 My favourite time of the year! Pinfest! This year was extra special for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I had been on long service leave for a month prior to Pinfest. This gave me plenty of time to get games ready and plan for the trip. It's always nice to have some time to prep a game for the beating it takes at Pinfest because, invariably, there are issues that crop up at the last minute. Secondly, I had tried and tested my van as a pinball moving vehicle for the Newcastle Pinball Pop-Up a couple of months ago, so I had decided to bring not one, not two, but three games to Pinfest this time around!
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 It's happening! Time for Pinfest! This year's show promised to be the biggest and best yet, with more machines on display (104, to be precise) than any year before! The show gets better and better each year, and this is a huge achievement for such a small and dedicated pinball crew from the Newcastle Pinball Association (NPA). Compared to the absolute insanity of larger shows such as Pinball Expo (400 games, including other coin-op games!) which is happening as I write this, the NPA team do a fantastic job at organising a relatively large show with limited resources. I'm always happy to be a part of it.  Life has been busy over the last few months so it has taken me a while to finally write a report on Pinfest 2022. Better late than never, so here it is! 2022 was the first year since the pandemic that things were back to "normal". Machines were set up so the venue was at capacity and social distancing was no longer mandatory. Ticket sales for each session were capped, but this was more to ensure everyone had a chance to play the machines rather than a limit set due to Covid restrictions. Pinfest 2021 was a great show, but it did feel a little emptier than usual, so Fiona and I were excited to get back into the swing of things properly.  Well, the last couple of years have been rough! Last year was the first time Fiona and I had missed out on Pinfest since we first attended in 2015. By the end of 2020, the COVID pandemic was in full swing and travelling hours away for a weekend was just not an option for us. Regardless, Pinfest 2020 still went ahead, albeit at a reduced capacity and with fewer games. I was bummed that I couldn't go to my favourite event of the year, and promised that we would be back in 2021 when the pandemic had completely blown over...  It's Pinfest time again! Once again, Fiona and I headed off to our annual Pinfest pilgrimage, this time for the fifth year in a row. This was Pinfest's second year at Club Macquarie in Argenton. The Newcastle Pinball Association is responsible for organising Pinfest each year and they did a fantastic job again. This venue is great for the event but as Pinfest gets more and more crowded every year, and people contribute more and more machines, it always seems as if we are short on space! All in all, it shows pinball is still popular and, if anything, getting more popular as time goes on. Not a bad problem to have! |
✍️ BlogHere you will find logs of our pinball and arcade machine restorations, repairs, discussion about general pinball and arcade topics, as well as recounts of our random pinball adventures.
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Running this website is a hobby for me (just like pinball!). I like being able to show off my restoration work so everyone can learn from it and potentially fix their own machines. If you enjoy reading the site's content or it has been helpful to you, please consider donating to offset some of the website's operating costs. |
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