Tilted Dreams
Jack Danger and His Passion for Pinball
“There’s just something about controlling this little tiny ball going everywhere. Once you learn how to actually control a pinball, you feel like a freaking magician.” — Jack Danger
The phone rings. Jack Danger, busy at his Chicago animation studio, picks it up.
Brad Stark doesn’t miss a beat. “Jack, you’re never going to believe what I just discovered in Portland. There’s this thing called pinball.”
Stark goes on and on about the classic arcade game. But Danger isn’t interested. He hangs up the phone and forgets all about it until a week later, when Stark comes up to him at the studio.
“Hey dude, you got a lot of space here. I just bought a Lord of the Rings pinball machine and I don’t have anywhere to put it. Can I leave it here at the studio?”
Skeptically, Danger agrees to house the machine and they bring it up on a freight elevator. He tries playing a few times but doesn’t get what all the hype is about. It sits, mostly ignored, next to the foosball table.
Danger doesn’t think much about it, until Stark approaches him again two weeks later. He has just bought another machine — and once again, has nowhere to put it.
“If you don’t have anywhere to put these things, then maybe you should stop buying them!” Danger tells his friend.
Still, something tells him to (reluctantly) keep it. They freight it up and get it all set up in its new home. As he flicks the switch, Danger anticipates the same indifference he felt for the first machine. But the moment Judge Dredd comes to life — the name ablaze in neon blue, surrounded by intricate animations reminiscent of 1980s comic books — he is hooked.
It’s love at second sight.
Today, Jack Danger is a legend in the pinball community, celebrated under his alias “DeadFlip.” His journey from casual pinball player to a pinball icon is a story of passion and innovation. He’s known worldwide through his Twitch channel, Dead Flip Pinball, where he not only pioneered the concept of live-streaming pinball but also revolutionized it, dedicating over a decade to sharing his love and knowledge of pinball. 2021, he transitioned from live streamer to pinball designer, joining forces with Stern Pinball, the largest manufacturer of pinball machines in the world to design pinball machines. His debut design, Foo Fighters pinball, came out in 2023 to rave reviews. As a Twitch partner and ambassador, he is known globally for making the game more accessible and engaging to a diverse audience.
“The second we plugged that thing in and turned it on… something about that game clicked with me,” he tells me in our interview, recounting that time back in 2012 when he was first introduced to pinball. “I was like, ‘Wait. This is actually pretty cool.’”
He went online to try to find out how to beat it, accustomed to the digital video games he had loved since he was a kid — which were always based on a typical finite game structure. But pinball is an infinite game. You can keep getting higher scores, but you can never beat the machine and “win.” So, when he typed in, “How do you beat Judge Dredd pinball?” nothing came up.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he told himself. But that only intrigued him more. Before long, he was struggling not to buy his own pinball machines, and he and his friends at the studio were spending more and more time battling each other for the highest score. When they learned there were tournaments around the city, they signed up.
“We thought we were really good,” he says in our interview. “We were like, ‘Let’s go try our hand at beating the crap out of other people!’”
“It turns out we weren’t incredible,” he said, laughing. “We were good against each other, but not in the world against people who have been playing it their whole lives.”
They went to a tournament at a GameWorks and were surprised that they were not, in fact, the best players there.
Danger recalls how Zach Sharp, just a kid at the time, came up to him at one point.
“I can tell you’re kind of new,” he said. “Don’t take offense to this, but I’d love to show you a few things if I could.”
At the time, Sharp was number one in the world as far as competitive pinball players go. But Danger didn’t know any of that. He just thought he’d happened upon a group of random people who happened to all be nuts over pinball.
Still, Danger loved the game and agreed to let Sharp take him under his wing. That’s when his real training began, Danger tells me.
“He started training me very montage-y style,” he says. Sharp made him play with his non-dominant hand behind his back. Then he’d made him play one handed. Then he’d challenge him take both hands off the game altogether.
“It was all this weird stuff,” he says. At first, he didn’t think any of it was helping him. But before long, he started surprising himself with how he was playing. He began taking what he learned back to the studio to show the guys. One of his friends told him he should start streaming on Twitch, which was a relatively new live streaming platform at the time, primarily used for streaming video games.
“You should just throw some cameras over a pinball machine and record yourself playing,” his friends told Danger. “Drink some beer and show people what you’re doing.”
Danger thought they were crazy. “Why would anyone watch someone play pinball?” he wondered. “That sounds freaking ridiculous.”
Despite his initial hesitations, Danger took the leap and created Dead Flip Pinball, a streaming channel he named after a specific move in pinball used to skillfully control and position the ball. Danger streamed for hours almost every night (when I ask him specifics, he describes his streaming schedule as “between two and un-rememberable hours”) and his fast-growing audience tuned in to watch his transformation from a novice to a proficient player in a game he had fallen in love with. He started sharing all that he learned, as well as frequently bringing guests on the show to share insights and strategies of the game. Before long, he was traveling the world, showing people how to play pinball. He did this for the better part of a decade, helping to pioneer streaming something that wasn’t just video games on the platform.
“It was awesome,” he says of this time. “I had a huge viewership every night. I was paying a mortgage and keeping food on the table for a wife and two children. All through the awesome generosity of the pinball community. I loved making content. It was a beautiful marriage.”
And then, he adds, “I shut it all down.”
In this unexpected action lies this week’s lesson about living on fire. Sometimes, it turns out, our dedication to a passion necessitates a shift in our role or contribution, even as we recommit to our underlying passion — or else we’ll burn out. Like great athletes who transition into coaches, or retired teachers who step into the role of a mentor for new educators, the manner in which we engage in our passions changes as our lives shift.
For Danger, the realization that he needed to recalibrate his life came after the birth of his second child. His schedule had remained the same from the time his wife and he started dating to after getting married and having two kids together. He would work all day and then start streaming at six or seven o’clock at night.
“It was terrible for me and for being involved in my family,” he says. “I was like, ‘I love what I’m doing here. But frick (!) if I don’t love my kids a hell of a lot more.’”
Danger says this realization was the wakeup call he needed. He knew that if he wanted to stay involved in this game that he loved but also be a great partner and raise a family, something needed to change.
So when the opportunity to become a designer full time with Stern Pinball came up, Danger took it as a sign. He saw it as an opportunity to stay involved in pinball — and be able to spend more time with his family.
The first game he got to make? Foo Fighters.
“That was a huge honor, a huge title,” he tells me. Danger had grown up listening to their music and now he was getting to design their pinball game. It was a dream. It also was much harder than he imagined it would be.
“It’s the hardest job I’ve ever had in my life,” he says between laughs. “It’s a lot of freaking work.”
One pinball machine requires over a year of relentless planning and designing and a whole team of talented people to put it all together. Still, he loves it.
“If you're interested in pinball, this is the pinnacle of that dream,” he tells me. Danger brings his skills as an animator, giving a unique flavor to each of the games he creates. “There’s nothing like being able to actually produce your own vision for what you think would be fun for people to play.”
Danger says that he misses streaming and connecting nightly with his fans but sees the opportunity to give his fans something he created as a whole other level of connection. He is more passionate about the game and the community than ever.
I ask him what he loves about pinball.
“It’s the tactile nature and the chaos,” he says. “I’m sitting in front of a James Bond pinball machine right now. If I play this game right now, and I end my game and go to play it again, that experience will not be the same. There are video games that have patterns, but pinball is always chaotic.”
Danger tells me that even if there were two of the exact same games sitting next to each other, those two games will not play the same. There are many reasons why.
“How is it set up? Is the play field a little dirty? Are some of the rubbers a little dinged up to cause the ball to bounce all over the place? Or has it been played for a while and the coils are hot?” There are countless different factors that could cause the game to play differently, he tells me. And that’s what he loves about it.
“It requires so many of your senses to play pinball because you’re listening, you’re watching, you’re feeling, you’re doing all this stuff. You can’t focus on anything but playing that pinball machine.”
“There’s just something about controlling this little tiny ball going everywhere,” he says. “Once you learn how to actually control a pinball,” he assures me, “you feel like a freaking magician.”
I’ve played pinball many times before, but I can’t say I’ve ever reached that state of flow he’s talking about. I’m guessing I don’t have the right strategy. Or really, any strategy. I ask him for some tips for beginners like me.
“This is my favorite thing to talk about,” he responds. He loves recruiting new people to the hobby he loves. “On a pinball machine, if you want to know the rules or just a broad stroke of the rules, right at the front of the game there will be a rules card. There has been for decades or decades.”
This is news to me. In all my years of attempted pinball playing, I have never once noticed that card. Good to know.
“It’s just a rough overview of what’s going on,” he continues. “But if you’re in the middle of playing and you don’t know what to do, the thing that has told players how to play forever are the lights on the playfield. If something is blinking, it wants your attention, and it wants you to shoot it.”
“If it’s blinking frantically,” he says, “that is now more important than any other blinking thing on the playfield. And that is just a rule of thumb on all pinball games.”
Do something about the blinking lights. Noted.
“As far as control goes,” he says, “stop flipping so much. If you’re flipping at every ball that’s coming at you, you are shooting that ball in a place you don’t know.”
I laugh. That’s always been my strategy — flip as much as possible. I’m guessing I’m not alone.
“But if you let the ball come to you and do something called a dead flip where the ball comes at the flipper, the ball is going to hit it and that’s going to eat a lot of the momentum. And then you have the opportunity to cradle the ball.”
“You’ve stopped the game,” he continues. You can pause, even take a drink if you want, and then send the ball on its way. “So just flip less. And don’t be afraid to give the game little slaps and nudges to influence where the ball is going to go.”
I ask him if he’s working on something cool. “Yes,” he responds, brightening up. “But I can’t tell you what it is.”
“The pinball industry is worse than the automotive industry,” he laughs. “Everything is secret. So yes, there’s another game coming from me. It’s going to be the weirdest fricking pinball machine you’ve ever seen. But I cannot tell you anything about it.”
Takeaways
Here is one big thing I learned this week about passion, one exercise you can do to stoke your own inner fire, and one aspect of Danger’s intense enthusiasm that rubbed off on me — and that I now want to learn more about, too!
One Lesson: Give Yourself a Timeline on Your Passions
When Danger shifted from a well-paying animation job to pursuing his passion for pinball, a field initially less lucrative, he began by implementing a three-month timeline. If, by the end of that time, he was eating leftover ramen out of the fridge, he’d know he needed a plan B. This strategic move wasn’t just about following his heart; it was a calculated risk management plan. Danger's journey teaches us an important lesson: pursuing our passions is vital, but so is planning for their pursuit. By setting a timeline, we can chase our dreams while staying grounded in reality, ensuring we don't veer too far off a sustainable path.
One Exercise: Try a Three-Month Passion Test
Inspired by Jack Danger's journey, try a three-month passion Test. Select an interest or passion you've been curious about. Dedicate the next three months to actively pursuing it, setting aside regular time each week. As you immerse yourself, observe how this activity affects your mood, creativity, and overall life satisfaction. At the end of the trial, assess your experience: Has this pursuit enriched your life? Do you see it becoming a bigger part of your life moving forward? This exercise helps you test the waters of a new passion in a structured, time-bound manner, mirroring Danger's methodical approach to following his pinball dreams.
One Curiosity: Pinball Strategy
I’ve already scouted out all the places to play pinball near my home in Los Angeles (there are more than I knew!) and can’t wait to try out Danger’s tips for beginners like me — particularly his advice to flip less and pay attention to the blinking lights (I always knew these were trying to tell me something!). And of course, I can’t wait to try out the dead flip.