Pinq FAQ

Pinq is an experimental search engine for pinball machines. It uses vision data and named features to improve pinball searchability.

Pinq is a portmanteau of pinball query. It is pronounced "pink", as in the colour.

IPDB holds the richest data on pinball machines anywhere, but it can only be searched by keyword and it has no API. OPDB gives developers a way to identify games and build on them, but its search is still primitive.

Pinq helps pinball fans find a game easily, then find the resources the community has contributed for it.

No. The databases are IPDB and OPDB. Pinq crawls OPDB, machine vision describes the photos, and that becomes the search index.

Every game has its own page with a permanent URL, linked out to where the full detail lives. Thumbnails are mirrored on our CDN so as not to load OPDB, and every image links through to the original.

Anything you can see or remember about a game: a colour, a character, a scene, a toy on the playfield. Try "golf themed games" or "sunsets viewed from the cockpit of a fighter jet".

Add a name, decade, manufacturer or designer to move matching games up the list. Nothing gets filtered out.

Type a short name on its own, such as WH2O or TZ, to jump straight to that game.

Fix it upstream. Add photos or correct details on the game’s OPDB record and the indexing here gets better.

To update a link or ask for a listing to be removed, use the contact form on the About page.