Few kids grow up with a pinball machine, but Sarah Schudel had a game room full of them. Her childhood home has 47 pinball machines. Schudel is ranked 7th in the state and 8th in the world for women.
On Saturday, February 11th, she’ll be one of 16 Michiganders competing in this year’s Michigan Pinball Championship put on by the International Flipper Pinball Association.
The state championship works in a bracket. Two players compete against each other for the best of seven games. The winner moves on to the next player. The loser gets bumped out of the running. Because each pinball machine is different, each player gets their turn to pick which game to play.
Sarah Schudel says most great pinball players know how to slow down the ball and take their time. They also learn the rules to the different games:
“There’s so many pinball machines out there. And yeah you could be really good at flipper skills, but if you don’t know what you’re doing on a machine you’re not going to do as well as someone who knows exactly what to shoot for in this specific order.”
Mike Schudel is Sarah's dad and is hosting the championships at his home this year. He says newer games are also a lot different from older models.
Schudel's oldest game, called “Subway,” was made in the late 1960s and is pretty basic. There are bumpers, a few targets, an option for an extra ball - and that’s about it. But in some ways Schudel says it’s a lot more difficult than newer games. For one thing, the flippers are smaller.
“Yes it’s very hard to control the ball," he says.
"You can’t really trap the ball on here and these out lanes are just so wide that the ball tends to go out the out lanes. So you don’t really get to play for a long time.”
Mike Schudel's newest game is Metallica made by the Illinois company Stern - which is still making pinball machines today.
“This is definitely newer, you can see it has the ramps on it, it has drop targets on it, it has places for the ball to come out. There’s just a lot more things going on here and the rule set is just so much more complicated than an early EM game,” he says.
Mike Schudel says pinball has seen a resurgence lately - likely due to nostalgia. There are more than 47,000 registered players in the International Flipper Pinball Association alone.
“There’s a lot of people that grew up with pinball when they were younger and now that they’re starting to see a little bit of it in the bars, they’re like, ‘Ah, I remember playing pinball when I was younger. It’d be nice to have one,’” he says.
Sarah Schudel says more women are entering tournaments too. This will be the second consecutive year for the women’s world championship in March.
Father and daughter have different reasons for liking the game.
“It’s not a video game where you memorize a pattern. You’re actually interacting with something physical in a three-dimensional, you know, box," says Mike.
“Every game is different," says Sarah. "So I could play Metallica here and you know have a game and then I play two seconds later and I’m having a completely different game.”
The state pinball championship will be held Saturday, February 11th at the home of Mike Schudel. After the championships there’s a charity tournament at around 3 p.m. that’s open to the public.