AUSTRIAN PINBALL FESTIVAL 2026

In 2025, RS-Pinball head, Stefan Riedler, headed up the team organising the 2025 European Pinball Championship. It was held at the REVA Halle Eissport in the town of Vöcklabruck in the centre of the country. We were there and you can read our report here.

The EPC was such a success with so much support, nobody wanted it to just be a one-off event. Thus, the idea developed to recreate the EPC, albeit on a slightly smaller scale, and turn it into an annual show. The Austrian Pinball Festival was born.

The REVA Halle Eissport is an ice skating rink from October to February in which guise it hosts public ice skating, curling and ice hockey matches. Then, from the end of February, the ice is melted, the water drained, a floor laid, and the venue becomes a 1,800m² exhibition and entertainment hall.

At the end of March, the huge banner for the Austrian Pinball Festival (or APF) was hung over the entrance, six weeks before the doors opened on Wednesday 13th May.

The APF is a five-day show starting with the Warm-Up Tournament on Wednesday afternoon – the first of eight tournaments held during the APF – and concluding late Sunday night with the finals of the High Score Tournament.

Before we get to the competitive side, let’s take a look around the venue and the layout of the show.

THE VENUE

The attractions start before we even get through the doors. On the right is RS-Pinball’s latest promotional vehicle, a mobile mini-arcade.

The mobile mini-arcade can be taken to all kinds of gaming and collector shows, driven onto the show floor and opened up without the need to set up a stand. The mix of machines can vary, but for the APF it featured four pinballs, a multi-game video game and an Ice Cold Beer-style skill game. The pinballs were Pokémon, Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye, Queen and Halloween.

On the left side was the catering team and food truck. The main catering team were present with their gazebo most days, while a larger rotisserie food truck was also in attendance at the busiest times.

The main team provided burgers, fried chicken, fries and salads, with schnitzel rolls also being available to purchase inside at the bar.

Should attendees require an alternative and more varied selection of food, a large Maximarkt supermarket was a short walk away across the car park.

We used the Maximarkt several times during our stay to buy fruit, juices, wraps and sushi for some of our meals, and knew from last year’s EPC visit that the store would be closed all day on Sunday, so planned to buy extra on Saturday. What we hadn’t realised though was that the Thursday of the show was a public holiday in Austria (as well as several other countries), meaning the store was closed that day too. Lesson learned.

Front Area

In contrast to last year’s EPC event, the weather for the APF was cool and wet for most of the show. Things improved markedly by Sunday, but the low temperatures and cloudy skies helped maintain a pleasant atmosphere inside the REVA Halle Eissport.

On the right as you enter the hall, the registration desk is where pre-paid guests could collect their badges and wristbands, while un-registered visitors could buy single or multi-day entries.

Entry to the APF free play area cost €25 per day, €45 for Saturday and Sunday or €75 for all five days. A family day ticket for two adults and two children was also available at €60. Packages with tournament entries could also be purchased, along with single tournament entries for those events not already fully subscribed.

The registration desk also sold a large selection of merchandise, from promotional T-shirts to toppers, translites, playfields and other pinball mods.

On the opposite side of the entrance – on the left as you enter – was the bar and food service counter.

Multiple large refrigerators held assorted beers, wines, soft drinks and water. Bean-to-cup hot coffee was also available. Payment was made using an A5-sized card which cost €20 and featured multiple boxes which were crossed off as drinks were purchased. The exact number of boxes crossed off each time depended on the type of the drink purchased.

Schnitzel burgers could be purchased at the bar, as could hot pizzas. These were listed on a menu and then cooked to order in a bank of pizza ovens.

Because food and drinks were not permitted in the free play or tournament areas, multiple tables and benches were set up next to the bar where they could be consumed. Tags were available on which you could write a name or initials and then hang it on you unfinished drink bottle for later use.

At the far end of the seating area was the main stage with a large, bright LED screen.

The stage was where announcements and trophy presentations were made, where the live stream of some tournaments was shown, and also where the seminars by the APF’s special guests took place.

When the show was held, Pokémon was Stern Pinball’s current title. So, not only was one of each version of the game set up for guests to play, but a large inflatable Pikachu oversaw fair play.

With the registration desk, bar and seating areas at the front of the hall, the middle section contained all the free play machines and vendor stands.

Free Play Area

The central area of the hall consisted of four corridors, each with a row of free play machines, vendor stands or homebrew games on either side. We’ll look at each row from left to right, but because we were at the show for all five days certain machines may not have been set up fully, weren’t switched on yet, or might have been out of action when we took our photographs.

At the end of the first row, Vincent Mods had a nice display of their toppers and other themed mods.

Row five brings us to the start of the homebrew games. Some of these we saw in last year’s report, but even then in many cases there has been continued development to improve the quality of gameplay.

Like the Gas Attack game from the Grossology exhibition, Buddy uses pinball as a biological teaching tool.

Moving over to row six, Hexa Pinball had a stand showing their latest The Three Musketeers prototype alongside two of their previous Space Hunt games.

The Pinball Power Up Controller (PPUC) is an open source project to replace the hardware control system on Williams and Data East/Sega/Stern games right up to the SAM system, allowing you to write your own game rules and create your own DMD graphics. You can download the board designs from GitHub and have them made yourself, although talks are taking place for vendors to also sell ready-made systems.

Then we come to three custom designs by Stefan Mader.

Stefan’s third game was a coffee table machine called Spectra 6 which used the same black and white colour scheme as Centaur. All the playfield sculpts are 3D printed and then joined together into continuous models.

If you’d like to learn more about their creation, the builds of Deep Blue Rage, Tree House Club and Spectra 6 are all documented on Pinside.

Over on row seven, two working and one upcoming conversion projects by Alessandro Cacciola of SteelShot Pinball were on display. Lupin The 3rd (based on Diner) and Hokuto No Ken (based on Rollergames) were both at last year’s EPC, as was the work-in-progress Dirty Harry conversion, They Call Me Trinity, although the actual title of the game has changed in the past twelve months.

Alessandro’s SteelShot Pinball had a stand next to his games, selling multiple ways to bling up your games, from side rails to speaker panels, shooter rods and bottom aprons.

Pinball Parts also had a stand at the APF, selling some hard-to-find components as well as more familiar ones.

Finally in this row was a set of four games all coming from Germany.

The first three are conversions – Miss World (Bally’s KISS), Wild Schütz (Bally’s Strikes & Spares) and La Retata (Williams’ High Speed) – by Geiger, while the fourth, Sexy Girl, is a semi-original design by Arkon but based on Bally’s Playboy layout with a projector window added.

The free play area wasn’t entirely populated with pinballs though. Four amusement machines were set up at the front on the right to provide some silver ball alternatives.

Tournaments Area

The back of the hall featured three areas dedicated to tournaments. Their designation was indicated by signs hanging from the rafters.

On the left was the High Score Tournament.

On the right side were four rows of machines for the main Austrian Pinball Masters tournament. Each row was dedicated to a specific group of players (Group 1 – Group 4) for the qualifying rounds.

Large touchscreen monitors at the entrances to each group’s area let players check their upcoming matches, record the outcomes and check their qualifying standings.

At the far end of the hall were the machines for the Classic Tournament.

Christophe Berry streamed many of the later stages of several tournaments on his HaleMary12 Twitch channel.

The more premium trophies for the tournament were made by Vid Kuklec who also made similar awards for last year’s EPC.

You can take a full look all around the first Austrian Pinball Festival in our exclusive Twenty-Four Minute Tour, all shot in ultra high-definition 4K.

SEMINARS

This year Stefan invited several special guests, four of whom made presentations on the main stage on Saturday.

The talks were all streamed live by Pinball News on the Pinball News Twitch channel, and also uploaded to our YouTube channel.

First up was Alice Lemoine from Hexa Pinball.

Alice described some of the unique aspects of how Hexa Pinball makes the machines in the Bordeaux factory, including their playfield manufacturing methods.

She then talked about the company’s second release, The Three Musketeers, which was available to play on the Hexa Pinball stand at the show.

Then Aaron Davis and Brian Madden spoke about building your own pinball.

Aaron is the co-founder of FAST Pinball hardware system while Brian originated the Mission Pinball Framework which is behind many homebrew and commercial pinball machines. Together they urged everyone in the audience to realise their dream theme by collaborating with friends and other members of the homebrew community to build their own pinball, describing the initial steps and explaining the ever-expanding range of products available.

Later in the day, Eric Meunier from Jersey Jack Pinball gave a presentation about the making of the Harry Potter pinball.

Eric is the lead designer of Harry Potter and spoke about his love of the theme, the inspirations for the key mechanisms in the game and many of the challenges the team faced not only building the many components but also ensuring everything could be manufactured repeatedly, reliably and in quantity.

Later in the evening, Pinball News Editor, Martin Ayub, helped by Dutch Pinball Open Expo organiser, Marcel van Kessel, put together an impromptu quiz to give away a bunch of great prizes generously donated by vendors exhibiting at the show, as well as from American Pinball, Spooky Pinball, Stern Pinball, Barrel of Fun and RS-Pinball too.

On Saturday there was also a ceremony to present an award to the best homebrew game of the show.

Show guests were invited to use a voting card to submit their rankings for all the homebrew games. The top selections from that process were then put before a panel of show guests to pick the overall winner.

With so many ingenious and innovative games from which to pick, it was a close-run choice. However, the ultimate winner was Stefan Mader for his Deep Blue Rage machine.

Stefan won a brand new pinball cabinet and backbox set with which to build his next project. Stefan Riedler presented Stefan Mader with the backbox part of the set on the stage.

TOURNAMENTS

The first of many competitive events was the Warm-Up Tournament held on the Wednesday.

Warm-Up Tournament

175 players took part, with play registration from 1pm and the first rounds at 3pm. There were seven rounds of 4-player groups playing a single game per round with the winner earning 7 points. Second place scored 4 points, with 2 points for third and 0 points for fourth.

After seven rounds, the top 24 players had qualified for the play-offs. There was a tie for the last qualifying position, so a tie-breaker was played.

That made the qualifying list as follows, with the top 8 receiving a bye through the first round of play-offs:

The play-offs were head-to-head best-of-three matches which were played until just a final two competed for the top spot. They were top qualifier Viggo Löwgren and 10th place qualifier Lukas Ott.

Game one was played on Grand Lizard, which Viggo won. Game two was on Deadpool. Viggo tilted early on his first ball which gave Lukas the opportunity to pull ahead on his second ball, which he did to end on 773M.

However, Viggo had a great second ball to overtake Lukas and end his ball with a score of 1.4B.

That proved to be the winning score, as Lukas drained his third ball on 870M, giving Viggo the win.

In the third place play-off, Dominique De Cock triumphed on Indiana Jones and The Sopranos to win 2-0 against Alexander Muer, who ended in fourth place.

With the tournament ending at 22:35 when everyone else had left, the trophy presentations took place at 8:50am the following morning.

Winner, Viggo Löwgren, wasn’t at the show yet, so his first place trophy was collected on his behalf.

Main Tournament

Qualification for the Main Austrian Pinball Masters tournament was held in four blocks – two on Thursday (A & B) and two on Friday (C & D). Players could choose in which of the four blocks they wished to play their qualifying games.

Those in block A played their Main Austrian Pinball Masters qualifying matches on Thursday morning from 10am. Meanwhile, block B players played their qualifying matches in the Classic Tournament instead. Then, at 5pm they swapped over, so block A played Classic qualifying and B played Main. On Friday, the same thing happened with blocks C & D.

Each block (A-D) was then subdivided into four groups (1-4) of sixteen players each. Everyone in each group played a single game against everyone else in their group, giving them 15 games to play. The four players from each group with the most wins proceeded to the play-offs which began at 9:30am on Saturday.

The 64 qualifiers were (in alphabetical order):

The Main Tournament play-offs were played as best-of-seven head-to-head matches.

First into the final was Arvid Flygare who cruised through the first four rounds before a close 4-3 win in the semi-final against Jakub Tkacz. Arvid met Theodor Kristensen in the final, who had a similar progression, with his only close match taking place in the semi-final with a 4-3 win over Viggo Löwgren.

The first game of the final was No Fear.

No Fear was won by Theodor, but Arvid levelled the score with a win on Rush. Wins on Cyclone and Led Zeppelin put Theodor on the brink of winning the final, before Arvid came back with wins on Venom and Iron Maiden. That left NBA Fastbreak as the deciding game.

Played for basketball points rather than pinball points, Arvid set a final ball total of 87 points for Theodor to catch. It looked out of reach following an outlane drain, but Theodor easily made the Million Dollar Shot to keep playing, and despite a few nervous moments, inched past Arvid’s total, stopping play when he reached 89 points.

So, Theodor won and Arvid was second. In the third place play-off on Indiana Jones, Timber Engelbeen beat Jakub Tkacz.

Those who weren’t playing currently playing in the Main Tournament or Classic Tournament could compete in the qualifying rounds for the High Score Tournament.

High Score Tournament

Players could try to achieve their best score on all of the sixteen machines used for the tournament, with all scores ranked. They had unlimited attempts over the 30 hours of qualifying. At the end, their best 12 ranking points scores counted towards their overall total, with a maximum of two scores from any specific machine. 12 entries were included with registration, with further sets of 5 entries available to purchase.

Qualifying continued until 9pm on Saturday, when the top 32 players had qualified for the play-offs with the top 8 receiving a bye through the first round.

The qualifiers were:

The most qualifying entries played by those made it through was 97, the least was 37.

The first round of play-offs took place on Saturday night after qualifying, with the remaining rounds played on Sunday after the Main Tournament had concluded.

After a bye through round one, Arvid Flygare had three 3-1 victories to take him into the best-of-five final. His opponent was Warm-Up Tournament finalist, Lukas Ott, who also had a bye but followed that with two 3-0 victories and one 3-1 win.

After a win on Junk Yard, a loss on Jackbot and another win on The Beatles, Arvid led 2-1 and only needed a win on Creature From The Black Lagoon to seal the win.

In fact, Lukas won on Creature to level the score at 2-2, making the fifth and last game on Johnny Mnemonic the decider.

In a fast game, after five minutes the game was decided, with Arvid winning and taking first place overall.

In the play-off for third place, Erik Palfi beat Benjamin Kispal 2-0 on Revenge From Mars and Stern’s Jurassic Park.

With the final ending at 10:15pm on the last day of the show, the trophy presentation took place immediately. The presentations were made by Stefan Riedler and Arno Nöbl.

On Friday night there was a Women’s Tournament which began with a social quiz held in front of the stage. This was designed to get the players to know each other a little better before the pinball tournament began by creating teams of three to answer pinball-related questions. Answers were written on a sheet and the top team’s members would each win a trophy.

After the correct answers were revealed there was a tie for first place, so a tie-breaker question was introduced where both teams had to try to guess the number of pinball bulbs in a jar.

Whichever team was the closest would be the winner.

The Women’s Tournament didn’t start until 9:30pm, so a late finish was expected.

In fact, there were nineteen rounds of head-to-head play after which the top four went into the final.

They qualifying results were:

The final was played over three games – Radical!, Pinbot and Laser Cue.

After wins on Radical! and Pinbot, and with other the places going her way, Shirin had already won the final after two of the three games with 14 points to everyone else’s 4 points. The third game would, therefore, decide second, third and fourth.

Laser Cue was won by Sabine, with Elli second. Shirin was third and Irene fourth.

So, Shirin was first overall, Sabine second, Elli third and Irene fourth. The tournament didn’t finish until after 2am, so the trophy presentation was held in the morning. Not unsurprisingly, most trophy winners were not yet back at the venue when the trophies were handed out, but the winner, Shirin, was.

Classic Tournament

The Classic Tournament split all the players in each session into groups of four, with each group playing a single four-player game on a selected classic machine. Points were awarded for finishing position using the 7/4/2/0 system.

The groups and machines were then mixed up for the next round. Eight rounds were played in this way, after which the twelve players with the most points had qualified for the play-offs on Saturday afternoon, with the top four receiving a bye through the first round.

Unfortunately, on Saturday afternoon we were busy streaming the seminars and then helping to judge the best homebrew game. As a result, the final rounds were over before we got there to watch. However, we can report that Viggo Löwgren defeated Michael Trepp 3-0 to reach the final. There, he met Thomas Mästerman who had a much closer 3-2 victory over Bart Volman.

The final was played on Arena, Warlock and Pinbot, with all three wins going to Viggo, giving him first place. In the third place play-off, Michael Trepp had a 2-0 victory over Bart Volman on Skateball and Space Shuttle.

Bart wasn’t present for the main Classic Tournament trophy presentation but did arrive a little later to collect his award for fourth.

It is a tradition that at some point Stefan will lift someone onto his shoulder. Last year it was Abe Flips, this year Viggo received the honour.

The Warm-Up, Main, Classic and High Score Tournaments were all IFPA-accredited, but there were also four tournaments run simply for fun and bragging rights.

The Children’s Tournament was played on Sunday afternoon on a bank of Stern machines.

The results saw a win for Simon, with Paul second and Marlon third.

However, everyone won Lego prizes for taking part.

While we are talking about Lego, one of the other fun tournaments was held on one of the more unusual machines, a Lego pinball.

Lego Tournament

The Schoko 42 Lego pinball was built by Rolf Brisberger using Lego Mindstorm. The flippers are manually operated, but the game includes switches, bumpers, targets, LED lighting and mechanical stepper motor reels for score and ball number.

The title ‘Schoko’ is German for ‘chocolate’ and sure enough, at the end of the game a small foil-wrapped chocolate ball is dispensed to the player.

A tournament was run on the game to see who could achieve the highest score.

The highest scorer was Simon Wodok with 16,000 points. In second place and just 450 points behind, was Arvid Flygare, while a further 450 points back on 15, 100 was Martin Wodok.

There was also a Team Tournament held on Saturday night.

Team Tournament

With so much else happening we didn’t get to see it in action but were there for the presentation of trophies. By the time the trophies were handed out, not all the team members were present at the show, or were busy playing in different tournaments.

We will fill in the team details later when we get them, but here are the top three.

The end of the High Score Tournament’s final and the presentation of the trophies brought this inaugural Austrian Pinball Festival to a close.

Many thanks to Stefan, Julia, Arno and the huge team of volunteers who worked so hard long before, during and long after the show.

While there was widespread agreement that it had been a great success with the tournaments both well-designed and well-run, it might seem odd to find out there will not be another APF next year.

That’s not due to anything related to the APF itself, but simply because the German Pinball Association already has plans to hold an expanded GPA Expo in 2027, a month before the date an Austrian Pinball Festival would be held. The location for the GPA Expo is also not too far from Vöcklabruck, so the Austrian pinball community will be helping to support that event

However, planning is underway for the APF to return to Vöcklabruck in 2028 and, with two years to organise things, there are even greater aspirations for the second Austrian Pinball Festival.

In the meantime, we hope you have enjoyed our coverage of this year’s APF, our live streaming of the seminars and our recorded videos on YouTube, all available exclusively here at Pinball News.

Read more at https://www.pinballnews.com