A 25-year-old PC pinball game is my new meditation app

It’s 1993. I don’t even remember where I first began playing the Jurassic Park pinball machine, but the sounds are burned into my brain: the roar of a T. rex, the driving score, and the famous words uttered once again: “Welcome…to Jurassic Park.”

Decades later, I can play it once again, via Visual Pinball.

Video games are as close to reality as they’ve ever been. We can model entire civilizations, even galaxies, in pixels. But there’s something visceral about pinball: the flashing lights, the careening balls, trying to hit targets and ramps in a set amount of time. Pinball demands skill, lightning reflexes, and coordination, all for the chance of an extra ball or even a free game.

I started playing around with Visual Pinball more than a decade ago, maybe even two. I stopped, well, because life got in the way. But I recently got the urge to start picking it up again, and you should too, even if you don’t consider yourself a gamer. Why? Because there’s a reason Microsoft built a pinball game into early versions of Windows: We all instinctively get pinball. And Visual Pinball makes it better than ever, all for free.

A taste of your childhood

Visual Pinball is art, and more than you think. Yes, there are faithful recreations of the tables you played as a kid, but there are entirely new designs, too, all engineered by a dedicated one or two or five people placing each bumper and target and ramp by hand.

Visual Pinball has been out since 2000; it’s a free, open-source app that has been continually updated. It’s essentially a pinball table construction set. If you want to play a recreation of a real table, you’ll need a second piece of software, called PinMAME, that essentially serves as the “script” for how the table should operate.

I first started fooling around with Visual Pinball more than a decade ago. The biggest change I’ve noticed is that a long time ago, ROMs were kept secret, existing in somewhat of a gray area, legally. The tables are recreations, but the ROMs themselves — plus backglass art and voices — appear to be circulated much more openly, perhaps just to keep the genre alive and well. Again, there’s nothing like playing an actual table, and modern tables like Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye are much more than just whacking a few silver balls around.

But Visual Pinball is also kind of a club, the kind that’s sort of frustrating to navigate until you’re inside. Although you can try to find Visual Pinball and tables by yourself, the easiest route is to sign up at one of the three main sites: VPforums.org, VPUniverse.com, or VPinHub.com. You’ll have to register to download anything, with (not particularly onerous) limits on how much you can download at a time. I started at VPForums, but the other two have their own appeal. You may find different tables at different sites, as well, depending upon the author.

The other thing to know is that Visual Pinball isn’t just a single app; Visual Pinball originated with VP8, but a schism of sorts happened with Visual Pinball 10: Visual Pinball 10 is now called Visual Pinball X (VPX) and the tables and software are incompatible with VP8. Most people play VPX tables, though there are other emulators, like Future Pinball.

Visual Pinball has even added an OpenGL fork with support for Steam VR, so that you can play pinball via Vive or other headsets. You can even build your own pinball cabinets, though that’s a substantially larger investment of time and money.

I haven’t been able to find any hardware requirements for Visual Pinball, but chatter from a decade ago claimed that a 4th-gen Intel Core i3 could run all of the tables easily. I used a laptop with an AMD Ryzen AI 300 CPU and its integrated graphics, and that’s all.

Tips: How to use Visual Pinball

It’s all a little overwhelming, and I confess I wrestled with the Visual Pinball setup for an afternoon or two before I figured it all out again. A single installer, linked below, simplifies this immensely. Half of the tutorials seem like they were written decades ago, and probably were.

It’s important to realize that many tables have both a table and a ROM file, and you’ll need to download both. Realizing that will help immensely.

If you get in trouble, try these tips:

Download the VPX Installer app from Github. (Windows won’t recognize it, so you’ll have to approve it manually.) That will download and set up most of the files in its own directory. Also download the scripts, samples, and fonts. I tried winging it without them and not everything worked.

After you’ve installed VPX, you’ll want to download a table. Look closely at the table entry to see if there’s an associated ROM file. If there is, download the zipped file, and then put the unzipped folder into your ROMs folder. Place the unzipped table inside the Visual Pinball “Tables” directory. Some tables do not have ROM files associated with them. If they don’t, just use the table file.

While you can launch a table by clicking a table in your tables folder, launching the game using either the VisualPinballX executable or one of the OpenGL derivatives will open up Visual Pinball. Navigate through the menus at the top and change (or learn) the key commands for “inserting coins” (5) and “starting the game” (1) as well as the flippers (SHIFT) and the plunger (ENTER). Visual Pinball also supports “special” keys that reproduce functions in the game, such as the Jurassic Park table’s “smart bomb” or the gun trigger in the Terminator tables. Learn those, too.

Playing Visual Pinball is magic

But man, once you’ve figured it out, even virtual pinball can be transcendent. It’s easy just to lose yourself in the flow, turning off your brain while you flip balls at targets. Maybe there’s a reason why one of the other paid pinball apps is called Zen Pinball, right?

Some of the older tables — Tales of the Arabian Nights, Theatre of Magic — were ones that I discovered as I started playing more physical pinball, but the look and feel has been carefully emulated. I don’t know how you reproduce an animatronic dinosaur that gobbles pinballs, but I’m sure glad they found a way. Visual Pinball is also a gateway drug — what’s that? And what’s that? It’s not hard to download three or four tables at a time, just to see how they play.

When you consider that these tables have to be essentially placed and scripted, especially if they’re recreations or new works, it’s incredibly impressive. Each table is at most about 150 megabytes, which isn’t much at all for a modern PC. I also doubt that you’ll have to do all that much adjustment, visually. Most of these tables were coded and uploaded over a decade ago, when PCs were weaker than they are today. Still, all this means is that you can tuck away a bunch of killer tables in a corner of your hard drive, without worrying too much about either the amount of space they’ll take up or the stress they’ll put on your PC.

For me, Visual Pinball is nostalgia, a quick break from reality to relive my childhood. More than that, though, it’s just so much damn fun.