Yes, my 'take' is that PBR works because it's primarily a community. It has a local-ish social scene of pinball players (not necessarily home owners) within an hour's drive/public transport of Croydon. PBR itself has pins, volunteering and ownership shared between ten people who evidently knew each other beforehand (the founders will know better about this than me). There is a core group of members who have sustained the club during its closure with continuing memberships, donations and even helping paint/fit out the new venue. You also get 'walk-in' players and regulars on weekends who aren't part of the existing membership, but might become part of it. The number of casuals may increase now it's in a shopping centre - rather than down a bumpy dirt track in an industrial estate!
We have about eight machines at home, but I go out (mostly) to PBR to play different machines, play in competitions and hang out socially with regulars. It is a club, first and foremost. The Medway Pinball Club feels like something of a spinoff of the original PBR venue - it shares a founder - and is also focused around community events.
I think the 'Blackpool' venue idea would work best if
@lukewells:
- Found someone else (or several someone's) to collaborate with, ideally someone with a slightly different collection.
- First, it means all the work of running and funding the club isn't down to him, and the club doesn't fold if he's abruptly ill or busy;
- Second, clubs work best if they have a selection of pins from different eras. I've noticed from doing London and SE League (primarily) that collectors often like a particular period or theme or gameplay style, and you're cutting down the number of people in an already small hobby if everything is pre-00s or modern Sterns or EMs or whatever. One of the big 'draws' to PBR when I first got into pinball was encountering the iconic 90s pins I'd already played on the Williams app. Other people will remember pins from the 80s, or have played a couple of modern Sterns.
- Situate the club somewhere in the north of England to reach the maximum possible community of existing players, whether central to drive to or take the train. In my experience with people playing pins in my house, and chatting to walk-up players on location, very few people walk off the street into a pinball venue and come weekly from then-on in. You might get a few of walk-in nostalgia players if you had Flash Gordon, The Addam's Family and Stern Star Wars in a glass window in a prominent position on the Blackpool seafront, along with gameplay instructions stuck up next to each pin (and the owners taught people who walk in off the street), but that's expensive, exhausting for the volunteers, and not the main way people seem to come into clubs.
- Organise as a community club first and a pinball venue second. Casual competitions, new pin launch evenings, etc. seem to be a great way to get people to emotionally invest. Otherwise, as @David_Vi says, you're expecting people to commit to making potentially long round trips purely to play pinball when they already have pins at home!
