Tilt

GAMERS:  On Friday, we took a field trip to Tacoma to attend the Northwest Pinball & Arcade Show. It's always big fun. 

We arrived at the Tacoma Convention Center just after noon, when the show's doors opened. 

Up first in the exhibition hall were some brand new pinball games. 

 The KISS one was certainly colorful.

 And the Game of Thrones machine was attractive droves of fans.

 There were a couple of (new) Star Trek pins.

After perusing the latest and greatest, we made our way over to the classics. Along the way we ran into what was billed as the world's largest pinball machine, Hercules by Atari, from 1979. A pool ball was the pinball. It was hard to even get it out onto the playing field, it was so heavy!

We saw a number of great old machines we'd never seen before. Several of them had a very 'mod' look about them. Check out Beat Time, obviously a bit of a riff on The Beatles.

Loved the artwork on the Faces game!

Crescendo was pretty groovy, too.

Isn't this bumper below a beauty?

 CJ's favorite pinball machine of the day was Big Ben.

 He went back to it multiple times. 

 I loved the bumpers on a pin called Butterflies.

 And who wouldn't want some Flower Power when playing pinball?

We always love checking out the space-related games, of course. Skylab is a classic!

 Mars Trek was new to us. It was an unforgiving game, reminding me that NASA engineers always say, "Mars is hard."

  The game below preceded the movie by a number of years.

There were plenty of sports-themed pinball machines, as well. 

Knowing he was in the hospital at the time, I lingered over the Muhammad Ali one for a long time thinking about The Greatest. 

 Sadly, he died later that night.

This hockey themed machine was a beauty!

       

At the end of one row, a wildly psychedelic themed machine was in pieces, unfortunately. Loved the graphics on Time Fantasy!

And you can't have a pinball show with out a Pinball Wizard to play!

There were video game arcade cabinets, as well.  Bagman was a new one on me.

 CJ and Annabelle really enjoyed this old game.

CJ waited to play Donkey Kong. And waited, and waited and waited some more. Turns out the guy playing the game was a "professional," or so he told us.

 CJ eventually settled for Donkey Kong Jr.

Speaking of CJ, I'll let him tell you a bit more about the show.

The annual Northwest Pinball & Arcade Show is an event in Tacoma, Washington, which, according to the event's website, features over 400 pinball and arcade machines from the 1950s to today, tournaments, world record high score attempts, vendors, seminars, guest speakers, raffles and prizes. The event ran from June 3 to June 5, and we went on the first day of the event. Compared to last year's Pinball & Arcade Show, there were several more pinball machines this time, with most of the arcade machines put in back. As I mentioned previously, some of the pinball machines are very old, dating back to the 1950s, while some of them were produced very recently, such as the Star Trek Pro machine and KISS machine. At the show, one of the pinball machines was Atari's Hercules, which was apparently the largest pinball machine ever made. However, Hercules is notorious for requiring constant maintenance, making it undesirable to keep at most arcades and events.

6/6: This day marks two anniversaries of note. Most notably, it is the anniversary of D-Day. We watched a short PBS video about the event. The kids' eyes were pretty wide when they heard how many men were lost that day.

June 6 is also the anniversary of the Great Seattle Fire, a very not great event. 

This photo shows the start of the Great Seattle Fire, looking south on 1st Ave. near Madison St.