71 Days: Pinball Inflation

I'm a little behind on the blog, but catching up, so here goes :-)

There's really few better father/son bonding experiences than a pinball museum

Anne Margaret's boob lights up. Perfect.

On Friday, John and I visited the Asheville Pinball Museum. I can't say enough about this place, it's so cool! For a $13 admission you get to play all you like on dozens of pinball and classic video games. They are all set to "free play," so you're 13 bucks is all you all need. They limit the number of visitors, so you'll need to get there at opening as John and I did or call ahead and check to see how long the wait is. This is a great system, though, as it keeps it from getting too crowded and having people wait for a game to play. We jumped from table to table for a couple hours and had a complete blast.

Turned out to be both John's and my favorite

The pinball machines ranged from a fairly modern Lord of the Rings to some really simple older ones from the sixties. One thing really struck me.....pinball has been hit with inflation. I don't mean the price to play, but rather the scoring. The oldest machines had four digit score counters (they flipped after 9,999) and the bumpers got you ten points. The machines from the '70s added a digit and the bumpers generally got you 100 points. The newest machines were digital and went up into the tens of millions, one I noticed required 15,000,000 for a free game.

Of course part of this that as technology grew there were more "things" that got one points, so I suppose you had to hike up the total possible. But I wonder if some of it was sociological. I'm thinking people liked scoring high and moved to machines that gave them a higher point total for about the same skill level. It's human nature, I think. And it's kind of funny to see it play out in pinball machines.

As one of my favorite college professors would say, "Someone needs to do a thesis on that."