For the Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show we generally have 400-425 games and the breakdown is usually about 175-200 pins, 200-225 video games, and 20-25 older style EM arcade games. I don't think anyone putting on one of the 3 or 4 big shows in America would think there is a contest between our shows, they are unique and different!

What makes the Northwest Show unique is 99% of our games are on freeplay the entire 3-day weekend--we don't have a bunch of games that you can't play or allow people to pull games off the floor until the show is over, it's a player's show. We also have tons of volunteer techs fixing games the entire show, 95% of the games on the floor will be on and working. I think while other shows have surpassed our number of pins in recent years, they don't usually have the killer volunteer tech team we have, you won't hear the complaints about half the games being pulled, turned off or broken by Sunday with our show, which you will hear about a few others. I would also put our seminar line up against any show in the nation, we also always have the top pinball designers, engineers and company owners at the Northwest show speaking and hanging out for the weekend, it's a lot of fun!

Here's Gary Flowers, Steve Ritchie and David Thiel from last year:

Well, if you don't have to move them all in a weekend, that's awesome. Of course keeping 1100 games all in good working order has to be hard. I think we had 425 games at the last Northwest Pinball & Arcade Show... hauling them all there and back to people's homes is quite a labor of love involving 100 volunteers, 60 people's collections, 5 large trucks and dozens more people individually transporting their own games.

I think Doug touched on the key to vending, you really need to have a large crowd of people to make it worth their while. For the Northwest Show, it's super easy to get local vendors, it's harder to get out of state vendors to drive or fly all the way here with their stock. But when they do, I think they are pretty happy they've come, we draw 3,000-4,000 people over the weekend and they buy a lot of stuff. Plus, for newer collectors, meeting a vendor and buying their products starts a relationship that can last for decades. It's kinda hard to put a price tag on those future sales, but I know when we have say an LED vendor at our show and they talk with a lot of people and sell their LEDs all weekend, they make a lot of loyal customers that will buy lots of their products online later over the years, talk up their products in forums as their favorite LED vendor, and bring a bunch of cash the next year to buy more of their product. That personal connection can be the reason why someone chooses to shop with one vendor over another.

On a side note, I really like it when people that help put on the various shows can talk openly about this stuff, share insights and info, and help each other out. It helps all our shows and is good for the collecting community.

Our venue is pretty awesome in that the loading dock where the trucks of games are loaded and unloaded is on the same level of the facility where the show is at, no elevators. We are also real big on having regional repair parties before the show to get most of the machines in good shape and have a fantastic team of techs on hand to fix games as they go down, the result is 99% of the games on the floor are running and at the end of the show, there aren't a lot of broken games for people to deal with. It took us many years to figure out all this stuff to make the show run a lot smoother.

Don't shows get a lot of requests for parts vendors? I thought one of the main reasons why people go to shows is to buy games and parts.

This is interesting to me because I'm positive most people that come to our show in the Northwest aren't coming to buy a machine. We get a lot of the general population, my feeling is most people come to play games in either the tournaments or in the freeplay section, which is most of the floor.