Wedgehead Pinball Podcast

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Good friend of the show and all-around expert solid state assassin, Ty Palmer joins us on the show once again for his SIXTH appearance to defend his DOTH game, 1979's Future Spa.

Designed by George Christian and released by Bally in their golden era, this game is a super wide body with a very weird and very horny art package, but it&apos...

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This episode is all about the mystery and mystique surrounding Bally's best game designer from their early solid state golden era, previously covered in our Susan B. Anthony Years episode.

And just like last time, we are joined by local Solid-State assassin and good friend Ty Palmer to discuss what is all of our favorite designer fro...

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This episode we discuss Stern pinball's interesting way of approaching certain licensed games that they make, including their recent games Dungeons & Dragons and King Kong, before we dive into the differences with their earlier Marvel games like Spider Man, Iron Man, or Avengers to what they make nowadays with Deadpool, X-Men, Venom o...

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This episode was written by Alex, about how to get the most out of a Pinball Show.  As the popularity of pinball has grown in the last 5-10 years, so too have the number of Pinball Shows/Expos/Conventions, and there is probably one near you too.

Shows can be overwhelming, so listen to Alex & Alan discuss their tips for getting the most ou...

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In this edition of DOTH, Marcus Petersen from the previous episode about creating a pinball scene in a rural town, is back to defend his love for Sega's final pinball machine: 1999's South Park.

I am sure everybody has heard of the show at this point, but this game was released after the first two seasons of the show. The pinball machine is no...

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This episode we are joined on the show with Marcus Petersen, who became a pinball operator in Lassen County, in Northern California near the Lassen National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Susanville is the biggest city in the county with less than 10,000 residents, so Marcus really had a small pond when he decided to first start operating pinball m...

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This the follow-up episode to Episode 76: Original Themes, and in this episode, we explore the licensing wars in the early 90s through the lens of Joe Kaminkow at Data East pinball and their shift from original themes to only making licensed games.  We talk about how Williams and Gottlieb follow suit and compare sales strategies amongst the companies.

Th...

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This episode we are joined by the Underboss of the Stern Family, Mr. George Gomez to discuss the single most popular location game in the Portland pinball scene and celebrate the 20th Anniversary of its release.

George tells us stories about the production of the game, working with Lyman Sheats and Chris Granner, as well as answering our questi...

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On this episode, we have a listener from the New England area Josh who wants to talk about the first Dungeons & Dragons pinball machine released in 1987 by Bally.  It's a famously hard game with very weird inlanes, so it should be no surprise that it is not well loved by most pinheads.

But Josh came on to set the record straight, and respond to ...

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This is a good one, where we discuss how Williams was able to prove that during the renaissance period of the late 1980s and 1990s, they were able to design, manufacture, and most importantly, SELL the crap outta their original theme games.

In this episode, we talk about how Williams beat their competition with original themes and then discuss why almo...

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Scott Danesi rejoins us on the show to defend his love of Gottlieb Premier's Raven, the lowest rated game that we have ever featured on the show!  Scott goes on the record with why he thinks Raven is actually great and confronts and addresses all the bad internet reviews.

Standard warning: We curse on this show; in case you weren't aware of ...

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In this episode, we are joined on the show by the patron saint of making pinball challenging again, Scott Danesi.  Scott works a full time job at Pinball Life as a multidisciplinary engineer, creating replacement pinball parts for all of us to benefit from, but he also famously has designed 3 (as of this recording) production pinball mach...

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In this episode we discuss the final chapter of Gottlieb as a pinball manufacturer.  The prevailing narrative around these games is that they're all terrible, but that's simply not true.  There was a bunch of talented individuals working at Gottlieb at this time, making some very interesting games on extremely tight deadlines, with few resources and we wanted to highlight...

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We are joined on the show by our friend Todd Robinett, to discuss creating a pinball scene from scratch in a small town near the Oregon Coast.  He operates pins in his two businesses: the Merry Time Bar, and the Labor Temple Diner.

When Todd first moved out to Astoria, there were no pinball machines.  Now Astoria has 45 pinball machines on location in a town of 10,000 people, and To...

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IFPA director, and former women's world champion Zoe Vrabel is back on the show to discuss the past, present, and future of women's competitive pinball.  Zoe tells us all about the rise of competitive women's pinball, and what she would like to see in the future.

Stream the Women's World Championship March 29th-30th on Twitch through Backhand Pinball

Local Portland Women...

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This episode our special guest Glenn Waechter (of the Saw Homebrew machine) joins us on the show, to Die on the Hill for Stern's 2001 game, High Roller Casino.

This early stern, rare non licensed title wasn't well received upon its release, as evidenced by all the bad reviews we found, and it's low overall rating on pinside.  But it was loaded with cool m...

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This episode is all about the history of the licensed band pin starting way back in the late 1970s, with a couple dots in the 1990s, and finally into the explosion of them in the 2010s until today.

We talk about the effect it has had on the industry, and why, love 'em or hate 'em, old man band pins are here to stay.

Warning: If you don't ...

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This is the finale episode of our 3-part trilogy of episodes that began with the first episode: Pinball Buyer's Guide, continued in our episode Pinball Maintenance, and finally culminates in this episode right here.

Alex and Alex talk about coming full circle on a pinball machine and give you some hot tips for kicking that giant box of lights down the road.