About five years ago, Jay Adelson was restoring an old pinball machine with his teenage son when he had a revelation.
“During that process, you learn everything about pinball machines, and how they work, and how they function—electronically, mechanically, the construction of them,” Adelson says. “In that process, it opened my eyes—and opened my son’s eyes as well—to some of the things we could do. And I went back to Brian and Ron, and I said, ‘Hey, I think there’s a way.'”
The project, now called Scorbit, involves both custom hardware and software, and Adelson, who co-founded the company with O’Neill and Richards, expects a public launch within six to 12 months. But his startup isn’t alone in trying to bring pinball machines online. The venerable pinball maker Stern, which now produces 90% of the world’s machines, is working on its own connectivity system for release later this year, threatening to make Scorbit redundant for the vast majority of newer games.
However Scorbit’s and Stern’s plans pan out, the race is now on to bring pinball—a defiantly offline hobby for decades—into the internet age.
“You can change the game”
Pinball machines have gone through plenty of changes over the years, but the guts of most machines from the late 1970s onward have some common elements, including a processor, memory, and a display. To bring those machines online, Scorbit uses a custom piece of hardware called the Scorbitron to intercept game scores, error codes, and other bits of data, usually on their way to the display. To make the connection, Scorbit has devised a series of connectors, or “probes,” that can plug into hundreds of different machines.
“There’s no data that a machine generates that I can’t collect,” Adelson says.
