Lyons Classic Pinball Arcade

While not nearly as cool as the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games, Lyons’ is a small pinball arcade, tucked off a small road near Estes Park, Colorado.

Estes is a little tourist town that happens to be home to the Stanley Hotel - a structure which served as the inspiration behind Stephen King’s The Shining. King did not write the novel while staying there, nor were any of the movie scenes filmed there, however the hotel does show the The Shining on a continuous loop on channel 42 on all the hotel TVs – so that’s creepy.

But I digress.

It was while making our way to the Stanley Hotel that we stumbled on Lyons Classic Pinball, just tucked away on a little sidestreet.

It looks like (and probably is) a converted 2-bedroom house with 4 rooms and about 40 games. You can find little arcades like this all over the place, but it’s still always fun to stumble on one and spend an hour or so wasting quarters.

To be honest, it was a pretty quick stop, just enough time to snap some pictures and play a few games.

Half the fun for Anjel and I is just looking at the artwork on all the vintage games. There are a lot of fantastic modern games out there (Theatre of Magic, Addams Family and Twilight Zone are a few of my favorites) but the old games with their hand-drawn graphics usually reward further exploration.

Though I am no expert on the subject of pinball graphics, the artist Coop (of Smoking Devil fame) had an interesting article a while back about Dave Christensen, the “King of Pinball artists.” While most of us probably didn’t realize that there was a king, it’s a good read and full of several examples of Christensen’s work. Worth checking out.

I don’t know if there were any Christensen games at Lyons, but there was a “Hercules” machine. Created in 1979 by Atari, Hercules is the largest commercial pinball machine ever made. It’s impossible to tell from the photo below, but it’s huge. The ball is the size of a billiard ball and the playfield is nearly 8 feet long. Those make for some impressive stats – but the gameplay itself isn’t much to write home about. In fact we played it once and as the novelty wore off, so did the fun.

All in all Lyons was just a pleasantly unexpected diversion on a day out. You can see the full Flick set of Lyon’s Classic Pinball photos here.

Or go to Lyons’ Website yourself to visit next time you’re in the area.