Time to fess up.
I have a vice.
To be fair, I have multiple vices, but there’s one I just can’t resist. Whenever I have the opportunity to indulge in it, I do. I can’t help myself.
It’s pinball.
(Boo this man!)
Okay, yeah, that’s a pretty weak-sauce vice, but it’s mine. I’ve loved pinball ever since I was a kid. There’s a picture, probably long gone by now, of me in the lobby of a Shakey’s Pizza at the age of six or seven, wearing my Mork from Ork rainbow suspenders and playing Bally’s Flash Gordon pinball table.
When I ran my comic shop in the 1990s, there was a pizza joint across the street with a Guns ‘N’ Roses table up front that I’d play daily. The third ball played “Nightrain” and you could get a wicked multiball while the song was on.
Whenever I’m at an arcade, it’s a coin-flip whether I’m drawn to the light-gun shooters or the pinball tables first, but I always hit every single one. So yeah, I was kind of bummed when the tables started disappearing, and the arcades after them.
There have always been computer versions, like the one that used to be built into Windows, but they’re rarely the same. Pinball FX is a game where they’d design impossible effects-driven tables with 3D figures walking around on the playing field and licensed content, but it was just never going to scratch the same itch.
Until a bunch of hobbyists started digitizing actual pinball tables, and then it was like discovering crack cocaine. Early attempts were very limited due to the licensing involved, but eventually Williams partnered with Pinball FX and started releasing vintage tables in digital format. When I found out I could get Pin-Bot and Bride of Pin-Bot, even though I don’t get the wonderful tactile response, I was bitten hard. And so I’ve been collecting every remade digital table they release.
I mention it today just because they finally started producing the heavily-in-demand expensive-license tables, like the Star Trek TNG and Addams Family boards. I see a lot more coming, too, like the Judge Dredd table and the various Elvira ones. So even though there’s the winter sale coming up on Steam, seeing everything discounted for the Fall sale has caused me to open my wallet yet again.
(No Guns ‘N’ Roses as of yet. Music licensing has to be a bitch, but hope springs eternal.)