Who are we ?

This website is maintained by Nikky and Aeneas. We are somewhere in our 30ies, and pinball machines are more than 10 years one of our hobbies.

A lot of people around our age were avid pinball players when they went to college (somewhere in the 1990ies). Later they get a job, buy a house and settle down..
When they suddenly find out you can actually buy these great machines you remember playing (such as The Addams Family, Star Trek, Twilight Zone, ..) the madness hobby starts.

Our story is no different - we had bought a house and once we were settled in, we decided to buy a pinball machine. We thought this was a good idea to fill a part of our empty living room. Did we know it would fill more than one room...
This was around 1999-2000. We found an operator who had some pinball machines for sale. By the time we got there the argument started about which one to buy. Aeneas wanted a White Water and Nikky a more classic looking machine with bumpers at the top of the playfield, so she preferred Road Kings. In the end we made it easy for ourselves and just bought both.

Aeneas had discovered the newsgroup rec.games.pinball and learned more about pins and all the different models. Pinball repair guides were detailed enough to try and buy a few 'project' machines. The hobby for Aeneas was not anymore only about playing, but also repairing and restoring the machines, learning how everything worked, ..
Nikky enjoyed visiting shows (with pinball machines, rockabilly, collectibles, ..), helping others and making pinball more popular.

The (pin)ball just kept on rolling. We had a lot of fun with our first two pinball machines, but looked for another and another and another... the first years in this hobby we often changed pinball machines, always trying a new model to see if it was more fun to play than one we had. Some games we liked so much that we didn't want to sell them, so the collection started to grow.
When our living room was full, the pinball machine moved upstairs to the spare bedroom. Later they moved into the master bedroom.
Only three years later, our house became too small: pinball and arcade machines started to invade our kitchen.. We decided to build a specific gameroom in the garden that can hold 14 pinball machines..

Our personal homepage was started around 2001 with the pinball newbie pages, and moved a few years later to this domain: www.flippers.be. During all these years we daily get emails from people asking questions about buying a pinball machine, looking for spare parts or a specific machine, who need help repairing their pinball machine, .. and always try to help everyone.
The pinball hobby became more and more about helping others. We became members of the Dutch Pinball Organisation, Nikky even became head of their Belgian division. We organised two times the belgian pinball championship and helped others organise pinball competitions. We opened up our gameroom, inviting local pinball enthousiasts so they could play pinball and meet each other (this was before local pinball forums existed), a few times we even rented the latest Stern pinball machine from the distributor so people could come to our house and play it. We sometimes invite people who are new into this hobby over to our house so we can explain things, in one or two hours you can show and teach a lot more than by sending emails..

Becoming a parent changes your life, and for us this was not different. We scaled back our involvement in pinball drastically.
The website remained and we still answered emails, but that was about it. We didn't visit local pinball events anymore, ..
In the meantime the pinball scene in Belgium had also grown from a dozen to more than hundred pinball collectors, local pinball forum websites had started where people could get to know and help eachother, others opened up their gamerooms and organised competitions and new pinball release parties, ..
The last few years we're back into pinball a little bit more, visiting shows, always trying to help people, updating this website, .. pinball machines are again a hobby.

Credits: www.flippers.be logo designed by Frans Kwanten.