The plunger on Terminator 2: Judgment Day isn’t a plunger at all — it’s a gun, and on a Tuesday night in Tempe, Mark Pearson wrapped his hand around the grip and squeezed the trigger to fire the ball cannon toward its targets. Around him, three other competitors waited their turn on a machine that first shipped in July of 1991. Pearson took the game, and in doing so joined a small parade of players who spent the evening feeding quarters’ worth of attention into a 35-year-old Steve Ritchie design that refuses to age out of the rotation.
That, more than any single result, was the quiet subplot of Electric Bat Tuesday Night League Season 21-1 #5: a lineup of 67 machines spanning 1976 to 2026, and yet one of the oldest, loudest attractions in the building still commanding a group in three separate rounds. Terminator 2 turned 35 this month, and 100 players showed up to prove the old Cyberdyne warhorse can still headline.
A Hundred Deep at the Electric Bat
Electric Bat Arcade in Tempe is unapologetically a pinball house — a 4.8-star, silverball-first room where the video cabinets are almost an afterthought — and it needed every bit of its floor space for this one. A full 100 competitors packed in on a 99-degree desert evening, 88 of them IFPA-ranked, running five rounds of four-player group match play across 124 games.
The field carried real regional weight. Eight of Arizona’s top-10 NACS players were in the room, led by state No. 1 and event high-seed John Shopple, who sits at IFPA #94 nationally. Thirteen players ranked inside the national top 500 and 25 inside the top 1,000, giving the bracket a depth that meant no group draw was a gimme. In a format where a single fourth-place finish can sink a night, surviving five rounds against that caliber of company was its own accomplishment.
Shopple, for what it’s worth, felt it early — he opened with a fourth on Strikes and Spares before rattling off four straight round wins, a rally that still only landed him in a five-way tie for fifth. When the strongest player in the building can’t crack the podium, you know the top of the standings was doing something special.
Roesch’s Flawless Five
That something special belonged to Andrew Roesch, the rating favorite who simply never gave the field a foothold. Roesch finished first in his group in all five rounds — a clean sweep — and his machine card tells the story with almost comic efficiency: top score on all five machines he touched, from Strikes and Spares and Johnny Mnemonic to Black Knight, King Kong, and Firepower.
Roesch has been trending up, his rating climbing year over year to IFPA #331, and this was the kind of night that fuels that curve. A dozen years and 176 tournaments into his career, he’s a fixture on the Electric Bat scene, and he’s turned recent visits into hardware — a win at the NMT Brewing Side Finals in June and a runner-up at the Knockout at The Outpost in May sit right alongside this one.
The closest anyone got to him came in Round 3 on Black Knight: Sword of Rage, the Stern brawler with its motorized flail gate and glowering upper-torso knight. Roesch and Brian Pinney — two of the night’s eventual top finishers — drew into the same group, and Roesch handled it, taking the game with Pinney second and Grant Kroeger and Kyle Erickson trailing. It was the rare moment the leaderboard’s heavyweights collided, and even head-to-head, Roesch didn’t blink.
Pinney, Worosello and a Two-Way Tie for Silver
Second place split cleanly down the middle. Brian Pinney and Wesley Worosello finished dead even, and their paths there were near mirror images — each dropped a single round and won the other four.
Pinney is the story of a player peaking in real time. At IFPA #164 he’s at a career best, and as Arizona’s No. 2 with five wins across 20 events this season, he’s spent the year turning consistency into rankings gains. His only stumble was that Black Knight group against Roesch; otherwise he was flawless, closing on Solar Ride, Pulp Fiction, King Kong and Nitro Ground Shaker. Regular readers will remember Pinney claiming the Season 21-1 opener at this same venue — he remains a load to shake at the Electric Bat.
Worosello, the Phoenix regular sitting at IFPA #506 and a 2025 career peak of #435, took the harder road to the same place. He opened with a second on Hotdoggin’ behind Jack Joy, then ran the table — Iron Man, James Bond, Aerosmith and Solar Ride all falling his way. His night also nudged an old rivalry: across 16 shared tournaments he and Hailey Buhrman have stayed closely matched, and this time Worosello came out in front, part of a tight ongoing back-and-forth.
Behind the podium, Nicholas Zachry — himself at a career-best IFPA #162 — landed fourth on the strength of wins on Jurassic Park, Andromeda, Black Knight and Pokémon. The five-way logjam at fifth swept in Shopple, Walter Dony, Jeff Barthold and Paul Hoeprich, a reminder of just how compressed the scoring got beneath the leaders.
The classics did their share of storytelling, too. In Round 5 on Andromeda — a 1985 Game Plan title of which only 500 were ever built — Amanda Williams, who finished well down the order overall, edged Hailey Buhrman in a twelve-minute four-player scrap, a small triumph on a machine where completing the drop-target bank spikes the spinner value and rewards patience over power.
Thirty-Five Years and Still Loaded
Strip away the standings and what lingers from this one is the sight of a room 100 deep still routing its best players onto a machine older than most of them have been playing. Terminator 2 logged three group games across the night, averaging a healthy 17 minutes apiece, and it drew the likes of Shopple, Pearson and Adam Horton to its cannon-and-skull layout. Steve Ritchie built it, Doug Watson painted it, Williams made 15,202 of them, and 35 years later it’s still earning its spot on a competitive bank — the clearest proof that a great table doesn’t retire, it just keeps collecting new challengers.
Roesch, meanwhile, made his own kind of statement: five rounds, five group wins, five machine-best scores, no debate. On a night built to honor the old guard, the man at the top played like he had something to prove about the here and now. The final podium:
- 1st — Andrew Roesch
- 2nd (tie) — Wesley Worosello
- 2nd (tie) — Brian Pinne
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