Dirtypool Pinball - PODCAST - An Exploration Of The Pinball Industry

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Mike Vinikour (MXV) has had one of the more unusual careers in pinball. From testing games at Williams/Bally Midway during the arcade era, to competitive Mortal Kombat, to helping shape modern Stern Pinball software and rules, he's been involved with games from several different angles.

In Episode 35 ...

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Jason Knapp of Knapp Arcade joins Dirty Pool Podcast to talk about running one of the few dedicated pinball news sites still trying to keep track of the hobby in real time.

We get into pinball journalism, how stories are chosen, how much work goes into keeping information accurate,and what it’s ...

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Steve Bowden has one of the stranger paths through modern pinball. Tournament player. Broadcaster. Rules analyst. Designer. deeproot employee. American Pinball employee during one of the company’s rougher stretches. A lot of the modern hobby overlaps with Steve somewhere along the way.

The conve...

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The P3 has carved out a very different lane in modern pinball. Swappable modules, a ball tracked LCD playfield, physical mechs, and a platform that approaches game design from a completely different angle than most traditional machines. Gerry joins the Dirty Pool Podcast to talk about the origins of the...

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It's podcast time with RAYDAY! Raymond Davidson of Stern Pinball known for titles like Rush, Metallica Remaster and of course Fall of the Empire. We’re lining up topics around rules design from a player mindset, how code evolves after location testing, and how modern games balance competitive dep...

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We’ve got Kaite Martin joining the Dirty Pool Podcast. You may know her from Scorbit, NYC Pinball, or from helping keep the New York scene visible and active. We’re digging into tournament culture, media coverage, what it takes to grow pinball in a major city, and how newer players find thei...

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💰 Kaneda’s Pinball Podcast

http://www.patreon.com/kanedapinball

Back to the table with another long-form conversation, this time with Chris Kooluris from Kaneda’s Pinball Podcast.

Starting with where that voice comes from and how unfiltered commentary fits into a hobby that usually lea...

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I sit down with the highest ranked pinball player in the world, Jason Zahler, to get into what competitive pinball actually looks like at that level. We get into his early start, climbing to number one, how he approaches tournaments, what separates top players from everyone else, and how he keeps his ed...

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Abe Flips from AbeFlips.com joins the Dirty Pool Podcast to talk about his new instructional series Mastering Pinball and the state of modern pinball education. Abe has become one of the most respected teachers in the hobby through his clear breakdowns of real control techniques, helping players move be...

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Ron Richards joins to talk about the origin of Scorbit, the platform that lets pinball machines report their own scores. What started as a way to automatically capture game results became a hardware system that does much more.

The Scorbitron reads score data from the game and sends it to the cloud, letting players track sc...

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▶ Previous Episode

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This one isn’t about defining pinball culture. It’s about exploring what it means to different groups and why those meanings don’t always line up. Episode 25 of the Dirty Pool Podcast features Cliff Albert aka DJ Wa...

Pinball artist Christopher Franchi joins the show to talk about designing art for fast-moving, physical games where nothing stays still and everything has to read instantly. We get into how pinball’s mechanical constraints shape composition, how Spooky Pinball’s visual identity comes together, and why horror themes only work when restraint is part of the design. Franchi breaks down collaboration with designers and progr...

This episode traces Total Nuclear Annihilation from its earliest idea through to a finished production game. Scott Danesi walks through how TNA started as a very specific reaction to modern pinball, how the layout, rules, sound, and scoring all evolved together, and what had to change once it moved from a personal project into a real commercial product. We talk early prototypes, design compromises and manufacturing realities. It&...

Ryan Gratzer from Pinball Map drops by to untangle how the world’s most obsessive pinball location tracker actually works and how your favorite arcades lineup changes the second you visit. This one digs into Ryan's pinball origins, community reporting, app evolution, and the odd psychology of people who will happily move a mountain to report a broken slingshot but won’t like, comment and subscribe. Also there's a lot o...

Bug from Spooky Pinball joins to break down the creative chaos behind Beetlejuice, from shaping the theme into a playable world to the collaboration across design, code, art, and sound that gives the game its personality. We talk problem-solving during development, how rules evolve once players get their hands on the machine, and what it takes for a boutique studio to ship something this ambitious.

It’s a grounded look at S...

Counterflip absolutely makes the best pinball t-shirts... Shea sits down with us and we get into everything from his pinball favorites to why making a genuinely good T-shirt feels like a boss battle. We talk about how printing goes wrong, how his first business attempt at 15 tanked spectacularly, and how he rebuilt it into Counterflip by focusing on real quality instead of the disposable stuff most people print on.

We dig into wh...

What does it take to build the brain behind modern pinball? Aaron Davis, founder of FAST Pinball, joins the show to talk about designing the hardware that powers homebrews, boutique manufacturers, and the next generation of game coders. We dig into the origins of the FAST platform, how open hardware changed the indie landscape, and what it really means to make a control system reliable enough for production but flexible enough for ...

Brad Albright is the creative force behind the 2D layered art of Winchester Mystery House, bringing the entire cabinet, playfield, and backglass to life with his signature dimensional style. His work bridges vintage illustration and modern surrealism—capturing the mansion’s eerie beauty while still keeping it fun and tactile.

In this episode, Brad talks about how his multi-layered approach evolved into the game's dist...

The next stop in our Winchester Mystery House series introduces Eric Priepke — the software engineer and programmer behind the house’s mind-bending code. From scripting the complex logic that ties every haunted room together to balancing the chaotic layers of light, sound, and animation, Eric helped the house come alive in ways that only a true programmer could appreciate. His precision work is what makes each mode flow...