The Modern Pinball Comeback: How Pinball Came Back to Life

If you only know modern pinball, it is easy to forget that the industry looked very different not that long ago.

For decades, pinball had gone through huge ups and downs. Manufacturers disappeared, production became more limited, and for a while Stern was essentially carrying the new pinball market almost by itself.

Then something changed.

The Beginning of the Modern Comeback

Around the beginning of the 2010s, Stern started producing machines that felt like a real turning point for the hobby.

Iron Man arrived in 2010, followed by TRON: Legacy and Transformers in 2011. Then came machines such as AC/DC, Metallica and Star Trek. Suddenly, there was a new generation of machines with big themes, modern electronics, increasingly ambitious rules and a growing collector audience.

You can see that evolution in machines like TRON: Legacy, which still feels like one of the defining visual statements of that period.

It was also the beginning of a much broader Stern catalogue. Looking back at Stern's greatest modern machines, it is easy to see just how quickly the company moved from simply keeping pinball alive to producing machines that could compete for the attention of a new generation of collectors.

And it wasn't just about Stern.

More Manufacturers, More Ideas

In 2011, Jack Guarnieri founded Jersey Jack Pinball. Two years later, the company released The Wizard of Oz — its first production machine and a huge statement about what was possible in modern pinball.

The machine was enormous, packed with toys, mechanisms and visual detail. More importantly, its arrival proved that there was room for another major manufacturer in the pinball market.

The history of Jersey Jack Pinball is really a history of how quickly the premium end of modern pinball evolved after that point.

Around the same period, Chicago Gaming brought Medieval Madness back as a modern remake. Suddenly, players had another reason to look at classic pinball differently: the games of the 1990s didn't necessarily have to remain locked in the past.

They could come back.

And they could come back with modern hardware.

The message was becoming clear.

Pinball wasn't simply surviving anymore.

It was growing.

The Comeback Became a Movement

Once the market started moving again, more companies and more ideas followed.

Spooky Pinball appeared in 2014. Jersey Jack continued producing ambitious machines. Chicago Gaming continued its remake programme. Stern kept expanding its own catalogue.

Eventually, the industry became much more diverse than it had been when Stern was effectively alone at the top.

That is something we find particularly interesting at Wizard Mod.

We only make mods for modern pinball machines, but the reason modern pinball is so interesting is because it didn't appear out of nowhere. It came from this period of experimentation, competition and renewed interest.

Today, you can have a Stern, a Jersey Jack, a Spooky, a Chicago Gaming remake or a machine from one of the newer independent manufacturers — and they can all feel completely different.

Then Ghostbusters Changed the Look

But there was another comeback happening at the same time.

Not just a comeback in the number of machines being produced, but a comeback in how pinball machines could look.

For us, Ghostbusters is one of the most interesting examples.

Released by Stern in 2016, Ghostbusters made a very different artistic choice from many of the machines that had come before it. Instead of relying heavily on photographic movie imagery, it embraced a bold, illustrated, hand-drawn visual style by Jeremy Packer, better known as Zombie Yeti.

And suddenly, it felt like pinball had remembered something.

The great machines of the 1990s weren't trying to look like movie posters. They had their own visual language. Characters were illustrated. Scenes were exaggerated. Artwork was created specifically for the machine.

Ghostbusters showed that modern pinball could do that again.

It wasn't just artwork placed onto a cabinet. The artwork became part of the identity of the machine.

And that opened the door for a new generation of beautifully illustrated pinball.

You can see just how important that evolution became when looking at our most beautiful modern pinball machines, where Ghostbusters sits alongside machines such as Batman '66, Godzilla, Metallica Remastered and TRON: Legacy.

For a machine with such a strong visual identity, adding custom artwork can also be particularly effective. Our Ghostbusters Pinball Mods are a good example of how that original artwork can be extended without losing what made the machine special in the first place.

From Comeback to Renaissance

From there, the industry just kept expanding.

More manufacturers appeared. Remakes became a major part of the hobby. Premium editions became increasingly ambitious. Original themes returned alongside huge movie and music themes.

Today, companies like Spooky and Barrels of Fun are part of a much broader pinball ecosystem than the one that existed fifteen years ago.

And that is what makes the modern era so interesting.

The pinball comeback wasn't one machine or one company.

It was a chain reaction.

Stern showed that modern themes pinball could still work. Jersey Jack proved there was room for another major manufacturer. Chicago Gaming helped bring classic games back. Spooky and the newer boutique manufacturers showed that smaller companies could also find their place.

And artists like Zombie Yeti helped remind everyone that pinball didn't have to simply reproduce the artwork of another medium.

It could create its own.

That is probably the biggest reason we love modern pinball at Wizard Mod.

There has never been more variety, more creativity, or more machines worth customising.

The comeback that started around the beginning of the 2010s didn't really end.

It just became the modern pinball hobby we know today.