Walking into a pinball arcade feels close to time travel. Whether it is simply the act of playing the games, or their titles—ranging from popular comic book villains and movie star heroes to hair bands and TV shows—the nostalgia is inescapable. Pinball machines have their roots in much older, simpler games. But the machines of today are a sophisticated assortment of lights, sounds, and mechanics. These features have propelled pinball to its cultural icon status in the digital age.
There are more than 10,000 locations operating some 42,000 individual pinball machines worldwide. About 7,200 of these operators—and more than 31,000 machines—are found in the contiguous United States. This data and information comes from PinballMap.com, a crowdsourced project started in 2008. It allows the public to update and browse an ever-changing inventory of pinball machines.
Although the project features data for pinball machines all over the world, there is more data for US-based machines than others. We used this data to create the map above. It shows the location of every recorded pinball operator and the number of their machines.
Not surprisingly, most pinball machines are found in arcades (or combinations of arcades and bars, or arcades and restaurants). Breweries, museums, and bowling alleys also house a high number of pinball machines. States such as California, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Washington have numerous locations operating pinball machines. But most operators in the US (91 percent of the total) feature fewer than ten machines. In contrast, only about two dozen locations (0.3 percent) have 75 machines or more. Four locations stand out with their vast collections exceeding 300 pinball machines.
PinballMap.com provides an interactive view into this data. You can explore your own neighborhood, or cities around the world. And once you locate an arcade, you can get a list of the machines on offer and read public comments and reviews about each machine. For enthusiasts and the casually curious alike, projects like this demonstrate what’s possible when a community is formed around crowdsourced, geographic data.
More to Explore
- Check out the mobile app for PinballMap.com.
- Learn how you can use this data to develop your own applications.
