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How We Make Pinball Accessible - Pinball Expo 2023 - Pinball News

Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2023)·video·26m 36s·analyzed·Oct 21, 2023
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.026

TL;DR

Pinball accessibility panel showcases adaptive controllers and venue improvements for disabled players.

Summary

A panel discussion at Pinball Expo 2023 on making pinball accessible to people with disabilities and accessibility challenges. Speakers representing Inclusive Gameworks, Adaptive Flipper Control (AFC), and Project Pinball presented adaptive controller solutions, discussed venue accessibility improvements, and highlighted how emerging technology like Stern's Insider app can personalize gameplay settings for players with sensory sensitivities, mobility issues, and other disabilities.

Key Claims

  • Stern Pinball has technology for Bluetooth headphone capability on machines, per Gary Stern conversation

    high confidence · Speaker states 'Gary Stern told me last night that, yes, They have the technology now pretty much for that' regarding Bluetooth audio ports

  • Stern Insider app will allow players to customize machine settings (lights, sound, callouts) by scanning machines

    high confidence · Speaker: 'So if you want to have the lights dimmed...if you want the call-outs but not the music...you walk up to a machine, you scan it, and it should automatically adjust to your specifications'

  • AFC (Adaptive Flipper Control) kits have been tested and installed on 50+ pinball machines ranging from 1959 EM models to modern Godzilla game

    high confidence · Rusty Key: 'I have it on 50-something pinball machines at my arcades, and they range from 1959...all the way up through our modern Godzilla game'

  • AFC installation takes less than 10 minutes with no soldering required and minimal cabinet modification

    high confidence · Rusty Key: 'we can put in your machine...less than 10 minutes...There's no soldering. The hardest thing to do is drill a hole'

  • Pinball Brothers has developed motorized legs that raise machines 6 inches, inspired by a basketball player's height accommodation needs

    medium confidence · Speaker: 'they have motorized legs that they're putting on their machine...It raises it six inches, and the reason is is because it was inspired by a basketball player...almost seven feet tall'

  • Jersey Jack Pinball machines have built-in audio jack ports and Bluetooth capability for accessibility

    high confidence · Speaker: 'Jersey Jacks, they have...They have the jack, and they have Bluetooth capability'

Notable Quotes

  • “My goal is to have an umbrella organization where if you have somebody in your life or you yourself have something that is a challenge that may prevent you from playing pinball, that we have something to make it overcome that challenge.”

    Panel organizer@ 0:06 — Establishes the core mission and scope of the accessibility initiative

  • “Disability takes a lot away from you. When you live with a disability of any kind, you just get used to losing things in your life and having things taken away. And this has been a really unique opportunity to where I'm getting something back that's meant more in my life than I ever thought a pinball machine could.”

    Zach Christopherson (Inclusive Game Works)@ 9:59 — Emotional articulation of why accessibility solutions matter beyond commercial applications

  • “Inclusivity is the desire to have me there. It's more than just how do you get me in the building? Why should I stay there?”

    Zach Christopherson@ 11:29 — Distinguishes inclusivity from ADA compliance; advocates for deeper community integration

  • “We don't care whether you pick mine his feels whatever we just want you to help folks and that's what that's what we're all about.”

    Rusty Key@ 21:33 — Demonstrates collaborative spirit among competing accessibility solution providers

  • “I talked to one of the best pinball players in the world the other day, and he said he can't play anymore because of his knees, and he needs to sit down.”

    Panel organizer@ 23:06 — Illustrates hidden disabilities affecting even elite players; expands scope beyond obvious accessibility needs

Entities

Inclusive Game WorkscompanyZach ChristophersonpersonRusty KeypersonJim AustinpersonProject PinballorganizationStern PinballcompanyGary SternpersonJersey Jack Pinballcompany

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Multiple independent companies (Inclusive Game Works, AFC, Project Pinball) developing complementary accessibility solutions; provisional patents filed by at least two parties

    high · Panel speakers note they 'started looking out there and go, oh, look, there's somebody else doing almost the same thing we're doing' with provisional patents filed independently

  • ?

    community_signal: Stern Pinball leadership (Gary Stern) engaged directly with accessibility advocates; Gary Stern confirmed technology capability for Bluetooth audio

    high · Speaker states 'Gary Stern told me last night that, yes, They have the technology now pretty much for that'

  • ?

    community_signal: Industry-wide commitment to accessibility from operators, manufacturers, and charity organizations; collaborative rather than competitive stance among accessibility solution providers

    high · Rusty Key: 'I don't care whether you pick mine his feels whatever we just want you to help folks'; multiple vendors at same booth; Pinball Brothers installing AFC kit in new game

  • $

    market_signal: Pinball manufacturers beginning to integrate accessibility features as standard equipment (Jersey Jack audio ports, Stern Insider app, American Pinball flipper options)

    medium · Multiple shout-outs to manufacturers incorporating accessibility as strategic feature; speaker notes 'We have the technology. It's just not really been pushed or asked for'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Jersey Jack Pinball and Stern games supporting flipper inversion and single-flipper play modes; American Pinball exploring similar accessibility features

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.080

0:00
Pinball for All. My goal is to have an umbrella organization where if you have somebody in your life or you yourself have something that is a challenge that may prevent you from playing pinball, that we have something to make it overcome that challenge. There could be physical disabilities that you might think of as far as wheelchairs, as far as leg height. But we also have things that a lot of people don't stop and think about, which might be sensitivity issues, people with autism, people who just have high sensitivity to the light, to the sound, to the amount of people around. There's things that we can do for that. And these are all pretty easy fixes, and we have some amazing engineers out there and people who can fix and repair things. So I believe it's very possible. We have some people here today. I want to introduce everybody. We have Zach Christopherson. We have Rusty Key. And Jim, I don't remember your last name. Austin. Jim Austin.
1:08
These young gentlemen are from Texas. And where are you from? Colorado. We're from Colorado, yeah. I didn't know which city it was. And I'm from Kansas. I came up here to talk to all of you about this, and my laptop has gone missing in the last 12 hours. So I apologize. I had a PowerPoint and I had pictures and I had the whole shebang. But hopefully we can just go kind of off my memory. I've been preaching it to everybody since I've been here. I've gone to the Stern parties. I talked to Gary Stern. I talked to everybody who had listened. They listened because I kind of pushed it. I feel like at this point it needs to happen. I feel like it should have happened by now, but that's okay. People are starting to become aware. And Project Pinball has, if you've already been over there, they have some devices.
1:59
Next to Project Pinball is Rusty's booth, and they have the equipment, which is... Sitting on it? I'm not.
Pinball Brothers
company
Barrels of Funcompany
Marco Specialtiescompany

medium · Speaker: 'american pinball there's another shout out...they started out with octoberfest...like in rush you can flip this...Stern...you can change the flippers'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Stern Insider app will include customizable gameplay settings (light/sound/callouts) triggered by machine scanning for accessibility

    high · Speaker: 'we already have that Stern Insider capability, and that's going to be coming out soon...you walk up to a machine, you scan it, and it should automatically adjust to your specifications'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Aftermarket adaptive flipper control solutions achieving compatibility across 60+ years of pinball hardware (1959 EMs to modern Stern/JJP)

    high · AFC kit tested on machines ranging from 1959 EM models through modern Godzilla; installation takes under 10 minutes with minimal modification

    • 2:12
    This is the wire kit, and we'll get into all that here in a little bit. One of the other things I want to talk about, we talk about inclusivity. That could be women playing pinball. We have women's tournaments, but we need to make inclusive environments. And that also might be, when I talk about accessibility, we need to think about tournament play and your venues, your pin caves, your arcades. Are those physically accessible. At a case in point, we're not on the stage. I'm sure there was a miscommunication somewhere, but we thought we would have an accessible stage or no stage. So this is an exact example of what people have to deal with. Just even finding the elevator. So if If you have a venue, if you have a tournament space, if you run tournaments, maybe start looking at even adding time. There's things that we can do as far as some people may need breaks.
    3:22
    Make the tournament shorter. You can have, I don't know where you all are from, but there's sensitivity movies. You can go to a movie theater and the lights could maybe be up Or it could be quieter for people who have autism or other needs such as that. So we have a lot of people on the spectrum who want to play. But quite frankly, the sounds, the lights, they can be really overwhelming, especially in an arcade setting when it's like a casino and everything's going at you. So it might be good to have once a month or once every quarter a high-sensitivity need-based tournament where you just make the sounds quieter. You dim the LEDs. You get in there to the pinball machines, and you adjust the settings.
    4:15
    And then we have the technology. Headphones are great. Headphones completely change. It doesn't matter if you have a hearing issue. Headphones can just make the game completely different. You may hear it for the first time. You know, when you're at an arcade and you have 12 machines going and everything else, it's really hard to hear it. So that helps. I want to call out some of the companies that are doing some things.
    4:44
    So we have one of the things I'd like to see is, like, screen enlargers. For people who have low vision, you can take a magnifier screen and you can put it on the top. you can have on the glass people already do this, they have the darkened glass you can get the reflective glass but you can also just have a screen that if you don't want it on all your machines if you have one person that maybe you know needs that, you can have that available to them at your arcade the LED lights we already talked about some of those can get, they're starting to get a little bright So maybe think about turning those down and maybe not installing quite as many because your customers may, or your players, just really that may be hard for them. Another thing we're looking at is legs. I don't, this is one thing that I've kind of been on everybody. It's like, why can't we just cut those legs down? And I know they're heavy, but it is possible. And actually right now, downstairs at Pinball Brothers, I was hoping they'd have it early enough for me to display it, but they have motorized legs that they're putting on their machine right now. And it raises it six inches, and the reason is because it was inspired by a basketball player.
    6:08
    He's going to be there today to demonstrate. He's almost seven feet tall, and he has to bend over so much to play, and he has back issues. And so they made this pretty much for him. It's motorized. So we also have Marco, I think, is going to start making that available to people, shorter legs. You can have many different heights. Project Pinball has a pair that they just had made And so you can ask to see those over there in their booth But so yeah we don think about we think about shorter legs but we don think about taller legs But there's people out there who need that. And so if we have something that can adjust up and down, that's a little bit more complicated because you have to collab, what's the word?
    6:56
    No, when you have to, yeah, grab, I'm gonna collaborate. My mouth is. Yeah, there we go, calibration.
    7:09
    And so, I mean, those are things you could have just, you could have two that are lower to the ground. Oh, you guys got the lower one over there at Project Pinball and the foot pedals. So I want to go ahead. There's some more things I want to discuss, but I want to let these guys talk for a second about the inspiration behind their equipment and their remotes. if you haven't been over to Project Pinball and to Rusty's right behind get over there because you can play these devices and they are not just for people who are in a chair or may not be able to reach you know or what not I play with his I love these because for somebody who has social anxiety or somebody who's autistic I don't or a woman and I don't want men or anybody maybe close to me or children running. The thing is, is I can back up and I can go anywhere I want. I can see a different vision of the game. You can, the glare, the glare might be too bad. We play tournaments in Wichita, Kansas. One of my friends from Wichita is back there. I'm going to call him out. We have tournaments during the day, which I try not to hold mine in the afternoon solely because we have, the arcade is great. We have beautiful machines, but the light comes in and they didn't think about this moving, putting all the pinball machines right up against the windows. So between open to about 6 o'clock, you can't really see that machine. But if I move around, I can absolutely get some, I can be able to play it. So there's many uses for it. So I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to Zach for a moment and let him explain how his process works and what the inspiration was behind it. Hello, everyone. My name is... My name is Zach Christofferson, and I'm with Inclusive Game Works.
    9:08
    That's the label on the side of our controller, if you could show them that. It kind of started as an idea that we had with the six friends. They had a pinball machine in their basement, and we own a brewery in Denver, and we were installing stuff in there.
    9:28
    I kind of had the thought of, well, why would I care about pinball? I can't play it, so I don't want to have that conversation. And so that kind of sparked the creative juices between the six of us, and we thought, well, maybe you can't. And prototypes later, and we put this thing together, and now we've put the design work in, And the idea is just getting more people to have whatever activity they need in their life. I always say how disability takes a lot away from you. When you live with a disability of any kind, you just get used to losing things in your life and having things taken away. And this has been a really unique opportunity to where I'm getting something back that's meant more in my life than I ever thought a pinball machine could. It's been really special because I can't go out and throw a ball with my kids. I can't go on those hikes. But now I'm sitting in a basement or going to an arcade or a bar and playing and doing the normal stuff that you would want to see people doing with their kids. And that's been exciting. And I get to teach them a little bit about it as well. and it's really a unique opportunity for us to be able to widen the disability community out into the social aspect.
    11:07
    It's important for people with disabilities of all kinds to be comfortable getting in and out of social situations.
    11:19
    The ADA, well, it's a wonderful thing. It's really just the law. And I think the word inclusive, like we use for Inclusive Gameworks, that goes even further because inclusivity is the desire to have me there.
    11:37
    It's more than just how do you get me in the building? Why should I stay there? What's more than just sitting at a table with my food or my drink?
    11:48
    That's what inclusivity is. Let's involve everybody and allow everyone to have a chance to enjoy this fun game.
    11:59
    Did you want to explain any more about how it's made or how it looks up? Yeah, so this is just a, this is our controller. We do different stuff with it. So this one has three buttons, left, right, flipper, center, launch button, action button, depending on what it is. and then there's an internal harness that we can snap in there real quick. Depending on if it's two flippers, three flippers, four flippers even, that changes a little bit inside of there, and we run some jumpers. What's nice is it does not take over the machine, so it allows the buttons that are on the cabinet to stay functional. So you could play the way that you'd like to play while I play with this, or we can both play on there together. We always say no nudge, you know, because I can't do it.
    12:55
    Yeah, but it hooks up really easy, and it's nice. It just has a little click on the side of there that you can move that machine to machine, or I have one that I just carry in my backpack that the five game rooms that we have set up in Denver I just take mine and I can plug into whatever machines they got set up And then they also have some behind the bar at those places as well And it doesn't take much on your cabinet.
    13:30
    Yeah, we can install that in about 10 minutes. Yeah, some people say we can't put headphone jacks in, we can't put these things in because I don't want to mess up my cabinet. But it's really not very invasive at all. And it's absolutely worth what you're going to get out of it. Like he said, freedom to just have that therapy that we all want or that pleasure of just having some fun and enjoying that.
    13:58
    Do you have anything else you want to say about it right now? That's it for right now. I really appreciate you guys coming in here. And we're down there next to the Project Pinball booth. Come check out Inclusive Gameworks. We've got five games hooked up today, and we're doing the first ever inclusive pinball tournament. Yeah, go play that. It's for a good cause, and you can get some play. Next is Rusty and Jim. Yeah, I'm going to stand up.
    14:29
    Try that, try that, try that, try that. Try that, try that. There it is. Hello. Put on the DJ boys. Hello, everybody. No, we're not going to do that. So the inspiration for our stuff came from this man here. Jim was my senior tech working for me at the Game Preserve. I have two large arcades in Houston. And Jim had a stroke, and we almost lost him. So he came back to work about what, almost a year later. Yeah, about a year later, he finally was able to get up, move around, and do things, and he came back to work. and so we brought him back to work and he could be our eyes and our brains and then I had junior techs learning from him so they would go in and do stuff and he would just use their brains which has been working out really really well for us but he realized that as he played he could have instruct and things but he could never test the machine how do I test machine what happened to Jim is he lost one half of his body his little right hand side which is used to be his normal side or his regular side is no longer work. So now he's one handed. So he's like, I can't test these machines. How do I test these machines? So he started messing around with an idea in his head and he came up with a device that he hooked up to the flippers and hey, look what I did. And he took a little plastic box we had that we normally made buttons out of and it was, let me have the smaller one. It was this one. He came up with a little button like, cause we put these on, we are free play arcade. So we put these kind of buttons on our games you press the button it drops a quarter right so he came up with this stuck these tied it into the flippers and go hey look this thing works so he brought it to me and said look hey i think we should do this and it's and all the time he's thinking it's not for me it's for as many people as we can he can get and and that really resonated for us for me especially um it's not just you know it wasn't just about him it's how many people can we get this thing to and how many people we can do So our objective was to make things very simplified, very easy to put in, and very easy to work. And they have a beautiful product. They really do. Ours looks a little janky compared to what they've got. And we have two sizes now. This one's for the kids and this one's for an adult. You can hold it like this. You flip it over and turn it the other way. But what we did decide on is that to get them into the machine, we use a standardized quarter-inch jack. Nice, simple, heavy, robust. Plug it in. And what we've done is we've put those things under the bottom left-hand corner of a pinball machine because there's usually nothing there. We have a Ghostbusters machine that has a shaker motor in it. Not a problem. Still plenty of room to put our jack because we go in. Let me see the jack. So this is the kit. It's really that simple. And like you said, inside theirs is just as simple. Just let me connect to the wiring. and then get back to things, and this is what we do. Now, we call our kit, we call it the Adaptive Flipper Control, because there went all my stuff. So the Adaptive Flipper Controls, we picked the term adaptive. I love the story about the inclusive, brother. That was awesome. That really helped. I hadn't heard that, and I hadn't really had a chance to talk to these folks until now. We all came up with this individually, and then when we started doing provisional patents, we started looking out there and go, oh, look, there's somebody else doing almost the same thing we're doing, you know. And I know you all have a provisional patent, as we do as well. But our objective was more of, as an arcade owner, I'm looking, well, this is great. How do I have to plug this in, right? Well, the kits that we have, we can put in your machine, as he said, less than 10 minutes. We can hook these things in. There's no soldering. The hardest thing to do is drill a hole. You drill a hole through the, and we pick the bottom of the cabinet. That way we're not messing up the pretty cabinets, not messing up all the doors. So we go through the bottom. You plug in. And we have tested our kit. I have it on 50-something pinball machines at my arcades, and they range from 1959. We can do all the E.M.s all the way up through our modern Godzilla game. And have you seen the new Labyrinth game? Okay, we're from Houston. Labrath, Barrels of Funds from Houston, too. We're going to brag a little bit about Houston. It's a beautiful game. They're putting one of our kits in their machine today. So inclusivity, which is what he talked about as we were sitting talking about it, I went over to those guys and says, look, let's put a kit in because we have people coming in to play these tournaments and things that have these difficulties. If we put this kit in, now they get to play the newest game. I didn't want the people that come in like Jim or him to come in and say, okay, we have 40 pinball machines. You can play those two. So we wanted to make sure, and that was really where our objective was, was to get those things in to where everybody would be able to play. Now, we control the flippers. That's it. We don't control the plungers. We don't control the stop button. That's where they take up a little bit more fudder than we do. But ours was just about the flipper controls because generally you can hit the plunger or things. And a lot of the new Stern games and we have a Ghostbuster set up in our booth right now if you hold you can set it to where if you hit the two pinballs together the two flippers together it'll launch the ball for you. So you can do the ball launch with that. But that's only specific. EMs, you can't do that, obviously. There is no ball launch on EMs, right? Somebody's going to have to pull that. So as we looked at how do we go through the most, this is what we were hitting for.
    20:16
    I've been working around folks that have disabilities for years. I hired a gentleman back in the early 2000 that was in a wheelchair. This was my first experience to be with someone that was with a chair. And it was raining one day. And he was like, it was time to go to home and it was raining. I said, well, let me get the umbrella. I'll come with you. He goes, no, that's okay. I'm going to get wet anyway. And I said, what do you mean? I'll help you. I'll hold it. And he goes, no. He said, when I get in to the house, I've got to get my chair out. I've got to put it together. He had hand controls. He said, I can get out. I can do all that. He said, I'm going to get wet. That's just what my life is like. we came up here in an rv and we've thousand eleven hundred miles in an rv three stops different places and in and out of an rv going different places you really understand what these folks come through what they have to go through what these challenges have taken away so the more we can do to give them that sense of life back together again that's what we want to do and that's what we're trying to do so however you folks however we come together you know we have with there's the other folks with the with the pinball pedals yeah with the with the things we've come we've been sitting here talking about that we know we all have products we all know we're hoping to get you guys to to pick up our products but you know what we don't care i don't care whether you pick mine his feels whatever we just want you to help folks and that's what that's what we're all about. Thank you, Rusty. Did you want to say anything, Jim? No. Okay.
    21:46
    Oh, what? Oh, I thought I had an hour one. Okay. So in order to find theirs, they have a sticker. It says AFC equipped, and it'll point right to the jack. One of the other things, technology, if any of you guys do, I talked about headphones before, and people say, why do you plug in? Why and we're using Bluetooth. If you don't know, it pretty much wasn't fast enough to keep up with pinball.
    22:10
    So that's why a lot of people go back and they're using that cord. However, I have been told now, well, Jersey Jacks, they have, that's one great thing, shout out to Jersey Jacks. They have that port in there. They have the jack, and they have Bluetooth capability. So Gary Stern told me last night that, yes, They have the technology now pretty much for that. But what the other thing is, is my goal is I want to be able, there's a lot of hidden disabilities that you can't see. I'm on a stage, and right now I'm having a good day. But I have good days and I have bad days. I have days where I'm catatonic and I can't move. I get completely paralyzed. And in between, because I have muscle diseases. And I know people with arthritis, they can use these flippers, but maybe they can't stand. Your back hurts. Your knees hurt. I talked to one of the best pinball players in the world the other day, and he said he can't play anymore because of his knees, and he needs to sit down. Oh, we have our pinball brother in the back who has legs that I was talking about, those motorized legs. And I think he got – did you get them calibrated? So shout out to Pinball Brothers again for having those motorized legs, so check that out. But again, I don't have my pictures because my laptop's gone, but there's wider legs. There's cabinets that you can go across. You can go and put a wheelchair closer to it.
    23:43
    But what I want to do is be able to walk up to a machine and have it personalized to me or to yourself. So we already have that Stern Insider capability, and that's going to be coming out soon. So if you want to have the lights dimmed, as I said, because of sensitivity issues, if you want the call-outs but not the music, or if you don't want the sound at all, so you walk up to a machine, you scan it, and it should automatically adjust to your specifications. And it may be height someday, too. But we have the technology. It's just not really been pushed or asked for, And we're just keeping out a massive amount of people who want to play, your customers, just people who want to play. And it's not everything that you can see. Like I said, there's autistic and there's sensitivity issues.
    24:34
    So just think about that if you're an operator and get with these guys. They have, yeah, they have those jacks. The foot pedals, the fills, they're over there as well. They basically took like guitar, I mean drum, yeah, pedals. And it's pretty interesting. Everybody's just kind of working on it and getting through that initial testing phase of all of it. But, yeah, go check them out. If you have any suggestions, does anybody have suggestions? Originally it was, yes, please.
    25:09
    Yeah, that would be absolutely great. Standard. And the pedals, the fills, they actually have the hand controls and the foot pedals all working together. They wired them in together. So that's a little bit easier. But like I said, on the newer machines, that is a goal and that is a future. It's already there. and originally the flippers um who uh american pinball there's another shout out um they started out with octoberfest it was more i think i remember it was like a drunk thing you know you're supposed to feel what it feels like to play opposite but um like in rush you can flip this with you know and stern and there's another one you can you can change the flippers the technology is there you can play with one side you can play um one side flipper the tech it's We just need to ask for it. We need to push our, if there's any other companies out there, please make it accessible for everybody. And I appreciate your time. I think we're out now. Thank you, guys.