Yes that was our F-14 Tomcat in Freeplay. Got a call on my cell phone asking if it was for sale. I said I would meet you in front of the Concession stand by Freeplay to discuss. I said I had my Pintastic T shirt and blue sneakers. (Doesn’t everyone have there Pintastic shirts on?, so I threw in the Blue sneakers) I get to the concession area and there is Steve talking to another guy with Pintastic T and blue sneakers. I didn't make the connection yet until I overheard Steve said to the guy, “Let’s go look at your machine.” Then I was like, oh boy, I think its Steve looking for me! I jumped in and said “I think your looking for me”.

He wanted me to ship it to Chicago and I said I would handle it all on Monday. We parted ways and the next thing I know he texted me to come to the Automated Services booth. Jack and Mike D at Automated said they would handle the shipping to Chicago. Next thing I know the twins are called into action with their manual delivery from Freeplay booth (Video above).

Pintastic needs signatures from the buyer and seller on the back of the registration card so I have a nice autographed card for the memories. “To Mitch! Thanks a Million! Steve R.”

Really impressed with the AV staff and their capabilities along with top notch equipment. Nice job!

Thanks.

He does, right Dave?

I would also like more info on the game bringer raffle. So last November you conveniently changed the time and didn't tell anyone. I had brought 50k+ in games and you told me I won free shipping from Marco (not even a vendor).

Where is the list of winners? You guys promised some decent cash prizes, wondering who won them? I had 9 games I your free play area on Sunday morning, guess it's bad luck I didn't win anything...

What a whirlwind of a weekend. Just wanted to finally take a moment to thank everyone for coming out this weekend and playing in our tournament. Nearly 200 of you registered to play over Friday and Saturday. I also want to sincerely thank everyone who helped me run, setup and break this whole thing down throughout the entire week. Could not of done it without all of them. It took countless hours from all of them.

Congrats to all of our winners! In the Junior Divisions we had

1)Jason Zahler
2)Ashton Capone
3)Liam Bradley

For the main division

1)Jason Zahler
2)Levi Nayman
3)Raymond Davidson
4)Steven Bowden

We had some insanely great competition and close battles and comebacks. I hope everyone had a great time playing and if you have any feedback for the tournament please direct it towards me. We try our best to make a large fun event and strike a good balance of tournament play with show enjoyment. We hope to keep our tradition of never reusing a game in a tournament bank for 7 years running. See everyone in 2023

-Jim

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i dubbed it the bog of eternal stench. it was so bad I ended up using the exit closest to my room to walk to the event...

reference

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and that looks like Jack immediately behind Steve with the cell phone video rolling.

It's been like that for years now. It's just a money grab. Pretty sad!

You know I take great offense to this comment. I worked the tech crew for 2 days of the show. I assisted, and probably helped move most of the machines around in that room. We took GREAT CARE to carefully move the machines, in fact we spaced them out to give people more room, and make it so the machines wouldn't hit each other.

We also did board work, for FREE, got a bunch of machines that were DOA back up and running for the duration of the show.

Please let me know what machines were damaged in any way, as we took pride in our work.

When I brought machines to the show, the tech crew were very particular about caring for all of the machines. The general public is another story. Parents allowed children to have free reign showing little respect for other peoples property.

Re-reading this, I absolutely apologize for my tone here. The tech crew did, and always does, A PHENOMENAL JOB working on the games, for free, when things go wrong. Stellar work. Always. And with a smile. (and while I'm at it, your game played great in my book Eric).

I heard of a head a few early SS got dropped on the body which left massive dents in the rails when it was moved. Could have been that the head wasn't strapped down properly when it was set up. Could have been in the move. I heard a few other people complain about scuffs on their machines.

Could be that those issues were already there and people were just claiming it happened during the moves, but who knows.

Having brought a machine this year I think the tech crew did an amazing job. I know they had to do something to the machine at one point, but the only way I could tell anything was done to the machine at all was because I cleaned both sides of the playfield glass (I even gave my daughter a whole lecture while setting up on how I clean both sides of the glass so there are no smudgy finger prints on the back side of the glass). When I broke down the machine on Sunday there were a few sets of prints on the back side of the glass..... and that's it. just some finger prints. I think that's a total win. Great job guys!

For any of you "kids" that might be on Tik Tok here are a few videos I made of the show....

The adventures of bringing my Wizard to Pintastic: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRedUJNn/?k=1

Pintastic Thursday: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRJUW7qu/?k=1

Pintastic Friday: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRJUaSvf/?k=1

Pintastic Sunday: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRJU771V/?k=1

If you are not on Tik Tok I believe you can still just view these using the links above.

And you know the deal.... if you are on Tik Tok... like and follow and all that

There was absolutely an assumption made here. I think Tony could chime in but no heads were dropped, or folded down when the machines were moved. If there was damage to the rail, or head I can assure you tech crew was not involved. We used a pinmover to move the machines around, and we did it carefully.

Thanks, I actually went around in the morning, and cleaned the glass on a bunch of machines, however did not slide the glass out to clean the back side, as I was too afraid of having an oops on someone else's machine.

Please understand that we have processes in place to have repairs attended to. First is to scan the QRC code which you stated you did not want to do, got it. Second, when you walked up to the big yellow and blue station board there was a white board complete with marker for you to log a needed repair. The repair team gets hundreds of repair requests and someone walking up to a tech to get a repair done unless it is late night will probably get forgotten.

At home I use cotton inking gloves so I don’t leave fingerprints on the inside.

https://www.cartoonsupplies.com/content/gloves-animation-cel-inking-painting-now-3-sizes

The QR system worked great. The 3 games I reported got fixed quickly.

Got to say I am extremely aggravated with your damage comment as well " I heard " is different than I had seen. Tony, Eric, Paul, Chris, and I as well as all other tech team volunteers have well over 150 years of technical experience repairing and moving machines. Most of the crew are high OCD when it comes to being careful when working on or moving other people's pins. To our knowledge there was no damage to any machines caused by the tech team reported. If there had been such a report, myself, Tony, or Eric, would have done everything in our power to make it right including bringing it to my shop and doing the repairs myself. Your should really stick to your opinion in your review and stay away from what you heard. There was a machine that was damaged last show where the owner dropped the head on the side rails and damaged them. This show two individuals dropped the body to one of their machines and spring the cabinet. Please stick to facts and not what you heard.

I guess I'll let the owner of the game in question chime in. He's in the thread. He's the one who pointed it out to me. He has a better reputation in this thread than I do apparently. I'll let him chime in or message me about what happened and explain what I saw.

I'll amend my post to mention more what I saw.

Sorry my post came off like I was slamming the best tech crew at the best show with the best and most number of games on the floor running.

None of the heads get folded down when they are moved by the repair team. Always with lift tables or carts.

Weirdest thing I saw was dudes literally carrying pinball machines out the door during break down Saturday night. (Not pintastic crew or staff)

There were hand trucks everywhere!!

For me it was easier to carry out, if it was going into a pickup truck. Leave legs on until it's in front of tailgate, then hold up front, pop 2 legs off and slide in. If I have help thats the easiest way. If I'm on my own I use the hand truck. (I had one in my truck as well).

Didn't see too many unsupervised young children at the show this time. A few years back, a young boy was trying to slam all five balls into the shooter lane on my Gottlieb "Sky Line" and managed to bend the ball lift mechanism inside the game. It was balky the rest of the show, but I repaired it when I got home.

I was crestfallen to see the sign on cris-cross that it had been broken only a few hours into the show.

To survive 90 years and get broke at a show is a crotch kick.

I'd like to address the "I heard a number of people report their games getting damaged (somewhat severely in my book) when the crew was shuffling games around." comment.

I'm the lead of the Repair Team (aka tech crew). NO ONE "reported" to me (or Gabe or Gerard or Nancy) any cases of games getting damaged "when the crew was shuffling games around." I'm not denying it might have happened because I wasn't present everywhere at every moment of the show; if you have concrete facts to back up your claim then I would appreciate your contacting me privately so Pintastic can make things right with anyone whose game was actually damaged BY OUR TEAM (this goes for anyone reading this thread). As Eric noted, he and I shifted a number of games in the Free Play room Saturday morning to even out the line-up, and we took great care with every machine we moved.

As for the damage to Criss-cross that was indeed heart-breaking; while we try to monitor folks in the Free Play area we can't be at every game every second of the day. It gets harder for us to monitor games late at night - especially after midnight - because our volunteer pool shrinks to almost no one (poor David Scruggs probably gets an hour or two of sleep each evening because he often is the entire security staff due to lack of volunteers). If you do see someone abuse a machine in any way then please report it to a tech IMMEDIATELY; abuse is grounds for eviction from the show.

We own pinball machines ourselves; we do our utmost to treat every game at the show as if it were our own. Allegations of this sort can do great damage to the show if those who bring games to the show get the idea we DON'T treat their games with every bit of respect they deserve.

Tony Dziedzic
Repair Team Lead

Steve had another vintage game damaged at another different show, again by an unsupervised child. I think a good rule of thumb is to avoid bringing any game earlier than 1967 or thereabouts. Not that I mean to discourage bringing older games, but bring them at your own peril. I felt like a dick having to paste labels on my game, both instructive and prohibitive, but as I mentioned before, I had a game slightly damaged a few years ago.
This time, I just didn't have anything else ready to go which I was offering for sale, so I had to bring a five ball push-up game again.

I’d like to add that we did look to see if we could fix the issue with Criss Cross, but unfortunately the owner was correct that it was beyond our ability to resolve on site.

But more importantly, I’d like to thank the people who reported via the website or by speaking with us to point out anything that wasn’t functioning correctly. I’ve been and will continue to be a game bringer bc despite the risks and the labor involved, there’s a great community of people who really just love pinball at heart, help us keep the games going, and it’s a blast to share my pins with that crowd!

That was mine. Most unfortunate, and it happened because someone violently pushed in the coin slide. I mentioned elsewhere in the thread that I accepted an offer on the machine-- I got a note from the new owner yesterday, and he's already got it back up and running.

I love to bring my old games to shows for a couple of reasons... I've got games that literally almost no one alive has ever played... and they are a little smaller and a lot lighter-- making them easier to extricate from my basement.

Ah the Saratoga show, where a kid was trying to hang from the shooter rod and bent it. Then his father yelled at me because he was "a potential customer". I was not nice in my response to him.

Sorry, I only walked up to them to let them know it was F'd up, I obviously wasn't expecting someone to run right over and fix it. The second time I walked over I mentioned it to Eric, who I didn't realize was volunteering. Eric and I have known each other for years, so he suggested I power cycle it and told me where the power switch was (I know my way around many things in this hobby, and do 99.9% of all my own repairs, which Eric knows). Stupid me still couldn't find the damn power switch, as I don't own, and haven't worked on the newer Sterns with the relocated power switch.
So again, I wasn't expecting them to fix it, just wanted to let someone know. I'm sorry I didn't notice the board to write on either.
And yes, I refuse to scan anything to do so, as first off, the system failed me miserably last year after I had to mount a machine to scan that stupid thing tryingto find out if a machine was for sale(drop down menu led me to "For sale, Not for sale" with neither checked off, and second I have a new phone that I'm ready to smash as I hate it. Thanks for the heads up though, next time I'll move on to a machine that works and let the next person scan the thingee.

Glad Mr. National cleared this up here.

I really was trying to hone in on the fact that everybody here does a fantastic job, and there's so many moving parts to this show, and any complains anybody has, should be taken with a grain of salt (on the gentle end) or suck a fart right out of my ass (on the more aggressive end). This show is a blessing and I'm looking forward to the next one.

The tech team, as they've stated and we've all seen, do an extremely thorough job and do excellent work FOR FREE for all of our games that we bring, because, at the end of the day, it's those games that make the show great and go off without a hook.

I'll admit some fault here: I shouldn't have repeated the story about RoboWar. That's someone else's game and not problem. It was expressed to me that the game was damaged during the move, but it was not explicitly stating that the crew was the one doing the moving. I realize my comments filled in some gaps there.

Again, I saw lots of this and was filling in some memory gaps here and there.

I've apologized personally to both Brian and Tony about the comments and I'd like to point out, again, that the post was more inclined to help cast aversions to negative comments about the show. Sorry I caused this stir.

I don't know what the solution is to this, but I'm open for suggestions. I see kids fairly often being abusive to the games. This year's standout was a kid playing Sonic. When the ball ended, he leapt up and slammed his elbow down on the lockdown bar. The father (who sounds like he's involved with a co-op) gently said "don't do that". The Sonic designer joked and said "as long as I can buy the part here at the show, I don't care what breaks". But if I saw that happen to one of my pins, you're off the pins for a month. And I'd be saying that through clenched teeth. If the dad doesn't seem to care, and the owner doesn't -seem- to care, why is it still bothering me today? Eesh.

Either way, another great show!

It's endemic. I know a guy who owns a very high grade restoration 16 cylinder Cadillac. A couple of years ago, a father picked up his kid, plopped the kid down on a fender, and wanted to take a picture. The father couldn't understand why my friend went ballistic on him for assuming it was ok to do this to his $250,000+ car. The father's response "what's the big deal? It's just an old car". Dad is lucky he left with all of his teeth.

A guy who used to be a fixture at the PA shows told me that he once caught a woman changing her kid's diaper on his newly restored Gottlieb "Central Park"!

It's why anytime my wife and I are at a car show we have a rule that someone has to be with our bus at all times. At a show once and the wife and I saw a rare vw roll in so we went over to chat. When we came back to our bus a family OPENED my slider door and let their kids frolic in the bus. One kid was hanging off of a fold out shelf and nearly broke the supports. All while the parents just sat there taking selfies..... Luckily the wife stepped in first as she could see that I was about to go macho man randy savage on the dad

I have restored muscle cars; this is one reason I don't got to any shows now that the kids are grown up. Joe average public is utterly indifferent to your property if not downright abusive.

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If you observe a machine being abused - regardless of whether the owner seems to care - please report it to a member of the Repair Team (yellow vest). Abuse is clearly stated in the Pintastic Code of Conduct (the big banner next to the entrance of the Free Play room) as grounds for possible ejection from the show. I would be very happy to politely point that fact out to any attendee (or their parent).

I've seen a pinball machine used for a changing table before at a show as well. I've also seen a small kid, maybe 3 years old, placed sitting up on the lockdown bar area for pictures with a game they liked. I didn't do anything about the changing table thing, since I was far away, but I quickly told the parent of the kid sitting on the game that it was dangerous, and he could break the glass. I knew full well that was unlikely, but I bet they didn't think about ever doing that again. The mom grabbed the kid like it was sitting on lava

For my part, I have never had a machine treated poorly by anyone aside from the general public, and even then it was relatively minor stuff. The worst I saw at Pintastic this year was when people put drinks/food on games that somehow made it into the room. The volunteers roaming the Free Play area took care of that quickly it seemed.

I have never stayed in any of the rooms, as the drive isn't terribly far for me, so I commute back and forth. I have used friend's rooms for the bathroom though, as they were kind enough to help me avoid the bog of eternal stench bathrooms downstairs. The rooms did not seem very nice at a glance, but I was in and out, so I didn't test the walls for sponginess like someone else mentioned ha.

Ah the old "hey can I take a dump in your room" move?

Hey I don't blame you!

Does the folks who run the monster/ horror poster booth between free play and vendor hall have a website?

Upset I just didn’t suck it up and buy the poster I wanted on Saturday.

His card only had a name on it. I found their instagram from that.

https://www.instagram.com/weirdo_wonderland_ct/

His shop is down the road from me. If you want anything let me know what you wanted and I can talk to him.

Yup. I did this during the fall show. I went into the public bathroom and somehow EVERY toilet seat had literal feces on it. Like... how... why? Craziness.

I went into one and someone had left a triple decker.

It's the hotel's version of Cairn. Some find it "artsy".
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