I should have asked her, like, how did she even think of that? I don't know. Because I've never been before, and this was just something we discussed last year, but it must have just stuck in her craw. tonight on who wants to be a pin billionaire can don answer the pin billion dollar question and win a free godly pinball machine all right all right everyone settle down for one pin billion dollars in a 1980s Gottlieb pinball machine. We need to know, what is a craw? I need your answer. Final answer right now. What? A craw? What the heck is a craw? Can I phone a friend? Who are you going to call? My friend Matt in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Let's see if Matt can help you become a pin billionaire and win that Gottlieb machine. Ah, gosh. Sorry, I keep doing that. I just forget that I have these old tapes of who wants to be a pin billionaire. I'm just trying to conserve tape and reuse. My craw is getting pretty full. Anyways, this is episode eight. We're going to talk about Matt's recent trip to Pinfest. It's going to be a two-parter because there's a lot to discuss. The food, the smells, some new games, updated impressions on games you've already played, some disappointment, and if you stick around long enough, you might find out if Don ever got that Gottlieb machine. Anyways, here we go. Here's the right tape. Sorry about that. Here we go. Come on in. Welcome to the theater of magic. Welcome to the party zone. Welcome to my home. Welcome to the bash. So Pinfest. Yeah, so Pinfest is at the Allentown, Pennsylvania fairgrounds for no apparent reason. I think it's just the guy who started it however many years ago just lives in Allentown and started it there. But yeah, it's a – I don't know, just a big kind of open space convention center kind of thing that maybe there's cows in there sometimes. Sometimes maybe there's like giant pumpkins that they're, you know, it's, I have no idea. It didn't have barnyard smell. So that was nice. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of the first thing I thought of. Yeah. Like, like NC State. Like hay. Yeah. Like, yeah, it smelled fine other than, you know, the people. But next to it is the farmer's market, which is the biggest, a big draw, let's say. Gotcha. everybody always talks about how good the farmer's market is. And it's not like a farmer's market that I'm used to down here. It's a huge, old, indoor, long brick building. There's two aisles on either side, and there's stuff on the left and in the middle and on the right. It's just full of food and produce and stuff like that. But it's just a ton of restaurants and Amish people preparing food in front of you that you can eat minutes later. And it was all really good. So most of the time, I think Kayla just hung out at the farmer's market because it was great and they just had a ton of options and like legit food. Even if you're not into pinball, but you want to go with somebody, the farmer's market will keep you entertained from a food perspective. Kayla was pretty happy just to hang out in the farmer's market most of the time. That was a nice surprise. So Pinfest, the Pinfest event is in a separate area from the farmer's market. So it's like an indoor. Yeah, they're both indoor. They're just two separate buildings that are like kind of next to each other. Okay. How many rows? Was it like a big open space? Could John Youssi discernible rows of games or it was kind of – what's the size? I mean, I think they claim to have space for something like 250 or 300 games. Oh, wow. When you walk in, you can pay for like a single-day pass or like a weekend pass. It's a little cheaper. I don't remember the exact prices, but I think it was $20 a day per person or somewhere in that range. I mean, that's almost comparable to just like a regular arcade. Yeah, yeah. It's not that expensive. It's pretty cool. And then I think under a certain age, it's like $12 or something. And so you just get a wristband and you can go in and out as much as you want. Food and drinks and... So inside the Pinfest area, the convention center, whatever it's called, they have a lot of vendors too. But the food that they have there is much more just kind of like some basic hamburgers, hot dogs. Yeah. Kind of simple stuff. Yeah, almost like a food truck or something. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it was fine and it's not super expensive or anything. but um the better food is definitely like on the other short walk to the farmer's market what about beer i don't remember if they had beer there okay don't know don't remember i don't remember seeing people drinking in there i mean i would imagine it's probably better that way yeah but at the same time it's kind of enjoyable right sometimes yeah just to have like a beer or whatever but they had little like vendors that were selling cinnamon cashews or like flavored nuts was one of them. Then there was one selling like fancy licorice things. And, you know, there's just a variety of like little things like that if you want inside Pinfest. But yeah, the farmer's market is where it's at as far as the food goes. How many people can you guesstimate within like an hour? So Pinfest runs Friday and Saturday, not Sunday. And I guess Thursday is like set up day and everything. And then like the general public is Friday and Saturday. So it was actually the busiest Friday morning and afternoon. Really? More than Saturday? Yeah, weirdly. I thought Saturday would be busier, but it wasn't as busy as Friday. People out here can take Fridays off like that Maybe enough people are coming from out of town that you know it just they there anyway What the number Yeah I mean there thousands of people Thousands? It's a huge place. It can accommodate a ton of people. Yeah. And so, you know, they've got basically just this open area with rows and rows and rows of games. And those games are all, for the most part, ones that people have brought. so you get like a discount or free admission if you bring a game oh are they for sale uh optionally you can sell them if you want to or not i'd say you know at least half of them are probably for sale were were some of those people showing off their games or i mean not really so that brings up like games that are there didn't tend to be the best games in somebody's collection because if you have the option of getting free admission to bring a pinball machine, are you going to bring your best game or are you going to bring the one that you don't care if it gets messed up? B. Yeah. So the vast majority of the games that were brought by people were like borderline, you know, functional. Got it. Got it. And there was a lot of games that were just down for the count got it you know if a game went down or stopped working right the general etiquette is just like turn it off so that other people don't don't because you could walk past a row of machines and smell like burning coils and it's like oh this one of these games is like about to explode and so you know if you saw a game like that you should just turn it off yeah and then hopefully the owner of that game will see that their game is off at some point and fix it and then turn it back on, but that didn't always happen. So yeah, the quality of the games that people brought was pretty hit or miss, and also disproportionately old, like EM games, like 50s, 60s, 70s, games that are just lower value. Yeah, yeah. Which, by the way, I still kind of want one. Yeah. Like a super old one. Yeah, so if that's what you want to go there for, there's a ton of those. That's cool. Not really what I'm into. When you start to get into the games that I'm more interested in, which is like mid-80s and newer, there was a line for all of them. Really? All the time. It's not the kind of thing where you can just play a game as much as you want because there's going to be somebody behind you waiting to play it. So the general etiquette is like play a game. If there's somebody waiting behind you, once your game is over, get off the machine and the next person can play. One game? Yeah. So, I mean, you can get back in line. Yeah, yeah. Any of the good games that were playing well that were in that mid-80s and newer range had at least, like, on Friday, two people deep maybe waiting to play it. So you might have to wait a few minutes to play a game. It's not terrible, but I realized pretty quickly that if I wanted to play the games that I wanted to play, I was going to have to wait, which is fine. But it's not quite conducive to learning a game or figuring out if you really like a game or something. also because not all of them are in the best shape either. And now for a word from our sponsor. Now it's here. The excitement, the adventure of a new force at breakfast. We'll call them C-3PO's. New C-3PO cereal from Kellogg's. Twin rings, hazed together. For two crunches in every double O. A delicious part of this nutritious breakfast. Now you can experience the taste of Kellogg's C-3PO A crunchy new force at breakfast May the force be with you And now, back to the show Matt Yeah People are really into pinball Yeah There's that many people out there Yeah That want to make the trip and pay the prices And stand in line to play one game Yeah A lot of white people yes that's there was there was a little bit of a mix there was some there was a few not was it people that didn't look like me but what would you say like 80 20 uh 80 white people 20 everything else this is also like amish country so you you gotta keep in mind that just the people around there and in general i would say it was more like 95 white people oh the male female mix was pretty diverse. More diverse than I would have thought. The male-female? There was more women there than I would have expected. Oh, okay. It was closer to 50-50. You were thinking it was also going to be 80-20, 90-10. And the male-female. Yeah, Kayla remarked that she was surprised there was as many women there as there were. That's surprising to me. Yeah. I pictured a bunch of back-hairy white people, you know? Well, it's also very unsanitary as far as like... Oh, touching. Everybody's just playing these games back to back to back to back. And so Kayla got a little grossed out because she was like, I tried to play a few games, but it was just like... Greasy? Greasy. That's disgusting. That is the most nasty thing to me when I... Cheese fingers. Cheese fingers. I have a thing with smells. Yeah. And I don't know what happened one day. I think I was playing... For whatever reason, I wanted to smell my hands. And when I smelled my fingers, it was like a weird cheese smell. almost if you can eat doritos or you mean after you played pinball at an arcade after i played for a couple hours you know in like a weird auto way to remember if i wash my hands or something yeah and the smell okay you eat a bag of doritos you lick your fingers yeah wait like five minutes and smell that so that is what my hands smell like after i played and ever since that moment yeah I immediately washed my hands. So just to clarify, are you saying that the cheese finger smell originated from your own behavior or from you acquired the smell from the machines that you were playing? The collection of fingers on those machines were somehow on the plastic. And when I got there, it was transferred on to me. Yeah. And because, you know, I know what I smell like. Yeah. That was such a foreign, nasty cheese smell, man. It's the only thing. Like, wash your hands, people. Wash your hands. Don't play the games with pizza fingers and, you know what I'm saying? Like, I've seen that too, right? People eating pizza and then just, like, greasy and cheesy and they go touch the buttons and wash your hands They could definitely do a better job with just sanitation because the you know there wasn like hand sanitizer stations yeah maybe there was i don remember seeing any yeah nobody was like going down wiping down the machines or anything like that so and yeah i mean it's a bunch of sweaty dudes you know and there's oftentimes standing right behind you while you're playing and and so you know it's just it's just kind of the nature of it but it's also just you know you and i've both been to nam yeah like the big pro audio yeah convention that happens that's a much more high-end and and namthrax exists you know what's the pin fest namthrax yeah i don't know what the what's the name would be the name yeah yeah um we'll have to we'll have to think about and come back but i mean it's a much smaller scale event than that but it's also just like a much more there's there's no yeah frills there's no like it's not it's like you're in a big warehouse with a bunch of pinball here's a bunch of games A bunch of people, yeah. Complain. I mean, that's cool, too. It's cool, yeah. Some of the vendors are interesting. Like, anybody can rent a space and bring, like, a bunch of old parts. And, you know, if you want to find, like, an old board for a machine or something, there's a decent chance you'd be able to find it there. Just obscure parts and things like that. And then people are selling, like, random bar arcade type of, you know, signs. and I think you could buy a full stoplight somebody had for sale there. I was like, oh, that'd be cool for high speed. Yeah, super. If I had gone with a truck with the intention of bringing stuff back, I could have found a bunch of stuff to bring back if I wanted to. That would be a good use of Pinfest, just to find cool, weird, random stuff. Yeah, which, by the way, thanks for snagging me that shirt. Oh, yeah, no problem. Super cool. It had a bunch of Valley Williams from the early 90s, Some of my favorite games, the ones that I enjoyed playing. Pretty much what we recognize every character on the... Pastiche. Yeah, collage. I don't know. Some sort of mixture of all these different Williams characters. Mostly those are from 90s games on your shirt. Yeah, Brian Allen artwork. The art of Brian Allen, Flyland Designs. Super cool, yeah. The shirt is awesome. Maybe we should post a picture and people can check out Brian's art. If you like the shirt, buy it. It's cool. A cool booth. He had one of the cooler merch booths. If I saw someone with that shirt, I would definitely talk to them. Yeah, yeah. You know, if I hadn't seen it before. They also had alternate back glasses. And so you could buy a No Good Gophers alternate back glass that looked more... It had Bill Murray's head popping out. Yeah. And it had more of the Caddyshack types of things and stuff like that. Did you happen to see the alternate hook translator? No. It's pretty bad. No, no, yeah. Good, good, good. I'm aware, but I didn't see that one there. But yeah, there was tons of stuff like that. Like if you wanted pinball mods, accessories, like cool lighting kits, like pinball machine legs that lit up and were different colors and like all different color powder coats. And like Marco Specialties had a big booth. Oh, that's awesome. Like tons of parts. But unfortunately, like by the time I was going to go over there, they had already closed up. Oh, did you? So, yeah, towards the end of the day on Saturday, everybody just starts leaving. Leaving, yeah. And that's the other thing is like as far as the games go, you want to get there as early as you can Friday and play the games you want to play as early as you can because a lot of them are for sale. And if somebody sells one, I don't know that they're necessarily obligated to leave it there because games were just kind of disappearing. Well, if I buy it and I'm only there for one day. Right. You got to take it. Yeah. So some of the games that I wanted to play, like there was a Dodge Viper game. Yeah, yeah. I've wanted to play that one for a while. I've never seen that game anywhere. And there was a line on it. And so I was just like, I'll wait, I'll wait, I'll wait. And then it was gone. So I didn't get to play it. So yeah, definite tip for pinfests is play what you want to play. Also because they break. A lot of these games just break and then they don't get fixed. And so if you don't play it, you might miss out if you don't get it in early. And now for a word from our sponsor. GI Joe Falcon Glider and Cobra Viper Glider sold separately. Figures included from Hasbro. And now, back to the show. Was the general public cool? Were they nice, easy to get along with, polite, friendly? You know, somebody wasn't breathing down your neck. They were just hanging out with you while you're waiting for the game? Yeah. What was the vibe like? I would say so. You could tell some people were less thrilled about, like if you were waiting. The wait time. If you're waiting for somebody to finish playing, some people clearly weren't thrilled about having to give up the game. So lots of times you would go up to a game and there's two or three people playing a multiplayer game and you're just waiting for them to finish. That is a long game, yeah. And so there's a little bit of that. I don't know. Most of it was cool, though. And everybody, every single time, seemed to respect the... Now, there was one occasion where a guy just, like, played another game, even though there's, like, a long line of people behind him. And it kind of broke the etiquette of that. And that was a little irritating. Where is Pinfest Police? Yeah. Yeah, there's no, yeah, there's no police thing. Pinfest Police. And there's, as far as I know, there's no, like, stated rules or anything. Oh, but he knows. Yeah. He knows. He knew. He knew. And he played a very long game. Bash Pinball disapproves. Yeah, that was a little irritating. He knew. So Spooky Pinball was there. The spooky guys were there. Spooky guys. Spooky Luke and I can't remember the other guy's name. Spooky Luke. The guys in the spooky promo videos were present, and they had, I don't know, maybe three Texas Chainsaw Massacres and three Looney Tunes. Heck yeah. But they were the only manufacturer that was present. Got it. I didn't see Stern had a booth or anything. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Nor did Jersey Jack or some of the other ones were kind of represented by a distributor or something Got it A distributor was there and they would bring a bunch of new games kind of on someone's behalf. Got it. Spooky was the only one that actually showed up. Did you talk to them? No, I didn't. They seemed pretty busy. A lot of people were talking to them? Yeah. Did they seem, I don't know where you are with this now, but based on some of the stuff that happened with Halloween and some of the issues and stuff, are they getting hate on right now or have they worked through some of those problems with updating the code? And I noticed a lot of people online reporting things that were down and their machines. I'm not sure. I know when I was there that some of the new games went down. Oh, while they were there. Like one of the Texas Chainsaws was down for a while. So, yeah, some of the new games were not exactly 100% functional the whole time. It's got to be hard to try to make it out there as like a pinball manufacturer. So I'm going to go ahead and say mad props to Spooky because I played Halloween with my dad in Arizona at Starfighter. I kind of walked away wanting that game. Then I found out about some of the issues that the game was having. Then I found it looks just like Ultraman. But anyways, what I'm trying to say is that I think at its core, I really enjoyed that Halloween game and it kept me wanting more. I was curious. I wanted to advance the story and watch the movie and play it at night with the lights off. So I want to give him props for that because it takes a lot of work and it's hard to get there to that point. And then you have to bring those machines with you. So there was Jaws everywhere. Yeah. There was probably at least 10 Jaws there that you could play. Gross. There's just no reason to. Come on, dude. We don't need 10 Jaws. But I didn't see any Jaws go down. I didn't see Labyrinth go down. I didn't see Pulp Fiction go down. So it seemed like most of these new games were up and running pretty much the whole time. So there is quality. With people just playing them nonstop. Generally, there is quality still, right, in the newer games. Oh, so the other thing that's going on at Pinfest is there's a tournament. And so I was like, oh, maybe I'll do the tournament because there's like about 15 games that were just for the tournament. I did not because I realized that the entry fee was like $130 or something like that. Is it expensive? For the tournament? The way that it worked is you play 12 games and then just as qualifying, just pick 12 games and play them. And then your score is recorded. And then based on those scores that you get on those 12 games, that's your qualifying. Wow. So it's very low stakes, low pressure to qualify, but I think it was like the top 48 or 64 or something that would get into it. But then there was something about like if you're not IFPA ranked above 250 or something like that, then you like don't qualify either. So I was like, well, I don't think I'm IFPA ranked at all. So it just seemed like kind of pointless. And there were – It wasn't really like an open tournament then. It was definitely geared towards very skilled tournament players. And I recognized some of the people there too, just from other tournaments that I've watched online and stuff. So yeah, I didn't end up doing it because it just seemed like I was going to pay $130 to play 12 games that I've played before. I mean, I think the guy that won it last year was Raymond Davidson. He's the guy who coded Avengers, which is cool. He's a great player, tournament player. But there was no chance of me winning a prize. or anything like that. So I was like, I'm going to save my $130. What do you win? I think you win money. Pinfest champion? Yeah, there was various prizes and stuff and cash. Cash, cold hard cash. If you win one of those things, I guess you could say you're a professional pinball player. Yeah, I mean, lots of these tournaments, you win games too. You win a brand new game. I would play for my life for a game. I would play like I've never played before if there was a game on the line did John Youssi there was a local tournament recently where they were giving away a Gottlieb game it was valued at $2,000 I was like really? we need to give away a game as a part of our the Bash Pinball Podcast marketing hey guys we're giving away a machine follow us now undetermined which machine may be a Gottlieb game from the mid-70s. Oh, maybe. Probably will be a Gottlieb. And now, Pinball Deep Thoughts with Matt and Don. To win pinball, you must be one with the ball. Physics, patience, skill, self-reflection, all in one, one in all. It only takes one ball. Look close enough and you'll see you already are one with the ball. So that was part one of the Pinfest episode. We're going to be posting some Pinfest pics on our Instagram, which is at Bash Pinball. Feel free to head over there and check that out. Next week on part two, we're going to focus a little bit more on the games that Matt actually played while he was there. And we're going to debut a new segment called Matt's 10 second reviews. And also just for you. I'm going to look for that tape in case you wanted to know if Don ever got that godly machine. We'll see. We'll see. And don't you ever forget. You rule the universe. Leave this territory now. Return to your home. evacuate all personnel