A lil’ ditty ‘bout location timestamps.

Activity on the website picks up on the weekends. The weekends, after all, are when many people get a chance to hop around and play pinball. Friday and Saturday evenings, especially, seem to produce the most updates. Some of these updates are drunkenly typed machine comments (which can be pretty entertaining!), but many are quality map updates: machines added to spots, machines removed, comments about machines. We’re always thankful that people have their local pinball map in mind when they’re out and about. It’s cool that they (you) take a moment to make sure it’s up to date.

When we first launched this site back in 2008, it was the Portland Pinball Map. Then people in other cities wanted to use our interface+app, so we created separate maps for them. We figured that distinct maps would encourage locals to “own” their map and keep it up to date. And distinct maps would help contain the data, so that admins would have a better chance of verifying the validity of data. And users would have a higher chance of updating the data, given that the regions were centered around populated areas with active pinball scenes. Plus, we didn’t want to attempt to map every machine in the entire country. That had been done before, and it resulted in many locations in far off areas that are never updated.

Mike Miller, a pinball enthusiast in the Bay Area, created a fun short pinball movie. “Flipped” shows us the sad days of yore when pinball lovers had to blindly venture around looking for a lone machine trapped in the rear of a convenience store. But those days are behind us! The movie then transitions into the glorious present, where there are plentiful quantities of leagues and places to play lots of pinball. And, there are cool maps to help you find nearby machines!

Feature update: We added a button to the top of the home page that says, “Find Your Closest Map.” When clicked, you’ll be prompted to share your location (basically using this logic). If you share it, the browser will automatically take you to your closest regional map.