Visiting Pinball Expo this year made one thing clear to me: there are a lot of cool "boutique" or home-brew pins being made all over the world.

These often unique pins differ from "real" pins in that they are usually made to only have one machine built. Pins about your family, pins featuring your favourite vampire slaying chick, pins dispensing beer, etc.

Today I'm announcing that Pinside is going to accommodate these pins in our archive!

There will be a new field type to allow you to filter on these types of games, I was thinking to distinguish like this:
- commercial release
- home-brew release

But we also need some rules to this, because we don't want dozens of poorly constructed science projects flooding our archive. I think, at minimum, a game needs:

- to be finished or at least 90% completed
- to have been shown to the public at some public event at least once
- have a gameplay video available, e.g. on YouTube
- have at least x Pinsiders requesting it be added (via a petition on the forum?)
- ... other suggestions?

I'm still contemplating wether these unique games should be allowed in our Top 100. But I'm thinking they probably should. We also allow ratings on games like Total Recall.

So what to do to have your game included in the Pinside archive?

Open a topic on the forum, in the homebrew/boutique sub-forum, announcing your game.

Make sure to mention at the very least these properties:

- Game name
- Manufacturer name, e.g. Stern Pinball Inc.
and short name “Stern”
- Release date
- Machine type: SS or EM
- Production run
- Game type: commercial release, home-brew, other… (?) - this will be a new field type.
- Design team for the following roles:
concept, game design, mechanics, artwork, animations, software, sound, music (where applicable)
- At least a backglass image

If enough people vouch for your game, having played it etc, your game will get added to the Pinside archive.

After the game is added, you can go in yourself and add in all the details, as well as upload many more photos.

Note that all of this is "in beta", I'm evaluating this concept as we go and still need to be making some chances to our system to accommodate these games.

So, if you know someone with a custom game. Or own one yourself and are able to provide above details. Go ahead and open a topic requesting it to be added.

Well, we have the mandatory "15 votes needed to appear in the top 100" rule for that, right?

You can also just PM me with your request to add a game to the archive, if you think it belongs there! The above was just meant to streamline things a little and to lay out some "rules".

It's been that way for many years and never caused many problems. Yeas, we do get the occasional new Stern game enter the top 100 at #1 but the same things happens on large sites like IMDB where a new movie (e.g. "Interstellar") enters the charts extremely high because the fans will be the first to visit the movie and rate it. The number often quickly goes down and settles to a more sensible / widely accepted position in the list.

Please PM me with a link to the post containing the info needed for inclusion in our archive. I will look into it and decided wether the game deserves to be included, based on the factors described in my OP.