Summer at the lake, soda bars, mini golf, and movie theatres... Or just home in your air conditioned man cave. All familiar places for the irrepressible and jubilant sounds of pinball machines.

For those luckily in the San Jose area, you have California Extreme this weekend, with its tournaments, and pinball experts demonstrating post transfers, bang backs, and death saves.

What better time to inaugurate a formal Pinball Special Interest for the Giant Bomb community, in this year 2016?

We don't aim to be the hugest or hardcorest group on the interwebs, but like all thing Giant Bomb, our diversity and our memes give us strength!

Brackynews and Bobafettjm bring to you:

Giant Bomb Pinball Wizards*

(*that ramp is fucked up)

Who for?

Any GB duder who seriously enjoys pinball in any form.

What’s seriously?

You’ll know it if you (or your wallet) feel it.

What forms?

• Maybe you check airports and movie theatres to see what’s still in circulation.
• Maybe you’ve got garage space devoted to dusty backglass.
• Maybe you still keep your PS3 running to avoid rebuying your Zen Pinball tables on PC.
• Maybe you still have a copy of Epic Pinball installed, or keep a Kirby's Pinball Land cart handy.
• Maybe you're on the bleeding edge of VR pinball.

What can I do to partake in this shared interest group?

There’s several options depending on your situation:

• Say hello, and talk about the pins you play (we’ll use this platform forum).
• Be a friends list pinbassador on consoles.
• If you live near a good arcade, host a tourney.
• Help work on the wiki (ask for advice if ya need).
• Help to review every digital pinball table ever released. (srsly!)
• Donate for contest prizes.
• And certainly not least, help make some suitable art and designs for us!

Like digital pins on PC? Join our Steam Group:

• http://steamcommunity.com/groups/GBPW/
• Befriend: http://steamcommunity.com/id/AutomaticOcelot
• Befriend: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Bobafettjm
• (currently a private group to see if gameplay statistics are of any useful interest. Will be changed to public when capacity exceeds 150 people, or so desired.)
• You can expect to have your leaderboards full of duders, and monthly themes, challenges, and… contest prizes? hmmmmm...

I primarily play pinball these days on Steam, but I also have quite a few tables on Xbox 360 and Xbox One for Pinball FX and PS4 for Pinball Arcade.

I would love to see some more duders join in and help fill up the leaderboards. There is always more work to do on the pinball wiki pages. I have done quite a bit of work on them, but there is still a lot left.

Good lawd! As far as pinball i play, there is nothing locally to play so i have to wait for arcade festivals to roll around, which here in Texas, is the Texas Pinball Festival (saw someone wearing a GB Tshirt there!) and the Huston Arcade Expo. Outside of that, i play a lot of Pinball Arcade so anyone can add me on Steam (sin4profit) if you want to compete for scores.

As far as snazzy pinball art i did an art for a pinball related Twitch personality by the name of Deadflip.

I probably spend as much time every year standing in front of real tables as I do digital, but since I'm going to be a homebody for a while, I'd like to start taking digital a little more seriously. I recently topped up my Zen Studios content on Steam, and will be looking at how to invest into Farsight in a viable way. (Like, not-Train-Simulator viable. O_o)

Older titles like Tristan, Epic, and even the classic creators like Bill Budge are very interesting to my ludology history genes. I also follow news of active cabinet manufacturing and was keeping the wiki current with Stern's offerings.

Right now I'm starting to pay attention to VR and table design.

Why yes, I do enjoy pinning the occasional ball. Not so much the constant relentless maintenance aspect (worked in an arcade), but hey, for the chance to play the new Ghostbusters table every day at work? I'd have happily retrieved a thousand stuck balls.

Elton John > The Who. Sorry, but it's true.

I'm rarely afforded the opportunity to play "real" pinball, but I sure do have a lot of Pinball Arcade tables on console. I have to say, though, Farsight's support of their game other than releasing new tables has been downright appalling. They teased that new interface coming up on two years ago, and the console versions still don't support friend leaderboards or even the ability to turn the music off.

Still enjoy it quite a bit, along with Zen Pinball. Really looking forward to VR pinball as well. I think Zen studios have already expressed an interest in creating a VR mode for their tables, although I might be remembering that wrong.

Saw the thread which inspired me to reinstall Pinball Arcade. I love the Next Generation table in that, but I'm gonna try and branch out and play some of the other stuff I've bought in packs.

I go to my local arcade to play about once a week, and Pinball Arcade is definitely my podcast game.

Thanks for setting this group up! Joined w/ my Steam account, Rex Dart. Would love having some scores I can try and match and hopefully crush into DUST

I just moved to a small island town not far from Seattle and discovered a local arcade with a bunch of very old pinball machines. I took some pictures: http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/hobbz/images/?tag=Pinball

Pinball cabinets shown: Lucky Strike, Ding Dong, Big Ben, Wild Wild West, Teacher's Pet, Super-Flite, Aztec, Quick Draw, Skylab, Jumping Jack, Space Odyssey, and Buck Rogers.

They also had an unpowered Zaxxon cabinet, as well as a Pac-Man table, Aero Fighters, and Sky Shark.

Jeff's stream the other week got me thinking a lot about pinball again. I'm a lifelong fan as my dad owned a table since before I was born. I can't remember what his initial table was but when I was 5 or 6 he sold it and bought a Black Knight 2000 machine. Many hundreds of hours of my life have since been spent in front of that machine and I continue to play a few games any time I go home for a visit.

Since leaving home I have managed to seek out a few arcades and play a variety of machines but I'd love to have easier and more regular access than I do. I've messed with Pinball Arcade on both PC and PS4 but I find playing with a keyboard just doesn't feel right and the support for the PS4 version is disappointingly bad with not a great selection of tables.

The prospect of VR pinball is easily the thing that has me most excited for that platform and I'm really interested to see where that goes.