The 12 Hour High Score Shootout

The 12 Hour High Score Shootout
Sunday 18th January 2015
At Didcot, Oxfordshire

This was an epic 12 hour Sunday of pinball, hosted by David Mainwaring. I was originally put off due to the fact it's a high score tournament, and I'm not particularly good at getting high scores, but after hearing of other players traveling from Bristol, I decided to go for it despite the odds...

Looking at the list of players already signed up it's quite daunting - a selection of the UK's top players including the top 1-4! I was way out of my depth considering I'm partly playing for fun, and this is actually quite a serious competition for the high scoring players. 

However the way the competition ran was kinda in my favour...

The day is split into three sections of four hours. Before each section the high scores from each machine is cleared and started from fresh. The aim over each four hours is to put up the best scores on some of the machines in order to score points. On each machine there are usually five high score places. For the competition these are assigned points. The Grand Champion gets 10 points, High Score #1 - 7 Points, High Score #2 - 5 Points,  High Score #3 - 3 Points, High Score #4 - 1 point.

Martin Ayub playing Stern's 24

These points count for World Pinball Player Rankings (WPPR). For comparison, before the competition, Martin Ayub (current UK #1) had 482.77 points, and I had 0.24!

With 9 machines in a very tight space in David's living room, and around 40 players, there was a relaxed queuing system in place. You would just grab the next available machine and play a two player game with the next person in line. For me the great thing about this was getting to play pinball alongside these top ranking players, to observe and learn from their techniques. Over the course of the day I was picking up tips and confidence from advice, watching and playing lots!

A game with UK's #2 ranked pinball player Craig Pullen: 100+ million to my measly 6!

At the start of a session it's very easy to put up a high score, it feels like quite an achievement to put in a high score - but of course as more games are played it pushes my score down and eventually off the top spots. The whole day I managed to get one high score (Attack From Mars - 3.5 Billion giving me High Score #1! Yes!) This gave me a total of 7 points. I'm delighted with this!

Well done to the top four players who won trophies on the day:

1st Craig Pullen
2nd Luke Skywalker
3rd Martin Ayub
4th David Mainwaring

12 hour high score pinball competition today #pinball

A video posted by Jono Sandilands (@jonosandilands) on Jan 18, 2015 at 12:18pm PST

What's this all about?
This post is from my journal on MA Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking.
I am currently developing a project based around arcade games, specifically Pinball (see all posts on pinball).
Part of my research and understanding is to play see the seperate post about the machines I have played recently.