Pinball Map Blog

New Fields: All Ages and Free Play

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:20:20 -0700

For years now, we have been getting regular requests for two additional location fields: parents/caregivers want see whether a place is “all ages”; and people want to see what type of payment the place accepts.

Side note: See below (fine if you skip to it) for how we could use your help!

Adding new fields to locations is something that we never do (unless there is a way to programatically populate the data). This is because a new field means that we/you have to populate 12,600 entries (times 2 for two new fields), which is a lot. And it also means the interface will become more busy/complicated. So despite the requests for these tags, we were very hesitant to do it.

The additional consideration was that it’s actually not simple to implement these correctly, and we ended up discussing how best to do it for years (and whether we even wanted to add them). For example, for all ages, some places are all ages until 8pm, or half the machines are in an all ages portion and half aren’t, do we track 21+ vs 18+ (etc.). For payment type, places take tokens, coins, payrange app, many other apps, RFID, or they’re free play at certain times and coin drop at other times, or the entire place is free play except for two machines, ETC. What is the best way to handle all of this??

Note that most of these discussions occurred “publicly” in our Discord, not as some internal developer-only discussion. We are interested in ideas from a wide audience.

Much of our hesitation stemmed from the understanding that attempting to accommodate every single case would add unwanted complications for users and would result in messy data. We needed to focus purely on the core problems. And after all this talk, we think that we were able to distill these fields down to the essence. Will this make everyone happy? No! But that’s ok. That’s not the goal. The goal is to solve the most pressing problems.

So, what do people actually want? They want a simple location filter for “all ages” that excludes the places their kids can’t step into. So we added the value “Yes”. Given that a pure Yes is not always correct, we also added “At Times”. But we still kept a simply binary (?) filter: All or All Ages. If a user filters for “All Ages” they get results for both of those values, but in the details it explains which one is All Ages At Times, and then you can read the location description for further details. For the sake of managing data and seeing which locations have been edited, we also added a “No” field. This field isn’t used at all in filtering or display or anything. There is not enough need to filter for “places kids can’t go to” and doing so - again - would complicate the interface. But if that’s something you really wanted, you could get mostly there by filtering for Location Type: Bar, Bar/Arade, etc.

Payment type was even simpler. We realized the core thing people want to know is: is the place Free Play? Ya know, coin drop vs free play. Given that like 98% percent of places are coin drop in some form, there really isn’t a need to track coin drop. And there isn’t a need to track all the different flavors of coin drop. People, in general, don’t care (although based on map comments people do not like paying via app or RFID card). They simply want to know if a place has an entrance fee and then they can play unlimited games for free in an allotted span of time.

Anyway, so now it’s live. We pulled the trigger, spent a week dialing it in (such as adding tips for what to select, displaying these fields, and so on). We initially populated the all ages field using the location types, which is a good first step and probably gets us 90% there in terms of accuracy and completion. Some location types are very obviously all ages. Some are almost definitely not. And some could go either way (and for some of those, we opted to not tag them at all, so that they can be manually updated by users). And for the Free Play tag, the initial population was based on words or phrases in the location descriptions.

As of this writing, these fields are in an unstable state. They still need a lot of review and editing before they are settled.

If you’ve read this far:

Here is where we could use some help

These four location types are mostly untagged for all ages (they only total like 380 locations):

Club
Casino
Music Venue
Pool Hall

Filter the map for those types, and go through the list, see which ones are not tagged, and then fix!

This location type is tagged as NOT all ages, but… some of them might be, or might be at times:

Bar/Arcade

This location type is tagged as all ages, but it may be wrong in some cases (like for cannibis shops and adult emporiums and Bar/Restaurant that actually just bars… with food):

Shop
Bar/Restaurant

And yeah, check for places that you know are FREE PLAY and see if they’re correctly tagged.

THANK YOU.

Side note: the creation of these two fields closed out our last two remaining issues in the Github website repo. We’re done! Now no one will write to us asking for stuff, because we officially did it all.

More screenshots:

Pinball Map API Tokens

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:20:20 -0700

We have always been happy to provide an open, friction-free public API for any developers that want to use it. This has encouraged a diverse group of people to make interesting uses of the data: Students simply wanting to learn how to use an API; analytics-minded folks who like to explore the data in interesting ways; businesses that want to easily list their line-up on their website; folks like Matchplay that use it to quickly import machine line-ups for a tournament. These uses align with the intention of the API: to make the data available so others can make interesting things.

Most of the time, people approach us with their plan and we work together to find a good solution.

There have always been people here and there who grabbed the data (often very inefficiently) and made a “where to find pinball” site with it - basically cloning our core functionality, and sometimes with no attribution. Lately, though, with the barrier to entry so low, basically everyone who is working on a pinball app/website of any sort is slapping on a pinball map. Making a pinball rules app? An operator maintenance app? It appears that whatever you’re doing, your LLM is going to suggest “now let’s help people find where to play.” After spending a couple hours completely hallucinating API endpoints, they settle on something like, “query the Pinball Map API and load 6,000 locations every time someone visits the site, and then poll these 98 other endpoints once an hour” (or something equally bad).

Every week there are about two of these new apps popping up. It can be a lot to deal with for a hobby project like ours, and we don’t have a ton of time and patience for it.

Our goals are always to provide you with a fast, reliable, and easy to use and update map. And these apps, while useful in advertising Pinball Map, are devouring our resources and effectively taking people off-site for a very similar map experience, thereby reducing Pinball Map’s chances of receiving updates (which will slowly drain Pinball Map of its usefulness to so many people).

Thousands of people have put in thousands of hours of work over 18 years to develop and maintain this data, and this is its home.

In the end, we’ve come to the decision to require an API key on requests. Keys must be requested and approved. And they can be revoked!

Go here to request an API token. You must provide a detailed plan of your use. (Note that since adding this requirement, nearly all denials occur because the requester doesn’t follow that one basic instruction.)

From today - July 16 - we will have a 2 week period before the requirement is in place. On July 30 the gate will be closed and you’ll need a key.

We don’t have a way to contact everyone who is currently using the API, because for the most part we don’t know who you are. So, sorry if your app breaks.

And as always, we are happy to discuss ways to efficiently make use of the data.

Pinball Life List

Sat, 16 May 2026 09:20:20 -0700

Have you ever dreamed of keeping track of every single machine you’ve ever played, so that if someone asks, “Hey, have you played Joker Poker?” you can answer them within 30 seconds? Then we’ll be pleased to tell you that we just added a table to the database and various buttons on the app and website, which altogether will fulfil your dream.

Here’s how it works:

Any time you add a score to a machine, that machine is added to your list.
If you’re looking at the machines in a location listing, each machine will tell you if you’ve already marked it as played, and if not there will be a button to mark it.
Your User Profile will not only contain a list of all of these machines you’ve played, but also a form where you can search/scroll and quickly add more machines to your list.
And some further details: In your profile, you can “filter” your list in order to quickly find a machine.
If you have scores, the scores will be listed in that list. If you don’t have a score, then you’ll have an option to remove the machine from your list in the event that you mistakenly added it (to your list).

That’s pretty much it. It’s a simple, but effective feature.

Also, if you already maintain a gigantic list and want to integrate it into Pinball Map, we will help you. Get in touch via admin@pinballmap.com. But, if your data is in very poor shape, then our willingness to help will decrease. Ideally, your data will either contain Pinball Map machine ID values or OPDB ID values. Those can be found in this JSON endpoint. Less ideally, your data will contain really clean machine names that… pretty much perfectly match our machine names.

Pinball Map App 5.4.3

Mon, 11 May 2026 09:20:20 -0700

Hot off the high heels of our big v.5.4.0 app release we have another hefty one with some great new features.

We are pushing hard to close out as many github issues as we can, and we are pretty close to being done.

View, upload, and delete location photos. This closes out a github issue from 2018!! We had the API endpoints ready to go for many years. But that was only half the battle. Now the battle is over.
Added a new Filter Recently Activity option: Saved Locations. It limits activity to only your saved/favorited locations.
Let users select a “flag” icon (via profile screen). Show that flag icon next to user names. In addition to country/state flags, we also added “Misc” flags. If you have ideas for more flags, let us know!
Added email and phone buttons that copy operator contact information so you can directly contact operators that opt in to this feature. Read about that feature here.
Updated FAQ, including adding a table of content to jump to sections and better new operator instructions.
Added an Account Settings screen in the User Profile for changing email and password or deleting account. Apple kind of has a requirement for this. We always fulfilled the requirement by linking to the website profile page where users could do this. But once a year Apple would reject an app update because of this, and then we would have to appeal (and the appeal would always succeed). We got tired of this rejection/appeal process, so we resolved the root issue.

In addition to the above, we spent a lot of time examining server responses when using the app, and we cleaned up quite a few functions that were over aggressively querying the server for data. As a result, the app will now be faster and smoother!

What about bug fixes? This will probably jinx things, but we have actually had no bug reports from v5.4.0.

Operator Direct Contact

Mon, 11 May 2026 08:20:20 -0700

As of this writing, over 450 operators are listed on Pinball Map. 300 of the operators receive daily digest emails containing activity information on their machines.

We’ve been doing this for 18 years, and we carefully consider how best to serve operators while at the same time making sure the site is useful for all users. While our current setup is appreciated by most operators, it was recently suggested that users should have an option to directly contact operators. That’s a good idea, which gives users more options without removing any features (some operators want to disable public comments on their locations - which is an obviously no-go).

So we added this feature. Operators can opt in to be contacted by email or phone or both. The feature is simple. Pinball Map does not facilitate the interactions; instead, we just share the direct contact information. It is displayed as a phone and email icon. When users click, the value is copied to their clipboard, and from there they can call/text and email.

For more information about what we offer for operators, see this section of the FAQ. And see this old blog post where we were first soliciting operator info.

Stats Page

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 07:20:20 -0700

This is old news going way back to 2025. But we didn’t announce it, and better late than never.

We made a Stats page that contains a whole bunch of interesting data.

Such as:

Top 25 machines (currently at locations)
25 biggest locations
Top 10 cities by number of locations
Top 10 cities by number of machines
Top 25 users (# of edits)
Annual map edits from 2018 to today
Pinball machines made in 2026, added to locations up to now
Pinball machines made in 2025, added to locations up to now

Those last three are shown as charts.

The data is cached every hour, just to ensure the requests don’t hit the db too hard.

Many of the items are links to map results.

We also added this to the app in the most recent app update (except the charts).

Anyway, it’s another way to learn about the map and explore the data.

Pinball Map App 5.4.0

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:20:20 -0700

A year ago we wrote a really good blog post called Zoomy Map. Since then we have apparently had nothing to blog about. We meant to do a 2025 wrap-up post… but here we are.

Zoomy Map laid the foundation for this latest app update. It was basically a proof of concept for the logic required to make a map that can load 12,000+ map markers in a second, with no performance issues. As noted in that post, the logic was basically to split apart the map data request and the “location list” data request.

We even POCed it in the app last year, but it required a lot of additional work to get right. But at least we knew that those pesky “zoom limits” (where you could only zoom out so far before we said “hey wait”) would be eradicated soon enough.

Backing up a sec, app release 5.3.0 was in August 2023. Since then there have been 42 5.3.x releases. All exquisite releases with many great features, but still none had quite the oomph to crest that hill into 5.4.x-land. We knew that zoomy app would get us there. To be honest, zoomy app is the feature hanging over our heads for years and years. Zoom limits are a lame technical issue. The past couple years’ work was our version of a sprint to knock out our most important issues and finally feel that the app and website are in a “stable” state, and that perhaps we can chill out.

So yeah, this 5.4.0 app release removes the zoom limits and now you can see the entire world. But that’s not all! We closed 18 of the 25 github issues with this app update. It is packed with sweet features. What’s funny is that there are virtually no design changes. We spent the last couple of years creating API endpoints with a masterplan in mind for the app, and this update is essentially wiring in those endpoints.

Here is a rundown.

Zoomy app

Remove zoom limits - now you can zoom out to the entire world.
Updated map marker colors (based on number of machines).

Pagination

Added pagination to the Location List, and Recent Activity and Location Activity feeds.

Previously we were just fetching the most recent 200 items. But no more! Now it’s 50 per page (which is faster than 200)

Global Activity

Added a “Global Activity” feed option to Recent Activity so you can see edits across the entire map.

Your Activity

Added a “Your Activity” filter to the activity feeds so you can just see your own edits.

Machine Activity

Added a “Select Machines” option in Recent Activity so that you can limit activity to particular machines (can include more than one).

5 New Filters, Plus Multiselect

Select multiple machines.
Select multiple location types.
Choose whether you want see locations where a particular machine (or machine group) has Stern Insider Connected enabled.
Filter by manufacturer (can select multiple, and this also filters the machine selection list).
Filter by machine type (All or EM, and this also filters the machine selection list).
Filter by span of machine years - start and end years.
Filter by whether the location has at least one Stern IC machine (any machine).

High Score Tracking Revamp

Track your highest score across any copy of a machine. Displays highest score on machine details screen (and user profile).
Exclude scores from other users - both from machine details screens and from the activity feeds. You can see other people’s scores if you select the “High Scores” filter in activity feeds.
Profile screen shows your highest score per machine, as well as some high score statistics.

Show Other User’s Profiles

Usernames are now clickable, so you view their profile.

Stats Page

Added a Stats page (linked in About) that shows cool map statistics.

And More, Such As

Confirmation modal for IC toggle button.
Added a Share button to bottom sheet on map screen.
Notify user when a Suggested Location appears to be a duplicate.
Speed up initial app load.
Location details should load faster.
Map results should load faster.
Better error message handling for disabled users.

Do More With RSS

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 07:20:20 -0700

Two years ago we posted about how there are RSS feeds for individual machines, which lists a particular machine geting added to places.

Those are cool, but were they enough? They weren’t.

So we enhanced them. And now they can do more.

Support arrays of machines (e.g., multiple machine IDs)
Support a location ID
Support latitude and longitude in order to show nearby machines being added.

Here’s an example: http://pinballmap.com/location_machine_xrefs.rss?machine_id[]=4615&machine_id[]=4616&machine_id[]=4617&lat=34.05223&lon=-118.24368

That is showing the three versions of Pokemon being added around Los Angeles.

These are the params:

machine_id[]=
location_id[]=
lat=
lon=
max_distance=

Distance defaults to 30 miles, but can be adjusted.

machine IDs can be found here: https://pinballmap.com/api/v1/machines.json?no_details=1

location IDs can reliably be found by looking up a location on the website and then seeing the id in the url or in the permalink.

Have fun!

Zoomy Map

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 07:20:20 -0700

Today we deployed a website update that achieved something we’ve wanted for a long time: no zoom limits! For so long, we had it so you could only zoom the map out so far - this was due to performance issues related to loading thousands of locations on the map (and in the results section). We spent the last month tackling this issue. It might not necessarily be done, and it’s certainly not perfect, but we think it’s cool! Check it out.

The performance issues were overcome by doing these things: switching to a different method for displaying map data and markers (from “markers” to symbol layers); and limiting the number of results that show up on the left hand side.

We also changed the icon symbology. You can see a key for it in that screenshot. The icons change as you zoom in out, and they start showing the number of machines as you zoom in more (sometimes these labels overlap and it’s ugly).

Due to the nice and lean way the data is being constructed, AND because we host our own map and don’t have to worry about “map load quotas”, we made it so the map autoloads stuff when you first visit it. No more wondering what to search. We used to show a “near” button right away that you could click and the browser would request your location and then show nearby locations. Now we switched to an IP geolocation database to automatically obtain an approximation of your location, provided by MaxMind. We store that db ourselves and do a lookup based on your public IP address, then we zoom super far out and show locations in the area. If your IP doesn’t have a matching lat/lon, we fallback to showing the United States.

We hope all this makes the map more fun and easier to explore!

Next up we’ll do something similar in the app.

Year in Review 2024

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 06:20:20 -0800

What is happening.

The best way to reflect on the past year is to copy paste statistics with very little commentary. 2024 marked the 16th year of mapping pinball on Pinball Map.

We resurrected the podcast (from the grave). https://pod.pinballmap.com

Scott and Ryan were guests on a podcast. See Wedgehead podcast episode #63

We started using Bluesky. And we still post to Mastodon. And we stopped posting to Twitter.

We started a discord.

We branched out from Patreon and added a Ko-fi option for supporting the map and buying stuff. Thank you for supporting Pinball Map!

We write a weekly “best location” column in the This Week in Pinball newsletter.

We’ve remained a commie website that does not monetize anything, has no social aspects, is not desperate for your attention, shares data through a free public API, and relies on community contributions.

We deleted 1,629 locations in 2024. Places that no longer have pinball.

But it’s ok, 3,372 locations were submitted to the map! (it’s easier to look up “submitted” rather than approved/added, but we can assume most of those were approved.)

What else?

Over 25,800 machines added to locations.
Over 20,000 machines removed from locations.
Over 19,400 machine comments.
Over 14,800 toggles of whether a machine is Stern Insider Connected (or not).
Over 3,800 machine scores.
Over 7,000 line-ups confirmed.
Over 2,800 location infos edited.
Over 380 messages were sent to our contact form.

17 app releases.

Buncha website updates with many new features.

There are 362 operators in the system.

There are over 29,000 registered users (over 6,600 new ones this year). 93 of whom are administrators.

Our robust FAQ has helped clear up confusion and quiet down complaints.

What’s next?

The greatest way to know what’s being worked on is to look at the issues on the github repos. It’s all there!

https://github.com/pinballmap/pbm-react/issues

https://github.com/pinballmap/pbm/issues

The thing we’re most excited about is trying to remove the “zoom limits” in the app. Can we do it?! Maybe.