The Boston Pinball Map was a big map. How big was it, you ask? It covered a good portion of New England.

New website features:

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.