Episode 332: Starfighters Arcade

Pinball Profile·podcast_episode·18m 53s·analyzed·Jan 29, 2022

Analysis

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TL;DR

Starfighters Arcade hosts inaugural pinball festival in Mesa with 108-player tournament and Bowen Kearns appearance.

Summary

Pinball Profile Episode 332 features Mike Lovato and Kevin Curtis from Starfighters Arcade in Mesa, Arizona, discussing the arcade's history since 2014 and their inaugural Starfighters Pinball Festival scheduled for February 4-6. The episode covers the arcade's growth from a basement hobby to a 50-machine venue hosting monthly tournaments and charity events, and details the festival's offerings including a 108-player match-play tournament, Beat a World Champion competition with Bowen Kearns, pin golf, women's tournament, and 150+ machines in free play.

Key Claims

Starfighters Arcade currently has approximately 50 pinball machines on the floor, from solid state to DMD to latest titles like Avengers
high confidence · Kevin Curtis directly states current collection size and newest machine
Monthly tournaments at Starfighters grew from initial 20-23 players in January 2017 to nearly 80 players at peak attendance
high confidence · Kevin Curtis provides specific founding tournament date and growth trajectory
Starfighters Pinball Festival will feature a capped field of 108 players in match-play tournament format with divisions on Friday/Saturday qualifying and Sunday finals for top 16
high confidence · Kevin Curtis explains tournament structure and current registration status
Bowen Kearns will play six machines with no warm-ups Friday-Saturday for Beat a World Champion competition throughout the festival weekend
high confidence · Mike Lovato describes the Beat a World Champion event mechanics and Kearns' participation
Starfighters Arcade arcade was founded in 2014 after Kevin Curtis discovered the location had opening and found five pinball machines available
high confidence · Kevin Curtis describes discovering location approximately one mile from his house in 2014
Mike Lovato purchased his first arcade game in 2010 for a basement in his second house, which eventually grew to justify opening a community arcade
high confidence · Mike Lovato explains the origin story of finding a house with a basement and acquiring his first game
The festival will feature over 150 machines in the free play area, with potential to reach 200 machines
high confidence · Mike Lovato discusses machine count and logistics of moving pins
Starfighters has ordered newer games including Halloween, Aliens, and Godzilla to keep the collection fresh
high confidence · Kevin Curtis mentions games on order at the arcade

Notable Quotes

“At about 85 games we decided that I decided let's take a look at See if we could set up a community arcade That would be supported by the community for the community”
Mike Lovato @ early in episode — Explains the founding philosophy of Starfighters Arcade as community-driven rather than profit-maximizing
“Because our overhead is so small, it allows us to only be open on those time frames... limited time on the weekends is very deliberate.”
Mike Lovato @ mid-episode — Reveals key business strategy of minimizing overhead to ensure sustainability, contrasts with failed retail arcade models
“I regret to this day is i never ever went to pinberg it is a regret that i'm going to have forever... so what we decided to do is let's try to recreate a mini pinbird for starfighters pinball festival”
Kevin Curtis @ festival planning section — Explains motivation for festival design and tournament format inspired by Pinberg's legacy
“There's not that much of a drive involved for those folks and there's plenty of room in the pinball world for both events, so I'm not too concerned about it.”
Mike Lovato @ InDisc conflict discussion — Addresses potential conflict with InDisc California event on same weekend; positions festival as complementary rather than competitive
“I was hooked. I was there every weekend for the first year or so and I watched it grow and grow and grow and they got to a point where there's so many and they were having a hard time just taking care of them.”
Kevin Curtis @ early arcade history — Explains how Kevin became involved as volunteer helping with machine maintenance and repair

Entities

Starfighters ArcadeorganizationMike LovatopersonKevin CurtispersonTracy LindbergpersonBowen KearnspersonStarfighters Pinball FestivaleventSouthwest Autism Resource Center (SARC)organizationPinball Profilemedia

Signals

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business_signal: Starfighters Arcade has sustained operations since 2014 through deliberate low-overhead business model (weekend-only operation, minimal commercial space rental, high community engagement) enabling growth despite equipment age and maintenance demands
high · Mike Lovato explains strategy: 'Limited time on weekends is very deliberate. Commercial location has been very deliberate... Because our overhead is so small, it allows us to only be open on those time frames.'
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community_signal: Starfighters expanded from annual December charity raffles supporting Southwest Autism Resource Center to festival-based multi-charity approach, indicating scaling of fundraising mission
high · Mike Lovato: 'Rather than lamenting that everybody else has shut down... why don't we combine them both? Let's put our money where our mouth is... expand the amount of charities that we could potentially benefit instead of just going with Sark.'
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community_signal: Starfighters Arcade has grown from zero public tournaments in Arizona (2015-2016) to regular monthly tournaments averaging 20-80+ players, indicating rapid expansion of competitive pinball infrastructure in Arizona
high · Kevin Curtis: 'There wasn't any tournaments in the Valley in 2015, 2016... And then our first one was 2017, January... And each month we do a tournament... one weekend And we had almost 80 players.'
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sentiment_shift: Strong positive community reception and excitement for Starfighters Pinball Festival among local Arizona players, particularly those unfamiliar with large national events
high · Kevin Curtis states 'Local players that were at our event over the weekend were just talking about it all day. They're so excited. Want more and more information. None of these players that I talked to have ever done a big event like that.'

Transcript

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0:00

It's time for another Pinball Profile. I'm your guest host, Tracy Lindberg. You can find everything on pinballprofile.com. past episodes, subscriptions, and more. We're on Twitter and Instagram at Pinball Profile. Check out the Facebook group. And you can email pinballprofile at gmail.com. It's always good to shed some light on arcades around the world, and especially when they're holding a big event. Today we are talking about Starfighters Arcade and the upcoming Starfighters Pinball Festival in February in Mesa, Arizona. And Starfighters is certainly one of my favorite arcades in the world. Joining us is Mike Lovato and Kevin Curtis. Hello, Mike and Kevin. Hello. Before we talk about this large event, let's tell people about your amazing arcade. Like many people, Mike, you used to frequent arcades as a teenager in the 80s. As you grew up, the arcades disappeared, but not your passion for the machines. Tell us what happened in 2010 when you came up with the idea of reliving the dream. Yeah, well, oddly enough, it's a tale about a basement. So my wife and I were looking to purchase our second house, and one of the requirements is we wanted to have a furnished basement, which is not typical for housing here in the Valley area. They normally do not have basements.

1:40

But she did her due diligence, and a day and a half later, she had a place for us to look at, and it had a basement. So when we were discussing what we wanted to put down there, the thing that came up was potentially an old arcade game. So I dutifully went out and found one here in the Valley, did a restoration on it and had a really good time doing that and of course that sparked my memories of playing in arcades in general so I started to snoop around and found out you really could not find an arcade that had any of the equipment anymore the larger ones had gone, a lot of them to Redemption or the newer games so if you wanted to have a good game of Pac-Man or Defender or Missile Command unless you knew someone that had a private collection you were kind of out of luck So given that, you know, one game turned into five games Which turned into 20 games Which turned into a real headache for my wife But at about 85 games we decided that I decided let's take a look at See if we could set up a community arcade That would be supported by the community for the community And have arcade games from that era And of course based on all of our memories of those events And what we were exposed to We could add those elements to the arcade and hopefully have something special for the Valley. So, Mike, it's one thing to collect the machines, but it's another to get a lease, pay rent, manage hours of operation, repair machines, and hope the customers will come. What made you confident it would work? At that point in time, there's really nobody doing what we're doing now. There's been a big boom in the last three to four years based off of the success of efforts like ours and others around the country. But from a business perspective, given that I've run businesses for most of my professional life, we looked at it from an issue of mitigating our risk as much as possible, really minimizing our overhead, low cost, no cost is kind of our mantra, maximize our opportunity and the value to the customer, and not really be in trouble from a financial perspective. So the limited time on the weekends is very deliberate. The commercial location has been very deliberate. And those things have really helped us offset what could be disastrous. I know some others that have tried it prior, and because they were in retail space, you really have to be running them seven days a week. And the equipment itself is 30-plus years old, so the maintenance is going to be higher. So that kind of worked out, right? So we could be shut down during the week, do repairs, and then also be open for special events if something comes up. But because our overhead is so small, it allows us to only be open on those time frames. So on our opening night when we threw it out there and we had some media buzz, we decided, myself and Steve, that we were either going to be playing our collections alone for four hours or it would be a big success. And I was there on that opening night and I remember just how busy it was. And you've grown quite a bit since then. So for anyone now who looking for pinball in Arizona you can find a bigger well collection Kevin tell us what you have at Starfighters Arcade Basically how I got involved with Starfighters Arcade is they started in 2014 and I was into pinball. I was playing pinball. But there was really only a couple little tiny places in the valley to go play locally, and one of them being Golf Land, and I think the other was like Castles and Coasters. in Phoenix and that's a long drive. This place just happened to be a mile from my house and they open up and they've got, I want to say like five pinball machines. I was hooked. I was there every weekend for the first year or so and I watched it grow and grow and grow and they got to a point where there's so many and they were having a hard time just taking care of them. And that's where I started to get involved. I love repairing them. I love fixing them. I enjoy We're playing them even more. So that's how I got involved. And so what's the collection like now? What is there at Starfighters? There's about 50 machines, 50 pinball machines on the floor. So it's all solid states to DMDs to the latest one, which is I think Avengers is the newest one we have right now. We've got a couple newer games on order, one from Halloween, and Aliens is on order, and Godzilla is on order. So we're constantly trying to keep it fresh, but we love the old games too. We try to keep those old games in there, and people love those old games. We need a bigger space. Anyone has a warehouse, chief, Mesa area, contact myself or Kevin. The number of pinball players and leagues keeps growing, including leagues like Elk Chimes Phoenix, Electric Bat Arcade, Tilt Studio, and Tucson Pinball League. Starfighters Arcade is a major destination for both leagues and tournaments. Tell us what goes on there on a regular basis, including your many charity benefits? One of the things myself, I always wanted to play in tournaments. I was very gun-shy at first, and there wasn't any tournaments in the Valley in 2015, 2016. It just didn't exist. Before that, it was all private tournaments ran by Arizona Pinball, Apple, Arizona Pinball League. And I tried to join up to that several times, and there just so many people trying to join up. You're just basically on a waiting list. So to see the league start up and at the same time, Starfighters is growing their pinball collection. It was just the perfect timing from that first public tournament in September 2016, if I recall right. And then our first one was 2017, January. We have a lot of help from Tracy, of course, and the pinball community. And I think our first one we had about 20 players or so, 23 players. and I was over the moon. I mean, all I wanted was like 12. I was thinking maybe 12 people would show up, and it would be kind of cool. And we had 20-something players, and we were just like so impressed. And each month we do a tournament, usually the second Saturday of the month. That's what we try to plan it for. One month will be like strikeout format. The next month will be an eight-round format. And that's slowly grown over the years to the point where one weekend And we had almost 80 players. That was one of the highest ones. And it was absolute chaos in there because we just don't have the room. We have the amount of machines to facilitate it, but we just don't have the space. So I was so impressed that we've grown that much and the whole community has grown that much. As of our charity events, which we're very, very proud of, we host those every December. Last year is an exception because we have this event going on in February that is going to be our charity event. So I'm going to let Mike talk a bit more about the charities and who we take care of. After our first year, we kind of mapped out that we would do a year lease, and then based off of how that turned out, we would continue just kind of minimizing our risk. We were well-received. We were in the black. Things were good, so we wanted to give back even more. we just started to hold raffles for games in the month of December, and that grew as well. So the initial charity that we had targeted and were working with was SARC, the Southwest Autism Resource Center, and the games just got better and better. I'm not saying that they were ever junk, but the last one had quite a bit of work that was put into it. Quite a few dollars went into that one. So when we were looking at expanding that that one of the reasons we went to the festival actually So last summer you came up with an idea and every pinball fan loves to hear this for their city You said let do a pinball festival and you wanted it to be for charity So this year, February 4th through 6th, you are holding the first annual Starfighters Pinball Festival at the Sheraton Mesa Hotel at Wrigleyville Woods. Yeah, so, you know, taking some of the elements that we picked up from attending other festivals or conventions, not only here but on a national level. I saw from Kathy discussing the fact that everything was shut down.

13:07

Don't have regrets. Local players that were at our event over the weekend were just talking about it all day. They're so excited. They want more and more information. None of these players that I talked to have ever done a big event like that. It's going to be a first for a lot of people, including myself. So we've got pin golf is all set up for that. We've got a kids' tournament. There will be a women's tournament Saturday night with bells and chimes. We are also looking at potentially getting some live entertainment for Saturday night as well. And so it should be a blast. It should be fun. The venue we selected specifically because it does have a lot of amenities that would allow people to stay very comfortably. So if you wanted to have a nice three-day weekend in four-star accommodations and not have to worry about the hassle of driving from A to B, we should certainly accommodate that. So tell me what this Beat a World Champion event is about So for the first time we going to do a competition We got Bowen Kearns coming in on Thursday and Friday morning He's going to play about half a dozen machines. No warm-ups, no practice, just play half a dozen machines. Write down a score. So then when you come in in the event over the weekend, his score and his face would be on the machine. You could try to beat his score. If you do beat his score, it's going to be a selfie picture. Take it up to the tournament desk, and we've got prizes if you beat Bowen's score. T-shirts, passes for the arcade, things like that. So we do have a Beat a World Champion competition running all weekend. And I know that you realize that this is the same weekend as InDisc in California, and that's just one of those unfortunate things because your date was booked and set long before InDisc announced their February dates. But this is an opportunity for players who may not be looking for the best game style of Ndisc and they might be looking for match play. It's an alternative, and it includes also a big show attached to the tournament, which includes over 150 machines in the free play area at this point. Yeah, we certainly are. We're not overly concerned right now about getting to the 200. We are about moving the 200 pins, though. That's going to be back-breaking, but we've been very careful. but yeah we're looking forward to that and it is unfortunate that it ended up being on the same day at Zendesk we'd already gone up and running and we were under the assumption that they were not at that point but hey it is what it is and we're certainly going to throw our party and hope that people want to come and hang out with us and have a good time we do have some advantages again from a local perspective there's not that much of a drive involved for those folks and there's plenty of room in the pinball world for both events, so I'm not too concerned about it. So, Kevin, I'd imagine with a big show like Starfighters Pinball Festival, you will be looking for help and volunteers. What are you looking for in both machines and people? The main help that we're going to need is going to obviously be load in and load out. So Thursday evening, Friday morning, that sort of help to set the areas up. And, of course, Sunday evening and Monday, we're going to need help loading out. That's the biggest hurdle to overcome. We've been very blessed that we've had a lot of people, a lot of organizations, step up, local companies within the community to offer their services. So somebody doing all of the peripheries as far as the visuals and stuff that you normally have to pay big bucks for, they've offered to do it for free. So I'm going to be working with those guys going forward. And then, like Kevin had mentioned, there's a webcast group that's based out of Arizona that wants to see if there's an opportunity for them. So the finals, for sure, we can make it work. We want to set that up and make it entertaining. So it's something a little bit different. Where can people reach you and find out more about the Starfighters Pinball Festival, February 4th through 6th in Mesa? StarfightersArcade.com, our website, has a direct link to the festival and all the information is there. Kevin's contact information, too, is a lot of the Facebook postings as far as volunteers and games. So if you check out our Facebook page, Starfighters Arcade on Facebook, there's more contact information there as far as the volunteers and or if you would like to donate again for the effort that weekend. Also looking for technician volunteers. I'm about one or two short technician volunteers. We do have Chris from Firebird Pinball as our main technician, and he's going to be there supporting us. but having a few more technicians to keep these games as tip-top as we can over the weekend and to make sure they go back to the respective homes repaired in fully working order. So we are kind of still hunting out for at least another one or two technicians that might want to help out and volunteer. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast today. I look forward to the big event in Mesa. Thank you, Tracy. Thank you very much. Thanks, Tracy. Thank you, Jeff. I appreciate it. This has been your Pinball Profile. You can find everything on pinballprofile.com, plus Twitter and Instagram at pinballprofile. You can email pinballprofile at gmail.com and check us out on Facebook. I'm Tracy Lindberg.