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The Pacific Pinball Museum Unveils the Atlas Pinball Archive Preservation Project

Marco Pinball·video·53m 17s·analyzed·May 21, 2026
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Pacific Pinball Museum launches Atlas Archive, a digital preservation project photographing 1,300+ machines with AI search and comparison tools.

Summary

Pacific Pinball Museum unveiled the A.T.L.A.S. (Atlas Pinball Archive) Preservation Project, a major initiative to digitally photograph and catalog their collection of 1,300+ pinball machines with high-resolution imagery and AI-powered searchability. The project, which began during the pandemic shutdown, features a free-to-access website (atlas.pacificpinball.org) built on open-source technology that allows researchers and enthusiasts to study pinball art, design, and engineering in unprecedented detail. The museum is seeking donations and partnerships to complete photographing their collection and to access rare machines from private collectors, particularly pre-flipper games from the 1920s-1940s.

Key Claims

  • Pacific Pinball Museum has a collection of over 1,300 pinball games stored at their annex facility

    high confidence · Museum representative during presentation stated '1,300 games' as their total collection size

  • The Atlas project photographed approximately 2,100 images over a four-month period during the pandemic shutdown

    high confidence · Mike (museum founder) stated '2,100 so far' and 'worked for four months'

  • Roy Parker's artwork became dominant in the pinball industry because Gottlieb games were more popular, despite Williams dismissing his style as 'low class art'

    high confidence · Mike discussing art history and artist attribution during the website demonstration

  • George Melenton developed many core labeling and design conventions used in pinball (like 'shoot here' arrows and point labels) but is largely uncredited

    high confidence · Mike discussing artist contributions: 'developed most of that stuff that he just doesn't get credit for'

  • There is a seven-year period (approximately 1960-1967) where pinball machine artists were not credited on games

    medium confidence · Mike noted 'after 65 is when Roy Parker passed away' and 'there's at least seven years where the artists are just not credited'

  • The Atlas website uses AI image processing and semantic search technology to allow users to search for specific visual elements across machines

    high confidence · Jeff (volunteer developer) explained the technical stack including AI keywording and Meilisearch for semantic search

  • Pacific Pinball Museum is planning to photograph 50-100 additional machines from Richard Conger's private collection of 1930s-1940s games in June

    high confidence · Mike stated 'we're hoping that that's going to happen in June and we'll be able to go in there and take another 50 to 100 machines'

  • Jeff, the primary developer, has professional web experience from working on high-traffic sites including George Lucas' Educational Foundation and the Exploratorium

Notable Quotes

  • “What this does is allow you to study the art in detail... you can zoom right in on these things and look at details”

    Mike (Pacific Pinball Museum founder)@ 11:54 — Explains the core value proposition of the archive—unprecedented access to detailed pinball artwork that was never previously studied in depth

  • “Nobody was really going back and photographing some of the older machines, which we have a lot of. So we thought it pretty necessary to digitize our collection.”

    Mike@ 11:19 — Articulates the mission gap the project addresses—lack of quality historical documentation of machines prior to modern pinball

  • “Every back glass is a composition. Whether you realize it or not, the artists spent a lot of time on it.”

    Mike@ 19:58 — Demonstrates Mike's philosophical approach to pinball art preservation and his insights into designer intent

  • “Williams decided that they were only going to use George Melentin because they thought Roy Parker's art kind of was low class art. Which is exactly opposite of how it turned out.”

    Mike@ 24:00 — Key industry insight about the historiography of pinball art and how manufacturing decisions shaped the legacy of artists

  • “Not very often that we run into someone with the exact skill set that we need as a volunteer.”

    Museum representative (unnamed)@ 34:39 — Highlights how critical volunteer expertise is to nonprofit projects and the luck involved in finding the right person

  • “We're using AI for intelligence search for comparison, and it will actually crawl through our images and find very specific details”

Entities

Pacific Pinball MuseumorganizationMikepersonJeffpersonMark GibsonpersonRob ParikapersonDan FoncepersonRoy ParkerpersonGeorge Melentonperson

Signals

  • ?

    historical_signal: Seven-year period (approximately 1960-1967) where pinball artists were not credited on machines; major gap in historical record that the Atlas project aims to address

    high · Mike stated 'after 65 is when Roy Parker passed away' and 'there's at least seven years where the artists are just not credited'

  • ?

    preservation_signal: Large-scale digital preservation initiative converting 1,300+ physical machines into indexed, searchable digital archive with 2,100+ high-resolution photographs

    high · Atlas project photographed '2,100 so far' over four-month pandemic period; project is ~50% complete

  • ?

    technology_signal: Implementation of AI image keywording and semantic search to enable detailed visual element searches across pinball machine artwork and design

    high · Jeff explained AI processes images to generate keywords, fed to Meilisearch semantic server; users can search for specific elements like 'horses' to find 74 machines with that element

  • ?

    community_signal: Museum seeking access to rare pre-flipper games from private collectors for photography project, positioning preservation as collaborative mission

    high · Mike stated 'we're hoping that that's going to happen in June and we'll be able to go in there and take another 50 to 100 machines' from Richard Conger's collection

  • ?

    operational_signal: Nonprofit project success hinged on finding volunteer with rare combination of web development, software engineering, and pinball enthusiasm

    high · Museum representative: 'Not very often that we run into someone with the exact skill set that we need as a volunteer'

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.160

0:00
A.T.L.A.S. Pinball Archive Thank you so much for coming out everybody. A lot of really familiar faces out there. People have come to the museum, people that always come to our presentations. We really appreciate that. We're really, really excited to talk about something that we've alluded to in multiple previous years. We've come out to Golden State Pinball Festival, which is our Atlas Pinball Archive Preservation Project. It's a really special photo project that we did over the pandemic shutdown. And we've got a lot of things to talk about in the very beginning, kind of basic museum information, the foundational, and then we'll really run into talking with Mike and Jeff about how special this is and what it can really show people in the pinball community.
1:16
A little bit about us, just to cover all the bases. The Pacific Pinball Museum is a true 501c3 nonprofit museum. I'm one of the few that has a real mission of preservation education. We really try to connect pinball to STEM disciplines. Our whole statement is to inspire an interest in science, art, and history through pinball and to preserve and promote this important part of American culture. And we really feel that with pinball we're able to do that really successfully with the breadth of our collection. We're really proud to be transparent in terms of our nonprofit running. We're on Benevity. We're on GuideStar. We're a top-rated great nonprofit and we're a platinum candid transparency 2026 candidate as well. We're also part of the Association of Science and Technology Centers. We've done a show with them in San Francisco and we're part of a larger group of science and technology museums across the United States, really leaning into being different than, say, an arcade or a private collection that's brought to people.
2:21

high confidence · Jeff introducing himself: 'high-profile, high-trafficked nonprofit sites. George Lucas' Educational Foundation and the Exploratorium'

  • The Atlas project is approximately half complete, with only about half of the museum's collection photographed so far

    high confidence · Mike: 'only shot about half of our collection. We worked for four months there'

  • The museum is still working on completing designer and artist profile sections every weekend, with only one or two fully complete entries

    high confidence · Mike during website demo: 'I think there's one designer, one or two designers in there that have fully filled out. So we're literally working on that every weekend.'

    • Museum representative@ 26:54 — Explains the practical, mission-aligned application of AI technology in the archive

  • “If it doesn't happen, these are going to be lost. They're either going to go into private collections, but they won't be available to the public.”

    Mike@ 46:16 — Conveys the urgency of the preservation mission and the threat of private collector gatekeeping

  • “The beauty here really is, this is a semantic search, and so what that means is it's looking for that term 'horse'... and so you get 74 machines with horses in them.”

    Museum representative@ 28:06 — Shows how the technology enables entirely new research methods previously impossible with pinball games

  • “As we're delving into this, I just want to say this is very much a work in progress.”

    Mike@ 32:01 — Sets expectations for community feedback and positions the project as evolving, not a finished product

  • “The AI is doing the keywording, but I think in the long run what will happen is we will actually go through and keyword some of these things. We'll fill in the gaps as it were.”

    Jeff@ 27:39 — Describes the hybrid human-AI workflow necessary to scale the project sustainably

    • Richard Conger
    person
    Chris Kuntzperson
    Melissaperson
    Jim Strelowperson
    Gottliebcompany
    Williamscompany
    Atlas Pinball Archiveproduct
    Mirador systemtechnology
    Laraveltechnology
    Meilisearchtechnology
    Gizmosvenue
    George Lucas Educational Foundationorganization
    Exploratoriumorganization
    Pinball Databaseorganization
  • ?

    design_philosophy: Detailed analysis reveals pinball back glass design was treated as serious artistic composition by designers, with intentional visual storytelling and sometimes subversive Easter eggs

    high · Mike's analysis of Playboy game: found hidden bunny stirrer in cocktail glass; observed women figures positioned to comment on drunk male behavior; 'every back glass is a composition'

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Williams and Gottlieb made deliberate choices about artist hiring based on target market perception, demonstrating how business strategy shaped pinball art legacy

    high · Mike: 'Williams decided that they were only going to use George Melentin because they thought Roy Parker's art kind of was low class art' to appeal to certain class of buyers

  • ?

    venue_signal: Pacific Pinball Museum operating dual facilities (main museum in Alameda with 100+ games; annex with bulk of 1,300+ collection) and actively seeking additional access to rare private collections

    high · Presentation described main museum on Webster Street with over 100 playable games; annex houses remainder of collection; planning access to Richard Conger's 30s-40s collection

  • ?

    event_signal: Major presentation at Golden State Pinball Festival announcing Atlas project to community; formal unveiling of preservation initiative

    high · Museum had 'alluded to' project 'in multiple previous years' at Golden State Pinball Festival; this appears to be formal public announcement

  • ?

    fundraising_signal: Museum actively soliciting donations, corporate sponsorships, and private collection access to complete Atlas project photography (especially for rare pre-flipper games)

    high · Museum explicitly requested individual donations, monthly donors, corporate sponsors, access to rare collections, and ephemera donations to finish project

  • ?

    content_signal: Jeff's garage pinball workspace and web development work featured in Make Magazine (current/recent issue), increasing visibility of project and community recognition

    medium · Jeff mentioned 'I was in Make Magazine last month, the last issue for my garage pinball space' and referenced photo showing 'that desk there is where I coded most of this website'

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Museum employs systematic photography protocol with professional photographer, controlled lighting, high-resolution imaging, and restoration work (cleaning, disassembly) to ensure archival quality documentation

    high · Professional photographer with Disney background; 'controlled lighting, controlled space' setup; 'three-quarter views, additional pictures' and 'very high resolution'; assembly line process with team

    • Let's try running this. This is a little out of date at this point, but just for a little overview of what we have in our main museum, which is in Alameda on Webster Street, where we have over 100 games. Just get a quick video here.
    2:36
    This is a drone video that's a little out of date, but it still gives you an idea of what we have in our main museum that's available to everybody every Tuesday to Sunday.
    2:46
    So you say a little out of date. This is about a year old, eh? It's about a year and a half old. This will be talked about a little bit later today as well. You can see these beautiful murals in our history room as you enter the museum that Dan Fonce worked on. Mike will be doing a talk a little bit later today about that. We have something that very few people have in their museums or private collections available to the public, which is a lot of wood rail games from the 40s and 50s. We really want to make sure that's represented to people. This is a really popular room. This is the famous history room that people first come into when they come to the museum. A lot of really great games from the 60s and 70s as well. And you'll see that we have toppers on top of each one of those games. We want to make sure that people learn about the manufacturer, the artist, the designer of that game and a little bit of history about each one. This is our kind of changing exhibit room. This is Pointy People, which used to be in that room. Now it's our Women's Pinball exhibit. Our Oddball room, which is a fantastic exhibit, one of my favorites just because they're all unique kind of polarizing pinball games. And this is the original Lucky Juju room for folks that remember coming in the very beginning before the Pacific Pinball Museum even incorporated. This is where it started with Mike's collection. Now Mike will be talking a little bit later on about some of those murals that you see in the background which are also other projects that Dan Fons worked on as well. Let's skip ahead a little bit. I want to make sure we get up to the modern room as well.
    5:00
    Always encourage people, even if you don't have the two hours, to make sure you have a good amount of time to play. Take a walk through the museum if you're in Alameda. It's just such a bigger collection than people expect it to be Thank you. We don't buy games. We only take donations at this point as a 501c3.
    5:50
    So that is a really brief kind of tour of what we have available every day. And we could talk a little bit about what we have at our annex, which really leads into this project, and you'll hear more from Mike. This is a peek at the world's largest pinball collection. Thank you. This really raised the question of, well, what do we do with these games? We have them, we're preserving them, we're recording them, we're keeping them in inventory. The plan is to bring them to the public at some point, but during the shutdown, what can we do with these games? What's a constructive project? What's something that can lean into our mission of preservation and making sure these games are available to the public? And that's what led to the beginning of our pinball preservation photo project. Starting in the museum, we had a professional photographer come out and work with museum employees during the shutdown when we had no patrons. And it wasn't just taking photos. I think we've all seen books that are pinball books, that are independent books, even some professional books that maybe have photos which are taken in situ, in an arcade, in a location where you don't have optimal lighting or setup. We very specifically created backdrops, controlled lighting, a controlled space to make sure we got really great pictures of these games. And not just a picture of the glass or the play field, but three-quarter views, additional pictures of the games that are done very well, very high resolution in a controlled environment for really good reproduction. We can see Mike and Rob Parika, our photographer, working in the actual museum, pulling one game at a time and taking really great photographs.
    8:03
    And this project continued for how long, Mike, in the museum itself? It's a couple months. And then after the museum, it moved out to our annex as well, where we had the most, the breadth of the collection. Thank you.
    8:52
    You can see some of the work Mike, our founder, and then also Jim Strelow, a volunteer who's on our board, are working on a wood rail game. And they're putting that together and they're making sure it's clean, that it's clear, glasses removed for good pictures of the play field.
    9:10
    And to really see where all this comes together, what the real ultimate goal is. This is years in the making, finding the right software, finding the right volunteers that can support it, and coming up with a concept for how this will be brought to the public. I'm going to hand things over to Mike, and we'll actually get the website open. There we go. Okay.
    9:37
    So does this work? Yeah. All right. This is how it comes up before you log in. So it is a free site, but we ask that you put in an email and then a password. Just for two of the more advanced features, just because I don't want bots to suck up all the resources. But that's the only reason there's a sign-up there.
    10:07
    As you know, the IPDB is experiencing, I guess, a lot of bots hitting it. So that was a precautionary. Bots are a real problem right now. But with this, Jeffrey set it up so you can type in just a few, I think it's just two letters, right? Just do two. Depends what you're searching for. Yeah.
    10:31
    So it'll... Let's see. We'll just do road race. So. So usually there's three images for each machine. If you only see one image, then that's one that we were not able to get all the images for.
    11:01
    Basically what this site is about, and I just want to backtrack a little bit. So this site's about how to fix machines, about the engineering, and a lot about everything, about new pinball machines. The only decent pictures that I found were all new machines. And nobody was really going back and photographing some of the older machines, which we have a lot of. So we thought it pretty necessary to digitize our collection. So we just started mainly with the wood rails and the wedge heads and games from the 70s.
    11:39
    And the reason is because, you know, the one thing that isn't celebrated too much, even though everybody talks about it, is the art. There's just not any way to really go in there and look at some of the artwork. What this does, and I might have a little trouble, but can you, oh, there you go, okay. So you can zoom right in on these things. And look at details that, is there a way to, how do you move that? Oh, okay, you can do that. Okay, I'm using my system. You can go in there and study the different artists. You can do comparisons, we'll get to that later. Thank you. A lot of the courses from Mark Gibson, and so I met him there and we got to talking about it, and he said, well, I can do that. And I don't know, was it two years or a year and a half? Yeah, it was a while ago. Yeah. So he started working on it, and I found, you know, the site I wanted to emulate was the National Gallery from the Smithsonian. They had a great website that allowed you to compare paintings So I thought well that kind of what we need So we came up with this the Mirador system that allows you to put up multiple images at once But you have to log in With this you can do the three shots
    13:44
    I have a hard time with this. You can look at the three-quarter shots, the playfield shot, or the backlash shot.
    13:55
    And the cool thing is doing the playfield, because you never get to look at the playfield like this. And we started discovering that a lot of thought goes into the aesthetics of the playfield itself, not just labeling things as to what you're supposed to shoot for, et cetera. But if you get an overall picture of it, some of them are just spectacular.
    14:17
    So this allows research into the different artists, the different techniques used, and discovered a lot about how these machines evolved.
    14:32
    Artists working with the engineers and finding out how they work together to do this. How do I back out of this? Thank you. Actually, I was kidding. I really hope it does not pinball. That would be really embarrassing. So what Mike is doing by logging in is he's accessing a higher level of this website. We're going to have a portion of the website which is available to the public to take a look at, to research, to see what we've done for this project. And there's going to be We're going to be a different level of the website, which is accessible by providing an email to the museum, mostly for tracking purposes, but also so we can add more folks to not just our newsletter, but for any updates that we have museum-wide to go out, changes on the website, other information we have fundraising that we do.
    16:02
    Pretty soon. You can go to atlas.pacificpinball.org right now. It's online. Yeah. Now, as they're doing this, I just want to preface. What we have online right now is sort of the minimal viable product, right? It's, I'm paying very close attention to how traffic affects this site because I suspect we're going to have to scale the resources. So what is my password?
    16:34
    Isn't it change pinball? I don't remember. I don't know. I could log in if you need to. I very specifically don't know your password. I'm pretty sure that's what it was. Oh, there we go. Yay! Okay. There we go.
    16:50
    All right. Good job, Mike. Thanks. So, okay, here's one of my favorites. So you get to, anything that you do, you can save it. Scroll up just a little bit, Mike. Okay.
    17:08
    Thank you. So I found the lady with the glass with the martini, and in there is this little bunny. It's a Playboy bunny stirrer.
    19:25
    I thought, wow, Hugh, that's going to piss him off, but apparently he never saw it. And the only reason it's in there is because some artist just said, you know, let's see if we can screw with playing by glove. I mean, what other reason would be to put that in there? But nobody's going to see it because nobody ever looks at a pinball glass that closely. I really studied this one a lot just in terms of what was going on with, like, to me, every back glass is a composition. You know, whether you realize it or not, the artists spent a lot of time on it.
    20:03
    Maybe the company said, hey, you need to take that out or this and that, and they had to adapt it or everything. But generally, it is a composition that they get to do. And in this one, I thought it was really interesting that they had all these bunnies, and they're being chased and harassed by these drunk men. But they have two ladies on the very outside of this back glass, and they're both looking down.
    20:37
    I don't know. Like I said, I spent too much time looking at this stuff. But I just thought, well, that's kind of interesting. There's some sort of statement going on there that the women are, they look like they're at a golf course or a country club or something, Thank you. So you've got these, again, drunk men oogling all these women that kind of are working there. They're obviously just doing their job, and these guys are acting like complete idiots.
    21:43
    There's one here where there's a guy with the fingers. There he is. It's pretty incredible. He's reaching out to grab them. So this is the kind of stuff that you just don't get to look at because nobody brings attention to it. But a lot of thought went into this stuff, a lot of, sorry, and a lot of design goes into this. So I really wanted to set up a site where you could not only look at this but also compare it. Thank you. We're used to doing silk screen art, which basically went on paper. When you go into pinball, the back glass is actually reverse screen. So you do the black lines first, and then it goes from lighter to darker colors screen. So it's a different technique that they both had to learn. George Melenton got hired at the age of 21. Roy Parker was a little bit older.
    23:22
    Looking into this, you find out that Roy Parker was chosen by Gottlieb because he represented kind of a comic book art, whereas George Melentin was more of a commercial artist and would represent stuff realistically. So I found it really funny when I found out that Williams decided that they were only going to use George Melentin Because they thought Roy Parker, they were trying to sell games to a certain class of people. And they thought Roy Parker's art kind of was low class art. Which is exactly opposite of how it turned out. Because Gottlieb was the most popular games and so Roy Parker got the most recognition for all the pinball art. And George Melentin, who actually developed a lot of the graphics that were used in pinball, like shoot here and the arrows and labeling of points and things you don't even think about. He did all of that, developed most of that stuff that he just doesn't get credit for.
    24:42
    That is a great question. I don't know who did play time. The other thing that this site allows you to do is study the art in detail, so you can definitely make the assertion that, no, that was not George Melenton and that was not Roy Parker. But when it comes to certain dates, like after 65 is when Roy Parker passed away, And that's also when George Melenton was no longer the advertising poster. Well, he became the art director for advertising posters, so he pretty much stopped doing pinball art. So they were all these freelance people that they were bringing in. So unfortunately they didn't keep records. I've reached out to Tom Grant's son.
    25:36
    They just don't have any records, so I can't find out who some of these artists are. But Chris Kuntz and I talk about this a lot, like, well, who did the art on Viking? Because that's, you know, there's also a lot of machines that you know it's not either of the two major artists. And then after that, they started giving credit to the artists, so we kind of know who they are. There's at least seven years where the artists are just not credited. You should demonstrate the intelligence search. So we have something really incredible with this system, something that happens at the museum, main museum very often is we'll have someone come in and they just want to find the game they remember playing when they were a kid. A from that game that they remembering It had a horse on it it had cowboys it had someone wearing a top hat it had a dog in the back or it had a certain colored car And this feels like a truly good use of AI searchability, as opposed to making art, which is kind of a polarizing subject. We're using AI for intelligence search for comparison, and it will actually crawl through our images and find very specific details like what Mike just typed in. It's great. Yeah, so this one's kind of weird. Jeff actually found this one. You type in demon. Of course, you get devil's dare. And then you get this actually was a glass that advertising posters made that never went on any pinball machine. It was just wall hanging art that they would sell. So then we get to Fantastic. Why did it choose Fantastic? Because one of the artists has a goatee and a little, you know.
    27:33
    I should say, you know, it's like Gorgard didn't show up here, which it should. Yeah. It's not an infallible system. The AI is doing the keywording, but I think in the long run what will happen is we will actually go through and keyword some of these things. We'll fill in the gaps as it were, but AI does a very good job of doing the initial sort of batch key wording. This one's for you, Dee. Horses. You get how many? 74 machines with horses in them. The beauty here really is, so this is a semantic search, and so what that means is it's looking for that term horse, Thank you. But you get the idea. Yeah. We should pull up a wood rail or a pre-flipper game from the 20s or 30s. So as bright and poppy as a lot of the 50s, 60s, and 70s games are, we're also making sure to photograph our pre-flipper collections, so games from the 20s and 30s as well, games that are very much lost to time. They may exist in private collections, but people haven't seen them. Thank you. I'm not sure what's being compared here. Dragonette and Four Bells. Oh, yeah, there you go. That's my favorite comparison because essentially it's the same exact game with different art.
    30:52
    This also kind of illustrates something I really like about this, which is you can see the three-quarter cabinet art on these older machines. Some of it is just spectacular. Yeah.
    31:03
    Yeah, that is one great feature because most people don't even get to see the cabinet art because it's hidden. Yeah, it doesn't necessarily pop out. Yeah. That's one thing I've really... So, let's see.
    31:17
    Yeah, here's the play field. So you can see the play fields are exactly... I should also say this is really meant for like a desktop. You can do it on your phone. It is, and I'm used to my desktops and controls and everything. But yeah, this is... You can see this is exactly the same play field with different art.
    31:42
    And the system also goes beyond art, of course. Do you want to pull up one of the artists or one of the game descriptions, Mike? Yeah, so besides all the photographs that you can look at, there is, let's see.
    32:01
    As we're delving into this, I just want to say this is very much a work in progress. Only a few. Are there features like spares?
    32:09
    We could. We haven't yet. Thank you. And getting to work with the artists, you know, there's obviously this rapport between them.
    33:20
    So that's pretty amazing. I should point out, too, that this isn't his entire body of work. These are the machines that we've taken photographs of that are available. Yeah, it says 122 machines, but he's done more than that. That's just what's in our collection that we've photographed. Well, we could do that, but really what we want to do is photograph more machines.
    33:47
    Let's get the rest of that collection in there. Is George Martin up there? Right, so that's actually a lead-in towards the end of the presentation where we talk about what we're copying and archiving I wanted to make sure we had time to give Jeff an opportunity to talk a little bit about his background. So just leading into this, I want to say how thankful we are to have run into a volunteer that has the web and design background and the engineering software background that Jeff has. Not very often that we run into someone with the exact skill set that we need as a volunteer. We absolutely adore everything that we're able to get from folks because it means everything to the museum and it's how we work. But this was a really just a very lucky match and it feels like it was perfectly aligned around this project. So we dearly appreciate it, and I wanted to make sure Jeff had an opportunity to talk about the background of the software and the program a bit. Well, just to give you a little bit of background about myself, my first job I ever collected a paycheck for was cleaning old pinball machines. I spent pretty much half of the 80s working for various arcades and cleaning old pinball machines.
    35:23
    Cleaning old pinball machines was how I got started in all this. Where was that at? That was at Arcaden, Omaha, Nebraska called Gizmos.
    35:34
    And Gizmos has some minor notoriety because they sold their collection in the late 80s. And a lot of that collection landed here in the Bay Area.
    35:51
    And guys like Mike and Evan knew all about it. Larry. Larry was shocked when I met him for the first time. A little bit about on the back last year on the slide, you can see there's a, I was in Make Magazine last month, the last issue for my garage pinball space, which is just fun. So we bring it back up so we can see. Yeah, so there, yeah. So if you have last month's or last issue Make Magazine, there's that image and you can see a little, That desk there is where I coded most of this website.
    36:29
    Professionally, I've worked for sort of high-profile, high-trafficked nonprofit sites. George Lucas' Educational Foundation and the Exploratorium are both very large, heavily trafficked sites.
    36:45
    I actually volunteered at the museum to clean machines. The pinball thing was really, or the website was really a side project. We met at, you were taking Mark Gibson's class. That's right. And we started talking about that and you said, yeah. He just kind of mentioned it offhand that he'd seen this mirror door viewer and that got me interested. That was two years ago. Well you kind of, yeah, you were able to, I showed him the site, the National Gallery site and you dissected it and found how they were doing it. Well, so the beauty is they're using open source tools. None of this is any, you know, anybody in this room with web development skills could do that. None of this is proprietary or unique, but, you know, it's the effort, really.
    37:33
    So, yeah, just a little bit about this. Atlas is built on a Laravel stack for the nerds. I won't even go much farther than that. If you know what Laravel is, you'll appreciate that.
    37:47
    The AI is kind of interesting. I had originally set up a much more complicated AI structure and then after time realized that it was really overkill.
    38:02
    So I'm using AI to process the images, to generate the keywords, and then we feed those keywords to a search server called Melee Search, which is another open source. It's called a semantics search server. These are servers that are really adept at working with AI and whatnot.
    38:24
    And so, oh, and then the images are served by what's called the tiling server, which is very similar to, say, Google Maps or any other kind of service where you're, I mean, I don't know if you noticed earlier, when we're far out, the image is clear, and then when you zoom in, the image is clear. And that's a little bit of tiling magic because that's not normally how these services work. Usually you get bit mapped images when you zoom in and out.
    38:59
    So tying these three pieces together ended up here. And so, like I say, we're off to a very good start. I'm a little bit of a fan of the We're lucky that we had Jeff's technical ability pop up. That was really a match made in heaven, kind of what you dream of when you work at a nonprofit and you have people volunteering. So this of course leads into what every nonprofit is going to hit you with at some point in a presentation What you seen is only what we have in our collection what we have access to as impressive as Thank you And as impressive as our collection is with our 1,300 games, we all know that there's thousands and thousands more pinball games out there that have been made through history, depending upon your definition of whether the first pinball game's in 47 with flippers or the first one is a coin slot game from the 20s like baffle ball, or if it even goes back to the 1860s with the bagatelle with the Montague shooter. So what we need to finish a project like this, to finish photographing our collection, which is only about half complete, is donations, whether they're individual, one-time, or monthly, always tax-deductible since we're a 501c3. We need sponsors, whether they're corporate or private, someone that wants to see this project seen through, also tax-deductible. Something else that can be done is access to a special private or rare collection. Folks that have special games that might only exist at this point in their collection, say pre-flipper games from the 20s, 30s, or 40s. World War II games that are very rare. And even if they don't want to sell it, can that game be made accessible to us for special photography? Thank you. A lot of ephemera and paper donations that have been brought to the museum. We're really deep into a current project to stabilize, archive, and catalog a lot of the paper donations that have come to the museum over the last 20 years. And they're phenomenal. They range from things like a stock certificate for micro pin games that were only made for a year or two in the 70s, which don't exist anywhere else, to something like a 1984 Gottlieb Christmas party invitation card with the folks that will be there, the owners, the different artists that will be talking that have been sent to us. Amazing examples of ephemera which might not exist anywhere else or be accessible to folks. So really, in addition to what we always need in terms of public support, especially for this project, to make sure things are saved digitally and can be brought to other folks. And especially as other sites maybe have issues bringing either new or more games to the public, this can be a new site which is more advanced, has more options, and can continue forever as part of a nonprofit that can just be continually added on to. And of course, donations can go through our website. Folks can always reach out directly to the museum. Thank you. So, we have Rob Parika is coming back out. He worked for Disney for a couple of years doing their photo. He's a digital retoucher.
    45:07
    So, he wants to come back out and I reached out to Richard Conger who has this incredible collection of 30s and 40s. And we'd actually, that's how I met Rob. He shot the back glasses working with Dan Fonts back in, jeez, I don't even know when that was, 2004 I think it was. And he managed to shoot a lot of the back glasses in there with literally, you know, no setup. He just went down the line and got some excellent pictures of them. Thank you. So we're hoping that that's going to happen in June and we'll be able to go in there and take another 50 to 100 machines and get them documented. Because if it doesn't happen, these are going to be lost.
    46:22
    They're either going to go into private collections, but they won't be available to the public. And it'd be a real shame because the artwork, the designs, the machines themselves are just incredible. So we're going to try and raise money for that specifically. And also to fill in, we only shot about half of our collection. We worked for four months there, and it was pretty brutal, you know, moving all these machines and having to take them apart. There was a whole team of Melissa and Jim and Chris and myself and then Rob was doing the photography. And we had a whole assembly line going for this, so it was pretty intense.
    47:07
    I don't think you get an idea of how many photos are in here, but about 2,100 so far. So you can punch in Williams and it will give you page after page after page of Williams games. Also, you can do it by the artist, you can do it by designer, and you get all the machines associated with that person. So again, the designer section, you'll see it in the drop-down, is very much a work in progress. I think there's one designer, one or two designers in there that have fully filled out. So we're literally working on that every weekend.
    47:48
    So more to come. The other note, we have a lot of games. Some of the games are not the best quality example of that game. So that's another opportunity is to improve the ones we have. We shoot them as we see them. Shoot them as they are. Yeah, as they are. Sometimes they're pretty funky. We wanted to make sure to leave some time open. Did folks have any specific questions or additions or changes to the website? We always want to make sure that that's something that we open the floor to. We usually have really good questions out there.
    48:23
    Thank you. Yeah, yeah. No, thank you. This is, like I said, this is... This is actually really good for us to circulate it outside of internal use because we're going to get a lot of good feedback and things we can take a look at. And, you know, honestly, we could test it all we want, and as soon as I give it to somebody new, they're going to find that one button.
    49:39
    Be like, oh, this broke. I found a bunch. What's that? I just have a few comments about the device. Please.
    49:52
    Oh, be able to do the side by side. Oh, that is intriguing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The other thing I noticed is that at the top of each pin, it lists the designer and no other person involved. Well, again, this gets back to my earlier comment about these records are not complete. Yeah, of course, but like the bio has the people. Thank you. Maybe that's why we haven't tried it. Yeah, no, but Williams absolutely should work because they're all organized by manufacturers.
    50:58
    Yeah, so we'll have to go ahead and take a look. What we've discovered with a lot of games, at least from the 50s and 60s, is they don't necessarily have a known artist. We know that it came from a company and from an art group, but it might not have a specific artist in some of the older games that we're able to tell for sure. But again, a lot of it is just the heavy lifting of actually getting in there and applying all this metadata to all of these records. Because, yeah, we're not even close to being done with that. And the eventual idea is the website, this archive site, will be directly linked through our main website, which is pacificpinball.org. So it's going to be attached directly through there. It's not a separate site. It will actually be portaled through our main site because it really leans into our mission of preservation.
    51:47
    So you should basically be able to go to atlas.pacificpinball.org and that should go right to it. Yeah, it'll take you right there. Yeah, I can do it on my phone. But Dee, you said you had trouble getting in there? I did, but I figured it out. So did you have trouble signing up? Okay, yeah.
    52:09
    Thank you. Jeff's amazing at just like, oh, okay, yeah, you'll find the problem. Oh, well, yes. Like I say, it's a labor of love.
    52:52
    It's probably going to need a little more server resources behind it to keep it running with more traffic. But, yeah.
    53:04
    Well, thank you for coming, everybody. Yeah, it means a lot. Thank you.