When you enter Flight Deck NC in Morrisville, you may assume each patron is there solely for the love of airplanes and craft beer, unaware of the rows of pinball machines right around the corner.
But the bar, which opened in November, is home to the newly minted Triangle Pinball Collective. More recently, it expanded farther into the building to host around 15 pinball machines.
The game room space of Triangle Pinball Collective is windowless, lit by the neon glow of pinball machines and Triangle Pinball Collective signage. The games are set up in a few smaller rooms down a narrow hallway, giving an almost speakeasy-like ambience.
Standing in front of a machine, you can hear music and chatter from the bar in the other room and airplanes preparing to land at nearby RDU International Airport flying overhead. But pinball players often play without talking, and it can be seen as poor etiquette to speak to them before the game is up.
On June 13, the collective held its second formal event, the inaugural run of a new King Kong themed machine. The tournament drew 49 participants, which may be the largest pinball tournament ever in the Triangle, or at least in recent years, according to organizers.
A Facebook group called Triangle Pinball Players has been around for 10 years or so, organizing tournaments at local arcades like Boxcar, according to Ovid Dillard, a longtime pinball lover and Triangle Pinball Collective organizer. To him, the collective is a continuation.
Many of the pinball machines in Flight Deck’s game room are brought here from personal collections, including Dillard’s.
“I think it’s a combination of mechanical play, the artwork, like the friendships you pull with people,” Dillard says. “There’s nothing quite like it.”
Jesse Marion, the owner of Flight Deck NC, says he had wanted to expand back into the other rooms in the building but had no idea what to put there until Jerrod Lankford, a member of the collective who owns several machines, started showing up for a beer.
“Probably the third time he was here, I showed him around the space and was like, ‘I don’t know what to do with this.’ He was like, ‘Have you ever thought about pinball?’” Marion says. I was like, ‘I have, but I’ve heard with some of the companies the machines aren’t great, and they’re not always maintained really well, and they’re expensive to fix.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, let me tell you about my pinball collective.’”
Pinball machines are both expensive and rather finicky, and require a fair amount of upkeep to be up to snuff for tournaments sanctioned by the International Flipper Pinball Association (IFPA). Several of the players in the Triangle Pinball Collective say they have been frustrated in the past with pinball machine repair speed at other pinball locales.
“Every other place that has pinball in the area, those machines are supplied by a company,” says Kat Lake, a Twitch streamer who sometimes streams pinball games. “I don’t think they take care of the machines .… They just put them in places and make sure that they’re working. And they don’t really follow the community or anything, they’re not really a part of it. And so this place was opened almost in spite of them, and wanting a place that we had access to the machines.”
The IFPA sanctions competitive pinball tournaments, both open division and women’s, and keeps rankings of competitive pinball players. There are plenty of competitive players in the Triangle, including Samantha Bacon, ranked 11th in the international women’s league.
Bacon says not even the best pinball players in the world can make a living off playing, so if a player is in the top 250 open ranks or top 100 women’s ranks, they are automatically considered professional pinballers.
Despite her high rank, Bacon says much of the appeal of pinball is social.
“It used to be like, if I got knocked out immediately I’d just be really upset for the rest of the trip,” Bacon says. “But at this point, I know enough people that it doesn’t matter where in the country, or to some extent, even the world, like I can show up anywhere and know somebody, and I’m looking forward to hanging out with them again.”
Competitive pinball is divided between open and women’s tournaments, but there are also groups for women and nonbinary people who play at any skill level. There is a chapter of Belles and Chimes, the international women’s pinball group, in the Triangle for “women, femmes and thems” looking to get into pinball.
“It [pinball] is very male dominated,” says Kennan Staelin, a member of Belles and Chimes. “That is why it is important to have those female chapters, and that is very inclusive, so it’s not just if you are a woman—like you are gay, them, women, queer, questioning—like we’re very open. It’s just a safer space. It’s a little bit less intense.”
Lake says she thinks pinball in the Triangle can be unusually challenging.
“The machines here are set up very difficult, and it’s because the level of player is really high. It’s interesting,” Lake says. “So when they [Triangle pinball players] leave the area and go play elsewhere, it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, hold on, I’m much better than I thought I was.’”
The collective will host a costume party to launch their newest game, Evil Dead, on July 19 at 3 p.m.
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