Story Time

Song of the Week

Let it be known that I had an entirely different newsletter planned and drafted as of Thursday afternoon this week. It was going to be about how there wasn’t much going on, and therefore, I wasn’t going to write much and would be keeping things “short and sweet.” It had a short, high-energy song, a pancake happy face image, and other things that fit the theme.

But then Scott from Pinball Map sent in his Location of the Week article, and it turns out it’s a whole short story! Pinball location fan fiction, if you will. It’s about a guy named Zane Montana who, having suffered the many indignities of life, discovers himself and finds peace at the bottom of a Bucket O Blades and a good game of pinball.

As I was reading it, I knew I had to find a more appropriate song pairing, and I pulled Phosphorescent’s 2013 hit Song for Zula from the playlist in my head. Like this week’s Location of the Week feature, it’s a story-driven tune and drips with this nostalgia-tinged feeling of heartbreak, longing, and hope.

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Pinball Map Location of the Week

Ryan and Scott from Pinball Map run a regular series that highlights one new pinball location each week. This week, Scott writes about Winona Axe & Arcade.

Zane Montana was having a tough go of things lately. An ill-timed joke about wood grain cost him his job at the lumberyard. Similarly, an ill-timed double-take at a sexy Halloween costume led to the loss of his girlfriend. Tragically, a perfectly timed drunk driver struck and killed his dog. Zane was down. And when Zane was down, Zane looked for security in the routine. And for Zane, that routine was steeped in lumber and lumber-adjacent martial weapons. Zane knew that he had to go to the place “Where Fun Hits the Target”, he needed to go to Winona Axe & Arcade.

Winona Axe & Arcade, located 337 miles from the source of the Mississippi River, had quickly cemented itself as a mainstay of the Minnesotan axe arts community. While a relative newcomer to the scene, their blend of comfortable hay bale seats, local beers, and children’s electronic video entertainment had created an environment where confident woodsman like Zane could thrive. And in search of this thriving, on a cold Wednesday morning, Zane pushed through the door to clock into his new job - occupying his mind in a fruitless struggle to stave off the icy claw of depression. With a grunt and a nod, he greeted Bruce, the resident smithy. No words were exchanged between these two slabs of men. Bruce grimly slid a Bucket O Blades over to Zane and resumed his post [Author’s note: Bucket O Blades is an actual thing you can get at Winona Axe & Arcade. It contains tomahawks, spears, knives, throwing stars, playing cards, and a tactical shovel]. Zane turned his attention to the throwing area, a place where he searched for answers but had only found men in t-shirts.

Zane hurled the tactical shovel gracefully, end over end, landing with a satisfying thud against the well-maintained particle board haphazardly stapled to the drywall. "Heh," he grunted quietly to himself, a warm sense of satisfaction trickling down his thrice-fused spine (lumberyard accident). Zane looked around and unleashed a subtle flex of his pecs, not for anyone in particular since he was alone that afternoon at Winona Axe & Arcade. The flex acted as a reminder of the spoils from his time at the lumberyard, where he essentially exercised all day. Those days were gone, and now he maintained his shredded physique by spending upwards of $400 per day to hurl blades at the wall. Zane smiled, shook his head knowingly, though unsure what he knew, and lost himself in the comfort of physical toil.

Four hours later, Zane's strength left him, and he fell heavily onto a nearby hay bale. His strained muscles sang a tune he thought he might never hear again. "Caroline will regret this decision," he thought with a deep stain of insecurity. Zane then succumbed to his woe, releasing tears he had bottled up for decades. Mid-weep, a strange noise snapped him back to attention. It came from a corridor of Winona Axe & Arcade that he had deeply discounted due to it being lousy with children and guys either too large or too small to carry their own weight at the lumberyard. But on this particular day, the corridor called to him with a satisfying riff not unsimilar to the music that hung in the air on the day his dog woofed off this mortal coil. Zane followed the sound. What he discovered here rocked the very foundation of his core understanding of fundamental realities.

A room. A brightly lit room that made Zane wish he had remembered his Pit Viper branded sunglasses. And inside the room, strange devices, akin to the ornamental coffins Zane had once seen on an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives when Guy visited rural parts of Mexico. These coffins didn’t house the dead though, they teemed with life. One particular coffin seemed to speak directly to him, Iron Maiden, the chorus of his youth. With trepidation, Zane approached, and gently slid his last four quarters into the appropriate slot. The machine hurled Zane into a simpler realm. He found himself in a world neatly contained under glass, its boundaries clear and comforting. In this compact universe, Zane rediscovered his sense of control and purpose. He had fallen for an unlikely companion - a 300-pound behemoth of wood and steel that offered him solace and excitement in equal measure. Zane was home.

Winona Axe and Arcade is likely the best place to legally throw axes in the beautiful state of Minnesota. They have 10 pinball machines for you to play. If you GC one, you are legally entitled to hurl playing cards at it until you crack its backglass. They are open 5 days a week - usually until 10pm. I am confident that you will find answers there.

Winona Axe & Arcade
350 W 2nd St, Winona, MN 55987
Website

Obscure Pinball Facts of the Week

I feel like we need a better transition than “and here’s the news!” so how about a few fun, obscure pinball facts sourced from the Kineticist Facebook hivemind?

• One of the most remote locations for pinball on location is in Bodo, Norway, about 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle at Royal Bowling & Billiards. - Doug Mahar

• I just learned yesterday that Brian Allen was the designer of the Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty, so there's that. - Christopher Jay

• Algar is Gorgar’s brother. The Gar boys. - Skinny Jay

• The first generation mockup of a Pinball 2000 machine was graphically driven by a Commodore Amiga owned by George Gomez. - David Yopp

• Pat Lawlor made a Good Morning America pinball machine in 2007. - David Morgan

• Pinball artist Greg Freres used fellow Bally pinball designers Dennis Nordman and Jim Patla to be models for the illustrations of The Wolfman and Dracula on the backglass of Elvira and the Party Monsters - Joe Ciaravino

  

• Dr. Phil and his wife have a few pinball machines. He said it is a vice for him and his wife often play until 2 or 3 am. He called them a lost piece of art! - Albert Agar

• Karen McDougal is the only model to pose nude for a pinball machine and to sleep with a president. - Chuck Webster

Pinball News of the Week

And here’s the news!

Wonderland Amusements Shows Playfield Renderings

Wonderland Amusements, the new pinball startup focused on building a cheaper, consumer-grade pinball machine (think Arcade 1up, but for a physical pinball machine), released playfield renderings of their in-development game based on Alice in Wonderland (yes, another Alice in Wonderland pin). By itself, I’m not sure this announcement would move the needle for most of the pinball enthusiasts reading this newsletter, but it did give me a chance to notice that they also brought on Steve Kondris (The Pinball Room / Led Zeppelin homebrew) as a design consultant for the project, which gives me some hope that the whole endeavor might be worth keeping an open mind to.

Updated John Wick Tutorial for Code Version .90

We don’t have a new tutorial for you this week, but we have gone back and made revisions to our previous John Wick tutorial in light of recent substantive code updates. It addresses the new lights-out mode, plus other adjustments.

New Rumors of American Pinball’s “Imminent” Demise

This is one of those things I feel obligated to cover because it’s generating a lot of conversation in the community, as these things tend to do. My instinct is to take it with a massive grain of salt, as you should with most stories where the creator primarily references trusted anonymous sources and where that creator may have an axe to grind with a noted company employee.

However, it is fair to say that from an outside perspective, the business moves that AP has been making of late (discontinuing games, public disputes with former employees, pushing back game release dates, etc.) do not inspire a ton of confidence in the long term viability of the company.

I hope it all ends up being noise, we get to see Ryan McQuaid’s first game soon (presumably Cuphead), and they knock that release out of the park, but there’s at least a lot of internet chatter indicating that path may be somewhat in doubt.

Links of the Week

• Cool timelapse video of Wormhole Pinball’s fancy new mural installation.

• Two Googlers (Mofi Rahman and Drew Brown) built a custom pin called Backlogged Pinball out of a modified Multimorphic P3 system that would allow them to connect to Google cloud services for things like score tracking and leaderboard updates. In the future, they plan to add features like a Game Advisor Service that uses AI to provide game analysis and player coaching.

• A reader flagged the original Making Metallica Pinball video from Stern, released alongside the original game in 2013. It’s a fun piece of history for Metallica pinball fans and something to file away for whenever they release a new making of video for the Remastered Edition.

• YouTuber Cooltoy picked up a Labyrinth machine recently, which is notable because, through public comment banter, I was able to learn that he (like myself) is also a big David Bowie fan and that he, too, has a child who was named after David Bowie in some form! Whoa!

• The LoserKids sat down with Raymond Davidson to discuss his work on the Metallica Remastered code.

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