Ontario man spent nearly 3 years building award-winning pinball machine

An Ontario man has spent nearly three years building an award-winning pinball machine — a DIY project that's now generating buzz and even attracting international interest.

Marco Bucci is a 43-year-old artist and teacher based in Pickering, Ont., with more than 20 years of experience working across illustration, animation, games, and film.

While a lot of suburban dads his age spend their free time tinkering away on a Camaro, Bucci, being the visual creative that he is, put his own spin on the ol' sports-car-in-a-garage cliche. 

For the past two and a half years, Bucci has been working tirelessly – virtually every day – to fulfill a lifelong dream of building a pinball machine (a "homebrew," as it's called in the community) from scratch. Having been obsessed with both pinball and The Simpsons for most of his life, it only made sense that the two interests would eventually merge into one project.

"I would work on it a bit in the morning, and then after my kids would go to bed at night, so I would spend never less than an hour a day, but sometimes I'll spend 10 hours a day. Sometimes two hours or three hours, it varied," Bucci tells blogTO, adding that the massive project first took off in October 2023.

Bucci knows his way around a canvas, but a circuit board? Not so much. While pinball machines are colourful and visually-driven, he had to learn the technical side of things since, as he puts it, pinball machines are essentially computers underneath.

"I had almost no electronics, no coding, no metalworking [experience]…so all of those skills I had to learn, and how you learn those is through a lot of trial and error," he explains. He'd take time building smaller side projects to practice, like a frog-jumping game for his kids with simple wiring that flagged right or wrong lily pads. This, he describes, is the trial run for putting together a pinball machine.

The underside of the Simpsons pinball machine shows all the wiring that's required.

In addition to the tens of thousands of hours Bucci put into building his "Who Shot Mr. Burns?"-themed machine — a nod to his favourite Simpsons episodes of all time — he also spent about $5,500 on materials like metal, glass, bulbs, wires, basically all the components needed to bring a pinball machine to life.

The blood, sweat, tears (and dollars!) Bucci spent on making his lifelong dream of designing a homebrew seemed to have paid off. On May 31, he debuted his latest creation at Ontario Pin Fest, the province's only festival dedicated to pinballs and arcades, held in Stayner, a small town near Wasaga Beach.

There, he took home Best Homebrew Pin, which came with a physical award and some "good old street cred."

Marco Bucci took home Best Homebrew Pin at Ontario Pin Fest.

Now that it's decked out in accolades, it seems everyone wants a piece of this DIY pinball playground. Bucci tells blogTO that gamers in Whitby will get a chance to give it a flip on June 28, when he loans it to his favourite arcade, 8-Bit Beans.

Bucci will also be lugging the 250-pound pinball machine across the border later this year, with plans to showcase it at the Pinball Expo in Chicago this October. 

"It's a big pain to move, that's for sure," he admits, though he says it's worth it for the simple joy of watching other people have fun playing it.

Bucci's machine, "alongside its brothers and sisters" at Pin Fest.

The game was built around a "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" mystery mode, where players collect clues as Chief Wiggum, answer Simpsons trivia, and work through six possible suspects. By the end, they gather enough evidence to make an arrest and decide who they think did it, with the outcome changing each game.

While he notes that, based on current going rates, the machine is valued at around $10,000, he has no plans to ever part with it, given its sentimental value. "It's tied in with just memories of my kids these last two years, you know? They saw me build it; their handprints are on the top. I just could never emotionally sell that one."

For now, the Simpsons game will remain a permanent fixture in his Pickering home, though he's already working on a second build — this time a Wile E. Coyote-themed machine — leaving open the question of where that one will eventually end up once it's complete.

Only one thing is certain: Bucci sure plays a mean pinball.