The past, present and future share exhibition space at Pinball Expo 2026

Latest news from the show

Stern’s latest offering, To fallstood near the entrance to a convention hall filled with the latest machines from manufacturers like Jersey Jack, Barrels of Fun, Spooky Pinball and others. I have been attending this show for four years and every year new companies seem to join. Despite more than 25 years of advancements in home entertainment, nothing quite compares to the tactile pleasure of throwing a metal ball around a wooden cabinet.

Several companies have showcased their latest attempts to bring pinball into virtual reality without abandoning physical controls, by allowing players to wear a VR headset while pressing real buttons on a base. It’s a fun novelty that demonstrates what’s possible, but if the lines at the expo were any indication, most people still prefer to get up close to a physical machine and enjoy the touch controls, visuals, and sounds that come with it.

The modular market

One of the biggest questions facing anyone purchasing a pinball machine for home use is what to do when you get bored with a $10,000 game. Until recently, the options were selling it, finding someone willing to trade, or creating your own virtual pin setup with screens instead of physical playing fields. The Multimorphic P3 team saw an opportunity for another approach.

According to Stephen Silver, co-creative director of Multimorphic, “The way P3 is designed is that the bottom two thirds are an interactive ball tracking screen… We have floating mechanics above the screen, floating flippers, floating slings, floating targets. And the top third is a swappable playing field. We now have 10 different playing fields that we can swap out and change the whole game.”

As demonstrated by the much publicized Carl the dungeon crawler prototype (whose lines never seem to get shorter), the P3 system uses a playing field screen that can react to ball movement in real time, and the game can change to match players’ choices. In Carl the dungeon crawlerfor example, the display layout changes depending on which book in the series the player chooses.