The past, present, and future share a show floor at Pinball Expo 2026

Latest from the show floor

Stern’s latest offering, Fallout, stood near the entrance of a convention floor packed with the latest machines from manufacturers like Jersey Jack, Barrels of Fun, Spooky Pinball, and others. I’ve attended this show for the last four years, and each year seems to bring new companies into the fold. Despite more than 25 years of advances in home entertainment, nothing quite matches the tactile thrill of launching a metal ball around a wooden cabinet.

Stern's latest game, Fallout, appears on the Stern show floor — The new *Fallout* machine from Stern Pinball.

Credit:

Nick Indge

Several companies showed off their latest attempts to bring pinball into virtual reality without abandoning physical controls, letting players wear a VR helmet while pressing real buttons on a pedestal setup. It’s a fun novelty that demonstrates what’s possible, but if the lines at the expo were any indication, most people still prefer walking up to a physical machine and enjoying the tactile controls, visuals, and sounds that come with it.

The modular market

One of the biggest questions facing anyone buying a pinball machine for home use is what to do when you get bored with a $10,000 game. Until recently, the options were to sell it, find someone willing to trade, or build your own virtual pin setup with screens instead of physical playfields. The Multimorphic P3 team saw an opportunity for another approach.

Multimorphic's Portal pinball machine is a part of their P3 lineup of swappable table designs. — Multimorphic’s Portal pinball machine is a part of their P3 lineup of swappable table designs.

According to Multimorphic co-creative director Stephen Silver, “The way the P3 is designed is that the lower two-thirds is a ball-tracking interactive display… We have floating mechanisms above the screen, floating flippers, floating slings, floating targets. And the upper third is a swappable play field. We’ve got 10 different play fields now that we can swap and change the entire game.”

As demonstrated by the much-hyped Dungeon Crawler Carl prototype (whose lines never seemed to get shorter), the P3 system uses a playfield screen that can react to ball movement in real time, and the game can change to match player choices. In Dungeon Crawler Carl, for instance, the display layout changes based on which book in the series the player chooses.

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