Running a pinball and classic arcade tournament?

I am considering running a (non-ifpa sanctioned obviously) tournament involving pinball, classic arcades and ice cold beer and fire escape. Has anyone tried it?

Considering pin-golf style. Introduce the pin people to arcades and what you are trying to do and vice versa.

Or Matchplay style. Maybe making the arcardes a X minute drill when they cannot be played head to head. Don’t really want 2 hour games of Donkey Kong.

As pinball players would you take part in such an event at your local barcade?

Now you’ve completely ruined your recent vaguebooking!

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No, mostly unrealted to my vaguebooking. Trust me, that will be a big let down for anyone expecting something big.

I’d play in something like that. I suck at most video games. But most people that are good at video games suck at pinball. Then there are people like McSirTuna

I recommend a Gauntlet timed format. Set a simple goal on each machine, then time people as they play for all the goals at once. One year at CA Extreme we did this using two pins, two vids, and Ice Cold Beer. Targets were things like 3000 points on Donkey Kong, 10 million on Addams Family. Low-difficulty goals where it becomes about speed.

Pingolf works too, but it’s harder to keep track of Pingolf scores on the vids.

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The Columbus Retro League (columbusretroleague.com) that I’m a part of has done this once, combining both a game that many of us love (Windjammers) and pinball into a single event called … wait for it … Pinjammers. :wink:

The way we did it, we broke up the scoring 50/50. The first half was a Windjammers tournament, round-robin and then a semis and finals after that. The other half was pinball played using five different games. Where we were at, we had the luxury of picking different pinball genres with all five (Stern, Jersey Jack, Williams 80’s and 90’s). Our method was to have everyone play each pinball game once to put up a score, and then with every game of Windjammers you won, you got the ability to re-try one game of pinball to put up a better score.

So yes, it’s absolutely doable to combine the two things. We did it and had a blast because of the shared interests of our group, but certainly the sky’s the limit depending on what you have and want to play on each side.

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LAX does a head to head tournament every year that lets you pick any game on the floor arcade or pinball. Winner moves on.

Who picks the game?

Great question. It’s super casual so I bet it’s a coin flip. I’ve missed out the past couple years.