About

We help people buy used pinball machines without getting caught out. Name the game you’re after, like Twilight Zone, Medieval Madness, Black Hole or Lord of the Rings, and there’s a page for it. Each one tells you the game’s story, who designed it, the boards it runs on, what breaks, how to move it and what to check before you buy.

Some buyers want the game they played in a bar in 1993. Others want a first pin for the basement and don’t know a WPC board from a System 80. What collectors know about these games is scattered across the Internet Pinball Database, PinWiki, old manuals and forum threads, and a raw eBay search gives you none of it. So we keep 30 machine pages in one place, write down the things that catch used buyers out (batteries that leaked on the CPU board, a worn playfield, a broken toy, a missing key, a cabinet with no plan to move it) and pick the listings we’d buy.

We don’t sell machines. No affiliate links. We earn nothing. We only recommend what we’d buy, and we’d rather you buy used. We run no analytics or tracking cookies, and we’re not affiliated with any pinball maker. See how we work for how the pages are researched and our disclosure for how links, picks and photos work.

Backbox is part of allbutnew, a set of shops for secondhand gear. Got a pin to sell? The “Get an offer” link on every machine page sends it to our pinball expert, who replies by email.