# Colin Alsheimer- Pinball Expo 2023 - Pinball News

**Source:** Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2023)  
**Type:** video  
**Published:** 2023-10-21  
**Duration:** 32m 39s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtFf9dxVSyU

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## Analysis

Colin Alsheimer, founder of Kineticist, presented the mission and philosophy of his pinball media platform at Pinball Expo 2023. He outlined Kineticist's focus on the 'Three Ps of Pinball' (games, people, places), described the platform's key features including the Hype Index for theme speculation, games database, tutorial series, and location guides, and shared his personal path into pinball starting from 2017. Alsheimer emphasized building an open, welcoming community for pinball enthusiasts and outlined future plans including collectible action figures and expanded contributor networks.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Kineticist launched in 2022 and is exceeding 30,000 monthly website visitors, 55,000 page views, and 1,800 email subscribers — _Colin Alsheimer stating Kineticist growth metrics at Pinball Expo 2023_
- [HIGH] Kineticist has identified approximately 1,800 unique pinball themes through community crawling, with 250 surfaced on the site — _Colin Alsheimer describing Hype Index methodology_
- [HIGH] Back to the Future, Jaws, and He-Man are the top three themes on the Hype Index — _Colin Alsheimer responding to audience question about top Hype Index entries_
- [HIGH] Alsheimer prefers open communities like Pinball Map over closed systems like Stern's Insider Connected — _Colin Alsheimer answering audience question about Stern's community approach_
- [HIGH] Labyrinth and Elton John were ranked between 75-100 on the Hype Index — _Colin Alsheimer responding to audience question about Labyrinth's hype ranking_

### Notable Quotes

> "I want to help generate more of those inciting incidents for people who may not be aware of the depth and vibrancy of the pinball hobby today"
> — **Colin Alsheimer**, ~18:00
> _Articulates Kineticist's core mission to attract newcomers to pinball_

> "To me, it's kind of the Holy Trinity of the silver ball, right? You've got pinball and the games. That's kind of obvious. But then you have the people behind the games, the people behind the community, and the places that people go to play the games and socialize"
> — **Colin Alsheimer**, ~22:30
> _Defines the 'Three Ps of Pinball' philosophy central to Kineticist's approach_

> "A game that requires the amount of focus pinball does means I can ignore my constant internal dialogue for a few minutes at a time"
> — **Colin Alsheimer (quoting community member)**, ~27:00
> _Illustrates therapeutic/mental health benefits of pinball play_

> "I'm much more on that side of the fence [open communities]. But at the same time, you know, I understand that Stern has, they have different business priorities"
> — **Colin Alsheimer**, ~31:45
> _Diplomatic acknowledgment of Stern's closed community strategy while maintaining preference for openness_

> "I do most of the graphic design work myself. I find it to be, it's a fun creative outlet, mostly. And I want things to look good. I want things to feel fun. And like someone who cares, kind of put it together. Because to me, that's what the pinball community deserves."
> — **Colin Alsheimer**, ~34:00
> _Reflects Kineticist's design philosophy and commitment to community care_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Colin Alsheimer | person | Founder and lead of Kineticist media platform; marketing professional with background in film, music blogging, and craft beer; speaker at Pinball Expo 2023 |
| Kineticist | organization | Pinball media platform launched in 2022 providing games database, Hype Index theme tracking, tutorial series, location guides, and people database; subscription/reader-supported model |
| Hype Index | product | Kineticist's proprietary tool tracking community interest in potential pinball themes; crawls multiple pinball communities and allows community voting on themes |
| Pinball Map | organization | Open-sourced pinball location database with API that Kineticist builds upon for location guides and city guides |
| Rob Burke | person | Organized Pinball Expo 2023 and invited Colin Alsheimer to present |
| Joe Lemire | person | Collaborator with Colin Alsheimer on Pin Masters of New England tournament organization in 2019 |
| Noah Crable | person | Contributor to Kineticist spearheading game tutorial series |
| James McFatter | person | Contributor to Kineticist spearheading game tutorial series |
| Bowen Kerins | person | Interviewed by Kineticist about Final Resistance experience and career; pinball game designer and community figure |
| Drew Robichaux | person | Guinness World Record holder for continuous pinball playing; featured in Kineticist community highlight series |
| Brian Eddy | person | Pinball game maker featured in Kineticist's pinball people database with career stats and interview links |
| Alyssa Alsheimer | person | Colin Alsheimer's wife; co-founded Five O'Clock Dallas nightlife website with him |
| Stern Pinball | company | Pinball manufacturer mentioned for Insider Connected closed community platform; contrasted with Kineticist's open community philosophy |
| New England Pinball League | organization | Volunteer pinball league where Colin Alsheimer discovered community and later volunteered |
| Pintastic | event | Pinball event discovered by Colin Alsheimer that contributed to his interest in the hobby |
| Deadpool | game | Pinball machine owned by Colin Alsheimer |
| Joker Poker | game | 1979 EM pinball machine owned by Colin Alsheimer; acquired from wife's father |
| World Cup Soccer | game | Pinball machine owned by Colin Alsheimer |
| Aztec | game | Pinball machine owned by Colin Alsheimer |
| Congo | game | Loner pinball machine mentioned by Colin Alsheimer |
| Labyrinth | game | David Bowie-themed pinball machine; Alsheimer has placed deposit; ranked 75-100 on Hype Index despite low community hype |
| Ethan Alsheimer | person | Colin Alsheimer's child; Kineticist presentation was developed while Ethan was being born |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Kineticist platform mission and philosophy, Hype Index methodology and current rankings, Open vs. closed community platforms (Stern Insider Connected comparison), Pinball content creation and media landscape
- **Secondary:** Colin Alsheimer's personal path into pinball (2017 onward), Kineticist growth metrics and future plans, Community moderation and fostering welcoming spaces
- **Mentioned:** Collectible action figures and product expansion

### Sentiment

**Positive** (0.85) — Colin Alsheimer expresses genuine passion for pinball community and optimism about Kineticist's mission. Tone is enthusiastic, thoughtful, and appreciative of community support. Diplomatic when addressing Stern's closed community approach. No criticism or negativity toward people or organizations; acknowledges legitimate business differences.

### Signals

- **[business_signal]** Kineticist planning to introduce collectible action figures and additional non-traditional products beyond digital subscriptions to generate revenue (confidence: medium) — Colin Alsheimer discussing three-year vision of product diversification and collectibles in works
- **[community_signal]** Tension between open community platforms (Pinball Map, Kineticist) and Stern's closed Insider Connected system; preference for transparency and open-source models (confidence: high) — Audience question and Colin's response articulating preference for open communities while acknowledging Stern's business priorities
- **[community_signal]** Kineticist has achieved 30,000+ monthly visitors, 55,000 page views, 1,800 email subscribers within 2 years; community embracing platform features and growth (confidence: high) — Colin Alsheimer stating growth metrics and noting community reception
- **[market_signal]** Pinball as mental health/wellness tool gaining traction in community discourse; multiple testimonials about focus, sensory regulation, neurodivergent benefits (confidence: high) — Multiple quotes from community members describing therapeutic benefits: 'ignores constant internal dialogue,' 'quiets neurodivergent brain,' 'novel physical focus and stimulation'
- **[market_signal]** Back to the Future, Jaws, and He-Man dominating Hype Index top rankings; suggests strong community interest in licensed IP themes over originals (confidence: high) — Hype Index data showing top three themes; Colin noting original themes receive far less momentum
- **[sentiment_shift]** Labyrinth (David Bowie theme) successful in market despite low Hype Index ranking (75-100), suggesting disconnect between community discussion and actual purchase interest (confidence: high) — Colin noting Labyrinth and Elton John ranked low on Hype Index but observing manufacturers picked these themes anyway

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## Transcript

 Wave hi to Ethan. That would be awesome. Amazing. Okay, now we're all basically friends, so we can get started. So, my name is Colin Alsheimer. Some of you know me, a lot of you don't, but I love pinball just like everyone else does here. I started Kineticist in 2022, and I'm really incredibly honored to be invited by Rob Burke and the whole team here to have a chat with you all today. So I want to say that Kineticist, for those of you who are familiar, it's a team effort. So it's something that I lead and I run, but I really couldn't do it without all of the contributors that we've had up here. I think we've had something like 15 different people help out with the site. So it's really a big team project and a ton of wonderful support from friends and other mentors in the community. So I'm super appreciative of that. Okay, so the three Ps of Pinball. It might seem a little bit cryptic, a little bit weird. but if we flash back to this past July when I was tasked with coming up with the idea of this talk I mostly did it from the hospital room where I am in that photo where Ethan would be born just a few hours later so while the origins of the talk may come from a place of extreme sleep deprivation I think there's a kernel of truth that kind of speaks to what I think Kineticist is good at and what I'd like it to be. So I spent most of my college career as a film major before moving into marketing to try to make some money. And I still have a deep passion for film and storytelling. And I love evaluating things through the lens of story. Some of my old agency colleagues were probably tired of me using, you know, the hero's journey in all of our pitch decks. So here I'm doing that again. This is kind of your typical three-act story structure, and you'll see it emulated in a lot of different places, from movies to TV and all sorts of things. You kind of have your backstory here, your rising action, the inciting incident sort of kicks off the plot, all the way leading up to a climax in act three. So the next part of the presentation will sort of follow the structure a little bit. So starting with the exposition, because every good story needs an excessive amount of context, at least in my world. So before Pinball, I was kind of a suit-wearing marketing executive. I wouldn't be wearing a T-shirt on stage here. Working for agencies, Fortune 500 companies, startups, some major political organizations, that kind of thing. So think of me more as like a trained marketer and a business guy who happens to really enjoy creating pinball content. Earlier in my career, I ran a local happy hour and nightlife website called Five O'Clock Dallas with my lovely wife, Alyssa. We were kind of lumped into the citizen journalism movement at the time, which is like people without a trained journalism background reporting and creating content on sort of different scenes and cultures, which enabled us to speak at South by Southwest in Austin, which was great. Then we moved on to running an indie music blog, mostly so that we could get into shows for free in our local scene. But it worked. I mean, I've always been kind of a music nut, and it was a good excuse to get some practice creating content in that area and sort of getting more networked into that scene. So there's a little bit of a pattern here, if you can see that, with what we're doing with Kineticist. I would then eventually get into homebrewing, but beer, not pinball. wrote a craft beer review column and started working on plans to open up a brewery which never quite materialized but that's probably for the best alright so now that the excessive back story is over we will get into the inciting incident for why pinball and this is kind of a big deal for me because unlike a lot of people that I talk to pinball, the draw for it has very little to do with childhood nostalgia, for me at least. I pretty much barely remember getting a chance to play a lot of pinball growing up. If I kind of scan my memories a little bit, I remember being kind of captivated by pinball machines when I'd come across them with the lights and the sounds and the whole kind of world under glass thing. But the few quarters that I'd have at my disposal, they never lasted really long because I never really understood how to play the game. so I'd kind of gravitate to other types of games in an arcade where maybe my quarters would go further or I could get some tickets for redemption, that kind of thing. But in 2017, we actually took over ownership of Machine, a 1979 Joker poker, which I have right here, the EM version, from my wife's father. So this is actually one that she grew up with in her basement. And that was the first time I'd really been able to experience playing pinball regularly in a home environment and just got completely hooked. After that, I would discover the New Robert Englunds Pinball League and the great community there. And Pintastic as well. That was the first year we discovered that. And I would say my mind was just kind of blown and I was completely hooked. so now here's where i start to get really deep into the pinball hobby so in 2019 i started organizing um a bunch of tournaments with joe lemire uh if you know him and his pin masters of new Robert Englunds group um it was really interesting and kind of learning what it takes to put on a fun pinball tournament um and and sort of getting a better feel for you know what what makes the community tick and what kinds of things are important to them and sort of seeing the room there was for kind of creative and fun work in pinball. I really wanted to help that series grow and get more established, but, you know, life happens. I broke my leg. We had COVID. So my involvement with pinball really kind of tailed off. I'd play in the occasional tournament when we could, stayed involved in the local league, but everything else took just a bit of a pause. So as COVID started wrapping up, kind of almost on a whim is when I started working on the bones of Kineticist. So it was sort of a callback to some of those other projects I had mentioned before, the Five O'Clock Dallas and the But I Just Like Music, where I really enjoyed doing that kind of building websites, creating content, and tying it back to some sort of hobby or interest that I had some passion for. And you know at the time I was spending an inordinate amount of time watching pinball streams and tournaments and podcasts and playing pinball so I figured if I'm spending all this time doing this anyway why don't I try to like write about it or build something around it. So it started off as a WordPress blog called Game Room Dude which is a terrible, terrible name. And I really didn't like it at the time. But it was a good way for me to just sort of get started and get practice in just sort of writing and creating content again So later that year I relaunch under the Kinetisys name and start bringing in that blog content background alongside more robust data from VOPDB and Pinball Map. The Pinball Map team is here. They're wonderful. They have a really awesome API that you can tap into. And I started building with that, plus all the content, and sort of growing out what Kineticist was and could be. So at the same time, I started volunteering with the New Robert Englunds Pinball League just because it's important to me to try to give back to a community that's given me so much and just try to – it's a volunteer organization like a lot of these things are. So anything I could do to sort of ensure that the league would stay around for a long time is kind of what I wanted to help out with. And then I started writing with This Week in Finball, helping out with their regular updates. And here we are today. Kinetisys really continues to gain a lot of traction, probably a lot faster than I intended at the time. We're currently exceeding about 30,000 monthly website visitors, about 55,000 page views, and have an email list with 1,800 subscribers, and we're approaching 3,000 followers on social media. So the growth has been spectacular, and the way that the community seems to have embraced what we're doing has been really wonderful to see, I would say. So I guess we'll call this kind of the midpoint of the story, because truthfully I don't know where it's going to end, but maybe speaking here today is the climax, which would be great. Hopefully it's not, but you never know. It could be. Pause for drink. So if we were to sort of take a look at all of that and kind of chart my own personal pinball path, it would look just a little bit something like this, where you have, there's before pinball, there's the inciting incidents that got me into pinball, and then this crazy pinball explosion just going deep down the rabbit hole of this wonderful hobby. And so I would say that's kind of where I want Kineticist to live, right, where I want to help generate more of those inciting incidents for people who may not be aware of the depth and vibrancy of the pinball hobby today, where they can get introduced to it in a friendly, approachable way and then start to go really deep with tutorials, learning about the games, learning about the history, learning about the people, and everything that we try to represent on the site. So all that said, we'll tie it back to the three Ps of pinball, at least the way that I see it. To me, it's kind of the Holy Trinity of the silver ball, right? You've got pinball and the games. That's kind of obvious. But then you have the people behind the games, the people behind the community, and the places that people go to play the games and socialize and congregate. I think you need sort of all those three things together to make pinball as interesting and vibrant as it is. We'll talk you through a little bit how this kind of manifests on the site for those of you who aren't familiar with it. So for pinball, for the games, we've got a few different areas that we focus on. There's our hype index, which tracks the hype level for various potential pinball themes that could be out there. We have the games database leveraging the OPDB data and building on top of that. We have our games tutorial series, which are a little more approachable than like a Tilt Forums guide, if you're familiar with those, but more in depth than something you'd find on a pin tips. And then lists and guides, which we'll get into. We do a lot of those as well. So the Hype Index here is the first major feature that we built out on the site. As a film, music, pop culture nerd, I love the theme speculation that goes on in the hobby and the discussion that goes around that. And I wanted to build something that could sort of track that to some degree and sort of make sense that what people are interested in potentially playing or even buying and really seeing if we could find any kind of pockets of interest for IPs that might speak to non-traditional or younger pinball audiences. Plus, I would say just the marketer in me is kind of fascinated by this kind of market research and how it might apply to the business side of pinball. So for this, we crawl several popular pinball communities for discussions about pinball themes. And right now, we manually review all that content and sort of tag and log it in a custom database where it gets aggregated and reflected on the site. We've identified about 1,800 unique themes so far, but we only surface about 250 of them on the site right now. Currently, people can also, when they view the hype index, they can log their own personal hype level on a scale of like 0 to 100, just to introduce a little bit of a different ranking system on the site. So we also have a games database. I see it as kind of a vector point for exploring the people who made the games and how to play them. And also giving people a path to explore some of the other great community content that's already online that might be hard to find. It's why where we can, really try to make it a point to include videos and tutorials and links that other people are already producing rather than needing to necessarily reinvent the wheel on our own, which we will do sometimes if we think we can add our own spin to it, but that's not always the idea. The game tutorial series, these are spearheaded by two of our contributors, Noah Crable and James McFatter. And it's one of my favorite things that we do. It gets really good response on the site. I'd say our goal with these is just to make the games a bit more approachable for new and casual players, and to present it in more of a text-based format for easy scanning and future reference. I would say as great as some of the video tutorials out there can be. Not everyone has the ability to dedicate that kind of time to sit through hours of a video or a gameplay stream. And I think much like how everyone has a different learning style, some people enjoy having different options when it comes to learning how to play a game, just like any other life skill. And like I said before, I would say these tutorials, that they live between like a full printed rule sheet or something on a Tilt forums and something that's more quick hit like a Pintips. And of course, as a digital publication, we create a lot of lists and guides. It's a format. It's a lot of fun to write these. And they do get strong engagement from the community when we publish them. Despite some of the, I would say, sometimes negative reactions to a quote clickbait tactic we always do try to make sure that there some substance behind what we create And, you know, from my own experience in my career, it's a format and a structure, much like the three-act structure that we talked about before, that it works. And it works for a reason, and it's worked for a very long time. So we do those there. On the places side, we're mostly building on top of data from Pinball Map, which is fantastic. And we introduce a few of our own wrinkles. So for the locations database, we take some of the data from Pinball Map and we filter and transform it a bit for our purposes. So, for example, we don't include locations that haven't been updated in a few years. We try to only include locations that have two or more games on site. We really want to try to drive people to quality locations that might cater more to a pinhead kind of audience and would be more likely to provide a positive pinball experience for a new player. Typically, we see this being reflected in locations that have a handful of games on site where their pinball map listing gets updated frequently because that means pinball people are probably playing there. and if they're playing there, it's probably a good venue more than likely. And then we use some of that data alongside our own research to create city guides for anyone looking for sort of a concise roundup of where they might be able to place some pinball wherever they happen to be traveling and whatnot. And again, the goal here is to drive people to quality locations. that some of them may not always get the same kind of love and attention that they should. And this is one of my favorite things that we do. We have a monthly series in collaboration with the Pinball Map team, just highlighting new locations that have hit the Pinball Map database in the prior month, which I love this for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it helps give more attention to some of the small businesses that are jumping aboard the pinball train, and it's another thing that I think just showcases the vibrancy of the community and how pinball can be a part of all sorts of businesses, from your traditional bars and arcades, barcades to, like, retail stores and concert venues. It's really fun to see. And they're quite funny, too, if you read through them. On the people side, we're still kind of building this out, But I think it's an incredibly important part of the pinball picture that sometimes gets overlooked in the community alongside the more game-centric content. So we have our pinball people database, which we've been building out, and today it covers just about every known person credited for building a pinball machine. I'm sure we're missing some people, but it's pretty robust at this point in time. We then go through and we collect third-party materials like podcasts and interviews and articles and videos and capture them in the database. This way, when someone wants to learn more about a particular game maker, they can easily find and engage with a lot of the great content that's already out there. So, for example, this is a page for Brian Eddy. We have a little quick bio for him, some key kind of career stats like how long he's been active, how many games he's produced. And then we just link to public interviews. or podcasts or videos that he's already done so people can explore those some more. And we also do the occasional interview, like what we did earlier this year, speaking with Bowen about his final resistance experience and some of the other kind of key beats from his career. So we'll be doing more of those in the future. and then the community highlight series I really like too where there are stories about people in the community that might not have the stature of a Bowen but are no less important so like for example this is Drew Robichaux if you're familiar with him he broke the Guinness World Record for continuous pinball playing earlier this year so we had a chance to have a conversation with him and he was a super interesting dude and so I mean bottom line here I love pinball games, I love pinball people, I love pinball places, and just some parting thoughts that I want to sort of leave you all with, and then you can ask some questions if you like. But I've been asking a lot of people this question, both in various pinball communities and pinball media outlets, and it's, what do you love most about pinball? Everyone has a little bit of a different answer, so I'm just going to highlight a few here. A game that requires the amount of focus pinball does means I can ignore my constant internal dialogue for a few minutes at a time. I feel that one all the time. It quiets my neurodivergent brain in ways nothing else really replicates. It hits the perfect spot of novel, physical focus and stimulation. That comes up a lot. That buzz you get when absolutely rocking it, blasting that saucer and hitting ramps in AFM or consistently nailing the ramp chair combo in Adam's Family. I love it. I'm a huge fan of the feeling of consistent improvement. Pinball has so many little techniques and game knowledge that you could hypothetically improve indefinitely as long as new tables are being made. Being able to slowly do better and better at my low-stakes local tournaments is a fulfilling feeling. Gets me out of the house and meeting people. Most of the others at a pinball event will be my kind of nerd. Fully agree. It's tactile and visceral and I can share it with my kids. My 13-year-old put up 1.1 billion on Infinity Quest recently and I couldn't have been prouder. The whole atmosphere of a games room, billiards, darts, music, buddies, beers and some green. So I would say Cadeticist, it's born from a love of pinball and the people and places who make it possible. our goal is to showcase the vibrancy of the pinball community and foster welcoming and friendly community in the pinball hobby and I'll leave you with the note that we're always looking for contributors and collaborators there's the website URL there's my email address you're more than welcome to reach out and we can talk ideas but thank you for attending this it's been wonderful if you have any questions you know We know that Stern is trying to have a closed community through Insider Connected. Do you have anything that you would say to a person who says, well, Insider Connected is good enough for me? Did you say to them about what they're missing? Yeah, that's a tough one. I much prefer open communities where everyone can participate. It's sort of why I love what like Pinball Map is doing, for example, where they've open sourced their code and allow people to contribute and use their data. Like I'm much more on that side of the fence. But at the same time, you know, I understand that Stern has, they have different business priorities, right? And I don't have the insight in terms of what those are to be able to answer that fully. I noticed on your site that you put a lot of effort into your graphic design. Yeah. I'm just wondering, one, if you do that all yourself, and two, just, you know, what you see as the value of putting in all that work Yeah It seems like the site stands out to me Colorful lots of you could tell every little main image on your articles had a lot of thought put into it. Sure. Yeah, it's a great question. I do most of the graphic design work myself. I find it to be, it's a fun creative outlet, mostly. And I do want it. I want things to look good. I want things to feel fun. And like someone who cares, kind of put it together. Because to me, that's what the pinball community deserves. Have you ever had a manufacturer weigh in on the height index? Like kind of tell them what they should know? Not yet. But I know some of them are looking at it. Where was Labyrinth on the hype index? Oh, man. Somewhere under 100, like 75 to 100, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So Labyrinth and Elton John were sort of not very hyped, I guess, at least judging by what we look at for the hype index. So it's interesting seeing those manufacturers pick those themes. As a follow-up, does the hype index incorporate rumors, or is it mostly just what people want in their dream? It's mostly what people want. There's definitely overlap with rumors because people discuss those things kind of hand in hand. But it's mostly people talking about, hey, here's my dream theme, and trying to advocate for their dream theme over and over in various places. What's number one right now? Back to the Future. I think it's like Back to the Future, Jaws, He-Man are the top three. Are they all licensed themes in the Hype Index? Most of them. Or is it just their own idea? There's some. We do record some original theme ideas, but they don't get nearly as much momentum as the licensed themes. So, yeah, there have been some weird ones in there. Like, I've got a post in there about, like, the most degenerate themes that you'd ever see. And, yeah, there's some weird stuff. Anyone else? Yeah. I'm just curious. There's other sites, obviously, that involve networking and forums and things like that. And a lot of times they tend to degrade into not so friendly places. Yeah. How do you balance that between creating an open space for people to share their thoughts and feelings and not having to turn to accessible? Yeah, that is an excellent question and is a big reason why we don't really have a community on the site yet. because if we're going to put something like that on, I want to make sure that we have really strong community moderation practices in place so that we can keep it positive and friendly. And that just takes, from my experience and what I've researched, it just takes a ton of work and effort to keep those things running well. So we're just not quite there yet, but I'd love to. Yep. Some of the two-part questions. top three games and what games do you own ah okay uh games that we own we own uh deadpool joker poker world cup soccer aztec uh we've got a loner congo and we did put a deposit down on labyrinth so we're excited for that one um top three themes so to be quite honest bowie david bowie was a was a top theme for me i'm a big fan. I never thought that would happen in pinball, so it was really exciting to see that sort of like a Bowie adjacent theme come to the market in Labyrinth. Other ones, I would love to see a Gorillaz pin for a music pin. And I would love to see like a boy band pin, or like something like 90s. Yeah, I don't know. I think that'd be fun. NSYNC, yeah, NSYNC or Backstreet Boys. I just think it'd be a lot of fun. I don't know. Yes. Yeah, not com. One day we'll maybe try to buy that, but I'm sure it's expensive. Yeah, we're on most of the major ones. So we're on Facebook, Instagram. We are on X. We don't use it that much. We have profiles on TikTok. We don't really use that. Yeah, mostly the Facebook community or the pinball community tends to congregate mostly on Facebook. So that's where we spend most of our time. And do you have to eliminate any negativity there? Do I have to illuminate? I try not to. Sometimes the negativity finds me. Do you have to be a pinball expert to be a contributor? Nope. Nope. In fact, we've worked with a lot of people who aren't pinball experts, and I love working with them because they just bring a completely different perspective to everything. And I love learning more about kind of what makes a casual player tick and how they get deeper into the hobby. I do not have a booth, but I will be walking around the show floor if you want to come say hi. Yeah. You mentioned OPDB, but maybe not everyone knows what that is. I'm curious to know if everyone knows what that is. Does everyone know what the OPDB is? One, two, it's the Open Pinball Database, right? So think of it like an open-sourced IPDB, for example, or Pinside Game Listing, where they have pretty much every game in their database, plus key details that you can access through an API, and it's community supported. So there are a lot of people who contribute game listings and photos and content that everyone can use, which is wonderful. Anyone else? You were saying? you will have a comment section eventually? I would like to, yeah. Once I can figure out the moderation part of it, yeah. Yeah, sometimes there are articles and I'm like, oh, I'd love to see. I'd love to weigh in on this. I'd love to see. But yeah, I do see where the . Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. What's your three-year vision for the site? Three-year vision? So I need to continue growing traffic to just sort of cash flow to break even. But then I want to introduce more sort of products and services that people could buy that the pinball community would be interested in. So you've got ads already? CHRIS WIDDOWSON- Very minor ads. We're really focused just on sort of growing traffic, growing the brand, and sort of learning what works and what doesn't. Yep. Like what kind of products are you using? So collectible action figures, for example. We have something like that in the works. I don't want to get too much into that right now. But yeah, it's something a little more non-traditional than just selling digital subscriptions. I want to add more value than that to the community. Anyone else? Cool. Thank you so much for coming. It's been great.

_(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: e721b56c-13c8-4e9e-a444-eadffe1e45b5*