The First day of Pinball Expo usually is only an evening since nothing happens until the Bumper Blast Welcome Party. I aarived at 7:00 PM at the Westin, which at that time already had lots of Expo visitors being present. The nice thing about Expo is that you (I) see a lot of people that appreciate Pinball Magazine and come over to tell me.

 

The flyer table at Pinball Expo, with seasonal Dutch candy, free sample Issues and Pinball Magazine cover posters.

The flyer table at Pinball Expo, with seasonal Dutch candy, free sample Issues and Pinball Magazine cover posters.

After picking up my registration stuff I put up some posters of Pinball Magazine No. 1 and 2 and distributed the first copies of the sample Issue that was made for this event. To my surprise I think about 300 copies were picked up during the first evening. I also introduced some seasonal Dutch candy which turned out to be be very popular too.

 

The evening itself was just great. Catching up with people I met last year, or see more regularly. Like Rob Berk said in Pinball magazine No. 2, “Pinball Expo is like a love in.” I had a great talk with Multimorphic’s Gerry Stellenberg about their P3 platform and upcoming games. I think the platform is great and may even be the future of pinball. All it needs to take off is a great fun game.

 

Gerry and I went for a drink at Twin Peaks, a Hooters-like type of restaurant/bar. To be honest it was a good thing I new what type of bar it was, else I might have thought it could have been a gay bar based on the number of male (and lack of female) visitors. For a moment I was also wondering why one of the waitresses had her boobs lifted into her armpits, but if that makes her happy…

 

When I returned to the hotel I ran into ColorDMD’s Randy Perlow. We had an interesting, lengthy discussion and I eventually was able to sleep for four hours before getting up in time for the Stern factory tour the next morning.