How Winchester Mystery House Became the Breakaway Hit of Pinball Expo

By Garrett Martin | October 22, 2025 | 5:47pm

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How Winchester Mystery House Became the Breakaway Hit of Pinball Expo

Barrels of Fun, the boutique pinball manufacturer from Houston behind the recent Dune and Labyrinth games, brought three units of its newest machine, Winchester Mystery House, to Pinball Expo last week. That wasn’t enough to meet demand; the company’s booth, set up like its own private room within the main convention space, had a lengthy line throughout the whole show. Some of those guests were no doubt hoping to get time with Dune and Labyrinth, but the new machine, based on the infamous mansion in San Jose, Cali., was the one Barrels of Fun promoted the most, and the one most people wanted to play. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that any single pinball game is the star of a show like Pinball Expo—pinball itself is the star, obviously—but if it was, Winchester Mystery House would clearly take the honors.

In many ways it’s easy to understand why this particular machine would draw so much traffic. The game was announced with great fanfare within pinball circles last week, mere days before the start of Expo, and sold through its 525 unit run almost immediately—the kind of sales success that can easily drive hype. It’s the first machine designed by top champ and popular streamer Karl DeAngelo, which should drive interest. And Barrels of Fun’s model—making small runs of top-quality machines at high price points—means it’s not easy to find their games outside of shows like Expo. If you were at Expo and didn’t wait in line to play Winchester Mystery House, who knows when you’ll get another chance?

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In other ways, though, Winchester Mystery House flouts some common pinball wisdom. The biggest is its theme. It’s technically based on a licensed property—again, this is a real (and real weird) mansion, once owned by the family behind “the gun that won the West,” that has been a popular tourist attraction for decades. (It’s also a popular spot for ghosthunters and paranormal investigators—hence the pin’s spectral theme.) It’s not the kind of IP you typically see in pinball, though, which largely depends on legacy pop culture franchises beloved by middle-aged men. Compared to the regular barrage of movie and rock band-themed machines, including Barrels of Fun’s first two games (one of which is kind of both), Winchester Mystery House and its haunted story feels like an original concept. Like Barrels of Fun’s earlier machines, it also eschews the multi-edition release strategy preferred by Stern and Jersey Jack, with different, varyingly complex versions of the machine at different price points.

It also helps that Barrels of Fun is a young and exciting company in an industry without too much competition. That field is slim but was roundly represented at Expo. Stern Pinball, the biggest name in the game, had the largest footprint at the show, with dozens of its recent machines, including what felt like an arcade’s worth of its newest release, Star Wars: Fall of the Empire—its third Star Wars machine in eight years. Jersey Jack, the 14-year-old company behind much of pinball’s recent tech innovations, brought several units of its acclaimed but ethically stained Harry Potter machine, along with at least one copy of all of its older games. Spooky Pinball displayed a row of Evil Dead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre pins, Texas-based Turner Pinball had a handful of its new Merlin’s Arcade game and a single unit of its first release Ninja Eclipse, and remake specialist Chicago Gaming brought a few of its recreations and its one original game, Pulp Fiction. Even American Pinball, widely believed to be on the verge of extinction, had enough life left in it to bring a lineup of its games to Expo. There are other, smaller players—international companies whose games can be difficult to find in America, tech-forward firms that specialize in digital hybrids or fully virtual facsimiles of pinball, and passion-driven homebrew developers whose machines are fully bespoke one-of-ones—but the pinball industry, all told, is a small one, something reinforced by the amount of Expo floorspace devoted to older games and a large variety of vendors (including one company that will turn your pinball playfield into a working guitar).

Another reason for Winchester Mystery House’s popularity at Expo is the most important factor possible. Um, it’s pretty damn cool? It has a macabre yet whimsical tone that’s in contrast to the grislier edge often found in horror or supernatural pins (I’m looking at you, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Evil Dead), and is far closer to Tim Burton’s family-friendlier territory than the blood and guts of slasher flicks. The game’s design smartly incorporates some of the mansion’s most infamous quirks, like a ramp that stands in for the staircase to nowhere and game modes that evoke its sealed rooms. In addition to its official inspiration, it’s also clearly in conversation with Disney’s Haunted Mansion attraction, which was itself inspired by the San Jose mansion and the stories of its haunting. From the patrician tones of its ghostly narrator, to the Pepper’s ghost trick used to make objects on the playfield appear immaterial (the same optical illusion used liberally in the grand hall scene of the Haunted Mansion), to the common element of both mansions having an officially designated seance room, Disney fans will definitely think of the ride when they play this game.

Above all, though, you can probably jot the game’s must-play status at Expo down to canny marketing. Announcing the game two days before the show’s start, first unveiling it at the show itself, and producing a run so small that it basically insured an instant sellout were all deliberate decisions that drove the hype. And it helped that, unlike every other booth at Expo, Barrels of Fun’s was essentially closed off to outside eyes. Like a ghost, glimpses of it were fleeting, as you couldn’t really get a good look at Winchester Mystery House until you were inside that booth’s temporary walls. And that meant queuing up and waiting your turn in the ever-present line, which constantly fed into the hype around the game. Barrels of Fun clearly understands pinball, but they might have an even firmer grasp on promotion.

The downside to the long wait to play it is that it was hard to develop a firm opinion on the game without lining up again and again. I played it once. It was fun. I also played probably 100 other pinball games across those three days, and my memories of that single playthrough of Winchester Mystery House are beyond fuzzy today. It’s not nearly enough to go on to analyze it as a game, to weigh in with any authority or critical faculty on its modes and shots and general design ethos. As a piece of interactive, high-tech art, though? Well, remember when I called it “pretty damn cool” a few paragraphs ago? I stand by that. And hopefully I’ll be able to revisit Winchester Mystery House enough in the future to really get a feel for it.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about videogames, theme parks, pinball, travel, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.