2000 - 2010 : 10 years of pinball

Here's the post I made in 2010 on the rec.games.pinball group.

Never thought this hobby would become this big and change my life that
much (we've remodeled the whole house to get more pins in, when we
bought a new car the first question was: does a pinball machine fit
in ?, ..)

One of my early posts was after I had visited Tim Arnold and I had put
the pictures online.
My personal homepage was extended with pages about what I learned from
pinball machines and later moved onto it's own domain, http://www.flippers.be
(and I really don't want to know how many hours I've put in
maintaining the site, replying emails, .. over all these years)

Over the years I've seen this group change, seen people come and go.

10 year ago this group was still recovering from WMS closing its
pinball division..
Gene then bought up the parts but nothing came out.. Wayne then also
bought up rights..
each of them finally started producing parts..
Gene even produced BBB, I've seen the first posts here, had disbelief
if that ever could be done, there was the long silence when the
project had a delay, but finally he produced what he had promised..

Stern Pinball also growed, it was the only pinball maker left but its
games (Striker and Austin Powers) didn't have a good reputation.
Pat Lawlor designing Monopoly was huge news. Later other designers
followed him... and left Stern again :-(

Tim Arnold had the idea of doing something in Vegas, possibly together
with a casino.
He was organising fun nights, selling vhs tapes (and later dvds),
aided by Clay.
The Pinball Hall of Fame became reality, and even has moved into a
bigger location.

Everyone was eager to see a new repair video by Clay.
His repair guides improved too, became larger, now discuss more types
of games, ..
While 10 years ago there were a lot of tech posts on rgp, with large
discussions going into detail,
after a while the replies to tech posts all changed into : first check
marvin3m.com/fix
and the amount of tech posts here decreased a lot imo..

I've seen trolls come and go to this newsgroup..

After Clays dvds we also got pinball radio, ..

Leds and mods came to pinball machines. 10 years ago everyone wanted
their games to be as original as possible. Now a brand new game
immediately gets modded. Pinball leds in all sizes, colors and types
are easy to install.. before you had to calculate what resistor you
had to use somewhere..

I've probably forgot half of what changed, even don't start mentioning
names of people here..
A lot of changed the last 10 years. This group different, but still
good to hang out with..
I'm going to take a drink on you all, and on the next 10 years !