How Much Does a Pinball Machine Weigh? 50 Years of Data

If you have ever tried to move a pinball machine, you will know that accurate weight information is surprisingly hard to come by. Manufacturer flyers rarely listed it. Where weights did appear, they were often wrong. Retailers copy-paste specs from each other. The internet, as usual, is confidently unreliable.

So when we started pulling together weight data for a range of machines, we quickly found ourselves relying heavily on the work of one person: Todd Tuckey of TNT Amusements.

Todd has been shipping pinball machines and arcade games for years, and he took the methodical approach of actually weighing them and then published the data in a post on the Pinside forums. It represents the most trustworthy body of pinball weight data we have found. We cross referenced the list of games with data from IPDB and then supplemented it with mid-era and modern weights pulled from manufacturer manuals, retailer listings, and operator specs. We must note that the confidence level drops once we move beyond Todd’s verified figures.

Then we plotted it all.

What the data actually shows

If you squint at fifty years of pinball weights expecting a clean story, machines getting steadily heavier as technology piled on, you won’t find it. The weight of a standard-cabinet pinball machine has fluctuated more than it has trended. Early electromechanical games from the late 1960s came in around 240 lbs; so did a DMD-era Williams from the 1990s. The relay banks gave way to circuit boards, the score reels became dot-matrix displays, and the box stayed roughly the same. Weight savings from technological improvements may have been made up again in playfield complexity, playfield depth, and playfield features.

The outliers are where it gets interesting. The Caveman pin-video hybrid from 1982 hauled in at 340 lbs. Gottlieb bolted an arcade monitor to a pinball machine and the laws of physics responded accordingly. At the other end, the Night Moves cocktail sits at 161 lbs. Cabinet format matters as much as what’s inside it.

The Pinball 2000 machines are a story unto themselves. Revenge from Mars and Star Wars Episode I both broke 350 lbs. The projection screen added serious mass, and the platform died before anyone worked out how to slim it down.

The real divergence comes in the modern era, where brands with different manufacturing philosophies occupy different parts of the scale.

A note on the data

This is a limited dataset and is certainly not exhaustive and only represents a cross section of games through the eras. All data shown is for amusement purposes only ;) Todd’s figures come from weighing the machines on a commercial scale before shipping them. Everything beyond that should be treated with more scepticism. Modern weights come from a mix of manufacturer manuals, retailer product pages, and community operator data cited below.

Raw data

Todd Tuckey / TNT Amusements: verified scale weights (1966–1996)

Data sourced from Todd Tuckey via Pinside, cross-referenced with IPDB data for year, manufacturer, and cabinet type. Weights include legs. Coin box fitment varies.

Internet sources data (1995–2024)

Weights drawn from manufacturer manuals, retailer listings, operator specs, and community sources. Accuracy is variable. Treat these figures as reasonable estimates rather than verified measurements. Note on Stern SPIKE-era Pro models: Stern’s manuals consistently cite 210 lbs across a decade of releases; this is widely regarded by operators as a factory understatement.

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