Trivia / Pinball

• Banned in China: Pinball was banned for 34 years in many jurisdictions in the United States because they were believed to be a form of gambling. It wasn't until 1976 and Roger Sharpe's display of pinball skill during a court case, concluding with his famous Skill Shot, that such bans were removed.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Archival of Pinball machines is actually quite the struggle—as they're physical machines, it's not exactly easy to 1-to-1 "emulate" them like many other digitized games, since you'll always have to contend with emulating the physical game space of the table itself. Video Mode machines are even more difficult, ironically, as not only do you have to emulate the video mode's hardware, which is, y'know, emulating more-or-less an entire video game, you'd have to also emulate how it reacts to the Pinball mode. It's not to say it's impossible, though; quite a few pinball video games are based on replicating real world Pinball tables in digital space, using physics engines and 3D modeled environments akin to those of the tables. However, if a pinball table didn't have the blessing of getting a video game version created for it, and there's no real fan projects out there to emulate said pinball table, especially if it happens to be a licensed table, that's where the problems come in...
• Why the Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: While many prolific industry figures engage with the pinball fanbase, the majority of them have particularly dropped their online presence on the Pinside Forums, due to the vitriolic, unpleasable, threatening, and unruly nature of the site's occupants. Jersey Jack Pinball's lead programmer Keith Johnson and Stern Pinball's public relations manager Jared Guynes are some of the many people who have distanced themselves from Pinside— a perfect indicator of the increasingly poor reputation that the site has been getting.