What the Virtual Pinball Machine Is
It's a full-size pinball cabinet where the playfield and the backglass are both screens rather than a fixed mechanical table, which means the one machine holds hundreds of pinball games at once. Ours is a Multipin cabinet, the same sort sold for the home through Liberty Games, and you'll see it listed elsewhere as a digital pinball or virtual pinball machine. The flippers, the ball-launch plunger and the speakers are all real - you pull the plunger to put the ball into play and work the flipper buttons the way you would on any machine - but the table you're playing is on the display, so it can be The Addams Family one minute and Medieval Madness the next.
The library runs from seventies and eighties classics through to nineties tables and modern designs. The photos here show it loaded with The Addams Family, Judge Dredd, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Cirqus Voltaire and Bride of Pinbot, among others. The backglass screen carries each table's own artwork and a matrix-style score readout in the rear casing, so it reads like the real thing from across a room. It's set to free play, so nobody needs change or a token to have a go.
We've been hiring out exhibition and arcade games from Sheffield since 1999, and we own and maintain 95% of what we send out from our 25,000 sq ft warehouse in Rotherham, five minutes from the M1. If you want more than the pinball on a stand, we carry over 600 products across 68 categories, so it's one booking, one invoice and one point of contact. Every hire includes £5 million public liability insurance, with risk assessments and method statements emailed to you or your venue before the event.
