Amid waves of 80s and 90s nostalgia, a pinball league rises from the ashes at a Thunder Bay pub

Thunder Bay's pinball wizards, get ready — pinball league is coming back.

The new league's first season will start this month at the Tilted Turret Pinball Pub on Archibald Street.

It's not the first time a pinball league has operated in the city. Tilted Turret co-owner Steve Vares said another league was launched in 2019, operating across a few locations with pinball machines in the city.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic brought that to a halt.

"With the facility we have here now, and nine pinball machines, the players have been asking for it," Vares said. "People want to do it again."

The re-started league — known as the Thunder Ball Pinball League — will run across at least two seasons per year.

The first will start in October and run through to December, while the second season will take place in the winter and spring. A shorter summer season is possible, too, depending on interest, Vares said.

One of a kind experience

As for the schedule, Vares said that will largely be left up to the players themselves.

"This is going to be a more casual approach to it," he said. "Before, we had set days we would play. Now we're going to leave that up to the players."

Players will be able to arrange their own pinball nights, Vares said. They can get a group together, and go play the required league games at the Tilted Turret on a night that's convenient for everyone. Scores will be submitted, and the highest-scoring players will win prizes at the end of the season.

So far, dozens of people have expressed interest in the league on Facebook.

"One big thing about pinball is, it's something that has never been able to be fully reproduced with electronics," Vares said. "You can't have it on a gaming console quite the same as playing a real pinball machine."

That was echoed by Josh MacKay, who owns a shop in Ottawa. 

"To actually have a physical ball that moves around and does all this stuff under glass, I guess it draws people's attention," MacKay said.

MacKay has been collecting pinball machines for years, and also does repairs and restoration work on the machines. It was an interest that grew out of his collecting vintage technology, mostly gaming-related.

"The opportunity arose to buy pinball machine, and I thought that was kind of the perfect branch between the mechanical and electronic age," he said. "So I had to get it, and what they don't tell you when you buy pinball is that they break all the time."

"I actually found that I was getting a lot more pleasure out of repairing them than I was even playing them," he said. "It was kind of like an obsession with me to to learn how these things work, and to be able to restore dead machines.

"I started buying broken machines out of people's basements and went to work."

Nostalgic appeal

That led to MacKay launching the Ottawa Pinball and Game Room show about a decade ago. And since they, he's watched pinball grow in popularity.

"When I first got into it, there was already a small private league that would have monthly tournaments at private homes," MacKay said. "It kept growing. The more we would do the show each year, we got more and more people to come through the doors, and a handful of diehards would would get sucked into it each year."

"There's definitely some sort of pinball event that you can check out every other week."

"Nostalgia is kind of a powerful drug, you see it in every major industry.- Josh MacKay, Ottawa Pinball and Amusments 

And that growing interest in pinball isn't confined to Ottawa, MacKay said, with pinball bars and cafes opening across the country.

"In the past 10 years, it's kind of ballooned up into what it would have been like in the 80s almost," MacKay said. "Nostalgia is kind of a powerful drug, you see it in every major industry."

"They're remaking every movie that came out 10 years ago, every video game," MacKay said. "Pinball hasn't escaped that either. There's actually companies that will remanufacture popular games from the 90s now.

"So I think just the the level of nostalgia that our society has is very powerful."

Anyone interested in joining the league can contact the Tilted Turret, or look up Thunder Ball Pinball League on Facebook.