It’s four days to Pintastic NE and I find myself more excited at the prospect than previous years. The lack of Pintastic last year and the delay to the week before Thanksgiving instead of the week before the 4th of July has made the anticipation much higher.
It’s going to be a lot of fun.
The biggest worry is November snow because of what is involved in the Transport of these large heavy machines. Fortunately the 10 day forecast for the Sturbridge MA area shows four dry days and that Thursday the day of setting up will reach as high as 60 with the daily forecast running from the high 30’s to mid forty’s but most importantly no snow.
My scarfs will not just be for decoration this year.
I was explaining Pintastic NE to my parish priest who is my age who like me grew up in an age of coin operated arcade games. The change over to “Pay one price Barcades” and home ownership has changed the concept of the game in the sense that you design a game differently. When your goal is to get people to feed coins you need to make the ball drain, but not so fast as to scare people away. When your goal is a home sale or a barcade, where the profit is made from the base sale or the drinks, your goal is to keep the ball in play long enough for multiple goals but not so long as to make it too easy.
One of the other things about the classic machines at places like Pintastic is people forget that many if not most of these machines are 25 to forty years old and a good chunk are 50 plus. The amount of care and effort to keep up these old machines and to either preserve or upgrade the technology to the point where they still function as they did is significant and I think people outside of the hobby really don’t understand how much effort that takes. There is a real skill involved here that is to be appreciated.
Finally one can’t express enough gratitude to Gabe D’Annunzio whose efforts make this event possible and not only the efforts of organization but the physical effort of moving dozens of his own game for people to play. Here is our closing interview from pintastic 2019 before the coming of the pandemic
Gabe could have just decided to pack it in, he didn’t so all of those who have fun next weekend, make a point to thank him. The changes for 2020 like the new location didn’t happen due to COVID it remains to be seen if they come the following year
fyi you can still buy passes here.
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