Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: On Day 3, We Were Pinball Wizards!

THIS is the other compelling reason why I wanted to come to Chattanooga. Not only did they have a museum exhibit of fantasy art, but they also have a museum of pinball and arcade games, all playable with one single admission price!

Matt loves all kinds of video games, including vintage arcade games and pinball games, and I LOVE pinball. Although I owned Nintendo Pinball when I was little, and the movie theater where I worked as a young adult had a pinball game that I spent way too many quarters on, I had never, until this day, played my fill of pinball.

It was a GREAT DAY!

Happily, the rain that had mostly avoided us on the previous day was spitting down off and on all day on this day, which made it the perfect occasion to eat a hotel breakfast and then walk over to the Chattanooga Pinball Museum. I accidentally got into the line for the Maple Street Biscuit Company at first, because we turned the corner, I saw a long line, and assumed that obviously everybody else in Chattanooga would be standing there on a Sunday morning at 10:58, as well, waiting for the pinball museum to open. I mean, what on earth ELSE would you want to do on a rainy Sunday in Chattanooga?!?

Fortunately, Matt was all, "OMG stop standing in line for biscuits, we just ate, come over here and play pinball."

So we did!

The pinball games are set up in roughly chronological order, each with a little stand-up informational blurb sitting on it. The stands were a bit in the way, but later I saw someone hook the stand over the side of the game when they went to play it, so then I did that, too, so that everyone would know that I was an expert.

I absolutely loved the mechanics of these older games. The score physically ticks over as you play, and there are literal bells that the pinball hits that make a delightful musical cacophony. It is magical!

Some of the older games ARE pretty racist, though, which is a bummer:

I love these stylized stencils on the sides:

Move forward in time a decade and you're dealing mostly with sexism rather than racism:

And now you've got more colors and lights and digital effects!

This 1982 Haunted House pinball game was my second favorite game in the museum:

You can't really tell from my terrible photo, but it's a multi-level game, with an upper level at the back that is the haunted attic, but then, if you hit the ball just right, it will roll down into a hidden lower level below the main deck. A green light will turn on, allowing you to see that your ball has rolled into a haunted basement, with new obstacles and flippers that you can control, but the ramp is REVERSED so that it tilts down towards the back of the game! Such an awesome gimmick and very Upside-Downy.

Matt enjoyed the pinball games, too, but he was really there for the vintage arcade games:

He literally stood there and beat the entirety of Streetfighter II:

OMG 1991 me would have been just as impressed as I was on this day!

My favorite thing about pinball is all the millions of fun, creative themes every game has:

Each game always has a new and different creative theme, and new and different gameplay elements that you've never seen before AND that support the theme.

And check out how much of it is hand-drawn. It's like playing a vintage comic!

I don't always love a lot of sensory input all at once, but for some reason, being overstimulated by pinball is the BEST.

Check out the wings on top of this game!

Okay, the one sensory thing that I do not like, actually, is multi-balls. Ugh, two balls in play is TOO MANY BALLS IN PLAY! I can't watch them all, and I just end up losing all my balls quicker than if I'd only kept the one.

So even though I loved the theming of this pinball game (you KNOW how much I love space!), I actually loathed playing it, and I *only* played it something like four or so times before I was done with it for good:

Its multi-ball gimmick? Ugh, I can barely even stand to think about it again. It blasts you with THIRTEEN BALLS SIMULTANEOUSLY. Because it's Apollo 13, get it?

2/10, recommend playing only four times and then never again. That Star Wars: Episode I game to its left was surprisingly awesome, though!

For lunch, we walked through the drizzle to Burger Republic, where I ordered this spiked Nutella shake--

--and then complained to Matt for half an hour that I didn't think it actually had any alcohol in it. But just now, as I was forwarding their spiked shake menu to Matt via email and asking him to learn how to make me ALL of them, preferably this weekend, I noticed that there's also a regular, non-alcoholic Nutella shake.

The menu was one of those giant chalkboards on a wall that you had to look at before you ordered at the counter, so now I'm wondering if I saw the Nutella shake in the spiked shakes section and ordered it without specifying the "spiked" part because I didn't realize there were also virgin Nutella shakes on the menu...

Well, when Matt makes it for me it'll definitely be spiked!

Lunch hit Matt hard, so afterwards, he suggested walking back to the hotel for an afternoon nap. Since it was his birthday weekend, I told him that was an awesome idea, and was then all, "Do you want to just walk back to meet me at the pinball museum when you wake up? Because that's where I'm headed!"

While Matt napped, I discovered my 100% absolute favorite pinball game on the planet, 1999's Revenge from Mars:

It is SO FUN! There's a holographic video screen made possible via a Pepper's Ghost effect that hides the back area where the pinball can go, which means that the game can have all these video-based mini games where you shoot the ball at various holographic targets that are on top of ramps, so you get real-world effects as well as video effects. And the mini video games were SUPER entertaining, like saving the White House from a giant spaceship, or saving the Eiffel Tower from alien troopers, etc.

This 1973 game also had a fun mini game associated with it:

As you play, the pinball builds a game of tic-tac-toe in that central grid:

I was disappointed in this Star Trek: TGN pinball game, which had a lot of cool ramps and gimmicks, but it just wasn't as fun:

Eventually, Matt came back with a second wind--

--and we played pinball for a couple more hours--

--before at one point, just finishing a Hot Wheels pinball game, I kind of blinked and thought, "Huh, is this what it feels like to maybe be kind of tired of pinball? What time is it, anyway?"

Only 7:00 or so, which meant that I'd ONLY been playing pinball for, oh, let's say 6.5 hours. I could literally play another 6.5 hours of pinball right this second, but on that rainy Sunday evening, I reluctantly shook out my aching hands, and found Matt, who reckoned that he, too, could probably be done with pinball.

Instead, we went to go look at a giant waterfall under a mountain!