1980’s: THE NEW YORK YEARS

The Professional & Amateur Pinball Association was founded in the mid 1980’s by Roger Sharpe and Steve Epstein at Steve’s world-famous Broadway Arcade in New York City. Steve and Roger ran six world championship tournaments, with the last one being held in Las Vegas, before retiring and passing the reins to current president, Kevin Martin.

In Steve’s own words: The beginning of what was to become PAPA began in the late 1970’s when myself, Roger Sharpe, and a third player named Lionel Martinez, began tracking personal games played against one another. We logged over 10,000 sets of games over a four/five year period. From that data we developed the league scoring system used in the first PAPA league play around 1985/1986. This lead to the tournaments in the early 1990’s. I guess meeting Roger at the Arcade in 1975 and starting to play together on a daily basis not only led to a great and lasting friendship, but to the world of competitive pinball.

Way back in 1992, Steve Epstein, co-founder of PAPA, started publishing a nifty little magazine called “The Flipside”. Each issue was between 24 and 44 pages, all black and white, and the issues came out on a regular schedule of “whenever”. When Kevin Martin acquired PAPA from Steve and co-founder Roger Sharpe, that included various inventory such as T-shirts and back issues of The Flipside. Unfortunately, most of those items were destroyed in the flood of 2004, before they could be put to any good use. The good news is that we still have at least one copy of every issue of The Flipside. Better yet, we have scanned these in and published them here. You may browse these pages as high-quality JPEGs, or large PDFs. Download them, save them, enjoy them at your leisure.