These People Want Your Money: Game Over for the World's Largest Museum of Pinball?
Project The World's Largest Museum of Pinball
Cash Ask $150,000
Concept A place where all the world's children can come together and play antiquated pinball machines in a massive eruption of shared, borrowed nostalgia.
Creators John Weeks is a semi-obsessive pinball collector with over 500 machines locked away in storage units somewhere in California. It's his dream to create a giant arcade/museum to house them all for public consumption. The host of the video, David Trotter, is a high-on-life (or something else) marketing guy who was presumably the one to suggest using Kickstarter.
Worth Funding? Somewhat moot. There are 19 hours remaining and the project is $125,000 short of the target, meaning this endeavor has been relegated to "pipe dream" status at best. There are plenty of reasons for that—a pinball museum located in California holds limited value for anyone not living in, or traveling to, that region, and honestly it's not like substantial pinball arcades are particularly hard to find in America. The so-called Pinball Hall of Fame is in Las Vegas, just a handful of hours away from the proposed site of the World's Largest Museum. It doesn't have as many games as the proposed World's Largest Museum would—but the Pacific Pinball Museum, also located in California, does. Or will, if it gets the money it's trying to raise.
So the question is: Does the world, or even the west coast of the United States, need another cacophonic building filled with 400 or more pinball machines? (That's a rhetorical question.)
All that being said, the idea of Weeks and his unwieldy collection of pinball machines is pretty depressing, which is why I'm posting about the campaign with so little time remaining. My suggestion: Go ahead and pledge $20 or $50 or even $25,000. This project is on the express train to Unfundedville, so any money you offer won't actually be used. (Kickstarter only charges your credit card if the project is fully funded). At this point, it's just about lifting John Weeks' spirits. Any man who sincerely believes he can build pinball Mecca deserves our optimism. I want his dreams to come true—and I'll take the time to enter my credit card information in vain just to make them seem that much less far-fetched. We are all John Weeks in one way or another.
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