Just another nerd.
In 1967, Chicago Coin Manufacturing Company released a Beatniks theme pinball machine. The video below the flyer and backglass/playfield images is from someone who was selling his well-preserved machine in 2018.
One of the first video games I remember being completely addicted to was Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set on the Apple II. Released in 1983, PCS was one of the first games that relied on user-generated content.
Oddly enough, considering how good the game was for the time, Budge himself was not a fan of either pinball or videogames,
Budge does not enjoy playing video games, and described having to play pinball for months while developing Pinball Construction Set as “sheer torture.” He more enjoyed writing fast graphics libraries for game programmers. Budge said “I wasn’t that interested in playing or designing games. My real love was in writing fast graphics code. It occurred to me that creating tools for others to make games was a way for me to indulge my interest in programming without having to make games.”
One of the best computer games I ever played was Bill Budget’s Pinball Construction Set. Today, Visual Pinball takes that idea far beyond what anyone imagined was possible in 1983.
Visual Pinball allows for extremely detailed recreations of existing pinball machines, and for some innovative and very fun new pinball machines. The graphics are just amazing, and clearly a lot of pinball fans put insane hours in reproducing their favorite machines.
This page has photographs and information about a full-sized pinball machine made entirely out of Legos:
The control system uses RCX units from Lego Mindstorms. Amazing.