![]() This is a non-profit enterprise, so when you pony up $22 for a single, $15 for a student, or $55 for a family of four, you’ll support a fun place for people to gather and not executive bonuses. Games are presented in chronological order and historical display from the 1940s to today. The Pacific Pinball Museum is an interactive museum with 90 playable pinball machines. You’ll have a few days to rest up though unless you strike gold in a midwestern USA bar: none of these are in the middle of the country except for one outside of Detroit. You could put together a whole USA road trip based on this list, so we’ll start in the west and head across the country. ![]() If you want to spend hours hitting the flippers and bumping the machine strategically without tilting, here are some of the best places to play pinball in the USA, “pinball museums” where you can hit the flippers until your arms cramp up. At any of them, at least one machine will probably be out of order at any given time. Now, in most of the spots listed in this pinball places article, there’s a full-time person on site keeping the machines rolling. In the old days there were roving technicians who spent all day making repairs, traveling from bar to arcade to pool hall. Pinball machines take up more room than most (but not all) video games, plus they are much more complicated machines. It wasn’t just changing tastes that led to a decline though. (See more about that in Sheila’s post on the National Videogame Museum.) They just don’t do the huge sales numbers they used to back in the days before Pac-man, Asteroids, Centipede, and Donkey Kong started taking their place. Pinball is not a dead form of entertainment: new machines are still coming out all the time, like that one pictured here that I just spotted in a local brewpub in Tampa Bay. Most of them are tagged as pinball museums, but they’re arcades where you can actually play with the exhibits. "It's the same as we kept that alive here with the games, and it's something different or it's something from back in time that you remember doing when you were young.Are you a budding pinball wizard or are you an oldster like me who prefers the tactile feel of those machines over the bits and bytes of video games? Fortunately for you, there are still some great places to play pinball in the USA. "It's almost like a record, how actual vinyl comes back, and then you realize you love that crisp sound," Barber said. ![]() you really have to use all your senses."īarber said pinball makes you focus and be in the moment, which she said is a welcome breath of fresh air in an age of smartphones and tablets "where you just sit there and stare at it." "Even for all of us, and for young people now, it is a very tactile game," said Patty Barber, the museum's senior vice president. They combined their collections, and Silverball Retro Arcade was born. His longtime friend and business partner, restaurant owner Steve Zuckerman, also had a pinball machine collection. Before then, co-founder Robert Ilvento's daughter, who has autism, really loved playing pinball, so Ilvento, 57 started collecting pinball machines and built a collection. You can touch it, it feels very different than a video game. "It's like a treat for the senses," said 48-year-old Raffi Abelson, playing on one of the oldest pinball machines from the 1950s.
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