#Home pinball machine how to#

Back then, if you wanted to create a new pinball game, the only way to do it was to “re-theme” an old machine by swapping out the artwork. None of this was possible as recently as the early 2000s. The ball did what the ball did, with that exact air pressure or that exact elasticity of metal.” This took him over two years and, he estimates, “between 1,000 and 1,500 hours.”īut he loved building his pinball machine for the same reason he loves pinball: It’s “physics as a game.” Unlike the digital worlds of video games, with pinball, “the one who says whether you won or lost is just reality,” says McQuaid, who lives in Franklin, N.H.

#Home pinball machine how to#

One of them is Ryan McQuaid, who co-hosts an expo panel called “How to Build a Pinball Machine in 4,761 Simple Steps.” McQuaid, 34 and bald and built like a linebacker, had to teach himself how to weld, how to code, how to 3D print. Kaiser made his game all by himself, as did the 11 other homebrewers at the expo, more or less. Stern’s biggest competitor, Jersey Jack, employs 125 people and has created six games - in its history. On a continuum, constructing a pinball machine is closer to building a SpaceX satellite than designing a website.įor perspective, at the Chicago factory of the world’s largest pinball company, Stern, it takes an army of 350 people to make just three titles per year. Pinball machines are built with roughly 3,500 parts and a quarter mile of wire. Why are people building pinball machines in 2021? The same reason people climb Kilimanjaro. They’re offline games in an online world. This year, the 37th annual expo (back after a one-year break from COVID) is celebrating a new category of games that are reinvigorating the pinball industry: homebrews.

on a late October weekend at the Pinball Expo, a three-day gathering of 4,000 pinball junkies, vendors, and collectors. Pinball is clearly bumping in Schaumburg, Ill.