So just a little over 2 years ago I moved across the country. It's been me and my wife's dream for well over a decade to move out west. Our original goal was to move to Portland, oregon but we could see it go downhill, and after covid hit and they decriminalized hard drugs it got REALLY bad.. So we ended up in Washington State.
I know you're probably thinking "Whaaat?! you moved away from the pinball capital of the world!". Yea, I spent my first 48 years there and I was done and ready for something new. I couldn't take another chilling winter in the midwest, nor could I retire there with the high property taxes. Washington (specifically Seattle) has a TON of pinball. Not that I venture into the city much, but even in the burbs there's lots of pinball (25 minutes away are 2 arcades within walking distance, and another two within a 10 minute drive).
So what games did I keep you might be wondering. The plan was to keep CSI, rick and morty, and apollo13 (because they are all low volume games that would be hard to replace. Ending up selling apollo last minute because the movers screwed us. I had weird al on pre-order so that arrived about a year ago and I'm regretting it. Not as fun as I thought it would be (I should know better about multimorphic games), and if I do sell I know I'll probably end up losing $3k if I'm lucky. Then a few months ago I see someone within an hour away put up a space shuttle and space station up for sale so I snagged those. The space station is pretty immaculate, and the space shuttle had a CPR playfield already installed (so even more immaculate). It's a running joke with my friends because I owned a space shuttle for a decade, bought the CPR playfield and never got it installed (then bought the outside edge overlay and never got that installed either). Now I have the space shuttle I always dreamed of thanks to the last owner.
So where does that leave homebrew? I literally have a Den packed with 5 games now, so I need to get rid of Weird Al just to open up a slot. Over the past few years there's been so many ideas popping in my head so I'm really itching to get back into it. After seeing nearly 40 homebrew games at Expo (not physically but youtube walkthroughs) it's an exciting time for sure.
