About Flipcommons

Flipcommons is a collaborative encyclopedia for pinball knowledge: the machines, the people behind each machine, the manufacturers, the history, the weird edge cases and the facts hiding in somebody's memory or basement binder.

Why we're building it

Pinball has nearly a century of history spread across flyers, manuals, forums, collectors, museums, operators, designers and half-remembered stories. We want a collaborative, truth-seeking place where that knowledge can be collected, debated, corrected and made public.

Facts need footnotes

A lot of pinball facts come with asterisks. Who built what? Which company name counts? Was this a prototype, remake, conversion, export version? Instead of pretending every question has one simple answer, Flipcommons is built on a system of claims, citations and sources, so disagreements can be seen, discussed and resolved without losing the history underneath.

Relationship to The Flip

This site grew out of work for The Flip, Chicago's Playable Pinball Museum. Museums need good data to tell good stories. But this isn't only a museum catalog. It's meant to be useful to players, enthusiasts, researchers, contributors, collectors and anyone else who thinks pinball deserves better public memory.

Who started it

Flipcommons was started by two friends building a thing we wished existed. Meet the people who got it going.

Get in touch

Say hi, share a correction, or tell us what's missing: howdy@flipcommons.org.