Jim Brown is the greatest college football player ever, and he played 64 years ago.

Very good question.
I would suggest to split up the "Top 100" not only between SS and EM but also between DMD plus maybe Electronics from 1985 to 1990 AND ALSO to create another list for Electronics before 1990 or 1985.
The DMD machines should have at least 50 ratings instead of 15 before they get into the list.
15 votes for the "older" machines should be OK.
The EM-List requires only 5 votings which seems a bit funny but on the other hand there are very few ratings anyway so it's difficult.

hmmm, I’ll guess you’ll get either many or few responses - theme matters, it has to be fun, pinside ranking is worthless, new games have much deeper rules and older games are too shallow, newer games have no humor and no magic, build quality, repairability....

or we can talk about Hendrix - nobody playing guitar for two years can touch him - but most of the folks in the pinball industry today have been doing it for much longer than two years.

I would like to see a secondary list for new releases that gets merged into the primary list after a 5 year wait.

great idea, but maybe less of a wait?

2 years?

It also depends on if we are looking at this as a "Hall of Fame" or a "Best 100 Machines" list.

Maybe Hall of Fame could be ALL machines, across all platforms (EM/early SS/DMD/modern)? And hall of fame machines must be released at least 5 years ago.

Top 100 can be more volatile and include new releases....but maybe some kind of mathematical formula which makes up for the fact that the older machines have so many more ratings?

Agree that longevity should factor in. And really the remakes should not be listed as separate games - they are basically identical in build, and certainly in rules.

Perhaps a gentle weighting based on the age of the game

Good points. How about different categories, so we compare apples to apples?

I'm no expert, but I'm thinking:

1. EM (is wood rail worth mentioning? I have no idea)
2. Early SS (1977-1985)
3. Late SS (sys 11 etc) 1986-1990
4. DMD (1991-1999)
5. Early Modern (2000-2012) - up until WoZ
6. Contemporary Modern (2013-present)

This is there already...goto custom and enter what you want?

So for me the true top 100 is 1979-2004 Bally Williams Stern Gottleib for example.

The top 100 as it sits is really the popular 100 I think.

Sure, I think that works if 2 years is long enough to get a decent amount of reviews and have the initial hype of the machine wear off.

Go to the top 100

Click on various tab

Click on list by decade.

https://pinside.com/pinball/top-100/various/decade

I made up a quick spreadsheet.

Removed games with less than 500 machines
Removed novelty machines
Removed machines with less than 15 ratings
Categorized Sega with Data East.
Only made the list with Bally, Capcom, Data East, Gottlieb, Stern, and Williams
I made it for fun.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kVwUSGx8CVXBxI2ceKUG32wr4EhavZTn/view?usp=sharing

Great work.

Ironic this came up (again) because I was just looking at it yesterday.....there's actually only one machine that doesn't have multiple releases, over 1000 reviews at the top.....TZ (also the IPDB #1).....played it tonight, and it's easy to remember how well this machine stacks up to all the new shineys.

The top 100 is amusing to look at, but in no way reflects actually ranking, longevity and staying power of the game. Just my take, but a game should at least have several hundred votes to even make the list.

(also played my Spidey tonight, and completely blows my mind how fun some of these "not so shiney" games stack up to the latest)

It took how long to get GoT, GB, BM66 code finished? 2 years is not long enough.

You can create these kind of lists using the custom functions in the ranking, can’t you? What I’ve always thought would be nice is to be able to eliminate what I consider to be the bogus rankings - any rating above x or below y

I agree, that looks fantastic!

MODERATORS!! Go have a meeting, make this happen!

A lot of reviews reflect games with incomplete code. Especially ghostbusters has greatly improved but it is a long list. Batman 66 was barely a game. Even AC/DC has received polish that changed the game.

While we're at it I wouldn't mind seeing a change to the Bang/Buck list either. Maybe a separate list for every $1,250 or $1,500? Maybe only do three list with the highest being $4,500 if you do it by $1,500. I've seen several post with people asking what are the best machines for X amount of dollars and this just might make things a little easier and quicker.