pinball Map creators in articles about pinball's resurgence around 2008-2010 |
| Willamette Weekly | organization | Portland area publication that featured Pinball Map in early coverage of pinball's resurgence |
| The Oregonian | organization | Portland newspaper that featured Pinball Map in early coverage of pinball's resurgence |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Pinball Map platform history and evolution, Technical architecture and software development practices, Operator vs. location player tensions and moderation, Community-driven data crowdsourcing model
- **Secondary:** Funding and sustainability of volunteer projects, Portland pinball scene history and CFF, Why pinball has better mapping infrastructure than other gaming niches, Mobile app vs. web platform usage patterns

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.82) — Largely celebratory interview with warm community appreciation for Pinball Map creators. Positive tone throughout with genuine enthusiasm from both hosts and guests. Tension around operator complaints adds complexity but is handled thoughtfully. No hostility detected.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Operator-location player conflict exists regarding what machine condition information should be publicly visible; operators perceive Pinball Map as harming their business by exposing negative reviews (confidence: high) — Scott: 'they kind of think we're a business... treat us like we are a profit-generating business that is hurting their business.' Includes incidents of operators deleting and re-adding machines to clear comments.
- **[community_signal]** Pinball Map has become essential infrastructure for the global pinball community with daily location submissions and active maintenance by passionate users (confidence: high) — Ryan notes 'we get, like, new location submissions every day, many, many every day. And people are constantly leaving comments and adding, removing machines.'
- **[sentiment_shift]** Pinball enthusiasts are uniquely motivated to maintain detailed, crowdsourced location data compared to adjacent gaming communities (confidence: medium) — Hosts note lack of equivalent platforms for arcade games or rhythm games despite larger audiences; attributed to pinball community's meticulous nature and passion for sharing machine condition information
- **[community_signal]** Portland pinball scene (CFF, leagues, tournaments) was foundational to Pinball Map's success and regional expansion model (confidence: high) — Word-of-mouth spread through CFF and existing leagues; creators required regional administrators and established communities to expand, ensuring quality and adoption
- **[design_philosophy]** Pinball Map employs strict criteria for regional expansion: requires non-operator administrator and existing league to ensure data quality and prevent abandonment (confidence: high) — Scott: 'somebody there who's not an operator... And ideally, there's a league there already. So you have like an audience that will start using it already'
- **[market_signal]** Volunteer-maintained infrastructure critical to pinball ecosystem; creators sustain project through Patreon/Ko-fi support despite modest revenue (confidence: high) — Scott notes costs evolved from ~$10/month to $60/month funded by Patreon and Ko-fi, indicating sustainability model shift from zero-cost hobby to community-supported infrastructure
- **[community_signal]** Ryan's sustained technical effort over 14+ years is primary factor in Pinball Map's longevity; automated testing and open-source transparency enable confident ongoing development (confidence: high) — Scott credits Ryan's relentlessness; mentions elaborate automated test suite and open-source changelog showing Ryan's constant contributions despite slowing in recent years
- **[technology_signal]** React Native unification (2018) of iOS and Android apps improved user experience with seamless cross-region functionality and likely contributed to continued platform growth (confidence: high) — Scott describes React Native allowing single codebase compilation and notes unified map (no longer region-segmented in app) made experience 'so much easier to use now' and 'the app take off even more'

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## Transcript

 🎵 Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. My name is Alan, host of this podcast and one of the owners of Wedgehead, a pinball bar in Portland, Oregon, for which the podcast is named. My loyal co-host Alex the Waterboy is out dealing with some water-related emergencies, but still got a great show for all of our loyal listeners this week. Today I'm welcoming on the show two almost criminally undernown heroes of the pinball scene. These guys created, built, and maintain the pinball map. We bring it up on the show all the time because if you're a pinball player, the pinball map is the single greatest resource available to you. And the pinball map started right here in Portland. It was originally only used to map all the pinball machines in Portland before it eventually grew to include cities all over the world. It's a free resource and it's all user updated. And if for some reason you found this pinball podcast before you found the pinball map, well, your life's about to get a whole hell of a lot better. Welcome to the show, Ryan and Scott. How are you guys? Hi, Alan. Hey, Alan. happy to be here you want to say your name uh for the listeners so they can get to know your voice sure i mean ryan and i this is scott well i've been told that ryan and i have very similar voices with a similar zest for life that comes through with them so it might be hard to tell us apart i just wanted to say at the very top of this i'm a big fan of this podcast listen to every episode of it. So it's a real thrill to be on here. And I'm curious if Alex, the water boy is not here. That means you're not recording in his basement studio. Where are you recording, Alan? Where are you? I'm recording in my own house, in my own non-basement studio, in my little library. We just felt like it was going to be, he's got some holiday plans and, you know, having four people on a podcast starts to get a little bit unwieldy anyway but I really wanted to get this episode together because I'm really excited to talk to you guys we just did a recent episode with Isaac about the kind of pinball tournament scene in Portland and its history you know you guys obviously came up and I was just like man we really got to do this episode about the pinball map it's something that just everyone uses if you're in a pinball I mean you've used it all time and I've met you, Scott, when you've come into Wedgehead. And I was just like, it's crazy how like, it's this ubiquitous resource that everyone uses, but like you guys are just unassuming. And I said, criminally undernown. So I wanted to change that a little bit. Can I ask you guys, when did you first launch the pinball map? Uh, sure. Before that though, Ryan, you gotta, you gotta weigh in here. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. I'm Ryan. I'm a voice number two and yeah. Happy to be on here. I'm based out of Los Angeles right now, so I'm coming from far away. And I listened to the episode with Isaac this morning, so I thought it was great. He said a lot of stuff that brought back some memories. I thought one thing was funny that he mentioned was how we started gaming the IFPA system a bit with those weekly tournaments rotating from space to space. And I think I got up to like 120 or something like that, just mostly only playing weekly tournaments through in Portland which uh you can't do that these days yeah what you just you help what what do you guys call that in your software engineering what do you call that where you just sort of try to break something to then fix it it isn't don't you guys have a word for that pen testing or something like that yeah I heard that episode this morning too Isaac a tall and handsome man he's a tall and handsome man tall and handsome man um and he was there like very shortly after we launched the map. I think that was your question. We launched it back in 2008 in Portland. Ryan and I were actually roommates at the time. And Ryan's the one who got me into pinball. He's been into pinball much longer than I have. And we would ride our bikes around town looking for pinball machines and having kind of a hard time of it. And plus, when you're riding a bike a great distance, you don't want to show up and be disappointed. There were solutions. There There were, what do you call them, Google Spreadsheets, and there was Pinball Rebel. Do you remember Pinball Rebel, Alan? Whoa, my God. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's actually, it's still around. You could still look it up, and they still have a locator on their site. So you could, I don't think it's changed much since then either. So you could see what it looked like back in 2008. How long did it take you guys to, like, kind of launch the first version? Like, how much? I think the first one took about three months of pretty intensive software development. It was actually just a project to learn more about Perl, which anybody listening to this who knows what Perl is will maybe roll their eyes. It's kind of an antiquated language that I was professionally developing at the time. So I thought, well, I better actually learn how to do this. So Ryan and I got down and put the map together. Ryan, I think you did all the original CSS on that site too, by hand. I was pretty brand new to CSS at the time too. So I did my best. Wow. Do you remember how many machines you had listed when you first launched the site? Yeah. You know, I pulled up one of the original spreadsheets that Scott mentioned right there, and it had 43 locations on it and 133 machines. and this was something that was maintained by the Portland Pinball League, and I'm not even certain if that's still around, but yeah, just a spreadsheet that they'd been keeping up with for a couple years, and we just grabbed that data with their permission and plopped it into the map. So just 43 locations. And how did you guys get the word out? Because Isaac said he met you at a weekly, and how did you get users to use it? Because it's all user-updated. again i'm assuming to the listener here if you haven't used the pinball map good god like i don't know what you're doing with your lives like if you're into playing pinball location this is this is the most important resource but like at the time how did you get people to be like all right you're gonna log on i remember using it when i got in because someone saw me playing pinball i think at beulah land and they were like oh you like this game i was like yeah i really like this they're like oh you should play this other game you would really like it tales from the arabian nights and I was like what's that and they're like oh they have one at such and such I was like how and then they just kept kind of like telling me about all these machines around town and where I should go play and I was like how do you know this and like oh you got to use the pinball map and I was like the pinball map you know this is like around 2008 or so like right when you guys launched which I didn't realize it was that new at the time but that's why I feel like when I talk about on the show I'm like man I've always it's just always kind of been around and I think there's a lot of new players not only in Portland but all around the world where that's the case like they get into pinball they get excited about pinball like it just feels like it's just ubiquitous like but like I'm assuming at the beginning it took some doing or some adoption yeah I'll take a stab but two quick things Alan number one I'm having a weird experience on this podcast because like I said I've heard every episode you guys do great work and I listen to podcasts at two twice the speed that they're supposed to happen. So I'm hearing your voice, and it sounds incredibly slow to me, even though it's your real voice. Yeah, talk faster, please. Yeah, Alan, if you don't mind. Number two, you say maybe these people who haven't used the pinball map are missing out, but maybe they aren't, Alan. Like maybe these people are having a much better life than anyone using the map because they don't have that choice thing. What is it called? Like something of choice? Paralysis by choice. There's just some person who's playing like one or two pinball machines in some small town and having the time of their lives, you know? Yeah, I guess it's true. I guess you guys sort of took away the joy of discovery for people on location, didn't you? This is all a great mistake, I guess. But we were never, I mean, I don't think we were ever good at advertising it because we never really felt a need to. It was just sort of a thing that we did for solving a problem that we saw. And I guess in 2008, it would have been word of mouth through Weegs, friends of ours, CFF, which Ryan is currently a member of. I think that was a way to get the word out, too. I don't think you've talked about CFF on your podcast before. For the listener. Well, I try not to get it too regional. You know, I try not to be like it's the Wedget Pinball Podcast, but we don't spend a ton of time talking about my bar or just Portland in general. We just talk about pinball in general. But for the listeners, a little backstory, the CFF or the crazy flipper fingers was a pinball street gang. In fact, one time, I think the Portland Police Department even categorized y'all as a real gang. They had jackets and they had like a logo and they would go around and play pinball on location. and put up scores that's it yeah be rowdy they had uh everyone had to put up cff as their initials right if you put in a high score you always had to put cff uh that's what i remember about it yeah but you know it's a tight group and just like the the leagues and the weekly tournaments were so it was pretty easy people were immediately excited about it and you know the the big difference that we were trying to solve essentially was being able to search for machines so when you had a spreadsheet or like a custom Google map. Back then you could make custom Google maps where you're just starring locations on a map basically. But for some reason back then you couldn't actually search those custom Google maps. You could just browse them. So we were just solving that issue of being able to search, search for machine, search for, we made little zones in Portland. So you could, if you lived in the Northeast, you could search for Northeast and limit your results just for that area. And, you know, I also want to add that we, back then, I mean, this has sort of died off, I guess, at least people coming to us for this, but we would get interviewed sometimes for, like, Willamette Weekly or the Portland Mercury or the Oregonian, you know, some other, you know, little paper like that that wanted to be like, oh, pinball's coming back. You know, it was really, it was very new back then, pinball coming back. I mean, people are still writing articles like that, but yeah. Yeah. So that helped. We got it. We got a fair amount of like mainstream press. Yeah. Isaac brought me an old issue of the Portland Mercury. Portland Mercury is like a free kind of weekly newspaper here in Portland for the listeners outside of Portland. But he brought me an old Mercury issue with you guys in it. And it's kind of an, it's exactly that. It whoa do you guys remember pinball machines Like they coming back in a big way in Portland It funny to kind of look at that old issue It pretty cool Enough about Portland. Like when did you guys first expand outside of Portland to include other cities and regions? And where did you start with that? Pretty quickly, I'd say it was like around 2010. You know, we started this in late 2008, around this time of year. Pretty shortly after that in 2010, people started coming to us and asking if we could cover their area, basically. And we started around that time adding regions. And just a quick background into the region concept is that, you know, there's a lot of areas like Bay Area, for example, San Francisco, where they had a rich history of communicating to each other on, like, Usenet, Games Rec Pinball, about where to find machines. they had a website i think it was called like pinball machine.org managed by this guy johnny and you know we didn't want to just like barge in and be like hey use our map ours is you know we have a better interface or something like that they would come to us and basically say we want to port our data into your interface and we would say okay we'd create like a separate map you know slash Bay Area for them that only contained Bay Area locations. And we just said, this is your website. This is your map. It has, you're the administrator for it. And go, go ahead. And yeah. That's interesting. I remember when you would click on like the homepage and there'd be like, oh, you can check out Austin, Texas or Portland, Oregon or Seattle, Washington. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. So around 2010, we started adding Seattle, Bay Area, L.A., Chicago. Like it really started, you know, growing pretty quickly. And it was always done that way. It was like, would you reach out to them or somebody would reach out to you and be like, hey, how do we get our local scene on the map? Yeah, they'd reach out to us. We weren't like doing any outreach to other people. And we just say, yeah, this is what you have to do. We have to have an administrator. So somebody there who's not an operator, like doesn't have any commercial interest in excluding the competition or something like that. And ideally, there's a league there already. So you have like an audience that will start using it already, like immediately. and so we kind of had some somewhat strict criteria to make sure that it was updated and high quality because we didn't want to just start adding wherever and then have no one update these areas yeah we also didn't want to go somewhere where they didn't want us to be there you know like if they already had a map and it worked really well for them then we would just back off i i remember in the earlier days seattle uh with skillshot was was one of those things where it's like, yeah, maybe we don't need a map because we already have this thing covered. And they still do that zine today. And I think that's a pretty cool way of tracking pinball machines. That's interesting. When did the app first come about? And how much traffic does the app receive now versus the website version? This is where it gets pretty computery. We launched an Android version and an iOS version, I think, if not at the exact same time, like a couple months apart. And at the time, that meant that you had to write two separate applications you had to write them and you had to maintain them so if you wanted to update the website you would then need to update the android version and the ios version and ryan keep me honest here because this was what 14 years ago isaac tall and handsome did the first uh ios version i think right he came to us with that Yeah. Yeah. And there was a guy, Matt Frank Michael, who did the second version. And then I think I did the third version. No. No? Who did the third version? I mean, you did Android at the same time as all that. And then the third iOS version is what we're on right now with React Native and Beth. We used to have two totally separate versions, one for Android, one for iOS. And then Beth, local Portland legend Beth, came and wrote a new version of the app in this thing called React Native, which you write once and then it compiles to an Android app for Android users and then an iOS app for iOS users. I don't know what year. Ryan, do you know what year that happened? I think that was like 2018. so that's pre just prior to that we had kind of uh made a universal map that wasn't only segmented by region and then we wanted an app that can support that and not have to like have the burden of switching between regions in the app because that's what you had to do before you know a lot of people are traveling you get off the airplane and you have to switch to a different region in the app, which is confusing and hard. And so we wanted more of a seamless experience. And that kind of helped the app take off even more, like even more, got even more popular after that, because it's just so much easier to use now. Yeah, but that was 2018. Alan, do you want to guess, do you want to play a fun guessing game? How much traffic you think is app versus desktop? I would guess that it's got, I would guess it's about 80% on the app yeah that's uh it's a smart guess and i think i would make that guess too but it's actually closer to 50 50 isn't that really like who are these monsters that are using the desktop browser on their laptops or something and don't most people just use apps yeah wow okay that is surprising uh i mean i use the app version a lot on the phone normally when i'm just i usually use it to update our location, like when we bring a new game in or swap a game out or whatever. But yeah, I guess I do use the desktop version a lot for the show. So I guess I do use both. Maybe it's people at work or something. I don't know. Yeah, that would be my guess. People just in front of their computers already at work. But you know, that said, we don't do the greatest with looking at metrics or tracking anything. Like we don't even have a counter on the website. So take it with a grain of salt. Okay. Okay. Well, I wanted to ask you guys, you know, because like pinball's a small hobby, but it's, you know, like a ferociously passionate one. My question is, how much money does it cost to host and run the pinball month every month? And why do you do it? The cost has gone up since we started it. We used to try really, really, really hard to minimize costs. And we still do, of course. But for a while, it was like 10 bucks a month or something like that. It was very cheap. And then we started getting like Patreon support and Ko-fi support, which kind of gave us a little more runway. I don't know if that's the right term, but more space to put a little bit more resources into it. When we were as lean as possible, we were always like maxed out at using 90% of the server RAM at all times. And if someone made like a crazy query, it would just degrade the entire site. We were always right on the edge. So in the last five years or something, we switched from our old server setup and just are using more of that Patreon money. So now it costs like 60 bucks a month. And half of that is the server with like four gigs of RAM, which is very plentiful for what we do. and then a database which also has a bunch of RAM, which makes, you know, just the goal is for the site to be fast and responsive, and it's kind of worth it to put a little bit more money into it. That, you know, people are paying us. They're paying us to have the site be fast, so that's why we pass the money right back over to have a fast site. I think, Alan, I think Ryan is being a little humble here too because I've seen examples where, So when a map loads on your screen, that's actually costing money. Like a service is providing these things called tiles, which is how the map renders. And over the years, we saw Google Maps go from free to very expensive. And then there's a bunch of third-party map providers that also cost quite a bit of money. And as the site gets more popular, more maps are being rendered and the prices go up. Ryan works pretty tirelessly to shift around what our map options are to the point where I think we have tiers where it'll load one map until it runs out of the free tier and then switch to a different one. He's just constantly juggling the way this thing works in order to save money. Instead of saying, hey, pay our way out of this, Ryan will actually program a solution that's more cost effective so it's impressive yeah we think a lot about tiles map tiles all the time that's wild i find this all very fascinating like the pinball map the idea the concept now is sort of like uh it's it's so obvious and it seems so essential you know and you guys built that but i was talking to the water boy and you know because he also really likes especially japanese candy cab arcade cabinets and we were just talking about like it's weird that there's not really at least in the u.s there's not really like an arcade equivalent of the pinball map but for arcade machines that there's not like a universal arcade map and i know there's one for sort of like rhythm games and stuff uh but it's not nearly as robust or well maintained as the pinball map is and i just want to ask you guys because like the video game industry in general i know the coin-op video game industry is fairly small but certainly the overall video game industry is much much larger than our small niche hobby of pinball but like why do you guys think like this is a more philosophical question because you guys know the nuts and bolts of like how to make it how to make something like this i'm sure there's other people that could do that for video games but like what is it about pinball that makes people spend months or years of their lives building a resource like this for other pinball people and why doesn't it seem to happen in an adjacent hobby like coin out video games geez a philosophy question i let me give a quick nuts and bolts answer and maybe ryan has the philosophical answer we're people who are into a niche hobby i'm sure we're all people who know somebody who starts a project and gets really excited about it and doesn't finish that project. Right? Yeah, people, people do this all the time. I think there are three reasons that the pinball map was successful. The first is when we wrote the initial version of it, we wrote a really elaborate automated test suite along with it. And what that means is, whenever we make a change to the code, we can run the test suite, and it'll tell us with relative confidence if we broke something else. Like, you know, code, you're always introducing bugs. We tried to make it so that we could make big changes and not break the entire site. So that gave us the confidence to keep poking at it without worrying that we'd have to start over every time. Number two, Ryan is absolutely relentless with this code It an open source project so you can go see online exactly what the code looks like at any moment Just go there and look at the changelog and you will see this guy in there all the time making visual updates, adding functionality. At the end of the day, Ryan is doing the good work of the pinball map and just has never stopped. And I think the third thing is the pinball community in general has just been really meticulous and excited about keeping the data fresh. Like we could write all the code in the world and if it just sits there never being updated, then it's useless. But for some reason, which maybe Ryan has the answer to, pinball users are really hyped up to tell you about the condition of Monster Bash in some small town in Iowa. Yeah. Ryan, why do people care so much about pinball? Well, first off, I want to say that, you know, you I wouldn't say it's me being relentless. I mean, if you go back in the changelog a couple of years ago, it's mostly you slowed down a little bit as you got a busier job and other things took over. There's a humongous amount of changelogs attributable to you in there, obviously. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I know the philosophical answer to that. I think we continue to do it because a lot of people use it, basically. You know, if people weren't using it, we'd just stop developing this. We get, like, new location submissions every day, many, many every day. And people are constantly leaving comments and adding, removing machines. So it's very obvious that there's a lot of people that use it and like it. And so that motivates us to continue with it. I think, you know, it's a lot of work. I would say it's the reason why, one reason why it's not, there aren't like similar ones for other game, gaming platforms or whatever, is just because it's a lot of work to set this up initially, I think. You know, once we have the momentum going, it's easier to kind of maintain it. I don't know. You know, once we are an open source app, so someone could easily port it or fork it. And just instead of having pinball machines in the database, they have arcade games in the database. They could just do that. But the fact that nobody has, I think, just demonstrates that it's kind of a lot of work. That would be my best guess. So like I'm an operator. You know, I've been asked this before by I think I was doing like a Q&A or something, maybe on our social media one time and I got a submission and I and I get this sometimes whenever we get a very kind of strident comments on the pinball map they go how do you feel about this as an operator and I want to ask you guys the question is I'm imagining you guys have at least in the past or still do do you guys get angry messages from operators based on the comments that players leave on their machines? Yes. Yes, yes. I have to be the first line of answer for that because Ryan is the one that gets the questions. And so I hear Ryan, he recounts the highlights to us and it's pretty brutal. Like he mentioned, we have admins in different regions that handle this sort of thing. But for a region without or for an area without an admin, it goes to Ryan. So Ryan is the front line here. I think the highlights are, well, for a while we had people deleting comments or, I'm sorry, deleting machines and re-adding the machines in order to clear out the comments on condition. Right. So that's just like a bad experience for everybody. Another frequent flyer is that people will want to track non-pinball machines like bat games. Where do you think, Alan? Like, do you think a bat game goes on there or like Bagatelle or something? No. Do you think it should go? No. No. What is the pinball machine, Alan? What even is pinball? It's got to have flippers, I think, to be a pinball machine. But what about like Hyperball or something like that? Do you think that's pinball? Have you played Hyperball? I do like Hyperball. I mean, the thing is, is like in a perfect world, I think we would have the pinball map, but it would also include games like skeeball and pop-a-shot basketball and air hockey and stuff like that. Because those are all games that people play, and it'd be nice to know at a glance if, just like with pinball, if you're into any of those games, just knowing that they have a weird Japanese rhythm game in good condition at this spot near you, that's valuable information. But I do love, because I'm a pinball guy, I kind of just care, I really only care about pinball. so I like that we have our own resource I like that you guys are the ones that made it and I kind of don't really want to see I like I don't want to click on a spot and then scroll through like say somewhere like ground control they have what I don't I don't even know but they may probably have like I don't know like a hundred video games plus all their pinball machines I wouldn't want to have to scroll past video games just to see what I care about which is What pinball machines do they have on the floor right now? You know what I mean? Yeah, that's fair. I would say above all other things, though, the angry messages that we get from operators, and I'll let Ryan give you the real answer. The angry messages from operators, they kind of think we're a business. They treat us like we are a profit-generating business that is hurting their business. And at the end of the day, like we're not a profit generating business. We're not a business and we don't want to hurt anyone's business. We're just reporting the condition of machines as the public reports them to us. That's it. There's a couple of different interests that the pinball map serves. And one is operators helping them advertise their locations. And then two is helping regular people who aren't operators find machines and also have some idea of the condition of the machines at a place. So those two interests can sometimes butt heads with each other. And I mean, I have pretty thin skin. I don't love getting upset messages. I think it was last year I spent a lot of effort responding to operators and like writing like an FAQ that really encompasses the main questions that we get a lot or the main comments that we get a lot from operators, which is like ban this user from leaving comments at our location or ban users from talking about our coin slots or something like that. Only let them leave comments that are of this type of comment. Like, and we're just like, no, we can't do any of that. Like, we can't control what people are writing. And we're not going to ban individuals just because you don't like that person. So we just kind of, I started just like pointing them, engaging less and pointing them to the FAQ, leaving notes when people leave comments. I have little tips or we have tips that say like, you know, please be respectful of the time that it takes to fix these machines so that people aren't, you know, leaving angry, drunk comments that piss off operators. And because, you know, we're just in the middle of that. We just get hit with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys are getting the crossfire of the war between operators and location players. so I appreciate that you guys are catching some arrows too how do John Youssi it Alan like what the role of the pinball map I know you guys are keeping your machines really up to date well maintained like if somebody put a mean comment how would you feel like Ryan I don't know if I would say I have I don't have thin skin but I have angry skin You know what I mean? When I hear shitty comments, it upsets me for sure, because, you know, I spend a lot of I spend every day working on our games to make sure that we're offering the best quality playing experience. and there's just some things that like players don't know like now i try to talk about it on the show you know but it's like we were just in chicago for chicago expo and we got to go on the stern factory tour and i went on the stern factory tour and i look at the they have a whole lobby full of games right and every one of their games is set up steep with the leg levers in the back all the way up all the way flat on the bottom you know kind of how we typically set up our games steep many operators do but there's this like home collector idea of like aim should be flatter you know so like people will just comment like these operators saying this to steal all your money and for you to have no fun and shit like that like man dude you can go to the factory yourself and see for yourself but uh you know they're just sort of i think it's called the dunning kruger effect is like people think that they know a lot more than they know just because they go out and play pinball i don't know what you guys can do about it i don't think that there's really anything for you guys to do about it and i do think that if you're a good operator the pinball map is just does so much for your business as an operator to be upset at you guys for someone leaving bad comments on their machine like one it's like if the comments are made in good faith then maybe you're just a shit fucking operator, dude. That just like run shit games. You know what I mean? Like you're like, and then, and then, and then just the criticism is fair and valid. The only thing I would say is like, if I had my dream feature, here's my pitch, my dream feature for the pinball map. Okay. You guys ready to hear this? Yep. We're ready. Yeah. Okay. When someone leaves a comment, if I could click on that person's name and see the other comments they left. oh okay as long as i could do that then i feel like when because i look at it like the pinball map is sort of like when you read online reviews right for any restaurant or any business or whatever you can click on that their name and then you can be like oh is this person just an idiot do they just write this stuff all the time or is this like oh no they give very thoughtful advice. So when they go, oh, you know, this, you know, this machine's like falling apart and hasn't been cleaned in 10 years or whatever, you probably know that you're like, oh yeah, they're, they're probably just factually updating the app in good faith. Yeah. Like how, how seriously should I take this person? Cause you're just getting drive-bys. You're just getting like one random comment by a random person and you don't really know what it means. It's one of the weirdest things to run this site is you hear about Facebook moderation and like what, what the rules of Facebook should be and what they should remove and add and all that stuff. I'm not saying we're at that level at all, but a lot of the nuance of online moderation bleeds into the pinball map, which is always wild to me because it's just supposed to be a place to find pinball machines. I know. Right. Yeah. But yeah, it's, I mean, it's an interesting idea. I don't think it would take too long to do that either. No, yeah, I think that's a good idea. I do like that. I've always, I know that whenever I use it, I'm always like, I could see a person's kind of handle and I always like I want to click on it and see what else they leave Like that the like I always wanted that feature so I don want to create any more work for you guys but if you know in the future you do that I would I would appreciate it because there are there are people in our scene or in any scene that just sort of, I think are, I want to say bad faith actors, but definitely maybe a little bit edge Lords, you know, and it'd be nice. It'd be, it'd be so easy to click on their name and go, Oh, okay. I get it. this guy's just a, he's like the local jackass of Miami or whatever. Like, you're like, that's just, that's the guy. He likes to make weird jokes on the condition of games or whatever. But yeah, I think as an operator, like it's the best. I mean, I'm a player and an operator and I appreciate it from both sides. Like, just like what you said, like just being able to like go in and I can update, we get a new game. I'm just like, Ed Boon, we got a new game. You know, here it is. Here's the game we don't have anymore Ed Boon it's gone right it's the best i think one thing scott didn't mention at the beginning was like and you said it even alan you said in 2008 you log in and do like something you know edit it but we didn't have logins for i don't know like six or eight years or something like that there was no users everything was done completely anonymously with no names so it was it was a different experience at the beginning where there was like absolutely you had no idea who was leaving comments essentially at any time. And yeah, we had to eventually add more control to the situation because people were occasionally doing bad faith edits or bad faith comments. But I want to state that by and large, considering how many edits are made to this site, there's not that much messing around. It's very surprising, I think. Like, mostly people, I think, recognize that it's a good resource and they don't want to turn it into something bad. And so they sort of have good behavior more or less, I think. Yeah, it's helpful that it's not forum, you know, and I'm glad it hasn't turned into that because it really is just a resource like, hey, we're just trying to figure out what pinball machines are in what spot. Yeah, yeah, it's not a social site. I think it helps that we didn't include social aspects to it. And we don't want people using comments to talk to each other and have a back and forth or something like that. I don't know. It just degrades the site immediately when they do that. Yeah, there's plenty of other spaces for that. It's nice to just – when I click on a Wikipedia article, I appreciate the brevity and I appreciate the scope of what they're offering. you know and that's how i feel like the pinball map is such a great resource is like it's exactly what i need when i need it it helps me find places to play when i'm traveling and i could be like oh wow they have oh my god they have an eldorado there like i haven't played one of those in god i don't know how long you know like i'm absolutely going to go 45 minutes out of my way just to go to this spot because they have it and i know that it got updated a few weeks ago so I'm reasonably assured that when I go there, that game's going to be there. That's the best part about the pinball map. I want to end this kind of episode with, I want to ask you guys for some stats, if possible. We love stats, Alan. I figured you guys would. All the computer programmers I know, they love stats. So let's start off with the easy ones. How many locations and machines are you tracking at the time of this recording? tracking 10,965 locations uh hoping to get to 11,000 by the end of the year we'll see and uh machines 45,350 wow alan you've stated that you want us to return to the 60s and 70s heyday of pinball where they were ubiquitous right they'd be everywhere what do you imagine the number of locations was in 1965 roger sharp has told me and i have no reason to disagree with roger sharp he put the estimate that i guess the industry back then put uh and if you look at some of the production runs of games from the late 60s into the 70s like the 70s is like the Ed Boon decade that's where shit was like big i think it was the estimate was somewhere in the 500,000 to a million active machines wow so uh it's a huge order of magnitude difference right which i think is when you talk to people that lived in those decades like my parents were teenagers in those uh decades and like you talk to them and that's what it was it was like it was ubiquitous it was um it would be like seeing you know like a starbucks in a city in the u.s or something or mcdonald's or like it was you didn't there's no way the average person hadn't seen a pinball machine in the last week you know what i mean like and not going out and searching for it just in their daily lives because pinball machines used to live in so many different locations used to make sense in like break rooms and uh you know college uh dorms would have game like all sorts of stuff and i know a lot of those businesses have changed like we don't have but we still have a lot of those businesses too like they just don't have pins in them and it's interesting i guess i always talk about that on the show because i'm like because i've been playing pinball for closing in on 20 years now and i love seeing it grow right and you guys get to you guys get the front row seat to see it grow probably nobody else sees it grow in the same way you guys see it grow like i guess you're not selling the machines to the home market which i know stern has said is 70 of the market but you're you're getting to read that of the location machines. You get to see it go up. Yeah. You know, someone just submitted a location country roads, beer company in West Virginia, white sulfur Springs, West Virginia. So we're, yeah. A special shout out. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. We know these things right away. How many active users use the site? Um, I, I kind of, we kind of have to guess at this because again, we don't do great, uh, tracking of this stuff for the app. We have, you know, we use Mapbox for the map. And so we can see how many times that gets loaded by unique individuals per month. So it counts the individuals. And Mapbox usually says around like 15,000. And then if we want to, I don't know, double that for the website or something like that. I mean, it's hard to say we have like, you know, we added user accounts, like I said, I don't know, whatever, six, eight years ago or something like that. And we've got around 30,000 accounts, but you know, not all those people are active. So interesting. I don't know. It feels like more, but, uh, you know, maybe people just come and go sometimes. Yeah. I mean, we tend to track things like, uh, edits as a more meaningful metric for usage and stuff like that. So I'll throw out some numbers real fast for you. Okay. So in the last 30 days, there's been 7,268 edits to the map. So in the last month, over 7,000. And just under 2,000 of those were machines added to locations. Just over 1,600 of those were machines removed. So that's a healthy state of updating the site, I think. And then we had comments. We had, I think, just under 1,400 machine comments in the last 30 days. So those seem like pretty good numbers to me. Yeah, I would say so. Do you have any, idea what city or region is experiencing the fastest growth or change the number of pinball machines on location maybe over the last year or last couple years like is there a hot spot like an outbreak where the next pinball pandemic is gonna crop out from like you know no no like individual spot that's super obvious like that i mean i would say for the u.s and a lot of canada too you know a lot of it's been mapped like you know it's there you know there were times a few years ago where like Wisconsin was going off and like a huge amount of submissions were coming in from Wisconsin, but then they get mapped and, you know, then, then it kind of levels off after that, because after that, it's just like a new business opening. And so I would say that's like the context. So I would say with that in mind, it's probably Europe because we were slower to map in Europe. And, you know, I just, it's hard for us to tell if these are brand new locations or if it's someone discovering the site and submitting a location to it that's been around for a long time. We don't always know what's what. But Europe sees a good amount of growth these days, like the Netherlands and Sweden. Yeah, Germany. I want to end this episode. I want to plug a couple of things. The first thing I want to plug is your own coffee account, the Pinball Map. You can go and support this resource. They have different tiers of memberships. You can set up a donation that comes out every month like I've done. Or you can just send them a one-time gift. They also have a Patreon. We set up our own Ko-fi account, which you might know. And that's, I think, the best way because they take a more amicable split for the creators. But you also have your own podcast, the Pinball Map Podcast. Sorry, Alan. It's actually called Mapping Around. Sorry. Don't forget. Yeah, it's Mapping Around. You're right. Something about that real quick. episode three of that podcast features an interview with your own Chris Rhodes discussing the opening of Wedget. Yeah. So you guys started this podcast a long time ago and then took a extended hiatus and then have now been back recently over the last few months. Where can they find that? I mean, I know they can find it on the Pinball Map website. That's how I usually listen to it. Yeah, you could find it all the usual spaces. I think we upload it to everything. But yeah, on the site, it's at pod.pinballmap.com. And our coffee, yeah, we originally did Patreon. Then we learned about, I think originally coffee only had like one-time payments when it first started or something like that. They didn't have reoccurring donations. So we tried to switch over to it, but we can't like boot off the Patreon supporters. And we're very appreciative of them. Yeah, totally. We usually end these episodes with a plea for everyone to use the pinball map, go out and find some pinball to play on location, report your local operators and play pinball in its natural habitat, which is the wild. If you run into any games that need some work or have changed, feel free to use the pinball map to let others know what you found on your journeys. And I want to thank Ryan and Scott for joining me on another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. We appreciate you guys. And for the listener, until next time, good luck. Don't suck. Bye.

_(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 4092f00a-3d54-4a02-a653-269cc74b7243*