The January 6th Pinball Machine
Since it's now making the rounds in national media outlets like Kotaku and The Hill, figured I may as well tell this minor story from an article I was working on last year.
Last August, The Boston Globe published an article about the annual PorcFest in New Hampshire. For those unfamiliar, PorcFest is like Burning Man for Libertarians. I had never heard of it till seeing this article, but quickly saw mention of a January 6th themed pinball machine.
Naturally, this being a pinball publication, I felt inclined to dig a little deeper. After cold emailing a bunch of PorcFest organizers and mining public social media posts from the event, I finally managed to track down the game's creator.
I only managed a single email exchange with him before he went dark on me, but you could tell he was quite proud of his efforts, having video and marketing materials for the insurrection-themed game at the ready. The image above is from the game's promo flyer.
It's a custom virtual table produced by "Freedom Dawg Games" which is mostly just a reskin of the classic Williams game, Dirty Harry. It's without a doubt the worst virtual pin work I've ever seen.
I shelved the story once he went dark, so suffice it to say I was shocked to see it crop up again stemming from coverage of this year's CPAC conference in Washington, D.C.
Let's just say that I'm not a fan of this particular effort in any regard, but it's also rare to see pinball covered in this way from national outlets, I have some prior insight with the story, and I'm not immune to the realities of trying to grow a niche digital publication.
Anyway, despite publishing this on Feb. 22nd, 2024, I'm backdating it to an earlier date because I don't really want it on our home page.
Colin is the chief pixel pusher at Kineticist. He's a lifetime gamer who became enamored with pinball after taking in a family copy of the 1979 classic Joker Poker (the EM version). Since then he's bought, sold and repaired many machines, competed in all kinds of tournaments, and contributes to This Week in Pinball, the New England Pinball League, and Pin-Masters of New England. Previously, Colin spent over a decade working in marketing for agencies and tech startups. He also started and ran a music blog, happy hour website, and wrote a regular craft beer review column for Central Track in Dallas. Once aspired to be an artsy film director.
