Post by e***@stevemoyersubaru.comI would be willing to bet that if a flood of pinball machines were to
hit an area, you'd see a big spike up in interest. If everywhere you
went there was a pin to play, eventually a lot of people will drop
coins in them and many will get hooked. Right now they are so scarce
that it's just never going to happen. The only public machines I know
of within 15 miles of me are old and buried along the back wall of a
lifeless arcade.
The industry needs at least a little marketing to attract new blood.
There's just no organized attempt to grow the industry. If I were
running a pin company, I would be putting significant effort into
pumping some life back into the coin-op business.
Unfortunately that costs money and takes time to yield results. It
should have been done when times were better.
Agreed, agreed and agreed.
Interesting case study -- I used to work at the University of
Wisconsin Milwaukee and one day I walked into the student union and
was *extremely* surprised to see two rows of 12 pins there with
banners declaring that it was "Pinball Expo!" (I kid you not on the
name, it was literally three days after Expo ended in 2006). I
actually had nothing to do with it, which made me really interested
who did but I never found that out. Anyway, they contacted one of the
operators for three days to stick these 12 games in the union and let
people play for free. Everything from a brand new, just unboxed POTC
to an EM Surf Champ was there for people to play.
I was interested in just sort of hanging out and hearing what people
had to say about the whole thing. A ton of people were surprised by
it and declared things like, "Wow! This is great! I haven't seen
games like this in years!" and "We need more of these around here,
they're so much fun!" The games all had lines (well, all except the
poor X-Files game that was there which no one ever finished a game on
that I saw, I swear), and they were played constantly. People were
amazed by SWE1 and that monitor. They LOVED POTC which often had a
big line to play. The EMs had some good competitions going. It was
all really fun to see.
About a month later, the pinball machine at the student union got
joined by a second one. Both of them had more people playing then I
had ever seen before, and I used to play the one pin on route there a
ton (it's where I fell in love with AP!)
I really don't think it would take that much, but people need to know
these games still exist and they are out there. For whatever reason,
after the introduction of TOPS which seems to have been a LOT less
pushed lately to me, Stern seems to have given up on the attempting to
give operators and players new reasons to play the games. They expect
the operators and locations to get the new players to notice the
games, and it doesn't work that way.
While I'm unfortunately feeling more and more like the demise of
pinball is among us -- and if Stern closes up, no one is coming in to
save and and I would also expect a complete end to video arcade games
in the *very* near future -- I don't feel it is because of a lack of
interest at this point in time. I think there was a lull in interest
for a bit caused by an oversaturation of the arcade market in the
early 2000s with more equipment than players, I think the novelty is
there and it could be geared for a comeback. I just fear that it
won't.