Wow, what a week or so!
We’ve worked with a great group of operators, locations, and players and have arrived at a full slate of 9 locations joining us for Season 1. Nine locations! Five states. It’s a lot to take in, but I’m excited to get this rolling and seeing where it goes.
When I came up with the idea for NPC (A summer league during NEPL downtime with a different finals format a team competition), I took it around to a few different trusted operators and locations to provide feedback and see if they were interested in joining. Of the 6 spots I talked to, only 2 were interested in joining. Some even told me it was probably a dead-end idea: people love being outside in the summer. Schedules are busy. People need a break from playing in, and running, pinball leagues. And that honestly tracked with what I expected the reaction would be: New England is pretty saturated with opportunities to play pinball. We have tournaments practically every week, 3 very large, all encompassing league seasons a year, and tons of fun, lightly organized events pretty much any day of the week. So the three locations that wanted to give it a try decided to launch it and see what happened.
The result has been pretty surprising to me. I knew I wasn’t the only person who wanted organized summer pinball, but I think I underestimated how many other people were down to play this summer too. To have 6 other spots reach out almost immediately and say “we’re in” was a challenge we gladly took on. Some really great players, people, locations, and amusment operators reached out and said we’re gonna do this too. It was great. But we already started to see that it was a mistake to underestimate the pinball community of our region.
That was my first mistake. It was a mistake to not talk to more locations. To work on this “quietly” and only allow a short period of time to let people know what was going on. To not map out players to locations to days available. To hold finals at a space-constrained spot. To push the league into a cap on locations for season 1 due to those constraints.
My promise to you: before the season’s up, I’m going to make more mistakes. The goal of Season 1 is to learn. For many years, I and others have debated back and forth “well we should run things this way” or “It makes more sense to do this instead of that”. Season 1 is going to test all those assumptions. Some will be right, some will be wrong. I do know this: I’ve spent the better part of 3 years making the best damn pinball experience I can for people that visit my venue. Many of the awesome people, locations, and operators we’re working with I know for a fact do the same. We are going to have as much fun with new ideas as we can this season, play some great pinball, and learn what worked and didn’t and return to you — with lessons learned and changes in tow. And everything will be above boards and open to inspection by people who wish to do so.
I’m sorry that we couldn’t get to more venues. I’m sorry we don’t have days and locations in as many places as the elephant in the room, NEPL. The good news is that if you can and want to play this summer, you should have a great time with great places. NEPL will be back in the fall, and large scale organized pinball will be there to accomodate all the things that a new, upstart, smaller operation can’t. I would recommend any venue looking to hold a league this summer: do it! I’d be happy to help talk formats and share all my documentation for NPC with you. Be there for your local community and have fun this summer.
But for now, let’s try to support all these people taking a flier on something different and doing it all to bring you something cool to do this summer.