Stern Controls 90% of Pinball, but the Other 10% Is Building the Future
The past, present, and future share a show floor at Pinball Expo 2026
At Pinball Expo 2026 in Schaumburg, Illinois, Stern Pinball still dominates roughly 90 percent of the market, yet the show floor revealed a thriving fringe: Multimorphic's P3 platform swaps playfields and ships a free SDK, a browser-based Pinball Construction Set revives Bill Budge's 1982 classic, and homebrew tables like Shaolin Flow let players flip with punches. Pinball's revival, it turns out, is being built from the basement up.
At any given time, Stern controls 90 percent of the current pinball market, and everybody else splits the rest.
- Projectiboga
My all time favorite was Beat the Clock. It was in the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, NJ. Instead of three or five balls you got an allotment of time. The hook was you could pause the clock and until it restart you had extended time.
https://pinside.com/pinball/machine/beat-the-clock
I liked several others too, I'm old enough I recall the time before video games being born in 1968. Pinball has the visceral feel once you master the gentle nudge and flipper skills.
- danielodievich
About a decade ago I took my then little children to Seattle Pinball Museum for a day of tremendous fun for everyone. The machines were rated on 1-10 "grin factor" scale They had a machine there that wasn't your typical pinball, it was twice as wide and it shot a stream of balls from the center like a machine gun, in a continuous stream and you controlled the direction above with goals of hitting the targets that would light up. The balls would cascade down and get fed back into continuous loop.
This machine's "grin factor" was marked as 11 (naturally!!) and yeah, it was tremendous fun. It felt like I imagine it feels operating a seriously big machine gun! There was momentum of the heavy steel balls in the feeder so one couldn't swing it around willy nilly, so one had to really put some force into it. It was also really loud, and the feedback from the pusher vibrating through the handles was very visceral. Loved that machine!
- mrandish
> it’s a very exciting time to be a pinball fan.
Indeed it is. I've been a pinball enthusiast since the 90s and in recent years pinball is seeing a truly incredible resurgence. In the early 2000s the number of places you could play pinball was lower than any time since the 1930s and the world was down to one (barely) surviving pinball manufacturer who very nearly went bankrupt in 2010. Yet in the last decade the number of manufacturers, new titles launched and machines sold has kept increasing fueled by a new generation of barcades and a flood of new home machine owners and collectors driving creativity and new technologies into the hundred year-old hobby.
One thing TFA didn't mention is that even small towns now have growing hobby communities based around leagues and tournaments. Tournaments are usually at barcades or local pin shows and weekly league nights are held at private collector's homes where all the machines are on free play. We've lived in our suburb for years with no idea there were nine houses within a mile of ours with 10+ pinball machines hiding inside. It's not uncommon to walk into a league night and get to play a rare, lovingly restored, museum-grade classic pin you'll never see in a barcade.
Local leagues are welcoming to newcomers, can be very social and are the closest I've felt to the vibe of my dad's bowling league or my mom's bridge club. A few years ago my wife joined a league and now dozens of 'Pin Neighbors' we never knew existed are new friends. I […]