When I was ten years old I asked for a pinball machine for my birthday but never believed I would actually get one. Sure enough my dad had a friend who sold arcade games and pinball machines and I ended up with a mid-seventies machine called Meteor that I’ve played thousands of times since then. I also grew up in malls around Southern California and I used to go to hit up Aladdin’s Castle where I’d buy a bag of tokens which mostly went to whatever pinball machines they had in stock.
A couple weeks ago while I was in the Bay Area for Treasure Island Festival and the Bridge School Benefit I stopped by Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda. They have almost 100 machines ranging from the 1930s to today. It cost $15 to get in and you can play them for as long as you like. I had about three hours to burn which was about the perfect amount of time
The main entrance houses all of the machines from the sixties and older. I checked out all of them and snapped some pics but only played a handful. The art on the old machines is part of the reason I love them. Since the machines were displayed chronologically you could see the advancement of pinball from the days when you just shot a ball and hope it landed in holes to the advent of flippers, drop targets, add-a-ball and more.
On the way to the back rooms with the modern machines there was an art exhibit from Doug Watson who designed the original art for the backglasses of some of the most legendary machines, like Terminator 2. Behind that room were some fun old arcade games then behind that was the seventies rooms which housed old favorites like Captain Fantastic. My favorite up till then was Big Brave, a relatively simple machine that kept me coming back for more.
The games from the mid-eighties to the present were in the final room and you could tell this one got the most use. I hadn’t seen a Diner machine for a while and I also found a Time Warp, Creature From the Black Lagoon and Road Show (which was my favorite that day). I wish I would have taken more pictures. I hadn’t thought of writing an article on it until after I left.
A couple other pinball museums to check out are the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas and the Silver Ball Museum in Asbury Park, NV
