Editorial standards
About This Site
A pinball reference written on the assumption that you can tell when you are being sold something.
What this site is for
Pinball information online has a structural problem. The queries with the most traffic are valuation queries, valuation content is cheap to produce and impossible to fact-check at a glance, and so the top of the results is dominated by pages full of confident numbers that nobody stands behind. Meanwhile the questions that actually matter to somebody standing in front of a machine — what is this, what is wrong with it, what will it cost me to keep — get answered in scattered forum threads from 2009.
This site answers the second set of questions and refuses the first.
What we will not publish
- Valuations. No price ranges, no "worth between X and Y," no market estimates. Value guidance here is always method: how to find comparable sales, how to filter them, and what to adjust for.
- Unverified production figures. Production runs are documented facts. Where we cannot confirm one against a real source, we omit it rather than approximate.
- Unverified authentication tells. This is the highest-risk category in collecting writing. A wrong identification detail causes somebody to buy a fake or pass on a genuine piece. Where we cannot confirm a tell, we teach the check instead of asserting the answer.
- Invented auction results or price-guide citations.
Sourcing
Machine-specific details — manufacturer, year, designer, artist — are verified before publication. Where a detail cannot be confirmed, it does not appear. Corrections are welcome and acted on; this is a field with genuine experts in it and we would rather be corrected than wrong.
Imagery
Photographs used for atmosphere on this site are illustrative and marked as such. They are never presented as reference specimens and never used to support an identification claim. Diagrams are original work. Where a reader needs to compare against a real machine, we point at live listings with real photographs rather than at anything we produced.
How this site is funded
Through the eBay Partner Network, and nothing else. There are no sponsored placements, no paid reviews and no advertising. See the affiliate disclosure for detail on how that works and what it does not change.