Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. I am Alan, your host of the Wedget Pinball Podcast. Joined today with my co-host Alex, the water boy in his basement studio. How are you doing? I'm doing pretty good. Just pretty good. Last time we recorded, you were mad that I didn't ask you how you were, and it's because you give me shitty answers like that. I didn't know how I feel, you know. You're still hurt. You're still hurt from the last time. Okay. Today for our episode, we're talking about mega locations. Is that the phrase we're using here? I didn't know what to call it. Nobody's really defined this, but you put it in all capitals whenever it's used, which I really enjoyed. Well, it's mega, dude. Mega location. You have to know it's big, dude. It's bigger. I don't know. I kind of jumped the gun. I ruined your intro here. Everything got thrown off. Run it back. Run it back. Yeah, I'll run the I'll read the intro. All right. The year is 2024. Location pinball is spreading like a pandemic across the globe. I should have put a different analogy there, but I thought about it and then I tried to do it a different time and i was like matt it works it works we all went through a pandemic we know what it means there's more new locations arcade bars operators and museums popping up every week it seems and many more are announced and slated to appear on the horizon the coming months and years ahead all this might seem like a textbook market bubble and maybe it is the history of pinball is rife with boom and bus cycles after all but uh i'm gonna enjoy it while we have it and So should you. Pinball is more accessible on location now than it has been in at least 30 years. And what's most interesting is the rise of our subject today, the mega location. Mega locations. What I mean by that term is it's a very large location that houses 100 plus games under a single roof and is open to the public to play. So the 100 game, the definition of mega location at 100 games, an astute listener might notice that's where the pinball map happens to have a filter setting. Yeah, it's a little bit easy to do it that way. This was perhaps a little arbitrary on the definition, but you need to draw the line somewhere, and 100 games is a lot. 100's a lot. I look at it like 100 is like, even if the average game there was five grand, you're looking at half a million dollars of investment. You're going to need lots of square footage. You're going to need a space that's... It's a lot, because I also feel like most people, if they're opening a really big spot, It's kind of like that's a threshold number for a lot of people, I think. Yeah. And you see a lot of barcades that have like 20, 30 games or whatever. There's quite a few in that ballpark. In Seattle, they're everywhere, dude. It's riddled with places with 20 or 30 games. But that's a big jump from 20 to 30 to 100. Oh, yeah. It's massive. It changes the math. It also... You're no longer in normal commercial real estate. You're in a fucking warehouse. Yes. And that's part of what we'll talk about with mega locations is like where they have to end up being. They're not in city centers. There's one major exception, which we'll talk about, but for the most part, all of these locations are on outskirts or suburbs of suburbs, things like that. Rust belt cities. Where rent's cheap. Where rent's cheap. I mean, because you're going to need a lot of square footage. There's just no way around it. Pinball machines take up a lot of square footage. And so to open up one of these, you would need to do that. These types of locations used to be extremely rare. When I first started playing pinball, it was in 2008, and the only mega locations that I knew about that were open were the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas and the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, which is just outside of San Francisco in the Bay Area. I think doing research on this pinball perfection outside of Pittsburgh might have been open at that time. Papa headquarters open to the public? No, not really. Like you could get in if you knew people. Yeah. But like it wasn't like an open location. So you had to go to their big tournament. There's still a lot of kind of like semi-private locations like that. They might be open a day or two a month. We'll talk about some of them in this episode, but we're really focusing on the ones that are open that you, the listener, you don't need to know anybody. You don't need to be a friend of a friend. You can just show up and pay money like a normal business and go check these places out. Yeah, absolutely. I think we wrote down a count. I didn't count and then you corrected me, thankfully, because I missed a couple locations and I don't want a bunch of people going, oh, what about this spot? What about this spot? They have 100 games. Yep. We I'm sure we even still I'm sure we still missed one. But it wasn't intentional. These are just the places we could find sorting on pinball map and places we've heard of. But we counted about 18 total across the globe. And 14 of them are located here in the U.S., three in Europe and one in Japan. They're all run a little bit differently. Most of them are on free play. Yeah. With like admission prices. Some of them are on Coindrop and some of them bill themselves as museums. And some of them actually do feel like museums. But they also there's a lot of them that label themselves museums and they're just kind of like a big hangar building. It's kind of funny how, yeah, and they do that for a couple of reasons, right? Like it gets you a little around some like local legislation or whatever. Sometimes it's an honest effort to be a museum. Sometimes it's just like, hey, we can't say that we're an arcade. We have to be some other kind of business. Yep. It is interesting how you run into that. It's common with a lot of these mega locations where they'll be called a museum and you'll show up and it's just a bunch of machines turned on, right? And they might have like a little note card that has like the name of the designer and the artist or whatever on it. I appreciate those note cards. I like those. Sure. They prevent me from looking up IPDB. Sure. But it's not a museum. So there's a couple that, you know, like we said, essentially function as semi-private clubs. So we want to start this off the top. These places are seemingly awesome locations with 100 plus games, but I don't think they're really eligible due to their very limited hours of operation. I think the most common one, the one I hear about a lot here in the U.S. is District 82 in Wisconsin near Green Bay. It seems to have a great collection of games, but they're only open twice a month normally, occasionally other days for other big tournaments. They stream a lot of pinball. So if you like to watch streams and tournament streams, they do that a lot. And it seems like if you're a serious big tournament player, it seems like you're going to have to make a pilgrimage out there at some point, right? Like, I don't really include in this because when I'm thinking about a mega location, this Alex and I will travel to these mega locations and we'll talk about why we're doing that episodes because there's a lot of really cool mega locations. We can't just show up and walk in. Yeah, you'd have to make the vacation around the specific day they're open. Similarly, like another pilgrimage spot is Joshua Clay's VFW, the Pinball Museum in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is famous. It's been he's been collecting. He's been a huge asset to the community forever. He's been a guide for, you know, how to fix everything for pre-internet days. Yeah. Right? Joshua Clay's been around. Yeah, like, he's been writing pinball repair guides for at least 30 years. Yep, and they've got 500 games or so out there, but they're only open to the public, I think, twice a year. So even more than that. They said sometimes it's twice. A lot of times it's only one weekend a year. Yeah. And they do a big show. My business partner, Rosie, got to go last year. I didn't get to go. I had to fucking stay and work. Someone had to run Wedgehead, but I'm jealous, and I'm definitely going to make it out there one of these years. The other one I saw in the research was the Paris Pinball Museum. It's only available by appointment ahead of time, and it only seems like your appointments can be made on Saturdays, but it looks to be the largest collection of playable wood rails in the world. That's really sick. And when you walk in, it says Pinball Museum, and it looks like a pinball museum. Like, I haven't been there, but, like, it's got, like, rooms that are labeled Gottlieb 1972 to 1979 and Genco, you know, 1960 to 1965. And, like, it's set up like a museum. And he's got all these wood rails that you could play if you get there. And I'm like, this is so fucking cool and rare. There's probably not another location that truly has wood rails like that collection does. Yeah. And then I saw two more in Germany. I want to shout out because I know we have German listeners. There's a flipper in Arcade Museum and Seeligenstadt. Seeligenstadt. That's why I was just staying quiet. I was like, you got to try to pronounce it. Seeligenstadt. I'm sorry. And Freddy's Pinball Paradise in Exxon. Yeah. Both of which are only open once a month, but they also have very impressive collections. Freddy's Pinball Paradise is actually themed like a Western kind of, like an American West saloon. That's kind of fun. I always love something themed. We love a good theme. We like pinball themes. We like location themes. I like location themes a lot, dude. I like that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, now let's get into mega locations. Like, what makes a mega location appealing? Like, why would you want to go to one? So, the pinball, Alan. That's why you want to go. Oh, they have those there? the biggest they have a lot of them though they have a lot of them by our definition over 100 wow that's a lot of pinball the really nice part is if you're traveling a long distance to go play pinball which a lot of our listeners are in portland and they don't leave more than five minutes from their house to play pinball ever and they don't understand in other parts of the country you have to sometimes get in a car to play pinball and if you're doing that and you can go somewhere with a hundred games it's fucking awesome because you could go see all these games you've never played before you could spend time on anything you want these places that we're going to talk about have a huge variety of stuff for the most part and it's just great being able to go somewhere and just chill and play as much pinball as your heart desires and never get sick of a game it's fucking awesome what's cool about mega locations aside from the obvious i was joking there but it's like obviously they have a lot of pinball it's like what's cool about having a lot of pinball where pinball normally is as an operator you're forced with the idea of like i need to buy a game and i need to put out location it needs to make money yeah it's constant pick and choose of what's going to be played the most floor space is very valuable and when you get into these big locations they can have a lot of these games that would never fucking earn on a route like you can get all these old segas or data east games yep or gotley premieres or you can put ems or weirdo stuff like those big em bowler machines you can do stuff like that that like wouldn't earn on location in the modern day but you can play them there so it's a great way to go play these weird games that you've only heard about or if you listen to a weird ass pinball podcast where they yeah would defend these weirdo games and they die on this hill and we're always like go out and play this game you're like where the hell would i play one of these games you can play them at these locations usually this is where you're going to see them you're going to see them at pinball shows you're going to see them here mostly yes right and so that's what makes such a cool thing like you're having a it's very intentional anytime you're putting a hundred pinball machines somewhere someone is sacrificing a lot to make that happen and to be open to the public yep it's a lot easier to just own the games and keep them in a warehouse for you and your buddies it's like a passion project i think to make these places open to the public yeah that's kind of a big part of why we want to like shout out specifically the ones that you can just go and play at that are just genuinely you know an open location because yeah it's a big effort and it's sick yeah and i would say like as a location owner we are we are lucky to be next to one of these locations that we're going to talk about next level but like what does having a mega location do for a scene i think we talked about it but it's like alex and i have been on multiple trips we go on trips and we travel to go play pinball so what'll drive us to a region will be usually one of these mega locations one of these places that's going to have a whole list of games that we either haven't played before or we haven't played in years or we've never played a good working copy of and so it'll draw us to that and that's good for the local scene like myself as a business owner at wedgehead having people come to the portland area to play pinball and they go to next level they travel to go to next level they might end up at wedgehead right so like it feeds the normal scene the players in the scene get greater variety like it means that we can go out and be like oh we're gonna have somebody on the show and they want to talk about rocky and bullwinkle or they want to talk about lethal weapon or whatever yeah it's like we can go out and play that game like we can go play the game that we're going to talk about on the show and not everyone has that yeah it's something that us in the portland area definitely take for granted sometimes with next level right here because next level has such a comprehensive collection of like especially modern games like dmd plus games there's not a single dmd game that i you know that you're going to run into really from a manufacturer that they don't have there yeah and it's just like a very great resource when you're a nerd in the hobby like we are to be able to go and play any of these oddball games is it's great it's great for a local scene to have it because and maybe i shouldn't say this on the mega locations episode but i'm going to anyway. Mega locations aren't my favorite place to play pinball, generally speaking. I typically like a good bar or like an arcade bar. It's mostly like some of these mega locations, maybe some of the downsides are sometimes they just feel like a warehouse, like a warehouse full of games. The downside can be the vibe. It's hard to cultivate like a good environment to play pinball in when you are trying to do it at that scale. And that's true of basically anything that you're scaling up way past its usual size. Right. It's like, it's hard to build, you know, like you can build a lot of like 2,500 square foot houses that look good. If you try to build a 10,000 square foot house, it ends up looking like shit because houses aren't meant to be that big. It's weird. It's hard to make something cozy. It's, it's, it's easy to make a cool little cat neighborhood cafe. It's different when you have to make a giant mess hall to feed, you know, 10,000 Marines or something and some places put a lot of effort into cultivating the vibe even though they are a mega location some places it's just a big warehouse full of awesome games and that can i mean that's still a blast we're in a pinball but they definitely don't feel like a little spot and we obviously love little spots we shout out a lot of little spots on this show constantly on our operator series i like to focus on those yes because those are who i feel akin to those are the places i like to play at because i as much as i love pinball and i love playing pinball I really like going to a cool spot and a vibe And I think pinball can fit anywhere I don think it needs to be in these warehouses i don think it needs to be only in shows it doesn need to be in a rich guy house or basement like you can experience pinball at a cool local bar or brewery or cafe or anywhere and have a good time and usually you can find places that have cool vibes that also have pinball which i think just enhances the vibe yeah but yeah we should go into the list of these i think What we really want to start with is we want to talk about a trip that Alex and I did where we traveled specifically across the country, and we went to two of these locations, the first one being Pastimes in Girard, Ohio. They have 393 pinball machines plus a bunch of other video games and various old – Yeah, some really cool retro arcade shit. Like mechanical light gun games. Yep, they had that old Sega, the Sega electromechanical shootout game and everything. They got some cool stuff. Very cool stuff. It's open four days a week, every week, and it costs you $20 for all-day free play access. It's currently the largest, and in my mind, this is a personal opinion, the most impressive single location I've ever been to. It's got an insanely rare collection of European solid state import games that has an unrivaled collection of Zacharias and Sonics and all of the shit that you see pictures of online. Inders. Oh my god, I would love to play that. You go to Pastimes and there's a row of probably like 60. Yeah, it's crazy, dude. Import games are probably more than that. It's crazy. Like just the lineup of import games alone would be worth traveling to play because there's nowhere else to play those. I think the reason that Pastimes specifically, I mean, why we wanted to go out there is because of their focus on electromechanical games, specifically just like the golden era of Gottliebs. Yeah. It's unmatched. We're saying this with bias. We haven't been to all these locations. We'll do it some more, but... We'll be honest about the locations we've been to. We're going to start with the locations we've been to first so we could speak from experience. We went to Past Times. We made a whole trip out there. We spent two full days out there. So like a five-hour day and a six-hour day, right? Like back to back. More than that, yeah. Or maybe even more than that. Yeah. Truly is so massively impressive that I can't even really put into words. But if you're listening to this podcast, you need to go. This is absolutely top tier level for whatever era of pinball you're into. We will talk about other locations that and the differences, but their EMs and the way the EMs played. yeah they had their there's dialed yep like absolutely dialed and those solid state european stuff that they had that i didn't even know existed i've been in the hobby a long time i'm a fucking nerd about pinball history i was seeing games i was like what the hell is this like and it's crazy and you get to play them those games are so rare like collectors that have them don't let people play them like the fact that you could just go in there pay 20 bucks and then just beat on these games is crazy it's a huge testament to the techs they have working there i think mike hale is the lead tech or what lead tech and like the work that they've put into those games and getting that lineup running as well as it all does has to be insane it's insane rob burke the guy that puts on pinball expo this is a good chance to say this is the 40th anniversary of pinball expo rob is the original organizer of the show he's still running the show this is his baby he's been collecting pens a long time this is his arcade location and it's been open about a year now they just celebrated their one year anniversary it's a good time to tell everyone if you're gonna be in chicago at expo this year myself and rodsey will be there so come say hi water boys staying at home yeah so he won't be there but rodsey my business partner and i will be there so come say hi but for everyone else like past times yeah if you can make it out to uh pittsburgh or we flew into um we flew in and out of cleveland cleveland yeah yeah but it it's i want to go again right now we're going to do that trip every year i think at least hopefully it is absolutely worth it absolutely incredible yeah do we want to speak on uh the other place we visited out there or should we talk about next level i think let's talk about next level because this is the one that is closest to us he said we visited by far the most uh i think i've been to the pinball hall fame more than I've been to Next Level. Oh, wow. But it's because of how long I've been in the hobby. That makes sense. Next Level is out in Hillsborough, Oregon. People will be like, it's Portland. It's like a suburb of a Portland suburb. So it's like Beaverton and then Hillsborough. So it's like two suburbs away. It takes me about an hour usually to get out there, but I live in a different suburb of Portland on the other side. But yeah, totally accessible. If you're visiting the Portland area, you should absolutely make a trek out there. They have 308 pinball machines, plus another 300 or so video games. They're open four days a week, $22 for all-day free play access, and they also have a shitload of toys, comic books, Pokemon cards, lunch boxes, and all sorts of, like, pop culture ephemera all over the walls. Uh-huh. And it's famously, if you're listening to this podcast, you already know what this place is. We mention them on the podcast a lot, but you also, if you're on Pinside or if you're on the Pinball subreddit, You'll see it get brought up all the time. People go there and they're like, this is the most amazing location I've ever been to. They've won Twippy for best pinball location in the world for like four years and counting. They got one of the best looking techs in the business, Charles, out there. He's going to love hearing that. He does. I mean, him and the rest of the guys working on those games keep things absolutely dialed. Yeah. It's a very, very impressively well-maintained collection of games. They definitely, they don't have any EMs there, which we give them shit for sometimes, but it's, like I said, we take it for granted. They, like I alluded to earlier, it's a focused mainly on DMD games and up. They do have a constantly growing collection of earlier solid states, which is awesome to see with the most recent expansion. They've been able to get even more out on the floor. Yeah, they just expanded again. So if you've been a few years ago, they, they just expanded and added like. They're expanding like every six months. It feels like they added like 50 pins and more video games. But they what I really like about it is as it's gone on, they've added more and more solid state games and they've gotten a little bit older. They still don't have EMS. This is one of those places that's labeled a pinball museum. I don't think it's a pinball museum. It is an arcade. One hundred percent the world's craziest arcade like it is the most impressive arcade. Yes. I don't think it's a museum. They have note cards and whatever. This has to be like a city zoning thing with the city of Hillsborough or something. That's what I would expect. It's not laid out like a museum. It looks like an arcade. It does not have the atmosphere of a museum. It's an arcade. It's very much, it feels like when you've seen it, it's got all the underglow on the games. It's got the arcade carpet. It kind of has that like 90s mall arcade look to it, which is why it photographs well and everyone loves sharing the photos everywhere. Just on steroids. It's like it is massive. It gets bigger. You get lost in there. And I think they get voted the best pinball spot every year. You know, they also campaign pretty heavily for it. Like you walk in the door and they shove it down your throat and they'll send you emails about it to vote for them and stuff. But that's all fine and good. This place, even if they didn't do that, they would get voted the best pinball spot in the world, I think, every year. It's incredible. And this is going to be the spot that if you're into modern pins, if you're into games, if you're really only excited about games that have ramps, like multi-balls, modes, if you're excited about like, oh, am I going to get to play Oktoberfest or any of these weird American games or all the spooky games or every Jersey Jack game, including Pirates of the Caribbean or all the Stern LEs with toppers. Yeah, if you want to see all of the fancy new shit, Next Level gets it as soon as anybody on the West Coast gets it, which is sick. If you're a nerd like me that likes new stuff, it's another thing we take for granted. It's every time, like, Berrio's BBQ comes out, I can just – You can play it there. Yep. I don't have to go to a show and hunt it down. It's like, why would I wait? It's kind of ruined the appeal of shows to me in some ways. Yeah, you can play Queen. You can play Alien. You can – they always have – I don't think they have Queen or Alien, Alan. They will. or at some point i mean that's the thing though is they have 300 games like what they don't have doesn't matter because like every single sega pin made the american sega pins if you want to play every dmd bally williams every single like dmd gotlieb it's it's an insane collection yeah it's absolutely insane live up to the name it lives up to the hype i would say you need to travel for this too we said this about past times we had to travel luckily we live in this area so we don't have to travel to the next level. Like we can just go. Yeah. It absolutely warrants a trip. 100%. Like these two places, the first two that we start with, I think the first four of these places that we're going to talk about, I've been to, and I think absolutely are worth traveling to. Yeah. The next one we're going to cover is Wizards World. The name has kind of changed. I can't remember what it specifically is, but if you search Wizards World, it still pops up. It's in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Sometimes it's called Fort Wayne Pinball. That's what it's called. Yeah. Fort Wayne pinball, but the merch still says Wizards World. They still have wizards and stuff like outside. There's like a scarecrow wizard. This is another place that Alan and I hit up when we flew in Cleveland after we had done Pastimes. We were both a little worried that leaving Pastimes, we thought nothing could compare. We thought pinball was ruined forever and we would never enjoy it again outside of the walls of Pastimes. We were immediately blown away. Wizards World is fucking awesome. So sick. It's so rad. And it's one of those things, it's this little low ceiling building, games absolutely jammed in there. Jam packed, dude. Like packed the fuck in that building. Pinball Hoarder's Garage, where it's like every spare piece of square footage is utilized to put another fucking awesome game in. And the games were absolutely dialed. That was the one that set it more apart than, I've never been to a location like that where every solid state I went up to was just fucking fast and mean. and I didn't have a single gripe about setup on in the solid states. It was like absolutely perfect. The setup, you can tell. I always tell this to people. I think it's very interesting when you go to pinball locations because when you go to pinball locations, I always feel like I can immediately tell. No matter what they have on the floor, I can tell what the owners or what the operators of that space, what their true love is. And when you go into Wizard's World, you can tell that they love early solid state games like they had some awesome bally's some williams and then they had a bunch of stern electronics and they all had like new playfields new pop bumper caps like like new plastics like absolutely gorgeous stern electronics games and they fucking ripped they ripped and the thing that they did is that they set up alex says there's nothing to complain about this up they set those things up hard as fuck dude yeah people would complain people would definitely complain do not i loved it we i mean how much money did you and i alone put in flight 2000 we put in i probably put 15 bucks in a flight to yeah just in like a couple hours i just was obsessed we were obsessed because we were on the we were trying to start the multiball and how many times we got so fucking close dude it's funny because this is one of the only locations it's the only one on this list i've been to that's a big spot with it being on coin drop and it's interesting to see how much money you can burn through when you're playing pinball for hours like that oh yeah we obviously gravitate towards harder games shorter playing games but we also played a lot of easy games there and we were also i know you've mentioned it in the past like we were playing well like yeah we were setting good scores i was set i set three gcs while i was there and it's like whenever people complain about entry fee and how all they could get their money no you fucking can't yeah yeah no like we went through so much more than twenty dollars over the course of six hours or whatever it was common we also were there that's the thing about these mega locations if you're traveling like you it's a destination you're there to play yeah when we're talking about a hundred games you know how hard you can't even play even if you're there for six hours you can't play a hundred games one time yeah that's the big thing about these mega locations i tried at past times i did my i did my fucking best to play every game I hadn't played before, and it was exhausting. I gave up on day two. What was good about it, because these places are overwhelming. When you go into this place and you live in a different place that doesn't have a lot of pinball, what happens is you're like, oh my God, they have all these games. They have my favorite game. They have maybe the nicest version of my favorite game I've ever seen, and you might be tempted to go play it. But really, what you should be doing is play all the games you don't get to play. Yeah. That you never get to play, that you've always wanted to play. Anytime you walk up to a game, you're like, what the hell is this? play that game like that's what you should be doing at these locations and past times was great because they had i don't know maybe like a hundred or so were like dmds up to kind of moderns that i was like oh i played all these i don't even need to play them so i'm like taking a hundred out of that 400 machines that they have and i'm like don't need to worry about that but then it became like oh my god they had so many rare fucking games that i've never seen anywhere else i mean they have the the rarest collection of games yeah but wizard's world has like the nicest versions of solid state games outside of we will shout out our favorite spot to play these solid states up in seattle the icebox they have like a little and germane that that runs those games they're incredible like it's like that's what it was like at wizard's world it was like it was like playing germane solid states but there's more of them in this big location we were in the middle of you know northern indiana yeah and it was it was awesome dude i mean so much fun wizard's world was sick nominal spot absolutely would love to go back we'll be going back as soon as i can yeah 100 the next one on the list i don't think alex has been to but i've been to i know rodsey's been to rodsey was like if you're driving through because i did a road trip back down to california for a buddy's wedding and on the way back my rodsey was like you absolutely have to go to pacific pinball museum in alameda they have 103 machines but they've got like a whole fucking warehouse and it's a whole thing they can't find they've yet to find the building that can house more of it and it's a lot of city legislation shit and all that kind of stuff but it's again 22 all day free play access it's open six days a week and of all the places i've been to they take the museum of pinball museum the most serious this actually feels like a museum you can play all the games but like you walk in and it starts with like baffle ball and it starts with like those kind of bagatelle like pull the plunger games without flippers and then it moves to wood rails with flippers and it tells you like humpty dumpty this is the first game with flippers and they'll go through and be like this is why this is interesting they have different rooms where it's like here's pointy people art and here's the art of Christian Marche and they'll show you like all these games that he did or here's the games of like ted zale and like why his games are interesting and they'll have like a room where they have like pieces of pinball machines like hanging on strings and wires so you can grab a pop bumper and like squeeze it and see how it moves and just stuff like that they commissioned or made you know the first now more people have done it but they they made like ems that were made out like lucite cabinets so you can see the inner workings of the games while you played them and they do stuff like that like they take the exhibit all that stuff is very taken very seriously and shown a lot of care and as somebody that loves the history of pinball like i love that place and they have great ems and the games play great they have lots of volunteers that do a fucking excellent job and i wish i lived closer i wish i could go more often I love the Pacific Pinball Museum. This is absolutely, again, one of the best places in the whole world to play pinball. It's a place that I definitely want to go to. I never find myself in California, but at some point I'm going to have to kind of make a trip down. It's worth a trip just to do that. And there's other great places in the Bay to play. So, again, it's just like one of those things where you go there, you get drawn in by the mega location, and then you play at all the cool little bars and cool little spots around there. I think that's the biggest appeal of these to me is it's a good basis for a pinball centric vacation or destination. And then you can go hit like it's an excuse to check out all the shit around it. Yeah. That's the fun part of it, I guess, is that you go for the big thing and then you stay for the little stuff. Yeah. You find the little gems. The next one on the list is this the last the last on this list that we've been to or I've been to. And it's definitely going to be the most contentious. And that is the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas. pinball hall of fame they've got 350 ish games who knows how many are working that day alan they're open every day it's moved locations a couple times right now it's right on the strip in the giant building that says pinball on the front what do you think about it they got some of the rarest games too they got the only pinball circus python's game that was a prototype two were made this is the only one that's in public playable they got it going nuts which is a crazy game that was a time-based game um then they have the firepower prototype where Steve Ritchie had the drops in there when he was first building that game got switched out to stand-ups the rough part about the pinball hall of fame is that all three of those games you named were powered off the last time I was there. And that's what happens with that place because it gets a ton of traffic and people travel to Vegas and they swing in and they want to play one thing specifically and that one thing will be broken. And then they'll just write off the whole place as just unredeemable garbage. And in reality, it's not garbage. It's not the best location ever. It leans a lot more towards the good side than the bad, in my opinion. It's just a high traffic location. It's all on coin play. There's no entry fee. That's the thing. So it's not like they're stealing your money. They're stealing your money. And he operates Tim who runs the place. He operates it and gives all the proceeds charity. So he catches a lot of flack for that because like, just hire more techs, treat it like a business, this and that. And that's not his thing. It's never been his thing. He's always wanted to do it. He used to be an old school operator in the seventies in Michigan. He moved out to Vegas. He brought all these machines. He doesn't have to do this like i said when i first got into pinball this was one of the only spots he was in a different location it was a little bit smaller he was also younger and the machines were more well maintained back then yep than they are now there is criticism that's real about going out there but i also feel like i defend this place a lot because i fell in love with pinball there and going there and my mother-in-law lives in Vegas, so I would visit Vegas a lot. I don't gamble. I hate Las Vegas. And it always gave me like a reprieve. It's like, man, I could just go play hours and hours and hours of pinball. I could play. That's where I fell in love with EMs. I feel like his EMs always play a lot better than his solid state or his modern machines do. Again, it ends up becoming like you can tell what people care about, like I said. And Tim, just like Joshua Clay, who we talked about with the VFW Hall. Those guys know each other. Those guys have contributed so much to the hobby. They both gave seminars at pinball expos. They both wrote guides on fixing and restoring pinball machines when the internet was early, when it was young, when parts weren't available, pinball had died. They were helping people get their games online. Whether you know it or not, you've learned or benefited from their knowledge of fixing games through the grapevine. So when I find people shitting on the place or shitting on him, it strikes a chord that it upsets me because I just think you're ignorant of like the history of pinball. And that's not to say that there aren't considerable gripes about the current version of it, but the way people gleefully shit on it and think that they could do a better job upsets me because what they're doing, even the other places we talked about, wizards world pacific pinball museum next level pastimes those places are not on the las vegas strip that's the biggest thing i the amount of traffic that place gets in the amount of just like shit that those games have to deal with is a big part of it i again i i was kind of playing i have to play the negative role here because i know you love the place and otherwise neither of us would speak any ill of it yeah we didn't want to come across too glowing but the pinball hall of fame similarly for me the first time I visited it was off the strip it was at its previous location and it's basically it was the first time I ever played an EM and all I did was play EMs I sat there for I can't remember how long I was allowed to stay there with like three hours or whatever and just played like the EMs because I was I'd never seen it before I immediately fell in love and it was just kind of like oh my god this like it was so great because there was nowhere else that I had been there were no other locations around me in the midwest that dared to put an electromechanical came out on location and Tim had like hundreds of them and they played great and a lot of those EMs still do play great at the new location every time I go there I've been a couple times since it's been on the strip and every time I've been there again you might find stuff turned off that you wanted to play but I guarantee you'll find good games that you'll like to play that are still powered on and it's like even if I go and I just want to play Spanish Eyes or I just want to go play you know Drop a Card or what whatever random EM that I like want to play that day it's worth going mean just for that experience and it's realist things i don't know i think it's unfortunate because there's a lot of people out there a lot of pinball players you might be one of you listening you don't give a shit about ems you don't want to play ems you look at all those games it's like games that aren't fun to you yeah i hope that as you're in the hobby longer you will gravitate backwards like that's i that's what i did that's what alex did i don't expect people to immediately get into pinball through godzilla or ghostbusters or Stranger Things and then jump way back and think that Drop a Card is super fun or North Star or Big Casino or Grand Prix or something. I don't expect that. But there will come a time if you're in it long enough and you play the right one at the right time and it'll just unlock it in your head. And he always put those out. I respect what he does. I respect the money he gives to charity. I respect that he doesn't need to be doing this. I hope that he gets more volunteers and that he can bring it back to its former glory because the people that see it now, it's easy to dump on it. Now, I'm not going to argue. Some of the criticisms are valid, but I will say that I've interacted with him before. He is not the jerk that I hear stories about. I've never been in there. And there are always kids in there where he's throwing a child out by their ear. I know he hates kit. Here's the thing. I own a promo location. Sometimes kids are the fucking worst and it's not the kids. it's the parents. Parents will let their kids run around screaming and hollering and whatever, and they won't say anything. Tim doesn't put up with that. So you know what I mean? Like, it is what it is. Like, and if you have young kids, you want to take them somewhere, and you don't want them yelled at by Tim, then don't go to the Hall of Fame, right? You're going to hear a lot about it. I wanted to give, we had to give a measured take on it, because I'm not going to ignore people's gripes about it, but I love the Hall of Fame. My mother-in-law lives in Vegas. Every time I'm in Vegas, I'm going to go. So I hope to see some of y'all there in the future. We could play some dollar games on Spanish eyes. Okay. That wraps up all the locations we've been to, but we do want to talk about all the big locations that we came across in our search. The first one on this- Future visits, really. It's like future places of like, hmm, what if we go visit these spots? Yeah. If you haven't heard of these and they're in your neck of the woods, absolutely make a point to get to them if you've never heard of them and you're like want an excuse to travel somewhere check them out we're going to just kind of give you our best understanding from what we've seen on the internet but please take everything we're saying from here on out with a grain of salt because we might have completely wrong information we're basing this off of like pin side maps the location websites etc so that's just google images that's my disclaimer if i say something don't take it the wrong way yeah the first one we want to talk about though is pinball perfection in Westview, Pennsylvania. Just outside of Pittsburgh. Has the fucking sickest website. Dude, it's so good. It's tagged in here 1998 and they haven't touched it since 1998. It's got news about like Stern Harley as if it's an upcoming game. It's got, it's insane. It's got a Godzilla section and it's talking about the Sega Godzilla. It's incredible, man. This website alone is worth going to. Pinballperfection.com. Yeah, it's got all these animated GIFs. It looks like an old GeoCities Angel Fire website from the old web. It's fucking awesome. Yeah, it's awesome. It's using Comic Sans, and it's not doing it as a joke. Yeah, it's awesome. The website's fucking rad. The website's worth going to. That's why I'm just like, holy shit, we need to talk about the website. The place also appears very much worth going to if you can accommodate their odd hours, which are noon to 5 p.m., like five days a week. It's $12 free play, but they have 300 and- Per hour. Oh. It's per hour free play. So it's $12 per hour. Whoa. Yeah, yeah. Oddball. Okay. Yeah. Well, they have 350 games, so it's probably $12 well spent. Yeah. Even if you're only there for an hour, absolutely well spent. It seems kind of, I don't know what the actual- It's been like a weird kind of- Industrial little- Building. Yeah. This is what we talk about. It's like you get into these big locations and sometimes they're just kind of like warehouses and stuff. Yeah. And it makes- You're going there for the pinball machines. Yep. This is definitely one that I think you're going there for the pinball machines. 100%. And I mean, when they got $350, that ain't a bad reason to go. Also nearby in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania is Pinball PA. They have 184 pinball machines plus a ton of other like vintage video games. They're open six days a week. They're free play, but they have even weirder kind of like pricing splits because they'll give you like discounts for like families and groups. But just to keep it simple, single player price is $25 for two hours or $40 for the whole day. So it's a little more expensive, but they seem to have a lot of games and video games as well. Yeah, jumping kind of all over the map. But the next one is Atomic Pinball in Wood River, Illinois. They've got 120-ish games. They're open three days a week. It's $10 per hour, $20 for free play. All day. These places in the – yeah, the places in the Midwest seem to really like the weird hour or whatever, which seems confusing to me. I wonder how they police that. As a free play location, it's like I don't want to do hourly because I don't want to be like, you've been here for an hour. Like, get out of here. We've got other shit to go on. You know what I mean? It seems very much like a trust Ryan Policky. You'd have to just be like – Well, I'd like to hear from them. If you or anyone you know lives near or works at any of these places, like, send us an email, WedgetInfo at gmail.com. Love to hear about how you make it all work. Yeah. Atomic Pinball, they're doing more hours. They're upgrading space. Yeah, this is actually just outside of St. Louis. Like, it's in Illinois, but it's a suburb of St. Louis. Okay. That makes sense. The next one is the Silver Ball Museum, Ashbury Park, New Jersey. for the pin side map they got 120 pins open seven days a week which i think is awesome hourly rates or 25 all day they're heavy on ems again speaking my fucking language yep wide variety airy ceiling string lights seems like a cool like cool vibey kind of spot for mega location seemed very cool to me i liked how that place looked it's just one of those ones that's like immediately it's like okay i like this they're clearly putting the effort in it's heavy on the ems like alan mentioned that's definitely up our alley it's one of those spots that it's like i'd love to get out there i've never been to jersey i'd love an excuse to get to the east coast someday i'm gonna have to yeah we're gonna have to next one game galaxy arcade massive place right outside of nashville or at least it looks right outside of nashville maybe it's longer if you live there you can crack it might take three hours with traffic or whatever but yeah 173 pins which is a shit ton but they have over 400 games total including lots of kind of like modern or 90s and 2000s arcade stuff that i'm very into it's 20 entry fee it's open seven days a week i think this is a fairly modern location and i've heard from someone that's not into pinball at all that it's cool awesome that always bodes well for it cool but yeah that's definitely you know there's some cool spots in tennessee that i could do a whole trip to just tennessee it's fun with these ones where it's like nashville's a town that a lot of people just find themselves go to anyway vacation yeah so it's like that's why i think it's fun to shout out these places because it's like hey if you're going to nashville because your you know wife likes dumb country music or something he shots fired damn no if you're going to nashville for some very fun reason maybe you can have another day of fun at game galaxy arcade it's the other one the other one made news recently it was on the forums but the pinball Palace in Brunswick, Georgia. They have 184 games. They have hourly rates, 12 an hour, 18 for two. Yeah, they love these complicated bases. Or 30 for all day. They're open seven days a week. They got kind of an eclectic lineup but they got lots of boutique stuff Tons of boutique stuff on that place list like they have all i think of your like new boutique shit and they got an atari superman which you know really see richie game yeah he really speaks highly of the owners i'm like hey if you can do it both ways more power to you that's fun to see they got a big bounce house for kids that alex included i guess yeah they have a bounce house they have like half of the space on the website is dedicated to the bounce house that's awesome so i like that i like it when you can get the kids to go scream and jump away from the pinball machines yeah give them something else to do if the bounce house doesn't give it away it's a very family friendly vibe at pinball palace then uh we got the electromagnetic pinball museum pinball museum and restoration it seems like they do a decent amount of actual like restoration work out of the same location that's in hot tuck it rhode island seems like it's ten dollar entry which seems fucking cheap dude dude and it's closed mondays but 138 games very classic heavy yeah but still has modern stuff yeah they have a little bit of modern stuff it's definitely classic heavy you're definitely gonna get your 10 bucks like jesus dude 10 bucks is insane that's why i was like holy shit 10 entry it looks very lord It's another one that's kind of like games crammed in there. Tons of like personal decorations on the walls, just goofy shit going on. It looks very, very cool. I'd love to hear from someone that goes there. So many of these locations have snuck under our radar because they're on the East Coast. Yeah. It's just too far from us. And then I see them and I'm like, dude, this place looks really, really sick. How come people aren't talking about this? I don't know, man. Another one in Kentucky is Pinball Museum of Corbin in Corbin. and uh yeah they got 101 games so it's one of the lowest on our list because we have our filter set to 100 but that's that's still a lot they did that if they did that intentionally they want to get to 100 dude it's important like it's important i think it genuinely is seven days a week 18 for an all-day entry pass but if you want the ability to leave and come back it's 22 i love that i don't know why that should it's just very it's like they don't give you a wristband if you pay 18 you just get to walk in i assume oh and then yeah yeah four dollars gets you the wristband but it's very funny that's interesting good variety in the lineup 101 games kind of all over the place they got some ems they got a lot of stuff and they've got alan's favorite game of all time oh baby wipe out it's time to rip the crud if you find yourself in kentucky you go to pinball museum of corbin you get to play wipe out seems well worth it i'll meet you there the last one uh Last one on our list in North America is Tycoon Arcade, which is owned by a big board game distributor. And they've also got a large tabletop game store at the same location. It's kind of an odd location. I think it's very, very new. It's in Manchester, New Hampshire. Yeah, this just opened. Yep. And they're right over the cutoff to 102 games. I think it's Coindrop. Yeah, they're tokens. Very, very modern heavy. Like, they only have five pre-DMD games, I think. one of those is dungeons and dragons which i think was very appropriate for a game board store place to have and it's i'd prefer more variety but that's cool they've got all of the boutique stuff like yeah that's for you dude that's your shit if you want to play these games it's probably easier to fly to new hampshire than to go to a show and play them they've got a fucking they've got a honey factory who the fuck has a honey factory nobody yeah and they're looking to hire attack i noticed so if you're in the area you want to go fix some boutique games which sounds like hell to me yeah if you want to be on customer support with boutique manufacturers but if you're confident they're looking for attack okay anyway that's all of them in north america yeah now we're going into europe there's three very cool locations in europe and before we get to them i just want to say like when i was talking about like there's a lot of like kind of like warehousey vibes like even the pinball hall of fame if you've been there it's like it's like that like they sort of invented the big like vibeless warehouse thing aesthetic right like oh but there's a lot of games europe is different dude like the big mega locations in europe are all like swaggy like they're all fucking just like the drip that the euro locations have is sick and it's making me really want to do a euro trip doing this research is like the first one i saw is Budapest Flipper Museum in Budapest, Hungary. Oh, the other thing you got to know is in Europe, they call pinball Flipper. They don't call it pinball. It's like a French thing. The French start calling it Flipper, and the French, even though pinball is an American thing, they're like, no, we're going to call it Flipper, and you're just going to have to deal with it. The Budapest Flipper Museum, they got 100 machines. They're open six days a week. I saw various prices, but I think it's like 10 to 12 euros for free play, and it's located in like a underground kind of like cave or cellar like have you seen the pictures of it i've not heard of this one before it is so sick like you go underground that is like in like a like a cellar or like a cave like it's it's fucking cool man like oh man it's beautiful yeah bunker yeah you're in like a bunker dude it's so cool man european stuff dude like you have cobblestone streets above of your head and like leonard like whoa yeah buildings no it's cool man it's just it's way different oh shit they got a rocky yeah dude then the u.s stuff we have they and they got lots of rare games um lots of very interesting games yeah that's really sick and then the next one is the dutch pinball museum in rotterdam netherlands this one gets quite a bit of publicity i would say it's definitely one i've been well aware of for a long time yeah i guess i'm also dutch kind of yeah you are we also have listeners there so shout out anyone listening yeah i got some braxmas over there still yeah so there's a 124 games they're open three days a week 16 euros for two hours free play and this place also looks very sick it seems like a like a friendly crowd there the people that run it i don't know they they just it always seems like a good time it's one that has always looked fun and friendly to me for some reason that's how they come across just again they I know that they've had at least one wood rail or a couple wood rails. They have games from different eras. They also just, again, vibey, cool. They're in the Netherlands. Yeah, that place is way cooler than I remember. Like, just cool. The steps going down there and everything, it's a cool spot. Looks cool, man. Which is, like, what we said at the top. If there's anything that's kind of a bummer about some mega locations is that it could feel a little bit like kind of like vibeless and not comfortable. Yeah. And like these European ones, just from the pictures, we haven't been there yet. To be fair, these are on the smaller side of mega locations, which definitely opens up your options. 100, 124. 100-ish games is a lot different than 400, though. Sure. 400 has to go. Yeah, but there's only one that has 400. 400 has to go in a grocery store. A lot of those have 400. when you get the arcade games and shit in them. Yeah, well, I don't count those. Those are trash. They still have to go in the grocery store. No, they don't. Like, I will give you extra points if you have no video games in your spot. Okay, last one in Europe. Terra Technica? In Czechia, in the Czech Republic. Oh, okay. They got 142 machines. It's like an Americana pop culture museum, which I love seeing as an American. Like I love seeing like a different country like interpret our culture and like make a museum out of it. So they've got like an American diner and they serve like burgers and milkshakes and like the waitresses look like 50s diner waitresses. Like they've got like you have pay to get in and then it's also on coin drop. Pay admission and then you still pay to play the games. Yep. I think the admission is not that expensive. but they also have like what i saw is they have a full like full scale tim burton batmobile from the first batman movie that's rad like and they've got like stuff like that in there so it's like it's not just a pinball spot it's it's like an americana they got jukeboxes they've got old american cars and that's quite interesting that they have this many pinball machines on top of all this other shit yes and so like like you'd think like 20 pinball machines would make sense here like that's all they needed but it's like no it's still very much a pinball spot yeah it's crazy i mean you have 142 like you did not need that many no you did not so the last one we have is in japan well we actually have two in japan but once i added one's a cheater one it should have gone earlier the first one though that's very much a real open location and it's been there for quite a while is silver ball planet in osaka yeah 124 games they're on coin drop it's open seven days a week it's in i can't remember the actual name of it it's little america in osaka there's kind of like the american district or whatever and it's it's there it's pretty i mean that's a big spot for japan they obviously have big arcades though so it's not outlandish yeah i'm going back to japan this fall i'm really looking forward to going to osaka we kind of wanted to hit osaka anyway and i have a very very uh accommodating and nice wife megan who i bring up on the show often who let me she's an enabler let me schedule the entire trip around playing in their casual tournament on the last saturday of september this year so you happen to be going to japan and you happen to be yeah last september come come meet me there but yeah it's a rad place it also very much leans into like the america i mean it's in little america or whatever also we're learning japanese you were taking classes how do you how do you say i'm the water boy oh my god uh watashi water boy yeah nice that's good it's a cool place they're leaning into the americana side of things they got like vintage coke machines and stuff it looks rad i'm looking forward to it they also have they get all the new games which is cool because japan does not have a lot of pinball it's slowly growing but for a long time they very much were carrying the torch of pinball in japan and they would still buy like every new stern that came out which is pretty rad when you're like a country around the world and you're paying to import all yeah dude it ain't cheap pretty fucking rad yeah so it's just cool that they've been doing that and they also have like a decent lineup of classic games they got like stargazer they got some like cool yeah really nice so it's interesting i'm really looking forward to going there the other one i wanted to shout out even though it it does not fit in with everything else we've talked about but i just wanted to kind of give it some attention to because it's a limited hours location it just started opening this year and that's Heavenly Pinball in Hanyu City in Saitama, which is like the northwest, I don't know if you can even call it a suburb, it's like a whole other region of Tokyo, but it's kind of an outstretch of Tokyo. Hanyu City is way up in Saitama, and it was an enthusiast, pinball enthusiast, that just didn't think the location games. It's funny because when you read through the website and Google Translate, It's very politely saying that a lot of the pinball in location in Japan wasn't doing justice to what pinball should be. Right, like it wasn't well maintained. It wasn't maintained, and that would give a poor impression to people. And so he wanted to make well-maintained games accessible to the public, and they're really doing what they can to try to make it very friendly. They're teaching people how to play pinball because it's just not a thing that's been popular in Japan. They used to make games back in the 70s, and then they kind of moved away from it. And so it's cool to see these spots growing in Japan, popping up. They are open, yeah, one day a month just for general public. It's completely free admission. You can just show up and walk in. Damn. They give you free snacks and stuff. Wow. It's very funny. And they also hold IFPA tournaments there. There's a couple locations in Japan that do IFPA tournaments, but it is pretty notable. There's maybe only two or three locations in Japan that do that. It's just kind of cool to see these places growing. That place sounds sick. I just hope that in the future they could be open more often. I mean, that's what I'm hoping. It's a really odd location way out of the city, and it's, like, limited parking. Like, it's a very compromised location, but I'm really hoping with the efforts they're putting in to try to grow it, I would love to see it eventually move to a better location or just somehow make accommodations, figure out a local parking lot or whatever they can do. It would be really cool if that place could be open all the time because it's a very sick lineup, too. It's very classic heavy. So, it's a cool one. In the games, they are immaculate, fully restored stuff. That's awesome, man. Well, that's been this episode of what we're calling Mega Locations. Mega Locations. Why you would want to go visit them. We talked about some of our favorites that we've been to that are absolutely worth going and checking out. We talked about a lot more that we want to go visit. Yeah. I think there's always a draw to be like, man, there's always something else out there. because pinball, there's been, you know, thousands, maybe even 10,000 unique pinball machines that have been made over the last century or so. So, like, even us, like, we haven't played every game that's ever been made still. There's a lot left to play. And a lot of the times when you're going to get a chance to play them is at one of these mega locations. Yeah. So if you have anything near you, go visit it. Otherwise, start getting on your little Google box and start finding a way how to make a trip out to one of these locations. locations plan a trip around one it's a ton of fun like we keep talking about me and alan did it just recently we went out to cleveland and it was rad we would love to go back i'm hoping that we can do that every year we're gonna do that trip every year and then we're gonna have to try to go to some of these others also in between for everyone else go out and play some pinball that's what this is all about play some pinball location even if it's a mini location it's still fun even if it's like a tiny little pinball bar and you know northeast portland and they got like like 24 games of different eras. They got good food and drinks, and there's like weird alligator shit everywhere. You know, just go find your spot and go support them. For everyone else, we want to thank you for listening. Until next time, good luck. Don't suck. We'll be right back. We'll see you next time.