The Pinball Primer was created and is primarily run by solar_espeon (she/her). Call me espie or Rachel! I don't play in tournaments yet due to my current location and other life stuff, but I plan to; for now I'm just a pinball hobbyist with a deep love of pinball history and rules, including a special interest in the games of the 1970s-90s. I'm the principal author of most of the pages on this website. You can contact me as solar_espeon on Discord or at pinballprimer@gmail.com: I also frequent many pinball streams around Twitch.
Contributing with some pages as well as updates and additional information on pages I wrote is Samantha Bacon. Sammie (IFPA #59655, she/her) is one of the world's premier women pinball players, ranked #35 in the world as of June 2024; she cracked the top 10 women's rankings in four different U.S. states for the 2023 season, and placed 3rd in the 2023 North Carolina Women's State Pinball Championship. She has years of experience playing on tables from all eras at over 200 IFPA events.
Additional credits and shoutouts go to arborelia (Elia Lake, IFPA #92725; she/her), GlitchCat7 (he/him), and TerpohGaming (he/him) for their feedback and assistance. Check out all three of them on Twitch- though, as a heads-up, they are not solely pinball streamers.
The Pinball Primer is designed to be a one-stop shop for anyone looking to learn a pinball table of any era. Whether you're playing casually or in a tournament, and whether you're new to pinball or have years of experience, my vision is for The Pinball Primer to be a place where you can spend 30 seconds to quickly learn the strategy of any table you walk up to, or spend about 5 minutes deeply learning all the rules to truly understand how the game works.
Yes, other resources do exist, but incompleteness in their coverage or quality is precisely why I want to make The Pinball Primer a single, thorough, go-to resource. Inspiration was taken from some of the following places:
The Pinball Primer was not created to plagiarize the hard work of any of these people; it is merely intended to compile, refine, and expand upon it to help lower the barrier of entry for anyone who wants to enjoy playing pinball at any level.
Pinball games get re-released for a myriad of reasons, such as having both solid state and electromechanical versions, having versions with different numbers of players, trying to recapitalize on the success of a previously successful layout, or updating a licensed game in time with the release of other related media. If a table was released multiple times under different names with minimal rules changes, they appear under all different names on the game list and are counted separately to help a player that may not know that a game they're looking at has a "sister title", but the different links lead to the same page for efficiency's sake. Such guide pages that detail a table with multiple releases will include notes on the different versions of that game at the top of the page.
Sure! Just don't expect it to be ready immediately. The Pinball Primer is a labor of love and a hobby, and it takes a fair amount of time to learn a table and then do the write-up on it. Feel free to reach out, though, and we'll do what we can.
If you're looking to offer financial support: first of all, thank you! We don't have anything like this set up yet, but hopefully it's coming soon.
If you'd like to submit a correction or become a writer: message solar_espeon on Discord or email pinballprimer@gmail.com and let's talk.