All really nice people, almost every last one of them.” I won that contest and had so much fun that I kept playing competitively, and then discovered this huge underground scene of pinball fans. It wasn’t until one summer, when a friend of mine invited me to an unofficial pinball tournament at my local arcade, that I started getting into it. I liked physics, so I was always going to the Science Museum in Boston to watch the big moving ball sculpture there. “Pinball was something I was drawn to when I was little but never really serious about until I was older. “Sonic, I’ve been a huge fan since day one… I can’t remember when I first played because I was so young, but it’s just always been a part of my life. ![]() ![]() So I think it all fits quite well.”Ī fan of the blue blur ever since he could hold a controller, and a pinball enthusiast from childhood, Ryan was drawn in by the bright colours, intuitive physics-based play and satisfying feedback loop of both types of games. I also didn’t have to think very hard about what would work on a Sonic pinball table – the elements are already there in any Sonic game you can think of. “There’d be no other game I would make other than Sonic. “There was no thinking about what theme I wanted to make for my game, that was obvious from the very beginning,” Ryan explained to The Sonic Stadium. And Mark wanted to make sure that Ryan didn’t waste any time getting started. This rite of passage was special, because both Ryan and his fellow pinball fanatics all knew exactly what that first homebrew project was going to be. “For me… well, every time I finish a pinball restoration, I’d have a party and invite people over to play it… at my last party my friend Mark, who made the Metroid Pinball homebrew, showed up with this big bit of wood and said, ‘here you go, get working… you have wood, now you have no excuse to start on it!'” “All of us in the pinball scene, as soon as we see someone that we think can be convinced to take that step, we do as much as we can to push them over the edge,” Ryan laughs. Ryan, who had been largely restoring old “pins” before he started work on Sonic Spinball, remembers vividly the moment he decided to make his very first pinball machine: by receiving a large piece of wood from a friend in the community. This is a matter that Ryan McQuaid, avid Sonic fan and pinball restoration wizard, hopes to rectify with his award-nominated homebrew project, ‘Sonic Spinball’. ![]() Can you believe that Sonic the Hedgehog, a game series whose design has often been compared to the physics of pinball, has never had a ball-flipping table to call its very own? Not even SEGA, who once dabbled in producing licensed pinball machines, thought to build a table for its very own Casino Night-visiting mascot.
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