Glad I could play a role in one your sweet pinball moments.
One of mine is when DDT and I dual-GCed at Shanghai Tunnel in Portland. We were side by side, him on Addams Family and me on Getaway, and our games ended at the exact same time. clack clack clack clack. DUAL-GC!
I saw that on the live stream and thought how awesome that was. I was surprised when the commentators didnāt mention it at all! It was cool to watch.
Hell, I thought it was awesome, and it cost me $2000 to watch.
A pretty funny thing happened recently on my Star Trek PRO. At one point during a multiball i suddenly had three balls in the plunger lane during PD1 with Away Team running. So all top rollover lanes were lit. Plunged all three balls, and they all went up to the rollover lanes collecting all three shots simultaneously. Sweet! 
I loooooove blindly shooting the Double / Triple Jackpot on TAF.
Also, once, when I was playing High Roller Casino, I attempted to stack Super Loops and Slot Machine Multiball together. It turns out if you have Super Loops active, the magnet that normally feeds the ball into the bumpers is disabled, so a shot to any loop collects the Jackpot for both the loop you actually shot and the loop on the opposite side. Because of this, I was able to score the Super Duper Mega Extreme Jackpot for the first time ever.
Four chicks beat pinball superstar team on Frontier at Pinbrawl!
Hitting Do or Die for 49.x million and grabbing the GC on a route IM on about my 10th-ever game of IM, about a year ago.
Getting to meet @Lobster at the NC Oursler benefit last year and losing an epic game of LOTR to him, 86m to 84m.
Playing my first-ever game of Congo for the 5th-8th place game at the NC State Championships at Flippers last month and winning by a billion+ in a group that included my very talented son and a top-800 player.
Proud PAPA moments: At his second major tournament, watching my son Andrew get narrowly pipped at the end of qualifying by uber-talented Joshua Henderson at PAPA 15 juniors (http://legacy.papa.org/papa15/live/J.html); an earlier entry got Andrew the GC on MM (78m) to a great round of applause on his first-ever game of MM; another entry included a 1.4b on WCS that was also a #1.
True story about Bowens Shadow warm-up at Ifpa 9 -
I was coming into the room where the game was set up and saw him crack off that sequence. He was super pumped up and ready to go. He looked very on point.
Soā¦ I proceeded to say that I needed to go use the bathroom. I went in the bathroom down the hall, and just stood in there for 5 minutes doing nothing. Then came out, Bowen was cooled off and wasnāt exactly on point anymore. XD
Back when I was still relatively new to pinball, I reached a point where I felt like I was just never going to be able to get good or pull off the skill techniques I had seen in videos. We have a Star Trek: the Next Generation at the bar I work at, and I decided that if I could make it to final frontier, there was hope for me yet.
For weeks I just plugged away at that machine and practiced, practiced, practiced. I got close several times but kept on falling short. One night after work, I just decided, ātonight is the night.ā I raced through my closing duties and headed straight for the machine. After about three hours, I was almost ready to give up and started up a last round of games. Eventually, I had a good run and ended up with final frontier lit and the ball trapped on the left flipper. It was my last ball, so I had to hit it. My hands were so sweaty and shaky, and my heart was beating real fast. Then I nailed it. I screamed super loudly and looked around for someone to acknowledge me, but it was five in the morning, and all my coworkers had gone home. I donāt even remember playing out the multiball or how I did overall in the game, but I do remember turning all the lights off and locking up that night with the biggggggggest grin on my face. Iāve kept going ever since and now consider myself a pretty decent player. Iāll never forget my first wizard mode!
Man, thatās awesome. Middle-of-the-night pinball is always pretty great pinball.
For me that moment was my first Tour the Mansion. Itās funny how at that time, all you had was the local player base and the game. At the top of that mansion, a giant question mark ā¦ a mystery to solve through kicking butt.
I remember that. There is still a picture of that somewhere on the interwebs. Fred just sitting there with a dejected look on his face.
Big one for me early on in my competitive days. It was the Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown when Ironman was just released and was the tourney game for the show. I just barely qualified into top 16 in the last spot with a last minute game of BBH of all crappy games, but I was excited as I had not previously qualified for this tourney. My excitement ended quickly though as I realized being #16 I would have to play #1 qualifier. This is when all the big names still came to Colorado for Showdown and it was KME ffs!! I remember feeling I was doomed and had no chance, especially on a new Ironman game on which I had little experience. (learned a few things the previous night at the Grill 
). This feeling probably helped but I remember I was nailing the ramps and also making progress towards DoD, back when it was 50million, I had it lit; missed and then got it the second time for around 40 mill. My first Do or Dieā¦ against KMEā¦ in a tourney setting even! I drained out immediately from Jericho like a noob, but I remember turning around and getting my first clap from the gallery. I won the match and knocked him into the loserās bracket. I was so ecstatic I remember jumping up and down and running a few laps around the whole show with a huge grin on my face. Of course I lost my next two matches straight like a dumbass but I was proud I made a showing. DNO won the whole shebang that year.
Still had the commemorative picture of this wonderful moment on my hard drive.
Classic! Didnāt know that you had took this pic.
needs meme text: YOU GOT NUKEāD!!
Take your pic(k)
That early code made the game a lot more fun than what it finished at. The Whodunnit and Junkyard effect.
Fred wasted. Classic.
My own personal highlight was playing Attack from Mars against Andrei Massenkoff in the finals of the Nutcracker Duel.
In a best of 3 match, I squeaked by with a win on game 1. Basically we both sucked.
In game 2, I had about the same score (around a Billion maybe) and Andrei put the smack down. A few Billions later, I knew it was going to game 3.
Andrei started, and put up a good ball 1. Somewhere in the 3.5 billion area. I stepped up and ended just behind him at 3 billion (both of us just going for multiballs). It was a great start for me, and the best I had ever done on an AFM.
Andrei comes back on ball 2 nearly doubling his score. Ugh.
Then the magic happened. I got in a zone, and eclipsed his score. Somewhere in that blur of playing (multiball after multiball) I noticed that I had many of the major shots close to completion, but none actualy done. I recalled my PAPA tutorial research (thanks @bkerins) and was able to actually pull of the billion shot.
I, at this point, was talking while playing, letting the few spectators know that I had only ever seen that done on the tutorial! (This was past midnight, if I remember so most had left long before).
After the dust settled, I had beaten his score on ball 2 by a decent amount, but still less than a billion separating us.
Ball 3, Andrei tilted pretty quickly, and I didnāt have to play ball 3 (against Andrei F-ing Massenkoff!).
I won the match, but had to go again with him, as he had a strike to give.
We battled on GnR, and thankfully my knowledge and experience on that machine helped me give Andrei his final strike (winning 2 out of 3 games in it).
If anyone had asked me if I thought I had a chance to beat him before we started (in 2 consecutive matches) I would have said hell no.
It was by far my best tournament moment ever!
This was an actual game on Mars Trek at Pinburgh 2013. We all just stood there afterwards in disbelief!
One of my earlier wow moments was in PAPA B division qualifying several years ago. There was a Future Spa in the bank and it was playing quite difficult. No one had even come close to a million points at the time. It was late on Friday night I believe and I just got on a roll with it. Earned an extra ball. Continued to just barely break 1 million points. When I finished I turned around and I had no idea that a small crowd had formed and I got a big round of applause! That score held all weekend until it was finally beaten by one other player.
