I'm currently 29 years old, and I live in Laurel, Maryland, half-way between Baltimore and Washington DC. I currently work as an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at University of Maryland, College Park. I grew up in Montreal, and lived there until I was 21. In Sept. 1988 I moved to Pittsburgh, where I spent 6 years getting my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering. My specialty is software engineering for real-time systems, and considering that every modern pinball machine is a real-time system, my favorite hobby and work go hand-in-hand.
I was born in September 1965 in LaSalle, Quebec, Canada, a suburb of Montreal.
I started playing pinball at an age younger than I can remember. Probably when I was only 2 or 3 years old, and still in Montreal. My Dad was a bowling fanatic, and I used to hang out at the bowling alley whenever he played in a league. He used to stick in nickels or dimes (or whatever the price was back then) and let me play. I have no idea how good or bad I was back then for somebody my age.
I always played for fun, and the amount I played kinda went in stages. I played a lot when I was in high school, hanging out at a nearby mall arcade once a week, and at a bowling alley one or two other days a week.
The first time that I ever played until I was tired instead of until I ran out of money was when I was 15 years old, and was playing Space Invaders while my parents enjoyed life in the casino. Being able to play for as long as I want was probably the first step in me improving from a novice player to an intermediate player. But it would be 14 years until I would get the chance to play Space Invaders again ... and finally turn it over!
I hardly played during my undergraduate years at Concordia University in Montreal, although I do remember going for the occasional games here and there during those years.
In Sept. 1988 I moved to Pittsburgh to study at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). For my first 3.5 years there, I did not play pinball at all. The city was so new to me, and I was busy enjoying my wild college days (to make up for my undergraduate college days which were not too wild because I was still living at home.)
I got back into pinball in early 1992. The two most popular games around when I started playing again were The Addams Family and Fish Tales. I'm not sure what motivated me to start playing again, but I did. At this point I had become a decent player, able to hit the replay often enough, and get the occasional high score.
As I continued playing that year, my scores slowly improved, but there was some guy with the initials RCC that still always dominated the high score list with scores that were sometimes an order of magniture higher than my highest scores. I wondered for months who that person was, as I had never seen a player that was much better than me, and obviously from RCC's scores, there existed such a player.
It was October 1992 when I was playing Fish Tales at CMU, when a guy beside me playing on Terminator 2 was having the most incredible game that I had ever seen anyone play. When my Fish Tales game ended, his score on T2 was already about 450M. I stayed to watch, and had an incredible display of pinball. When he was at 750M and between balls, I asked him if he was RCC, and sure enough, he was. After his game, we talked and introduced ourselves, and I finally learnt that the name behind the RCC initials was Rob Chesnavich. He told me about this competition that he went to in New York City about 6 months earlier and how great it was. He had finished in the top 9 at PAPA-2. He also told me about rec.games.pinball, which I've been an active participant of since Oct. 1992 (wow, it's already been over 2 years??).
To give you an idea of my skill level at this time, my high score on Addams Family in Oct. 1992 was 250M (Rob's was over 1B).
In November 1992 I went to my first pinball event, Pinball Expo '92 in Chicago, and I loved it. I went with some friends who enjoyed pinball, but not quite as much, so I ended up only going for about 1.5 days. I did try out in the Flip-out tournament on Cue-Ball Wizard, and my high for 4 games was only about 150M ... obviously I was nowhere near competitive at this time.
It was at this that I first played with Lyman Sheats and Steve Baumgarden on Star Wars, but at the time I had no idea who they were, and I'm sure they did not know who I was. However, I did see a death save for the first time, and even succeeded in getting one!
Next major pinball point was first week of February, 1993. I heard of PAPA-3 on rec.games.pinball, but was not planning on going. A few days before, Rob called me and asked if I wanted to go. I thought about it for about half a second, then said sure, I'll go. The worst part of this entire trip was the drive, since this was the year of the big snow storm during PAPA ... it ended up taking us 14 hours to drive their, 11 hours to drive back, for a trip that should not take more than 7 hours.
At PAPA-3 I played in the B-Division. Unbelievably (at least to myself) my first time through I scored 550M, which was good for 5th place in the B at the time, and 9th overall by the time the qualifying round ended. What was most amazing is that the games I knew (e.g. TAF and FT) I scored 36M and 10M respectively. My big game turned out to be on World Tour, where I scored 250M, and didn't even know what I was doing!
I did really well at PAPA-3, taking 2nd place in the B division, with AJ Friend finishing first, and Fred Richardson finishing 3rd. 2nd place was worth $750 to me.
PAPA-3 got me addicted to pinball tournaments. Couldn't miss them now.
I went to IFPA-3 in Milwaukee in May 1993, and played in the Open division. I actually did 9-hour the Pittsburgh-Milwaukee drive alone; that's how addicted I had become. I did lousy in this tournament, but it was a turning point for my pinball career. Because I was knocked out early, I spent lots and lots of time watching the better players, like Lyman and Rick. In fact, I spent most of Saturday playing with Rick. As part of our conversations, I asked Rick if he knew how to do a bang-back (which I heard about on RGP) and he said yes, and that he would show me. He went to Twilight Zone (this was before it was before it popularly known that TZ was an easy bang-back machine), but couldn't show me, because the ball never drained down the outlane. Later in one of his matches, he pulled off a bang-back in the middle of the game. In fact, Rick did a bang-back from the right, it immediately drained from the left, he got another one, then 10 seconds later tilted doing a slap save.
I returned to Pittsburgh, and spent over a month trying to learn the bang-back. I had seen it done exactly once by Rick, so I couldn't keep seeing it over and over again to get it right. Many people watched me at one of my local hangouts (Doc's Place) try them, and kept wondering what I was doing. They didn't believe me that I could bang back a ball, until I finally did one, and many of them started learning. Three months later, half the city of Pittsburgh knew how to do bang-backs :-).
[Still to come ... Summer 1993, birth of the Three Rivers Pinball Assoc.]