Chicago Pinball Expo Convention 2008

Posted October 2, 2008

I have the opportunity to attend the Chicago Pinball Expo this year and am really looking forward to it. Chris Moore has already taken some cell phone photos from the Pinball Expo opening day and although I know little about pinball, it looks as though this will be a great opportunity to play some one of a kind games.

My question is, what sort of information do people want to know about this Pinball convention that isn’t already readily available?

I’ll be evaluating my tastes on the different pinballs

But surely there are some collectors of arcade games or of pinballs that won’t be able to make the show this year. Maybe you’ve never been. What sort of things would you like to know about what is happening specifically at this year’s Expo, or what the convention experience is like in general that I could write about?

I will be visiting some of the vendors to try to get a feel for the landscape and volume of competitors. Artwork, parts and I am sure a lot of other related pinball products that I have no idea exist should be for sale at this expo especially since Chicago has arguably the biggest pinball market.

Here are some ideas I thought about;

Videos of pinball machines / gameplay that don’t exist on YouTube or anywhere else
What pinballs were listed for sale and for how much
Which pinball vendor has the most original / competitive / highest quality product

And that is about where I ran out of ideas since I have little idea of what to expect.

I glanced through the posts on RGP this morning to see what people had written about. I am guessing that there will be plenty of photos of the pinballs on location from this weekend, and we can all access those photos on the pinball database anyway. Pinball News will be there as well, writing what will be a lengthy detailed review I am sure of everything that takes place at the show.

Sidebar: I am guessing that Pinball News is manually produced an RSS feed. I am guessing that that site gets about 10,000 monthly unique visitors, and could probably increase that traffic 500% if they would switch over to WordPress. The user interaction through commenting and the importance placed on the Pinball News content would shoot up it’s traffic. Maybe I’ll get to meet the author at the convention and we can talk shop.

But surely there is some small detail that we can focus on here. Any pinball collector have any suggestions?

Here are some similar arcade posts

Pinball

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Comments

Jeff's Arcade
October 3, 2008

Jeff,

I’m interested in the number of machines for sale and the pricing on those. I assume they will allow exhibitors to have machines for sale. If so, I’m gonna guess they will command a premium price, although I’m sure there will be some deals to be had. Unfortunately, my son has soccer all weekend so I won’t be attending.

Chris Moore
October 6, 2008

I left the auction floor after they finished the vids, which all went cheap. I did notice some pins on the expo floor with auction stickers and the final prices were pretty low. South Park for $1250, Monopoly for $1750 and Batman Returns for $900. Now this is from memory, but I’m close.

Jeff Rothe
October 9, 2008

@Chris Moore:

You have a good memory. On RGP they said the Monopoly went for $1725, but who knows, maybe that guy didn’t remember correctly either.

For anyone else interested to know what the rest of the pinballs auctioned for, check out the follow up Super Auction Prices Pinball Expo 2008 post.

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