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I went to the Silverball museum recently, the side effect of a haircut (the pinball museum is comfortably near my barber's), and only mildly strange things came as a result of it. For example, my entrance was delayed by a couple minutes because the person in front of me was having some surprisingly complicated discussion about arranging an event party where all the kids would play pinball (and the affiliated games they have there) after loading up on pizza and soda. I'd have expected this sort of thing to be right up the museum's alley, but talks kept going on, with a key breakthrough coming when it was pointed out all the kids would be wearing the same model T-shirt so they wouldn't need wrist bands. To compensate me for this exceedingly tiny inconvenience the guy working the register gave me a two dollar discount, which I suppose is what you get for being freshly shaved around there.
The day was relatively free of strange incidents except that while I was playing the Elvira-themed Scared Stiff a teenaged girl wearing a museum T-shirt stood by the side and stared at me. Steadily. Continuously. I would have guessed she was interested in the game, although she was more following my hand on the left flipper rather than the ball or the dot matrix display. As soon as my game finished, while I was still writing down my score, she slipped her hand over and hit the Start Game button. (The games are all on free play, with the cost covered by the entry charge.) She hadn't even said a word. There's something going on there I wasn't qualified to evaluate.
My habit of writing down scores did get someone else to ask if I were in the league, an association I didn't realize existed but probably should have imagined. He said he was there trying to understand why Attack From Mars commands higher prices on the resale market than Twilight Zone, and it's a fair question. Though Attack From Mars is a great game, Twilight Zone is enormously better. On the other hand, Twilight Zone has about nine hundred little fidgety props and no machine ever has had them all in working order simultaneously. There's probably a discount for the hassle of ownership.
In other notes I saw on high score tables the initials of Sean Joseph Grant, someone who back in undergraduate days I would watch in awe as he played with psychokinetic-level abilities. So apparently he's still in the area and visits at least sometimes.
Trivia: A 1950s policy of sanctioned feeding of pigeons made the species' population in Moscow increase by twelvefold over five years. Source: Superdove: How The Pigeon Took Manhattan ... And The World, Courtney Humphries.
Currently Reading: A War Of Frontier And Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899 - 1902, David J Silbey.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-08 11:10 am (UTC)That's nice, not having to drop a quarter each play. Was the place busy? I don't know the popularity of standard pinball anymore.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-09 04:39 am (UTC)It was jumping, yes. I'd say something around two-thirds of all the machines had someone at them pretty much all the time, and there were a fair number of people moving between machines.
Mind, this was also a lovely Friday afternoon, and the arcade/museum is literally on the Asbury Park boardwalk, so they would have to savagely beat passers-by to not get at least a modest crowd. They seem to be interacting well with the miniature golf course and the restaurants nearby, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-09 07:33 pm (UTC)Twilight Zone has tons of fiddly bits indeed. Ditto Addams Family and Medieval Madness, two of my favorites.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-11 11:44 pm (UTC)Perhaps it is thrown around pretty freely, the way I get more apple pies from McDonald's as make-goods on an order that's strangely delayed or confused than I do from actually ordering them. Though actually I'd already felt I was getting a good deal as the day pass was only $15.00, when I'd thought it was $20.00. Much more of this and they'd be paying me to be there.
The arcade has got The Addams Family (although in a second issue rather than the original), but not Medieval Madness, a game I think I've never seen in person.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-12 05:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-13 04:12 am (UTC)Yeah, that's it. Although I have to admit I don't remember any obvious difference between it and the regular edition.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-15 01:00 am (UTC)You mean this Silver Ball Museum (http://silverballmuseum.com/), in Asbury Park, which is a locale among the 99.9% of New Jersey locales with which I am completely unfamiliar?
That's different than the Pinball Hall of Fame (http://pinballmuseum.org/) in Las Vegas: entry is free, but the games are the original price. At least the 1990s games were -- I didn't move backwards through the 1960s-'80s end of the room to see if there was temporally-reversed inflation.
There was a "Star Trek" machine I was specifically interested in for nostalgia reasons, and I'd completely forgotten that, after feeding the machine quarters, you have to press the "start" button. The big and red, but not illuminated, button. It was a dark room.
Hmmm, the list (http://pinballmuseum.org/games.php) reads "Star Trek 25th, Data East, 1987." That can't be right: the 25th anniversary was 1991, because I distinctly recall the TV special during high school, and also drawing alternate logos in NewTek DigiPaint III on the school's Amiga. Also, when I played it at CMU in 1992, it was much too shiny to have been around for five years.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-16 05:27 am (UTC)I indeed mean the one in Asbury Park; it's a fine location. I haven't made it to Las Vegas for anything, really, although knowing now there's a Pinball Hall of Fame there I'm interested in that attraction.
There was a Star Trek pinball game, based on the original series, released in 1991. I think I only ever saw it a handful of times and had few games on it, but remember my impression as being disappointed. Data East tended to produce disappointing games. The Internet Pinball Database lists it as a 1991 game, which would fit the 25th year nicely. (http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=2356) There was also a 1978-issue electromechanical Star Trek (http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=2355) which I've never seen in person, and the curious 1976 Star Ship, featuring the Good Times Video ripoff of the Enterprise, (http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=3498) again one I haven't seen.
Of course the gold standard is the Next Generation pinball, (http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=2357) one of the all-time great solid-state games, and that's in an era which included The Addams Family, Terminator 2, Twilight Zone, FunHouse, and Road Show.