DPO EXPO 2017

After taking a year off to prepare for the 25th anniversary of the NFV (Dutch Pinball Association) this was always going to be an extra-special show, and the setting of the Evoluon in the city of Eindhoven looked like the perfect venue for the DPO (Dutch Pinball Open) Expo.

The distinctive 1960s spaceship-style building was once home to a science museum, but since 1998 Evoluon (pronounced ‘a-voo-lon’) has been a conference and concert venue.  The interior consists of a ground floor with three circular floors above plus a partial fourth floor and a basement conference room.  Utilising all this floor space would be something of a challenge, but one the NFV organisers and their supporters managed with aplomb.

Entry to the show cost €15 per day ($17.50/£13.36) with entry to the main Dutch Pinball Open tournament another €20.

The DPO Expo can be split into four main activities – vendors, free play machines, tournaments and seminars.

Ground Floor

The ground floor was where almost all the vendors could be found, whether they were selling machines, parts, mods, publications, posters, clothing, or videos.

At the entry desk, the NFV had posters, branded clothing, books, magazines, plastics, mugs and all their usual range of merchandise.  There was also free coat storage here and a large cafeteria nearby.

As you walked past the entry desk there was a mechanical ball rolling sculpture on the left which both fascinated and delighted visitors.

Just beyond that were message boards for guests to make their mark, with the first of the vendor stands on the right.

The first sets of free play machines were also here, with some of the newest and most sought-after titles set up for visitors to play.

Here are all the machines set up on the ground floor as recorded at the busiest point of the show on Saturday afternoon:

A short climb up the staircase or a ride in the lift brings you to Ring 1, the first of the three circular floors which run around the edge of the ‘saucer’ and allow you to look down on the floors below.

However we wanted to go straight to the top, so we took the lift to Ring 4 which is more like a platform than a ring but that’s what it’s called.

Ring 4

It was on this partial ring that the home-brew pinballs were to be found sitting alongside more free-play machines.  There was also a cafe/bar and seating area for those all pinballed-out by the sheer number of machines to play.  As you exit the lift you walk out onto a shiny floor which mirrors the ceiling and gives a disorientated feeling as though you are about to step into thin air.

Star Wars: Death Star One went on to win the Best Game in Show award as chosen by special guest Kevin O’Connor.

Here’s a list of all Ring 4’s machines:

Ring 3

Ring 3 was home to the tournament areas.

There were three zones in the tournament area; one for the main Dutch Pinball Open (DPO) machines, one for the Classics Tournament machines, and the third with machines for the side competitions such as the Ladies’, Youth and Swiss-Style tournaments.  The tournament desk where DPO players signed-in and reported results was also here.

Although the tournaments took up much of Ring 3, there was still room for some free play machines to be slotted-in.

Ring 3’s free-play machines:

Ring 3’s DPO Machines:

Ring 3’s Classics Tournament Machines:

Ring 3’s Other Tournament Machines:

Ring 2

Ring 2 was the most full-on as far as free play machines went.  They were split into several blocks of back-to-back machines with enough room for guests to pass on their way to more machines or to the staircases.

Ring 2’s machines

Ring 1

Ring 1 played host to the companies Ministry of Pinball and iPinball.nl, both of which had nice selections of games on free play.

Ring 1’s machines

In total we counted 468 pinballs over the five levels, including tournament games. Additional machines may have arrived later while others may have been removed, but 468 was the number we counted when the greatest number of visitors were in the Evoluon.

Seminars

Along with the machines, tournaments and vendors there was also a full schedule of seminars run by Jonathan Joosten, starting at midday on Saturday with Nicolas from PinSound talking about the various replacement soundtracks available for games using the PinSound board.

Most of the seminars were recorded by Peter Homan and we have added them all below.

At 1pm Wil Angenent spoke about his latest custom game creation, Star Wars: Death Star One, which he built from an original Star Wars game by Data East, but modified the playfield to add extra shots, new ways to start the features and added an LCD display.

Following Wil was Kevin O’Connor who recounted his early years in the pinball business creating art for many famous Bally games.

At 3:30pm there was a special presentation marking the 25th anniversary of the Dutch Pinball Association (NFV).  Former heads of the association joined current board members to talk about how the NFV was founded, the notable events in its history and to unveil the new NFV logo.

Note that this seminar was presented in Dutch.

At 5pm it was time for Barry Oursler to talk about his time designing games such as Gorgar, Pinbot, Comet, Cyclone, Doctor Who, Dirty Harry and many more while working at Williams.

Following Barry, Pinball News Editor Martin Ayub and Pinball Magazine Editor Jonathan Joosten held their popular So You Think You Know Pinball? quiz where the audience go to win great prizes from Jersey Jack Pinball, Stern Pinball, Dutch Pinball, Pinball Magazine, Pinball News and many others in return for answering pinball questions correctly.

Kevin O’Connor continued his seminar on Sunday at noon, looking at his artwork on more recent titles for Data East, Sega and Stern Pinball.

Then at 1pm, Dennis van de Pas spoke about the creation of his most recent custom game, Kill Bill, based on the Quentin Tarantino movie.

2pm was the time for Dutch Pinball’s Jaap Nauta and Barry Driessen to update the audience on their progress towards resumption of production of their company’s The Big Lebowski game.

Jean-Paul de Win was the next speaker.  He talked about his work on Jersey Jack Pinball’s Dialed In! game, creating the Quantum City model and all the in-game display animations.

In the final seminar, Barry Oursler concluded his talk from Saturday to look at his most recent work and his current job designing pinballs for Heighway Pinball.

With so many machines, stands and seminars spread out around the building, seeing the whole show takes some time.  So, here’s our exclusive Thirty-One Minute Tour video showing you all around DPO Expo 2017.

Tournaments

The name of the event was the DPO Expo, so the main Dutch Pinball Open tournament was a major part of the weekend.

244 players took part in the DPO, with play split between a set of qualifying rounds on Saturday and the play-offs on Sunday.

Qualifying was held in five two-hour sessions spread across Saturday.  In qualifying each player could choose six of the twenty-four available machines to play and record a score.  Scores on each machine were ranked and points awarded.  The total of all six games’ ranking points gave the player their total points and determined their qualifying position.

To select a game, players put their badge under the game name on one of two peg boards (one board for machines 1-12 and another for machines 13-24).  When their name moved up to the top position, it was their turn to play next.

In addition to their six games, each player had one joker which allowed them to replay one of their chosen machines.  This was a ‘hard’ joker, in that the score would be replaced even if it was lower than their original score.  The joker game could be played during the regular qualifying period, or in a separate joker round right at the end of qualifying.  It could also not be played at all if a player was happy with all six of their scores or didn’t want to gamble on improving one of them.

The top 48 players qualified for Sunday’s play-offs, with the top 16 getting a bye through the first round.

The play-offs on Sunday were a standard double-elimination format, with the winners bracket being the best-of-three games on machines chosen at random while the loser bracket was only a single game. Progress was shown on a spreadsheet.

Meanwhile, over in the Classics Tournament area qualifying began on Saturday morning and continued until lunchtime on Sunday.

The format allowed unlimited entries at a cost of €3 each.  Each entry consisted of a single game on three of the Classics Tournament machines.  As with the DPO, scores were ranked on each machine and the total ranking points from the three scores were used to rank that entry.  Only a player’s best entry could qualify, but all entries counted in determining ranking points.

Scoring for the Classics Tournament was done on paper and manually entered in to the computer system.

When all qualifying was over on Sunday lunchtime, the top 16 from the 151 entrants made it through to the play-offs.

They were (in alphabetical order): Albert Nomden, Benjamin Gräbeldinger, Cayle George, Craig Pullen, David Mainwaring, Evert Brochez, Greg Mott,John van der Wulp, Kirsten Adam,Mark van der Gugten, Michel Rorive, Peter Andersen, Ralph Beckers, Rich Mallett, Roy Wils & Stefan Herold.

The Classics Tournament play-offs were a simple best-of-three single-elimination format played as eight pairs in the first round, four pairs in the quarter finals, two pairs in the semis and then the final pairing of Ralph Beckers and Roy Wils.

After the first ball on Mata Hari it was close, with Roy ahead on 149,300 to Ralph’s 103,600.  Ball two wasn’t so good for Ralph and he only added 20k to his score compared to Roy who more than tripled his score to 383,980.  Ralph’s third ball was even worse, ending on 127,760 to give Roy the first game without needing to play his third ball.

The second game was Nitro Groundshaker.

Again, Roy was in charge scoring more than 500,000 on his first ball compared to Ralph’s 19,890.  Balls two and three were no better for Ralph and he finished his game on 40,410.  That gave Roy a 2-0 win in the final and first place in the tournament.  In the play-off for third place, Albert Nomden beat Stefan Herold.

The main DPO reach its final after the Classics Tournament had concluded.  Roy Wils was playing in both so they needed to be held consecutively.

Roy was joined by Peter Andersen and Taco Wouters to play the best-of-three final.  Each chose a machine to play and took the player one position on their choice.  Roy chose Rollercoaster Tycoon, Peter chose Aerosmith and Taco chose Whitewater.  Points would be awarded for position in each game using a 5-2-0 system.

Roy began first on Rollercoaster Tycoon.

Roy’s 692,910 on ball one was a disappointing start, but Taco only managed 305,890 on his ball.

Meanwhile, Peter’s first ball didn’t go so well either.

Taco started multiball on his second ball to take the lead.

His 5,229,380 was more than double Peter’s 2,448,650, while Roy was third on 1,178,290.

Roy wasn’t able to get a grip on the game on his third ball either, ending his game on 1,352,900 for third place.  Taco likewise had a bad third ball and only raised his score to 5,505,780.  Only Peter could prevent Taco winning game one, and to do that he really needed to start multiball.

Peter’s score soon passed Taco’s and he stopped playing with 5,783,420 racked-up.  So Peter had 5 points, Taco 2 points and Roy 0 points going into game two – Whitewater.

As with Rollercoaster Tycoon, the player picking the game didn’t get off to a great start.  In fact, Taco’s first ball only netted him 3,030,440 points.  Peter meanwhile scored 20,580,770 to take the lead with Roy having another bad ball, scoring only 1, 650,000.

All three did rather better on their second balls thanks to starting multiball.  Taco raised his score to 55, 701,120 and Roy to 41,721,100, but again it was Peter who did best of all which his 189,078,870 second ball total.

The pressure was on Taco and Roy to stop Peter taking another 5 points and wrapping up the win.

Taco couldn’t beat Peter’s score, ending his game on 74,961,230.  Peter used his third ball to extend his lead further and ended with 257,089,420.

Only Roy could stop him, and he did thanks to some great multiball jackpots.

Roy stopped with a score of 266, 231,560 to make the overall points total Peter: 7, Roy: 5, Taco: 2.

For Taco only a win would do to keep his championship hopes alive, and then it would require Roy to be second and Peter third to get a three-way play-off.  If either Peter or Roy won the third game then they would win overall.

It was Peter’s choice of Aerosmith and the curse of player one continued.

His first ball score of 513,960 was third, behind Taco in first with 2,108,600 and Roy on 1,518,890.

All three did better on their second balls but Peter was still third with his 3, 098,000.  Roy overtook Taco by 6,773,180 to 4,045,010, but going into the third ball it was still anybody’s game.

Peter did much better on his third ball thanks to a nice multiball.  He ended his game with 19,252,370.

Roy looked set to catch him when…

Roy’s score of 11,084,090 meant Peter had gained at least 2 points and so had safely won the final regardless of how Taco did on his last ball.

As it transpired, Taco only had a quick ball and ended with 5,291,390 points, putting him in third place in the game and third overall.  With the DPO running behind schedule, presentation of the trophies and cash prizes followed immediately the result was known.

In the Ladies Tournament held in the second tournament area it was a win for Evelyne Desot.

Evelyne beat Jasmijn de Jong who was second, with Julie Gray in third.

Jasmijn had already left by the time of the trophy presentation.

In addition there was a Youth Tournament held in the same second tournament area on Sunday.

We will bring you the results of this just as soon as we get them.

The tournament results bring our report from the DPO Expo 2017 to a close.

This was certainly a landmark event and almost certainly the largest European pinball show to date in terms of number of machines and the floor space available.  The venue was as impressive as the organisation, and given how much work must have gone into setting everything up it was a shame the event was only two days long; we could have spent a week there and still not played every machine.

Eindhoven was a great host city too – lots of nearby hotels, good train and air connections, and plenty of late-night entertainment for a post-Expo wind-down.  The show coincided with the Glow festival of light and colour which added an extra element to the weekend’s fun.

So, congratulations to the organisers and everyone who brought games, staffed the desks and tournament areas, helped with the seminars, repaired machines, set up and ran the scoring systems, assisted guests and generally made sure everyone had a great time.  How they will top this show in the future is anyone’s guess.

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