Surf champ.
Because me and my dad would play it at the local 7/eleven when I was a kid.
Now I own one and we still enjoy it.

LOTR, FGY, TSPP

I had a close friend. Like a brother. He was a HUGE fan of LOTR movies, HUGE! Every Sunday he'd watch Family Guy & Simpsons too. The guy almost treated Fox animation Sunday as a religion.

He was also my game room pal. He helped me pick up several games & always wanted to be a part of the process.

So I picked up my 3 absolute grail games all within 48 hours of each other or so. They were games him & I played often as well as themes we both enjoyed.

We met up for his daughters birthday at a bowling alley on a Sunday. We snuck away to the bar to do shots & discussed plans to play the new lineup settling on a BBQ for the following Sunday.

He never made it. Saturday morning he had a heart attack. Shit.

I dont think I will ever sell TSPP, FGY or LOTR. My wife will have to sell em when I die. If she can come to terms with it.

Plus the games are dope as fuuuuuuukc. I'd be an idiot to sell em.

My Elvira Party Monsters is mine. I played it every time I went to a Golf n Stuff now Castles and Coasters. I’d search the room to find it and play it endlessly. In 2000 or so I walked in and she was gone. I was so bummed. Fast forward 16 or 17 years later and I found out a league friend bought it in 2000 from the distributor who sold Castles all their games. He stored it for all that time and I bought it from him. Took it home and restored it. Still kept all the token stickers and route stickers on it when on regular restores I’d ditch that stuff. Even kept the original flipper buttons on it

The game with the most sentimental value to me would be Williams Whirlwind. I was an addicated arcade gamer when this came out and it was the first time since I was much younger that I actually put a few tokens in a pinball machine and I became hooked. Just a few months later, I was hired at this same arcade, so I used to stay after work following store close so that I could credit up the machine and play for free for hours on end. Man, those were the days.... The sounds, the light-show and that glorious fan blowing my once long, heavy metal hair off my shoulders. Now I keep finding more and more of that (now shorter) hair in my shower's drain....

There is a machine sentimental to my wife and I through my father-in-law.

I got into Pinball (didn't really play much as a kid in the 80's) after building a MAME arcade machine. After completion my wife liked it, but asked if it was possible to get or build a pinball machine? My wife got into Pinball from her Dad, who she would sometimes tag along with when he went to watch/bet on horse racing. I didn't meet him until later in his life when he was slowing down, but a really interesting guy. Military, bit of a greaser when he was a kid, a good boxer. And in hindsight, he is responsible for my new love of all things pinball.

The few times he came over my house, he would immediately head down to the couple pins I had and play most of the time during gatherings. I was still new to pinball and didn't have much experience with repairing, but I thought it would be amazing to get him his own pin. I found a partially working Post Time (single player EM horse racing theme) for cheap. The flippers were choppy and the cab was painted bright yellow, but I fixed the flippers, repainted the cab, cleaned it up and got all new rubbers. Delivered it to his home a few years ago and he was as excited as I've ever seen him.

He proceeded to play the hell out of it, I believe putting hours on it each day. His mind started to go a couple years back, but he could still play somewhat. He broke a flipper, wore out rubbers, which I repaired when I could. He has since sunk deeper into dementia, and in/out of hospitals/rehab. Last time I was there he had trouble recalling how to start a new game, but once the ball was available he goes into auto-pilot and can play. Doesn't care about score or making specific shots, just watches the ball and tries to keep it in play. He struggles to walk, but can stand at a pinball machine. He still tries to shake the machine.

He'll likely be gone soon, and I'm trying to figure out what to do with the machine. It's old, beaten up, doesn't work 100%, and isn't worth more than a $100 or so in current condition. But when he passes, I'm trying to decide if I want to try and get it. His wife only tolerates it because it keeps him occupied, the rest of the family thinks it's neat but doesn't have a tie to it. I'm sure my wife would love to keep it in memory of her dad. If we had it, I know she would think about him every time she played, and would love me to get it running well again. it would mean a lot to her.

So I'm considering ways to get this old machine from NJ down to Tampa where I'm based now, to work on it and add to our gameroom. Purely for sentimental reasons.

I just realized that I still have this game's backglass as my avatar, so guess it still means a lot to me too.

post time (resized).JPG

Star Trek may not have been the first pin I ever played, but it is the one I remember. There is no other pinball title of which I have specific childhood memories. I spent my winters growing up at a long-extinct ski area called Hahn Mountain in the northern tip of Berks County, Pennsylvania. Both my parents were ski instructors so I spent a lot of time there. It was at Hahn Mountain that I discovered Star Trek. I liked pinball when I was a kid. But I wasn't very good at it. My typical game would last about 20 seconds. And I often was not willing to part with 25 cents. At my young age, back in the early 1980s, a quarter still seemed like a lot of money. But I must not have had anything better to do with my allowance during the winter because I played Star Trek regularly. I know my allowance at the time was $2/week because I remember being able to play Star Trek eight times (plus, hopefully, a few replays and matches). I remember the game was three balls for a quarter. Most of all I remember the "Time Warp" shot back to the shooter lane. That shot was as rewarding and exciting as earning an extra ball. I don't remember having any particular grasp of the game rules. Maybe I wasn't even aware that pinball machines had rules. But after some practice I was able to keep my balls in play long enough to earn replays with some regularity. All this happened during the new craze of arcade video games. I remember that Star Trek shared space with two video games. One was Asteroids. The other was Space Invaders. Or was it Pac-Man? Maybe Pac-Man replaced Space Invaders. But I always found video games were about as much fun as tossing quarters in the trashcan. I skied Hahn Mountain from when I was about four years old in 1973 until around 1984 when the ski area closed for good. Obviously Star Trek was not there before 1979, but in my memory it always was.

Star Trek was the second game I bought and probably the last game I'll sell.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It became a grail game to me, and it seemed to take forever to find one I liked. I’d find a copy, go look at it, and think meh. They just felt wrong. And then one day I saw an ad for a bunch of awesome machines, including BSD. A big collector was cutting down his collection, and I went for a visit. I had to overpay by a few hundred bucks, and scooped it up.

Now granted, that was 7 years ago, so the game sort of kicks around in my collection. But I still enjoy it when I get around to playing it. I just don’t play it all that much. But I’m still attached to it.

My family would go the same pizza place quite often and I would play whirlwind as a kid. WW is the “one” for me.

My dad would always talk about eight ball deluxe and firepower, now that I have all three of these games I can’t imagine parting with them.

I played addams family a lot when I was a kid too, I just don’t see myself finding one I can afford, even if its a project.