Pinball In Chicago

We arrived in Chicago at around 9pm.on a Wednesday night. We were tired from our all day travel so we grabbed an Italian Beef and took advantage of our comfortable bed. 

I had a plan to play a lot more pinball than I did but Chicago wasn't cooperating. I had hoped to play at Logan Arcade, Headquarters Beercade, and Replay Lincoln Park but none of those venues were open during the day.  I feel very fortunate to have places in Minneapolis with a nice selection of machines where I can play basically whenever I want to play. 

The pinball highlight for us here in Chicago was going to The Flip Museum open house and meeting William. 

An interactive device to show how score reels work in EM machines. 

William has a small museum at the moment and had an open house every Thursday night. We reached out beforehand to make sure we could attend and he said we were welcome to come and play for free. He mentioned he wants to gather feedback for the real location opening in April hopefully. We arrived with some beer to.share and had a great time. While we were there a few other groups came in to play. I got to play a few machines I had never played before. 

i had never played Teachers Pet.  It was really fun and Donna enjoyed it too. 

I managed to roll Derby Day by ball 4 and when you roll a.machine that scores like Derby Day, the score just stops. Pretty cool!

William shared some interesting pinball history with us. 

He showed us this Ballyhoo magazine, a humor magazine going back to the 30s, the 1930s. He asked us if we could see similarities with the Ballyhoo Pinball Machine...

Yea it's clearly a copy. The Ballyhoo Pinball Machine was released in 1932 and was popular enough to get Bally Games off and running. 

He also showed us fantasy works from Borris Vallejo. 

If you are a reader of science fiction, you might recognize his work. He has 131 book covers. He also has a few pinball machines but they weren't licensed and basically ripped off. 

I saw a few images in the book that looked very close to pinball machines I recognize. 

After a bit more learning, we did more playing. 

This is his first machine. He picked it up years ago for $1200 IIRC. 

Steve Richie's (a game and pinball designer) Hyperball!  It isn't Pinball and it isn't a video game but it's also kind of both of those things. It was designed to compete with Space Invaders and other video games hitting the arcades back in the day. 

Willliam was quick to repair machines that were malfunctioning. 

I'm really glad we got the opportunity to play with and talk to William. Before we left, we gave our input on what we think a successful place would include. We had a lot of common experiences so ideas flowed. We are looking forward to coming back when his permanent location with many more machines opens.