New pinball: Jurassic Park (Premium)

Jurassic Park was my first Spike 2 machine, which means it was my first one with a full LCD screen in the backbox instead of the old dot-matrix display.

I grew up loving Jurassic Park, and honestly not so much for the dinosaurs. I am not big on gore. What I loved was the technology: the computer systems, “It’s a UNIX system, I know this,” Nedry hunched over his stack of Macintoshes. To a kid who would grow up to write software, that stuff hit different. So when I heard Stern was making a machine based on the original film, I knew right away that I wanted it.

It is designed by Keith Elwin, one of the best designers working today. It is a fairly simple layout without a ton of shots, but do not let that fool you, it is hard. I have still never made it to the Visitor Center, which is essentially the wizard mode, the final goal of the whole game. I just need to spend more time with it. The honest truth is that once you are up around eight or nine machines, actually staying sharp on all of them at once becomes its own challenge.

But I love the art, I love the sounds, and it is genuinely a really fun game.