I was recently in the San Francisco area and my wife and I visited the Pacific Pinball Museum one evening. The museum is fairly easy to get to in Alameda which is across the bay from San Francisco. The mistake we made was heading over there around 4:30 in the afternoon which got us stuck in rush hour traffic on the San Mateo bridge. If you avoid rush you can easily get there in less than hour from the San Fran area.
The area around the place is nice and museum itself just looks like a normal new storefront location along the street. There is lots of parking on the street and even behind the museum itself. We arrived around 6pm and there were maybe 5 people there. At the front there were about 7 newer Sterns including a Metallica pro that you had to pay to play. Upon paying admission which I think was $15 you moved past the front counter into a long room with pinball machines lining both walls. There were some very early "pinball" type machines on display that were not for play with cards explaining them. Spent about 5 minutes there before the sound of chimes forced me to stop reading and start playing. The one wall was almost exclusively wood rail machines, the other wall wedgeheads and EM games. Most of the games were in working order and the condition of the woodrails was good on most, and really good on a few. I do not remember any that were real beaten up but there may have some with rougher playfields and backglass. The EM side had a 4 or 5 not working and some of the playfields were beat up but they played and worked.
Subsequent rooms were smaller and I believe there were two more with machines. One had about 8 SS games and the other about 20 mostly DMD games. These two rooms had games you have probably played and seen in collections around the TOPL league. I won't spend much time on these games as we did not spend a lot of time playing them. We had played most of these somewhere else. They were in pretty good condition for the most part, any we played worked flawlessly. The DMD set to be honest I do not recall any of them except Champion Pub which we do not see in TOPL and my wife had never played. The time in this room was mostly spent playing about 10 games of Champion Pub. Wife really liked it and wants...good thing not one for sale on PBR.
The SS room had one game we played a few times but can't even remember it so could not have been that good or I lost and have repressed that memory. I will add some pictures tomorrow to the post if people want and when I look at those I can update the game lists and what the SS game we played was.
The EM games were interesting, they worked and I liked them. Not too much to say here, there were many I had never seen or played and got to try them.
In my view the only reason to make this trip other than getting a pinball t-shirt which could probably buy on-line is to see and play the wood rail games. There are a lot of them in one place and they work. There are little cards explaining the game's origin and the features and you can see a progression of new things showing up in pinball. For me, I love the look of these games, I love how hard they are and it makes me feel young since never saw any of these a child. We spent at least 90 minutes playing a lot these games and had the most fun with a horse racing one where you needed to hit things to advance actual metal horses around a track. I logged at least 20 attempts and never got a horse all the way around. To quote a famous TOPL player: "I was one shot away" seemed to be what I announced after most of these games. I want to get one of these.
The bottom line is that if you like pinball and have any interest in seeing a lot of working woodrail machines this is well worth trip. $15 is reasonable, there are good DMDs, SS and EM to play if you need a pinball fix and the place was not crowded. For us we paid $30 and got 2+ hours of entertainment that I am not sure you can get anywhere else. I will go again the next time I am in the bay area.
If people want pictures I can put up some tomorrow or on the weekend.
I also went the Musee Mechanique at Pier 45 on the San Francisco waterfront. I really liked it but it not so much pinball. Will talk about that in a separate post.
The area around the place is nice and museum itself just looks like a normal new storefront location along the street. There is lots of parking on the street and even behind the museum itself. We arrived around 6pm and there were maybe 5 people there. At the front there were about 7 newer Sterns including a Metallica pro that you had to pay to play. Upon paying admission which I think was $15 you moved past the front counter into a long room with pinball machines lining both walls. There were some very early "pinball" type machines on display that were not for play with cards explaining them. Spent about 5 minutes there before the sound of chimes forced me to stop reading and start playing. The one wall was almost exclusively wood rail machines, the other wall wedgeheads and EM games. Most of the games were in working order and the condition of the woodrails was good on most, and really good on a few. I do not remember any that were real beaten up but there may have some with rougher playfields and backglass. The EM side had a 4 or 5 not working and some of the playfields were beat up but they played and worked.
Subsequent rooms were smaller and I believe there were two more with machines. One had about 8 SS games and the other about 20 mostly DMD games. These two rooms had games you have probably played and seen in collections around the TOPL league. I won't spend much time on these games as we did not spend a lot of time playing them. We had played most of these somewhere else. They were in pretty good condition for the most part, any we played worked flawlessly. The DMD set to be honest I do not recall any of them except Champion Pub which we do not see in TOPL and my wife had never played. The time in this room was mostly spent playing about 10 games of Champion Pub. Wife really liked it and wants...good thing not one for sale on PBR.
The SS room had one game we played a few times but can't even remember it so could not have been that good or I lost and have repressed that memory. I will add some pictures tomorrow to the post if people want and when I look at those I can update the game lists and what the SS game we played was.
The EM games were interesting, they worked and I liked them. Not too much to say here, there were many I had never seen or played and got to try them.
In my view the only reason to make this trip other than getting a pinball t-shirt which could probably buy on-line is to see and play the wood rail games. There are a lot of them in one place and they work. There are little cards explaining the game's origin and the features and you can see a progression of new things showing up in pinball. For me, I love the look of these games, I love how hard they are and it makes me feel young since never saw any of these a child. We spent at least 90 minutes playing a lot these games and had the most fun with a horse racing one where you needed to hit things to advance actual metal horses around a track. I logged at least 20 attempts and never got a horse all the way around. To quote a famous TOPL player: "I was one shot away" seemed to be what I announced after most of these games. I want to get one of these.
The bottom line is that if you like pinball and have any interest in seeing a lot of working woodrail machines this is well worth trip. $15 is reasonable, there are good DMDs, SS and EM to play if you need a pinball fix and the place was not crowded. For us we paid $30 and got 2+ hours of entertainment that I am not sure you can get anywhere else. I will go again the next time I am in the bay area.
If people want pictures I can put up some tomorrow or on the weekend.
I also went the Musee Mechanique at Pier 45 on the San Francisco waterfront. I really liked it but it not so much pinball. Will talk about that in a separate post.