This weekend (1-20-24) Sitka will host the first ever Alaska state pinball championship. It’s part of a national resurgence in passion for pinball. The winner will advance to the North American championship in Wisconsin this spring.
Justice has been working at Sitka’s Coliseum Theater since last summer, taking tickets and selling concessions. Before then, her arcade experience was pretty casual. But now, when things are slow at the popcorn counter, she often sneaks around the corner to the black and icy blue pinball machine with Arnold Schwartzenegger’s half-molten face on the front and plays.
Cinephile Sitkans may have noticed the pinball machines lining the lobby of Sitka’s single screen movie theater. Most pass right by them, eager to get a good seat for whatever’s on the big screen. But for anyone who knows pinball, the collection will stop them in their tracks. David Elrod is one of those people.
He’s playing the rare Tron Legacy pinball game. As he flicks the flippers, the music of Daft Punk blasts from the speakers. Once or twice the silver ball gets stuck somewhere and he quickly nudges the machine. “Tilting is trying,” he says.
“I love the sounds on this game,” he says. “I just can’t believe this is in Sitka. This is not where I’d expect to see this game.”
Elrod isn’t just a casual pinball player. He’s the Alaska State Rep for the IFPA– that’s the International Flipper Pinball Association. And he’s the top-ranked player in the state. He’s here in Sitka for the first ever state pinball championship.
“I grew up in San Francisco, where there was a big arcade scene. And I wasn’t very good at Street Fighter two, or Mortal Kombat,” Elrod says. “But the 7-Eleven I used to play I had an Addams Family pinball machine, too. And when we moved up to Juneau, when I was, I guess, 13, they had one as well.”
Around five years ago, he dove into the competitive pinball scene in California. Then he moved back to Juneau during the pandemic to help the owner of the Crystal Saloon open a barcade. They started hosting regular pinball tournaments. Around the same time, a group of pinball players in Anchorage began hosting meets, and Alaska’s pinball scene was quickly on the rise. Meanwhile, word of a big collection of machines in Sitka started to spread.
“When I came back to Juneau, I kept hearing about the Coliseum Theater,” Elrod says. “I kept hearing about this movie theater with all of these amazing games in it. And we have this website called pinballmaps.com, which you can use to find games, and it wasn’t on there. And I’m like, ‘What is everybody talking about?'”
When Elrod became the state rep for the IFPA, he had to decide where the state tournament would be. And Sitka was at the top of the list. So he got a hold of the Coliseum Theater owner Scott Bowen.
“And then [Bowen] showed me the rest of the games that he had,” Elrod says. “He has like fifty-something games in storage. It’s amazing. I’m over there setting up now, and it’s just like, where did you get all this stuff?”
Elrod says it’s the imperfections of pinball that make it challenging and great.
“Pinball is tactical, it’s physical. In a video game, the coding and the computer is always going to rule but [in pinball] there’s always some imperfection. Or maybe something’s slanted a little bit differently, or the rubber is worn a little bit differently. So they’re not always going to play the same.”
And since no game is the same, that makes Sitka a perfect place for the top 16 players from Anchorage and Juneau to converge since there’s no “home field advantage.”
“Everyone’s going to have games they haven’t quite touched yet,” Elrod says. “They’ll hopefully know the rules by then, but it’s going to play differently than if you have the same game at home or in an arcade that you normally go to.”
Elrod hopes that the tournament will spark local interest, and perhaps produce a future tournament-level player from Sitka. Justice, at the movie theater, is entering a competition open to the public, just for a lark.
“So I definitely have been playing a lot more. I’m for sure not very good,” Justice laughs. “Scott, the owner of the theater, he was test playing one of the pinball machines, and just casually playing he definitely beat my personal best with ball one. So definitely don’t have expectations to make it very far, but I think it’s gonna be fun anyways.”
And that’s sort of the point of pinball– Elrod says it’s about the fun and the camaraderie. And beating the game, not the opponent.
Editor’s Note:
All are invited to enter Sitka Classics, an internationally ranked pinball tournament, 7 p.m. Friday, January 19, at the Coliseum Theatre. Entry is $10 and registration at the door. Players from Juneau and Anchorage will also be competing. Those interested in becoming a pinball tournament manager can contact David Elrod at david@crystalsaloon.com.
