The 2025 TWIPY Pinball Awards aired on Saturday, February 14th, and for the first time in the show's nine editions, the production looked and felt fundamentally different.
Co-produced by BASH Pinball and Kineticist, this year's show was filmed across five North Carolina arcades — Flight Deck in Raleigh, Arcadia Manor in Greensboro, Basement Arcade in Concord, Super Abari Game Bar in Charlotte, and The Baxter — plus Matt and Don's own Shedcade. The two hosted, conducted interviews, and portal-jumped between locations via a fictional pintonium-powered device. Marc Silk provided voiceover narration for each category introduction, lending every segment a cinematic gravity that punched well above the production's modest budget.
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We billed it the KISS Edition — a deliberate stripping down to what the TWIPYs were always supposed to be about.
Seven categories, all focused on game design. No sponsors. No creator awards. Just the games and the people who made them.
The Winners
Thirteen games were eligible: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Dutch Pinball Exclusive), Blues Brothers (Home Pin), Dungeons & Dragons (Stern), Dune (Barrels of Fun), Evil Dead (Spooky Pinball), Harry Potter (Jersey Jack Pinball), King Kong: Myth of Terror Island (Stern), Merlin's Arcade (Turner Pinball), Portal (Multimorphic), Predator (Pinball Brothers), Star Wars: Fall of the Empire (Stern), Walking Dead Remastered (Stern), and Winchester Mystery House (Barrels of Fun). The nominee pool varied slightly by category, with voters ranking their top three in each. Points were awarded 3-2-1.
Three games took all seven awards. Harry Potter took Game of the Year and Best Animations. Evil Dead swept Best Theme Integration, Best Art Package, and Best Sound. And King Kong earned Best Rules (the Lyman F. Sheats Jr. Award) and Best Playfield Layout.
Game of the Year — Harry Potter (Jersey Jack Pinball)
Best Theme Integration — Evil Dead (Spooky Pinball)
Best Rules (Lyman F. Sheats Jr. Award) — King Kong: Myth of Terror Island (Stern Pinball)
Best Art Package — Evil Dead (Spooky Pinball)
Best Playfield Layout — King Kong: Myth of Terror Island (Stern Pinball)
Best Sound — Evil Dead (Spooky Pinball)
Best Animations — Harry Potter (Jersey Jack Pinball)
Full results with vote tallies are available at twipys.com.
Evil Dead's Breakout Year
Spooky Pinball's Evil Dead was the story of the night. Three wins out of seven categories — more than any other game.
Corwin "Bug" Emery accepted on behalf of the Spooky team for both Best Sound and Best Theme Integration, crediting software developer Ben Heck and composer Matt Montgomery (Piggy D) for a sound package built entirely from scratch. The team didn't have the rights to the original film scores, so Montgomery composed every piece of mode music as original work. Bug and Heck spent days in Heck's basement layering four to six textures into every single sound effect in the game. "We said, okay, we're putting absolutely everything we have at this on all fronts," Bug said. "Just to see what we're made out of." Evil Dead, he suggested, was the culmination of everything Spooky has learned as a company. "Took us about 13 years, but we figured it out."
Chris Franchi, Spooky's new art director, took Best Art Package — his first TWIPY since winning for Stern's The Munsters in 2019. He was gracious about the field, singling out Brad Albright's two art packages (Winchester Mystery House and Portal) as a newcomer worth watching. When asked about translating Evil Dead's muted film palette into a pinball art package, Franchi's answer was characteristically practical: "If you take colors that already exist in that world and you brighten them up, you can get more impact, but you're still playing in that same playfield."
Three TWIPYs out of seven is a statement from Spooky.
Harry Potter Takes the Top Prize
Eric Meunier accepted Game of the Year for Jersey Jack Pinball, thanking lead programmer Joe Katz, mechanical engineer Dan Lachcik, and the animations team of Jean-Paul de Win and Olaf Gremie in the Netherlands. He called out Krystle Gemnich, an unsung hero who turns prototyping chaos into production-ready documentation, and made a point to acknowledge the production line workers who build the game every day.
"These games take so much of our heart and souls when we make them," Meunier said. "And it's not just the game designer that makes a game, it's the entire team."
Jean-Paul and Olaf, accepting Best Animations earlier in the show, offered an honest peek behind the curtain. Jean-Paul noted that Harry Potter was the toughest license he's worked on from an approvals standpoint, requiring sign-off from two separate parties. Olaf admitted that some of his favorite work got killed in the process — water under the bridge, he said.
Keith Elwin Keeps Collecting Hardware
Keith Elwin accepted Best Playfield Layout for King Kong — adding to a TWIPY collection that at this point needs its own shelf. He credited the lack of a licensor on King Kong (based on the 1932 public domain novel) for giving him an unusually long runway to refine the layout over six or seven months without having to start over due to toy placement mandates.
"Playfield design is kind of the easy part," Elwin said. "And of course the fun part's usually over way too soon, and then it's like a year of grinding development after that."
Rick Naegele accepted the Lyman F. Sheats Jr. Award for Best Rules, thanking Joshua Henderson, Brett Rubin, Mitch Deason, Mark Guidarelli, and Mark Penacho by name. He gave particular credit to Deason's Blender plugin that allowed artists to choreograph Kong mech animations in 3D software — a pipeline innovation that made the animatronic feel alive rather than mechanical.
A Different Show
Viewership and vote totals were down from prior years. That's to be expected with fewer categories and a produced video instead of a live broadcast. The early TWIPYs were scrappy, DIY affairs — the show grew from there, and it kept growing until it was bloated past the point of manageability. The KISS Edition was a reset. Strip it back to the essentials. See what happens.
What the show lost in scale, it gained in focus, craft, and personality. The KISS Edition framing was designed to give our production team cover to do something simple if they wanted to. Matt and Don took that permission and ignored it entirely — delivering something way more ambitious than anyone expected.
They were genuinely funny as hosts. The creative segments — a running sci-fi storyline involving pintonium and interdimensional portals, a man-on-the-street bit where arcade-goers tried to guess what a TWIPY is, and a chaotic mid-show interruption from Gorgar, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and King Kong arguing over lifetime achievement awards in a bit riffing on Conan O'Brien's Syncro-Vox segments — were the kind of weird, specific, low-budget comedy that only works when the people making it are having a good time. They were having a good time.
The interviews were the highlight. Instead of a quick thank-you and a wave, each winner sat down for a real conversation about their craft. Bug explaining how he and Ben Heck spent entire days in an unfinished basement making obnoxious noises into microphones. Chris Franchi on why fans beg for original themes and then don't buy them. Keith Elwin describing the dopamine of layout design. Eric Meunier getting visibly moved talking about his team. Rick Naegele breaking down the difference between good code from a programmer's perspective versus a designer's. These conversations don't happen in a live awards format. They happened here because this format made room for them.
Thank You
To the BASH Pinball crew — Matt and Don — for being willing to take a weird idea and run with it, and then making it way better than it had any right to be. To Ian Jacoby of Nudge for co-writing and production, and to Sarah Atashi for additional production support. To Marc Silk for narration that made a shoestring production sound like something with ten times the budget. To Anna M. in props and Brad Albright for lending his art and playing along with the bit. To Will Oetting for the vote stewardship. To every winner and nominee who gave their time for an interview — Jean-Paul de Win, Olaf Gremie, Chris Franchi, Rick Naegele, Keith Elwin, and Eric Meunier. To the Triangle Pinball Collective, the crews at Arcadia Manor, the Basement, Super Abari Game Bar, and the Baxter for opening their doors. And to everyone who voted.
This was a different TWIPYs. We took no sponsors. We produced it in a fraction of the time, on a fraction of the budget, with a small team of people who wanted to make something fun. We filmed it at real arcades where real people play pinball, and we asked those real people what the hell a TWIPY is, and most of them had no idea, and that was funny, and we kept it in.
Different doesn't mean worse. It means we get to try things. It means we get to be weird and creative and see what works. It means we can make an awards show where Gorgar and Arnold Schwarzenegger crash the ceremony and argue about nipple definition, and a guy from Portugal tells us his favorite game is Lord of the Rings, and Bug Emery describes the toilet situation in Ben Heck's basement.
We'll also be releasing the full-length interviews — many of which ran longer than what aired — as a series called The TWIPYs Afterparty. Stay tuned for that.
We're excited about what this creative team can build together going forward. Same energy, same people, more time to push the format further. The TWIPYs have always belonged to the community. Now they get to be fun, too.
Colin is the chief pixel pusher at Kineticist. He's a lifetime gamer who became enamored with pinball after taking in a family copy of the 1979 classic Joker Poker (the EM version). Since then he's bought, sold and repaired many machines, competed in all kinds of tournaments, and contributes to This Week in Pinball, the New England Pinball League, and Pin-Masters of New England. Previously, Colin spent over a decade working in marketing for agencies and tech startups. He also started and ran a music blog, happy hour website, and wrote a regular craft beer review column for Central Track in Dallas. Once aspired to be an artsy film director.
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