Saratoga Silverball, June 2025 pinball & arcade convention tour (Queensbury NY), full 4K walkthrough

Crazy to think, but here we are in June, and we're at our third pinball show of the year. After visiting Pinbrew back in April, Pinfest last month in May, now we've got the Saratoga Silverball show. This one wasn't really on our radar last year until we visited the area back in October and had met Lonnie, the manager of the WOW Entertainment Center in the Wilton Mall just a few miles away. He had mentioned that he runs a show every year, but we had just missed the 2024 edition. So I made sure to pencil it in on my calendar and attempt to make the trip up from New Jersey in 2025. But in the course of a year, a lot had changed; Lonnie's newest venture would be a long-held dream of opening a nonprofit pinball and retro arcade game museum, and in the weeks leading up to the show, he had announced on Facebook that the show would actually also be a soft opening for the museum, named Arcade Archaeology. This space would be inside the Aviation Mall, just a few miles down the road from Six Flags Great Escape. I'd never been to this mall before, so I went in curious to check it out. While the show itself ended up being the smallest of the three we'd visited this year, we had a great time the entire day on Friday, playing a mix of classics and rare machines that you don't see that frequently. It was awesome to finally get a chance to play Capcom's unique oddity Flipper Football, complete with a soccer ball firmly affixed to the backglass. Although I've tried virtual pinball recreations of it, the real thing just flows so much better. Another unique game that I haven't seen often in my travels is Gottlieb's Caveman, one of the few video game / pinball hybrids from the 80's when manufacturers were trying different things to stay relevant out there. Later in the evening, there was an informal five strikes tournament across a variety of the games; I jumped between Fish Tales to Black Hole, Maverick to Deadly Weapon. Unfortunately a pair of house balls took me out on Earthshaker