ARCADE EXPO 2019

It’s been two years since we were last at the Museum of Pinball in Banning for an Arcade Expo show. In that time there has been a number of changes to the building and the collection, but the essence of the show remains the same – an amazing collection of pinballs of all ages combined with an equally impressive range of video games, all available to play over the event’s three days.

The Museum of Pinball is located in semi-desert around 75 miles East of Los Angeles, at the foot of a mountainous landscape. It may be March, but there is still snow on the peaks and while the daytime temperatures might be warm in the sunshine, they drop away quickly once the sun drops behind the hills.

The Museum doesn’t open to the public daily, weekly, or even monthly. Instead, it hosts four major events each year – Arcade Pinvasion and INDISC Pinball Festival in January, Arcade Expo in March, and Pinball Madness in October.

Tickets for Arcade Expo could be pre-purchased online, or bought on the day from the ticket desk. A purchased entry got you a coloured wristband with which you could come and go as often as you wished.

Friday and Sunday entry cost $50 each for an adult, while Saturday is $65. Kids entry is priced at $15 per day, while a three-day adult pass is also available at $130 ($35 for kids). These are online prices. On the day prices are $5 higher.

The show began in the courtyard outside the Museum building where food vendors had set up. On Friday there were two stalls selling hot dogs, ice creams, burgers and other ‘street food’.

Food items purchase in the courtyard had to be paid for with tickets bought from a special stand. All food was priced in tickets, with each ticket costing $1.

With no food allowed inside the Museum, there is an outdoor seating area in front of the food stands. At night the area is warmed by living flame heaters.

There was a bar area inside the Museum with a serving window into the courtyard. Here, cash was used.

A little further down the hill from the Museum building we find a shooting gallery with electromechanical gun games along with a seating area where live music would be performed later in the day.

There was also a Funhouse facade which is presumably used for some of the other events held at the Museum.

Back up the hill, we return to the main entrance to the Museum.

On the wall is a large white space where visitors are invited to make their mark using the pens provided.

Beyond that is a display case showing some items found inside pinballs which arrive at the Museum, as well as the collection’s oldest exhibit.

As you enter the Museum you have two main choices – turn left for pinballs, or turn right for videos.

There is a third choice, and that is the Museum’s gift shop which has a selection on T-shirts, posters, patches, coasters, and other pinball and gaming items for sale.

Entering the pinball hall, you immediately appreciate the scale of the collection, with rows upon rows of games from all eras. For anyone experiencing this for the first time, this is often a jaw-dropping moment.

The newest machines are at the front of the hall, while the machines in each row are broadly determined by the manufacturer.

There is also a shorter row showcasing the latest (or sometimes, last) titles from other pinball manufacturers Dutch Pinball, American Pinball, Heighway Pinball, HomePin and Spooky Pinball.

The other newest titles are from Stern Pinball and they are found on the other side of the hall in the Stern zone.

Jersey Jack Pinball have their own dedicated area with three of their titles featured. Only Pirates of the Caribbean is not in this collection.

The machines were prepared for the show and kept running by a dedicated team of technicians who worked tirelessly throughout, doing running repairs to keep as many machines playable as possible.

The only vendor actually in the main pinball hall was Moto Glass who had a display of his game-themed etched drinking glasses.

The back part of the hall is where the older games reside. The Museum’s collection goes back to the age of the wedgehead but not as far as woodrail machines.

The EM area is filled with rows upon rows of machines.

At the entrance to the pinball hall is a side room featuring a long ball bowler. This was used by Marco Specialties this year to showcase the latest Stern Pinball machines.

On Saturday, artist Dirty Donny Gillies set up a stand in the Marco room to meet the public and exhibit (and sell) some of this artwork designs.

If playing pinball wasn’t enough, you could pop into the theatre room to hear seminars about the game from those working in the business and those who document its development.

In fact there was a packed schedule of talks taking place throughout the weekend, but the full list was only available to view if you were at the show, as the website only listed a few of them.

Riley Beres presented her history of pinball talk on Friday and Saturday.

On Friday, Mike Vinikour and Mark Guidarelli spoke about life ‘behind the scenes’ at Stern Pinball.

After describing their individual responsibilities at Stern Pinball, Mike and Mark talked about the many different job roles which go into making a pinball.

Rather than talk about the well-known designers and artists, they looked at the behind-the-scenes positions such as Mechanical Designer, the bill-of-materials manager, and the people responsible for the board mapping, cable design and manufacture, certification, building up the initial whitewoods and prototypes, the Hardware and Software Engineers, the game and production artists, and the IT, website and game manual designs.

There were several technical talks on how to fix pinballs, with a plethora of Pinball 101 and 102 talks alongside movie screenings of Pinball 101

Probably the most popular talk was by Museum of Pinball owner John Weeks who teamed up with Kenny Hardy to talk about how and why they created the Museum, why it is in Banning, where all the machines come from, and the way the events held there are organised.

The Museum of Pinball is also host to the Walter Day Trading Card collection, and the corridor to the seminars theatre are covered with framed sets of trading cards.

However, there is also a dedicated display room at the front of the pinball hall.

Of course, although it is called the Museum of Pinball, the event is Arcade Expo in recognition of the Museum’s huge video game collection which has a hall all to itself.

You can see every machine in the pinball hall, a look in the video hall and a tour of the Museum of Pinball complex for yourself in our exclusive Thirty-Two Minute Tour of Arcade Expo video below.

Saturday morning brought the swap meet at the side of the building.

It was a modest affair with around half-a-dozen sellers, but if they had something you’d been trying to find, it was invaluable.

There was also a Bumblebee-style Chevrolet Camaro from the Transformers movies parked in front of the video game hall, joining a DeLorean which had been at front since Friday.

Also at the front was the prize in the $1 raffle – a Williams Jubilee pinball

Also on Saturday, numerous new vendors had appeared on the raised patio area overlooking the live music stage. These were mostly selling pin badges, patches and other designer decorative wear.

The picture above is perhaps a little unfair as there was a much larger audience for the bands playing than you can see here, with many of them enjoying the music from the patio, and everyone in the courtyard and beyond also able to hear it.

There were also some video and pinball games on the patio for visitors to play at night – the ‘Starcade’.

We showed you the sign-in wall next to the Museum entrance earlier, but by Saturday morning there was little space left to make your mark.

At 11am on Saturday the qualifying for the main Spring Classics Pinball Tournament began, using machines located in the back-right corner of the pinball hall.

Entry to the tournament cost $15 which bought a single game on any six of the twelve machines available. There was unlimited qualifying until 5:30pm, with additional entries costing $2 per game or six games for $10.

The machines used were:

• Air Aces
• Aztec
• Dolly Parton
• Doodle Bug
• Dragonfist
• Eight Ball
• Free Fall
• Scorpion
• Tag Team
• Warlok
• Wyld Fire
• Wild Card

There were A and B divisions, and the top twenty players in each progressed to the play-offs. Prizes included gift vouchers for Captain’s Auctions and cash awards, with 100% of entry fees (minus IFPA charges) going into the prize pot.

In addition to the Spring Classics, a separate Belles N Chimes women’s tournament was run on Sunday morning at 11am.

At opening time of 11am on Sunday morning the number of visitors was lower than Saturday, but there was still a long line of visitors waiting to be one of the first to get in and have their choice of machines to play.

The sign-in wall was fully populated by Sunday morning, although that didn’t stop several kids trying to add more marks to the wall.

There were second showings of some seminars on Sunday, but all-new was the Belles N Chimes pinball tournament for women players.

Having spent three hours driving the 77 miles from LAX airport on Thursday evening, we opted to say our goodbyes and start the journey back to LA around 4pm, missing out the final of the Belles ‘N Chimes tournament.

The Museum of Pinball is a one-of-a-kind destination and a great venue to host a pinball or arcade show. If there’s any game you have been longing to play – either new or from your younger days – you will almost certainly find it here, and it hasn’t had to be packed up, transported, set-up again and perhaps not levelled properly.

Of course, with so many machines to prepare and maintain, keeping them all in top-notch condition is an near-impossible task despite having a large team of technicians. One suggestion would be to have an easy way to report any problems found – maybe a central desk – and to put numbers on each machine to make them easier to identify.

Although visitor numbers exceeded those of 2018, the huge pinball hall never seemed crowded or uncomfortable, and there were always plenty of free machines to play, even if getting your hands on the most popular titles might have involved a short wait.

Probably the biggest issue with shows held at the Museum relates to its remote location and the lack of any nearby accommodation.

Most major shows are tied to a large up-scale hotel, allowing visitors to return to their room for a break or to catch up with other family members at any time. Banning lacks any quality accommodation, pushing show visitors out towards Palm Springs and making it harder to dip in and out of the show.

Fortunately though, the location of the 18-acre plot allows the housing of an unprecedented collection of pinball and video games, and the ability to dedicate all the facilities to shows such as Arcade Expo.

If you’ve never been, you owe it to yourself to experience the jaw-dropping moment when you first see the massive collection in person. With the Museum only open to the public four times a year, Arcade Expo is an ideal opportunity to visit and play to your heart’s content.