The ball hung in the lane for half a second, amber swinging targets flickering, and Shawn Wylie did the math the way you do on a 1976 machine — bank the A-B-C lights, chase the spinner, ride the bonus before the outlanes eat you alive. When his Space Odyssey reading froze at 139,540, nearly double the next-best number in his group, it wasn’t just a game won. It was a fifty-year-old Williams machine, released the same month the country was busy turning 200, still standing in the middle of a competitive tournament and dictating terms. That single playfield, more than any bracket line, was the heartbeat of Interstellar Training S7 #3.
Twenty-two players packed into The Game Preserve in Webster on June 16 for the third stop of Space City Pinball’s NASA-adjacent training series — a Group Match Play grind of two rounds and 48 games that ran 140 minutes under a muggy, overcast Gulf Coast sky. The arcade lives up to its name: a retro sprawl tucked near NASA where the solid-state blips of the late ’70s share floor space with modern Sterns, and where regulars happily drive in from out of town to chase the silver ball. It’s a room built for exactly this kind of night.
Paragon Bites Back, and Valdez Cashes In
Round 1 sorted the field across the venue’s deep-cut lineup, and the early fireworks came on Bally’s Paragon (1979) — a wedgehead with knockout art and a playfield that rewards patience over panic. In a four-player group, Joshua Valdez stared down Marc Gammons, one of the strongest names in the building, and refused to blink. Valdez took the top spot for seven points; Gammons settled for second. The ratings had given Valdez something like a one-in-four shot in that group, which is the entire charm of Paragon: build your carryover bonus on ball one and the machine will reward the disciplined player regardless of the ranking next to their name.
Gammons would steady himself — he’d come into the night red-hot, with wins in two of his last five outings, and he’d close strong — but the Paragon stumble was a reminder that on these older machines, seeding is a suggestion, not a guarantee.
Wylie’s Four-Machine Tear Through the Solid-State Era
While the brackets churned, Shawn Wylie was quietly authoring the cleanest run of the night. He topped the scoresheet on four of the eight machines he touched — Delta Queen, Six Million Dollar Man, the anniversary-celebrating Space Odyssey, and a Round 2 turn on Congo — the kind of spread that wins tournaments without anyone noticing until the points are tallied.
Wylie’s own arc made the run sweeter. Twenty tournaments into his competitive life, his rating has climbed year over year to IFPA #7,064 — a player still building a résumé, doing it against opponents with a decade’s head start. On the night’s headline relic, he was simply the best in the room: collecting the lit letters to double his bonus, working the spinner, treating a half-century-old machine like the live, beatable arena it still is.
He wasn’t alone in feasting on the vintage iron. Rob Bellotto detonated a 2,256,360 on Data East’s Time Machine (1988), roughly 2.4 times Wylie’s runner-up 924,470 — the kind of runaway number that turns a single game into a story even from a player who finished mid-pack. On Time Machine, you live and die by the center STAR WARP ramp, and Bellotto clearly found the loop.
Syers, Martin, and a 69-Minute War on Revenge From Mars
The pointy end of the field tightened in Round 2, where the eventual podium-setters kept colliding. On Gottlieb’s Super Mario Bros. (1992), top finishers Branden Martin and John Syers shared a group with Jason Welsh and Dawn Freedkin — Martin grabbed it, Welsh took second, Syers third. Martin had walked in carrying a three-event top-3 streak and a pair of recent wins, the state’s #71-ranked player and the steadiest competitor in the room on form alone.
Then came the marathon. The longest game of the tournament — sixty-nine minutes — unfolded on Bally’s Revenge From Mars (1999), the same four players locked in a war of attrition. This time Syers flipped the script, posting the seven and leaving Martin in second. That single result, more than any other, is why the night ended the way it did.
The night also had its quieter milestones. Lisa Shore, nine years into her pinball life, banked a Round 2 group win and a personal-best-feeling top-3 day. And across the field, old familiars kept renewing their rivalries: Syers edged Cory Westfahl in a back-and-forth that now spans 21 shared tournaments, while Westfahl himself stepped in front of Jason Welsh in their own 21-deep series — the kind of recurring local theater that makes a regional scene worth following.
A Tie at the Top, Decided One Ball at a Time
It came down to consistency. Syers and Wylie both opened with a Round 1 group win and followed it with a Round 2 runner-up — identical scorelines across two very different paths, Wylie’s built on his four-machine sweep through the solid-state corner, Syers’ forged in that hour-plus slog on Revenge From Mars. When the points settled, neither could be separated, and the series did what good competition does: it let them share the summit. Branden Martin’s two seconds were good enough to anchor the podium a step below, the form player rewarded if not crowned.
Fifty years after Space Odyssey first lit its saucers, a room full of Texans spent a humid Tuesday night proving the old machines still have teeth — and that a co-championship earned a single ball at a time is no less a championship. Here’s where they landed:
Tied winners Podium
- 1st: John Syers & Shawn Wylie (tied)
- 3rd: Branden Martin
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