Observers of the Seattle pinball scene know intuitively that pinball has had a big resurgence in recent years. Still, seeing the graph below is impressive. Seattle has experienced near-linear growth in the number of games on location over the course of 7 years!
We seem to have hit a plateau for games on location, and it’s hard to imagine we could support any other major venues. But the graph shows similar past lengths of flat growth, and new locations are still coming. We may not yet have reached the mountaintop.
Seattle’s pinball boom has been concentrated to a few significant locations: Seattle Pinball Museum, Full Tilt Ballard, Add-a-Ball, and Flip Flip Ding Ding. Those four locations account for 35% of Seattle’s 281 games.
Removing SPM’s additions shows almost no change in the ID
Fish Tales was once Seattle’s most popular game. From mid-2009 to mid-2011 there were as many as 12 Fish Tales on location. Even the current most popular and perennial favorite Medieval Madness only has 11 machines on location. Despite its one-time popularity, there are now just 5 Fish Tales in Seattle.
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Amazing, thanks for putting this together!
“it’s hard to imagine we could support any other major venues” – Since these words were written all of these (major) locations have opened: Houndstooth, Raygun, Full Tilt Capitol Hill, The Ice Box, Coindexter’s and Jupiter. There have also been more medium size locations (3-6 pins) such as Black Cat, Lock and Keel and Populex Brewery. Add to this the locations in the immediate outer city (8-Bit, Another Castle Edmonds, Lucky Liquor, all of Bremerton) and Seattle’s total number of pinball machines have probably doubled since this appeared in Skill Shot in 2014.