The Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown is this weekend at the Sheraton down in DTC. Chris and I went Friday afternoon.

Twenty bucks at the door, play all the games you want. There was a pretty good crowd. We never had to wait to play, but almost every machine was in use all the time. All the machines were in pretty good condition. A couple were being worked on, but I’d say this was the best maintained bunch of pinball machines I’ve ever seen. The event filled the large ballroom and two large meeting rooms. Something like 125 pinball machines, perhaps 80 unique games.

It was a bit nostalgic. I played many of these machines many times and for many hours. I first played pinball when I was ten or eleven. We kept the trailer at Chateau Chaparral on the Arkansas River at Nathrop. Spent a lot of unsupervised time there, some of it in the clubhouse. The teenagers played CCR on the jukebox and shot pool. They had half a dozen pinball machines there. I played one of them Friday.

One of the first machines I ever played

Jerry’s parents bowled at Celebrity Fun Center and Jerry and I used to play pinball there. Then my misspent youth, first at Mines and then a lot of hours at Malibu Grand Prix before video games took over. Lots of sessions with Wes over the years. Hundreds of hours of pinball, on all sorts of machines produced over the last fifty years or so. This show didn’t have all the machines I played so often, but they did have a real nice mix.
But play lacked in intensity. There was nothing to play for. No matter how badly you did, you could play again.

Because the machines were in top shape, I was disappointed that they didn’t take more care in setting them up. Most were not quite level, some quite a bit off. I guess it would just take too long to get them all properly set up.

Years ago I went to an event like this with Wes in Phoenix. That one had fewer machines, but had some fun twists. Back at Mines we used to do things like throw a jacket over the top half of the table, or cross our arms and flip with the opposite hands. There they had a machine that was wired that way and one with the glass obscured. Another had a platform with flippers you operated with your feet. But nothing like that at this one.

There were vendors there. Show t-shirts, of course, but booths by machine makers and hawkers of supplies. There were cameras mounted over two machines and the video displayed on large monitors with pinball table aspect ratios.