Pinfest 2024

​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!

I had already decided that Johnny Mnemonic (Williams, 1995) would be a good candidate because it performed quite well as the Pinball Pop-Up event and didn't have any Cyberglove issues! That gave it a green light for Pinfest.

I had just finalised my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Data East, 1991) restoration, so I definitely had to bring that to Pinfest, too. (Keep an eye out for the restoration blog post relating to this machine; I'll be posting it soon!) This is a special machine because it is a prototype conversion; meaning I installed the prototype features that were removed from the production games. While there had been Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games at previous Pinfests, to my knowledge there are no prototype TMNTs in Australia, making mine the only one. Definitely a worthwhile "oddity" to bring to the pinball playing public!

And to fill the third space in the van, I actually decided to help a friend out by bringing his game to Pinfest, a Stargate (Gottlieb, 1995). 

Friday turned out to be a very busy day including packing our suitcase, packing the games up, loading the van, and dealing with the pets. We got to Newcastle by the evening, and spent the next couple of hours setting our games up, having dinner, as well as helping out with a couple of small fixes on other games.
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TMNT set up to play and Johnny Mnemonic undergoing some final checks.

The next day was Saturday, and all of the games got a solid play over the course of the day. There were no apparent issues with Turtles or Johnny all day. Stargate encountered one weird issue where it reverted to coin play and ran out of credits, even though it had been set to free play for the event. Weird. I previously fixed a problem on this game where free play was unavailable, as the tournament mode switch was not working. This turned out to be a case of a broken wire on a kicker target assembly elsewhere on the playfield, which is well documented issue. However, that was not the case this time. I set the game to free play again and it stayed that way for the remainder of the weekend. So there was no specific evidence for a cause for this problem but I think it must have been some odd memory glitch which caused it to revert to coin operation.

Saturday was a very busy day during both sessions; the auditorium was packed!

It was particularly fun to see lots of families and friends playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One guy with a TMNT jumper was obviously a big fan of the comics or the TV shows. He seemed to love the game the most!
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A TMNT jumper and a TMNT pinball machine. Perfect match!

​Towards the very end of the night on Saturday, I noticed a credit dot on Johnny Mnemonic. It hadn't had a credit dot at any point earlier in the day. I checked out the error, and it was a problem with the ball in hand switch. I went into switch test, held a ball in the hand magnet, but I couldn't get the hand switch to register. Time to get the glass off and have a closer look. I felt around on the inside of the magnet coil to see if the ball in hand switch had broken. It was definitely intact, but I could feel that it was quite loose in the assembly. I removed the hand plastic that covers the magnet and realised that the bolt that secures the ball in hand switch had come loose. No doubt the constant slamming of the ball into the magnet caused the bolt to loosen. I tightened it up and it was all good to go again. This is probably a good place to install a locking washer to prevent the bolt from backing out. I tightened the bolt after installing a lock washer and put everything back together. All was working normally again.
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View of the bolt securing the ball in hand switch, which has backed itself out slightly.

As well as fixing Johnny, Fiona and I got to play a lot of games on the Saturday night during the contributor-only session! There were a lot of new games to play which I wanted to try. First was John Wick (Stern, 2024). The pro version of the game was available to play at AMD's stand. The game is certainly fun to shoot. The shot to the car that bats the ball back at you is fun. The Continental hotel mould reminds me a lot of the warehouse from Dirty Harry (Williams, 1995) in shape and playfield placement. However, I don't have any real connection to the John Wick universe; I like the movies but nothing really interests me about the character of John Wick. So while it was fun to play I didn't feel like playing more than a couple of games on it. Nothing in particular drew me into wanting "just one more ball". 

John Wick being played on Saturday.

Nearby was another game I had read a little about, but had never considered I would get the chance to play. That game was Pulp Fiction (Chicago Gaming Company, 2023). Having seen the movie, I could appreciate a lot of what was happening in the game. While the playfield is very simple (single level, no ramps, no crazy mechanisms), this is a really fun game to play. The playfield toys are awesome; the Royale with Cheese sculpt is probably the most realistic toy in a pinball machine ever. I loved seeing the briefcase turn around an illuminate Vince's face at the back right of the playfield. Plus, the lightshow is really well integrated into the game. Once multiball starts, everything flashes in unison for a cool effect. So, I was really surprised by this game and how fun it was to play. Fiona and I played several games on it, and will play more the next time we see it!
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Playing Pulp Fiction.

Next up was the latest game from Homepin, the Blues Brothers (Homepin, 2024). The game at Pinfest this year was an early prototype. However, it flipped and played so everyone could get a taste of what the game would be like. My impression was that this is a step forward for Homepin after the lukewarm reception of both Thunderbirds (Homepin, 2018) and Spinal Tap (Homepin, 2022). The game flips pretty well, and with adequate power unlike my experiences with Spinal Tap. The playfield is simple, but there is very little guidance on what to shoot and when. Often you're forced to trap the ball and read the rule card to figure out what you need to do next. The shot geometry is also a little odd. For example, a shot up the left ramp sends the ball around an orbit from left to right, where it collides with a one-way gate at the end of the shooter lane and just dribbles away in a very anti-climactic fashion. Otherwise, the game's board system, which is reportedly very customisable, is the most interesting feature. I'll be following along to see what people manage to achieve with this board set when modifying the game.
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Vector Pinball also demonstrated their new Peter Brock: King of the Mountain game (Vector Pinball, 2024). It's a simple game, but feels nice to shoot. I don't have any particular feelings towards the theme, so the game didn't do much for me. The game objectives were very simple; shooting ramps seems to be an easy way to increase your score with little risk. But the playfield itself feels a bit "flat" with a dark red colour covering most of it with only a few simple graphics here and there. I actually prefer the gameplay of Eight Bally Fury (Vector Pinball, 2024) which is more of a shooters game with specific shots to be made in an obvious order. 

Having a game on Blues Brothers.

Trying out Peter Brock: King of the Mountain.

Sunday rolled around and Fiona and I decided to take it a little easy as we were still tired from Friday and Saturday. There's just not enough time to play pinball and sleep over the Pinfest weekend! Thankfully, Sunday ran quite smoothly and there were no machine issues to attend to. 

We played some classics including Tony's Robot (Zaccaria, 1985) and a bunch of Sega games including Apollo 13 (Sega, 1995), and Independence Day (Sega, 1996). I don't know what it is about these old Segas, but I love the themes and the gameplay. There's something nostalgic about the way Sega did their dots, too. 
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Fiona having a game on Robot.

Thanks to Ross for bringing Independence Day!

​One curiosity which I enjoyed having a game on was Miss World (Geiger, 1982). This is a conversion kit for Kiss (Bally, 1979). Yes, believe it or not, some operators preferred to have this rather than a Kiss! But once you have a look at the playfield artwork, which features a lot of nude women, you can start to understand why this game may have had some appeal. Either way with only 150 of these made, it was cool to play such a rare game.
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Playing Miss World.

Another shot of Miss World which shows off some of the playfield.

It was great to meet up with some friends and talk pinball again for another year. We met up with two of Fiona's friends this year, who attended the event for the first time. We managed to be the first people to play a game of doubles on the head-to-head Battle Pinny!

Playing a game of doubles on the Battle Pinny.

​And that was it for another Pinfest. Quite a busy one this time around since we had three games to manage, but it was made easier because the games only had a couple of minor issues over the course of the weekend.

​Once we got home, I was able to look at the machine audits to see how hard each machine worked.
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Johnny Mnemonic audits​:

Audit	Value
Games started	229
Total plays	218
Left drains	116
Right drains	109
Play time (H:M:S)	11:24:00
Minutes on	1,141
Balls played	663
Tilts	4
1 player games	115
2 player games	34
3 player games	5
4 player games	5
Left flipper	14,304
Right flipper	16,231

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles audits:

Audit
Balls total	942
Total games	335
0-1.4M games	​160
1.5-2.4M games	98
2.5-3.4M games	33
3.5-4.9M games	17
5-9.9M games	13
10M+ games	5
Games 1 player	202
Games 2 player	28
Games 3 player	8
Games 4 player	11
Drains left	135
Drains centre	620
Drains right	187
Skill shot made	333
Leonardo completed	144
Raphael completed	143
Donatello completed	149
Michelangelo completed	270
Left ramp shots	659
Right ramp shots	412

There are some interesting numbers to pull from these audits. About 550 games played between both machines, powered on for almost 20 hours, almost 1,000 balls played on TMNT and an average of 15,000 flips on each flipper on Johnny. I was also interested to see that, on TMNT, Leonardo, Raphael and Donatello were completed a very similar number of times. Michelangelo was more frequent as the orange targets are the easiest to hit. The games certainly got a good workout, which is what Pinfest is all about!

Be sure to check out this article in the Newcastle Herald about Pinfest this year, including some good photos of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As always, there are some great photos on the Newcastle Pinball Association Facebook page of the event. 

​We have a few other pinball events coming up over the next few months, so keep an eye on the blog for some additional event reports. We are spreading the love of pinball far and wide this year!