Well the early day for day one caught up to me on day two and instead of waking at 5 I woke at seven so by then the bandwidth of the Hotel was at full tilt and files that uploaded in a few minutes took a half hour or longer but here is what I have up so far:
I got a VERY early start for day two as I woke up before 5. This allowed me to upload all my day 1 stuff and write yesterdays post quickly and got me down to play pinball by 6. I headed straight to the extra ball lounge:
This was also the first chance I had to play the custom Happy Gilmore machine and so I jumped at it:
It’s a fun game but not easy to play while using my camera.
Dave Marsden one of the organizers of Pintastic NE since the start had some free time early and we went to the media room for an interview.
A bit later after breakfast my son came down and we hit the homebrew room the game he wanted to play was Critical Mass which is about as rare as it gets but in the middle of the game the fire alarms went off and the entire Pinball crowd and the staff ended up out in the wind and rain:
By a very odd coincidence when we went in the first person we ran into was the person who found and restored the game Eric who granted us an interview:
There was apparently a lot of work to do to create this prototype as a playable game but not only did he do the work he wrote a manual for it:
At this point we headed to the homebrew room to finish our game, Eric joined us and filled us in a bit more
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Afterwards we checked out the interesting mechanical game setup. My son played the baseball game.
We had lost a half hour due to the fire drill and wanted to get more pinball playing in but then I ran into Todd Tuckey who was free so again it was to the media room for a long sit-down interview.
And that’s when an extraordinary thing happened as we finished up a film crew came in who had press credentials for Pintastic. They spotted us and for some reason decided I would be a good subject for their interview. The irony of a film crew making a documentary on Pinball deciding they wanted me before Todd was not lost on me. I chatted with the crew and it was a United Nations of folks. the filmmaker from the US and his crew from Columbia, Argentina and The Ukraine.
I spoke to the young lady from the Ukraine at length before the interview which required a lot of prep just before we started I spotted my son who had been looking for me and he shot this brief video
They then wanted shot of me playing various games both alone and with my son. Ironically the Ukrainian Girl in her 20’s had never played pinball so before we let her leave us we insisted she try a game, we found a Cactus Canyon game open in the vender room and she got a game in.
Having lost an hour and a half of prime pinball time between the interview and the fire alarm the camera went away and pinball ruled the rest of the night interrupted only by dinner with my friend Hanna who you might remember from this photo from many Pintastics ago
Hanna came here as a refugee from Iraq. That was her first time playing pinball it would certainly not be her last.
I can’t believe that was five whole years ago.
I’ll update this post with the videos that have placeholders as soon as time and bandwidth allows
Update: For some reason the Todd Tuckey and Dave Marsden interviews won’t work in this post I’ll make an extra one with them.
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