The arcade and pinball hobby has a real, active event calendar — annual gatherings where hundreds or thousands of collectors, operators, and players converge on warehouses and convention centers full of machines set to free play. If you’ve never been to one, it’s worth understanding what’s out there.
California Extreme
Running since 1997 in the San Francisco Bay Area, California Extreme is built around a simple, beloved premise: hundreds of classic arcade and pinball machines, all owned and brought in by individual collectors, all set to free play for the weekend. It’s less a trade show and more a massive, temporary museum where the exhibits are also fully playable, and it remains one of the longest-running events of its kind in the country.
Pinball Expo
Held annually in the Chicago area since 1984, Pinball Expo is one of the oldest dedicated pinball events in the world, drawing manufacturers, historians, and collectors together for seminars, a large dealer marketplace, and — as with most events in this space — plenty of machines available to actually play rather than just look at.
Portland Retro Gaming Expo
One of the larger general retro gaming conventions in the country, covering console, computer, and arcade history together rather than focusing narrowly on coin-op, with a substantial dedicated arcade and pinball floor alongside its broader retro gaming programming.
Galloping Ghost Arcade Tournaments
Galloping Ghost, located in Brookfield, Illinois, bills itself as the largest arcade in the world with more than 900 machines on its floor, and it hosts a steady calendar of competitive tournaments across dozens of titles throughout the year — less a single annual event and more a year-round hub for the competitive side of the hobby.
The Amusement Expo
This is the industry’s own trade show rather than a hobbyist gathering — the modern successor to the historically separate AMOA and AAMA trade shows, which merged their events in 2011. Held annually in Las Vegas, it’s where manufacturers, distributors, and commercial operators do business, launch new machines, and network in a way that predates and still parallels the hobbyist convention circuit.
High-Score Culture and Twin Galaxies
Running alongside the event calendar is a competitive record-keeping tradition dating back to Twin Galaxies, founded in the early 1980s as the first organization to formally track and verify arcade high scores, eventually partnering with Guinness World Records to certify record claims. That verification culture — complete with its share of genuine controversy over disputed records — remains part of what gives competitive play at these events real stakes beyond bragging rights.
Why These Events Matter
- They’re often the only realistic way to actually play rare or fragile machines that few individual collectors could safely own and maintain.
- The dealer and swap-meet side of these events is where a huge amount of parts, board, and whole-cabinet trading actually happens face to face rather than online.
- For newcomers, they’re the fastest way to meet the local and national community in person rather than just through forums and Discord servers.
If you’re serious about this hobby, attending at least one major event is worth the trip — there’s no substitute for standing in a room with hundreds of working machines and the people who keep them running.