When pigs flew: The strange history of Capcom’s Big Bang Bar

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A story of passion, creativity, bankruptcy and pinball’s downfall

When I first heard the story, I thought it was an urban legend. Like Mikey’s stomach, infused with a deadly cocktail of Pop Rocks and Coca-Cola. Or Walt Disney’s frozen body awaiting a return to a perfect future world.

Always affable, nearly famous Todd Tuckey has a way of making anything sound like an urban legend when he talks. The owner of TNT Amusements achieved a sort of notoriety in Pennsylvania with his late-night, phlegmatic, never-ending ads for refurbished video game machines in the early 2000s. A fact he pointed out within minutes of getting on the phone with me.

I was working on a story about buying refurbed game machines and he was my source. After working through the particulars, Tuckey interrupted my wrap-up by asking if I wanted to hear a real story.

The tale he told, heard from the friend of a collector, was about a fabled pinball machine, a dream machine that was never manufactured, its design thought lost forever. But then in 2000, Tuckey said, a real estate magnate stumbled across a stash of design documents for the pinball table in the back of an old warehouse he had just purchased.

It was pure, blind luck, Tuckey said.

Lacking any experience in pinball, the story went, this guy who had never built a pinball machine, or any machine before, convinced a few hundred people to invest money in his attempt to recreate the pinball. And over the next five years, as hope for the machine faded and the money man disappeared, this collective of potential owners began to argue among themselves, buying and trading the rights to their owed machines.

They even had a shared motto about when they would see the machine or their money again: “When pigs fly.”

Then the inconceivable happened: Pigs flew. The machine, a collector’s item made from scattered parts and fueled by grit and dreams, was completed and shipped to the investors and was better than anyone imagined.

That was the story of Capcom’s Big Bang Bar pinball, or at least the one I heard that day back in 2007.

I later discovered that much of the yarn’s minutia was wrong. But it was not because its more unbelievable elements were crafted of pure fiction but rather because the drama and impossibility of the feat didn’t do the true story justice.

Big Bang Bar‘s creation is a story of pinball’s near death, of one man’s attempt to become a piece of pinball history, of bankruptcy, of obsession, of short-lived redemption and personal disaster.

Continuing reading When Pigs Flew at Polygon, where this story originally ran on March 21, 2017.