Pittsburgh has taken pinball from a once-scandalous pastime to a serious competition

To Dan Hosek, the more than 300 machines at his museum and arcade, Pinball Perfection, live and breathe. Dressed in a yellow T-shirt advertising his business, and a ponytail poking out of a hat, the 63-year-old tells Pittsburgh City Paper they’re like family. A Superman machine used to be in his son’s bedroom. A Super Mario Bros. machine came from the now-closed Chuck E. Cheese off McKnight Road.

And then there are the visitors.

“Every different kind of person you can imagine comes through this door, and from fucking everywhere,” he says. “You name it. China, Canada, Sweden, Australia — it just goes on and on. And they come here as a destination. ‘We had to come to Pittsburgh for whatever, this is why we had to come here, to see all this stuff.’ It’s weird.”

But to some, he says, pinball is “a lifestyle.”

“People are really into it.” he laughs. “Their life revolves around pinball and pinball things.”

Pinball doesn’t have nearly the same cultural caché it did in decades past, but in some parts of the country, enthusiasts maintain thriving scenes. Nostalgia drives a lot of it, but Pittsburgh’s working-class roots and bar scene contributed to making it one of the nation’s top pinball hot spots.

The city boosts its pinball clout with serious competitions. From Wed., July 23-Sun., July 27, hundreds of players will descend on the Pinburgh tournament in Bridgeville for the chance to win more than free games — the event touts over $42,000 in prize money. According to the Pinburgh website, tickets quickly sold out, and many hopeful players are now relegated to a waitlist.

The data analytics firm InterWorks, and Pinball Map, a crowdsourced directory of the world’s pinball machines, cites Pittsburgh as one of the top United States cities with the most pinball machines. In total, Pittsburgh boasts more than 1,185 machines.

Pinball Perfection, located in West View, has a lot to do with that. Other notable spots boast a respectable number of machines, including Pins Mechanical, Victory Pointe Arcade, Velum Fermentation in the South Side, and Verdetto’s Bar and Restaurant in the North Side.

Pinball has historically been a boy’s club, but that has changed over the years. Elizabeth Cromwell started the Pittsburgh Women’s Pinball League about 13 years ago after joining the Pittsburgh Pinball League with a boy she liked.

“Back then, we basically had to do a bar crawl down the South Side, because this bar would have one machine, and this bar would have one machine … and there were some people that made it not the most inviting place,” Cromwell tells City Paper. “So, I decided to start a women’s league so that women could get together, learn how to play pinball, get more confident, and build a community.”

The general pinball scene in Pittsburgh has become more inclusive, she says, but she still maintains the group to foster community. She believes having dedicated places stocked with machines to hang out with other pinball fans has helped make the space more welcoming for women.

Still, her experience with the Pittsburgh Pinball League wasn’t all bad — Cromwell ended up marrying that boy, Doug Polka, who is still involved in the city’s competitive pinball scene and the owner of the repair and rental business Pittsburgh Pinball, for which she does office management work. Polka and his business partners distribute coin-operated machines to businesses around the tristate area and, as he puts it, “make our money one quarter at a time.”

A ‘90s kid, Polka found that a few dollars could get him far if spent on pinball.

“I basically fell in love with pinball because when I would go with my family somewhere, and my mom would give me a couple bucks to go play in the arcade, I learned that, at pinball, you could win free games, and none of the other arcade games could do that,” Polka tells CP. “So I could take my two or three dollars that my mom gave me and play until she was done shopping at the mall or whatever.”

More businesses can now offer several coin-operated machines due to greatly relaxed regulations in the City of Pittsburgh, according to Polka. In 2021, the City imposed annual $150 fees for each machine. In 2022, the City wiped out that fee.

“A lot of places put stuff like that in place because the coin-op industry had a lot of connections to organized crime, because it was an easy way to clean money,” Polka says.

Hosek expands on this, saying that, as far back as the 1950s, pinball equated to gambling.

“You could put your whole paycheck in this game to win extra balls, to buy extra balls,” Hosek says. “And it’s two randomizers, so it could be 10 dollars to buy a second fucking extra ball. Ten bucks back in the day, you might have made $22 for a week’s pay.”

Pinball Perfection merges the now and then of pinball, and Hosek keeps up with the latest machines in the scene. But he also has a strong connection to the pastime’s bygone days.

When asked if he’s nostalgic, Hosek laughs and facetiously says “no”.

“Of course I am,” he says. “I think that’s half my problem, I can’t let go of things.”

This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2025.