Awesome Pinball Attraction in NYC

Located near 3rd avenue and 27th street, this place is something I stumbled upon while looking for a street hot-dog stand (still haven't found one... WTF?) and as I was walking down the street i was like "no.... friggin... way!"

This..place...is....awesome

I have always loved pinball machines and these days they are super advanced and complicated. I remember the first time I played a game with multi-ball, it was called EarthShaker and it was at the local 7-11. I must have sunk $20 into that thing and this was a lot of money in the late 80's. After living in Asia for more than 10 years it occurred to me that I have not seen a pinball machine at all the entire time i have been there. This likely has to do with the fact that generally speaking these are American-made and I would imagine shipping them without breaking them would be a nightmare if not impossible.

Anyway, I had walked about 20 blocks and was basically at that point hoping for a subway station when i spotted this shop across the street.

The first thing that came to my mind was "I hope it isn't a sales showroom" because obviously I am not in the market to purchase a machine and the second thing was "I bet pinball machines are expensive to play these days."

The good news is that all the machines can be played as much as you want without putting any coins in. You simply pay an hourly rate. Now it starts at $15 for an hour, which seems like a lot, but then it is $2 per hour after that. If you aren't a huge fan of pinball then i would imagine you would walk away at that point. However, lets imagine that it was a dollar per game (which would be reasonable considering how advanced the machines are these days) then it is conceivable that you would spend that much in an hour anyway.

This place is frequently booked for private events and if I lived in NYC I would definitely be having at LEAST my birthday here. There are also leagues and i think that would be a very fun league to be involved in.

My biggest problem was deciding where to start. I played a bit of this, a bit of that and rarely even understood any sort of strategy in any of them. I did have a great time though.

If you are ever in NYC and are a fan of this dying art (I haven't even seen a pinball machine at Dave and Busters... which is terrible!) then you need to head over to this place.

For me, this was the most exciting part of my stay in the Big Apple and I may go back again tomorrow before I go out and get tanked on my last evening both in this city and the United States as a whole. I think that going to Modern Pinball has definitely been one of the best experiences of this trip so far.

http://modernpinballnyc.com/