11/22/2023 0 Comments Pinball bar sacramento![]() ![]() While Zebrowitz and Thomas describe their club as rather casual in nature, Beard perceives it differently. The brewery owns all of the machines, and between the time they opened and March, they were able to host two of Durango Pinball’s tournaments. Lauter Haus currently has 12 machines up and running, but hopes to have 18 by the end of the year, Beard said. By bringing those two elements together, they’ve created the only honest-to-goodness arcade-bar in the region. While he grew up more on the video-game side of the arcade, his business partner Brad Foley was a pinball aficionado all along. opened in October of 2019, there was a set theme, but it was always supposed to have gaming, said owner and brewmaster Brandon Beard. When Farmington’s Lauter Haus Brewing Co. Their first tournament occurred during 2017’s Intergalactic Snowdown festivities. After the group grew to 20 or 30 people, they began hosting more formal tournaments, which draw up to 50 or 60 players at a time (up to a quarter of which are a new generation of kids and teens). They’d get together once a month to play as a group. Michele Zebrowitz, who runs Durango Pinball’s social media, said the group also formed about four years ago with just a handful of people as a selfie league - in which individual players go and play pinball independently and take photos of themselves with their high scores. Pinballers generally point to 2015 as the start of the new golden age. With no one to maintain them, the random machines you’d find in gas stations and restaurants fell into disrepair in the 2000s, and pinball nearly died.īut, with the advent of arcade-bars in major cities, and as the generations that grew up on pinball earn increasingly disposable incomes and grow nostalgic for the game, pinball is on the upswing again. Then, the arcades that still had them started to go the way of the dinosaurs. Interest in pinball began to wane in the late ’80s as arcade-style video games took over pinball spaces. Many of Thomas’ machines are new - a surprising fact to anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to the industry. Finally, in 2016, they let him put a Metallica and a Ghostbusters machine in the restaurant. Establishing the pizzeria as a headquarters for pinball allowed a community to slowly form. At the time, only a handful of other places, including laundromats and the airport, had machines, and they were poorly maintained. More recently, he bugged J.Bo’s owner Bo Maloney for years to let him manifest his vision of being able to promote pinball in the pizza place and bar. “I like video games, but if you memorize the Pac-Man thing that’s gonna be the same every single time versus in a (pinball) game, you can never replicate it - it’s always different than the last time you played.” “I’ve always been fascinated by moving parts and the fact that it’s random,” he said. Thomas got his revenge, though, by always having more machines coming in. His mother thought it was satanic, though, and blamed it for anything he did wrong, he said, to the point where she sold it for $200 to get rid of it. The most famous machine he had growing up was the 1979 KISS pinball cabinet. Living not exceptionally far from Santa Cruz and its boardwalk, Thomas was obsessed. Thomas’ dad owned Love’s Wood Pit Barbecue in Sacramento, California, and Thomas worked there during the summers in the mid-’80s to earn enough money to buy pinball machines. He’s an operator, meaning he owns and maintains the pinball machines at J.Bo’s Pizza and Rib Co., The Garage, and Union Social House in Durango - fourteen of the city’s machines. Durango Pinball, a club in Durango that has hosted a number of tournaments in Durango and Farmington over the last three years, has about 100 members.ĭurango’s current scene owes a lot to Jason Thomas. The return of pinballIn the Four Corners, the pinball renaissance is mostly occurring at five locations: three in Durango, one in Farmington, and one in Pagosa. The pinball cabinets are not just relics dusted off for the amusement of a niche community - as the industry slowly returns, companies are creating brand new machines, featuring innovations that continue to evolve the game. The machines that once dwelled in bars and arcades across the country are back, inviting adults with nostalgia for bygone eras to return while also hooking in a new generation of players. In a handful of venues across the Four Corners, there are familiar clacks, dings, sounds of steel rolling across a surface, and music and audio samples herald the return of a form of entertainment that has quietly survived the test of time: Pinball. ![]()
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